In this post, I want to take a moment to hype the many things I will be doing this summer.

One-on-One Philosophical Counseling/Tutoring
This summer I plan to get certified in philosophical counseling. Not all the problems people have in life are the kinds that require psychological counseling. If your problems do—don’t come to me, that’s not my qualification and I won’t pretend it is.

Some people are mentally healthy but still want the benefits of philosophical discussion for sorting out questions about their values, about how to live a genuinely meaningful life, about important metaphysical questions, about developing an irreligious or post-religious worldview, etc. Some people would just like to have a philosophical mentor or tutor with whom they can read philosophical texts and/or engage in vigorous open-ended dialectical inquiries into philosophical issues. Some people just think studying Nietzsche with a passionate Nietzsche specialist would be an enriching experience.

I have in recent months held sessions with a private student which have served all those goals and it’s been a very gratifying experience for both of us. We have both learned a lot and become good friends. I am really hoping in the coming years to make one-on-one philosophical counseling, mentoring, and tutoring a primary source of my income. This summer if you are interested in booking some time with me, either in person here in New York City or online (through video conferencing on Skype), please write me at camelswithhammers@gmail.com or on Facebook. If you would like to study with me but cannot afford frequent one-on-one time, I would be very amenable to teaching small groups for a more manageable fee, so let me know if you can rustle up the people for such a group or would like to be put on a list with others looking for such an option. My times to meet with individuals or with groups can be very flexible all summer as I have no official employment outside of Freethought Blogs until September. Hopefully relationships begun in the summer can continue on through the fall or resume in the spring.

As far as free philosophical advice goes, this summer I will finally launch my “Philosophical Advice” column here on Camels With Hammers, wherein I will answer your questions about ethical dilemmas and other tough life choices which are amenable to philosophical analysis. I was sent some very good questions to dive into a couple months ago and I am eager to get on with answering them on the blog.

Blogging Like A Maniac
This summer I am going to ramp up to my usual prolific levels of daily blogging. I hope to generally take the available time to do philosophical research and dig into some philosophical depth in most of my posts. But being available to blog most of the day will mean that I can also comment on breaking atheist and political news more often.

The last several weeks I have not been blogging to my usual standards, either in terms of quantity or quality, as I have been trying to wrap up teaching and grading 8 classes of philosophy. And so long without blogging makes me a little sluggish, so to get unstuck and back into the regular blogging swing I am going to carry out a 24 hour blogathon, as I did in January after my winter grading break. To make up for several weeks of anemic blogging, I will write 36 posts in 24 hours, one every 45 minutes starting Thursday May 24 at 9am and ending at 8:15am on Friday May 25. None of the posts will be written before Thursday. Numerous readers have sent me things to look at over the last several weeks and months and I will try to get to some of those items during the blogathon. Thanks for your patience in the meantime, everyone.

Writing A Book
This summer I have resolved to write a book. I know exactly what I want to write. I am going to keep the details about it under wraps until it is fully drafted. I promise it will be bold and creative, uncompromisingly philosophically rigorous, deeply informed by scholarship, and also scrupulously, unabashedly accessible to philosophical novices. I am going to write the book that is deep in my guts and worry about the marketing after the fact.

Learning How To Make Videos
I have long wanted to make Camels With Hammers a more multimedia experience. This won’t be my highest priority among these many ambitious projects I am setting out for myself but I at least hope to practice and learn a lot about filming, getting audio right, developing visuals, and doing editing so that some day further down the road I can make this a significant part of the Camels With Hammers experience.

Philosophizing About Batman Live
July 7 from 2pm-3pm I will be a panelist talking about Batman and Philosophy at CONvergence, in Minnesota. Be there!

I will also be hanging around lots at the Freethought Blogs/Skepchick room at the convention, meeting readers and promoting the blog network. Be there too!

Being A Groomsman in Dave and Meagan’s Wedding
Dave Smith, the web guy at Camels With Hammers who made the whole blog’s existence possible for its first two years, is getting married this summer to an incredible woman. Dave is a spectacular human being and an old friend going back to freshman year in college. His fiancé Meagan is a new friend and already one of my favorite people on the planet.

Losing Weight
I shall be more svelte come summer’s end.

Visiting My Family
Yes, Mom, I am coming down to Florida the week I have told you a dozen times that I am coming. I will book the flight soon as the semester is over to make it official so you can stop asking.

Your Thoughts?

Thanks for a great semester, all of you.

via Milwaukee Mart

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Photographer Joel Sartore shoots gorgeous portraits of endangered species to raise awareness about what’s at stake and to raise money. See photos and buy prints to support the cause here. Below is a news story from NBC about Sartore’s project.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

H/T: Neko Case, whose love for and identification with animals is unmissable on her brilliant 2009 album Middle Cyclone.

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John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named.

Read More.

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But Tuesday morning will be my final lecture and a week from tonight is my final day having to travel out of Manhattan. At that point, as I finish my grading for the semester I will slowly begin to ramp up for a summer of steady blogging. Thanks for your patience in the meantime. As a reward, please enjoy this cute video of a smart little seagull who shares my passion for Doritos, which come courtesy of Nick.

