Posted on April 19, 2008

What Atheism Offers: The Value of Life

Citing Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, religious believers frequently condemn atheists for not valuing human life, and condoning and causing widespread death and human misery. Setting aside the genuine question of Hitler’s religious standing, it ought to be clear that these atrocities, while committed by men who professed a lack of faith, were not enacted in the name of atheism. To claim secularism as the genesis of the Cultural Revolution or the purges of the 1930’s is as nonsensical as blaming Christianity for gang killings in our nation’s cities. And, as a study of the past makes clear, religious beliefs, and not their absence, have brought about far more death and dismay than the humanist perspective.

In fact, religion and war concurrently order the lives of humans at every point throughout history’s millennia. While one does not always cause the other, the assertion that the former inhibits the latter is equally unfounded. Religion does not stop people from being cruel to each other, it doesn’t prevent theft or abuse, hate or murder. The question that ought to be asked, both by religious and atheists, is whether faith makes those crimes less frequent by its existence. Would an atheistic society be worse?

Secular Europe and Japan have significantly lower crime rates than more religious nations, but that fact alone doesn’t provide an answer. After all, they’re richer, too, so we might say that it’s not atheism that promotes non-violence but access to resources and quality of living. Still, can atheism, and especially its lack of belief in an afterlife, promote peace?

The value of life—of living life, not a dreamed of posthumous eternity—is higher in the atheistic framework. Killing carries far greater existential weight, murder becomes a more poignant moral wrong. When discretionless bombing leads not to thousands knocking on heaven’s edifice but to lives snuffed out and ended entirely, leaders and citizens, commanders and soldiers are less willing to employ their weapons in the destruction of humanity. And when suffering leads not to favor in the eyes of God but to horrendous conditions in the only life the sufferer will live, the Christian fascination with the meek and miserable is revealed as a shameful doctrine of pain.

Through the unsubstantiated notion of paradise in the afterlife, religion turns to sadism and the good intentions of faith become the harrowing yoke of worldly sorrow. The part is always less valuable than the whole and seventy years compared to eternal life look insignificant indeed. But to the atheist, who sees those seventy years not as prologue but as finality, every moment is to be cherished and made the most of—both for himself and others.

Yes, there are atheists who don’t adopt this stance, just as there are religious believers abhor the devaluing of individual lives exemplified by so many of the faithful. People will always exist at the margins of any philosophical position. The point is not to entirely strip religion of its moral worth. Atheists have tried this, making such silly claims as “All evil in the world comes from religion,” but no thinking person buys it. Instead, this perspective on the value of life is meant to show that atheists do not logically see human lives without worth as a result of rejecting god, the soul, or an afterlife.

There’s an appreciation of life in atheism that is impossible to deny. This doesn’t merely take the form of the argument from limitation given above. No, there’s also a degree of wonder incompatible with a divine creator. The world around me is intensely, staggeringly fascinating because there is so much about it I don’t know. Complacency in these questions is inconceivable since there is no supreme being upon which I can fall back. The religious person always has the option—an option that has been utilized feverishly since humanity first learned to inquire—of saying, “Oh, that’s the way it is because god did it.” Weather, plague, human development—for history’s humanists, these have been terrific puzzles. But for most of human history and for most of humanity, their solutions could be readily found in immutable ancient texts.

Human life is the most intriguing puzzle of all. And because it hasn’t been answered, it needs to be explored. Inflicting suffering upon it or killing it without evidence that it will continue afterwards, effectively limiting the ability of others to explore their own lives, is anathema.

Posted on October 16, 2007

The Locally Owned Business Fallacy

William Gibson had a new novel out. Because he’s one of a very short list of authors whose works I make a point of buying as soon as they’re released and because he was doing a reading at a bookstore in town that weekend, I forwent my usual Amazon purchase and turned to the brick and mortars. Three are within an easy drive from my house: Borders, Barnes & Nobel, and a local establishment called the Tattered Cover. This last happened to be across the street from where I have my morning coffee, and reading Gibson while consuming caffeine appealed to me at seven o’clock that summer morning. So I called up the Tattered Cover and asked a rather reasonable question. Did they discount hardcovers? The chain shops do, taking thirty percent off the list price, saving me a good ten bucks. Amazon takes upwards of forty percent off, but I was willing to forgo the few extra dollars to have the book before the signing.

But, no, Tattered Cover doesn’t discount and, if you make the mistake of asking, you’ll be treated to a lecture about the plight of the locally owned business in a world increasingly ruled by impliedly evil chains. “We discount for teachers,” the clerk said. “Are you a teacher?” I’m not. “There are only three Tattered Cover stores,” she continued, “and they’re all locally owned.” These final two words she said with such gravity I felt like I was at a political revival on a college campus, not making a simple sales inquiry. “If we were to discount everything like the chains do, we’d go out of business.” I thanked her, hung up, and resigned myself to making the longer, post coffee drive to Borders. Ten dollars is a lot of money.

What the clerk was asking of me—because she very clearly wanted me to spend my dollars at the Tattered Cover and support local businesses to the exclusion of the national chains—was that I increase my out of pocket expense for William Gibson’s novel in order that a bookstore whose owner lives in the state can add another line on its sales report. She was, in effect, arguing that “localness” is a market trait worth ten dollars.

