Yet, despite the intuitive appeal of this moral claim, when you argue that it is very bad that we have normalised the selling of snake oil on countless fronts, you can expect a surprising amount of pushback. Even as the effects of mainstreaming and commodifying woo wreak havoc on America’s federal approach to everything from vaccines to milk pasteurisation, there remains a strong resistance to the idea that it should be illegal to sell a product using claims not supported by sufficient evidence.

So, in the interests of ethical clarity, I want to work through the objections that most frequently arise when you argue against the legalisation of selling snake oil. I’ve divided the arguments up into those meant to defend the selling of products by claiming it actually works, and arguments meant to defend the selling of products irrespective of whether they actually work.

Part 1: Arguments based on the product actually working

These objections attempt to defend snake-oil sales by claiming that the products do, in fact, work – just not in ways mainstream science recognises or can measure.

“Quantum physics proves it works.”

The most direct sorts of arguments in favour of snake oil are that you shouldn’t call it snake oil because cutting-edge science shows that it actually works, or at least provides a mechanism for how it could work. One of the forms of this, if not the most common, is what physicists have come to call “quantum woo” – the misappropriation of quantum mechanical concepts to lend a veneer of scientific legitimacy to pseudoscience.

You’ve likely encountered some version of this: consciousness affects reality at the quantum level, everything is vibration and energy, and the observer effect proves that your thoughts shape the physical world. Therefore, practices dismissed as woo are actually tapping into deep truths about the universe that mainstream science is only beginning to understand. No figure embodies this tendency more than Deepak Chopra, whose books (like Quantum Healing) argue that we can learn to manifest changes in quantum states that in turn impact our health and wellbeing.

Quantum woo fails as an explanatory mechanism for manifestation or any other form of snake oil on at least two points. Firstly, it requires that our minds somehow impact things at the quantum level, and secondly that changes at the quantum level then somehow ‘bubble up’ to produce changes at our level of existence. Both sorts of interaction are incompatible with current research in quantum physics research.

Advocates of quantum woo often point to the observer effect as proof that our minds impact quantum states, but the observer effect only refers to the interaction of measurement devices with quantum systems, not to human consciousness magically altering reality at the quantum level through intention or observation. Even if our minds could impact quantum states, the idea that changes at the quantum level somehow reliably “bubble up” to impact things at our level is also disproven by research on the nature of quantum entanglement, where indeterminacy at the quantum level does not translate into indeterminacy for us medium-sized dry goods.

On top of those theoretical objections, the quantum woo framework has a specific intellectual history that should make us default towards skepticism. As with so many problems I’ve previously covered, from racist pseudohistory to the worst parts of High Weirdness, quantum woo has its roots in the New Thought movement that arose in the 19th century. New Thought is the Western world’s patient zero for all things ‘mind over matter’, as well as a bunch of other loosely related snake oils. It cursed us with concepts of the “Law of Attraction”, which provides the basis for modern manifestation woo through books like Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret.

Long before there was any quantum physics to invoke, Phineas Quimby and other New Thought ‘pioneers’ were already claiming that the mind shapes reality and that we attract our circumstances, including all physical illness or other negative experiences, through mental vibrations.

When quantum mechanics came along, it simply provided a scientific-sounding rebranding of pre-existing beliefs. High Weirdness books like Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters established the template: find superficial linguistic parallels between quantum mechanics and Eastern mysticism, then declare that physics has validated ancient spiritual wisdom.

This history of ideas matters, because it reveals the quantum woo argument as fundamentally post-hoc rationalisation. Proponents aren’t following the evidence from quantum physics to conclusions about healing; they’re starting with conclusions inherited from 19th-century metaphysical movements and retrofitting quantum language onto them. The same beliefs that were once justified by appeals to animal magnetism, vital force, and thought vibration are now justified by appeals to wave function collapse and quantum entanglement. The packaging changes; the product remains the same.

Finally, even if we found that quantum effects were relevant to human biology at the scales that matter for health, this would not validate any particular alternative treatment. Demonstrating that quantum mechanics is weird and counterintuitive does not demonstrate that homeopathy works. The logical gap between ‘reality is stranger than we thought’ and ‘therefore, buy my supplements’ is vast, and quantum woo systematically obscures it.

There are many other forms of pseudoscientific explanations raised in defence of snake oils, often arising from other strands of New Thought, but they all face similar challenges from experts in the sciences they seek to ape. Another extremely popular one is one version of appeals to the placebo effect, where the claim is that the mental power exhibited in the placebo effect can produce objectively better outcomes, even curing illness. These arguments rely on poorly designed studies and misrepresentations of research, as documented extensively by Mike Hall and others.

These methods for defending snake oil are particularly insidious, because they readily exploit public unfamiliarity with the complexities of actual physics and the scientific method to make pseudoscience feel cutting edge. But dressing up 19th-century vitalism in 21st-century science jargon doesn’t make it true. It just makes the deception harder to spot.

“Scientists are unwilling or unable to study everything”

Instead of presenting evidence that science supports a particular snake oil, the epistemic humility gambit attempts to flip the script by positioning skeptics as the arrogant ones for assuming such a thing is necessary or even possible. The central claim is that scientists either can’t effectively study a particular phenomenon – like the mind’s impact on the body – or that they refuse to do so, because of conspiracy or academic taboos. After all, scientific consensus has been wrong before, and we know it’s wrong about some things right now, so who are we to even say whether or not a particular treatment works with enough confidence to regulate it?

Epistemic humility cuts both ways, though. Yes, we should be humble about the limits of current scientific knowledge. But we should also be humble about our ability to identify genuine treatments without rigorous testing. Much of the history of medicine before the scientific method was essentially a long experiment in trusting intuition, authority, and tradition that resulted in centuries of bloodletting, mercury treatments, and radium suppositories. The demand for evidence is not arrogance; it is the hard-won recognition that humans are spectacularly bad at figuring out what works without systematic controls.

If we consider what genuine epistemic humility would mean for policy, one could argue we should simply err on the side of caution and ban the sale of all unproven products and services. We don’t let companies sell cars without rigorous testing, so why give a free pass to other products, especially ones that carry significant risks of harm? Some might see that as overreach, and might object by shifting to one of the arguments for why we shouldn’t see a lack of current scientific evidence as sufficient to restrict a product or service. That said, we should at least be able to restrict the selling of products using efficacy claims that lack sufficient evidential support.

If we want to compromise and require people to loudly proclaim ‘there is no evidence that this product works and we’re not allowed to even imply that it does’ before selling their snake oil, that would still be a vast improvement over the current situation. Once you’ve got there, though, it raises the question what value there is in allowing even that, especially given concerns that individuals will heavily discount disclaimers when they’re desperate for options.

“You’re dismissing indigenous and traditional ways of knowing”

This objection has gained significant traction on the political left in recent years, often framed as a matter of cultural respect, or even anti-colonialism. One popular version of the argument is that Western science is just one way of knowing among many, and that dismissing untested traditional medicine as “woo” perpetuates colonial hierarchies of knowledge. One might even point out that the derogatory “snake oil” originated from con-men co-opting traditional medicines that may actually work, and replacing the ingredients with garbage, and that we shouldn’t hold such things against traditional medicines.

There is a kernel of legitimacy here. Traditional medical systems have sometimes identified genuinely effective treatments that Western medicine later validated – aspirin’s origins in willow bark being the canonical example. And the history of Western society’s dismissal of non-Western practices is indeed central to racialised colonialism.

However, the claim that there are multiple ways of knowing and therefore we should exempt traditional practices from evidential scrutiny does not follow. This argument is itself condescending, as it suggests that traditional practices cannot survive contact with scientific testing. It would be a form of bigotry of low expectations to act as though the best we can do for indigenous knowledge is protect it from evaluation. If a traditional treatment actually works, rigorous study will demonstrate that. If it doesn’t work, hiding that information would harm the very communities whose traditions are being invoked, and commodifying it spreads that harm for profit.

Part 2: Arguments that don’t assume the product works

These objections accept, at least implicitly, that snake-oil products may not deliver on their promises, and instead argue that there are other reasons to permit their sale.

“If it makes people feel better, what’s the harm?”

Some appeals to placebo effects don’t claim the treatment works because of “mind over matter”, rather they acknowledge that an alternative treatment lacks efficacy but that this doesn’t matter as long as people subjectively benefit from them. There’s something to this. Subjective outcomes, in the sense of how a person feels, really do matter, and many things can provide comfort, attention, and a sense of agency that can be hard to come by in medical settings.

However, even if we buy that there are subjective benefits, they come with serious harms. Firstly, there are opportunity costs: people who rely on ineffective treatments may delay seeking effective care until their conditions become harder to treat. This is not hypothetical. Oncologists regularly see patients who tried to treat their cancers with diet, supplements, or prayer, before reluctantly turning to chemotherapy. Research published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that patients who chose alternative medicine instead of conventional cancer treatment had a more than twofold increased risk of death, with breast cancer patients facing a more than fivefold increase in mortality risk.

Secondly, there are direct financial harms. The wellness industry now exceeds $6.3 trillion globally, extracting money from people who can often least afford it, promising solutions to problems that require systemic rather than individual intervention. The person buying mushroom blends to manage their chronic stress might be better served by structural changes to their working conditions, but the supplement industry would prefer they keep buying the mushrooms.

Thirdly, and most philosophically troubling: do we have a right to be deceived into feeling better? I’m reminded of one of my favourite articles by The Onion, Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show. However, while the urge to indulge sometimes is understandable, making it easy for people to habitually purchase self-deception has clearly contributed to a worse epistemic and health climate for all involved.

