The courts have regularly ruled that Intelligent Design is nothing more than Creationism with different words, so those seeking to interject religion into public school curricula will have to try again.

Indeed, it is improbable that the universe would have given rise to life as we know it and especially humanity. If conditions weren’t just right for the arrival of homo sapiens, we wouldn’t be here to wonder about it. Let me examine a few of the more obvious examples, then, to demonstrate that the courts have been right in this ruling.
(1) Not all humans are perfect. While some people, say, with less-severe cases of Down’s Syndrome, can have happy, meaningful lives, others will lead lives confined to the cradle. Some handicapable people can compete in the Special Olympics, but most others will have nothing much to look forward to.
(2) The blind spot shouldn’t exist. In optics, the light has to be focused on the optic nerve for us to see, but we can’t see in that spot, hence the term blind spot. Surely an infinite God could design the human eye without this flaw.
Mostly, though, in this essay I’d like to talk about the difference between short-term pain and long-term pain. Short-term pain (STP) serves a very useful purpose in alerting us that something is wrong. If you burn your hand, STP alerts you not to touch the burned area, or to have any other contact with it. The burn eventually heals, the pain stops, and you return to life as usual, using the hand as you did before (although you might end up being more careful around hot surfaces and substances). No problemo!
However, what if you burned your hand so extensively as to have permanent nerve damage? Then, even when the skin grafts have taken and your healing is complete, your hand continues to throb as much as it ever did. This long-term pain (LTP) serves no biological purpose, it seems to be a mistake in our biological processes. In my own case, it will soon be my six year anniversary of being continuously in pain from migraines; even when I’m not actively hurting, I have migraine side effects like continuous photophobia. Perhaps in the future they’ll be able to either to amputate LTP or at least block it with better medicines or procedures than we have now.

My point is that we shouldn’t have LTP at all, for burns, migraines, or anything else. Some people shouldn’t be born with mental or physical challenges. Troublesome anatomical features like the blind spot shouldn’t burden us. If this is the pinnacle of perfection that creationists site, I want no part of their agenda!

“Why should I become a Mormon?”

“Well, it says in the Book of Mormon…”

“Hold it right there!  I don’t want to hear a reason from the Book of Mormon, I want to hear one from the Bible!”

A circular argument is an argument in which you have to assume the premise in order to reach the conclusion, e.g.:

How do you know I’m trustworthy?  Well, it so happens I AM trustworthy, so when I tell you I’m trustworthy, you know you can believe it!

T v ~T/T?                         Trustworthy or NotTrustworthy, therefore Trustworthy?

(1)     T v ~T                                                                      Trustworthy or NotTrustworthy

(2)     ~T -> ~T                   (1) implication                     NotTrustworthy implies NotTrustworthy

(3)     T -> T                       (2) transposition                  Trustworthy implies Trustworthy

(4)     T                              assertion                                               Trustworthy

Therefore, T                  3 & 4 modus ponens               (I am) Trustworthy.

The fallacy, of course, is in line 4: there is no logical reason to assert I am trustworthy, T.  I could just as easily be untrustworthy, ~T.  Just because I claim trustworthiness does not make me trustworthy (in real life, experience demonstrates that usually people insisting on their trustworthiness are more likely to be untrustworthy).  So from the tautology T v ~T, all I can validly prove is T v ~T (or some other tautology) again.

In the absence of external proof, I cannot prove

• I am trustworthy;
• Mormonism is superior to Methodism; or even
• Faith is superior to no faith

For in each case, I am caught in a circular argument in what I can demonstrate or know.  We generally consider circular arguments to be fallacies, that is, they sound persuasive at first, but on closer examination turn out to be false.

Epistemic circles are not limited to character or religion.  Consider inductive reasoning versus deductive reasoning.  Inductive reasoning is what we use to describe, explain, and predict the real world.  How do I know if it’s raining?  I look out the window or put my hand out the door or feel the ground to see if it is wet.  When we depend on the senses, though, we introduce a measure of unreliability—our senses can be fooled (or perhaps we are trapped in The Matrix, being fed false data).  For absolute certainty, we must turn to deductive reasoning, where the form of the argument guarantees the result.  For instance:

(1)     R -> W                     If it is raining, the ground will be wet.

