“Harmful on net” means “after you balance the harm against the good, it is harmful”.
That appears to me to be a coherent position; someone whose position it is will disapprove both of drinking alcohol and of prohibiting it.
The first part of that doesn’t work by itself, since Lewis believes in compulsion for, for instance, anti-murder laws.
And the rest of it means that if you became convinced that the side effects of prohibition weren’t as bad as you originally believed, you would then support prohibition. The question then becomes “would Lewis think there are really bad side effects to not allowing same-sex marriage”. I doubt it.
I understand what “harmful on net” means, and I’m not sure why you think I don’t. The point is that there are different things that might or might not be “harmful on net”, and you need to not mix them up, and I think you are mixing them up. Specifically, “is drinking alcohol harmful on net?” and “is being allowed to drink alcohol harmful on net?” are very different questions, because of the things I listed that are functions of whether people are allowed to drink alcohol more than of whether they actually do.
The first part of that doesn’t work by itself, since Lewis believes in compulsion for, for instance, anti-murder laws.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what argument you’re making. It appears to have the form “Such-and-such a proposition about alcohol prohibition is wrong, because C S Lewis believed in compelling people not to commit murder” and I don’t even understand how anything of that form could be right—because there are potentially relevant differences between drinking alcohol and committing murder. (Examples: most people who disapprove of drinking alcohol think that murder is much, much worse; empirical evidence suggests that prohibiting alcohol is liable to result in a very large black market in alcohol, while prohibiting murder results in only a small black market in murder.)
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo in the foregoing paragraph.]
if you became convinced that the side effects of prohibition weren’t as bad as you originally believed, you would then support prohibition.
Yes, or at least almost. (Well, not me because as I said above I wasn’t describing my own position on alcohol. But someone who holds that position would indeed switch to approving of prohibition if they decided that the side effects of prohibition and the badness of the compulsion itself didn’t outweigh the harm done by drinking. The bit in italics is why I say “almost” rather than an unqualified “yes”.)
The question then becomes “would Lewis think there are really bad side effects to not allowing same-sex marriage”.
I don’t know what Lewis would have said about same-sex marriage if the question had been put to him in such a way as to get it taken seriously despite his society’s general presumption against the idea. For what it’s worth, I think he probably would have opposed same-sex marriage (perhaps arguing that it is simply impossible for two people of the same sex to marry, and that calling anything a same-sex marriage is an abuse of language), but if not then it would probably have been on grounds of freedom rather than of bad side effects of prohibition. (You can prohibit certain classes of marriage without needing much intrusion into individuals’ lives; it’s hard to see how there’d be scope for a big black market in same-sex marriages; any precedents established by the prohibition would probably also be ones Lewis would have been inclined to approve of.)
It may be worth noting that I am not Richard Kennaway and am not necessarily arguing for the same position as he is.
It may be worth noting that I am not Richard Kennaway and am not necessarily arguing for the same position as he is.
Nevertheless, I agree with all of what you just said. To it I would add that Jiro is still unconsciously assuming (I say unconsciously, because everything he is saying presupposes it, yet he never says it) that laws and punishment are all about adding up the good and the bad and seeing how the sum comes out. This is the very theory that Lewis was arguing against.
I don’t even understand how anything of that form could be right—because there are potentially relevant differences between drinking alcohol and committing murder.
Of course there are differences. But the differences lead into my other objection, which is that, as the old joke goes, now we’re just arguing about the price. If he supports laws against murder because murder does a lot of harm compared to compulsion and stopping it has few side effects, then if he were to be convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few side effects, he would support laws aganst divorce.
Then consider why Lewis believes that divorce (etc.) is harmful. It’s arbitrary—if his religion had said something else, he’d have believed something else. And likewise, his belief in the degree of harm done by divorce is arbitrary. His religion happened not to say that that particular sin was harmful enough to justify banning. But it could have said that. And given a long list of sins, it would be a pretty big coincidence if it didn’t say that for at least one of them, just by chance.
(I suppose there’s another possibility: Lewis doesn’t want his religion to tell him something is bad enough to ban. His interpretation of his own religion is biased by this desire, so he’ll always interpret his own religion as saying that a sin isn’t bad enough to ban. In that case, I need not fear Lewis banning anything. I guess that’s a defense of Lewis, but I would then note that this kind of bias seems to be pretty rare among religious believers who don’t like divorce, gay marriage, etc.)
For me, part of the humour in that story is that the person who says that is wrong—there really is an important difference (even if only a difference of degree rather than kind) between willingness to have sex with a stranger for $1M and willingness to do it for $100.
Anyway: I’m now not quite sure what argument you’re making here. I originally thought it was something like “Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it’s tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance, so he’s being hypocritical”. But tyranny, like prostitution, comes in degrees. Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal, so “If C S Lewis were convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few bad side effects, he would support laws against divorce” gives basically zero support to the idea that Lewis was or would have been any more of a tyrant than, say, 95% of the population. Could you clarify what your point is and why you’re making it?
Yes, wrong, for the reason I already gave. I’ll be more explicit:
What “we’ve already established” is that the woman is prepared to have sex with the man for $1M (or whatever the figure is), but that isn’t the same thing as being prepared to do it for (say) $1000, and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter. You can apply some term (e.g., “prostitute”) to both, but prostitute-in-sense-1 and prostitute-in-sense2 are very different predicates, apply to very different sets of people, and justify somewhat different sets of inferences about the person in question.