“Adults should be free to spend their money however they want”

The autonomy objection is typically the next line of defence after attempts to claim the product objectively or subjectively works, and just as with those arguments there’s some bit of truth here. Respecting individual liberty means allowing people to make choices we disagree with, including choices we consider irrational and to some degree self-harming, such as engaging in dangerous sports. If someone wants to spend their money on homeopathy or healing crystals, who are we to stop them?

The problem is that this objection conflates two very different things: the freedom to make choices and the freedom to be deceived. Genuine autonomy requires informed consent, which means having access to accurate information about what you’re buying. When a supplement company claims their product “supports immune health” or “promotes natural detoxification”, they are not facilitating autonomous choice – they are exploiting the gap between what those phrases legally require them to prove (nothing) and what consumers reasonably infer them to mean (that the product does something).

The autonomy objection also tends to assume a model of human cognition that doesn’t match reality. We are not perfectly rational agents calmly weighing evidence before each purchase. We are exhausted, hopeful, sometimes desperate, and subject to a host of cognitive biases that snake-oil merchants have become experts at exploiting.

The same people who would never argue that fraud laws violate autonomy somehow treat medical fraud as a matter of personal choice. This is not respecting autonomy; it is abandoning people to predators while feeling virtuous about it.

“What about religious freedom?”

When the snake oil in question comes wrapped in religious packaging, such as faith healing, fortune telling, or blessed objects, a different set of considerations unfortunately come into play. In many jurisdictions, religious exemptions create carve-outs that allow practices that would otherwise be regulated or prohibited, and that is likely to some extent unavoidable in a free society.

I want to be clear about the limits of my argument here. I am not arguing that religious belief should be illegal, or that churches shouldn’t be allowed to offer prayer. What I am arguing is that the moment someone begins selling a product or service with explicit or implied claims about better outcomes, they should be subject to the same evidential standards as everyone else, regardless of whether those claims are framed in religious terms.

The religious exemption framework will always be a problematic shield for a wide range of harms, but limiting the commodification of snake oil via that exemption is likely to limit the scope of those harms. The prosperity gospel pastor selling miracle cures to vulnerable people he will never meet has more in common with a supplement company than with a local pastor praying over a sick congregant. The commercial intent exacerbates the cost to everyone for allowing any degree of localised autonomy on this front.

“First they came for the homeopaths…”

The slippery slope objection predicts regulatory overreach: once we start banning snake oil, where does it stop? Will vitamins be next? Will we need a prescription to buy herbal tea?

Once more, these concerns are not entirely without merit, as regulatory agencies can indeed overreach, and the line between ‘unproven’ and ‘disproven’ is not always crisp. However, we already regulate claims in other domains. Pharmaceutical companies cannot claim their drugs treat conditions without evidence. Food companies face restrictions on health claims. The supplements industry exists in its current form largely because of specific legislative carve-outs, particularly the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in the US, which were the result of industry lobbying, not some principled commitment to consumer freedom.

The question is not whether we should regulate claims at all, since we already do, but whether the current exemptions for supplements, alternative medicine, and wellness products are justified. I don’t see how they are.

The costs of inaction

What ultimately undermines all these objections is the mounting evidence of real-world harm from our current permissive approach. The wellness-to-conspiracy pipeline has been well documented, and researchers have coined the term “conspirituality” to describe how alternative spiritual beliefs and wellness culture can funnel people into far-right conspiracy theories.

The current US administration’s hostility to basic public health measures didn’t emerge from nowhere. It grew in soil that the alternative health industry has been cultivating for decades. As PBS has reported, more than 420 anti-science bills attacking long-standing public health protections have been introduced in US statehouses this year alone, pushed by people with close ties to the current Health and Human Services Secretary – someone who I first wrote on back when he was a virtual guest of honour at the Better-Way Antivaxxer conference.

We have, as a society, decided that it is acceptable for whole industries to profit from claims they cannot substantiate, often targeted at particularly vulnerable people in the midst of some sort of life crisis. We have allowed “wellness” to become a multi-trillion-dollar sector built on the principle that feelings matter more than actual outcomes. And we have watched as this epistemic rot has spread from the supplement aisle to the halls of government.

The objections I’ve addressed here are not frivolous. They reflect genuine tensions between individual liberty and public protection, between intellectual humility and universal epistemological standards. But none of them, individually or collectively, justifies the status quo.

Selling people things that don’t work, using claims designed to mislead, remains wrong. It’s long past time our laws and norms reflected that basic moral truth.

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However, I worry that popular approaches to promoting intellectual humility focus too much on rejection of uncertainty and objectivity, resulting in an increased risk of succumbing to reactionary centrism, contrarianism, and various forms of misinformation and pseudoscience.

Attempts to explain intellectual humility often start by focusing on exemplars of intellectual hubris, such as the extremely dogmatic or the arrogantly ignorant, looking at the behaviours and mindsets that define their approaches, and then defining intellectual humility as the opposite of that. While there is value in looking at textbook cases of what not to do, if we’re not careful this approach can also lead to an overemphasis on claims of certainty and objectivity as the primary indicators of intellectual hubris.

Consider, for example, the arc of movement atheism from the early 2000’s to the present. Atheism, as a form of skepticism about religious beliefs, often draws on appeals to intellectual humility to counteract the cognitive and cultural factors that might incline us towards religion. However, associating atheism with intellectual humility is likely to provoke derisive reactions from anyone familiar with the rise of New Atheism and the subsequent schism in movement atheism on the issue of “wokeness”.

New Atheism gained prominence after September 11th, 2001, as a reaction to both the perceived threat of Islamic fundamentalism and the surge of overt Christian Nationalism that followed the attack. Popular scientists, philosophers and public intellectuals such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett mainstreamed arguments about cognitive biases and evolved predispositions to attack the certainty of religious dogma. The aggressiveness of New Atheism generated significant interest and growth in the movement, but also exacerbated the widespread negative stereotype of atheists as arrogant, to the point where many in the movement prefer terms like “secular” or “nonreligious” over hard “A” atheism. Atheism, after all, is an assertion that theism is wrong, not merely that the individual doesn’t believe in them.

In its critiques of religious beliefs, New Atheism drew support from the “heterodox” movement, particularly the intellectual pessimism of academics like Jonathan Haidt. Haidt and others argue that humans are much more prone to act on intuitions, or pre-reflective judgements, than they are on reason, and that this fact makes us far more intellectually unreliable than we like to believe. This perspective, as opposed to a more optimistic view where we recognise the role of pre-reflective judgements in human cognition but remain bullish on our ability to know and understand things, has gained significant support in atheist and skeptic spaces. The result, once again, is a kind of skepticism that emphasises distrust of certainty or anything that feels like “dead dogma”.

The rise of this sort of intellectual pessimism has resulted in significant problems within movement atheism and skepticism, as exemplified in the schism of these movements over “woke dogma”. There are a disturbing number of examples of prominent atheists and skeptics who have become convinced that critical social justice is a religion that threatens the fabric of our society, leading them to spiral into conspiracy theories, anti-trans bigotry, and White Christian Nationalism. Indeed, our community is patient zero for the terrible argument that social justice is a religion, which is why it has all the trappings of weaker atheist arguments against intellectual hubris.

The problem seems to be that attempts at intellectual humility can easily slide into either reactionary centrism, where all “extreme” views are treated as equally suspect, or a sort of contrarianism to anything perceived as the “mainstream view”. I’ve written previously about how the latter problem often arises in spaces influenced by High Weirdness, which includes both movement atheism and skepticism.

One particularly illuminating case study for this problem is Street Epistemology, a group that arose within New Atheism and has also attracted many people to the movement by providing techniques for dealing with a deeply religious world. At first glance, Street Epistemology seems to be all about intellectual humility. The approach involves using a form of Socratic dialogue to decrease people’s confidence in their beliefs, particularly beliefs that they are extremely confident about. The hope is that, by practising this approach with others, we not only help them to avoid errors, but also habituate ourselves to be similarly uncertain and open to revising our beliefs.

However, there is significant reason to question whether Street Epistemology techniques reliably produce the sort of intellectual humility we are hoping for. As with New Atheism more broadly, several of the leading figures in the founding of Street Epistemology, such as Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, had some of the worst epistemic spirals around social justice. It is hard to know if Street Epistemology methods exacerbated their spiral, but it clearly didn’t inoculate them from reactionary ideologies in the way we would hope. The persistence of and continued promotion of reactionary views in Street Epistemology spaces also suggests those prominent individuals were not outliers. Overall, Street Epistemology and movement atheism more broadly present a cautionary tale for how attempts at intellectual humility can slide into intellectual pessimism and thereby increase the risk of adopting harmful ideologies.

Similarly, on the left side of the political aisle, the push for intellectual humility has driven many to adopt a kind of reactionary skepticism about “objective” truth, meaning claims about the world that are truly independent of our beliefs or perceptions of the world. Objectivity, for many, has come to be associated with colonialism and epistemic injustice, where the understanding of marginalised communities is devalued and dismissed relative to the views of the dominant group. While there is a genuinely horrible history of epistemic injustice that has been central to colonial consolidation of information and power, it does not follow that we should abandon claims about objective truth, or that such a thing is even possible.

These rejections of objectivity are often vague or incoherent, and often involve conflating claims of objectivity with overconfidence or unwillingness to consider diverse perspectives. William Gillis does an excellent job laying out the problems with these rejections of objectivity and how they increase the risk of reactionary politics in his book Did the Science Wars Take Place?: The Political and Ethical Stakes of Radical Realism.

