Harry Marks wrote: the "coherent vision" of Christianity recognizes that any good work is done for Christ, and that the coherent strategic vision sees such works operating like the mustard seed, starting small but generating wider and more empowering flows of compassion.

And who is Christ? The stable durable rational order of the cosmos, reflected in connection to human life as a pure ideal of love and truth.

Harry Marks wrote: "Faith" in NT usage should be seen as "trust" and "faithfulness" and as such, does not really function as a coherent strategic vision.

That separation between faith and coherence is a contestable assertion. Jesus pointed to a coherent strategic vision when he told Pilate he was a martyr for truth. The subsequent Christian religion lost coherence, by taking symbolic ideas as literal. The underlying coherence can be restored by seeing symbol as symbol, not as fact.

Harry Marks wrote: The triumph of markets over central planning was a gradual, long-haul response to incentives. That is the kind of thorough-going, comprehensive response we need to GHG's.

An incentive-based approach to climate change is too slow. The melting of the Arctic, and the death of the Great Barrier Reef, to take just two extreme risks, have feedback loops that become impossible to reverse as they get worse. I just read a book called Fighting Cancer. It makes the excellent point that any delay only means the cancer will get worse. The same applies to global warming, the urgent need is to apply all resources to remove dangerous carbon before the cancer kills us.

Harry Marks wrote: Even if all your favorite notions of the effect of sea-life cultivation were to prove out, the Malthusian process of unregulated GHG production is still capable of overwhelming that removal.

No, that “Malthusian” spectre of exponential growth in greenhouse gasses is entirely false. Humans add ten cubic kilometres of carbon to the air every year, and any change to that amount will be arithmetical, not geometric. Marine carbon removal can aim to remove twenty cubic kilometres of carbon per year, double total emissions, so the ‘overwhelming’ can be in the reverse direction from your claim, with removal overwhelming emissions. But if we just concentrate on reducing emissions we will fail, since that is only a marginal approach, addressing less than one cubic kilometre of carbon per year, that ignores the main task of research, development and deployment of carbon removal technology.

Harry Marks wrote: I grant you that humanity faces an emergency, and even that it may take more than just government action to create market-like incentives against GHG emissions, but refusing to use both approaches (private innovation and incentives against external costs) is almost as foolish as refusing to use either one.

My attitude is not “refusing” incentives, as I actually welcome them to some extent as a helpful adjunct to carbon removal, serving to shift the tax burden to more effective economic and environmental objectives.

But incentives for emission reduction are only incidental to addressing climate change. What is needed is a Manhattan Project scale of deliberate intervention, testing large scale practical methods to restore the climate to Holocene stability. We are too close to the edge to mess around with incidental methods, which are like imagining meditation can cure cancer.

Harry Marks wrote:If our ego, or consciously aware thinking mind, is constituted by objectivity, that is if it is committed as a matter of self-protection to the illusion that mattering is objective, then it will suffer by attachment.

Believing that “mattering is objective” need not be an illusory source of suffering.

To construct a moral position as an objective matter of good or evil is often the only way to inspire social momentum. The uncertainty involved in an advocate of a position saying “I might be wrong” displays a lack of faith, confidence and trust, destroying prospects of cohesion.

Analysis of global warming provides a factual case study on this theoretical problem for philosophy and religion of the relation between objectivity, values and detachment. Climate science indicates that the Arctic will melt and the world’s coral reefs will largely die in our lifetimes, generating irreversible damaging impacts. Such predictions need to be treated with proper scientific caution given errors in past predictions about sea level rise and warming.

However, such claims of objective knowledge, when they are backed by strong science, are far from being a source of delusion and suffering. Scientific certainty can serve as a mobilising incentive by claiming that the evidence is objectively important. Such certainty can be open to falsification, but that is not the same as accepting doubt about central abundantly verified observations.

The idea that we could be detached from the collapsing climate system that sustains us is a great delusion, constructing an alienated fantasy world separate from nature. Such detachment produces inevitable suffering. Failure to respond to objective evidence is a dangerous relativising result of the attitude that mattering is only subjective. “Its only your opinion” is a great excuse for inaction.

But that detachment is what happens when we say that the claim ‘mattering is objective’ always involves ego-based delusion. That attitude of detachment means there can be no objective values. Rejecting objectivity in values sits uncomfortably close to nihilism, the belief that nothing matters, and to relativism, the belief that values cannot be objectively ranked.

We can consider that set of ideas – objectivity, nihilism and relativism - against what I have argued is a fundamental moral axiom, that human flourishing is good. Some might say that the claim 'human flourishing is good' can only seem objective to those deluded by attachment. At one level, rejecting objectivity in values may seem to reflect a serene detachment. But at another level, detachment involves an assertion that it does not matter to the universe if humans continue to exist. While that might seem to have an austere logic, it also involves a failure to care. Against the argument that we cannot be logically certain either way if it ultimately matters if humans go extinct, we can say that accepting doubt on such a fundamental moral concern can only reflect an inhuman lack of existential commitment and care.

