Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

Nathan made a long series of comments on my earlier post on terrorism and Just War theory. I’m going to try to reset a bit.

In that post I argued, I think correctly, that terrorism is not justified under Just War theory. But: is Just War theory applicable today? Do we believe that everybody should follow it?

The first question is whether war can have rules at all. There is a long history of rules of warfare, most recently the Geneva conventions. There is also a long history of people ignoring those rules. Obviously nobody in Iraq today is scrupulously following the Geneva conventions (though I hope that most of the U.S. military is trying to do so).

One way to see whether the rules mean anything at all is to look to see what happens when the war is over. Are people who violated the rules punished? A relatively recent development is international tribunals which attempt to punish people for violating the rules–not so much the Geneva convention, as extreme so-called crimes against humanity. These tribunals can be effective ways to punish the leaders in a war, though in general they can only punish the leaders of the side who lost.

Another way to see whether the rules mean anything is to see who follows them. Until the Iraq war, the U.S. was generally careful to follow the Geneva conventions, and other agreed upon laws of war. Will the decision by the Bush administration to ignore the conventions have lasting bad effects on the U.S.? I tend to think that it will, but it’s obviously difficult to prove. Russia, for example, ignored the Geneva conventions in their battles in Chechnya; no bad effects are evident to date.

If there are no rules, then does it make sense to speak of terrorism as violating the rules? In some cases we can say that there is no state of war, in which case the terrorist attack is simply a horrible crime. I would say that this is true of Timothy McVeigh’s attack in Oklahoma City. McVeigh claimed to be seeking revenge for Waco and Ruby Ridge, but there were other means of redress. It was correct for the U.S. government to charge him with a crime and convict him (though I am personally opposed to the death penalty which he received).

What about 9/11? I think Al Qaeda would say that there was a state of war between them and the U.S., although many in the U.S. were unaware of it. Al Qaeda believed that the U.S. had been attacking people in the Muslim world by putting armed forces in Saudi Arabia and by supporting Israel. It does not imply supporting 9/11 to observe that their argument is rational, nor does that imply that I actually agree with it. If Al Qaeda was at war with the U.S., and if there are no rules in war, then do we have any grounds for arguing that their attack was unethical?

I think there is an important observation to make here. Whether or not there are rules of war, the U.S. (and, for that matter, Israel) do generally try to avoid accidental deaths. The U.S. has made many mistakes in Iraq, causing many accidental deaths, but in general they were mistakes. In some cases, soldiers have been punished for them. In almost all cases, the deaths were considered to be regrettable. Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack was, of course, in no way a mistake.

Is that a key difference between terrorism and other forms of warfare? That terrorism intentionally kills people at random, while non-terrorism kills people by accident? It is a subtle distinction, but not, I think, an irrelevant one.

However, we must then also consider the ethics of creating a situation in which it is likely that people will be killed by accident. The unprovoked invasion of Iraq clearly created such a situation.

It is odd to observe that the Bush administration has on the one hand called for idealistic efforts to create worldwide democracy, while on the other hand it has adopted a very pragmatic and “ends justify the means” approach to actually (attempting to) create it.

Various people have argued that religion is hardwired into the human psyche, that most of us can’t help but believe in something larger than ourselves. Sometimes people go a bit farther and argue that some sort of religion is actually necessary for a healthy society. (Sorry I don’t have useful references here, I’ve forgotten them.)

I’m an atheist myself, but I don’t really consider myself to be a counter-example. I consider myself to be a fairly religious atheist: for me, atheism is a matter of faith. The people who are counter-arguments to the argument are the dedicated agnostics: the ones who say that they simply don’t know, and moreover have no plans to think about it. If religion is necessary for society, then those people are trouble.

These ideas date back at least to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said “no state has ever been founded without religion at its base.” Rousseau is most famous for writing about the social contract which forms the basis for a legitimate government, an idea that was of course also important to Hobbes.

So, is it true that we need to believe in something? I think it’s pretty clear that we tend to believe in something. I would describe this as an inborn tendency to see every action as caused by an agent. That is a specialization of our strong mental habit of looking for patterns. Seeing the world in terms of agents gives us a focused way to look for patterns. This is particularly important for children, who must learn enormous amounts about how the world works. It’s much safer, in general, to assume there is a pattern or an agent when there isn’t one, than to assume that there isn’t one when there really is.

Given this natural tendency, when we see events larger than ourselves, such as the weather, we tend to naturally look for larger agents who cause it. Thus we get thunder gods and the like. As people understand their world better, they transfer the agency to the entity which created the world and set it in motion, and thus we get omnipotent and omniscient creator gods.

Anyhow, other people have told that story better than I. The question I want to ask is: what happens if we deny that? What if we set aside god, and say that religion is simply irrelevant?

One reaction is to say that if there is no creator, then there is no design for life, and there is no purpose in it. Can we find a purpose within ourselves? I think that we can, and I think that many people do; people can lead a good life without being given a goal. Can we find a purpose for society? I believe that the goal of society is simply to provide a general happiness for its members, so, again, for me the answer is yes (note that many societies do have different goals).

Another reaction is to say that ethics depends on religion. With no god, we can not rely on any clear guidance as to what is good and what is evil. My answer to this is a bit subtle, and may indeed be wrong. I think that we have evolved such that certain types of behaviour are natural for us. That is, I agree with Socrates that we have a natural sense of the good. This leads to an ethical system which may not be truly universal, but may in general apply to humanity.