Rather than take these reactionary approaches to understanding intellectual humility, we should first get clear on the nature of humility as a virtue, and then see how it applies to the domain of beliefs. Humility is the sort of virtue that fits neatly into Aristotle’s classic understanding of the virtues as the golden mean between two vices, just as how courage is the mean between cowardice and foolhardiness, and temperance the mean between excessive indulgence and excessive austerity.

The psychologist Everett Worthington and his colleagues give what I consider the most robust definition of Humility as:

(a) having an accurate self-assessment that involves seeing oneself as a limited agent, (b) making a modest self-presentation to others, and (c) being other-oriented, holding an abiding attitude characterized by care and effort toward the advancement of others.

They emphasise that “accurate self-assessment” applies just as much to one’s strengths as one’s limitations, that it tends to lead to less of both “self-enhancing and self-deprecating behaviour,” and that the care towards others that humility engenders is distinct from the performative self-sacrifice associated with faux humility or radical altruism.

If we apply this understanding of humility to the realm of knowledge, we see that intellectual humility is the mean between wishy-washiness and overconfidence. One can err with regard to intellectual humility by being overly certain or overly skeptical, and we always have to be checking in to see if we’re sliding too much one way or the other in general, but importantly that doesn’t mean we should do something like adopt a 50% credence level towards all claims, or reject any claim that feels overly assertive.

When it comes to the virtues, the right mean or balance depends on many factors, and won’t be the same for everyone all the time. Pessimists might feel that they are providing a valuable corrective for our overconfident natural tendencies, and in some contexts that is likely true and valuable. In other contexts, or when taken as a blanket approach to everything, that pessimism lands us in wishy-washiness about deeply important issues where the evidence overwhelmingly favours one side of the argument. It creates an easy permission structure for pressuring people to be open to all sorts of ideas, even ones for which there is not significant evidence. It encourages the conflation of absence of evidence with evidence of an open possibility, in open defiance of Russell’s teapot.

To give some concrete examples, it is objectively true that the holocaust happened, and I’m certain of that fact, in the sense that I do not believe evidence could ever arise that would make me doubt that claim. Any such evidence would fall under the same approach that Hume takes to miracles, in that there will always be a better explanation for it than the idea that the holocaust never happened. Appeals to evil demons or all-powerful simulators deceiving me at a fundamental level feel totally irrelevant to me in this context, they do not move the needle for me one bit.

I can say the same about the theory of evolution through natural selection and the existence of man-made climate change. I can say it about the moral truth that it is wrong, all other things being equal, to cause unnecessary suffering or impede flourishing, as well as the more straightforward moral truth that Nazism is immoral and should be resisted by all means necessary. I can also say it about my disbelief in a god and the supernatural more broadly. If I was ever confronted by an entity claiming to be god, my hope is that I would have Kirk’s presence of mind to ask it what it needs with a starship.

Practically speaking, one valuable approach to cultivating intellectual humility focuses on creating space between your sense of self and your beliefs. When we hold on to beliefs that we shouldn’t, or when we resist new information, it is often because we tend to strongly attach our identity to those beliefs, such that we can’t imagine who we would be if we didn’t hold on to them. Here, Buddhist philosophers have some of the best medicine in the form of arguments and practices for recognising that you are not your beliefs. Whether or not that sounds trivially true, it is a truth people often have trouble actually embracing, which is why the arguments and practices are so valuable.

So, for two things to be identical, they have to have all the same features, including how long they exist for. Yet you as a person existed prior to the formation of any of your beliefs, and can persist beyond the “death” of any one of them. You and they have what we call different persistence conditions, and therefore you aren’t the things you believe. That might sound a bit theoretical, but one of the simplest and most effective forms of mindfulness meditation is simply observing how beliefs and other mental states come into and out of our minds constantly, while we remain. Noting how the same is true at the scale of our whole lives creates space between our sense of self and our beliefs, which can make it easier to let one of them go or replace it with a new one when the need arises.

Having the right amount of confidence about the right beliefs in the right ways and for the right reasons: that is proper intellectual humility. It is perfectly okay to say, “I don’t know enough about particle physics to have any idea if string theory is correct, but I do know enough about ethics to know it’s always wrong to be a Nazi.” Humility does not require that we remain open to being wrong about the Nazi thing.

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In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.

This claim has been thoroughly debunked. As one Springfield police spokesperson said:

we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.

Trump was trying to pull a very old trick in the populist handbook. Throughout history, accusations of cannibalism and unusual eating habits have often been used as a tool for dehumanising and delegitimising specific groups. Such accusations were commonly employed by European colonisers against indigenous peoples in Africa, the Americas, Oceania, and other regions as a means to portray them as savage and uncivilised, justifying their subjugation, exploitation, and even extermination.

These narratives of cannibalism and unusual eating habits were not only used to create fear and misunderstanding among different cultures but also served as propaganda tools that facilitated the expansion of empires and helped maintain power dynamics that favored European interests over those of colonised peoples.

But for the sake of argument, let us suppose that Trump’s claim is true. If someone steals someone else’s pet to eat it, then certainly it is objectionable. Yet, the theft itself does not have the shocking effect that Trump was intending. If the claim were that migrants steal pigs and cows to eat them, probably few eyebrows would be raised; after all, these types of thefts do happen occasionally. The shocking effect pertains to the type of animals being eaten: dogs and cats.

The animals that are eaten each year in the Yulin festival in China are not stolen. Quite the opposite, they are raised and killed by farmers, and their meat is sold and eaten by attendees. Yet, this festival elicits particular animosity in many people, because the animal species served on dishes are dogs.

There are some legitimate concerns about the miserable conditions in which dogs are kept in cages in preparation for the festival. But this is where the hypocrisy begins. Those Westerners eager to criticise such conditions in far-away China ought to begin their activism closer to home. Farms and slaughterhouses in most – if not all – Western countries are not exactly humane. As Peter Singer sensibly points out in his classical manifesto Animal Liberation:

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.

It is hard to find any significant moral difference between the Yulin festival and, say, Thanksgiving. If we come to agree that we have stronger obligations towards animals closer to us as a species – an assumption that would still be debatable – then perhaps eating dogs is worse than eating turkeys. Additionally, on account of their intelligence, cats and dogs probably have more elaborate consciousness than turkeys, so that might also lend some support to the idea that we are more justified in eating turkeys instead of dogs.

But what about pigs? Many studies suggest that pigs are as intelligent as dogs, if not more. Yet, few people in Western countries have moral qualms about the Saturday afternoon pork barbecue.

These inconsistencies reveal that most people’s judgments about which animals can and cannot be eaten are determined by specific cultural circumstances, and not substantial moral concerns. Anthropologists have long sought explanations for these variations in food taboos. For example, Marvin Harris famously explained that dogs are a food staple in China because that nation has traditionally struggled to find other sources of protein, and the advantages usually provided by dogs in Western societies – eg companionship – can be provided by other animals or humans. This explanation may or may not be accurate, but it does seem that, whatever the reason a society chooses not to eat a particular animal, it has little to do with morality itself.

Some people in Western nations might agree that there is a huge moral inconsistency in opposing the consumption of dogs and cats while thoroughly enjoying pork chops and Big Macs. These people would be willing to remain silent about the Yulin festival, provided dog-eating stays in China. But in their view, if a Haitian immigrant eats a dog in Springfield, that is unacceptable. As per their argument, dogs and cats have become lovable companion species in Western countries, so eating such animals hurts the sensitivity of most people and should therefore be outlawed.

This is not a very good point, for the same reason that blasphemy should not be considered a crime. By and large – some extreme cases might still be open to discussion – the offensive character of an act should not count towards its morality or legality. If you are offended by someone eating dogs, look the other way; bear in mind that many of your eating habits probably offend other people, too.

Furthermore, in claiming that eating dogs would be fine in China but not in the United States, there is a stench of moral relativism. Many post-modern critics have regrettably engaged in this intellectual vice, often claiming that human sacrifice would be morally wrong in 21st Century London, but it was not morally wrong in 16th Century Tenochtitlan because ultimately, morality is relative to the cultural context. Similar things are said about female genital mutilation, foot binding, and a host of other barbarous practices in non-Western nations, all in the name of postcolonial liberation. I counter that sound morality is universal. While there may be space for context dependence in some cases, most actions are universally right or wrong. Consequently, eating a dog – or a pig – is either right or wrong, regardless of whether it is in Yulin or Springfield.

Ultimately, if you are fully concerned about the welfare of animals, you have no other option but to become a vegetarian. It is of course hard being a vegetarian, and possibly there is no such moral requirement. Perhaps the ontological gap between our species and the rest allows us to eat animals. But moral consistency is a requirement, and if you oppose eating dogs and cats, then you must also oppose eating pigs and cows. If you choose not to be a vegetarian and enjoy that delicious steak, then you must refrain from criticising an immigrant for eating a dog. Arbitrarily deciding to oppose one but not the other, is a form of bigotry. Bigotry is a universal wrong, and it is the kind of moral flaw to which a demagogue like Trump was pandering in his now infamous remarks.

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Memetics has a varied reputation across academic fields. Writers – including Dawkins – have expanded on the idea, since its initial description only comprised a small part of the larger work in which it was born, The Selfish Gene. Memes, as Dawkins originally described them, represented a non-biological replicator to which Darwinian pressures might be applied. They would be another kind of playground to examine evolutionary concepts, and perhaps they weren’t just a concept but could actually influence behaviour.

From that first introduction in 1976, the idea has spread and changed. Other writers picked up on the concept and developed it further. Susan Blackmore and Richard Brodie have written on the topic, lauding it as a way to understand how ideas spread and change. The philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote of memes as well. Recall that in the early 2000s there was a highly popular movement called “New Atheism” and a group of particular authors including Dawkins and Dennett became known as the four-horsemen of Atheism.

