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Thought Experiment 78: Gambling on God

1/30/2017

What's trump again?

I've been blogging now about these philosophy thought experiments since March 2015—coming up on two full years. There have been many times during that tumultuous period when I've been tempted to give up this focus and start writing more forcefully about contemporary events. I've resisted for now, however, because I really do want to make sure I thoroughly cover the groundwork of philosophy. And then somewhat surprisingly, I almost always find that the "timeless" issues covered here are both important AND relevant too. Like the experiment we'll cover this week:

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And the Lord spake unto the philosopher, "I am the Lord thy God, and though you have no proof I am who I say I am, let me give you a reason to believe that will appeal to your fallen state: a gamble based on self-interest.
   "There are two possibilities: I exist or I don't exist. If you believe in me and follow my commands and I exist, you get eternal life. If I don't exist, however, you get a mortal life, with some of the comforts of belief. Sure, you've wasted some time at church and missed out on some pleasures, but that doesn't matter when you're dead. But if I do exist, eternal bliss is yours.
   "If you don't believe in me and I don't exist, you have a free and easy life, but you will still end up dead and you won't live with the reassurance of belief in the divine. If I do exist, however, it's an eternity of hot pokers and torment.
   "So, gamble that I don't exist and the best is a short life, while the worst is eternal damnation. But bet that I do exist, however unlikely that is, and the worst is a short life, but the best is eternal life. You'd be mad not to."

Source: Pensées, by Blaise Pascal, 1660.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 232.
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At a time when the world is screaming about what to do over the divide between Christian and Muslim worldviews, atheists are looking at everyone and wondering, "Why can't we just drop this whole charade?" The gamble on gods is being lost in at least one very important way that Pascal did not foresee. Can you spot it? Tell me what you think in the comments below. I'll be back on Friday to place my bet.

8 Comments

Programming Note

1/27/2017

2 Comments

Hola! I've been gone for a few weeks, so I just wanted to drop a quick post to say that I will be returning to my regularly scheduled blog posts next week as I continue examining philosophical thought experiments. I've been spending some of my break writing a philosophical short story for a competition that is being held by the Sci Phi Journal (as publicized in a blog post by the American Philosophy Association). The deadline for that competition is February 1st, so I'll be wrapping up my story over the weekend, but I won't be able to share it here for several weeks or months depending on how it is judged. If you want to submit something of your own, you still have a few days. Good luck to all!

While I was gone, I also spent a couple of weeks in Mexico on a personal tour of Oaxaca, Cuernavaca, and Mexico City. While I was there, learning about the fantastic, sophisticated, and ancient culture of the people in that nation, the U.S. inaugurated a new president who has promised to build a wall on its southern border to keep those people out. What a shame. I encourage all of you to do what you can to promote cooperation in this issue rather than competition, since we know from evolutionary history that cooperation is stronger over the long term. If you get discouraged or feel hopeless about this situation, though, remember this fantastic quote I just learned.

Para todo mal, Mezcal. Para todo bien, tambien.

I know philosophers like to quote the phrase in vino veritas, but this one feels more helpful now. It means:

For everything bad, there is Mezcal. For everything good, the same works too.

Salud! And keep your spirits up. I'll be back again on Monday with some deeper distraction.

2 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 77: The Scapegoat

1/6/2017

0 Comments

Did anyone really think this show was a tale of good justice and morality?

I know anti-heros in police dramas are popular, like Vic Mackey in The Shield or Jimmy McNulty in The Wire. But come on, these are just cautionary tales of the dangers of giving in to short-term thinking, right? Right???

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Why had Marsha joined the police force? In her own mind, the answer was clear: to protect the public and make sure justice was done. Those considerations were more important than following the rules.
She kept telling herself that, because she feared she lacked the resolve to break the rules in order to stay true to her ideals. A good man had made a terrible mistake, and an innocent woman was dead as a result. But by a sequence of accidents and coincidences, Marsha had enough circumstantial and forensic evidence to convict a different man of the crime. Not only that, but the man she could frame was a nasty piece of work who was certainly responsible for a number of murders. She had merely never been able to gather enough evidence to make the charges stick in court.
She knew that the due process of law left no room for framing, but surely it would be better to get a repeat murderer behind bars than a man who posed no threat to anyone? The justice in that was greater than the injustice of denying a killer the benefits of a fair trial.