I’ll make it more personal. I would not be willing to have sex with you (in the doubtless extremely unlikely event that you wanted me to) for, say, $100k. I would consider it a betrayal of my wife; I would consider it a violation of my marriage vows; I would be concerned about the possibility of damaging or breaking my marriage; knowing nothing about you, I would have to consider the possibility of contracting an STD; I am not much interested in casual sex; I’m pretty sure you’re male and I happen to be male and boringly heterosexual. These things matter to me, and they matter a lot. But make it a billion dollars and I’m pretty sure I’d consent, simply on effective-altruism grounds; I could do so damn much good with, say, half the takings as to outweigh those reasons, however compelling I find them.
To consider that the latter indicates “what kind of man” I am and puts me in the same pigeonhole as someone who will happily have sex with strangers for $100 a time is rather like saying that there’s no real difference in religious position between an atheist who is 99.9% confident there are no gods of any sort, and a fundamentalist who is 99.999% confident that there is exactly one, namely his own, simply because a sufficiently enormous quantity of evidence might turn one of them into the other.
(I do not, as it happens, share the widespread view that there is something terribly wrong with the “kind of woman” who is willing to have sex with strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, nor do I think that being that “kind of woman” is good evidence of any more general moral deficiency; but I don’t think my opinion on any of this would be very different if I did. E.g., I do think there is something terribly wrong with the kind of person who is willing to kill strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, but I think I would be willing to carry out an assassination for a billion dollars if I were really sure of getting the money and remaining unarrested for long enough to give a lot of it to effective charities, and confident that the assassination wasn’t going to do an amount of harm comparable to the good I could thereby do.)
and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter
You are just arguing definitions. It’s pretty clear that the conversation, real or not, riffs on the classification of women into two kinds: those who will sleep with a man for money, and those who will not. You may find this classification inadequate or not matching your personal views, but that does not make it “wrong”. It just makes you have a different opinion and prefer a different classification scheme.
The point (and I apologize for not being more explicit about it) is that this binary classification is unsatisfactory not only for prostitution but also for tyranny, which is what the joke was here being used as an analogy to, and that I find Jiro’s argument unconvincing for (inter alia) the same reason as I think the man in the joke is incorrect (albeit funny).
Could you clarify what your point is and why you’re making it?
Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it’s tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance
Yes. He believes that arbitrary things are bad. Belief that arbitrary things are bad would lead to tyranny unless we get very lucky and he happens, by chance, not to think any of them are bad enough to ban. Of course, he wouldn’t think of it as tyranny, he’d think of it as “not allowing people the freedom to hurt others” or some such.
Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal
But religion has a habit of tossing weird things into the mix that nobody would ever believe otherwise. Do you honestly think that many people would believe that killing a zygote is murder without the influence of religion? Or believe in 7 literal day creation? People whose religion is similar to Lewis believe those things, and it’s pure chance that Lewis’s branch doesn’t (at least for creation, Lewis didn’t say much about abortion).
I think the point that VoiceOfRa is making is that, just as a non-religious person might reasonably think that killing a newly born baby is murder, so might a non-religious person reasonably think that killing a zygote is murder. If so, then whether religion has or has not contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion is irrelevant to VoiceOfRa’s point. (VoiceOfRa, please correct me if I misunderstand your point.)
Also, it is not clear to me what you mean by “religion has contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion”. If you mean that religion has contributed to more infanticides than have all causes of a non-religious nature, then that seems unlikely to be true (and hard to verify one way or the other). What is your basis for this statement?
I suspect the polymathwannabe is referring to the ancient custom of war where after defeating your enemy, you go around and kill all their babies and their males, and take their women. Of course, that has nothing to do with religion one way or the other.
Regarding ordinary infanticide, that was also an ancient custom, approved e.g. by Aristotle. The practice had nothing to do with religion but had practical motivations. Areas that converted to Christianity put a stop to it.
Jane Goodall has some interesting oberservations regarding infanticide among chimpanzees in her book “Through a Window.” While chimpanzees will attack females that are strangers to a group violently, their infants will only, and in rare instances, die as casualties, but not be directly attacked. Infanticide within a community has only been observed in a few cases and all perpetrated by the same female individual and her daughter. However, she concluded from their behavior that their reason lay solely in the meat of the hunted infants.
You seem to be arguing against a position that, as far as I know, no one on LW actually believes or defends. You are doing this by generalizing about religiosity from examples of marginal and/or long since vanished religions, and all the while you are ignoring entirelyuseless’s probably correct observation that most infanticide historically has been due to reasons (warfare and practical considerations) that have nothing to do with religiosity.
I am not sure where you are going with all of this.
I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. That is not now the case about the seven day literal creation, but it was either the case in the past, or the account in the book of Genesis was not believed by the author, or not intended literally, since it was written one way or the other.
But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult and might not have adopted it if it had contained arbitary content such as “eating mushrooms is a grave sin that will be punished by a worse hell than anything else.” So even if we falsely assume that the content of all religions is completely arbitrary in itself, the content of his religion would not be, since he chose it.
I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious.
That link shows that one person would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. A poll shows 84% of atheists and agnostics in favor of legal abortion, with 14% against, and even that 14% is not specifically about zygotes, it’s about abortion as a whole.
But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult
His family was Anglican and he became an Anglican. That suggests that he adopted the religion mostly because of the influence of his background.
