The Canterbury cathedral didn't quite look like this when Anselm was its archbishop from 1093 to 1109. The gothic update visible today didn't happen until after Thomas Becket's murder there in 1170 made the place wealthy with pilgrims who travelled there to honour the martyr. Still, Canterbury was the seat of English Christendom, which, fresh after the Norman conquest, meant that it had broad influence over the British isle and northwestern France. Anselm had risen to this prestigious position from the unlikely source of a small village in the Italian Alps halfway between Lyon and Milan. He did so on the back of the philosophical writings he undertook while studying and working in a Benedictine abbey in Le Bec-Hellouin near Rouen. I wish I could land such a plum gig based on my philosophical writings. What could he have written that would bring him such fame and power presiding over an institution like this?

Chiefly, Anselm was famous for the Proslogian, written in 1077-1078. As he tells us in the preface of that work, Anselm wanted to find, "a single argument that needed nothing but itself alone for proof, that would by itself be enough to show that God really exists; that he is the supreme good, who depends on nothing else, but on whom all things depend for their being and for their well-being." That “single argument” is the one that appears in chapter 2 of the Proslogion, and the one that today we call the ontological argument (so named by Kant—the medievals simply called it Anselm's Argument). Versions of this argument have been defended and criticized by a succession of philosophers from Anselm's time straight through to the present day. Heck, even Stephen Colbert mentioned it in his google talk in 2012. Correctly understood, Anselm's argument can be summarized as follows:

1. That than which nothing greater can be thought, can be thought.
2. If that than which nothing greater can be thought can be thought, it exists in reality.

Therefore:

3. That than which nothing greater can be thought exists in reality.

That's it. Anselm, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, thought that "once we have formed this idea of that than which nothing greater can be thought, then we can see that such a being has features that cannot belong to a possible but non-existent object. In other words, hypothesis (2) is true. For example, a being that is capable of non-existence is less great than a being that exists necessarily. If that than which nothing greater can be thought does not exist, it is obviously capable of non-existence; and if it is capable of non-existence, then even if it were to exist, it would not be that than which nothing greater can be thought after all. So if that than which nothing greater can be thought can be thought — that is, if it is a possible being — it actually exists."

Philosophers have of course poked many different holes in this argument for a millennium. Try it for yourself. It's fun! But the one I want to focus on here is the leap Anselm makes between the ideas of the mind and the reality of the universe. A new reader sent me this comment this week: "One of the fundamental questions I ask and have been asked by my philosophy-minded colleagues is the relationship between matter and non-matter and how we (as matter) would ever be able to learn about non-matter?" I'm still working on understanding what this particular reader has in mind when he talks about non-matter, but generally the realm of thoughts and qualities are considered non-matter by idealists or dualists. The redness of a sunset, the taste of a wine, the "bat-ness" of being a bat. But recent neurological investigations into our use of metaphors helps explain how we make the leap from facts and observations about the concrete material world to the realm of our ideas about that material world. Here is an excerpt from a fantastic article entitled Metaphors Are Us by Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, to help explain what I'm talking about.

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"We’re not so special after all. But there are still ways that humans appear to stand alone. One of those is hugely important: the human capacity to think symbolically. Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech—they exert enormous power over us. We kill for symbols, die for them. In recent years scientists from leading universities, including UCLA, University College London, and Yale, have made remarkable insights into the neurobiology of symbols. A major finding from their work is that the brain is not very good at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal. In fact, as scientists have shown us, symbols and metaphors, and the morality they engender, are the product of clunky processes in our brains. Symbols serve as a simplifying stand-in for something complex. (A rectangle of cloth with stars and stripes represents all of American history and values.) And this is very useful. Symbolic language brought huge evolutionary advantages. This can be seen even in the baby steps of symbolism of other species. When vervet monkeys, for instance, spot a predator, they don’t just generically scream. They use distinct vocalizations, different “proto-words,” where one means, “Aiiiiii!, predator on the ground, run up the tree,” and the other means, “Aiiiiii!, predator in the air, run down the tree.” Language pries apart a message from its meaning, and as our hominid ancestors kept getting better at this separation, great individual and social advantages accrued. We became capable of representing emotions in the past and possible emotions in the future, as well as things that have nothing to do with emotion. How did our brains evolve to mediate this complexity? In an awkward way. The best way to shine a light on this unwieldy process is through metaphors for two feelings critical to survival: pain and disgust.