Robert Tulip wrote:And who is Christ? The stable durable rational order of the cosmos, reflected in connection to human life as a pure ideal of love and truth.

Yes, I recognize that the cosmic significance (which we historicists see as having evolved from his martyrdom) operates to some extent independently of any particular historical events and choices. That is what we call "transcendence". One of my first reactions, on hearing a good faith, reasonable presentation of mythicism, was that in my view the mythological significance is what really mattered, so that to a great extent it doesn't matter to me whether Jesus really lived and died. My interest in that part is mainly intellectual.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:The triumph of markets over central planning was a gradual, long-haul response to incentives. That is the kind of thorough-going, comprehensive response we need to GHG's.

An incentive-based approach to climate change is too slow. The melting of the Arctic, and the death of the Great Barrier Reef, to take just two extreme risks, have feedback loops that become impossible to reverse as they get worse.

Well, I tend to agree with you. I was aware of an urgent deadline by the time of the woefully inadequate Kyoto Protocol, and if I remember right the point at which the ice caps would probably be safe without removing carbon from the atmosphere was passed by about 2005, before China really got revved up. And that was before anyone had really measured the amount of methane being released by permafrost melting.

On the other hand, free markets without incentives to improve are as inexorable as, well, a glacier melting.

Robert Tulip wrote:any delay only means the cancer will get worse. The same applies to global warming, the urgent need is to apply all resources to remove dangerous carbon before the cancer kills us.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: Even if all your favorite notions of the effect of sea-life cultivation were to prove out, the Malthusian process of unregulated GHG production is still capable of overwhelming that removal.

No, that “Malthusian” spectre of exponential growth in greenhouse gasses is entirely false. Humans add ten cubic kilometres of carbon to the air every year, and any change to that amount will be arithmetical, not geometric.

I beg to differ. First, because even arithmetic growth can turn that 10 into 20 before many decades pass - the increase in automobile use in the last 20 years in India and China, for example, is expected to continue apace for a tripling of auto use in 10 years. And second, because experience suggests that economic variables continue to grow exponentially even when growth slows due to market saturation. We are now talking about being able to send our own private driverless car to the market, where they would put our order of groceries in and send it back. Do you really think that the historical pattern of exponential growth will slow without any signals to do so from the market? Well, you answered below that you are fine with incentives, so hopefully we will not find out.

Robert Tulip wrote:Marine carbon removal can aim to remove twenty cubic kilometres of carbon per year, double total emissions, so the ‘overwhelming’ can be in the reverse direction from your claim, with removal overwhelming emissions.

Well, I certainly hope that it does.

Robert Tulip wrote:But if we just concentrate on reducing emissions we will fail, since that is only a marginal approach, addressing less than one cubic kilometre of carbon per year, that ignores the main task of research, development and deployment of carbon removal technology.

I think the policy community is moving toward acceptance of the need for negative emissions technology, even if the IPCC is not yet on board.

Robert Tulip wrote:My attitude is not “refusing” incentives, as I actually welcome them to some extent as a helpful adjunct to carbon removal, serving to shift the tax burden to more effective economic and environmental objectives.

But incentives for emission reduction are only incidental to addressing climate change. What is needed is a Manhattan Project scale of deliberate intervention, testing large scale practical methods to restore the climate to Holocene stability. We are too close to the edge to mess around with incidental methods, which are like imagining meditation can cure cancer.

I promise you that robust anti-GHG incentives would rapidly accelerate both public and private interest in the crash R&D program you advocate, and make its point of demonstrable practicality arrive much sooner than simply arguing before boards and committees. There are investors willing to pay for space launches, of all things, which have much less prospect for earning returns than would carbon-removal with earnings from payments for carbon-saving.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:If our ego, or consciously aware thinking mind, is constituted by objectivity, that is if it is committed as a matter of self-protection to the illusion that mattering is objective, then it will suffer by attachment.

Believing that “mattering is objective” need not be an illusory source of suffering.
To construct a moral position as an objective matter of good or evil is often the only way to inspire social momentum. The uncertainty involved in an advocate of a position saying “I might be wrong” displays a lack of faith, confidence and trust, destroying prospects of cohesion.

It's an interesting quandary, this notion of refusing to admit the possible flaws in one's argument as a rhetorical strategy. Reminds me of the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov. I won't get started on all the others it reminds me of.

Look, in matters of morality the first step is always agreement that morality is the goal. As long as people are in "well, how much will it cost me?" mode, they are suffering from attachment (and begging to be deceived and manipulated).

That's not to say that moral issues never admit cost-benefit calculation as part of the decision process. As you are no doubt aware there are many economists (I mentioned Geoffrey Heal in an earlier post - he is the standard bearer for this argument) who still maintain that the costs of adjusting GHG levels now are bigger than the (discounted) damages down the road of inundating all the world's coasts. Essentially this is an argument that investing the money now can create so much future value that the world can well afford to relocate a quarter of humanity, with their fixed capital, out of the proceeds, and that the biodiversity losses, etc. can't possibly matter enough economically to outweigh adding 15% to people's living costs (i.e. recognizing the costs of that magnitude that they are inflicting without paying for it).

