Ethics, Chapter 3: Actors and Actions

Despite the apparent nebulousness of the topic at hand, it is trivially easy to make a clear delineation between conventional notions of morality and the morality of virtue. Conventionally, morality lies in action. It is what you do that is important, morally speaking. It's not hard to confirm this at a basic level; think of the problems I offered in Chapter 2. Why were they hard to resolve morally? Because every possible action leads to a result that is undesirable, or the possible actions themselves were in some way undesirable. Think of any other moral dilemma - why is it hard to resolve? I will wager it is for basically the same reason. Now, I suspect at least some of you will think this is a silly train of thought. After all, the whole point of a dilemma is to offer two actions, neither of which is clearly right. My pointing out that this is the case doesn't establish anything at all, does it? Well, it should, I think. Let me provide something of an abstract Gedankenexperiment.

Let's suppose that we can define "moral" to be whatever it is we choose. In real life we seem to think, for some strange reason, that good is good. We have already seen that this can lead to nasty dilemmas. Now, if we can choose any definition we like, we might as well try for one which eliminates such dilemmas. Then what is right and wrong will be, at the very least, less ambiguous than it is in the real world. Let's try making bad "good". But no, we get the exact same dilemma, except we're trying to be bad and not good. At the end of the day, we're still going to get a subpar situation which just hasn't turned out bad enough. But why bad? Why not something less value-based. Why not base morality on the ability to light fires, or the colour green? It doesn't really matter, at the end of the day. There will always be some situation which cannot be satisfactorily resolved for anyone, let alone everyone (at least from our objective standpoint).

The point is that it's not the content or the make-up of the dilemma that is important, it is that the dilemma exists.This suggests to me that maybe we are interpreting the situation wrongly, or that we're not asking the right questions. As an alternative, I will offer a suggestion of a radically different way of looking at morality that I imagine will take some convincing for you to think that I haven't completely lost the plot. My alternative is that the morality of a person's actions relies not on the morality of the action but on the morality of the person. Does that make any sense at all? If you understand me, then I imagine your first thought (as it would be mine also) would be, "Doesn't that lead to some sort of loop? You're judging a person's moral judgement based on... what? How moral they are? And how exactly do we do that, Mr. Smartypants?"

Clearly the matter is a little more nuanced than that. For the proposition I'm making to make any real sense to you, you really need to drop the outside frame of reference. "Judging" a person by means of virtue ethics is difficult at best. Maybe I should try putting it a different way for you. Ordinarily, if you want to ask the question, "Is this person morally good?" you enquire as to what their actions have been and you infer from the details of those actions an answer. In real life, most people aren't dyed in the wool consequentialists or deontologists but have some sort of mixture, some of which are more consistent than others. It doesn't particularly matter, though. In the one case you look at an action and determine its value by its consequences, and in the other case you look at an action and determine its value by its own nature. This is not just how we analyse other people's actions but also how we look at our own. My suggestion is that we change this question from asking what a person does to why a person does it, not only in terms of motivations but more generally their moral values, their influences, their character.

If my estimation of you is right, I imagine you're reading this with a vague sense of amusement, perhaps mumbling something sarcastic under your breath. Sure, it's a great idea, but it's probably full of holes, you probably imagine. Certainly it's all fine and good to have the right intentions, but doesn't everyone have the best of intentions, at least as far as they are concerned? And yet people still do bad things, act in a way which we would look down upon as immoral. You're not about to tell me that Hitler was fundamentally a good bloke, just misunderstood, are you? Well, I'm sure you'll all be happy to hear that no, I'm not about to say any such thing. I will answer your question in full, but first I will introduce you, or those of you not already acquainted, to the doctrine of double effect. The doctrine of double effect was introduced by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th Century, and attempts to provide a rationalisation for acting in situations which would ordinarily be permissible but in this particular case bring about particularly nasty side-effects. I don't intend to go into the DDE in much depth for fear of getting side-tracked, and certainly there is no lack of information out there should you choose to look for it. I bring up the DDE because one of the key criteria is "right intentions", that you mean to do well. This leads to some peculiar cases.