Source: Insomnia, directed by Christopher Nolan, 2002.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 229.
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When I first read this, I figured it was just a simple case of a lazy cop with bad reasoning who was willing to bend the rules and contribute to breaking the justice system rather than do her job properly. But then I read the explanation from Baggini and became infuriated. Baggini explains that for the cop...

...her problem is whether or not these are the kinds of exceptional circumstances which warrant rule-breaking. How could she decide that? Several different ways of determining this could vindicate her deceit. For instance, we might think that rule-breaking is permitted if three conditions are met. First, it must result in a significantly better outcome than rule-following. This would seem to be the case in Marsha's situation. Second, the action should not undermine rule-following in general. This condition would also be met, as long as Marsha's deceit remained secret. Third, the rule-breaking must be the only means of acheiving the better outcome. It seems there is no other way in which Marsha could ensure the real menace ends up in prison. ... Perhaps it is not contradictory to say that society must demand that the police always follow the rules, but that it is nevertheless sometimes good if they secretly break them. Our collective job may be to uphold the rule of law, but our individual duty may be to ensure we do what is best, inside or outside the law.

What horror this permits! And based on very poor reasoning! Even if we accept that Baggini's first condition for rule-breaking is met, how can his second requirement be fulfilled? How could illegal acts of justice ever be fully private? They cannot! Unless the judgements were only ever handed down via a secret book of guilt that no one else could read, then at a minimum the wronged person will also know of the deceit, and their story could some day contribute to the distrust and undermining of the justice system as a whole. This is incredibly dangerous. As I noted when I wrote about the sociologist Max Weber:

In Politics as a Vocation, Weber unveils the definition of the state that it is the entity that possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, which it may nonetheless elect to delegate as it sees fit - a definition that became pivotal to the study of modern Western political science.

To this notion, I responded that:

The state’s actual role is to correct for inefficiencies in the markets. Force, being an element required for the provision of the public goods of defense and justice, must be provided for by the state. And though the state has a monopoly on force, the true transparent separation of powers within a state would ensure that no one person or group could continually wield that force in a hurtful way.

In other words, when justice systems are corrputed by individuals who think they can wield force outside of the rule of law, that is a necessary and sufficient ingredient for the failure of an entire state because the government will then no longer have a legitimate monopoly on the use of force. The ultimate consequences of this breakdown—as seen early on in divided communities where the Black Lives Matter movement is strong, or later in mafia states like Russia and Mexico, or finally in failed states like Syria, Somalia, or South Sudan—are undeniably dire and must not be risked for the sake of one criminal. Do your job Marsha.

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Thought Experiment 77: The Scapegoat

1/2/2017

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Does justice have to be so blind?

Happy New Year! I'm back to blogging about the philosophy thought experiments in Julian Baggini's book The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, and this week's thought experiment is one that's always timely.

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Why had Marsha joined the police force? In her own mind, the answer was clear: to protect the public and make sure justice was done. Those considerations were more important than following the rules.
She kept telling herself that, because she feared she lacked the resolve to break the rules in order to stay true to her ideals. A good man had made a terrible mistake, and an innocent woman was dead as a result. But by a sequence of accidents and coincidences, Marsha had enough circumstantial and forensic evidence to convict a different man of the crime. Not only that, but the man she could frame was a nasty piece of work who was certainly responsible for a number of murders. She had merely never been able to gather enough evidence to make the charges stick in court.
She knew that the due process of law left no room for framing, but surely it would be better to get a repeat murderer behind bars than a man who posed no threat to anyone? The justice in that was greater than the injustice of denying a killer the benefits of a fair trial.

Source: Insomnia, directed by Christopher Nolan, 2002.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 229.
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What do you think? Could the ends ever justify the means for a police officer in Marsha's shoes? I'll be back on Friday with my answer, but in the meantime I'd love to hear your thoughts via the comment section below.

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Thought Experiment 78: Gambling on God

Programming Note

Response to Thought Experiment 77: The Scapegoat

Thought Experiment 77: The Scapegoat

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