Dawkins wrote further on memes, and it is in a volume titled Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind that he lays out the metaphorical case that I find troubling. His influential 1991 essay, Viruses of the Mind, opens the collection of essays, and compares religion unfavourably to both biological and computer viruses. The essay has been widely republished, shared, and debated, and really cemented the idea of a “mind virus” in the public discourse. Despite its utility and cosy simplicity, this metaphor is so wrong as to be destructive to any scientific potential memetics might hold for aspiring researchers into idea propagation.

I can certainly see why the idea has such appeal. Who among us does not have some friend or family member who picked up some notion or belief and changed their life’s focus or drastically changed their thinking afterwards? The nephew who suddenly becomes an evangelical preacher, the neighbour who seemingly overnight becomes a ranting advocate for the latest political conspiracy, the work colleague who can’t stop talking about their passion for the latest diet fad – these all fit this pattern of a person whose mind has been overcome by some compelling idea. Surely we have all seen radical behavioural changes in people we thought we knew that seem attributable to their encountering a particularly sticky idea or concept.

The metaphor of viral infection is a very tempting way to explain such rapid (and often seemingly detrimental) change, but ideas don’t simply hop into a host and take over. Something much more complex and interesting is going on and I hope to show that the simplistic metaphor of mind-virus is both inaccurate and pernicious.

Recently I wrote a paper for inclusion in a volume called Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous on the topic of how monster flaps are formed and spread. I spent a lot of time thinking and reading on the topic of memetics, for surely at some level the spread of stories of monsters is just another meme?

How do brains really process memes?

What truly happens when we are exposed to stories – or memes? Brain science is far from a full consensus for what consciousness is, and what brains do, but increasingly evidence supporting a non-dualistic explanation for brain functions seems at hand. I’m sure Dawkins doesn’t want to be described as a dualist, but his essay seems to be built on a very magical conception of how brains work. Metaphors like the “mind-virus” are effective because they fit into a framework of ideas we already understand, but poetical aptness is not ground truth.

Here’s a scenario to consider. Someone posts a meme online. Let’s say this is an image of a virus dressed as Marcel Marceau, a “mime virus” if you will.

Someone posts this to their social media timeline and the viewers in their network have many choices with what to do with this meme.

• The most common action, we might deduce, would be for the viewer to look at it but not take any action. This is the kind of meme that is sort of “dead on arrival.”
• Sometimes a meme will have more resonance with viewers and they will want to share the meme – in its unchanged form – by sharing it or liking it. Liking can increase the chance the algorithm will spread the meme to more viewers, but the viewer here needn’t be aware of that.
• Another portion of viewers will add their own comments when sharing the meme – a form of mutation, in the memetic sense, but leaving the image unchanged.
• Finally, some viewers will be inspired to take the original meme and either alter it or build their own fresh variants of the original. Each of these mutants, in turn, face the same selective pressures and might hit on some combination of images and concepts that really gets people fired up to share. We commonly call that “going viral.”

I’m convinced that the popularity of the phrase “going viral” has more to do with the common understanding that viruses undergo exponential growth than with any direct ties with Dawkins’ mind-virus concept, but regardless of how much careful consideration is applied to its use, the ubiquity of the phrase across the Internet inevitably promotes faith in the “mind-virus” metaphor as a literal truth. As I was preparing this essay, famously memeable billionaire Elon Musk claimed that the “woke mind virus” killed his child. (His child is not dead, and – as I hope to continue to demonstrate in this essay – whatever “wokeness” is, it’s not a virus of the mind.)

A history of mind-viruses

I couldn’t find many uses of the phrase “mind-virus” prior to the 1990s. Dawkins’ Virus of the Mind essay was published in 1993 as part of a collection of essays by multiple authors in the volume Dennett and his Critics: Demystifying Mind. He originally presented the paper at a conference in 1991, but had been making the “religion is a virus” claim in newspapers as early as 1990. Dawkins’ essay does explicitly discuss how computer viruses replicate, but it is clear from his tone that his intent in calling religion a “virus” is to be disparaging. He finishes out the essay by trying to explain that science, despite also being a memetic framework that involves copying and mutation, is not a virus because Dawkins sees it as a beneficent enterprise.

That approach has continued to be used in public discourse. Virality continues to be used as a general purpose term to express rapid spread of an idea, but mind-virus seems to be reserved as an epithet. Elon Musk in particular has used his X platform to talk about the “woke mind-virus” and the “extinctionist mind-virus“. He’s not alone. 

The connotation is in the context. If the scientific method itself can “go viral” and spread culturally, then people who oppose the memeplex of science might well characterise it as a virus. Dawkins refutes the idea that science could be a mind-virus by dint of its efficacy and self-evident virtues (“testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu…”), but his litany of laudibility reeks of scientism. Science is a human endeavour and thus inevitably flawed in all the ways you would expect from any system designed by deluxe monkeys. Paradigmatic science should always be pushing towards evidence-based truths, but it has to be exercised through the human substrate and we’re inherently flawed executioners of higher values.

Mind-viruses aren’t just a Dawkins idea. Like memes, the mind-virus idea has left the lab and is mutating in the wild. They make an appearance in fiction, most notably in Neil Stephenson’s dystopian novel Snow Crash which hit bookshelves in 1992. In that book, a fictional mind-virus rewrites the software of the language-processing portion of a person’s brain and makes them extraordinarily susceptible to manipulation. Effectively, Stephenson’s fictional mind-virus does what Dawkins suggests religion can do in real life. Snow Crash is likely another vector for the promotion of the concept of a mind-virus because the book was very popular and influential among the Sci-Fi and Technology set.

Exactly when the idea of virality achieved linguistic ubiquity might be best indicated by when it starts showing up in trendy business books. One of the earliest examples I found was the 2001 book Unleashing the Ideavirus, which featured an introduction, appropriately enough, by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell’s 2000 book The Tipping Point explicitly states in the introduction that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do”. Gladwell wants readers to think of the spread of ideas as being an epidemiological process. He argues that ideas spread slowly and then suddenly explode in growth when a tipping point is reached.

Mathematicians might see this as a poetic way to describe exponential growth. The parable of the “inventor of chess” and his gambit of requesting payment in the form of ever-doubling cereal grains on each square of a board as reward for his clever game design makes the same point about the power of exponents, but is much older. Gladwell’s epidemiology metaphor was very memetically effective. Discussing its effectiveness and reach within the context of an essay about how memes function risks a messy prose recursion, but suffice it to say that his contribution to the conceptual spread of virality is noteworthy.

If memes are not mind-viruses what are they?

Brain research has made big steps towards understanding how brains help us understand the world we’re experiencing. The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience is an excellent primer on the past few hundred years of the effort to decode what brains actually do when we think. That history includes many of the popular (but wrong) metaphors about our brains as steam engines, computers, telegraphy networks, and other popular technologies. Our brains are none of those things, though tempting parallels come along from time to time.

There are still many people who believe that our brains are just a physical substrate for some kind of ghostly intangible “something” that ideas are made of. Dualism has been a debate in brain science for as long as there has been “brain science.” We don’t even have a common definition of consciousness, so it’s impossible to get a united view of how it might function in a brain-based model of cognition. However, the past century of brain research seems to be converging on the idea that whatever the “mind” is, it’s happening within the structures of the human brain. This is where the “virus of the mind” metaphor becomes really problematic.

Despite there still being much uncertainty in the scientific effort to unravel the hows of brain function and consciousness, one particular book has led me to some tentative conclusions about a possible neurological structure underlying beliefs. Jeff Hawkins, whose commercial work in information technology led to the Palm Pilot, wrote On Intelligence back in 2004. He spends much time explaining the physical structure of how brains build predictive models eventually posits what he calls the memory-prediction framework. I won’t do you the disservice of trying to cogently explain in a paragraph or two what he spends an entire book laying out, but the big take-away is that he believes that much of what the neocortex does is to try and predict what is going to happen next by means of building connection structures that form a feedback network.

Even if it turned out that Hawkins’ theory is wrong in the specifics, it made me think about the kinds of abstract modelling we do beyond simple motor control activities like catching a ball or driving a car. When one initially takes up such activities it is very difficult and takes a lot of attention; but over time, we build something in our brains that we recognise as expertise or learning. What struck me during this research was that we’re perfectly aware that it takes time to learn a new skill, but there’s a broad cultural assumption that beliefs can be instantly changed with a good argument.

But what if beliefs are just another kind of predictive model built on the slow accretion of connected neural cells? That would imply that belief, like any mental competency, requires the development of a neural structure to hold it. It might seem odd to think of beliefs as the same sort of cognitive structure as learning to type or how to bake bread or perform math calculations, but beliefs do become models we test reality against. The person who believes in the plate-tectonics model of earth movement and the person who believes earthquakes are divine punishment from an angry deity both have a model of the world that explains real world experiences. Scientific models change as required by evidence and religious models tend to resist change through special pleading when reality doesn’t match expectations – but both are models of the way the world works. And as models they exist both in abstractions captured in writing and words, but also as neural correlates in the minds of those who have accepted them.

It takes time to learn these models. They don’t change quickly unless there is already a ready framework of supportive beliefs in place. The simple reality is that adult minds are not generally susceptible to ideas the way that the mind-virus explanation implies. With the caveat that I’m talking of adult minds, let’s get back to my argument.