For example, my understanding is that in all human societies the murder of another member of society is forbidden. Murder of members of other societies may be permitted, and some societies practice ritual sacrifice, but murder is forbidden. Similarly, young children are always to be protected, and it requires special explanations to harm the children of non-members of the society (e.g., the other children are subhuman, etc.). Newborn babies, on the other hand, have no such special rights, and some cultures practice routine infanticide (some would argue that our culture does as well); however, while killing your own baby is acceptable in some cultures, killing another person’s baby is always wrong.

I believe that these sorts of rules are universal in the sense that that all societies subscribe to them. That said, some societies do become decadent, and permit any rule to be broken. Even then, though, breaking the rules is, in fact, considered to be breaking the rules. It is not considered to be normal even by members of the decadent societies.

Now, obviously, these sorts of evolved guidelines to human behaviour do not truly constrain our behaviour: there are many murderers. And they are very incomplete, in that many ethical issues have completely different answers in different cultures.

So I’m going to argue that we don’t need religion to build a society. But I’m going to do it by saying that we are born with the parts of religion that we need: enough shared ideas to hold a society together. The rest of the ideas come from growing up within the society.

This is obviously an error-prone sort of argument. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what is true today is always true. And it’s easy to fall into the trap of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, to think that if you can find a nice explanation of some sort of behaviour that you have found the true explanation. So I don’t know how confident I am that what I am saying is right.

If I am right, though, it is interesting to consider what may happen as we encounter nonhuman intelligences. I’m not thinking so much about aliens from the stars, although that would be nice, as I am about robot intelligence, or the farfetched idea of copying human minds into computers. Without the shared evolution of culture, what will those minds be like? Why should they see things as we do?

One of the things I try to teach my daughter is how to live in historical time. By this I mean something in between deep time and the present. I try to regularly explain what is new in our environment and what is old. “When your mother and I were young, nobody had cell phones.” “When your grandfather was young, there were hardly any televisions.” “When your great-grandfather was young, there were no refrigerators, and hardly any cars.” “All the roads you see were built since your great-grandfather was born.”

We carry this back to trains, ships, horse transport, etc. And, of course, medicine. The change in ordinary human lives since her great-grandfather was born in the 1890s is simply staggering. It took me many years to learn to see the present as a snapshot of the ongoing change and development of our world. I’m hoping to give my daughter the ability to see that at a younger age.

Despite all the changes in historical time, human nature hasn’t really changed. Our ethical rules have changed, but our ways of thinking have not. For example, historical time doesn’t seem to come very naturally to people. How many events in history seemed to change everything, only to be forgotten? How many people think about the Lisbon Earthquake today? How many people think the future will be pretty much like the present? Everybody who thought that in the past turned out to be right in general themes, but completely wrong in detail.

On this theme I recently read Bruce Sterling’s story “Dinner in Audoghast.” It’s basically a nice retelling of Ozymandias, done before the fall rather than after.

This is an unkind thought, but I sometimes wonder what percentage of the people who declare themselves to be followers of Jesus really take to heart what the Bible says that he said. I know the percentage is way above zero, but I suspect that it’s also way below one hundred.

Look at quotes like “Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.” (Matthew 5:39-40–the Sermon on the Mount). That’s a direct command about how you should behave. How many of us can really follow that?

Or how about “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” (Matthew 19:21). Monks and nuns do that, but few other people do. And just after that: “everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” (Matthew 19:29). Did Jesus expect everybody to do that? If not, why not?

I think that Jesus was teaching a very radical, unwordly, philosophy. I find it difficult to reconcile that with the way some people act in his name today. Again I am of course not referring to all Christians, just some. In particular, the currently popular notion of “prosperity theology”–the argument that God wants his followers to be rich–seems to me to be particularly, well, unchristian.

Douglas Hofstadter sketched out a theory of super rationality in a couple of his Metamagical Themas columns in Scientific American in the mid-80s (he later collected his columns into a very interesting book). It was an attempt to solve the prisoner’s dilemma. The basic idea was that you should act as though everybody else is going to think the problem through the same way you do, and will therefore come to the same conclusion. Thus, in the prisoner’s dilemma, you can conclude that the other player will make the same decision as you no matter how much you think about it, so it follows that you should cooperate.

This is sort of like an amusing logic puzzle. Everybody on an island is a perfect logician. Some people’s eyes are blue. There are no mirrors on the island, but everybody can see everybody else and tell what color their eyes are. Somebody decrees that all blue eyed people must leave the island at midnight. Four days later, some people leave. How many people left?

It is also, of course, sort of like Kant’s categorical imperative, in that you should act as though everybody will act the same way you do.

The problem with super rationality, and, for that matter, with the categorial imperative in actual practice, is that people simply aren’t that rational. It’s hard enough for people to know what they themselves really want to do. It’s downright impossible to figure out what everybody should do.

In practice we completely fail to be super rational, and instead we solve the prisoner’s dilemma through simple guidelines: “nobody likes a tattle-tale.” These guidlines have generally developed to maintain cooperation in the face of temptation. I think our present society has a tendency to weaken those guidelines, stressing self-interest above all else, and thus weakening cooperation. Whether this is good or bad in the long run remains to be seen.