Personally I think this is a serious distortion of the actual cost-benefit calculation, and will lead to some interesting modifications in economic analysis. But for the moment I just want to make the point that moral conclusions do not have to be independent of practicalities to be aimed at answering the moral question (as opposed to a merely practical one.)

Secondly, there is a kind of suffering that remains invisible because it occurs by the refusal to admit the reality of one's situation. Refusing to acknowledge one's mortality is the classic example - the person in that situation will still suffer from the knowledge of mortality, but by refusing to admit it will decrease the overt experience of suffering while increasing the pervasive anxiety that leads to so many other problems. People who refuse to come to grips with the things that are bothering them inevitably inflict pain on others, not just themselves.

Robert Tulip wrote:Analysis of global warming provides a factual case study on this theoretical problem for philosophy and religion of the relation between objectivity, values and detachment. Climate science indicates that the Arctic will melt and the world’s coral reefs will largely die in our lifetimes, generating irreversible damaging impacts. Such predictions need to be treated with proper scientific caution given errors in past predictions about sea level rise and warming.

However, such claims of objective knowledge, when they are backed by strong science, are far from being a source of delusion and suffering. Scientific certainty can serve as a mobilising incentive by claiming that the evidence is objectively important. Such certainty can be open to falsification, but that is not the same as accepting doubt about central abundantly verified observations.

Well, the issue I was commenting on is very different. I think we can both agree that science needs to be properly circumspect about its analysis, pointing out both the chances that the risk is much larger and the chances that the risk is much less, and explaining the basis for these estimates of probabilities.

The issue I was commenting on is whether things that we think matter, like whether life has meaning, or whether we care about the inundation of Miami, New York City, London, Amsterdam, Venice, Bangkok, Kolkat and all the rest, are "objective" values about which there can be no meaningful dissent. If a person says, "I am going to die in a year and I don't care about anything that happens beyond that," there is no objective refutation for it. To imagine that there is is to invite the suffering of denial: to deliberately play "let's pretend" and then face the psychological costs of such a fantasy. Among other costs is the damage to myself of saying I can retreat in my rightness and ignore the consequences of not engaging to persuade such a person.

Robert Tulip wrote:Failure to respond to objective evidence is a dangerous relativising result of the attitude that mattering is only subjective. “Its only your opinion” is a great excuse for inaction.

Well, a person heaps moral guilt upon themselves when they take such excuses to avoid serious engagement with the consequences. There are signs at demonstrations around the country in the U.S. now, saying, "Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids did you kill today?" The NRA might have taken a decision not to care about the morality, but they can't change it.

And likewise, we can't change the fact that there is a subjective process in deciding on what matters, and that we cannot get closer and closer to an accurate model of the "truth" about what matters by simply knowing more about the workings of the world.

I agree that moral relativism is mainly an attitude adopted for rhetorical purposes of covering the evasion of responsibility. I am not averse to engaging relativists in persuasively oriented discussion. But what is added to the persuasion with a claim of the objectivity of the values involved? I can tell our "I will be dead in a year" person that they should care, and explain my reasons why, but they still may not be persuaded and no objective claim of the should will change that.

Robert Tulip wrote:But that detachment is what happens when we say that the claim ‘mattering is objective’ always involves ego-based delusion. That attitude of detachment means there can be no objective values. Rejecting objectivity in values sits uncomfortably close to nihilism, the belief that nothing matters, and to relativism, the belief that values cannot be objectively ranked.

My claim is that the epistemology of moral truths is fundamentally connected to subjectivity. I believe there are objective wrongs, in the sense that the meaning of the term implies the wrongness of some acts, but that there are many undecidable propositions within the process of trying to find the right or best path. As a corollary, the discomfort of sitting uncomfortably close to nihilism and rationalization by claims of relativism is just part of being honest to ourselves about the process.

Robert Tulip wrote:We can consider that set of ideas – objectivity, nihilism and relativism - against what I have argued is a fundamental moral axiom, that human flourishing is good. Some might say that the claim 'human flourishing is good' can only seem objective to those deluded by attachment. At one level, rejecting objectivity in values may seem to reflect a serene detachment. But at another level, detachment involves an assertion that it does not matter to the universe if humans continue to exist. While that might seem to have an austere logic, it also involves a failure to care. Against the argument that we cannot be logically certain either way if it ultimately matters if humans go extinct, we can say that accepting doubt on such a fundamental moral concern can only reflect an inhuman lack of existential commitment and care.

One doesn't reject objectivity in values, one merely accepts its absence. The persuasiveness of "human flourishing is good" does not rest on its intrinsic, verifiable correspondence to an external, objective nature. Rather, its persuasiveness grows out of the failure to care which is involved if one says, "What is that to me?" in response to it. Because others do care, they can be persuaded to focus on that and its implications. Their nihilism or rationalization is at odds with their own caring, and the persuasion rests on a process of appealing to that.