Consider the following: you stub your toe. Pain receptors there send messages to the spine and on up to the brain, where various regions kick into action. This is the meat-and-potatoes of pain processing, found in every mammal. But there are fancier, more recently evolved parts of the brain in the frontal cortex that assess the meaning of the pain. Maybe it’s bad news: your stubbed toe signals the start of some unlikely disease. Or maybe it’s good news: you’re going to get your firewalker diploma because the hot coals made your toes throb. Much of this assessing occurs in a frontal cortical region called the anterior cingulate. This structure is heavily involved in “error detection,” noting discrepancies between what is anticipated and what occurs. And pain from out of nowhere surely represents a discrepancy between the pain-free setting that you anticipate versus the painful reality. Now let’s go a little deeper, based on work by Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA. While lying in a brain scanner, you play a game of virtual catch, where you and two people in another room toss a cyberball around on a computer screen. (In reality, there aren’t two other people, only a computer program.) In the control condition, you’re informed mid-play that there’s a computer glitch and you’re temporarily off-line. You watch the virtual ball get tossed between those two people. Now in the experimental setting, you’re playing with the other two and suddenly they start ignoring you and only toss the ball between them. Hey, how come they don’t want to play with me anymore? Junior high all over again. And the brain scanner shows that the neurons in your anterior cingulate activate. In other words, rejection hurts. “Well, yeah,” you might say. “But that’s not like stubbing your toe.” It is to your anterior cingulate. Both abstract social and literal pain impact the same cingulate neurones. We take things a step further with work by Tania Singer and Chris Frith at University College London. While in a brain scanner, you’re administered a mild shock, delivered through electrodes on your fingers. All the usual brain regions activate, including the anterior cingulate. Now you watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. The brain regions that ask, “Is it my finger or toe that hurts?” remain silent. It’s not their problem. But your anterior cingulate activates, and as far as it’s concerned, “feeling someone’s pain” isn’t just a figure of speech. You seem to feel the pain too. As evolution continued to tinker, it did something remarkable with humans. It duct-taped (metaphorically, of course) the anterior cingulate’s role in giving context to pain into a profound capacity for empathy. We’re not the only species with an anterior cingulate, but studies show the human anterior cingulate is more complex than in other species, with more connections to abstract, associational parts of the cortex, regions that can call your attention to the pains of the world, rather than the pain in your big toe. And we feel someone else’s pain like no other species. We extend it over distance to help a refugee child on another continent. We extend it over time, feeling the terror of what are now mere human remains at Pompeii.

Consider another domain where our brains’ shaky management of symbols adds tremendous power to a unique human quality: morality. You’re in a brain scanner and because of the scientist’s weirdly persuasive request, you bite into some rotten food. Something rancid and fetid and skanky. This activates another part of the frontal cortex, the insula, which, among other functions, processes gustatory and olfactory disgust. It sends neuronal signals to face muscles that reflexively spit out that bite, and to your stomach muscles that make you puke. All mammals have an insula that processes gustatory disgust. After all, no animal wants to consume poison.But we are the only animal where that process serves something more abstract. Think about eating something disgusting. Think about a mouthful of centipedes, chewing and swallowing them as they struggle, wiping off the little legs that you’ve drooled onto your lips. Whammo goes the insula, leaping into action, sending out its usual messages of disgust. Now think about something awful you once did, something deeply shameful. The insula activates. It has been co-opted into processing that human invention: moral disgust. Remarkably, the way our brains use symbols to discern disgust and morality also contributes to political ideology. Work by scientists such as Kevin Smith of the University of Nebraska reveals that on the average conservatives have a lower threshold for visceral disgust than do liberals. Look at pictures of excrement or open sores undulating with maggots, and if your insula goes atypically berserk, chances are that you’re a conservative—but only about social issues, say, gay marriage, if you’re heterosexual. And if your insula just takes those maggots in stride, chances are you’re a liberal. Our wobbly, symbol-dependent brains are molded by personal ideology and culture, shaping our perceptions, emotions, and convictions. Many cultures inculcate their members into acquiring symbols that repel, doing so by strengthening specific neural pathways from the cortex to the insula, pathways that you’d never find in another species. Depending on who you are, those pathways could be activated by the sight of a swastika or of two men kissing. Or perhaps by the thoughts of an abortion, or of a 10-year-old Yemeni girl forced to marry an old man. Our stomachs lurch, and we feel the visceral certainty of what is wrong. And we belong. The same brain apparatus is behind symbols that move us to our most empathic, inclusive, and embracing.
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The article goes a little off track from the point I'm making, as Sapolsky explains the physical locations of metaphor for two emotional phenomena, but the point still stands: our physical brain (specifically the anterior cingulate and the insula regions in Sapolsky's examples) is able to lump attributes together into groups and then name those groups. This use of symbols and metaphors and where they reside in the brain helps to explain the bridge that dualists think exists over a chasm between two discrete realms, when in fact the bridge is just another metaphor our physical brains have constructed to help make sense of the material world we are trying to live, survive, and thrive in. This is the explanation from evolutionary philosophy of why the ontological argument has no merit. The symbolical and metaphorical pictures in our mind are just physical brain states. They have no bearing or implication on what actually exists in the cold uncaring universe around us that we have so recently evolved within. Anselm's insistence makes no sense that just because we can think of "that than which nothing greater can be thought," it must follow that that thing must exist. Why would it? We can't produce other figments of our imagination.