If memes are not viruses, and we’re not susceptible to quick takeover by invasive memes, then what is the value of the “virus of the mind” meme itself other than as a pejorative against memes we don’t like? If science is pushing towards a materialist model of what the brain is doing and is able to explain learning through structures within the brain, then treating ideas as though they were free-floating viruses that can infect us against our will is a kind of magical thinking.

In On Intelligence, Hawkins did not say that beliefs are just another predictive model. That was my own conclusion after reading back before 2014. However, I was excited to see that in his newest book, A Thousand Brains, he explicitly speaks of belief as just another kind of brain model. Beliefs, just like other predictive models, are built from networks of cortical columns within the neo-cortex. In chapter 12, which deals with false beliefs, Hawkins speaks to ideas (memes) that have a high degree of virality. He outlines through several examples (flat earth, vaccine denial, and religion) how an idea can be designed to be easily reproduced with a high degree of fidelity even if it is factually incorrect, and he explicitly invokes Dawkins creation of memes. However, it is also clear that Hawkins does not believe ideas are mind viruses. His work extensively describes the process of building new models and they must be integrated with existing frameworks of beliefs.

Ideas that do seem to pop with a high degree of virality are of special interest to many skeptics and remain quite mysterious. From fads to mass psychogenic illness to yawning, it’s clear that some ideas do spread rapidly across a population but this is uncommon, unpredictable, and usually not the sort of long term behavioural change that a change in belief would have on an individual. The very ephemeral nature of these exceptional phenomena is baked into our word “fad.”

Of course the irony is not lost on me that the introduction to A Thousand Brains is written by Richard Dawkins. That he could read Hawkins and not see how it undermines his mind-virus metaphor would be shocking if it weren’t the sort of thing that all of us do every day when we ignore contradictory evidence that would make us question our hard-won and comfortable predictive model structures (beliefs). However, Dawkins’ memes fit well within Hawkins’ framework and the last few chapters of the book speak much to the preservation of memes across time in a way that echoes The Selfish Gene. Thankfully, we don’t have to accept ideas (or beliefs) uncritically. That’s core to the skeptic’s favourite tool: critical thinking. I’m willing to accept the metaphorical virality of memes without accepting the existence of invasive mind-viruses. 

Our bodies invest a lot of work in constructing these neural models, and I am inferring that anything costly to create probably has built-in tools to defend it. Could our species’ vast number of biases be the result of our bodies trying to conserve the expenditure that was used to craft our network of models? Perhaps.

It’s a complex topic that I’m deeply interested in, but one that mostly lies outside the path of my professional career. Yet, I think that if the above is correct, it suggests what we all know on some deeper level: It takes time to change a belief.

If the predictive model idea is correct and also my deduction that beliefs are built from physical neural structures, and if we’re biologically incentivised to protect these structures, then the metaphor of a mind-virus that can sweep in and rewrite us into doing entirely new behaviours is just wrong.

In Dawkins’ essay, he claims that faith-based thinking is like a “bad” virus but that science is not a virus in the same way that “good” computer programs aren’t viruses. But both faith and science are learned clusters of ideas and behaviours. The distinction in labelling is derived from a subjective evaluation of their merits, not from a fundamental difference in their substrate. If memetics is right, they’re both memeplexes and subject to the same Darwinian selective pressures.

But, like the word meme, the mind-virus idea has itself spread and mutated and been widely absorbed with new and different meanings. I find the mind-virus metaphor troubling in ways beyond its inaccuracy. But it does suggest that not only do we want to protect our own extant brain models from outside conflicting ones, but that we guard them so closely we want to ensure our wider culture also is protected. “I don’t like that idea, so for the safety of everyone in my tribe we need to suppress it,” is a conversation played out millions of times a day on social media.

The mind-virus approach to religion implies that because faiths and mythology are not built out of rational evidence-based frameworks, they’re pernicious and worthless and dangerous. Or that everyone involved is a duped host of a parasitic memeplex. And — thanks to our brain’s tendency to prefer confirmatory evidence that makes us feel good — it’s easy for non-theists to think of examples where terrible things have happened because of organised religions, and to disregard the times people have been harmed by science.

Why do some ideas spread so widely? It’s safe to say that nobody – so far – knows the answer to this question. If they did, then advertising would be far more efficacious than merely ubiquitous. Finding an idea that everyone simply has to spread is the Holy Grail of a multi-billion dollar industry and if they haven’t got it down to a replicable science, perhaps this is another indicator that ideas aren’t “viruses.”

Molecular memetics

So what metaphors do work more accurately here, but without the cultural baggage inherent in sexual reproduction or disease-based analogies? I’ve turned to the field of chemistry for my answer.

In chemistry a few concepts may be helpful for discussing how ideas spread. First, I think some ideas tend to be elemental rather than molecular. Such ideas are like the noble gasses. They are clearly recognisable and don’t mutate much when they spread. Simple ideas that maintain this elemental purity are popular for brand identity, core religious principles, mathematical concepts, and so forth.

But some ideas really seem to spark a creative storm of mixing and remixing. These ideas have what I’d call a high memetic valence. In chemistry a high valence means that an atom has a high combinatorial power due to its abundance of free electrons. In memes, a high memetic-valence means that an idea has a high degree of combinatorial power. I can’t say with confidence why some ideas have high memetic-valence, but clearly some ideas really spark a creative reaction in large portions of the population, while others do not.

Memes can exist extra corpus in many forms, but when a meme enters our minds it has to fit within these neural structures to be processed. Again, I’m no dualist, so my point here is that when we learn things, they’re happening in a biological framework and are not loosey-goosey floating around in the ether.

The process — the biological process — of incorporating memes into our brain is far more complex than our simplistic metaphors. While viruses do capture the exponential concept of idea-spread, they do so at the expense of the fascinating internal struggle that must be happening as we all try to integrate such ideas into brains already fortified with predictive models.

The post A search for meming: fighting the mind-virus virus appeared first on The Skeptic.

As we are in the season of celebrating the work of Charles Darwin (February 12th was Darwin Day!), it seems appropriate to take a brief look at the misappropriation of deoxyribonucleic acid – the molecule represented in the acronym DNA – to depict essentialism, and what’s wrong with that, beyond the tired (and tiring) cliché.

“Essentialism” is the idea that things have a core of characteristics that determines what they are at a fundamental level – their so-called essence. To these fundamental characteristics are added others, called accidents, which define how they are what they are, and how they express their essence. A chair, for example, has the essential characteristics of being a piece of furniture formed by a seat and back (without a back it becomes stool), and then, as accidents, whether it has legs or wheels, whether or not it has arms, whether it is made of wood, plastic or metal, whether or not it has cushions, etc.

There is a strong connection between the concept of essence and the idea of ​​definition. The list of essential characteristics of something very easily gets taken for the definition of that thing: in essence, “chair” is a piece of furniture consisting of a seat and back, and “a piece of furniture consisting of a seat and back” is a reasonable definition of chair, found in dictionaries. You can say (and many people do) that the essence of something is what defines it.

Intuition

Thinking in terms of essences, accidents and definitions is very useful and enlightening in different contexts, helping to put certain ideas in order. But it also has the potential to generate confusions of epic proportions. Distinguishing situations in which essentialist thinking helps or hinders is a fun pastime, as well as being something that professional philosophers sometimes worry about.

But, at least in Western culture, even those who have never looked at the issue from a philosophical perspective, or have never even heard the word “essentialism” in their lives, probably have essentialist intuitions, beliefs and opinions about many things. It is something that is ingrained in language and in the collective mentality, appearing behind concepts such as soul and spirit (nuclei that concentrate the essence of an identity, whether individual, collective or even a situation: “the soul of the party”), and authenticity or sincerity (which are manifestations of fidelity to the essence: “an authentic hack”).

Distinctions between reality and appearance are often treated as if they were distinctions between essence and accidents; when we talk about someone who “behaves badly, but deep down is a good person”, we are presupposing a certain hidden essence to counterbalance the palpable characteristic. In fiction, narratives of overcoming and redemption are commonly constructed as stories in which an essence struggles to assert itself, to express itself in a heroic or, at least, constructive way.

The modern world, perhaps even more than at any other time, lives immersed in a kind of cult of the revealed essence of things: we experience an “ethic of authenticity”, where presenting oneself as sincere (or, in some cases, “sincere”) may be more valuable (or believable) than declaring yourself a good or well-intentioned person. Populist politicians work the magic of transforming their supposed defects, prejudices, ignorance and limitations into positive qualities and advantages, by exposing them “sincerely” – even more so if these defects and prejudices are shared by their base, who end up assimilating these defects into the idea they have of the group’s collective “essence”.

The DNA of the business

Co-opted by the marketing universe – which is already very well aware that language choices that sound “scientific” tend to convey an image of precision and sophistication – the contemporary passion for the ethics of authenticity gives birth to the cliché of “business DNA” in a variety of ways: “DNA of the firm”, “DNA of the team”, “It’s in our DNA”, “We have the DNA of innovation” and other permutations, ad nauseam. 

In all variations, the acronym “DNA” is used to mean that a certain desirable quality, attitude or characteristic is part of the essence of the company, business, or organisation. It’s an authentic facet, something that makes up the very definition of what you want to sell.

The problem is that, by treating “DNA” as a synonym for “essence”, these slogans end up imprinting (or reinforcing) in common sense a connection between genetics and essentialism which, in addition to being wrong, distorts the public understanding of science. One area in which essentialist thinking collapses (or leads to collapse, if it is persisted in) is precisely that of genetics and evolutionary biology.