One such case, which was raised by Judith Jarvis Thomson, I will paraphrase here. Suppose that you are a bomber pilot involved in a war which is in every manner fictional. Let us imagine two possible missions you are asked to go on. In the first, you are sent to bomb a munitions factory. You have good reason to think you can destroy the factory, but you will also likely destroy a nearby hospital, simply because your bombs cannot be any more accurate than that. In the second scenario, you are asked to bomb the hospital as part of a terror bombing campaign to cause the enemy to surrender, but will also somewhat serendipitously hit the munitions factory. In both scenarios we have the exact same result but according to the DDE the first mission is morally acceptable and the second is not. Such a situation is, to say the least, highly suspect, and it is same suspicion that I imagine many of you harbour against my newfangled suggestion. Clearly I'm not fazed by the objection, however, otherwise I'd likely not be bringing it up, so let me tell you why it doesn't in fact apply to the ethics of virtue.

It's quite simple, really. Yes, good intentions are a sign of virtue, but they are not sufficient. We have established already, as a matter of fact, that bad things can be done in the name of good intentions. As I have hinted at already, actions are not good or bad, but are made so by the actor. If an action appears to us to be prima facie wrong, then we can infer that, in this case, it is because of some deficiency in the actor (not, mind, from the action itself). Certainly it is good and well to bomb the munitions factory, but if one chooses to do so knowing that such an action will result in the deaths of innocent civilians and, furthermore, the destruction of a hospital, then we might argue that going ahead would not be the action of a virtuous person, though we are not yet able to establish why or why not we might reach this conclusion. The point, however, is that there is much more to virtue and, importantly, to character, than intentions alone.

In our discussion to this point, I have been working on some assumptions that perhaps we should question, and in doing so I think we will be able to establish some other interesting facts (if we can be so bold to call them that) about the nature of our morality. In Chapter 4 I will work on this interesting topic, focussing on the nature of objective morality and its implications for virtue ethics, before returning to an exploration of virtue itself in Chapter 5.

Magic Morality Addendum

It occurs to me more frequently than you might think that a lot of what I write seems fine in theory, and perhaps even interesting to read on paper, but holds no bearing in the real world, where things are as they always have been, and everyone is more or less fine with that. I mean, why even bother trying to work out ethical problems in the first place? People seem to have a good idea of what's right and wrong, and complicated hypothetical situations are only distractions or contrived examples of odd imperfections in an otherwise workable system. Right? Wrong. Sadly, I don't write only for the fun of it, I write because the system is badly broken and I see evidence of this on a daily basis, and I believe other people do, too. Because this has become quite galling to me since I posted Chapter 2, I've decided to offer up some real-life examples of how badly and how often our unwritten moral frame or worldview fails in the hope that any of you who were less than convinced by my theoretical objections to 'magic morality' will be more convinced by practical demonstrations.

First, something a little less public. In my last philosophy tutorial, we were discussing Rowe's evidential argument from evil, which is one of the more influential arguments about God since its publication over 30 years ago. Most of the group was satisfied that, though it might not be terrible strong or difficult to work around, it was still the best argument we'd studied this semester on the topic (not that that says much). There was one person who vocally disagreed, and he said that according to his notion of God, there was nothing in the argument terribly damning. For those of you not familiar with the argument, it's very simple and goes like this: There are instances of intense and unnecessary suffering in the world that do not give rise to a greater good nor prevent a greater evil, and yet God, who is supposed to be omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, does not prevent them. If He existed, He most certainly would do so, and so we should surmise He does not exist. An example given is of a fawn who is trapped in a forest which has been set on fire by a lightning strike. It is badly burned and lies in agony for a number of days before finally succumbing. I will not go into a detailed analysis of the argument and its strengths or flaws; I don't want to get side-tracked after all. The point is how he justified his claim. Now I am putting words in his mouth here, but this is how I interpreted his description of his God: "God's domain is a moral one, as it always has been. He is interested and indeed, should be interested, exclusively in the moral for that is His domain. Certainly, "bad" things happen to people and other creatures and one of those "bad" things is our notion of suffering, but where there is pleasure there must also be pain and we cannot hold God responsible for this, or any other, feature of the natural world."

