Very nicely put.

Along similar lines, quoting from a post I did a while back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140274):

"Activist groups have long looked for a hook by which to bring class actions against those whom they see as perpetrators of wrongs that they wish to stop. In this case, it is commercial tuna fishermen. However, the courts have denied them the right to sue on behalf of the dolphins (which are accidentally killed in the course of industrial tuna fishing) on grounds that dolphins aren't human beings and therefore do not have 'standing' to sue. This means that the activist groups also cannot bring class actions in the name of the dolphins. Of course, if the dolphins are 'self-aware,' then they arguably can be treated in a special way by the courts - as 'non-human humans' - and be given the right to sue. The research is being cast as disinterested science, but I believe it may be motivated by this extra-scientific goal and that is why it is routinely presented along with arguments for better ethical treatment of the dolphins. In essence, the bottom line will be this: better ethical treatment = enforceable legal rights (i.e., enforceable by activist groups suing tuna fisherman in federal court once a court recognizes their right to bring such suits on behalf of a 'self-aware' species that now should have 'standing' to sue)."

I am not trying to knock the science - just saying that, when cast as a moral imperative, it is as much advocacy as it is science and that its objectivity must be considered in that light. Perhaps it would be best for those who do these studies to stick to the facts and let others do the advocacy. It would give them a higher degree of credibility as scientists if they separated these roles.

That's a good point, but on the other hand, there are many issues that are unsexy, from which activists shy away. There's a passage in Russell and Norvig's AI book that relates how the US government once asked researchers to evaluate if we should ban a toxic paint component from being used in classrooms. The researchers did a proper utility calculation; they assigned a value (say 80000$) to a child's life, then evaluated the cost vs benefit (how many children lives could be saved vs. the cost of using another paint). It turned out that banning the paint component would be beneficial. The government was outraged, "How can you assign a monetary value to a child's life???"

So they rejected the report, and didn't ban the paint.

The moral was that "Refusing to assign a value to a human life leads to its being frequently undervalued"

There's no way that any activist group will ever march to support assigning value to children's lives. Yet, it may be the right thing to do, and it could happen if we had more scientific advocacy.

This is sometimes awkward to discuss in public, where emotion plays better in the media, but I'm fairly certain that it's been standard government practice to do such cost benefit analysis for decades.

(If the proposal did actually exist and was rejected then it seems more likely that a politician was using the emotional argument as a convenient cover for not implementing a policy that they disagreed with for other reasons.)

See for yourself:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=8jZBksh-bUMC&lpg=PP1&...

I had cited it from memory. It wasn't paint; it was asbestos.

Nearly every government decision (e.g. where to build roads) involves calculations that put a value on human life, never mind the more obvious ones about what drugs to provide via socialized medical services.

Great, though my point still stands that scientists are often the only people who can grasp a particular issue, and should perhaps consider advocating it.

Why not? Is there a law against that? I'm genuinely curious.

and scientists shouldn't advocate on the topics they are deeply attached to

That's a non-sequitur analogy.

Besides, who do you propose to advocate a position if not those who have learned the most about it? Shall we forbid Dawkins from advocating evolution? Economists (it's a science!) from advocating economic policy?

Should we forbid programmers from advocating software patent reform because "it's a topic they are deeply attached to"?

Yes, please, I'm begging you. Dawkins has made himself the WORST person to be advocating evolution because he's turned it from a rational scientific argument into the moron-capades by arguing about the existence of god.

To put it simply, he's trying to get his finger out of a Chinese-finger-trap by pulling, which makes him a moron because every 5-year old will tell you to give up and push your fingers together because its... you guessed it... POINTLESS, just like arguing about an unresolvable argument like whether god does or doesn't exist.

Does a tree falling in the forest make a noise? Yes, it's called science lets invite Dawkins to talk about it again.

Why shouldn't a doctor treat themselves? Because it's very hard to do open heart surgery on yourself!

Edit: > Should we forbid programmers from advocating software patent reform because "it's a topic they are deeply attached to"?