(2)     R                              It is raining.

Therefore W, the ground will be wet. 

This is a form of argument so common and so important that it has its own name, modus ponens.  It works no matter the contents of R and W; so long as 1 and 2 (the premises) are true, W (the conclusion) inexorably follows.  This seems pretty nifty, right?  The problem is, though, that it doesn’t tell us whether or not it is raining here now.  Deductive logic is like a chess board or a computer program, suspended in time with no connection to the real world.  We can call it a well-ordered system, internally coherent and the like, but like its cousin arithmetic, it does not exist in what we call the real world.  When done right, you can make some very sophisticated, even beautiful and elegant, arguments within either inductive and deductive logic, but you’re still operating within an epistemic circle.

Beyond character, religion, and logic, though, I would argue the entire rational enterprise is also trapped within an epistemic circle.  Why be rational?  I can offer a lot of rational reasons to promote rationality, but that is the type of reasoning we claim to want to avoid.  R v ~R?  Without a reason to prefer R over ~R, the two must be equally weighted.  Only a rational person would always choose rationality…right?  To do otherwise would be…irrational….  So to break the epistemic circle, I must find an irrational reason to favor rationality over irrationality.  The best I’ve been able to come up with thus far is an aesthetic argument:  I find it more beautiful to be rational than irrational.  This seems a feeble defense of some 50,000+ years of civilization and the conquest of irrationality by the forces of rationality.  Just because I have a subjective preference for rationality doesn’t mean that all people will find it equally attractive.  Indeed, some rational people make the argument that civilization has been a failure, thus humans should return to the wilds from which we came, ~R.  So, using rational arguments, we seem to’ve only demonstrated that rationality is not as foundational as we’ve always thought.  We are caught on a precarious perch.

Perhaps the best approach, then, is not to try to break out of the epistemic circle, but to make the circle bigger.  Let’s imagine a literal, mathematical circle, say  x² + y² = c².  When c²=1, we have a circle with a radius of 1, centered at the coordinate (0,0).  When c=2, we have a circle with a radius of 2, centered at (0,0), and so on.  If a horizontal line (a line with a slope of 0) represents perfect rationality, all of these circles will only be perfectly rational at the two points where x=0, namely (0,c) and (0,-c).  The farther away from the x-axis we get, the less rational they are.  But as c increases without bound, the more closely the neighborhoods of (0,c) and (0,-c) will resemble pure rationality.  So trivial circular reasoning like “I am trustworthy” is easily recognized and dismissed as faulty, while more advanced circularities require more thought—and more humility as to the limits of human rationality.

            One fine day at choir practice, Steve asked why all the baptisms at ABC were by full immersion.  “Surely some people are too scared of the water to go all the way under,” he said.  The choir members suggested Steve go to the Board of Deacons.

            Unfortunately, the deacons were not pleased with Steve’s question.  They said only deviant people even considered such things.  Baptisms were always by full immersion and that was the way it had always been.  In truth, one of the deacons had been sprinkled as a child in another village, but it was a secret he was determined to take to his grave.

            “I don’t want to be fully immersed, I want to be sprinkled,” declared Steve.  “No one else wants to be sprinkled,” replied the deacons, “so why must you be so difficult?”  Steve started asking the people at ABC and discovered about 10% agreed with his views on baptism and other things, too.

            Steve and his friends decided if they did not fit in with the way things were done at ABC, they would form their own church, to be named America Methodist Church.  There was an old, abandoned community center downtown that had been an eyesore for many years, but Steve and his friends thought with some loving renovation it would make a splendid home for the AMC.

            Steve asked the Town Council if he could buy the community center from the town so that AMC could renovate it and make it their beautiful new sanctuary.  Sadly, though, all of the members of the Town Council were also members of ABC; they declared that Steve did not have the right to submit a bid on the property.