Now in my opinion, this young man came so close and yet remained so far from a reasonable position. I agree that in and of itself there is nothing morally wrong with suffering, or indeed any other state of being. However, I do take severe umbrage to his notion of God, which, had I been otherwise inclined, I might have even found somewhat offensive. What do you take the "moral" domain to be? How much you give to charity? How often you pray? Whether or not you've ever put your penis where it doesn't belong? How very peculiarly narrow. It would seem to me that a God of any stripe which is indifferent to intense and apparently unnecessary pain is in fact quite cruel, even if we say that God is not responsible for the nervous system of the fawn or the starting of the fire. Not just cruel, in fact, but severely morally deficient. A being worthy of revulsion, if you will. Can you imagine my saying that I am a perfectly morally good and all-loving being while beside me an animal lies wailing in desperate pain? My saving (or even mercy killing) it does not impinge upon free will, it does not unduly interfere in the way of the world. The fawn is alone, whether it dies alone now or in a few days is irrelevant. It seems to me that the only way someone could justify holding such a position is if you held up some sort of moral divide, and the pain of an animal lay on the non-moral side, but why should it? Doesn't that seem entirely arbitrary? Why should it not be a moral matter? It seems to me to lie very definitely within the "moral" sphere, and I can see no particular reason why it should not.

But that is just one person, you might say, who made one silly remark in the heat of debate. That doesn't prove my point at all; the system is still workable, it still makes sense. Well, allow me offer another, more public example. Many Australians will be at least passingly familiar with the proposed Internet filter that, barring rejection by the Senate, the current Government would pass into law. Now, the purpose of the filter is to block out all illegal websites, especially those of an exploitative nature, much like a nation-wide firewall. Many objections have been levelled against the filter, varying from free-speech concerns to claims that Internet speeds will be slashed as a result, with many other objections in between. Again, I will not delve deeply into the debate in this post for fear of becoming side-tracked. The point is that the Government frequently retorts these objections with the claim that the filter is a moral necessity. It is morally wrong for people to view websites of a paedophilic nature and so it is a moral imperative to block them from view. This, I think, is supposed to be a debate-ender. After all, if it's a moral matter, surely there can be no real reason not to support it. This betrays two important and related features of magic morality which I mentioned in Chapter 2.

The first feature is that moral matters are different to non-moral matters. There's no doubting that denying people access to websites which benefit from the sexual exploitation is a moral action, and indeed it is deeply so. But let's remember that this proposed filter will, either directly or indirectly, affect millions of people. I'm not asking why this isn't a matter of equivalent moral import, I'm asking why it apparently isn't a matter of any moral import. The second feature is that moral matters are superior to non-moral matters. If I demanded to know why 3 is suddenly supposed to equal 2 and you responded that 3-2 equality was a moral imperative, I, and I think most people, would quite rightly think you had given a non-answer. If I demanded to know why the Internet should have a filter on it which would probably not even decrease the availability of child porn and you responded that it was a moral imperative, I would still think it was a non-answer, although it seems as though this time, for some reason, I fall into the minority. Why? To my mind there is no good reason.

The idea of morality as it currently exists in society is jumbled and incoherent. The fact that the very word "moral" can elevate a mundane problem to a matter of high interest is a direct result of this chronically damaged view. Now here I have presented two real-life cases where the current attitude towards morality has caused people to respond in a likewise jumbled and incoherent manner, logically at least. Certainly my analysis has been shallow and I admit that the two examples I have given are not entirely perfect, but they are two amongst many that have come up in the few days since I posted Chapter 2. Had I the time and the will to suicide in the most painful way possible, I would document them all. Now, in these two posts I think I have demonstrated that magic morality doesn't work and identified the need for a replacement, but I have not explained why this is the case and I haven't offered a replacement itself. These two matters are for Chapter 3, which is coming soon. I hope you are looking forward to probing the matter a little more deeply with me then.

Ethics, Chapter 2: Magic Morality

So, what is wrong with the ordinary modern understanding of morality? What in particular would make someone decide that it's an unworkable way of looking at the real world? There are a number of reasons, to be sure. I will here address two in particular. I do not expect these to by themselves provide any sort of conclusive and wholly persuasive proof that there is a need to betray our current framework, for surely I can do no such thing; I do, however, hope that they will sew the seeds of doubt to the point that when I provide an alternative framework it seems to the reader to be entirely plausible to adopt it in lieu of this one.

