A theory of discrimination [4]: Symmetry arguments

In this post I'm going to discuss symmetry arguments. These arguments typically arise as objections to discrimination against 'privileged groups'. For example say we didn't allow white men into a film showing. Someone might object that this is unacceptable because if you replaced white men with black women it would be viewed as utterly immoral. These arguments are typically based around some idea of positive discrimination. I'm going to argue that they are interesting and have some force but unfortunately they cannot apply. The symmetry doesn't work here.

So far the theory I have developed has the following kind of structure:

1) Discrimination is not inherently bad: Base Omega theory says that discrimination is permissible unless there is significant reason of the contrary.

2) Whether an instance of discrimination is permissible depends on both the context and the factor being discriminated against.

3) Principle of distributional equality: Across protected characteristics such as race, gender, sexuality all groups have the same talent distribution.

4) One can permissibly discriminate based on a factor if it is significantly relevant for the fundamental goal of the context.

Conclusion:

5) By 3 and 4, in talent related contexts such as jobs, education etc, it is is impermissible to discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics.

In particular, this means that it is impermissible to discriminate on the base of for example, race, in the context of education. This seems rather plausible, it would seem immoral for example to prevent black students from entering higher education on the basis of their race. What however about the contrary? What about 'positive discrimination'?

Something my theory has so far maintained is a kind of neutrality. Whilst it discusses discrimination on the basis of race, it takes individual races as abstract entities that can be plugged into a formula. The thought here is that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong in itself, and every instance of it regardless of which race it is targeted towards is morally impermissible. On some level this is very much intuitive. On another level, it feels like it is too abstract that it misses elements of reality. There is the thought perhaps that discrimination against certain races may be morally worse than discrimination against other races. Whilst I find this discussion rather uncomfortable I think it is important to address.

First things first: in an ideal or equilibrium state, it seems obvious that discrimination against all races is of equal moral weight. In an ideal state we would have no notions of racism in the sense of power dynamics, or history. There would be no impact of things like slavery, war and politics in the case of discrimination. These ideal states allow for perfect execution of base omega theory, we just systematically follow our method to discuss which cases of discrimination are good or bad. It seems harder to apply to this to our current reality. Whilst our base omega theory has some good applications, it is in some sense too discrete: whilst it tells us that some things may be permissible or not, it doesn't tell us the scope. It is not clear that our action guidance here is deontic: they may just provide moral reasons of different strength. There is the thought that whilst discriminating against white and black people is both wrong,  perhaps it is worse to do so against black people in our current society. 

Let's lay neutral to that conclusion for now. In our current reality, there are unfortunately things such as history that have impacts, conscious or subconscious on how we treat individuals. Whilst my theory largely covers explicit discrimination; we also need to recognise implicit cases where the subjects are unaware of some things they may do. Now one might consider the example of a black student who is unable to get a certain grade to get into a university. Perhaps being black is unfortunately correlated with a number of things such as going to a state school, being more likely to be part of a gang or so on. It seems inevitable that even if we followed our theory to not discriminate on the basis of race, there would still be very unevent treatment, despite our principal of distributional equality. Recall that the principal is meant to capture the notion that without discrimination, we expect equal distributions since all races are meant to be equal. In our real case we can clearly see a problem with our principal: its aims and the outcomes do not align.

This opens the door to positive discrimination arguments. For example universities may offer students from state schools lower offers on the grounds that they have achieved less support. This is of course an instance of discrimination, and perhaps one that my system would deem immoral. Yet this idea does not seem so fundamentally problematic. It perhaps sounds worse if we give black students lower offers, but upon statistical justification and restatement of our theory, even if can seem not so awful after all.

This sort of argument can be repeated in many cases, leading to arguments that for example it is permissible to discriminate against men or be racist against white people. Permissible not in the strict sense of course; but that relatively speaking it is less bad, and that the action may overall be morally okay if it helps achieve a good outcome. For example the labour party enforced 50/50 women politicians. This is of course discriminative, but they are motivated by claims that women are otherwise discriminated against / correlated discrimination with factors such as social pressures.