            Steve and his friends were upset they had been denied their opportunity.  Leslie suggested talking to the American Civil Liberties Union, which they did.  With the help of the ACLU, Steve and Leslie and the other prospective members of the AMC sued the Town Council for the right to purchase the property.  Although Steve was no longer alone, he was being called “unpatriotic,” “ungodly,” and many other unkind things.  Some people would no longer talk to him in public and he started receiving hate mail.

            During the trial, people said many things.  The chair of the deacons claimed that it would weaken the institution of baptism at ABC if Methodists were allowed to sprinkle.  Leslie answered that the folks of ABC were quite welcome to continue to practice baptism as they saw fit, but the folks of AMC should be entitled to do it their own way.  The judge listened carefully to what both sides said and eventually ruled that Methodists were entitled to the same rights as every other person in America and that Steve and Leslie and the others had the right to bid on the abandoned community center.

            Elections for Town Council were held not long after the judge issued her ruling.  Steve decided he would run for election on a pro-AMC platform.  However, the Mayor declared he thought that America should have only one church and proposed that the Town Council pass a “Protection of Baptism” act that would designate America as a sprinkling-free zone and turn the old community center into a Sanctity of Baptism Memorial.  Many people who personally agreed with baptism by immersion thought that the Mayor and Town Council were going too far in trying to contradict the judge and restrict the rights of the Methodists.  However, 56% of the people who went to the polls agreed with the Mayor, and to this day, America has only one church.

But if an animal can feel pain, if I owe it any rights at all, I owe it the right not to have pain inflicted on it by me or on my behalf.  Ok, so admittedly, we could confine ourselves to eating those higher animals that died of old age—but that would immediately cut down the supply of meat and dramatically increase the price.  To have a mass market in meat, we will have to kill animals in their prime.  Is there, then a pain-free way to kill an animal?  “Sure,” you reply, “when Coco was dying from cancer last year, we took her to the vet, who gave her a couple of shots and she just went to sleep; we all cried a lot, but Coco didn’t suffer!”  Nice try, but those chemicals would make an animal unfit to eat.

Historically, the “best” way to kill larger food animals like cows and pigs was to hoist them up by their rear legs, slit their throats, and let them bleed to death, since meat tastes better with the blood drained out of it.  Nowadays the food industry uses putatively more humane methods, such as inserting an electrified needle into the animal’s brain, which is supposed to kill it almost instantly.  “Supposed to,” of course, since it doesn’t always work, which is why they have to keep baseball bats handy….  I don’t think even the meat industry claims their methods are absolutely cruelty free (if they were so terrific, why don’t we use them for human executions instead of our current methods), but simply as humane as possible.  Is that much consolation, you think, to the animal in pain?

Of course, the cruelty is not limited to end-of-life issues in agribusiness.  Take a sheet of writing paper and fold it in half.  That’s approximately the size allotted to the average chicken on a typical chicken farm, that is to say, very nearly the size of the chicken itself.  The chickens are kept in wire mesh cages their entire lives, seldom or never seeing the sun.  As you know, birds’ feet by default curl, so as they grow, it’s not uncommon for the immobile chickens’ feet to grow into the wire mesh.  To keep the birds from pecking each other to death, the farmers often amputate their beaks.

Cows are fed mainly a diet of corn, which their digestive systems were not designed to handle.  Among other side effects, this leaves them with weakened immune systems and vulnerable to infections, so they are commonly given antibiotics (and bovine growth hormone to fatten them for market faster, too).  Tip: those routine antibiotics are a major part of the reason we’re seeing the growth of super bugs like MRSA that won’t respond to most antibiotics.

In breeding pigs to grow as fast as possible, a genetic defect was introduced such that when the pigs panic, their flesh begins to melt down and becomes unfit for human consumption.  Anyone who’s owned a pet pig can tell you that they are very intelligent.  Apparently quite a few of them figure out what’s happening on the way into the slaughterhouse and there’s enormous waste.

A normal, healthy human adult can get all the protein and every other nutritional need from plant sources with an eye on nutrition; it’s even easier if you allow animal products like eggs, cheese, milk, honey, or even shellfish, etc.

Eggplant lasagna, anyone?

Humans are rational.