The first of the two problems I will address is the less formal, perhaps, but the one I personally find more convincing. Indeed, it is this problem that lends its name to the title of this chapter. One of the founders of modern virtue theory, Philippa Foot, has for a number of years now campaigned (in the way that a philosopher is going to campaign at least, that is, through scholarly publication and debate) against what she calls "magic" morality, which happens to be the modern framework I have been somewhat more forgivingly been referring to. As you have probably guessed from the quotation marks, the description is not meant to be flattering, and is to the contrary something of a criticism. I will attempt to explain the criticism using some of my own examples.

If you are well-versed in history, you will recall that there was a period here in Australia as in a number of other countries (and indeed, this is true today for some of those as it was then) where compulsory military service was in place. Let us hypothesise that there is a nation in a state of war on foreign soil today where national service is in place. We are observing a committee hearing where potential conscientious objectors are being interrogated. The committee calls in the next applicant. Once the details are confirmed, the questioning begins.
"Why do you wish to become exempted from national service?"
"I feel, sirs, that I cannot in good conscience participate in the military."
"And why is that?"
"I have a strong moral objection, sirs, that prevents me from taking up arms against another man."
"Very well, objection granted."
Of course, such a hearing would be unlikely to go as I have written; the person would certainly be asked to explain his objection in full and would be subject to a round of questions. For the purposes of our thought experiment, however, it is not necessary to go into such detail; let us simply take the example for how it has occurred.

Now let us imagine the next applicant has had his turn called and once he fronts the panel and his details are taken down as was done before, the questioning begins anew.
"Why do you wish to become exempted from national service?"

"I feel, sirs, that I cannot in good conscience participate in the military."

"And why is that?"

"I made a promise to my mother that I would not willingly harm another person, and I cannot in good conscience break such a promise."

"Your story is touching, lad, but do you not think the safety of your fellow man is more important than one naive promise? Objection denied."

Putting aside the unusually similar beginnings of these simple examples, it is not inconceivable that they might realistically come to pass, though perhaps in a more complicated form, in our hypothetical land. I don't think it is fair to say the committee acted in a clearly biased or unfair fashion here; if anything, they've been reasonably reasonable. And yet still something bothers me about the exemption of one and not the other.

Trying as best we can to deal with the ambiguity of the first objector's reasons, why should the cases be treated differently? Yes, it is not hard to break a promise, especially if the reason is great enough, but perhaps in this person's mind the war, for whatever reason, was not enough to justify the breaking of that promise. Perhaps his family came from a war-torn country and his mother had seen first hand what killing can do. Perhaps this made it practically impossible for the second objector to accept military service as reasonable. Certainly his belief is a strong one, and well grounded. If he explained it to the panel that way, would they still deny him? It is not clear to me they wouldn't. They might say that though the reasons are compelling, they still do not have sufficient gravitas to grant omission. Yes, the promise is meaningful to you, but it is still just a promise, and promises sometimes can and must be broken. This may seem cruel, but war is cruel, and they are all victims of the circumstances they live in.

Perhaps, but why then exempt the first objector? If he claimed religious reasons for rejecting military service, I find it difficult to imagine his objection being denied, unless he was a part of some obscure cult, or couldn't sufficiently demonstrate adherence to his belief system. Even yet, is his belief made stronger by the fact that it is grounded in religion than secular promise? If the beliefs were held equally as strongly, let us suppose, would the panel still decide in the same way? Still, I think so. The fact that the first objector is religious in this paragraph is not of particular importance, I should note. All that is important is that he can prove that he is bound by the modern moral framework I have been talking about, and religious adherence is perhaps the most traditional indicator of that, while the unsuccessful applicant of an equally stringent belief is denied. Herein lies the problem.