I thought the conventional wisdom with copyright reform was that the MPAA, RIAA, etc. should be forbidden from advocating because "it's a topic they are deeply attached to" ... you know all those hundred-dollar bills don't roll themselves up into big fat wads and slip into Congressmen's pockets for nothing.

The crux of Dawkin's position is that the question of the existence of God is entirely resolvable. So your statement above is actually a direct disagreement with his position, not a critique of his methods. Have you read The God Delusion?

However, that shows the whole naivety of his argument. We're perceiving the universe from 14 billion years. It's unbelievable in scale and complexity and we've not even moved enough dust to even have started scratching the surface of understanding our universe as a whole. Yet this is the preferable choice under Occam's Razor? Why? Because of a reliance on an as-of-yet unproved hypothesis of a multiverse.

So multiple (by multiple I mean more than a googolplex of universes) universes is the preferable simpler scientific resolution to how we ended up in this universe, at this point in time capable of asking these questions?

So my choice is God vs A universe for every I/O binary action that has ever taken place in the universe.

Dawkin's method and argument is exceptionally simplistic and wholly biased by his perspective, which is exactly why he is hindering the teaching of evolution. If he wasn't making this huge crusade against God, he might have been able to spread evolution. However he's alienating himself from receptive Religious people and he's also alienating those religious people's children.

Really though, you're railing at the scientific establishment because the idea of many universes is too strange for you. If you have a better theory that fits the data, advance it and you'll have an audience. Belief in a deity may be a personal substitute for you, but it won't advance the state of knowledge any further; it's instead giving up, choosing to believe that an answer is out of anyone's grasp.

Historically many people gave up on interesting problems. Many now have neat answers based on our better understanding of the world around us.

The only reason God exists is because people respond to the idea of it. Dawkins like everyone else in the atheist religion of his is waging a crusade against something that will be forgotten with education, but they promote it with idiocy - if you make people choose sides, they'll choose the comfortable one over the rational one.

There's also a way to deal with the devout who are blindly substituting 'god' as a cover for their needs. Give them a few anti-psychotics and see if it clears 'god' up for them like the Schizophrenics who believe god is telling them to kill people.

I fail to see Dawkins as anything but an Atheist Pope. He speaks politely, he's literate and well read, he's a class act. Except they both command blind followers and make no attempts to educate or direct them.

Sorry, but the parallels are way too disturbing for me. I'm not atheist because I don't believe in god, I'm agnostic because I believe those behaviors of blind faith are what is destructive to our society and our sciences.

Blind unquestioning loyalty has led to nothing good. Dawkin's provides incredible literature on evolution, but I intend to be a logical person and question him, his motives and his work to no end, just like I have questioned the religious, their motives and their works to no end.

I'll remind you that the Scientologists fit the definition of an Atheist religion, and that is definitely the company I don't want to keep.

Ergo, you are an atheist.

> […] I also do not believe in blind faith of which you blatantly have in the non-existence of god.

There is no proof of such beings existing, no phenomena require their existence to be explainable and assuming their existence may compromise understanding the actual nature of phenomena. Therefore until shown otherwise I have no reason to assume they do exist.

With respect, your "agnosticism" is a distinction without difference and just sounds like an attempt to raise yourself above some arbitrarily defined group of people. Perhaps there really is a significant number of people who somehow have a spiritual belief in Atheist Pope, science or whatever, but your approach is unlikely to change any of that.

I'm sorry, you are an agnostic. If you are willing to accept the possibility of the existence of god, proof serving, then you are agnostic not atheist. Atheism requires faith that god does not exist.

Now please, stop trolling me with your ignorance and inability to understand distinctions.

Agnosticism asserts that the existence or nonexistence is unknowable[2].

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/theism [2] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agnostic

http://lesswrong.com/lw/q3/decoherence_is_simple/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/q4/decoherence_is_falsifiable_and_te...

I'm agnostic, if someone says "Why are we here?" I say "Because you wouldn't be asking the question if we weren't." I ask these questions about the universe because I can. I'm sure there's some little alien critter on another planet who's asking "why are we the only ones here?" and I'm sure there's a few billion of myself in existence, likely in the extreme of beliefs from Religious-right-wing-sociopath to Atheist-left-wing-sociopath.