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Where the Wild Things Are,

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Tom Gilson thinks that theism accounts for moral realism better than atheism does.  My reasons for rejecting that view are here (though I am interested in tailoring a future post specifically to Gilson’s particular way of arguing for a theist basis for moral realism).

For now, however, rather than counter Gilson’s positive claims for theism’s ability to ground moral realism, I want instead to answer the first of nine questions he poses as challenges to atheist moral realists.

I consider myself a form of moral realist, even on his specific definition of it as “the view that moral duties and values have an objective reality that does not depend on any person’s or group of persons’ opinions or beliefs about them”.  But I reject his equation of this position with the ideas that (1) that there are “unchanging moral absolutes”, (2) that moral duties and values have always existed, or (3) that morality’s “essential principles are eternally unchanging”.

In this context, I will answer the first of nine supposed problems that Gilson proposes for atheistic moral realists and in a future post I hope to address the other eight.  Gilson’s first question is, “What is a moral value or duty; specifically, to whom or what is it a value, and to whom or what is the duty directed, owed, or pointed?”

Moral values are valuable to human beings and possibly to other rational beings which may exist–if they share certain relevant features which would make moral values valuable to them.

But what are moral values and why are they important to human beings?  The first thing to note is that moral values are not our primary values. Our primary value is simply to exist.  This is the most fundamental value because it is the precondition of any other values whatsoever.

Our existence is constituted of certain activities in which we are instantiated as the beings we are.  For example, without our brain activities which generate our thoughts, for example, we do not exist as persons.  And, on a more physically fundamental level, without our cells performing the activities which constitute our bodies, we cannot even exist bodily and since our personhood depends on certain brain activities and the brain is a bodily organ, we cannot exist as people if the cells in our body do not perform “body activities”.

Therefore, in order to exist maximally we must maximally perform the activities which make up our kind of being.  In order to fully realize our humanity, which is our fundamental essence, we must maximally powerfully express our various powers through which we exist.  To certain important extents doing this entails having the requisite physical health to sustain the bodily underpinnings of those flourishing powers.

The more we realize our powers, the more we come into being, i.e., the more we are at all.  We have an inherent interest in being what we are since this is the precondition of all of our further interests.

It is in the context of this most basic good—the existential precondition of all our other goods—that we can assess the worth, i.e. the value, of everything outside of us and inside of us.

As far as things outside of us go, oxygen, for example, is of crucial value because it is an indispensable precondition of our organic life.  As far as internal components of our psyche go, we can assess some of them as being of greater value insofar as they either constitute, contribute to and/or amplify powers we have and others as being of lesser value insofar as they tend to detract from our other powers with a detrimental effect on our overall powerful realization of ourselves.

In this context, our minds have evolved powers of value discrimination, some of which function automatically and some of which involve deliberative processes.

Evolution has imperfectly but nonetheless powerfully effectively overall equipped us to make many snap judgments.  We taste sweet things as pleasant, which is equivalent to interpreting them as desirable.  This is because in the ages in which we evolved, sugary substances were highly advantageous to us and were in rare supply.  When those of our ancestors who had mutated the quirk of finding sweetness incredibly pleasant and desirable stumbled upon sugary things, they kept eating them and reaped an advantage over any of their peers who may have not had the quirk of finding sweet things pleasant.

Over time the fitness for survival of sweet tooths to our prehistoric environment kept encouraging the transmission of an automatic preference for sweetness until today our brain automatically makes the value judgment that sweet things are good for it (in the form of pleasant sensations when our tongues come into contact with them).

In such manner as this, our brains are naturally conditioned to make all sorts of automatic judgments of positive or negative value. Many of these judgments are immediately indicated to us with the persuasive force of pleasures or pains which often enormously influence how we react to things without any rational deliberations occurring or needing to occur.  And in certain matters in which erroneous rational deliberations would be extremely harmful (or even fatal), pain can be so extreme that we have no psychological ability to resist its demand we remove or avoid whatever is causing it.

There are some situations in which our automatic pleasures or pains may not be finely calibrated enough by the process of natural selection to guide us by themselves.  In some cases, we need to reason about the actual conditions of our survival or our flourishing either because our natural pleasures and pains offer no direct input or because the input they give us is insufficient for figuring out what is best for us overall when abstract considerations, remote effects, and complicated calculi about how to generate net gains in pleasure are all taken into account.

So we have vitally evolved powers of inference, by which we are capable of figuring out both what ends are worth pursuing for our most fundamental good and various effective means to attaining those ends.  Of course our inferential powers are imperfect and in numerous cases have taken centuries or millenia to figure out how various things work.  Nonetheless, inference is an often effective tool for figuring out what means are objectively efficient for attaining what ends.   And so we can say that inference is an effective tool for discovering values, insofar as value means potential effectiveness for attaining an end.