Creationists, of course, have long used an essentialist version of the concept of “species” to attack, in logical-semantic terms, the theory of evolution. If each species represents an essence created separately by God, how could some evolve into others? Hence the radical-essentialist reading of Genesis 1:24 – “God said: ‘Let the earth produce living creatures according to their kinds, domestic animals, creeping animals and wild animals, according to their kinds’”.

Even many people who have already overcome the mythological stage of intellectual development still have this intuitive equivalence between “species” and “essence” deep in their heads, just replacing the celestial design with some kind of “wisdom of nature”, and the magic word of Divinity by… DNA. This pervasive image of DNA as a kind of biochemical “soul” is what inspires much of the emotional resistance to genetic modification: who are we to interfere with the essential spirit of the species? But it’s an image that doesn’t make any sense.

Darwinian evolution ties all living beings on the planet into a vast network of common ancestry. We have genes that we share with viruses, bacteria, fish and plants. More than ninety percent of what is “in the DNA” of a human being is also in that of a chimpanzee.

Every time I read or hear that such and such a beautiful and wonderful characteristic “is in our company’s DNA” I remember the gene for producing vitamin C – which is in the DNA of Homo sapiens, but deactivated (this is why we need vitamin C in our diet and are vulnerable to scurvy). DNA is not essence, it is flow: it is a river whose source is somewhere in the cloudy mountain range of the origin of life, and which soon opens into an immense delta. What is essential, if anything, is something we share with the rest of the biosphere.

The cliché of what is “in the DNA” is therefore not only a worn-out cliché, but also an inept metaphor that miseducates by reinforcing the spurious link between genetics and essentialism. 

The post “It’s in our DNA”: the clichés that confuse the public about genetics and essentialism appeared first on The Skeptic.

“The Web of Meaning: integrating science and traditional wisdom to find our place in the universe”, by Jeremy Lent, ventures into the speculative territory between science and religion in search of the origins of consciousness and humanity’s fall from grace. Along the way Lent, described on the cover by  Guardian columnist George Monbiot as “…one of the greatest thinkers of our age”, assembles a fascinating collection of ideas that scientists have proposed to explain the big mysteries in neuroscience, cognitive psychology and biology, drawing parallels with the Tao Te Ching. The mistake Lent makes, however, is to present speculative ideas from the frontiers of multiple disciplines as established knowledge, rather than the untested or untestable hypotheses they are.

For example Lent claims that epigenetics ‘…simply refers to a form of inheritance that is not genetic’ (p.132). It doesn’t. Epigenetics refers to environmental influence on the way genes are copied, some of which is heritable. That a geneticist has suggested epigenetics be extended to include cultural inheritance does not change biology. Similarly Lent claims that Lamarckism – evolution through the heritability of characteristics acquired during a lifetime – has been ‘validated by science’ (p.154). It hasn’t, as geneticist Massimo Pigliucci explains.

This book ultimately begs the question: is it possible, necessary or meaningful to integrate science and traditional wisdom? Palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould attempted to resolve this by classifying science and religion as ‘non-overlapping magisteria’; two separate realms of human experience with no common ground. While Science documents the factual character of the natural world and theories that explain these facts, religion operates in the realm of purpose, meaning, and value, subjects which science might illuminate but can never resolve.

The problem is that science and religion inevitably do overlap whenever they make competing claims about the same phenomenon, such as the diversity and origin of life.

Until the second half of the 19th century, most scientists believed that the staggering diversity of life on Earth was the work of God. So Charles Darwin thought, at the age of twenty two when he left Plymouth on the Beagle in 1831. His theory of natural selection, shaped by what he saw on that voyage and what he read in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, proposed instead that the huge diversity of living things was driven by life’s constant need to adapt to a changing Earth.

After ‘On the Origin of Species’ was published, God could still be invoked to explain how life began, but was no longer necessary to explain its diversity.

Lent comes unstuck again when he claims that vitalism has been scientifically validated (p. 154). It hasn’t and it can’t be. Vitalism is belief in a life force beyond the physical world, and science can never validate the existence of a concept beyond the reach of our senses. While science can never validate vitalism, it could disprove it if there is ever a physical explanation for the emergence of life from matter.

A hundred and sixty years ago, Thomas Huxley suggested that using vitalism to explain the origin of life is like saying the properties of water are due to its aquiosity. Inventing a new concept is not an explanation. As the chemical and physical nature of more and more vital phenomena have been demonstrated, vitalism has fallen out of favour and has not appeared in biology text books since the 1930s. The boundaries between science and religion are renegotiated whenever a physical explanation emerges for a phenomena that previously relied on a religious one.

Earlier attempts to draw parallels between science and Taoism have not fared well. In 1975 Austrian physicist Fritjof Capra published ‘The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism’. The book sold over a million copies, was translated into 23 languages and helped to kick start the New Age non-fiction genre, but its timing was unfortunate.

At a meeting at Stanford University the month before ‘The Tao of Physics’ was completed, evidence emerged that overthrew the bootstrap theory – the basis of Capra’s book – in favour of the standard-model quantum field theory, following discoveries by Burton Richter and Samuel Ting, who were awarded the Nobel Prize the following year.

It was the standard model, based on the notion that the universe is composed of material particles and nothing more, that predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, which was first observed in 2012. In the view of physicist Peter Woit “The bootstrap philosophy, despite its complete failure as a physical theory, lives on as part of an embarrassing New Age cult, with its followers refusing to acknowledge what has happened.” (p.144)

For those inclined towards vitalism, this book offers the illusion of 500 pages of closely argued evidence supported by over 800 citations. But if you remain curious about life and the evolution of consciousness, Daniel Dennett’s ‘From Bacteria to Bach and Back’ is a useful antidote.

Traditional wisdom, religion and spirituality don’t need support from science. They are different ways of interpreting the world, existing on their own terms to be experienced on their own terms. Its where they overlap that things can get messy. 

“The Web of Meaning: integrating science and traditional wisdom to find our place in the universe”, by Jeremy Lent, was published in 2022 by Profile Books (ISBN 978 1 78816 565 5).

The post The Tao of Magical Thinking: pseudoscience in Jeremy Lent’s ‘The Web of Meaning’ appeared first on The Skeptic.

Essex’s piece is titled ‘Should we trust science?’ and is a review of Professor Naomi Oreskes book ‘Why Trust Science?’. Oreskes is trying to construct an answer to many people’s questions about the usefulness of science, largely brought about because of the campaigns to undermine public trust in mainstream scientists. A central theme to her work is that ‘consensus’ is vital to science. This is not a very new idea to the philosophy of science, and has been used very obviously in areas like public health or climate science, but, rather unsurprisingly, Essex rejects this idea.

A key insight into Essex’s view of how science works or should work is when he directly answers the question in his article’s title:

Should we trust science? The answer to that question is completely straightforward and simple: no! Why “no”? You’re not supposed to trust science! That’s the point of science!

This rigid epistemology seems to leave us in a bit of a conundrum. Essex never specifies who the ‘you’ is here, yet that clearly matters. If the individual in question is a scientist in the lab testing a theory, then this quote is perhaps reasonable. Practicing as a scientific researcher requires a level of scepticism, and when testing a theory it’s important not to have blind trust that the theory is true. However, even in this case the scientist is placing their trust in established background theories in science; for example, they’re trusting that the science behind the technology they’re using is correct. Under many other circumstances this attitude would detrimental to scientific work. Scientists have great faith in their theories, and they work hard to promote them through conferences and articles, all of which is very important for collaboration and progress. The Popperian attitude that scientists are just out to prove their theories wrong has been shown to be an inaccurate picture of how science works.

In everyday life if people didn’t accept any scientific knowledge there would be huge societal problems; it’s hard to comprehend the public health crisis we’d face if no one trusted any of the science behind any modern medicine or studies into human health. It’s clear that our epistemic standards, our standards for what we can reasonably claim to know, need to be contextual in order for science to be useful. Essex’s epistemology seems to consign science to a fruitless exercise.

Building on this, Essex tries to strip science of all its social context. He claims that human sociology bloats the term science, since it results in looking at the human organisations (universities, science publishers, governments etc.). Taking a stripped science, along with his rigid epistemology, Essex claims consensus is ‘unscientific’ and accuses Oreskes of thinking that “total consensus [determines] truth in the natural world.”

If taken literally, this complaint is a complete strawman. Oreskes says nothing of the sort; she simply claims that it is through consensus in scientific work that we can best hope to uncover those truths, or at least that is it the most rational route to follow to uncover natural truth.

Taking a more nuanced version of Essex’s claim, it seems like he’s dismissing the idea that consensus is the most rational route. If so, then what is the most rational route? Is there one? Not everyone can be a sceptic all the time, not even scientists. If we deny ourselves of any scientific knowledge, we’re in a very dire situation. The recent pandemic shows how important this knowledge can be.

Maybe there’s another route. Rather predictably, Essex uses this time to make a jab at the consensus around climate change, calling it an “ad hoc creation of political fashion composed of some legitimate scientific subfields”. If we were to follow the climate change denialists example, then we’d reject trusting the consensus for trusting a small group of contrarian scientists. Despite what Essex said earlier, it’s not that people like him don’t trust science, it’s just that they don’t trust the majority of scientists. Why? The answer is unclear, but it doesn’t seem to be due to a coherent picture of science.

By stripping science of its social context, we miss Oreskes’ key point. We need to have trust in science to prevent it becoming a fruitless mental exercise. Yes, science is inherently sceptical and so are scientists, but the level of this scepticism is contextual. If as a society we don’t have trust in science, then all the work of scientists becomes useless.