Although, then again, I'm a writer so I don't really need a multiverse to be that schizophrenic, I already have a family of people living in my head.

The reason I responded to your initial post is that it seemed to suggest you support Dawkins' ideas but not his methods. I was pointing out that his methods actually follow logically from his ideas. In your follow-up post, I realize that you weren't making an idea/method distinction -- you actually just disagree with him. So it turns out that this is really just a bog-standard debate about theism.

I was all fired up to post a response, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a refutation would really just resemble a series of excerpts from Dawkins' book. In other words, I think he's already addressed your position quite convincingly. If you read it and didn't feel the same, I'm unlikely to do better.

But one last point. You've misattributed the "boil down" of the book. Dawkins is doing something like this:

  1. Here's why it's illogical to be a fence-sitting agnostic
  2. Here's why it's illogical to posit God as an explanatory philosophy of the universe
  3. Here are some specific problems with common theist arguments
  4. Okay, now that we've got all that out of the way, here are some interesting theories on how things got to be the way they are

My personal context: I'm also an agnostic, but I am what Dawkins would describe as a Temporary Agnostic in Practice, whereas you seem to be what he would describe as a Permanent Agnostic in Principle. I disagree with Dawkins on many things, but I found his arguments against fence-sitting agnosticism to be persuasive.

It's maddening that this is even taken place, but it is. In the videos I've seen of Dawkins he's been polite, respectful, and very well spoken.

There is a divide between this task of explaining what is and proclaiming what should be. There is no way to make the leap with the tools of science (measuring, hypothesizing, testing, theorizing). Put another way, science does not have the meta makeup to look outside itself and say, "what is science good for?"

So when scientists make moral claims as scientists, they are dressing up a lay moral opinion in their lab jacket. Like Freud talking about linguistics or economists talking about love, we should only trust them as far as the limits of their expertise. And we should recognize that when scientists say that science proves an ought, they are committing a category error.

Forbid them, no. But when an economist switches from telling us the facts, and his professional opinion, to advocacy, he has a moral obligation to make it clear when he switches. As an advocate, he's not acting as a scientist (economist), but as an activist citizen.

Yes!

It was science that disproved notions of human racial inferiority, phrenology, witchcraft, and other social conventions that led to conditions of horrible oppression.

So while one might argue that the scientist should only reason about facts and not about morality, there are cases when someone acting in any professional capacity might choose to speak out about a moral issue that their professional activities have given them insight into. For what constitutes a moral judgment on a complex issue but an average moral judgment applied to advanced knowledge of a subject?

The key difference (in my opinion) is not in the area of moral judgment but that some humans have the courage to apply moral judgment to issues that they are uniquely able to understand and others do not (I recall we debated wikileaks here a few months ago :)

So unlike your conclusion that moral activism is outside the professional boundaries of science and should thus be left to professional moralizers (clergy? politicians? the general public?) I'd argue that anyone who discovers a moral outrage in the course of his/her professional work should speak out about it, but should not overstretch his/her claim to authority, since that authority is narrow to his/her field and often the moral question is broader, etc.

Programmers advocate topics close to themselves all the time. Why can't scientists?

Science now includes morality.

Science is now about how things work and how we should act.

Addendum: With science we can determine which behaviors can maximize happiness. Isn't that prescriptive, not just descriptive?

Yes, but only in a descriptive fashion. Science can now explain why homo sapiens has evolved specific moral feelings and customs.

Science is now about how things work and how we should act.

This "science as a moral authority" is a different concept altogether. I'm all for including scientists in public debate, but let's not go too far.

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-moral-landscape-...

Explain the discrepancy.

I find the comparison between the treatment of mentally handicapped people and smarter animals to be a very interesting moral issue. I've not seen an argument that doesn't essentially boil down to "but humans are better".

http://www.amazon.com/Open-Man-Animal-Giorgio-Agamben/dp/080...

Its comforting to know that human rights are a binary function and not a sliding scale, even if you'd end up on the top end.

There is something to be said about a scientific approach to morality but for the purposes of this discussion, is it not sufficient to posit that the scientists are merely making a logical connection?