Needless to say, appealing to people's caring, to enlist them in a common project of doing something about the things that matter, requires first that they can find a way to step out of the mode of treating others as instruments of their own selfishness. They have to overcome their fear (of being taken advantage of, for example) to access their caring.

Robert Tulip wrote:
But incentives for emission reduction are only incidental to addressing climate change. What is needed is a Manhattan Project scale of deliberate intervention, testing large scale practical methods to restore the climate to Holocene stability. We are too close to the edge to mess around with incidental methods, which are like imagining meditation can cure cancer.

Speaking of the Manhattan Project, Roosevelt established the Briggs Advisory Committee (forerunner of the Manhattan Project) in response to Einstein's letter about the possibilities of
atomic bomb production using uranium. And stating that Germany might well be studying practical methods of creating such a bomb.

Why do I hear so little from today's scientific community concerning climate change? Should our scientists not be up in arms about this clear and present danger? I know they've warned us and written books and papers about it, but I think this is not enough. They need to change the perception, still held by many, that we have no climate change problem, that is merely a leftist scare tactic. They really need to get it in gear on this issue (IMHO).

Litwitlou wrote: Should our scientists not be up in arms about this clear and present danger? I know they've warned us and written books and papers about it, but I think this is not enough.

I think scientists have done what they can in the way of advocacy. Not that they have stopped or will stop, but it is time for a different approach. Citizen's Climate Lobby is on the cutting edge.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/opin ... .html?_r=0

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:And who is Christ? The stable durable rational order of the cosmos, reflected in connection to human life as a pure ideal of love and truth.

Yes, I recognize that the cosmic significance (which we historicists see as having evolved from his martyrdom) operates to some extent independently of any particular historical events and choices. That is what we call "transcendence".

Hello Harry, I got somewhat overwhelmed by this discussion and other things, so am just returning to your last substantive comment here.

The nature of Jesus Christ is a central question for the overall problem of the relation between religion and philosophy. Liberal Christians today reject the miraculous and often say that what the Bible stories mean for us today in moral terms is more important than what really happened. So stories of the holy birth and the passion function as parables, as moral lessons about the meaning of existence.

That means the cosmic significance of Jesus Christ, which is where any ultimate meaning resides, is all about how we imagine Jesus connects us to God, or in Jung’s terms, to an ultimate archetypal reality of the collective unconscious. This theme you raise of transcendence is central to the meaning of Jesus for the world, in raising the problem of how our world deals with absolute truth.

The assertion of the Gospels is that the world responds to truth with denial, based on the story of the cross, but then truth asserts its priority, as expressed in the story of resurrection.

Harry Marks wrote: One of my first reactions, on hearing a good faith, reasonable presentation of mythicism, was that in my view the mythological significance is what really mattered, so that to a great extent it doesn't matter to me whether Jesus really lived and died. My interest in that part is mainly intellectual.

Some intellectual points of interest about the existence of Jesus:
There is no more real evidence for Jesus than for Adam, Noah, Abraham or Moses. Given how cultural beliefs have shifted to accept that these patriarchs are basically fictional, the template was in place in ancient Israel for the invention of characters who were widely believed to be real. For all these major figures from the Bible, one of their central mythological attributes was historical existence. Like Jesus, the myth was the claim that they actually existed historically, even though they didn’t.

If Jesus was real, it is unbelievable that neither Philo nor Josephus nor anyone else noticed enough to write him up, until Mark decades later, who is the only source for the whole Nazareth and Jerusalem and Pilate setting. The lines in Josephus about Jesus were only added in the fourth century when their absence appeared too embarrassing. If Jesus was real then Josephus would have covered him in much more depth, in view of his obvious significance in Jewish history, and Josephus would not have used anachronistic fourth century language to do so.

Paul says almost nothing to place Jesus in space or time, and his epistles make much more sense against the invention hypothesis.

If in fact Jesus Christ is a fictional character, how is it possible that he came to be venerated by Christians as the greatest man in history? The reason is we need a psychological connection to the absolute, and the belief in the existence of Jesus provides this connection, with the comforting message that belief will confer eternal life.

One of the greatest modern philosophers of religion, Voltaire, said if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The same applies to Jesus Christ, that if he did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.

Jesus anthropomorphised the religious functions hitherto attributed to the sun, such as providing light, life, power, stability and glory, and enabling shared mythology in the Common Era.

The Greek and Hebrew versions of the prophet Amos combine at verse 4:13 to define Christ as the mind of God. So the existence of a Christ had been on the mind of the Jews for the eight centuries between Amos and Christ’s alleged advent, or at least since the Greek translation of Amos from Hebrew. Carl Jung argues in Answer to Job that the function of Jesus was to make God conscious.

Harry Marks wrote:It's an interesting quandary, this notion of refusing to admit the possible flaws in one's argument as a rhetorical strategy.

Jumping now to the related discussion of how these themes in religion and philosophy impact on political, economic and moral issues around climate change.

The sad reality of politics is that as soon as a partisan expressed doubt about the cause, their ability to function as a public advocate is compromised. Faking certainty is central to political success.