Within all of this context, moral values can be situated as real, objective, but nonetheless historically malleable, goods for human beings.  Specifically moral values arise out of several psychological value priorities innate to our minds, given how we have evolved.  Because social cooperation was a powerful means for human survival, we have evolved naturally to be social beings.  Insofar as certain virtues and habits of judgment made social cooperation possible, we have evolved basic natural tendencies to develop various pro-social virtues and habits of judgment.

Some of these habits of judgment take the form of calculations of advantage which reflect the prisoner dilemma sort of situations in which our minds evolved.  We have habits of suspending our own primary interests when they come at the expense of others whose cooperation we need and of punishing others when they do not do the same for us and of punishing them even when it comes at further cost to us.  These habits help us automatically form and reinforce everyone’s participation in a cooperative society that objectively was the precondition of our survival.

In this situation we have deeply ingrained and further cultivatable aversions to causing each other serious harm which keep us from hurting each other—as long as other specific emotions which were naturally selected for their own contributions to our flourishing are not activated in such a way that they powerfully override this default restraint.  And we also have both automatic and cultivatable inclinations to care for one another which are manifestly powerful and constitute an enormous amount of our human lives—more than we ever realize or appreciate.  (We are understandably extremely highly sensitized to deviations from this cooperative norm and tend to remember, dwell upon, and lament these failures and, in our morally hysterical moments, confuse them for the dominant way we engage with each other, when in fact they are not.)

Our fundamental need for cooperative group and interpersonal behavior made it so that those who had strong intuitions that they should treat others the same as they themselves needed to be treated were likely persistently selected for since this inclination had the effect of leading to that vital cooperative group and interpersonal behavior that made humans live long enough to pass on their genes.

We can infer from here that an a priori norm of formal fairness, which tells us that we are required to treat each person who is similarly situated to another in the same way, has evolved and become a standard issue part of our mental machinery, in terms of which we all think.  And one of the primary concerns for formal fairness that we have also had is that it is only fair that we return favors with favors and harms with harms.

And so our consequentialist modes of thinking that seek to maximize not only our own pleasures and flourishing but others’ as well extends from our sense of fairness.  It strikes us as unfair to not generally wish others the goods we wish for ourselves–at least if those others are cooperative with us and not harmful to us.

Our ability to think in terms of formal consistency and formal fairness makes possible our strong feeling that there are moral absolutes. It is formally unfair for anyone to make himself an exception to the basic rules of cooperation which we all except.

The principle difference between deontologists and consequentialists strikes me as a difference between thinking of the rules atomistically and non-situationally  or thinking of the rules of fairness as allowing for highly contextual factors to influence what is fair.  So the deontologist thinks one may simply “never lie” or “never steal” since these actions are generally unfair; whereas, for the consequentialist it can be both fair for everyone to have the right to lie in cases where lying will save a life and fair for no one to have the right to lie where lying involves cheating others out of what they are owed on grounds of fairness.

Since very few cases of lying will actually have fair outcomes that give people what they are properly due, even most consequentialists will talk in shorthand about lying as bad without bothering to enumerate all the qualifying exception cases in which it would be good and fair.

A duty is a responsibility we have to act fairly and fulfill the demands of our moral intuitions. This duty is objective and our intuitions about the binding character of the principle of fairness is objective because the cooperative activities which their exercise sustains are integral to our survival and our thriving and our survival and thriving are intrinsically necessary to us.

To answer Gilson’s question about to whom our duties are due, the answer from the moral perspective is other people.  We have these duties to others, however, because they are a precondition of our own survival and our own thriving, and thus, ultimately our duties to others are actually made necessary by our intrinsic interest in our own being.  These duties are important to us regardless of whether we consciously acknowledge them as such.  They are independent of our beliefs and desires and objective in this way.  They need not be “eternal”, they need not “absolutely” override all other goods without qualification, and nor need they demand the same specific things of us in every circumstance whatsoever.

There is of course more to morality and Gilson has 8 more (generally simpler to answer) questions just about the justification of moral realism for me to address.  But those details will require other posts.

In the meantime, the considerations spelled out in the above post should offer a greater context and justification for the ideas in the following, roughly logically ordered, posts.  Several posts below have been written in response to this one and others were written earlier:

Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness)

Grounding Objective Value Independent Of Human Interests And Moralities

Non-Reductionistic Analysis Of Values Into Facts

Effectiveness Is The Primary Goal In Itself, Not Merely A Means

What Is Happiness And Why Is It Good?

Deriving An Atheistic, Naturalistic, Realist Account Of Morality

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

Subjective Valuing And Objective Values

My Perspectivist, Teleological Account Of The Relative Values Of Pleasure And Pain

Pleasure And Pain As Intrinsic Instrumental Goods

What Does It Mean For Pleasure And Pain To Be “Intrinsically Instrumental” Goods?

Against Moral Intuitionism

Moral vs. Non-Moral Values

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

On Good And Evil For Non-Existent People

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

Further Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

The Harmony Of Humility And Pride

Moral Mutability, Not Subjective Morality.  Moral Pluralism, Not Moral Relativism.

How Morality Can Change Through Objective Processes And In Objectively Defensible Ways

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