Think about it a little. You have two people, both of whom wish to avoid military service for equally genuine but different reasons. One is granted exemption because his objection lies within the sphere of our modern moral framework, the other is denied because it is a more borderline case; he may not like it, but is it really a moral objection? And yet for all intents and purposes the objections are the same. If drafted, both would have equal difficulty sleeping at nights. It is this differential quality that morality possesses in our society, the quality that makes the mere usage of the word set sentences and ideas apart from the competition, which is the problem, this apparently "magical" ability that, it would seem, it has no right to hold. Indeed, what in the above example sets the religious man's objection apart from the other? One cannot attribute it to his being religious, for religiosity is not a defining characteristic of objector status, nor can one fault the strength of the other man's case. It would seem that by accepting that the panel is reasonable we have nevertheless come to an unjust result, creating an apparent paradox. The only way to resolve the paradox is to accept that moral statements aren't really different to similar non-moral statements. If this is the case, of course, then what is there to differentiate any moral statement? Nothing, and so our framework must be wrong, for a fundamental tenet is that matters of morality are of greater severity and import than other matters, no matter the circumstances. 

I should note here that when I refer to moral statements and moral matters, I refer to statements and matters commonly thought of being somehow related to morality. If I thought that all truly moral statements were no different to non-moral statements and that, indeed, there is no such thing as morality at all, we would hardly be having this discussion. To the contrary, I do believe there is a morality, but to reiterate, our current perception of moral matters in distorted, incomplete and wrong. To further press the point, I will now address the other, more commonly cited reason for thinking there is something wrong with the way we look at morality.

A lot of the time it just doesn't work.

"Oh," but you may say, "we all know not to kill each other though, right? And we all know not to rape and steal and generally be unpleasant. Sure, there are the occasional bad eggs that go against the grain, but they're the exceptions that prove the rule." Well certainly we can agree that we know not to be generally nasty to each other, though we may do so anyway. I'm not arguing that point. But since we're putting forward examples, allow me to retort. I have already mentioned Philippa Foot, and I will probably mention her again, as in my opinion she is an outstanding philosopher. She is perhaps most famously known as the creator of the trolley problem, which I know many people not in the least interested in philosophy to be familiar with. Nevertheless I will provide a short description for you in case you are not so well-versed.

Let us suppose you are wandering by the train tracks one lovely afternoon, as you are wont to do. The day has been peaceful and largely uneventful, with only the singing of birds to disrupt your walk thus far. All of a sudden there is a rumble of thunder and it begins to rain heavily, not that you mind. You then (only barely) see in the distance a trolley hurtling toward you at tremendous speed, its sound masked by the downpour. You won't be hurt, of course, because you aren't silly enough to walk on the tracks, only beside them. You have just come to a junction where a lever lies to switch tracks - the thought strikes you that you might send the trolley off to a siding, where it will be stopped by some barrier, but you remember you have just come from that way. The track the trolley is heading down leads to a tunnel where five men are working on the track; why, you had a chat with them on their lunch break. On the other track is a gardener, working to clear the weeds away from the sleepers. Both tracks are supposed to be closed, and busy at work, in this weather, they are all unlikely to see or hear the trolley coming before it is too late. It seems one of the two groups is certain to die, but by a stroke of luck (good or bad) you still have the option, if you wish, to turn the trolley. The question here is this: do you save the five men and turn the trolley on to the track with the gardener, or do you refuse to involve yourself and allow the five men to die?

Clearly there is a moral choice to be made here, but whatever you choose it seems like you can't do the "right thing". Choose not to involve yourself and you allow five people to die needlessly, choose to pull the lever and you become personally responsible for someone else's death. Certainly it is possible to choose one or the other with some degree of confidence that your conscience will be clear, but for the vast majority of people, a nagging doubt lingers. Unsurprisingly, given it was made for this purpose, the thought experiment is a somewhat troubling one for the exact reason that it is so troubling. If we accept that for all "moral questions" there is a correct and an incorrect response, though those responses may be incredibly subtle and nuanced, and whether a response is correct or incorrect can be determined, why should this problem (and indeed, problems like it) be so troublesome? It's almost as if the very question itself forces an inconclusive and unfulfilling solution. But of course why should this be? It's easy to defer to some notion of mystery, that perhaps we simply haven't worked out a solution yet, or to put it down to a matter of interpretation, but to my mind these measured answers are both cop-outs. Why, only before we established, or so I thought, that killing, raping, and general nastiness are all wrong with some degree of certainty. In the real world (and the hypothetical world) things get fuzzy around the edges, but this isn't fuzziness, it's like someone smeared grease all over the lens.