Essex criticises the IPCC and quotes Sir John Houghton as saying that the IPCC was orchestrated for political reasons. Yet this only seems inherently unscientific if we take Essex’s rigid epistemology and anti-social view of science. Yes, the IPCC was created partially for political reasons. Science and the dissemination of scientific knowledge exists in a socio-political landscape. The IPCC was created to further voice the consensus that was being reached within the scientific literature, so that this literature and scientific work would be useful for society.

Both the anti-trust and anti-social view of science proposed by Essex don’t seem to match reality. Even he doesn’t stick to them. Denialists clearly have trust in some contrarian scientists, and climate change denialism is about as political as science gets. We want science to be useful and Oreskes is trying to construct a way to explain why it’s useful; it’s not surprising that denialist have issues with this.

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As with all social justice work, there has been significant backlash and skepticism towards discussion of privilege. For example, Pew research has found that Americans are strongly divided on the issue of racial privilege. While 58% of Americans surveyed in 2019 agree that white people benefit “a great deal” based on race, 71% of republicans and republican leaning independents claim that white people receive few or no advantages because of race, compared with 83% of Democrats who claim they receive either “a great deal or a fair amount” of advantage because of race. On the basic question of whether white privilege even exists, these groups are almost maximally divided.

Part of this divide comes down to a deep philosophical difference between progressives and conservatives on the issue of luck, which I’ll discuss below, but I also think at least some of the issue is one of language and messaging. The word ‘privilege’ is highly toxic at this point, it’s a culture war code word that can shut down any chance of engagement in a profound way. Part of that toxicity comes from the relentless and often disingenuous pushback, especially from the political right, against any suggestion that our society is significantly unjust or fails to more or less live up to our meritocratic ideals. However, some pushback arises because ‘privilege’ is just not the best word for the job, which is why I believe we’re better off replacing it with the concept of ‘moral luck’.

First, I see at least two reasons that ‘privilege’ is not the best word for the job. Privilege, I think by design, strikes the hearer as a smugly pejorative term. Being privileged is bad, it’s the mark of a spoiled brat, and the use of the term combined with the common claim that individuals are unaware of or refuse to acknowledge their privilege paints most people as immorally naive or complicit. That may be to some extent an accurate accounting of reality, but it should also be unsurprising that it produces significant blowback when the term is leveled at individuals.

More importantly though, discussions of privilege seem to imply to many people that there is no complexity to the sorts of advantages and disadvantages that we all experience in our lives. Some of that implication is again the result of well poisoning, by reactionaries who want to make any discussion of systemic injustice feel like a personal attack on frightened white folks. But I also honestly think social justice advocates sometimes talk like individuals are either privileged or marginalised, rather than some mix of both, which many experience as a flattening of their own journeys. This can lead some to skepticism of privilege discourse, even when they do believe that privilege and marginalisation exist.

Just my luck

So, instead of using the term ‘privilege’, especially when speaking to individuals who may be likely to react negatively to that terminology, I suggest we try talking about luck instead, and if you’re feeling bold try introducing them to the concept of moral luck. Moral luck is a concept developed by philosophers like Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, which refers to situations where individuals are held morally responsible for things that are out of their control. We all share a strong intuition, what Nagel calls the control condition, that individuals should only be held responsible for things that are under their control. The problem of moral luck is that, for a variety of reasons, we are inconsistent in what we call luck. If I’m struggling to hold down a job because of a global pandemic, almost no one would see that as a moral failing on my part, and our recently extended and expanded unemployment policies reflect that fact. The problem is, the same should be true for someone who struggles to hold down a job because of addiction, or PTSD from childhood trauma. Yet many will see the latter two as a personal failing rather than the result of luck. I believe one of the keys to social justice work is reconsidering where we draw the line of luck and adjusting our social policies accordingly.

Nagel argues that moral luck is ubiquitous, because ultimately everything about us and our lives is the product of luck. He identifies several different kinds of luck, the most problematic and unavoidable of which is our constitutive luck, the sort of luck that makes us who we are. Whether it’s nature or nurture, what we get for the first decade of our lives at least is unquestionably a matter of luck. Combine that with the circumstantial luck of the sorts of challenges we experience in our lives, as well as the consequential luck that even our best intended and executed actions can still produce terrible consequences, and it gets hard to deny that every single thing about each of us is the result of factors that are beyond our control.

Maybe you’re not in a place yet where you want to go that far, and you certainly don’t need to convince every person you talk to about this topic that the world really is luck, all the way down. I do think, though, that we all have an obligation to spread awareness of the pervasiveness of luck in our lives, and how it influences our judgments of other people. In our merit obsessed society, we consistently assign higher moral status to individuals because of their various kinds of luck. For many of those kinds of luck, like “work ethic”, we don’t even code it as a kind of luck, despite the fact that your ability to focus on work for extended periods of time is, in so many ways, the product of constitutive and circumstantial luck.

If we could just get people to recode more of the capacities and challenges in people’s lives as forms of luck, that alone I think would be a valuable change, but I think more can follow from this as well. This is not just a semantic move, though I do think the connotations matter significantly. Coming from the angle of moral luck, it’s clearer that individuals are not morally culpable for their luck, in the sense that they should not feel shame or superiority because of their allotment of luck. Instead, what I think we want people to feel is humility and gratitude, because that provides a healthy foundation for compassion towards those suffering from bad luck, as well as a strong desire to reform our systems in such a way that luck is more fairly distributed.

The other key shift here is that luck can be both positive and negative, whereas privilege doesn’t read that way to most people. Privilege lends itself to a binary with marginalization, whereas with luck we can talk about how everyone is some mix of good and bad luck, which seems more in keeping with the literature on concepts like intersectionality. Of course, we can still talk about which groups consistently tend to experience more of some kinds of luck, and that overall members of some groups are likely to be more marginalised than members of other groups – indeed, the hope is that the shift in language facilitates those discussions some.

Some may hear this suggestion and worry that this is ceding conceptual ground to regressives, or that it’s just taking another step on the euphemism treadmill and that a month after we adopt the new language it will be treated as equally toxic. I fully expect that many of the same people who have poisoned the concept of ‘privilege’ will attempt to do the same for ‘luck’. I also expect they will likely have some success, particularly with conservatives, because there is evidence that conservatives tend to downplay the role of luck in people’s lives and tend to see appeals to luck as excuses for poor behavior.

That said, I think ‘luck’ is a harder target to toxify than ‘privilege’, especially when we earnestly emphasise that everyone experiences a mix of good and bad luck, and that acknowledging luck is not tied to any moral judgment or even a claim that every person in one group has had it easier than a person in another group. Systemic injustice is more like roulette, a game of luck that also consistently favors one group, the house. So, sometimes in our lives we’re the player and sometimes we’re the house, and the fact that some players win big doesn’t change that larger truth that the game favors the house. I suspect most people, and even a fair number of conservatives, recognise that everyone can have a run of bad luck, and that such things are a cause for compassion and not derision. From there, it’s not hard to see that systems can be rigged so certain people keep having runs of bad luck, and that we need to fix those systems so everyone can flourish. 

I don’t think swapping out a few words is going to completely fix social problems that are centuries in the making, but I do think it can help. If you think language matters, please consider trying this new approach. If you don’t think it matters, why not try a new approach anyway? Maybe you’ll get lucky.

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Ethics is just one of many systems of knowledge that centers on evaluative judgments, meaning judgments about which things have value. Our evaluative frameworks shape every moment of our lives, so it’s ironic that we struggle to answer basic questions about value like “where does it come from?” and “do all things have it, or only some?”.

The field of value theory is vast, and satisfying answers are hard to come by. I personally have come to believe we should adopt a robustly realist approach to value, meaning that we should see value as an “objective” feature of some parts of our world.

I suspect most readers will react to this in one of two ways. Either they’ll intuitively be skeptical, because they see value as subjective, or they’ll agree that value is objective because they hold some sort of religious beliefs where a deity supplies the foundation for objective value. I was taught the first version growing up, so I’ll mostly speak to that perspective here. On the first view, valuing occurs when my mind experiences a value neutral physical world and then applies value to things based on my preferences, like a painter applying color to a blank canvas.

This view of value, which is commonly attributed to David Hume, fits comfortably with the common understanding of scientific truth. It generates an intuitively appealing divide between facts and values. Factual claims are claims about the world itself, and so can be true or false. Evaluative claims are about our feelings and preferences towards the world, and so are neither true nor false. Value is merely a sophisticated mental construct, rather than some objective feature out there in reality, like the spin on an electron or the almond in a chocolate bar.

In the area of ethics, Hume presented perhaps the most famous version of the fact/value divide, what’s known as the ‘is/ought divide’ or the ‘is/ought problem’. It is one of the most hotly contested pieces of real estate in all of philosophy:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it’s necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.

The most common reading of this passage is that you can never derive an ‘ought’ claim from an ‘is’ claim, such as inferring from “this object is a gun” to “this object is immoral”. In order to justify the claim that guns are immoral, we need some evaluative premise like “all objects that are highly deadly are immoral”, but the problem then arises where we find justification for that claim, and so on into infinity. Combine this problem with the value neutral model of the world, and it would seem that there is no way to ground “ought” claims. This is why the view commonly entails that moral claims and other evaluative claims either can’t be true or false, or are simply all false, because there is no way to ground them. At this point, the risk of nihilism, the rejection of all valuing, looms large, and the project of fields like metaethics and value theory becomes about salvaging a social basis for grounding moral claims, or at least some pretext for continuing to talk about them.