No.  Lots of animals have more rational capacity than newborns, the demented, and some of the mentally challenged.  Besides, if you’re talking computational ability, do you really want to propose a PC as human?

Humans use language.

No.  Creatures as simple as bees use gestures and pheromones that are arguably a kind of language.  Chimps have been taught to use at least rudimentary sign language, and have even been observed teaching it to their offspring.  Admittedly, it’s hotly contested what constitutes linguistic usage and the depths to which chimps genuinely grasp syntax, grammar, and all the rest, but clearly animals communicate with each other and with us.

Humans use tools.

No.  At the very least, chimps in the wild have been observed using sticks to collect ants–then scoot the ants up with their hands and gulp them down in one motion.  Yum!  I seem to recall primates, possibly even birds, using stones to crack nuts and mollusk shells.

Humans are the genetic descendents of the first Homo sapiens.

What?   You say you mean WHOLE organisms?  How whole?  Do amputees not count?  They do?  Then just HOW whole?  What if science were advanced enough to preserve the life of a person whose body had died, but whose brain lived on in a vat?  Would she still be a person?

But aren’t you being a little ethnocentric confining the human family to Homo sapiens?  How about those other branches on the human family tree closest to us, especially the Neanderthals?  I suspect most people would identify them as human, too.  Good thing, as many people believe many modern humans are partially descended from them, although this isn’t yet documented.

And when you start talking about genetics, you’re really opening a can of worms, of course.  We talk about THE human genome as if it were one thing, where there are countless known variations; let me discuss two of the better-known ones:

Down’s Syndrome is when a person has all or part of an extra copy of chromosome 21.  It usually causes mental retardation (although my Philosophy of Biology professor claimed that when she taught at Stanford she had a student with Down’s with an IQ of 140!) and a host of other mental and physical problems, but also a propensity towards less depression than typical.

XYY Syndrome is when a male has an extra Y chromosome.  According to Wikipedia, “most often, the extra Y chromosome causes no unusual physical features or medical problems.”

Since people with Down’s Syndrome or XYY Syndrome are genetically different from your typical person, are they really human?  I think most people would say yes.

And back to Dr. Who (and all the other fictional alien characters literature has given us, who hold a mirror up to our humanity, yet whose ancestors usually did not even spawn in our same oceans), who perhaps we will one day be privileged to meet in person.  Although genetically and internally he is certainly very different from us, yon Time Lord outwardly looks like us, reasons like us, has bad hair days like us, is subject to moral failings like us, uses tools far in advance of us, in short, seems to be meaningfully like us in every way that should count.

So, without a working definition, I want to say yes, I think if the Time Lord will accept us as company, we should accept him as human.

St. Augustine proposed that evil is the lack of good, much as cold is the lack of heat. By good, of course, he had in mind a theocentric concept, but what if we replaced it with a hedonistic concept? Specifically, let me define “good” as that which reduces pain and increases pleasure, for the individual and for the species. I’d also like to throw in the caveat that we should sometimes defer a lesser good for a greater good.  So, chocolate is good. No chocolate is bad. Enjoying a good book is good. Having a migraine is bad. So what if I take narcotics to relieve the migraine–that’s good right? The narcotics relieve the pain AND induce a certain euphoria of their own, a two-fer! So I should take them all the time right? Hold on, cowboy, that MIGHT long-term get me in trouble with Johhny Law, but it WILL cause brain damage resulting in a de facto chemical lobotomy, which is bad.

Likewise, speeding in my car will get me to my destination faster, which is good, but risks trouble with the police, bad, not to mention increased risk of an accident, additional wear and tear on the car, increased fuel consumption, and increased greenhouse gas emmissions, all bad.

Living intentionally as part of the human species, IMHO, is less about manners and more about reducing your carbon footprint, especially if you’re living in Western, industrialized democracy. Global warming is spiralling beyond worst-case scenarios and if humanity is to endure beyond the next couple of generations, it will be because of choices we make NOW.

So especially when we add the consideration of other people and living in a lawful society, so far our green morality doesn’t seem too far removed from any conventional morality. Maybe it would be easier if I found some counterexamples where my green morality might differ from what you might otherwise expect most people in most cultures to do nowadays.