14% of atheists and agnostics is a large number of people in absolute terms, and I suspect that a good number of those people would believe the same thing about zygotes for the sake of consistency. In any case it is not even close to saying that it is something that nobody would ever believe without religion.
It could be true that he became Anglican mainly because his family was Anglican, without it being true that he would have done so if the content of that religion had contained completely arbitrary claims such as the one I mentioned. I invented that arbitrary claim for a reason, namely to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims. There is a reason that Lewis’s religion did not contain that claim, and a reason why it did contain the claim that murder is wrong. The content is not arbitrary.
I largely agree with what you’re saying here, but:
I invented that arbitrary claim [...] to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims.
I’m afraid I don’t think you did a terribly good job of showing that. Plenty of actual religious claims are really not so different from your example. E.g., if it’s ridiculous to single out eating mushrooms, what about eating shellfish? If it’s ridiculous to suggest that eating the wrong foods is a particularly serious kind of sin, what about saying the same about sexual misconduct?
(My examples are from the Judaeo-Christian tradition because that’s what I know best, but I’m pretty sure I could find similarly close parallels from almost any religion.)
They didn’t say that eating shellfish is worse than murder, while if the claims were completely arbitrary, there is no reason why they wouldn’t say that, and no reason for them not to say that murder is good.
I agree that many, maybe even all, religions contain some things that seem somewhat arbitrary (like the shellfish), but they are not completely arbitrary (thus not worse than murder.) I would also suspect that those food regulations in their original context were less arbitrary than we suppose, and became more arbitrary as the situation changed, which led to most people abandoning those specific things.
This is certainly true about sexual misconduct: at least in the past, promiscuity was dangerous physically and in other ways, and condemning it was certainly not arbitrary.
They didn’t say that eating shellfish is worse than murder
No indeed. I was careful not to claim that they do. But if there are widely held religions that (1) condemn the eating of specific foodstuffs and (2) single out one not-obviously-specially-bad class of prohibited activity on obviously spurious grounds, then I don’t think you can really claim that combining those two features makes something so obviously silly that it’s unlike the perfectly sensible prohibitions that real religions have.
I agree that it’s not hard to imagine reasons why prohibiting shellfish and pork might have been quite a good idea. But you could say the exact same thing about mushrooms, no?
Ok, so in principle a religion might both prohibit mushrooms and even say that it is especially bad, even though I doubt there are many things like this in the real world. But it is very possible that Lewis would not have adopted such a religion precisely because he would not have considered it very sensible. I note that he did not even adopt one that prohibits things like shellfish even without saying that it is especially evil.
Also, I was not saying that such things are perfectly sensible, but that they are not perfectly arbitrary, which is what was being asserted, even if not by you.
I’m really not convinced that he would have found “religion X has arbitrary-looking prohibitions in it” good evidence for “religion X is wrong”. In one of his books he fairly explicitly argues for such prohibitions on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to obey God simply because one ought to obey God rather than because one sees the rightness of what he’s commanded. (One bit of my brain is telling me it’s in Perelandra, in which case presumably the idea is put into the mouth of his Eve-figure there whose name I’ve forgotten. Another is suggesting it’s with more direct reference to the Eden narrative in Genesis. Probably at most one is right.)
… I couldn’t remember her name because she doesn’t have one. Anyway, there is indeed something of the kind in Perelandra, though I have a feeling there may be something more explicit in one of his other books. But here’s the relevant bit. Context: the protagonist Elwin Ransom is on the planet Venus, also in this series of books called Perelandra. There are exactly two (more or less) human people already living there, corresponding closely to Adam and Eve in the Genesis story. The Adam-figure is somewhere else; Ransom has been talking to the Eve-figure. They have recently been joined by the villain of the story, a scientist (of course!) called Weston who is not only evil but pretty much a devil-worshipper. Where the Genesis story has a prohibition on eating one particular fruit, the First Couple of Perelandra have a prohibition on sleeping on “fixed lands” (CSL’s Venus has a lot of water, and floating rafts of plants on which one can safely live). Weston has suggested that maybe this prohibition was made with the intention that “Eve” should grow up a bit by exercising her independence from God and disobeying it. Ransom, who is generally something of an author mouthpiece, has a different view:
“I think he made one law of that kind [sc. one with no obvious reason why obeying it is a good idea] in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? [...] Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you to do something for which His bidding is the only reason? [...]
The Eve-figure is delighted with this idea, and the Satan-figure is rather cross at it—further evidence, I think, that Lewis himself endorses the proposal. Further dialogue ensues (there’s a lot of dialogue in this part of the book) and eventually Eve gets bored and goes to sleep.
[EDITED to add: There’s an extended discussion of the Eden story in Lewis’s book “The problem of pain”, which conspicuously doesn’t present any theory along these lines. Perhaps it is after all only in Perelandra that he proposes it.]
Ok, so maybe he wouldn’t have refrained from adopting a religion himself because it contained things like that. But I would be extremely skeptical that he would have any idea of enforcing them on people who do not believe the religion, if he believed that the prohibitions were arbitrary.
You are assuming without proof that the claims of Lewis’s religion are arbitrary. Of course they are not arbitrary, even assuming that his religion is false.
You are assuming without proof that the claims of Lewis’s religion are arbitrary.
We’re on LW. I’m assuming something that just about everyone here assumes anyway. Or at least close to it.
(I’m sure some people would argue that Lewis’s religion’s claims aren’t arbitrary because competition between memes ensures that religions which say extreme things about sins won’t last until the modern era. If so, fine, it’s not arbitrary in that sense.)