Given 1. Prevailing morality protects persons (humans as of writing); 2. Dolphins show a significant amount of person-like traits.

Therefore, by prevailing morality, dolphins should be protected.

It is obviously not quite as straightforward but neither does it require a great faith-based leap in logic.

…

As a sidenote, this is interesting to see on such an entrepeneurship-focused site:

> This is like when your chiropractor tells you that you have a bad back -- and need many more chiropractor visits.

Should "founders" not try to sell their product either?

So, given some operational definition of 'persons', a statement like, "The scientific research ... suggests that dolphins are non-human persons..." may not be entirely out of order in a scientific paper. If dolphins are persons, it's not a big jump to say that they qualify as individuals worthy of moral consideration.

Now, whether their operational definition of person is good or not is a question up for debate. Science has debated the meaning and use of many terms and ideas throughout history. Questions about the relation of the planets and stars used to be primarily theological (harmony of the spheres and so on). Some of our most famous scientists worked to develop good tests and supporting mathematics which slowly created the science of astronomy. That process has been repeated for many, many things over history. Personhood may be another one of those debates, one which we have the opportunity to witness in these sorts of studies.

So, provided the philosophical statements were properly positioned in the paper, I don't think they were entirely misplaced. Sloppy journalism is another issue entirely, though, and a common malady of good science.

But the input from objective, rational experts, including dolphin researchers, is certainly valuable in a discussion on whether dolphins are people -- as is input from philosophers, animal psychology researchers, and potentially legal scholars. Similarly, I would have a hard time accepting a claim that doctors shouldn't be in a discussion on right-to-die legislation because they must be too emotionally attached to their patients, or that civil rights activists and scholars shouldn't be part of discussions surrounding rights of US held detainees at Guantanamo/Bagram/etc because surely those activists are too emotionally attached to an outcome to be rational.

First the commenter sets up a straw man in which it is claimed that these particular scientists are "deeply attached" to the issue (which implies they are not objective). There is no evidence for this conclusion in the article, nor is one supported in any way by the commenter.

Then the commenter makes a really terrible analogy about doctors and lawyers working with themselves as clients. How exactly are scientists studying these dolphins analogous to a doctor swabbing her own throat and prescribing herself an antibiotic for her strep throat (which, by the way, is in no way unethical, and probably often done)?

Again, I'm sorry, but the commenter doesn't seem to understand word one about either science, or the role of science if he/she thinks scientists and science are supposed to be some glorified "information please" clerks who are there to provide whatever information you think you need to make a decision.

And you put forth a really muddled view of that constitutes ethical behavior. Are you really trying to advance the theory that physicians who advocate for healthy public policy are "unethical"? A pediatrician sees his community ravaged by whooping cough - you are trying to tell us he shouldn't get on the phone to his congressman and local newspaper and raise hell about vaccinations? A water scientist notes that local wells are contaminated by petroleum contaminants. You think she's wrong to pick up the phone and give an interview advocating investigation, cleanup, and prevention? You really think that people like Einstein and Bohr shouldn't have tried to influence policy as a matter of ethics and their professional duties?

Bullshit.

Part of the problem in this country is the lack of ability of "the public" to "make the decision on these issues". Science, physicians, and other professionals have a clear role in both informing AND persuading the public. We want the people who know the most about these issues speaking up the loudest...beyond politicians....and definitely beyond business people, who without a doubt are the ones who inevitably have the deepest conflicts of interest.

Thank God scientists ARE starting to speak out more, instead of the cacophony of "know nothing" we are hearing from certain anti-science segments of "the public". We just got done with eight years of an administration which put science on the back burner, while advocating the most irrational of policies.

The return of American "know-nothing-ism", exemplified by the commenter's little screed about the role of science, is a symptom of what has been going wrong with America over the last decade. We need more scientists speaking up and out.

Louder.

In this case the moral axiom would be that it is bad to cause suffering and good to cause joy. The science here is telling us that dolphins are capable of a full range of experiences, just as we are. It's up to you to interpret that information in your moral framework, but I think it's reasonable to believe many people will share a basic set of axioms about what is moral that make the implications here clear.