*Get off your fat butt and exercise!  Once you get used to regular aerobic and strength training, it actually feels good, and you’ll feel better generally.  And while your friends are having their first heart attacks, your doctors will be looking at your lab reports and saying to you, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!”  That also means walking instead of driving for short trips, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, etc.

*Reduce your carbon footprint. Seriously. For most of us the most practical way to do that is to reduce our meat consumption.  Electric cars, LED lights, and other technological marvels as they become available will be wonderful, too.

*Only have the number of children you can nurture well. For most of us, that means one, and never more than two.
*Technology is fun and useful and planety-friendly–use it. Going for a walk in the park is fun and good exercise and planet-friendly, too.

*Chicken is several times more energy-efficient than beef or pork, so those few times a week when you do serve meat, emphasize chicken.

*Be aware of “energy vampire” appliances that continue to suck current even when turned off, such that you have to unplug them when not in use.

*Spend some time with your family every day possible–if it’s not for them, what’s the point?

*Your spouse is your only love and your only sex partner; the infidelity rate is about 50% and the divorce rate is about 50%, too–see a connection?

*Never raise a hand to your child in anger–you’ll only teach brutality. Perhaps sometimes physical punishment is called for, but your child should be able to see that it pains you more than it does him or her.

*Don’t save fine china, fine crystal, fine wines, etc., for “some day” that never arrives. Enjoy them with friends and family at the next festive occasion.

*If you’re single (or it’s just the two of you and you’re not expecting or planning to have a baby soon) and you’re not responsible for anyone else and you’re not going to be driving and you’re willing to take the risk that comes with breaking the law and want to try some of the milder drugs out there froma trusted source, take precautions, but don’t be afraid to explore. You could open up whole new vistas in your life. Remember that all drugs have side effects and you should NOT take drugs if you have some major, unresolved issues or stresses in your life.

Fideism (from Wikipedia):
Alvin Plantinga defines “fideism” as “the exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason and utilized especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth.” The fideist therefore “urges reliance on faith rather than reason, in matters philosophical and religious,” and therefore may go on to disparage the claims of reason. The fideist seeks truth, above all: and affirms that reason cannot achieve certain kinds of truth, which must instead be accepted only by faith. Plantinga’s definition might be revised to say that what the fideist objects to is not so much “reason” per se — it seems excessive to call Blaise Pascal anti-rational — but evidentialism: the notion that no belief should be held unless it is supported by evidence.
The fideist would claim we ascend the mountain of human knowledge, but even having ascended to the top, there are ultimate truths and realities that are still unobtainable by rationality, so one must make the leap of faith into the arms of God. A current expression of this heard in church circles would be to “let go and let God.” There is no rational (or as per Plantiga above, evidential) reason to believe that there is a god to catch the aspirant, but because she believes, she moves into places beyond the pale of the merely rational.

Postmodernism (also Wikipedia):
Postmodern philosophy is skeptical or nihilistic toward many of the values and assumptions of philosophy that derive from modernity, such as humanity having an essence which distinguishes humans from animals, or the assumption that one form of government is demonstrably better than another…. Postmodern philosophy is often particularly skeptical about simple binary oppositions characteristic of structuralism, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher cleanly distinguishing knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, and presence from absence.
Most varieties of post-modernism despair that there may be no absolutes and everything is relative, or if there are absolutes, they are unknowable. Note that when pushed to the extreme, believing that that can be no absolutes, particularly absolute truth, this becomes a non-rational faith perspective that is self-contradictory: how can we know absolutely there is no absolute truth when there IS no absolute truth from which to learn such?

Is all of this just “the talk on a cereal box”? Interestingly, many postmodernists would agree, even as their hermeneutic (interpretive scheme) rests on a deep, philosophical foundation. And, too, the fideists would claim the only meaningful truths are revealed by God, so rational and evidential inquiry is ultimately fruitless. Even if some of the fideists were right, the truths they arrive at contradict the truths of other fideists coming out of different faith perspectives, unless one wants to claim that fideist knowledge is absolutely subjective, in which case it is not truth in a widely-accepted sense. Likewise, it seems to me that the radical postmodernist gives up without trying and ultimately lapses into nihilism and hedonism. I would argue aesthetically (so again, with a non-rational motivation) that the pursuit of truth is a beautiful, noble, and worthy thing; life is a journey and not a destination.