Let's cut this short now and look at what I had to say about Anselm in my analysis of the survival of the fittest philosophers.

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Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 CE) was the founder of scholasticism and is famous in the West as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God.

Survives
Not so much a philosophy or a theology as a method of learning, scholasticism places a strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference, and to resolve contradictions. Scholastic thought is also known for rigorous conceptual analysis and the careful drawing of distinctions. It originated as an outgrowth of, and a departure from, Christian monastic schools. Anselm may not have used it properly or well, but this rebirth of logic eventually led to the Reformation, scientific method, and the downfall of mystic revelation.

Needs to Adapt

Gone Extinct
Anselm reasoned that if "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" existed only in the intellect, it would not be "that than which nothing greater can be conceived," since it can be thought to exist in reality, which is greater. It follows, according to Anselm, that "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" must exist in reality. This was criticized on the grounds that humans cannot pass from intellect to reality. There are many things that humans can conceive of that do not exist in reality. A perfect circle for example.

Anselm also stated, “Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this, too, I believe, that, unless I first believe, I shall not understand.” He held that faith precedes reason, but that reason can expand upon faith. Thus formally accepting false premises and confirmation bias into the institution of religion.
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Almost home now. I can hardly wait to continue this use of scholastic reasoning to plow through two more mediocre medieval philosophers before we get to the good stuff. Onwards!

What would you say if you had the knowledge of this entire empire at your disposal in 1000 CE?

Last week, I looked at the soundness of Muhammad's teachings and found them severely lacking. What cannot be argued, however, is that they were effective. After his death in 632, proceeding leaders of the Islamic faith spread the word of their prophet and were unafraid to use the method of jihad to "struggle in the way of Allah" and build larger and larger caliphates, expanding first throughout the Arabian Peninsula, then along the Persian Gulf as well as the Mediterranean, Red, and Caspian Seas, before stretching out all the way from Portugal to India. While the collapse of Rome left Europe groping in the dark ages, this new empire to the south enjoyed several hundred years known as Islam's Golden Age during which time the extensive texts of the Greco-Roman, Persian, and Indian civilisations were encountered, translated into arabic, and studied extensively. The spread of this knowledge was aided tremendously by the concurrent spread of the invention of paper. While the Chinese had been using paper since they invented it in 105 CE, it did not move to the West until the defeat of the Chinese in the Battle of Talas in 751CE in present day Kyrgyzstan at the border between these two major empires. In the Muslim world, with a "new, easier writing system and the introduction of paper, information was democratized to the extent that, probably for the first time in history, it became possible to make a living from simply writing and selling books." (I wish that were easier today!) The whole of the Middle East along the silk road came to provide a thriving atmosphere for scholarly and cultural development. Into this world, in 980 CE, near the centre of present day Uzbekistan, in the city of Bukhara (which rivalled Baghdad as a cultural capital of the Islamic world), the great Avicenna was born—the most famous philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age.

 range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. Of particular note, 150 of his surviving works concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine. From these, the best quote I found from him was undoubtedly this one:

An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.