In a sense, that is what's going on here. It's this reliance of thinking in terms of magic morality that leads us questions like these which have no proper solution. I hope it seems a little clearer now why we need to shift our thinking away from the idea that moral considerations are somehow separate and of superior importance to non-moral considerations. Some of you may (and rightly so) still be sceptical, however. I hope to, in Chapter 3, outline how virtue ethics is different to magic morality in both theoretical and practical terms while still dealing in generalities. I hope that by the end of that chapter I will have given you reason enough to think that virtue ethics has at least some truth and some reason to it, and by that point we can move onwards to more specific matters. 

Ethics, Chapter 1: What is Morality?

It is surely tempting, if one wants to write an all-inclusive (or at least fundamentally so) treatise on ethics, to begin with a meta-ethical discussion, no matter how brief, on whether or not morality as a distinct fact of the real world exists in the commonplace sense, and if so how well (if at all) it can be known and by what form. Indeed, this is the course that previous (failed) attempts at this topic have yielded. I have come to realise, though, that this course of action is not wise, for if we are to be properly basic, we must analyse all (or the most important) of our underlying assumptions, and the most critical of these is unquestionably the nature of ethics and morality itself, what it is we are referring to when we talk about matters of morality. 

I have certainly been criticised in the past for being so unendingly pedantic in my quest for accuracy and completeness, but in this particular instance the question is not being raised simply to quash spectral, nagging doubts. It may come as something of a surprise to you, as it did to me, that the ancient Greeks of so many years ago did not consider ethics in the same way that we do today. Perhaps in hindsight it should not have been such a surprise that people of thousands of years past did not address a particular topic the same way we do today, but I digress. As a matter of fact, the Greeks did not have a word for "morality" specifically, or at least not in the way we mean it today. The word from which ethics is derived, ἦθος (ēthos), meant character, custom or habit, while the derivative of morality, the Latin mos (mōs), meant the same. 

I once pondered what responses I would get if I asked intelligent, educated people what morality was, or indeed what it meant to be moral. I found it very difficult to imagine much of a coherent answer that avoided undefined value terms such as "right" or "good" (a clue in itself which will become more meaningful later on) but even putting this aside, it was clear enough to me that no answer would or could come close to this "original" meaning. Ordinarily I should say this fact is inconsequential; language changes over time, as do ideas, and it certainly doesn't make our modern conception, whatever that may be, somehow incorrect. This is a special case, however, because of the very assumption that I am attempting to question, for the assumption about what morality is, if we include the implicit assumption that we are discussing "objective" morality (to my mind the only kind, but that is a topic for another day), is that our idea of morality, though the particulars vary from culture to culture and person to person, is and always has been universal. If this is incorrect, as it seems to be, I think it is time to start re-examining the ways we look at ethics, and the best place to start is with a little history. 

As I have oh-so-subtly hinted at, the current way morality is considered has not always been the norm. I think to anyone who has reflected sufficiently on the topic it should come as no surprise that modern morality, with its solid ideas of right and wrong and likewise expectations of reward and punishment, not to mention the strength of the notion of "social morality" and the blurred line between ethics and law, is a result of the medieval period, when the power the Church in Europe (and indeed, religion in general almost everywhere it existed) was far more direct than it is today. Over time in this highly religious cultural atmosphere, religious morality became not only the norm, but indeed changed the question sufficiently to become the very way the topic was framed. I think regardless of your religious inclination this should be at the very least a warning sign that we need not consider morality in the hard and fast sense that we currently do (though you, of course, may wish to, but then I must certainly have failed in my task to convince you otherwise). If we need not, however, what alternatives do we have, if this is all we have known? And in fact, why bother changing the paradigm at all? These questions I will attempt to address in Chapters 2 and 3. 

Ethics, Introduction

I have tried time and again to write a definitive essay on the totality of my moral/ethical ideas, and time and again I have been defeated, sometimes by a lack of time, sometimes by a personal sense of dissatisfaction, sometimes for not knowing where to begin but rarely for not knowing how to end. I have recently come to the conclusion that, at least in a practical sense, a holistic treatment of the topic is impossible. For that reason I have decided to publish my thoughts section-by-section in "chapters" as it were. Not only does this make the task somewhat easier for me, but I hope the subject material will be easier to digest for my readers and with some luck make updates somewhat more frequent too. This isn't the only change I have planned, but it is the one you'll see soonest, so the rest will, for the moment, remain a mystery. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Ethics.