(Gen 22 NIV) Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. {2} Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.” {3} Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. {4} On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. {5} He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” {6} Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, {7} Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?” “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied. “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” {8} Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.{9} When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. {10} Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. {11} But the angel of the LORD called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. {12} “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”

To me, this is the most gruesome story in the Hebrew scriptures (known to Christians as the Old Testament).  Abraham was called by a supposedly good God to sacrifice not only his son, but the son through whom his descendents were to be promised the land.  Even though the deed was putatively morally repugnant, Abraham (the superhero of the faith) obeyed God and was prepared to murder his son.

This is an example of Divine Command Theory: whatever God commands is good, whatever God forbids is evil.  When asked to explain their opposition to gay marriage, for instance, most of my students cite biblical prohibitions on homosexuality, often using the biblical term “abomination.”

How, then, do we know what God commands and forbids?  If, for instance, I heard a voice booming out of the sky, “SAM, GO YE FORTH AND SLAY THE CHAIR OF YOUR DEPARTMENT, FOR I, THE LORD, COMMAND IT!” I would more likely check myself into a psychiatric facility than commit murder, since I would strongly suspect some part of my brain would be broken, not that God had spoken to me.

OK, so why not restrict ourselves to what is written in our religion’s canonical scriptures?  The problem then is that there are plenty of other things in the Hebrew scriptures called “abominations” that most people knowingly and repeatedly violate, such as eating shrimp and pork, and wearing blended fiber clothing.   We cannot consistently pick and choose which of God’s commandments to obey.

Divine Command Theory therefore is not a rational ethic.  That’s not necessarily to dismiss it, for perhaps (as some would claim) the desire for right behavior is fundamentally not rational.  But it does mean that our rational skills to evaluate, prioritize, dismiss, or contradict certain behaviors are limited or non-existent.

So how about a rational ethic?  One historic way to approach ethics rationally is on the basis of consequences: do consequences matter or not?  If you answer yes, you are some form of teleologist (telos is Greek for end or point).  If you answer no, you are some variety of deontologist (deon is Greek for duty or purpose).

The most famous teleological family of ethics is Utilitarianism (note there are several varieties of such).  At its base, Utilitarianism is concerned with maximizing the hedonistic good: pleasure is good, pain is bad.  We often summarize Utilitarianism as the greatest good for the greatest number.  It’s as if goodness could be quantified into units and you seek to maximize that number of units: perhaps a small good multiplied over many people, or a vast good for one person.  This offers many advantages, for instance that you can quantify the possible ramifications of a decision and draw a decision analysis tree, yielding the decision that will statistically most likely most benefit the greatest number of people (or what will most benefit you as an individual, too).  Much of our medical practice is based on such a cost-benefit analysis.  Yet this approach can yield some results that make our skin crawl, like harvesting all of the organs and tissues of a perfectly healthy person–killing her–in order to save the lives of fifty other persons who will die without the transplant.  More broadly, within Utilitarianism, the end justifies the means, which would seem to justify behaviors that most other ethical systems would condemn.

Again, this does not mean that we should necessarily throw out Utilitarianism.  Perhaps our exposure to other ethical systems has simply blinded us to what is genuinely right such that if we’d been raised purely Utilitarian, we would have no objections.  On the other hand, other people have tried to tweak Utilitarianism, for instance differentiating between acts and rules, to remove the worst of the objections.