Napoleon’s advice to never admit mistakes, to never retract or retreat in politics, is unfortunately central to the practical activity of building mass movements, since followers easily lose faith in leaders who appear weak or uncertain.

That problem of popular leadership is a big part of why the literal historical story of the Gospel, with its simple truths, defeated the complex philosophy of Gnosticism in the ancient world.

The same psychology applies today to climate change. Polarisation means people must express certainty about their beliefs. The transference of the actual certainty of global warming to an equal certainty about the strategy of emission reduction is a dangerous modern myth driven by the Napoleon Syndrome.

Harry Marks wrote: many economists maintain that the costs of adjusting GHG levels now [by cutting CO2] are bigger than the (discounted) damages down the road of inundating all the world's coasts. Personally I think this is a serious distortion of the actual cost-benefit calculation, and will lead to some interesting modifications in economic analysis.

With all due respect, that discounting argument about climate risk is moronic and corrupt. It is a main area in which I differ from Lomborg. The problem of climate change is all about risk, but the idea that we can quantify those risks accurately is incredibly stupid.

For example, as I mentioned earlier, a repeat of the Permian Great Dying due to change to ocean currents looks to be a low risk, but if it occurred it would be utterly catastrophic in impact, making the sanguine calculations of economists about coping with higher seas incredibly foolish.

The precautionary principle means that we should look at all the high impact-low likelihood scenarios like the Permian Dying, such as outgassing of Arctic methane, melting of Antarctic glaciers, albedo feedbacks, etc, as a basis to move immediately to remove the dangerous carbon from the air. And even higher seas could have unforeseen impacts on conflict beyond the economic calculations.

Preventing these risks is the only sane course. Inaction leaves the world in a situation like the tarot fool dawdling on the edge of the precipice while the wise dog tells him to wake up.

Harry Marks wrote: People who refuse to come to grips with the things that are bothering them inevitably inflict pain on others, not just themselves.

That is a key principle of Buddhism. The Four Noble Truths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths are pain, its cause, end and removal. Buddhism teaches that the cause of pain and suffering and stress for the self and others is delusional attachment and desire.

Harry Marks wrote: science needs to be properly circumspect about its analysis, pointing out both the chances that the risk is much larger and the chances that the risk is much less, and explaining the basis for these estimates of probabilities.

Yet with climate change, given the politics, critics will leap on any admission of doubt or error, despite the complexity, just in order to sow public confusion and delay action. That method of promoting uncertainty, using the meme that ‘the jury is out’, comes straight from the nicotine poisoner's playbook.

Advocates of climate action respond by presenting the case for emission reduction in simplistic polarised terms on the popular front model, in response to the monolithic partisan attack. Unfortunately that simplification of debate is fertile ground for myths, which can even infest science, crowding out space for the cooperation across enemy lines that is needed to stop global warming.

Harry Marks wrote: whether things that we think matter… are "objective" values about which there can be no meaningful dissent.

The view that humans should go extinct in order to save the planet is an example of what many would consider meaningless dissent. If that view is an unstated corollary or implication of other views, then those views become equally meaningless. It illustrates that any claim of objectivity in values rests on axioms, in this case the axiom that human existence is good.

Whether emission reduction alone could prevent dangerous warming is a different sort of question, primarily a matter of scientific probability, not values, although the value proposition that fossil fuel extraction should stop tends to turn advocacy of emission reduction into a moral crusade rather than a question of scientific facts.

Harry Marks wrote: If a person says, "I am going to die in a year and I don't care about anything that happens beyond that," there is no objective refutation for it. To imagine that there is is to invite the suffering of denial: to deliberately play "let's pretend" and then face the psychological costs of such a fantasy. Among other costs is the damage to myself of saying I can retreat in my rightness and ignore the consequences of not engaging to persuade such a person.

That is actually a really complex psychological problem. If a pathologist says to you, “just keep smoking, your results show you will die anyway so you might as well enjoy yourself”, then the prophecy of death in a year becomes self-fulfilling, snuffing out even a small chance of life.

The placebo effect of faith is central to healing. Only people with an attitude of focus on recovery actually tend to recover, while people who want to die tend to die.

Framing an expectation of death against “objective refutation” is the wrong way to see this problem. We cannot know when we will die, and the quality of our remaining time is a function of attitude. This role of attitude in health also illustrates the healing power of faith and prayer, not as a cause of miraculous intervention, but as a focusing of deliberate intention of mind in a positive direction.

Harry Marks wrote: we can't change the fact that there is a subjective process in deciding on what matters, and that we cannot get closer and closer to an accurate model of the "truth" about what matters by simply knowing more about the workings of the world.

That claim assumes the truth of the positivist beliefs that we can never derive an ought from an is, and that values cannot be based on facts. And yet, continuing with the example of climate change, if a scientific model were universally accepted by experts as showing that four degrees of warming would cause ten metres of sea level rise and stop the main ocean currents this century, then saying this knowledge of the workings of the world does not get us any close to the truth about what matters seems an overly academic theory.