A note on an old adage

There's an old clichéd saying that I'm sure you're all aware of. It goes something like this: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Now, the way I've learnt to understand it is as meaning that whenever life gets you down, the best course of action is to not to wallow but to try to be industrious and make the best of it. It's certainly good advice, but over the years the way it's been chanted almost like a mantra by people insistent on always remaining positive and optimistic has led it to becoming hackneyed and cheap, as far as phrases go anyway. In case it hasn't come across yet, that is indeed my opinion of it as well (to be honest, if you ever said it to me in person, I would definitely think less of you for it) or at least it was until last night.

You see, I was mulling over a variety of topics in a meaningless and roundabout way, as the mind tends to wander late at night, and I came to this phrase, and it occurred to me that lemonade requires more than just lemons. This wasn't the first time this had occurred to me (as I said, I never thought particularly highly of the phrase) and I had always simply attributed it to the fact that it was a stupid little statement not meant to be taken too seriously. But for some reason I decided to take it seriously anyway.

If we really should make lemonade when life gives us lemons, then we're going to need more than lemons. To make decent lemonade, you're going to need some sugar and carbonated water at the bare minimum, and if life is giving you lemons it's not about to just hand out those premium ingredients. So if you're going to make lemonade you're going to need to already have sugar and carbonated water before the lemons come, and that means you're going to have to expect lemons to come and plan for when they do. Using this interpretation, the saying not only urges you to make the best of a bad situation, but warns you to be prepared for when bad situations inevitably arise in order to do so.

Now, lemons are sour and apparently a bad thing, and represent the bad times, clearly, and sweet, delicious lemonade represents the better times, the fruits of your labour if you will. But then what do sugar and carbonated water represent? I admit that as far as ingredients go, they're both pretty tasty. Maybe in that capacity they represent the fact that you need a mixture of good and bad elements to make a truly good result. Maybe they represent the sort of conditions you need to turn a bad thing into a good one, like a good character (the interpretation I prefer). Honestly, you could make it out to be what you will, but whatever you prefer I think you have to admit that this adage in particular is a lot more interesting and useful when you look at it this way than using the simple, common interpretation.

If you tell it to me though, I'm still not going to appreciate it.

The Poverty of Agnosticism

The title of this post is taken from The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Don't judge me just yet though; this isn't merely a rehashing of Dawkins' words, and I chose it for reasons which I hope will become more clear throughout the course of this post. Without any further delay, I will therefore proceed to the main body.

This may come as a surprise, but I try to avoid discussions on the topic of religion, as my position is difficult to offer concisely and summaries will often leave an impression which is both inaccurate and counter-productive. Even if this weren't so, I find that such discussions, except when handled on the most intimate of terms, soon devolve into impassioned arguments with little room to manoeuvre. Sometimes, this transition occurs before the debate can even properly begin, merely with the suggestion that someone wishes to raise an objection to your view (whatever that view is). Where I live, religions tend to be fairly moderate and so people are especially keen to avoid offence, as there is a sense of an uneasy peace between theists and atheists based on the agreement that each will keep out of the other's business, and this attitude is pervasive down to the individual level. This may in fact result in "discussions" which are anything but; lip-service paid to each side, concessions and admissions of understandings, the acknowledgement of the equal validity of opinion and so on. Such a conciliatory approach is often advantageous in debate, but when substance (especially in rebuttal) is forgone for such toothless tactics, what results is less an exchange of ideas and more an exchange of empty, meaningless words.

It seems we are stuck between extremes, then. Given the choice between happy but meaningless jibber-jabber and angry outbursts of almost absurd accusations, most people I know (myself included) tend towards the former, consciously or otherwise. Now, what does this have to do with agnosticism? I have had many discussions about personal beliefs with friends in the past and have noted that a large number have declared themselves to be agnostic when I asked them about their beliefs. It is my intention to show that such a response is in many respects a poor response (hence the title).