Unfortunately, so is an ignorant philosopher, as we have seen repeatedly throughout this series in my examination of the Survival of the Fittest Philosophers. Avicenna was less destructive than most medieval philosophers, and although that's not saying much, let's see exactly what he had to say.

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Avicenna (980-1037 CE) was a Persian polymath who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects. His corpus includes writing on philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, as well as poetry. He is regarded as the most famous and influential polymath of the Islamic Golden Age in which the translations of Greco-Roman, Persian, and Indian texts were studied extensively.

Survives
His 14-volume Canon of Medicine was a standard medical text in Europe and the Islamic world until the 18th century. The book is known for its description of contagious diseases and sexually transmitted diseases, quarantine to limit the spread of infectious diseases, and testing of medicines. Some nice contributions to the long lineage of medical science.

Needs to Adapt
Avicenna inquired into the question of being (metaphysics), in which he distinguished between essence and existence. He argued that the fact of existence cannot be inferred from or accounted for by the essence of existing things, and that form and matter by themselves cannot interact and originate the movement of the universe or the progressive actualization of existing things. Existence must, therefore, be due to an agent-cause that necessitates, imparts, gives, or adds existence to an essence. It is still not known what caused the origin of the universe or why matter exists at all. However, it is well known how form and matter interacted to create the progressive actualization of existing things—this is evolution. The infinite regression of the agent-cause argument (who created the first agent?) leads only to the same questions. It does not lead to an all-seeing god.

Gone Extinct
Avicenna wrote his famous "Floating Man" thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantiality and immateriality of the soul. He told readers to imagine themselves created all at once while suspended in the air, isolated from all sensations, which includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies. He argued that, in this scenario, one would still have self-consciousness. The first knowledge of the flying person would be “I am,” affirming his or her essence. That essence could not be the body, obviously, as the flying person has no sensation. Avicenna thus concluded that the idea of the self is not logically dependent on any physical thing, and that the soul should not be seen in relative terms. The body is unnecessary; the soul is an immaterial substance. But bodies cannot just appear all at once suspended in air and isolated from all sensations. The argument is false right from the start. Our bodies are grounded in reality and there are no souls.
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Not a particularly big contribution to the progress of philosophy, but we are indebted to Avicenna for his role in keeping inquiry alive during the dark ages. It won't be surprising in a few weeks to see the Islamic Golden Age come to an end though, moving on through one more bright light before the torch is passed to a revived Western Europe. Unfortunately, we haven't reached the light at the end of this dark tunnel just yet.

An ancient intricately carved doorway, falling apart at the edges, leading only into darkness. An apt metaphor for the poor nations housed under the crushing worldview of Islam.

In 2004, Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh worked with the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali (one of the original New Atheists meant to be part of the horsemen of the non-apocalypse), and together they produced the film Submission, which criticized the treatment of women in Islam. The title of the film is a literal translation of the word Islam (although in a religious context it means "voluntary submission to God") and on 2 November 2004, that submission was brutally enforced when Van Gogh was assassinated by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim for the views expressed in the film. The murderer "initially fired several bullets at Van Gogh as he bicycled to work. Wounded, Van Gogh ran to the other side of the road and fell to the ground. According to eyewitnesses, Van Gogh's last words were: 'Mercy, mercy! We can talk about it, can't we?' The murderer then walked up to Van Gogh, who was still lying down, and calmly shot him several more times at close range. He cut Van Gogh’s throat, and tried to decapitate him with a large knife, after which he stabbed the knife deep into Van Gogh's chest. He then attached a note to the body with a smaller knife" that contained more death threats and polemics against Jews and the West. Terrorist acts such as these make me reticent to discuss the philosophy of Muhammad—the founder of Islam—but much like my analysis of Jesus of Nazareth, it must be done because of the huge influence he has had over the moral beliefs of billions of people over many centuries. Unfortunately, direct quotes such as these:

Even as the fingers of the two hands are equal, so are human beings equal to one another. No one has any right, nor any preference to claim over another. You are brothers.

All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again; and may the last ones understand my words better than those who listen to me directly.

have been widely ignored by extremist elements of the religion who have continued to distort and misunderstand much of Mahammad's more benign teachings. But what after all where the actual words of Muhammad? And how do we understand them in the light of modern knowledge? How does he stack up in an analysis of the survival of the fittest philosophers?