Here is an example from the Second World War. Stalin held that knowledge of German troop movements in mid-1941 did not shift his ‘model of the truth about what matters’, which was based on his agreement with Hitler. No wonder Stalin went into such a funk of betrayal and despair and gloom when Operation Barbarossa started and his faith and trust were shown to be empty.

Harry Marks wrote: moral relativism is mainly an attitude adopted for rhetorical purposes of covering the evasion of responsibility.

Really? I see relativism as more an expression of post-colonial guilt, an emotional self-hatred by westerners who feel politically obliged to reject any assertion of western superiority over other cultures.

Harry Marks wrote: I am not averse to engaging relativists in persuasively oriented discussion. But what is added to the persuasion with a claim of the objectivity of the values involved? I can tell our "I will be dead in a year" person that they should care, and explain my reasons why, but they still may not be persuaded and no objective claim of the should will change that.

Back to the example of the person who would like to see humans go extinct. What happens in practice with such views is they encounter widespread public repugnance. So the philosophical argument about objectivity is subsumed beneath realities of generally held sentiment.

And you might be surprised by the value of talk in stopping people from killing themselves. Often suicidal ideation is a cry for help from people who feel that nobody cares about them, and it can be cured by pastoral attention from friends and family.

Harry Marks wrote: The persuasiveness of "human flourishing is good" does not rest on its intrinsic, verifiable correspondence to an external, objective nature. Rather, its persuasiveness grows out of the failure to care which is involved if one says, "What is that to me?" in response to it. Because others do care, they can be persuaded to focus on that and its implications. Their nihilism or rationalization is at odds with their own caring, and the persuasion rests on a process of appealing to that.

Here we see that care is an intrinsically relational activity, and the emotional connection arising from care is morally prior to any merely intellectual theory about what is good. We only get a sense of what is good from the intuitive emotional values arising from relationships of care.

Robert Tulip wrote:Hello Harry, I got somewhat overwhelmed by this discussion and other things, so am just returning to your last substantive comment here.

Always good to hear from you.

The nature of Jesus Christ is a central question for the overall problem of the relation between religion and philosophy. Liberal Christians today reject the miraculous and often say that what the Bible stories mean for us today in moral terms is more important than what really happened. So stories of the holy birth and the passion function as parables, as moral lessons about the meaning of existence.

That sounds like the viewpoint I am familiar with. I know plenty who don't reject the miraculous, but I think most liberal Christians no longer interpret things like "faith" and "salvation" primarily in terms of response to the miraculous. Even if the stories are not mainly parable or metaphor, they still matter mainly for reasons having little or nothing to do with supernatural things. So, for example, even if you think in terms of visions and appearances as "The Resurrection" it turns out that these were profoundly important in regenerating the Body of Christ, i.e. the movement, and thus in conferring victory over death.

The assertion of the Gospels is that the world responds to truth with denial, based on the story of the cross, but then truth asserts its priority, as expressed in the story of resurrection.

I might phrase things differently and shift the emphases, but I would certainly agree with this.

Some intellectual points of interest about the existence of Jesus:
There is no more real evidence for Jesus than for Adam, Noah, Abraham or Moses.

You left out Buddha, Elijah and Zoroaster.

the template was in place in ancient Israel for the invention of characters who were widely believed to be real.

The same is true of Theseus, Perseus and Heracles, so therefore Socrates is obviously a fiction.

If Jesus was real, it is unbelievable that neither Philo nor Josephus nor anyone else noticed enough to write him up, until Mark decades later, who is the only source for the whole Nazareth and Jerusalem and Pilate setting. The lines in Josephus about Jesus were only added in the fourth century when their absence appeared too embarrassing. If Jesus was real then Josephus would have covered him in much more depth, in view of his obvious significance in Jewish history

I am not an expert on the evidence, but I have read in credible sources that only part of the Josephus material bears the hallmarks of insertion. If in fact some of it was original, that would heighten the embarrassment of not delivering some version of the Christian party line, thus providing a better explanation of the parts that are apparently insertions.

But the claim that failure to mention him in historical accounts is incredible seems to me to fly in the face of the typical case, in which, for example, no contemporary historian mentions Buddha or Socrates (although he got a mention in satire). Whenever I see a case made for its incredible nature, the argument runs along the lines of "all those miracles would have been noticed," which is, of course, beside the point. John the Baptist got a mention (if that wasn't an insertion) but he seems to have been more in the face of Herod.

You talk about the obvious significance of Jesus in Jewish history, but such a significance was not in evidence at the time of Josephus, nor really 100 years later. Getting crucified and having followers doesn't make you a figure worth writing history about. The gradual development of religion also helps to explain why we don't know when Lao-Tzu lived (if, indeed, there really was such a person.)

Paul says almost nothing to place Jesus in space or time, and his epistles make much more sense against the invention hypothesis.

As I have said before, I think that is a really bad reading of Paul. The obvious embarrassment in I Cor 1-4, in which he talks about the foolishness of proclaiming a crucified Savior, is not something we have any indication of for Serapis or Osiris or any of the others on which the myth was supposedly based. Nobody considered such a thing foolish until Paul? And yet he based his life on it, without any official position or authority? If you ask me, there's a big gap there. And that's just one of the many gaps in the "all the historicism started with Mark" view.