Before I launch into any sort of tirade, I think it is important to establish exactly what it is we are talking about. Firstly, I will clear the air by stating that there are a number of distinct types or forms of agnosticism, but the common characteristic between all of them is doubt. I think that if someone told you they were agnostic, they would either mean they were a strong agnostic or a weak agnostic (I take this from experience). If we were to write a simple children's book, a first guide to religions and religious ideas, perhaps, then the definition of weak agnosticism would read something like "we do not know there if there is a god, and so we will abstain from judgement" while strong agnosticism would read something like "we cannot know if there is a god, so judgement would be pointless". I personally find strong agnosticism to be a far more pointed and interesting belief, but alas it is not the subject of this post. This post is directed at the weak agnostics who identify themselves as such and importantly, nothing more.

Weak agnosticism (I will hereforth refer to it only as agnosticism) is in my opinion largely about being noncommittal. If you ask someone who defines themselves as such if they are an atheist and they say 'no' or even go on to rebuke atheists for their certainty, then they seem to be trying very difficult to not pick sides in the atheism vs. religion debate (if we could say there is such a thing). This is a response which I do not like and do not appreciate for two reasons.

Firstly, if I ask what you believe about God, or what your opinion is about the existence of God, then saying you're an agnostic is akin to saying you don't know. That's a fair answer, of course, if the question was about whether or not you know if God exists. But that's not the question. The question is about what you believe. If you give the strong agnostic response, that we cannot know, then that can actually lead to some interesting discussion, but if you're simply saying that you don't know then you're dodging the question.

Secondly, if you do not believe in a god, you are an atheist. That's the definition of what atheism is, the lack of belief in gods. A + theism. It literally does not make sense for you to say you don't believe in God but you're not an atheist. If you don't know and so you've decided to not subscribe to any religion or any belief in God, then you are an atheist. Any denial of this is either due to an honest miunderstanding of what atheism is or a deliberate evasion of the... let's say 'not entirely positive' connotations of the word 'atheism'. Ignorance is excusable if you make an effort to alleviate yourself of that position, but deliberate obfuscation of your beliefs is intellectually cowardly and I don't care for it in myself or others.

Now, having ranted as I wanted to, I should add an important caveat. I consider myself agnostic, although weak or strong I haven't decided. I think it's really the only reasonable position to take. I think any sort of gnostic position, theistic or otherwise, is very foolish for reasons I will address in a much longer, more detailed post on religion. But what I think is important is that gnostic vs. agnostic and theist vs. atheist are two very distinct questions which must be addressed separately, and conflating the two is a mistake. You can be an agnostic and an atheist, as I consider myself, and you can be an agnostic and a theist, but you can't be an agnostic and neither, and it is people who try to take up this position, or pass themselves off as taking this position, who bother me. After all, if we accept that at least at present such debates are always going to occur, then the least we can do is be rigorous enough to know what we're talking about and honest enough to reveal our opinions to each other with enough clarity to allow open discussion and criticism.

Addendum: I've been meaning to add something to this post for some time, although I'm not sure exactly what. At the time of posting, I felt there was something lacking to it, there was an incompleteness about it, if that makes sense. The explicit purpose of the post was to address the cowards who try to redefine their own language to avoid being labelled as something and in doing so label themselves as something else, but in doing so, some of my objections which could have applied more broadly to other types of agnostics (not mentioned) would equally have applied. Take, merely for instance, the case of the apathetic agnostic; someone without any interest in the question of divinity (or even someone who has not even considered the question at all). The categorisation is typically framed as I have done, in terms of agnosticism, and yet by definition such a person must be atheistic; they have no belief in God, for if they did they could not call themselves apathetic. The same cannot be said, of course, of the agnostic theist. Just as I have claimed that the agnostics I mentioned so far hold atheistic belief claims but agnostic knowledge claims without any contradiction, it is important to note that there are those with theistic belief claims and agnostic knowledge claims (something I may have previously alluded to). It is also worthy of note that not all beliefs fall neatly into theistic vs. atheistic, although they all seem to at least lean one way or the other - this is something that should factor into considerations as well.

This little addendum here doesn't wholly amend my anxieties about the post, but I think it demonstrates at least that there is a little more to the subject than I have explicitly stated, and I invite all of my few readers to take the topic one step further (although not necessarily in agreement with me, I would imagine would be the response!).