Cheers,
sain-web.com

If you're interested in the philosophical side of the arguments, incidentally there are good papers to be had on Joshua Greene's website, Stephen Stich's Jean Nicod lectures on the subject are online here; http://www.institutnicod.org/lectures2007_outli… and the following books are excellent

Appiah – Experimental Ethics
Nichols – Sentimental Rules
Prinz – The Emotional Construction of Morals

P.S. – To be fair on Hume, he was on doctors orders to drink a pint of claret every day. Sadly you don't hear about that being given out as a cure for depression on the NHS these days.

So, I ought not to torture people. Why? Because it's a bad thing to do. That would be a moral ought, and if the sentimentalist is right then thinking that thought cincerely and acting upon it requires an appropriate sentimental setup as regards torturing which may or may not be innate and may or may not be culturally universal and which psychopaths appear to lack the capacity to form for whatever reason and so on. But not tortuing people in open view of a community who will run me out of town or worse for doing it; saying I ought not to do that seems to stray closer to being a 'prudential ought'. That is, it's still governed by the same affective processes as seem to be behind all action (Damasio) and to a certain extent requires the 'desire' to want to save my own skin, but that's a desire that all of humanity has other things being equal – psychopaths have it; it may even be a presumption we use in interpreting the actions of people in the first place (I'm thinking of Donald Davidson's discussions of interpretation if you're familiar with the philosophical literature). It seems to me there's a pretty strong case for thinking that 'epistemic norms' will fall into the latter camp. After all, 'wanting one's beliefs to be true' might be a 'desire' according to some ways of describing things, but it's so basic that I think it's legitimate to presume all people share in it. So if the worst charge that can be leveled against the new atheists is they go about saying 'you ought not to believe in Christianity' but neo-sentimentalism has shown that all 'oughts' need to be grounded in desires so it presupposes a desire for one's worldview to be correct… I don't think it's a particularly strong charge.

All that's just a roundabout way of saying that it doesn't make any less sense to say to people 'you ought not to believe in the truth of Christianity' (or for that matter, it being topical 'you ought not to beleive in the Easter bunny') in light of the research on sentimentalism, the worst that happens is you have to tell a longer story about what that claim means and what you're presupposing about the desires of your audience.

One pressing reason I might want to 'push' atheism is if I think someone's religious faith is doing them more harm than good. A friend of mine was concerned over his violation of – what I would say were – some rather anti-human precepts of the catholic faith. So over a few evenings we walked our way through the theology and the philosophy of religion (a little, dare I say, more critically than the person who taught him 'religious studies A-level' had done) and he eventually decided he didn't really believe it after all, and over time has ceased to worry himself about such things. I'd like to think I did my friend a service, and in any event would do the same in other conditions.

Another reason I might want to 'push' atheism is if someone asks me. For better or worse certain positions I held at university marked me out as a 'known atheist', and every so often strangers would send me messages and the like saying 'I'm having doubts about my religion, what do you think I should do'. In each case I told them basically the same things: I told them why I didn't believe what they were being taught, gave them some book recommendations and encouraged them to keep going to their church or whatever anyway to decide for themselves whether they could reconcile their changing worldview with their religious practice. Lacking follow-ups I don't know if it resulted in no change at all (it was a wobble) or a partial (Anglicanism where once there was Evangelicalism) or total deconversion but I don't think my time was wasted either way.

Finally there's the claim that you might feel free to scoff at but which has been pushed by a large number of atheists and which I am tempted to endorse that given the atheistic worldview appears to me at least to be the correct one, there are certain aesthetic reasons for holding it rather than an alternative variously summed up by colloquial expressions such as 'living in the real world', 'not kidding yourself' and so on. Now, right enough this isn't going to push me on a massive crusade to 'deconvert the heathens' but nevertheless if it's someone that's close to me, I think there's a case for thinking it's my 'non-christian duty' to encourage them to question their religious convictions. Indeed, to think otherwise seems to me to be a little patronising. I would like to think that if I structured my life around an idea, and there were people out there with (what they take to be) good reasons for thinking that my idea is false, then if they care about me they'll do me the courtesy of telling me what those reasons are rather than just shrugging their shoulders and saying 'they seem happy enough'.

So, while I agree with what you are saying up to a point I really think there are cases where a bit of 'preaching the bad news' might well be called for.

Best wishes,
Duncan Crowe.

What Hume is reported to have blurted out (in the pub, after the seminar) is that the passions were a hand-job to reason. But he was always a cut-up, The Great infidel. Especially on his third dram.

Will –

Outstanding journalism. Really. No hold bared applause here. Only … a pretty cheap target for your lede, no? Brooks is a conventional chap, writing for a very conventional broadsheet. He's stretching to defend the marbled gates of his magenta-tie convention against the metaphysical barbarians led by Harris/Dawkins/Dennet(most acutely) and Hitchens (who is truly the Samuel Johnson of our day – would that he had a Boswell!)

Why not push this critique (of the way 'science' is viewed as good when it accords with one's own ideology) into … say … global climate change? Or second-hand smoke? Or money-illusion and what it implies to Hayek's ideas as to how prices convey information?

Further, I withdraw my earlier poking about the utility of research into the human mind that post-dated the 18th century. I would recommend Hauser's _Moral_Minds_ to you.

Also – coming to Halifax in August?

The only things I might add are these. First, Brooks is acting like this is revelatory stuff, when in fact philosophers have worried about this very issue since at least Hume, who famously said that reason is, and ought to be, the handmaid to the passions, or words to that effect. And as you pointed out, even if this is what most non-philosophers do, it hardly follows that this is what everybody does, or should do, or is capable of doing. He should do some reading on the Naturalistic Fallacy.

Second, given the close tie between ethics and politics, I'm wondering how Brooks would characterize his own enterprise as a political commentator. If reason is truly impotent as the medium for discourse, wouldn't that make political commentating sort of useless? Unless, perhaps, he sees it as his job to appeal to people's emotions to get them on board with whatever he believes in. But that sounds more like a propagandist, or at best, an advertiser, than a public intellectual, which surely is more how Brooks would like to see himself.

I think this was Branden's point, if i remember correctly — I have grown accustomed to using reason, so I'm not as driven by emotions as I once was. So any belief system, religious or atheistic, unexamined by reason is a faulty guide. Plus, what does Brooks make of morality developed in groups which oppress women, or find human sacrifice emotionally appealing?