Jesus anthropomorphised the religious functions hitherto attributed to the sun, such as providing light, life, power, stability and glory, and enabling shared mythology in the Common Era.

Not to mention rising again at the right time of year to appropriate Spring mythology, by appropriating Passover which has nothing to do with Spring and Resurrection. Look, these are possibly true sources of the connections in Christianity. But it's also possibly true that the early Christians appropriated whatever mythological meanings were already floating around, as opportunity happened to present itself, but amplifying and annotating the stories that came down to them. It's a kind of circular process which I doubt anyone will ever be able to definitively separate out.

the existence of a Christ had been on the mind of the Jews for the eight centuries between Amos and Christ’s alleged advent,
Carl Jung argues in Answer to Job that the function of Jesus was to make God conscious.

I think this is also the basis of the most plausible historicist scenario: that the notion of a peaceful Messiah is implicit in the prophets, and that Jesus deliberately took on this mantle so that the shock of his defeat would confront his followers with the vital force of vulnerability in the service of truth about what is meaningful. If there's anything more significant than a martyr, it's a deliberate and innocent martyr claiming to be a new kind of Messiah.

The sad reality of politics is that as soon as a partisan expressed doubt about the cause, their ability to function as a public advocate is compromised. Faking certainty is central to political success.

Well, there is short-term success and long-term success. The Republicans looked pretty silly arguing for privatizing the government pension system (known as Social Security in the U.S.) after the dot-com bust. Only fringies still talk that line after 2008. Faking certainty is a good way to gamble away your credibility (not a word that gets a lot of attention in politics these days, but it used to count for something.)

One of the genuine problems with the right-wing strategy of putting hired guns in think tanks and then in politics is that they have never cared about the integrity of those people's positions, and so they keep having their shills exposed as frauds. It reinforces the alliance with the forces of ignorance, because only the ignorant keep falling for the same old cover stories over and over.

Napoleon’s advice to never admit mistakes, to never retract or retreat in politics, is unfortunately central to the practical activity of building mass movements, since followers easily lose faith in leaders who appear weak or uncertain.

Putin epitomizes that approach, but it says nothing good about the Russian people that it succeeds there. Yes, okay, they want someone who fights for their side and invades Crimea rather than leave a large concentration of Russians in the hands of hostile governments. And they prefer someone strong who will outmaneuver opponents because they believe they are in danger of being outmaneuvered back to the age of serfdom. But the pieces don't add up to a coherent whole - they are moved along by chaotic emotions rather than a reasoned picture of how the world works.

That problem of popular leadership is a big part of why the literal historical story of the Gospel, with its simple truths, defeated the complex philosophy of Gnosticism in the ancient world.

I think there is a lot of truth in that, but one could argue the same about Stoicism. The problem is more in the sociology: Stoicism and Gnosticism deliberately aim to make sense of the world to educated, highly intelligent elites, not to slaves and laborers. As a result they are passed on by elites to elites, rather than building up human solidarity as an experienced reality.

It's the flip side of Putinism: appealing mainly to emotions makes for a movement with deeper, archetypal appeal that philosophical positions do not have. As such Chrisitianity wasn't very effective at incorporating "practical reason" (as Paul noted in I Corinthians), but it was much better suited for human solidarity. Fortunately that was its aim rather than simply propping up oligarchs who could loot the riches in the ground.

The same psychology applies today to climate change. Polarisation means people must express certainty about their beliefs.

Or we could, as a marriage counselor advised to a husband losing his marriage because he withdrew from actually engaging with the issues of his marriage, stay around and duke it out. Engage, rather than ranting in the wilderness.

With all due respect, that discounting argument about climate risk is moronic and corrupt. It is a main area in which I differ from Lomborg. The problem of climate change is all about risk, but the idea that we can quantify those risks accurately is incredibly stupid.

Yes, well, in addition to the "unknown unknowns" which are a hard sell in the world of policy, the Lomborg view makes a number of highly simplistic assumptions about the ability of a society to mobilize resources to actually do something about damages they could have foreseen but refused to. Ask the Texans, and the Puerto Ricans. To claim that denial is a rational calculation is to lose touch with reality.

The precautionary principle means that we should look at all the high impact-low likelihood scenarios like the Permian Dying, such as outgassing of Arctic methane, melting of Antarctic glaciers, albedo feedbacks, etc, as a basis to move immediately to remove the dangerous carbon from the air. And even higher seas could have unforeseen impacts on conflict beyond the economic calculations.

Oh, indeed. I care more about maintaining civilization, which has shown signs of incredible shallowness in the last 3 years, than I do even about catastrophic extinction events. Do people even realize that the Syrian rebellion had more to do with climate-driven drought than with fugitive ISIS Sunnis from Iraq? And it is destabilizing the EU.

Yet with climate change, given the politics, critics will leap on any admission of doubt or error, despite the complexity, just in order to sow public confusion and delay action. That method of promoting uncertainty, using the meme that ‘the jury is out’, comes straight from the nicotine poisoner's playbook.