Then consider why Lewis believes that divorce (etc.) is harmful. It’s arbitrary—if his religion had said something else, he’d have believed something else.
This is a universal argument. “Given a different history, you would have believed something else, therefore your actual belief is groundless.” You can apply it to anyone, saying anything; which is to say, that it carries no force ever.
I suppose there’s another possibility: Lewis doesn’t want his religion to tell him
bong!!! But thank you for playing.
This is Bulverism, and not even Bulverism about a real characteristic, but about one you have just made up.
This is a universal argument. “Given a different history, you would have believed something else, therefore your actual belief is groundless.”
No, it isn’t. Religions tell people arbitrary things. Reasoning processes do not.
This is Bulverism
The question is “would there be reason to worry about a person like Lewis banning sins”. Figuring out why he believes is not, in that context, Bulverism because the question is not about whether his beliefs are correct, it’s a question of what he would do. Furthermore, it’s not Bulverism anyway because I have no need to prove his positions false—we’re on LW and it can be taken for granted that everyone here thinks gay marriage should be allowed and nobody here thinks divorce and polygamy should be illegal.
The question is “would there be reason to worry about a person like Lewis banning sins”. Figuring out why he believes is not, in that context, Bulverism because the question is not about whether his beliefs are correct, it’s a question of what he would do.
And of course to you, what he would do is to ban things, because that is what you would do, and the idea of not banning things you don’t like is to you practically a contradiction in terms. But it’s all right for you to ban things, because you would be banning the right things, the sufficient proof of which is that everyone in your circle agrees with you, but it’s wrong for Lewis to ban things, because he would be banning the wrongs things, the proof of which is that everyone in your circle agrees they’re the wrong things. We are right because we are right, and everyone else is wrong because they are wrong.
Thanks you for setting out your epistemology so clearly.
And of course to you, what he would do is to ban things, because that is what you would do,
No, it’s what people like him would do. Religious people have a really bad record with respect to believing arbitrary things are bad and then banning them. Your idea that I think he would ban things because I would ban things is pulled out of thin air. I think that people would do lots of things I don’t do.
“Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is quite the different question—how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.
My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christian and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.”
“It’s what people like him would do” is just plain false. He is quite clear there that the fact that he does not want to ban divorce for other people is not arbitrary, but reasoned, and he would apply the same thing to anything else which was specific to his religion.
Notice that that description doesn’t contain a claim that divorce hurts anyone other than the people getting divorced. So it doesn’t generalize to things which Lewis believes are banned by his religion because they harm others.
Also, it generalizes poorly to things like gay marriage. There used to be a time when nobody accepted gay marriage. Someone like Lewis could, while staying consistent with the above argument, claim that since gay marriage was universally abhorred, a law against it is not a Christian-specific law but a State-specific law.
Let’s suppose that Islam taught that every time someone drinks wine, ten random non-Muslims automatically will go to hell. Do you think that Lewis would have been less angry if consequently Muslims tried to ban wine for everyone? Since he compared divorce to that himself, fully understanding that the prohibition on wine looks arbitrary to other people, he would be fully capable of realizing that it would look arbitrary even if he himself had such a belief.
But besides that, as I’ve said all along, Lewis’s beliefs are not arbitrary. He would be unlikely to believe a religion that taught something like that about wine, and if he did accept the religion in general, he would be unlikely to accept that particular belief. And even if he did, the awareness that it looks arbitrary to other people could be sufficient reason for him not to ban it, by the same argument he made explicitly.
The gay marriage argument is irrelevant. Neither Lewis nor anyone else living at that time would have specifically legalized gay marriage, or even thought about it. Neither would you, if you had lived at that time and been in charge of England. That does not mean that Lewis or anyone else was tyrannical or would have been.
Your whole argument is based on a strawman of religious beliefs as arbitrary beliefs. One could as well argue that “Jiro’s beliefs” are arbitrary, since if Jiro had believed something different, he would have had different beliefs.
Let’s suppose that Islam taught that every time someone drinks wine, ten random non-Muslims automatically will go to hell. Do you think that Lewis would have been less angry if consequently Muslims tried to ban wine for everyone?
I could speculate, but you could just say he wouldn’t act according to my speculation. Do you have any examples of Lewis believing that something harms others, and yet still refusing to ban it (and for similar reasons)?
Neither Lewis nor anyone else living at that time would have specifically legalized gay marriage, or even thought about it.
But if he had lived at the transition point the question would come up. If he has exceptions that let him ban things that are condemned by society, he could argue that the fact that gay marriage was universally condemned makes it more like banning murder than banning wine.
One could as well argue that “Jiro’s beliefs” are arbitrary
Religions have a habit of throwing in “this thing is bad” purely on argument from authority, an authority Lewis considers himself bound to believe as an infallible source of truth. Nonreligious people have the step “figure out if it’s really bad” in there, which Lewis does not—if God says it’s bad, it’s bad.
I think one of us is misunderstanding Jiro here; isn’t s/he saying not that Lewis thinks God creates the moral law, but that Lewis thinks God is a perfectly reliable source of information about the moral law? (Epistemology, not ontology.)
[EDITED to add the second instance of “Lewis thinks” in the previous paragraph. I hope my meaning was clear anyway.]
(I’m fairly sure that Lewis wouldn’t have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim promulgated by the Church of England, or every moral claim a reasonable person could extract from the Bible, so I find Jiro’s argument less than perfectly convincing. But I think you’re refuting a different argument.)