The important thing to note is that the base omega theory cannot be applied directly to imperfect or current situations. It serves really as an ideal. In our current situation, there is a lack of symmetry. In particular, it means that discrimination against for example races A and B are not morally equivalent, and perhaps additional analysis is required. This is not to say that I condone for example positive discrimination, I very much dislike it and will address this in a later post. I simply want to rebutt assymetry arguments. In particular there may exist arguments that propose discrimination against for example white men can often meet backlash claims of sexism or racism. They are reminded that it would horrific if you for example replaced white men with black women. Whilst I dislike both cases, this argument fails because the substitution is unjustified. Unfortunately in our current society, in most contexts black women and white men do not occupy the same kind of status that would justify these moral claims about permissibility of discrimination. Whilst they are both persons which means their interests should be taken into account, the factor of history and the subconscious impacts it has makes direct substitution unjust. Many theorists would of course appeal to notions of power dynamics, cases of subjugation between races, genders and so on. I don't necessarily go down that route, but I can see the argument. I certainly accept that these symmetry arguments are faulty in some sense.

Addressing Moral Sceptics

I've discussed this previously with many ordinary people surprisingly willing to embraces different brands of moral scepticism. I find this phenomenon very surprising. In this post I'm going to talk about some meta-ethical theory in order to help people come to a decision. I am a realist (at the moment) myself, but my aim is less to promote this position but more to clarify what moral scepticism means, or at least what people seem to think it means. I am concerned that people adopt this position without understanding what the position entails, let alone it's consequences. This post is thus targetted at the non-philosopher someone who isn't familiar with the theory but of course is interested in ethics, minimally as a practical matter. Due to this I only target the arguments they are likely familiar with.

Normative ethics asks what things are moral, while meta-ethics discuss what are moral things. In other words, what is the nature of morality. People are perhaps most familiar with the concept of moral objectivism. In ordinary terms, this refers to morality being objective: there is the right and there is the wrong. Someone who is a moral objectivist believes in a brand of moral realism. They think that morality as a concept truly exists. This doesn't mean that their own moral claims are true - it only means that moral claims have the capacity to be true, and that they are meaningful. The intuition for this likely comes from trying to understand what certain sentences mean. If we say something like "Killing is wrong", for this to be true seems to be saying something about "wrong". It appears to be a genuine property, or at least a real thing. By real, I don't mean that we can always perceive it. What I mean is that it exists, even if we can't perceive it. In other words, it is mind independent.

Keep Moral realism in mind as a main point of comparison. The following positions I'm going to discuss deviate from the realist position in different ways.

When discussing meta-ethics with friends who do not study philosophy, a very common line of argument I hear is "Isn't it all subjective?" I will now attempt to describe what such a position entails.

The claim made here sounds like moral subjectivism. Like realism, this claims that moral sentences are truth evaluable. The difference is that the truth of such sentences are dependent on the evaluating agent. For example we might hold that morality is relative to a given society or even to a given person. In this sense, what might be morally wrong in the UK might not morally wrong in other countries. What might be right for you might not be right for me.

I think the main motivation people have towards this position are concerns about cultural superiority. They don't want to say that the moral standards of their own society are better than others. The thought is presumably something like:

1) I live in society X and adopt moral standards Y

2) If morality is objective, then there is  only one kind of standard

3) If morality is objective then Either that standard is mine or it is not mine

4) If it is mine, then any opposing ones are wrong. Thus societies with opposing standards are wrong.

5) If it is not mine, then why am I even behaving in accordance to this standard. Why shouldn't I go about for example killing people?

Both 4 and 5 are uncomfortable. We don't want to say we're better than others, yet we also don't want to say our standards are meaningless. By being more 'open minded' and adopting moral relativism, we side step these issues.

Now for some issues. The first of course is a question regarding the mechanism involved. Suppose that you and I have a disagreement about morality. You believe we should go around and enslave children for our bidding. I think that this is morally wrong. If you adopt a version of subjectivism, presumably we must engage in a degree of mutual tolerance to one another. If you suppose that the law is based at least partially upon morality, you can recognise that morality has real practical impacts. We need to make ethical decisions and differentiate between different actions. Moral subjectivism offers no way to disagree if both sides are equally right. Perhaps you respond that we live in the same society and thus must follow the same rules, but this also seems problematic. This kind of argument seems to be social as opposed to ethical. You're saying something along the lines that I agree to a certain set of rules by being in this society. Yet you aren't saying whether or not these rules have any kind of real moral status. You're instead going towards a kind of moral scepticism. 

The version of moral scepticism I will now discuss is known as error theory. This claims that all moral sentences are false. Since they are all false, everyone is effectively wrong. Thus we capture the idea that everyone has made a mistake. One advantage of error theory compared to subjectivism is its approach to disagreement. If morality does not exist, our disagreements can be understood in terms of non moral concepts. We can explain it in terms of social concepts, for example we are pressured by society to accept certain ideas. 