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Muhammad (570-632 CE) was the founder of the religion of Islam. Discontented with life in Mecca, he retreated to a cave in the surrounding mountains for meditation and reflection. According to Islamic beliefs it was here, at age 40, in the month of Ramadan, where he received his first revelation from God. The revelations, which Muhammad reported receiving until his death, form the verses of the Quran, regarded by Muslims as the “Word of God” and around which the religion is based. Muslims consider him the restorer of an uncorrupted original monotheistic faith of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets.

Survives

Needs to Adapt

Gone Extinct
The Quran presents five pillars as a framework for worship and a sign of commitment to the faith. They are (1) the shahada (creed professing monotheism and accepting Muhammad as God’s messenger), (2) daily prayers, (3) fasting during Ramadan, (4) almsgiving, and (5) the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime. Almsgiving is of course useful for a cooperative species trying to maintain diversity and coherence. In a universe without a god though, forcing the acceptance of one man’s unproven beliefs is harmful to society. Plus, once divine revelation is accepted, who is to say any one revelation is better than another. This creates the opportunity for perpetual uncompromising conflict. Prayers are a drag on efficiency and encourage faith where effort would be better. Intentionally weakening the body through fasting helps one to learn to deal with bodily pain, but spending one month a year in this weakened state is taking it too far. Requiring your followers to visit your birthplace is extremely vain and clearly intended just to boost your religion and the livelihood of your local followers (though they will gladly encourage the practice, giving a self-reinforcing circularity to the rule). 

In Shia Islam, there are ten practices that Shia Muslims must perform, called the Ancillaries of the Faith. (1) Salat (ritual prayer five times a day); (2) fasting during Ramadan; (3) almsgiving; (4) an annual taxation of one-fifth of all gain paid to Imams or poor descendants of Muhammad’s Ahl al-Bayt family; (5) pilgrimage to Mecca; (6) Jihad - a religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad; (7) do the necessary good in life; (8) forbid what is evil; (9) expressing love towards Muhammad's family, Ahl al-Bayt; (10) disassociation with those who oppose God and those who caused harm to Muhammad or his family. Allowing for the usefulness of almsgiving, doing good, and forbidding evil, the rest of the ancillaries are solely focused on the perpetuation of the religion but are in fact very damaging to the human species. Spending hours every day in prayer is monumentally wasteful. Fasting one month a year is too much time spent in a weakened state. Giving hard-earned money to the charlatans who created and run this organization is perpetuating fraud. Declaring war on unbelievers creates an unbridgeable rift in humanity that is a direct threat to the survival of the species.

In line with the prohibition against creating images of sentient living beings, which is particularly strictly observed with respect to God and the Prophet, Islamic religious art is focused on the word. Images are an important way to record and transmit knowledge. No form of learning must ever be banned. Ignorant species go extinct.

The Sharia (literally "the path leading to the watering place") is Islamic law formed by traditional Islamic scholarship, which most Muslim groups adhere to. In Islam, Sharia is the expression of the divine will, and constitutes a system of duties that are incumbent upon a Muslim by virtue of his religious belief. No laws or governments should ever be based on divine will or people who purport to know a divine will. No such thing has ever been proven to exist and acceptance of even one divine will by any small group opens humanity up to competing divine wills and unbridgeable gaps.
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Let's move on quietly. Sometimes the best way to convince others is to simply survive and thrive by following your own philosophy.

When I was in college, I took a Medieval Philosophy course that was taught twice a week for 90 minutes by a 6'4" reed thin Jewish man who wore a yarmulke on his bald head ringed with grey hair. He had a profoundly deep and resonant bass voice that years later would remind me of Christopher Lee performing the role of Saruman the white wizard. Somewhat predictably, the class only had three other students in it and I swear it always freezing cold outside but oppressively hot and stuffy in the room as the four of us sat in a line of desks in front of the professor while he lectured at us in a soothing monotone. To my great embarrassment, I think I fell asleep in just about every class. I remember trying to fight it, I remember struggling with head nods for what seemed like hours, only to decide it was best if I just gave in and closed my eyes for 5 minutes so I could refresh and pick back up on the lecture. I remember shielding my eyes by putting my forehead in my hand and looking intently down at at my notes as if I was trying to work something incredibly difficult out of them. I'd stay "focused" like this for a few minutes while I'm quite certain the professor knew exactly what was happening, but he considerately continued on without a change in his pitch that might otherwise disturb me. I got a B- in the course.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I know this stuff can be dull. I'm committed to surveying the entirety of philosophical thought though so I will do my best to push through a few famous names here while making it as interesting as I can—hence the gratuitous sleeping puppy picture and the embarrassing anecdote to start this series. Also, as Augustine of Hippo said:

Patience is the companion of wisdom.