Maybe you can't add 1 and 1 and get Moral, but you can certainly reason that people shouldn't be killed carelessly. And who better to know if dolphins are people, than the people spending their lives studying them?

Moving onto the Times article, it too fails to differentiate clearly between the findings of two scientists (Marino & Reiss), specializing in the study of dolphins, and a professor of ethics (White) offering a view on the implications of the scientific findings. Agree or disagree with his conclusion, offering opinions on ethical matters is the sort of thing ethicists are employed to do. What's not clear is the degree of advocacy taking place, or who is doing it.

If Marino and Reiss simply offer their findings about the neurology and observable behavior of dolphins, and observe that this allows us to make some inferences about how intelligent they are in human terms using rigorous methods, that's not advocacy of the kind you object to: that'd just good old empiricism. To the extent that there's an agenda in the choice of subject, it's one of increasing scientific knowledge. No scientists needs permission for the curiosity. How about White? Perhaps his abridged quote about delphine moral qualifications is advocacy, or perhaps it's the conclusion he's drawn after evaluating the accuracy of the scientific findings and placing them in a formal ethical framework of the kind we use to explore other ethical questions and inform policy. One doesn't have to agree with an ethicist's conclusion, but we must at least admit that someone whose job it is to teach moral reasoning is entitled to apply their skills and form an opinion.

It seems to me that you've decided to take the headline literally and attribute the apparent conclusion of the ethics professor to the psychologist and zoologist, and then condemn them for unscientific irresponsibility.

There are two flaws with this approach. The obvious one is the inaccuracy of judging someone by the actions or statements of another. The less obvious one - even if the advocacy is expressed by the scientists themselves - is the assumption that they are claiming scientific authority for something they might advocate. It is not wrong for scientists to have opinions on non-scientific topics like ethics, or to express those opinions in public. It's only wrong for a scientist to assert a scientific basis for an unscientific opinion by leveraging their academic authority.

For example, a biologist can observe that a human breathing x amount of carbon monoxide is likely to be fatal; this we are willing to treat as a fact based on academic credibility. The same biologist might also opine that killing people by suffocating them with carbon monoxide is immoral; here, academic standing confers no more moral authority than you or I enjoy, but nor does it imply any less. Moral hazard is when the biologist says 'my expertise on the biological effects of carbon monoxide gives me superior powers of moral judgment.' That's flat-out dishonest, and if a scientist employs a technical journal as a platform for their moral beliefs, I quite agree that it's unscientific. But if they want to present their moral beliefs in the Journal of Moral Philosophy, that doesn't bother me at all because I can judge their argument from its proper perspective, and evaluate whether the moral reasoning they employ justifies the conclusions they draw. Nor would I have a problem with an ethicist submitting a paper to the Journal of Morally Neutral Psychology if it were presenting rigorous empirical observations and statistical methods that were strictly limited to describing people's behavior. In short, it is the context in which activism takes place that matters when judging its professionalism - if any activism has taken place at all.

So, I did some research into the background. It turns out that the context in which these academics talked about dolphins was (drumroll, please) at a symposium on titled 'Intelligence in Dolphins: Ethical and Policy Implications' during the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Marino presented anatomical findings about the anatomical evidence used to evaluate the intelligence and wellbeing of dolphins, and whether measurable declines in wellbeing could result from conditions of captivity. Reiss reviewed her work on the cognitive and social psychology of dolphins, and asked whether scientists can or should seek to export existing ethical practices governing scientific research and treatment of livestock in the US to other nations who are indifferent to such ethical standards. White examined the ethical implications of these and other questions, seemingly concluding that despite fundamental differences, the basis on which we accord moral standing to humans also seems to apply to dolphins.

I don't know the details of what they said; I'm going by the abstracts for the symposium listed on the conference schedule, which seems to be the entire basis for the Times article as well. These are available at http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2010/webprogram/Session1526.html

But what I do know, now, is that these three individuals were not attempting to persuade or even address the public, but were discussing the ethical quandaries encountered within their profession, in front of an audience of other scientists at a professional conference.

Is this OK, or you still have a problem with it? If so, could you explain how it differs from discussions of medical or legal ethics among members of those professions?