Lewis would likely have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim he thinks was made by God. He might not believe that the Church of England is perfect at figuring this out, but whatever source of God-claims he uses instead of the Church would produce results as arbitrary as using the Church. (Except to the extent that he uses motivated reasoning to decide what God is claiming.)
It is not “motivated reasoning” to argue that God doesn’t claim a thing, if you have reasons for believing both that the thing is false, and that whatever God says is true.
“Harmful on net” means “after you balance the harm against the good, it is harmful”.
The first part of that doesn’t work by itself, since Lewis believes in compulsion for, for instance, anti-murder laws.
And the rest of it means that if you became convinced that the side effects of prohibition weren’t as bad as you originally believed, you would then support prohibition. The question then becomes “would Lewis think there are really bad side effects to not allowing same-sex marriage”. I doubt it.
I understand what “harmful on net” means, and I’m not sure why you think I don’t. The point is that there are different things that might or might not be “harmful on net”, and you need to not mix them up, and I think you are mixing them up. Specifically, “is drinking alcohol harmful on net?” and “is being allowed to drink alcohol harmful on net?” are very different questions, because of the things I listed that are functions of whether people are allowed to drink alcohol more than of whether they actually do.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what argument you’re making. It appears to have the form “Such-and-such a proposition about alcohol prohibition is wrong, because C S Lewis believed in compelling people not to commit murder” and I don’t even understand how anything of that form could be right—because there are potentially relevant differences between drinking alcohol and committing murder. (Examples: most people who disapprove of drinking alcohol think that murder is much, much worse; empirical evidence suggests that prohibiting alcohol is liable to result in a very large black market in alcohol, while prohibiting murder results in only a small black market in murder.)
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo in the foregoing paragraph.]
Yes, or at least almost. (Well, not me because as I said above I wasn’t describing my own position on alcohol. But someone who holds that position would indeed switch to approving of prohibition if they decided that the side effects of prohibition and the badness of the compulsion itself didn’t outweigh the harm done by drinking. The bit in italics is why I say “almost” rather than an unqualified “yes”.)
I don’t know what Lewis would have said about same-sex marriage if the question had been put to him in such a way as to get it taken seriously despite his society’s general presumption against the idea. For what it’s worth, I think he probably would have opposed same-sex marriage (perhaps arguing that it is simply impossible for two people of the same sex to marry, and that calling anything a same-sex marriage is an abuse of language), but if not then it would probably have been on grounds of freedom rather than of bad side effects of prohibition. (You can prohibit certain classes of marriage without needing much intrusion into individuals’ lives; it’s hard to see how there’d be scope for a big black market in same-sex marriages; any precedents established by the prohibition would probably also be ones Lewis would have been inclined to approve of.)
It may be worth noting that I am not Richard Kennaway and am not necessarily arguing for the same position as he is.
Nevertheless, I agree with all of what you just said. To it I would add that Jiro is still unconsciously assuming (I say unconsciously, because everything he is saying presupposes it, yet he never says it) that laws and punishment are all about adding up the good and the bad and seeing how the sum comes out. This is the very theory that Lewis was arguing against.
Of course there are differences. But the differences lead into my other objection, which is that, as the old joke goes, now we’re just arguing about the price. If he supports laws against murder because murder does a lot of harm compared to compulsion and stopping it has few side effects, then if he were to be convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few side effects, he would support laws aganst divorce.
Then consider why Lewis believes that divorce (etc.) is harmful. It’s arbitrary—if his religion had said something else, he’d have believed something else. And likewise, his belief in the degree of harm done by divorce is arbitrary. His religion happened not to say that that particular sin was harmful enough to justify banning. But it could have said that. And given a long list of sins, it would be a pretty big coincidence if it didn’t say that for at least one of them, just by chance.
(I suppose there’s another possibility: Lewis doesn’t want his religion to tell him something is bad enough to ban. His interpretation of his own religion is biased by this desire, so he’ll always interpret his own religion as saying that a sin isn’t bad enough to ban. In that case, I need not fear Lewis banning anything. I guess that’s a defense of Lewis, but I would then note that this kind of bias seems to be pretty rare among religious believers who don’t like divorce, gay marriage, etc.)
For me, part of the humour in that story is that the person who says that is wrong—there really is an important difference (even if only a difference of degree rather than kind) between willingness to have sex with a stranger for $1M and willingness to do it for $100.
Anyway: I’m now not quite sure what argument you’re making here. I originally thought it was something like “Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it’s tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance, so he’s being hypocritical”. But tyranny, like prostitution, comes in degrees. Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal, so “If C S Lewis were convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few bad side effects, he would support laws against divorce” gives basically zero support to the idea that Lewis was or would have been any more of a tyrant than, say, 95% of the population. Could you clarify what your point is and why you’re making it?
...wrong?
The canonical exchange, IIRC goes as follows:
-- What kind of woman do you take me for?!
-- I think we’ve already established that, now we’re just arguing about the price.
Yes, wrong, for the reason I already gave. I’ll be more explicit:
What “we’ve already established” is that the woman is prepared to have sex with the man for $1M (or whatever the figure is), but that isn’t the same thing as being prepared to do it for (say) $1000, and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter. You can apply some term (e.g., “prostitute”) to both, but prostitute-in-sense-1 and prostitute-in-sense2 are very different predicates, apply to very different sets of people, and justify somewhat different sets of inferences about the person in question.