It’s debatable how much Hume actually held an antirealist view about value, and there are several incompatible interpretations of his famous is/ought problem. Realists like myself will point to Hume’s claims that there are proper objects of valuing and that our moral sense can be improved with training as evidence Hume also believed in something like objective value. Still, the dominant successors to Hume, especially the Emotivists, carried forward the distinctions Hume made, with the result that many today take for granted that we live in a value neutral world and make evaluative judgments about it based purely on subjective preferences.

Several concerns arise with a view like this. One major concern, often voiced by religious conservatives, is that widespread adoption of the Humean view has contributed to the crisis of meaning that many are experiencing in the modern world. The rejection of the previous structure of meaning, one where a god or some other outside force imbues your life with purpose, created a vacuum in many people’s worldviews that remains to be filled, leading to a slide into hedonistic cultural decadence. Schools of thought like Existentialism arose in an attempt to address this absurdity of desiring meaning in an uncaring universe, with mixed results. To avoid nihilism, many of us can get caught up on the hedonic treadmill, where we always seem to need more and more to be satisfied, whether it’s pleasure or some fleeting sense of purpose. The result may be a turn to conspiracy theories and other narratives that return some sense of cosmic purpose.

Similarly, abandoning objective value means abandoning objective morality and the idea that some things are right or wrong whether or not we think they’re right or wrong. Much of the work of metaethics in ancient philosophy and over the past few hundred years has centered on challenges to objective moral truth and attempts to either refute those challenges or construct a subjective system of ethics that can serve as an adequate replacement. For example, moral constructivists argue that we can create reasoning procedures that are suitably fair such that no person could reasonably reject the conclusions of that procedure, conclusions like society must protect everyone’s rights equally. Critiques argue though that constructivist models fail to reach substantive moral conclusions without smuggling them in through implicit premises, which is actually the problem I think Hume was trying to highlight when he first proposed the is/ought divide. So, what do we do if subjective theories of value seem insufficient but we don’t want to abandon valuing entirely? I think the takeaway is to grow skeptical of how we’ve divided the world, and to question how that framing has lead us astray. I lack the space or the insights to provide a complete alternative, but let me point in some directions I hope are helpful.

First, I think it’s valuable to remember that the universe doesn’t just contain value neutral particles smashing into each other, even if that’s what everything ultimately is composed of. The world contains emergent phenomena, meaning entities that seem to have properties distinct from, and not reducible to, the properties of the particles or whatever that make them up. Your mind, with its internal states of awareness that are only perceptible to you, is a classic example of an emergent phenomenon, and much work has been done on the “hard problem” of trying to explain how minds could emerge from matter. What’s important here is that mind and matter, whatever their relationship, are both “part of the world”. They’re both things about which claims can be objectively true or false.

I worry that describing our minds as “part of the world” can feel jarring to some folks, because they have so internalised the separation between “the world out there” and the space we call “inside us”. It’s understandable, the distinction is intuitive and it has the benefit of quarantining minds, with all their messiness, away from the rest of reality which we can effectively study with our “hard” sciences. Unfortunately, dividing the world this way obscures more than it clarifies.

For example, and painfully abbreviated, suffering is a value-laden state that we all experience directly at many points in our lives. Your access to the suffering is fundamentally subjective, but the fact that you are suffering or not is a claim about the part of the world that is you, and its truth or falsity can be independent of anyone’s beliefs about it. Perhaps you live in a society so oppressive it has fully convinced you that your suffering is really flourishing; it would remain an objective fact that you are suffering.

Furthermore, it is a necessary feature of that suffering that it has some negative value, even if that negative value is outweighed by some other gain. Some suffering may be justified, but all other things being equal suffering is bad and instils in us an obligation by its very existence. The negative value of suffering does not fit the antirealist model of us applying negative value to a value neutral state of the world. Rather the negative value is a feature of the suffering, which is a part of the world, and our perceptions of that suffering and other value-laden states like flourishing give us access to objective moral and evaluative truths. On this view, which I find more intuitive than the antirealist model, it wouldn’t make sense for you to say “I’m suffering, but I’m not sure if there’s anything bad about it or not” or “that person is suffering, but it’s unclear if that matters”.

Therefore, at least one corner of the universe, the one that contains things like your suffering and your flourishing, has parts of it that exist objectively and are objectively value-laden. Attempt by earlier thinkers to exclude minds from the world was appealing, given the difficulties with studying minds scientifically, but it led us astray on this basic fact, and it’s time we find our way back. I believe the upshots are that our lives are filled with robust moral obligations but also with an overabundance of meaning and value. It may be hard to feel it sometimes. We may lose our way and society may twist us to value the wrong things or to value the right things to excess, but there are still things in the world worth valuing, and we’re some of them.

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“Who decides?” is a reasonable question to consider, but I want to talk about two ways in which it can derail a debate. It’s a reoccurring theme of this column, and philosophical skepticism more broadly, that good arguments and bad arguments are often difficult to distinguish, and sometimes even good argumentative moves can be used fallaciously. “Who decides?” is a powerful example of that, because it is very much a fair question, but it’s also a common last-ditch refuge for unsupportable positions. “Who decides?” is often a hard question with unsatisfying answers, and it’s easy to trade on that dissatisfaction when a better objection isn’t available.

The problem arises when a person asks “who decides?” because they’ve run out of other objections. In cases where “who decides?” is used as a counterargument, rather than simply trying to understand the decision mechanism, the question tends to shift the discussion away from the key points of disagreement that need to be resolved, and towards an issue that might seem especially challenging but ultimately isn’t particularly illuminating.

Take the example of defunding access to harmful or ineffective forms of “alternative medicine”. Relative to other ethical dilemmas, the question of “who decides?” is not especially salient here. Whether a treatment is effective or harmful is a question best decided by medical experts. The answer to the broader normative question of “who decides that we should restrict people’s freedom to seek alternative treatments?” is the community, likely through their elected representatives who, in theory, attempt to bring about greater wellbeing for their constituents through the advice of experts and thoughtful cost/benefit analysis. None of those answers are especially satisfying, partly because the question itself is not particularly salient in this context, and partly because a further step of “who decides?” remains an open question. Who decides who is a medical expert? Accreditors. Who decides the criteria accreditors use? And so on, ad infinitum. As our good friend Sextus teaches us, any argument can be thrown back infinitely like this. The choice, as with all our other beliefs, is either to adhere to Sextus’ radical skepticism, or to decide you’ve sufficiently guarded against bad inference at some point along the infinite regress.

It can be tricky to get a handle on what is problematic about this question, but I think there are two key ways in which “who decides?” can undercut fruitful discussion. The first way can best be understood with a comparison to “god of the gaps” style arguments used by creationists against naturalist accounts of the universe. The frustrating nature of the god of the gaps argument is best exemplified by the historic debate between Professor Farnsworth and Dr. Banjo in episode nine of season six of Futurama, “A clockwork Origin”. Dr. Banjo’s god of the gaps argument trades on the fact that there is always the potential for an explanatory gap between two states of events, and filling in that gap just creates two more gaps, and so on ad infinitum.

God of the gaps aren’t always empirical. One could argue that William Lane Craig’s metaethical pressupositionalism is a kind of god of the gaps, as he claims that it’s impossible to bridge the gap between our natural world and moral truths. What’s more, the early moves of pressupositionalist arguments are often phrased as “who decides what is moral?”, with the inevitable implication that a god is needed to decide or provide the grounding for the decision. Whether it’s claims about science or morality, the key feature of a god of the gaps argument is that you can simply restate the gap problem on into infinity.

Similarly, it’s easy to generate an infinite regress of “who decides?” such that critics can always claim that you’ve failed to thoroughly address their concern. These feelings of dissatisfaction are frequently amplified by emotional appeals to the looming threat of domination. The harmful result is that, as long as we can’t give a perfectly satisfying account of who decides up front, we feel justified in avoiding implementing any new action or system, lest that system fall into the hands of a tyrant.

These arguments all trade on a similar kind of appeal to ignorance, one that can be addressed given enough time, but in functional discourse can and should be deferred by recognising that further explanation is possible, but not necessary to feel justified in forming beliefs and acting on them. We may never be able to fill in every gap in the history of life, but the fact that every gap we’ve pressed hard on so far has yielded a natural “missing link” gives us good reason to suspect that the remaining gaps can similarly be filled without appeal to a divine creator. Similarly, I may not always be able to give a satisfying answer to “who decides?” at present, but the fact that humans have made some progress developing and acting on our moral knowledge inclines me to think more of that work can be done, even if the path isn’t always clear and the risk of abuse is real.

The second way that “who decides?” can be an argumentative misstep is in cases where someone must inevitably decide, but the question is posed in such a way as to suggest there is a decision-free alternative. I see this problem constantly in discussions about social media moderation. There is a great deal of outcry, some of it understandable, that unaccountable social media corporations have near absolute power in deciding who and what is allowed on social media. Folks across the spectrum find this situation intolerable, but there seems to be a lot of resistance to acknowledging that the power of moderation will have to rest in someone’s hands eventually. If not corporations, then government agencies. If not humans, then algorithms programmed by humans. Even adopting a maximally hands-off approach, which would be a disaster, would still be a decision that someone has to make.

In this context, “who decides?” could be a valuable question if it leads to analysing the costs and benefits of different decision structures and the implementation of the “worst option, besides all the others”. However, when “who decides?” is used as a way to imply that no one should have the power to decide, or that those advocating for any decision structure are in favor of tyranny or are oblivious to the costs of their preferred system, the question undercuts progress.

The answer to “who decides?” is often an unsatisfying “it’s complicated”. That’s okay though, right answers aren’t always satisfying, and if we learn not to expect them to always be satisfying, we can avoid the temptation of satisfying oversimplifications like “nobody should decide”.

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