So we must endure these dark times and learn to:

Love the sinner and hate the sin.

For even though:

One does not read in the Gospel that the Lord said: "I will send you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon." For He willed to make them Christians, not mathematicians.

(and doesn't that say a lot about Christian thought), we must do what we can and hope for the best, for:

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

Ok, let's not remain here too long. It's time to stop dancing on the head of a pin with angels and time to get to the analysis of what Augustine actually professed. What's that you say?

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

Ok, seriously now, it's time to move on. Even if Augustine didn't know that time is "a dimension in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future, and also the measure of durations of events and the intervals between them. … Time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe - a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence."

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Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), also known as St. Augustine, was a Latin philosopher and theologian from Roman Africa. He is considered the first medieval man and the last classical man and his writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity.

Survives

Needs to Adapt
Augustine believed that God exists outside of time in the "eternal present," that time only exists within the created universe because only in space is time discernible through motion and change. Even the agnostic philosopher Bertrand Russell was impressed by this. He wrote, "a very admirable relativistic theory of time. ... It contains a better and clearer statement than Kant’s of the subjective theory of time - a theory which, since Kant, has been widely accepted among philosophers.” Physics states that time is woven into the fabric of space within the universe. We have found no evidence of god within this universe, which is fine with Augustine. But we have also found no evidence of god existing outside of the universe either. We should abandon belief in that existence altogether.

Augustine took the view that the Biblical text should not be interpreted literally if it contradicts what we know from science and our God-given reason. With no evidence for any gods, our reason is highly unlikely to be a gift from one. Reason would seem to arise naturally during evolution as a solution to the need to understand and control our emotions and actions for the better survival of the species over the long term. But Augustine was right that scientifically discovered knowledge should trump mystical revelation.

Gone Extinct
One of Augustine’s most famous quotes comes from his prayer in Confessions - “make me chaste...but not yet.” Augustine held that a major result of original sin was disobedience of the flesh to the spirit as a punishment of their disobedience to God. The view that not only the human soul, but also the senses, were influenced by the fall of Adam and Eve, was prevalent in Augustine's time. In fact, short-term-focused urges of the flesh are simply remnants from our evolutionary history. They worked in the super-competitive environments of the past, but not as well as the long-term focused behaviors that we later learned and taught ourselves through cultural reinforcement. Unfortunately, evolution is blind and we are left holding our vestigial emotions. Sometimes literally.

Augustine taught that redemption was not in this world. When the Western Roman Empire was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Catholic Church as a spiritual City of God (in a book of the same name), distinct from the material Earthly City. While the long-term view is a good one, using a time and a place that does not exist as an incentive for good behavior is a house built on sand that has many bad side effects and inevitably will collapse.
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Hey hey! A joke about self-pleasure in the middle of analysing a monk's philosophy. Well that certainly was fun. But don't worry. Next week things will take a serious turn in the controversial topic of Muhammad.

Want a piece of the $20,000 I'm trying to win?

Three years after publishing The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris got so frustrated with the attacks that had been levied against the main argument of his book that he offered to award $2,000 to the person who could write (in less than 1,000 words) the best challenge to his central claim, with a total of $20,000 on offer if that essay succeeded in changing his mind. For those of you who haven't already checked this out, the full rules for the contest are described on his website. So what is the main argument in his book that entrants need to challenge? Officially, it is this:

"Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds—and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, fully constrained by the laws of the universe (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, questions of morality and values must have right and wrong answers that fall within the purview of science (in principle, if not in practice). Consequently, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life."


I won't bore you with all the details of the book and the range of criticism it has received from theologians, scientists, and philosophers, but here is a draft copy of my entry to this challenge. If you help me make changes to my argument and it ends up winning, then I will gladly share the prize and credit with you. Think you can help? The deadline for entry is Sunday February 9th, so get back to me before then with any thoughts or suggestions about my 1,000 word essay. Here it is:

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Your argument is right, in that the well-being of conscious creatures is a necessary job for morality, but it is not sufficient to say that is all it must do. This is why no one has yet disproven your argument, but (partly) why you still attract such disagreement. In this essay, I intend to show you what makes a sufficient purpose for morality, and by doing so change your mind and answer some of your critics.