I’ll make it more personal. I would not be willing to have sex with you (in the doubtless extremely unlikely event that you wanted me to) for, say, $100k. I would consider it a betrayal of my wife; I would consider it a violation of my marriage vows; I would be concerned about the possibility of damaging or breaking my marriage; knowing nothing about you, I would have to consider the possibility of contracting an STD; I am not much interested in casual sex; I’m pretty sure you’re male and I happen to be male and boringly heterosexual. These things matter to me, and they matter a lot. But make it a billion dollars and I’m pretty sure I’d consent, simply on effective-altruism grounds; I could do so damn much good with, say, half the takings as to outweigh those reasons, however compelling I find them.
To consider that the latter indicates “what kind of man” I am and puts me in the same pigeonhole as someone who will happily have sex with strangers for $100 a time is rather like saying that there’s no real difference in religious position between an atheist who is 99.9% confident there are no gods of any sort, and a fundamentalist who is 99.999% confident that there is exactly one, namely his own, simply because a sufficiently enormous quantity of evidence might turn one of them into the other.
(I do not, as it happens, share the widespread view that there is something terribly wrong with the “kind of woman” who is willing to have sex with strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, nor do I think that being that “kind of woman” is good evidence of any more general moral deficiency; but I don’t think my opinion on any of this would be very different if I did. E.g., I do think there is something terribly wrong with the kind of person who is willing to kill strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, but I think I would be willing to carry out an assassination for a billion dollars if I were really sure of getting the money and remaining unarrested for long enough to give a lot of it to effective charities, and confident that the assassination wasn’t going to do an amount of harm comparable to the good I could thereby do.)
You are just arguing definitions. It’s pretty clear that the conversation, real or not, riffs on the classification of women into two kinds: those who will sleep with a man for money, and those who will not. You may find this classification inadequate or not matching your personal views, but that does not make it “wrong”. It just makes you have a different opinion and prefer a different classification scheme.
The point (and I apologize for not being more explicit about it) is that this binary classification is unsatisfactory not only for prostitution but also for tyranny, which is what the joke was here being used as an analogy to, and that I find Jiro’s argument unconvincing for (inter alia) the same reason as I think the man in the joke is incorrect (albeit funny).
Yes. He believes that arbitrary things are bad. Belief that arbitrary things are bad would lead to tyranny unless we get very lucky and he happens, by chance, not to think any of them are bad enough to ban. Of course, he wouldn’t think of it as tyranny, he’d think of it as “not allowing people the freedom to hurt others” or some such.
But religion has a habit of tossing weird things into the mix that nobody would ever believe otherwise. Do you honestly think that many people would believe that killing a zygote is murder without the influence of religion? Or believe in 7 literal day creation? People whose religion is similar to Lewis believe those things, and it’s pure chance that Lewis’s branch doesn’t (at least for creation, Lewis didn’t say much about abortion).
Would anyone believe that killing a newly born baby is murder without the influence of religion?
Actually, religion has contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion.
I think the point that VoiceOfRa is making is that, just as a non-religious person might reasonably think that killing a newly born baby is murder, so might a non-religious person reasonably think that killing a zygote is murder. If so, then whether religion has or has not contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion is irrelevant to VoiceOfRa’s point. (VoiceOfRa, please correct me if I misunderstand your point.)
Also, it is not clear to me what you mean by “religion has contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion”. If you mean that religion has contributed to more infanticides than have all causes of a non-religious nature, then that seems unlikely to be true (and hard to verify one way or the other). What is your basis for this statement?
I suspect the polymathwannabe is referring to the ancient custom of war where after defeating your enemy, you go around and kill all their babies and their males, and take their women. Of course, that has nothing to do with religion one way or the other.
Regarding ordinary infanticide, that was also an ancient custom, approved e.g. by Aristotle. The practice had nothing to do with religion but had practical motivations. Areas that converted to Christianity put a stop to it.
Jane Goodall has some interesting oberservations regarding infanticide among chimpanzees in her book “Through a Window.” While chimpanzees will attack females that are strangers to a group violently, their infants will only, and in rare instances, die as casualties, but not be directly attacked. Infanticide within a community has only been observed in a few cases and all perpetrated by the same female individual and her daughter. However, she concluded from their behavior that their reason lay solely in the meat of the hunted infants.
I was referring to ritual child sacrifice, practiced across dozens of cultures.
But cultures with relatively low population counts compared to centuries of populous Christian countries.
Given ritual adult sacrifice, practiced across dozens of cultures, what does this prove?
In general, that religiosity does not prevent atrocious behavior, and if you need some special insight to stop killing babies, religion is not it.
Dozens? I only know of one, the pre-Jewish Semites.
Assorted examples from other cultures.
You seem to be arguing against a position that, as far as I know, no one on LW actually believes or defends. You are doing this by generalizing about religiosity from examples of marginal and/or long since vanished religions, and all the while you are ignoring entirelyuseless’s probably correct observation that most infanticide historically has been due to reasons (warfare and practical considerations) that have nothing to do with religiosity.
I am not sure where you are going with all of this.
I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. That is not now the case about the seven day literal creation, but it was either the case in the past, or the account in the book of Genesis was not believed by the author, or not intended literally, since it was written one way or the other.
But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult and might not have adopted it if it had contained arbitary content such as “eating mushrooms is a grave sin that will be punished by a worse hell than anything else.” So even if we falsely assume that the content of all religions is completely arbitrary in itself, the content of his religion would not be, since he chose it.