The most often studied of the deontological systems is Kantianism, with his famous Categorical Imperative: that we must only do those behaviors that everyone else could also do, and that we must always treat people as valuable in and of themselves and never only as a means to an end.  For Kant, the only criterion for evaluating the morality of an action is intention: if you intend in good faith to help someone especially someone you would not ordinarily be inclined to help (since we reflexively tend to help our friends), then your act is good, even if it has terrible consequences.  Likewise if you have malevolent intentions towards someone, your act is evil, even if it accidentally has good consequences.  For instance, if you are driving your car, sober and paying attention and your car in good mechanical condition, and a stranger towards whom you have no malice, but only equanimity, happens to step in front of you and dies from the impact, Kant would say you have done nothing wrong, it was a simple accident.  If you were not paying attention, or not sober, or had let your car lapse into undependable mechanical condition, and these things contributed to or directly caused the accident, you bear some responsibility.  And, obviously, if you intended to hit the person, your act was unequivocally evil.  We see this reflected in our legal system, wherein you would respectively be held innocent, be liable for manslaughter, and be guilty of murder.  Kant did not go back to the Categorical Imperative to evaluate every moral act; rather he generated “maxims,” sayings or rules, to guide life, that were consistent with the Categorical Imperative, such as “Never tell a lie.”

The duties given to us by Kantian maxims are simple and straightforward, yet perhaps they are too inflexible for real life situations.  For instance, what are you to do when you have conflicting duties, such as to tell the truth or to save a life and you cannot do both?  Kant held you could only have one duty at a time, but did not leave us an unambiguous way to sort out our duties–and our great temptation would be to evaluate them based on consequences, which would strike at the core of deontology.

If you’re confused now, that’s possibly a good sign, that you understand the complexities of what’s at stake.

As such, I overlap with, but am not identical to, libertarians, anarchists, communists, and especially utilitarians.  I appreciate the libertarians’ and anarchists’ zeal from freedom, but believe there is a legitimate function for a robust state–including to protect the rights of minorities.  I appreciate the egalitarian sentiments of communist theory, but especially in practice I have found it to be too heavy-handed and not respectful of individual rights.  I especially resonate with Mills’ Harm Principle (competent adults have the right to do as they please so long as they do not harm others), but am also turned off by his distrust of the common voter and his willingness to cede more power to the intellectual elite (e.g., the Electoral College as envisioned rather than directly electing a president by popular vote).

My stance, then, on some of today’s hot button topics:

Gay marriage: the marriage of GLBTQ people in no way harms the marriages or other rights enjoyed by the majority and this right should be fully recognized by the State.  What we have now is a Tyranny of the Majority denying rights to an unpopular minority.

Polygamy/polyandry/group marriages: the rights of consenting adults to live the lifestyle of their choice so long as it does not harm any children resulting from such unions also seems a no-brainer to me.  I’m the first to admit there are despicable things that have been associated with polygamy in the past, including the enslavement of women, but it seems to me these are a result of polygamy’s being forced underground.  If rigorously scientific tests showed that children of group (or gay) marriages were impaired, then the State would have a compelling interest in prohibiting their reproduction, if not their pairing–but as far as I am aware, no such study exists for either group.

Gun rights: it seems to me a tortured reading of the Second Amendment that allows unrestricted individual gun rights.  Hand guns in urban areas, in particular, are a public health menace and should be heavily regulated.  Guns that do not threaten the public well-being (in private homes for person defense, for hunting, in collections) should be reasonably regulated to prohibit their use for criminal purposes and to prevent their accidental discharge or use by minors.

God: American public places ideally should be free of religious monuments, symbols, artistic references, etc.  When they are permitted in tributes to historic origins of the law, etc., they must be open to all religious groups.  The free exercise of all groups’ religions must not be regulated so long as that practice does not harm the public good.

Drugs: competent adults should have unimpaired control over their own bodies, including the informed use of substances that are harmful to them, so long as they do not injure others in their intoxicated states–driving while intoxicated would be one example, as would neglect of a minor be another.  The State might reasonably restrict the use of intoxicating drugs, alcohol, etc., to private homes and sanctioned “shooting galleries.”

Abortion: a potential life is not equal to an existing life; as such viability is a reasonable (although admittedly imperfect) compromise between the rights of the unborn and the rights of parents–until viability, a woman should have unrestricted right to an abortion, while afterwards protecting the life of the mother should be the only permissible reason for an abortion.  Obviously this issue will need a major revisiting once science has developed an artificial womb such that all conceptions are theoretically viable when transplanted.