Why would a patron choose one bookstore over another? Price is an obvious consideration, but there’s also selection, atmosphere, friendliness and helpfulness of the staff, location, and a continuing list of whatever other intangibles we might choose to add, all those characteristics that make one store feel right. Is localness on the list? Many would say that it is and, in fact, they go so far as to argue that it trumps such values as price and selection. “Think globally, act locally” is the rallying cry of this mindset.

Let’s take a moment, then, to examine what “locally owned” means and how a business claiming that label differs from a national chain. The Tattered Cover employs a rather large number of people. For simplicity’s sake, say the store down the street has one-hundred workers. Borders, also a big store, has one-hundred, too. Further assume the wages are roughly the same. Unless they’re fans of long commutes, the folks working at both stores are local to the area. So far, then, the two businesses look much the same.

Yet Borders has its home base in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while the Tattered Cover’s owner lives in Colorado. Here’s where we find the locally owned difference. But as anyone in retail knows, almost all the money a store earns goes to upkeep and most of that upkeep takes the form of wages. Since both bookstores employ Coloradans, except for a tiny percent going to the owner, nearly every dollar they bring in is payed out to people living in the state. In fact, when the clerk at the Tattered Cover thrilled me with her microeconomics lecture, what she really wanted was for me to give money to one more person who lives in Colorado than would get a portion of the purchase price of the book if I went to Borders. One person. Why should the benefit of a lower price for the customer be ignored in order to line the pockets of one lone business owner in Colorado, a business owner who can’t otherwise compete with the offerings of a national chain? The ten dollars still in my wallet after shopping at Borders will probably eventually be spent at yet another establishment employing Coloradans, after all.

William Gibson has spoken of a post geographical world, recognizing that technology has altered our lives to the point where nearly anything we want is available nearly anywhere we can be. I can withdraw funds from my bank account not just in Denver, Colorado, but also at an ATM in Mumbai, India. I can have products shipped from warehouses in Maine to my home half a continent away. And I can form a business with employees spread around the globe, connected by wires and radio waves. Why, then, does it matter if a single business owner in Denver is earning very slightly more than a group of owners in Ann Arbor? Are we really so provincial?

Posted on December 9, 2006

The Evils of Disability Advocates

Wrongful birth and life suits, in the context of disabilities, are brought when a doctor’s negligence causes a child to be born with disabilities. The plaintiff seeks damages for the resulting increase in hardship and financial burden over the course of the child’s life.

Disability rights advocates often oppose these suits on the ground that they imply something “wrong” with being disabled. The argument goes that, since there is nothing wrong with being, say, deaf, only something different (i.e., “differently-abled”), damages shouldn’t be levied since no injury has occurred. The attitude behind the argument can be clarified by analogizing to race. Imagine that a doctor’s negligence somehow resulted in a white couple giving birth to a black baby. We’d be aghast if a court awarded them damages because being black was seen as a harmful disability. Since deafness, blindness, or Downs Syndrome are just different from a societally constructed norm, they’re no more injurious than dark skin.

In order to protect the disabled community from the institutionalization of this prejudice, organizations lobby legislatures to statutorily prohibit wrongful life and birth suits.

Few policy arguments could be more self-serving, irrational, or morally bankrupt, however A person of color is able, physically and mentally, to do anything a white person is capable of. But a blind child has severe limitations that will clearly make is life more difficult. Why should that child, or his parents, be statutorily barred from recovering damages for that difficulty—which often takes the form of significant expenses such as special schooling, full time care, modifications to the home, etc.—if it was the result not of mere natural happenstance but a doctor’s negligence?

Likewise, if it is true that disabilities are such a grand affliction as to warrant a statutory prohibition on resulting wrongful birth and life suits, why shouldn’t a parent be allowed to grace her child with the gift of deafness by taking an awl to his eardrum on the kid’s fifth birthday?

What’s clear but never explicitly admitted is that disabled advocates actually agree with the above criticism. To demonstrate how, one need only turn to the Americans with Disabilities Act. If a wrongful birth/life suit is brought to recover damages from an undue burden, the argument against it must be that disabilities are not burdensome. But if this is the case, why does the ADA exist in the first place. Why does it force businesses and government to expend significant sums to reduce the burden disabled people face when using goods and services? If the existing burden is zero, it is silly to have laws requiring costly reductions. But if it isn’t zero, then the argument that doctors shouldn’t be held liable for creating that burden makes no sense. In lobbying for legislation like the ADA, disability advocates are forced to acknowledge the significant hardships facing disabled people—hardships that ought to be compensated if they are the product of negligence.

Of course, the best way to deal with these issues is to leave them up to individuals. No disabled person is forced into court, compelled by a government agency against his will to file a wrongful life suit. Children and parents choose to do this because they have experienced first hand the difficulties inherent in disability. If a particular disability rights activist finds no burden, he can chose not to sue. But to deprive others of that right causes far more damage than the occasional bad feeling when a court recognizes that life with a disability can be hard.

Why Techcrunch is Wrong About Paid For Blog Posts

by Aaron Ross Powell on October 13, 2006

Stem Cells, Rationality, and Unicorns

by Aaron Ross Powell on July 18, 2006

Clarifying the Abortion Debate

by Aaron Ross Powell on May 31, 2006