The crux of your main tenet is that: “morality... depends on the... fact that [conscious] minds can experience various forms of well-being.” This is only one reduction in terminology away from being completely circular. Since morality is defined as “principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior,” morality and ethics are, in other words, simply “rules for acting well.” Substituting this definition of morality into your main statement, you get the fact that: "acting well... depends on the... experience of well-being." This is tautologically correct, but it’s uninteresting without anchoring the subjective adjective well to some objective fact. Without that anchor, the circular definition spins in place with nothing to grip, and the relativists and nihilists are free to point out that you are simply constructing a floating argument based on socially agreed upon definitions. The anchor we’ve been looking for though has been staring us all in the face for 150 years.

In one of my previous jobs in management consulting, I was a Special Advisor to the Director of the U.S. Secret Service and was tasked with helping him revise the performance metrics for his agency. Essentially, the main measurement that Congress used to evaluate the performance of the Secret Service was whether or not the president was alive. This was a binary, yes or no, easy to measure outcome of all the work the Secret Service does, but it told us nothing about whether the agency was getting better or worse at achieving this outcome. Was the president well-protected or getting closer to becoming unprotected? No one could say. The best practice for solving this type of problem in complex organizations is something called a balanced scorecard, where you measure performance across the entire value chain of the organization and look for problems in the system. You choose what measurements to take on the way from inputs, through internal processes, to outputs, and finally outcomes, and then you define targets in each area that will lead you to reach your desired (or congressionally mandated) outcomes. In this example, having a well-protected president was necessary, but it was only a subjective output of the agency. In The Moral Landscape, the well-being of conscious creatures is similarly just an output in the system—in this case, the system of life that is regulated by the internal processes of our moral rules. Using another example you like to cite, health is merely a subjective output in the system of medicine. However, the objective reason we know the Secret Service has not failed is because the president has not died. The objective reason we know the doctor has not failed is because the patient has not died. The objective reason we know our morality has not failed is because our species has not gone extinct. These are the objective outcomes that anchor the subjective evaluation of the rest of the processes. Russell Blackford was right to be looking for a metric to validate your claim; you were just pointing him in the wrong direction to find it. You ask in your book if the worst possible misery for everyone is not the worst possible outcome for a universe, but a universe devoid of life, devoid of any hope for well-being, is an even worse outcome.

Let me pause here to explain that I am not advocating the naturalistic fallacy of a eugenicist or the naïve adaptivism of a relativistic anthropologist. There is a difference between existing and surviving. It appears to us, for example, that sharks are surviving because they have been around for millions of years. Endangered pandas, on the other hand, are likely (though sadly) just existing at this moment in time. Based on what we know from evolutionary studies, some species endure and some species wink in and out of existence based on some rather clear properties: adaptability, diversity, redundancy, robustness, habitat stability, etc. Further, we humans are thriving in our survival because of the progress that comes from cooperation, which, as you note, come from: “kindness, reciprocity, trust, openness to argument, respect for evidence, impulse control, the mitigation of aggression, fairness, justice, compassion”, etc. Actions of these types would all be categorized as internal processes in the balanced scorecard method I outlined above—necessary, but also not sufficient to describe the successful performance of our species in this universe.

In the future, evolutionary studies could guide a science of morality towards understanding which actions meet the objective root-cause goal of survival. At present, we already know from scientific investigations into the consilient fields of biology that these actions take place over fantastically long timelines and are enmeshed in incredibly intricate webs of support, so we would be extremely arrogant to think we may ever know the full consequences of our behaviors. Morally tricky areas are tricky precisely because of this kind of epistemic opacity. Using a non-tricky point to prove the existence of the rule though, I believe you are right to say that it is obvious the Taliban is not leading a moral society, but this is because they are not leading a society that is progressing towards survival. (How would they deal with the asteroid strike that is likely to come one day?) That is the objective reason, discovered by science, that their morality is not as good as, say, Denmark’s. The well-being of conscious creatures is a necessary subjective output along the way, but the long-term survival of life over evolutionary timelines is the peak objective outcome that sufficiently describes the moral landscape.
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