Well, it is incumbent on all of us to change the politics, then, rather than go down the road of accepting denial.

Robert Tulip wrote:any claim of objectivity in values rests on axioms, in this case the axiom that human existence is good.

I think I am beginning to get the idea you are explaining as resting of values on axioms. It is not so far from my idea of "implication of the meaning of the words 'wrong' and 'right'." I don't think it solves the incompleteness problem, that many choices are derivable by logic from the axioms, (or perhaps from the meaning of the words), and yet these choices may be mutually exclusive (e.g. government should redistribute income, government should not redistribute income.) While more and better facts can get us closer to a properly meaningful choice, in the end persuasion will be the part that resolves the question (or does not).

Robert Tulip wrote:Whether emission reduction alone could prevent dangerous warming is a different sort of question, primarily a matter of scientific probability, not values, although the value proposition that fossil fuel extraction should stop tends to turn advocacy of emission reduction into a moral crusade rather than a question of scientific facts.

Yes, separating values questions from factual questions is a key skill in politics, or used to be before the oligarchs decided that the whole idea of truth is too threatening and they would have to fight it.

Any time you let your values preference determine your beliefs about facts you undermine human values in general, and rationality in particular. Yet that is common with evangelicals regarding evolution, with liberals regarding redistribution, with anti-theists regarding (a balanced view of) religion, with neo-conservatives regarding international treaties, etc., etc. Because values are so intertwined with generalized perceptions about the world (e.g. the world is a struggle, the world offers great opportunities for mutual benefit, the world is ultimately a fixed pie, men are more rational than women, etc., etc.) we tend to give a lot of importance to facts which fit our perceived narrative, and discount those that don't.

That is the situation currently with global warming. We have a slight majority in the U.S. who don't believe that anything costly needs to be done about it, but that is because of one or another of alternative narratives which give a lot of weight to various facts which call into question the conclusion about anything needing to be done. A substantial portion of that is climate denialism.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: we can't change the fact that there is a subjective process in deciding on what matters, and that we cannot get closer and closer to an accurate model of the "truth" about what matters by simply knowing more about the workings of the world.

That claim assumes the truth of the positivist beliefs that we can never derive an ought from an is, and that values cannot be based on facts. And yet, continuing with the example of climate change, if a scientific model were universally accepted . . . then saying this knowledge of the workings of the world does not get us any close to the truth about what matters seems an overly academic theory.

Well, I think I did overstate the point if I implied that facts do not matter in resolving issues of values or "oughts". They do matter very much in nearly every values question that is at all a question. I was making the overly academic point that in questions of fact one resolves the question by managing more and more careful observation to see what the world is telling us, but values epistemology does not work that way. The point of saying you can't get an "ought" from an "is" merely observes that, for many values questions, even knowing all the facts does not give us an indisputable answer. Irreducible differences in values can still survive.

One does not have to take that as a discouragement. Just as we would not want our human lives to be reduced to the status of automatons, required by facts to make one series of forced moves after another, so we can relish the process of discussing what makes communal life worthwhile, or which communal decisions present too much danger to be worth whatever potential benefits they offer. Such discussion and debate is the glory of humanity and mortal life.

You have made several points which translate my overly academic philosophical point into psychological implications, and that's an interesting approach. I don't see it as particularly relevant to the philosophical problem, because I am not willing to adopt rhetoric I don't agree with just for the placebo effect of it. But the doctor does not have to be harsh and cold just because the facts are scary. The rhetoric can be caring even while being faithful to the facts.

Robert Tulip wrote:And you might be surprised by the value of talk in stopping people from killing themselves. Often suicidal ideation is a cry for help from people who feel that nobody cares about them, and it can be cured by pastoral attention from friends and family.

Well, as I said somewhere else on this site recently, I think our problem right now is talking a paranoid down from the ledge. Pastoral attention is a matter of life and death, because we can't just write off 40 to 45% of the richest and most powerful country and say, "Well, they are adults, let them jump" because in this case they take the rest of us down with them. Unless, of course, the technical fixes of you and the other geo-engineers do manage to overcome the emissions problem, in which case we have successfully kicked the can down the road to the next set of environmental problem. That would be a very good thing, to my mind, despite what a lot of climate bureaucrats say about the precautionary principle.

Robert Tulip wrote:Here we see that care is an intrinsically relational activity, and the emotional connection arising from care is morally prior to any merely intellectual theory about what is good. We only get a sense of what is good from the intuitive emotional values arising from relationships of care.

[/quote]A long time ago, when I was a student journalist, I told the truth when some would say I should not have, and may have gotten Ronald Reagan elected as a result. Probably not, but it is not out of the realm of possibility.

The truth I told was a professor's reckless statement to an academic audience, making fun of someone powerful for their antiquated values. Academics often see themselves as hiding in a refuge from having to be relational, so that they can study the world in peace. One of the corollaries is that we can all agree as reasonable people not to let on to the rubes how superior we are. I think it is close kin to the Mafia view of "wise guys."