That link shows that one person would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. A poll shows 84% of atheists and agnostics in favor of legal abortion, with 14% against, and even that 14% is not specifically about zygotes, it’s about abortion as a whole.
His family was Anglican and he became an Anglican. That suggests that he adopted the religion mostly because of the influence of his background.
14% of atheists and agnostics is a large number of people in absolute terms, and I suspect that a good number of those people would believe the same thing about zygotes for the sake of consistency. In any case it is not even close to saying that it is something that nobody would ever believe without religion.
It could be true that he became Anglican mainly because his family was Anglican, without it being true that he would have done so if the content of that religion had contained completely arbitrary claims such as the one I mentioned. I invented that arbitrary claim for a reason, namely to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims. There is a reason that Lewis’s religion did not contain that claim, and a reason why it did contain the claim that murder is wrong. The content is not arbitrary.
I largely agree with what you’re saying here, but:
I’m afraid I don’t think you did a terribly good job of showing that. Plenty of actual religious claims are really not so different from your example. E.g., if it’s ridiculous to single out eating mushrooms, what about eating shellfish? If it’s ridiculous to suggest that eating the wrong foods is a particularly serious kind of sin, what about saying the same about sexual misconduct?
(My examples are from the Judaeo-Christian tradition because that’s what I know best, but I’m pretty sure I could find similarly close parallels from almost any religion.)
They didn’t say that eating shellfish is worse than murder, while if the claims were completely arbitrary, there is no reason why they wouldn’t say that, and no reason for them not to say that murder is good.
I agree that many, maybe even all, religions contain some things that seem somewhat arbitrary (like the shellfish), but they are not completely arbitrary (thus not worse than murder.) I would also suspect that those food regulations in their original context were less arbitrary than we suppose, and became more arbitrary as the situation changed, which led to most people abandoning those specific things.
This is certainly true about sexual misconduct: at least in the past, promiscuity was dangerous physically and in other ways, and condemning it was certainly not arbitrary.
No indeed. I was careful not to claim that they do. But if there are widely held religions that (1) condemn the eating of specific foodstuffs and (2) single out one not-obviously-specially-bad class of prohibited activity on obviously spurious grounds, then I don’t think you can really claim that combining those two features makes something so obviously silly that it’s unlike the perfectly sensible prohibitions that real religions have.
I agree that it’s not hard to imagine reasons why prohibiting shellfish and pork might have been quite a good idea. But you could say the exact same thing about mushrooms, no?
Ok, so in principle a religion might both prohibit mushrooms and even say that it is especially bad, even though I doubt there are many things like this in the real world. But it is very possible that Lewis would not have adopted such a religion precisely because he would not have considered it very sensible. I note that he did not even adopt one that prohibits things like shellfish even without saying that it is especially evil.
Also, I was not saying that such things are perfectly sensible, but that they are not perfectly arbitrary, which is what was being asserted, even if not by you.
I’m really not convinced that he would have found “religion X has arbitrary-looking prohibitions in it” good evidence for “religion X is wrong”. In one of his books he fairly explicitly argues for such prohibitions on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to obey God simply because one ought to obey God rather than because one sees the rightness of what he’s commanded. (One bit of my brain is telling me it’s in Perelandra, in which case presumably the idea is put into the mouth of his Eve-figure there whose name I’ve forgotten. Another is suggesting it’s with more direct reference to the Eden narrative in Genesis. Probably at most one is right.)
… I couldn’t remember her name because she doesn’t have one. Anyway, there is indeed something of the kind in Perelandra, though I have a feeling there may be something more explicit in one of his other books. But here’s the relevant bit. Context: the protagonist Elwin Ransom is on the planet Venus, also in this series of books called Perelandra. There are exactly two (more or less) human people already living there, corresponding closely to Adam and Eve in the Genesis story. The Adam-figure is somewhere else; Ransom has been talking to the Eve-figure. They have recently been joined by the villain of the story, a scientist (of course!) called Weston who is not only evil but pretty much a devil-worshipper. Where the Genesis story has a prohibition on eating one particular fruit, the First Couple of Perelandra have a prohibition on sleeping on “fixed lands” (CSL’s Venus has a lot of water, and floating rafts of plants on which one can safely live). Weston has suggested that maybe this prohibition was made with the intention that “Eve” should grow up a bit by exercising her independence from God and disobeying it. Ransom, who is generally something of an author mouthpiece, has a different view:
The Eve-figure is delighted with this idea, and the Satan-figure is rather cross at it—further evidence, I think, that Lewis himself endorses the proposal. Further dialogue ensues (there’s a lot of dialogue in this part of the book) and eventually Eve gets bored and goes to sleep.
[EDITED to add: There’s an extended discussion of the Eden story in Lewis’s book “The problem of pain”, which conspicuously doesn’t present any theory along these lines. Perhaps it is after all only in Perelandra that he proposes it.]
Ok, so maybe he wouldn’t have refrained from adopting a religion himself because it contained things like that. But I would be extremely skeptical that he would have any idea of enforcing them on people who do not believe the religion, if he believed that the prohibitions were arbitrary.
You are assuming without proof that the claims of Lewis’s religion are arbitrary. Of course they are not arbitrary, even assuming that his religion is false.
We’re on LW. I’m assuming something that just about everyone here assumes anyway. Or at least close to it.
(I’m sure some people would argue that Lewis’s religion’s claims aren’t arbitrary because competition between memes ensures that religions which say extreme things about sins won’t last until the modern era. If so, fine, it’s not arbitrary in that sense.)
Most people on LW would assume that his religion is wrong, but not that it is entirely arbitrary.
This is a universal argument. “Given a different history, you would have believed something else, therefore your actual belief is groundless.” You can apply it to anyone, saying anything; which is to say, that it carries no force ever.
bong!!! But thank you for playing.
This is Bulverism, and not even Bulverism about a real characteristic, but about one you have just made up.
No, it isn’t. Religions tell people arbitrary things. Reasoning processes do not.
The question is “would there be reason to worry about a person like Lewis banning sins”. Figuring out why he believes is not, in that context, Bulverism because the question is not about whether his beliefs are correct, it’s a question of what he would do. Furthermore, it’s not Bulverism anyway because I have no need to prove his positions false—we’re on LW and it can be taken for granted that everyone here thinks gay marriage should be allowed and nobody here thinks divorce and polygamy should be illegal.
And of course to you, what he would do is to ban things, because that is what you would do, and the idea of not banning things you don’t like is to you practically a contradiction in terms. But it’s all right for you to ban things, because you would be banning the right things, the sufficient proof of which is that everyone in your circle agrees with you, but it’s wrong for Lewis to ban things, because he would be banning the wrongs things, the proof of which is that everyone in your circle agrees they’re the wrong things. We are right because we are right, and everyone else is wrong because they are wrong.
Thanks you for setting out your epistemology so clearly.
No, it’s what people like him would do. Religious people have a really bad record with respect to believing arbitrary things are bad and then banning them. Your idea that I think he would ban things because I would ban things is pulled out of thin air. I think that people would do lots of things I don’t do.
This is from Lewis:
“Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is quite the different question—how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christian and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.”
“It’s what people like him would do” is just plain false. He is quite clear there that the fact that he does not want to ban divorce for other people is not arbitrary, but reasoned, and he would apply the same thing to anything else which was specific to his religion.
Notice that that description doesn’t contain a claim that divorce hurts anyone other than the people getting divorced. So it doesn’t generalize to things which Lewis believes are banned by his religion because they harm others.
Also, it generalizes poorly to things like gay marriage. There used to be a time when nobody accepted gay marriage. Someone like Lewis could, while staying consistent with the above argument, claim that since gay marriage was universally abhorred, a law against it is not a Christian-specific law but a State-specific law.
Let’s suppose that Islam taught that every time someone drinks wine, ten random non-Muslims automatically will go to hell. Do you think that Lewis would have been less angry if consequently Muslims tried to ban wine for everyone? Since he compared divorce to that himself, fully understanding that the prohibition on wine looks arbitrary to other people, he would be fully capable of realizing that it would look arbitrary even if he himself had such a belief.
But besides that, as I’ve said all along, Lewis’s beliefs are not arbitrary. He would be unlikely to believe a religion that taught something like that about wine, and if he did accept the religion in general, he would be unlikely to accept that particular belief. And even if he did, the awareness that it looks arbitrary to other people could be sufficient reason for him not to ban it, by the same argument he made explicitly.
The gay marriage argument is irrelevant. Neither Lewis nor anyone else living at that time would have specifically legalized gay marriage, or even thought about it. Neither would you, if you had lived at that time and been in charge of England. That does not mean that Lewis or anyone else was tyrannical or would have been.
Your whole argument is based on a strawman of religious beliefs as arbitrary beliefs. One could as well argue that “Jiro’s beliefs” are arbitrary, since if Jiro had believed something different, he would have had different beliefs.
I could speculate, but you could just say he wouldn’t act according to my speculation. Do you have any examples of Lewis believing that something harms others, and yet still refusing to ban it (and for similar reasons)?
But if he had lived at the transition point the question would come up. If he has exceptions that let him ban things that are condemned by society, he could argue that the fact that gay marriage was universally condemned makes it more like banning murder than banning wine.
Religions have a habit of throwing in “this thing is bad” purely on argument from authority, an authority Lewis considers himself bound to believe as an infallible source of truth. Nonreligious people have the step “figure out if it’s really bad” in there, which Lewis does not—if God says it’s bad, it’s bad.
Where are you getting this from? Not from any reading of Lewis, it seems.
C.S. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism”
I think one of us is misunderstanding Jiro here; isn’t s/he saying not that Lewis thinks God creates the moral law, but that Lewis thinks God is a perfectly reliable source of information about the moral law? (Epistemology, not ontology.)
[EDITED to add the second instance of “Lewis thinks” in the previous paragraph. I hope my meaning was clear anyway.]
(I’m fairly sure that Lewis wouldn’t have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim promulgated by the Church of England, or every moral claim a reasonable person could extract from the Bible, so I find Jiro’s argument less than perfectly convincing. But I think you’re refuting a different argument.)
Lewis would likely have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim he thinks was made by God. He might not believe that the Church of England is perfect at figuring this out, but whatever source of God-claims he uses instead of the Church would produce results as arbitrary as using the Church. (Except to the extent that he uses motivated reasoning to decide what God is claiming.)
It is not “motivated reasoning” to argue that God doesn’t claim a thing, if you have reasons for believing both that the thing is false, and that whatever God says is true.
Lewis, however, does believe that God makes moral claims and that he (Lewis) can know what at least some of them are.
Also, Lewis adopted his religion an adult; if it had said something different, he might not have adopted it.