One issue of course is that one now needs to explain why we are systemically making these mistakes. Recall that our error theory means that whenever we make a moral claim, we are saying something false. There are no moral concepts. Yet we think or at least act as though there are. This needs an explanation. One obvious objection of course is that since our moral talk is meaningless, we are free (on 'moral' grounds at least) to do as we choose. This seems a fairly outrageous conclusion that I think few people would accept. Thus one needs a satisfying social explanation, one that is descriptive in terms of our behavior, and also normative in why we should continue behaving in this way.

I think the social argument also has a few difficulties. The main problem is that there is something very uncomfortable about the idea that the only thing stopping us from killing people is that society tells us to. There are also difficulties with reconciling how our attitudes change. We like to believe that the reason we are able to reach ethical conclusions that for example homosexuality is permissible is because we are reaching the truth of the matter, achieved after evaluating the evidence or argument. It is concerning if such conclusions are not grounded by anything, just lessons from society. We might give an explanation of moral behaviour in terms of pragmatic or social optimality, but this seems rather unsatisfying.

Before I end this post, I'm going to quickly discuss some worries concerning moral realism. I think the reasons why people adopt these sceptical positions is just because they don't think realism is capable of dealing with these problems.

1) Explaining disagreement: as I discussed earlier, how can we reconcile objective morality with the fact that disagreement occurs?

2) Accessing moral properties: We seem to have intuitions about morality, but we never seem to actually experience or see the moral properties. We say that killing is wrong, but do we ever 'see' wrong? It certainly seems to be something very different from for example experiencing the colour and property of redness.

3) Accessing the objective standard. People often associate objective morality with God-like beings, or something that dictates the standard. If they do not believe in God they think that said objectivity can not be attained. The actual problem is not that morality can't be objective, but the question of how on earth we discover it. At least the bible is professing to tell us about an objective standard from God and we can see if we're on track. If it comes else where, we need to rely on alternative mediums.

A theory of discrimination [3]: Relating discriminatory factors with context

In this post I'm going to argue for why we should be taking the base-$\Omega$ thesis and how we can utilise this notion to suggest the fundamental discriminatory premise.

Recall that the motivation of base Omega is the idea of 'innocent until proven guilty'. That is, taking a neutral definition of discrimination as just differential different on the basis of a factor, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such treatment. That is to say that a factor such as racial discrimination is not problematic unless we are able to provide a reason for why it is. The main reason that I am inclined towards this position is the notion of onus. It seems to me there are so many seemingly unproblematic cases of discrimination such that if we do discriminate unjustly, there must be a justification. Base-$\Delta$ theories would of course respond that there is something intrinsically wrong about such differential treatment. I can't however see why this must be the case; we must it seems rely on some additional premise to tell us why there is an issue here. There's the argument of equality, but I view this argument as complex as opposed to trivially true.

Practically there are for and against arguments for Base-$\Omega$. The main advantage is that it is practically attainable. We could in theory consider our current state as $\Omega_0$ and then reason as to why it would be wrong to discriminate based on factors such as race, sex, orientation etc. Base-$\Delta$ theories must assume an initial state $\Delta_0$  that is extremely distant from our current state. In return they are able to pick out the salient discriminatory factors. It seems to me that pragmatically, Base-$\Omega$ is in a stronger position since its initial state is something we can directly engage with.

Now, a first observation is that what counts as problematic or unjust discrimination appears to depend on context. It seems reasonable for women to be barred from men's toilets, it also seems reasonable for basketball teams to discriminate on the basis of height, or universities to discriminate on the basis of education. We can thus consider a binary relation D(c,f) which says that it is justified in context (c) to discriminate on the basis of factor (f). Now there's three things to consider:

1) The set $C$ such that $c \in C$.
I.e. which contexts can we consider

2) The set $F$ such that $f \in F$.
I.e. which factors we can can discriminate on the basis

3) The connection between $c$ and $f$.

Question 1) seems pretty simple. It seems as if we can discriminate in any context (assume Base-$\Omega$) as long as there's no specific reason not to. The best example would be to consider some arbitrary context $c$ and consider an extremely trivial factor, e.g. Deciding whether to go heads or tails on the basis of the coins colour. Irrational perhaps, but certainly nothing problematic it appears. It might be argued that this example doesn't actually affect anyone whilst discriminatory practices are contingently harmful. The response is simply to imagine that your choice of heads / tails for some reason dictates who gets a job, except you don't anything about said people.
Thus $C$ is the set of all contexts.

Now $F$ seems much more difficult. We have a vague intuition about for example racism that it is fundamentally problematic. Whilst some would argue that it is essentially about power structures and systemic oppression, there still appears to be a fundamental notion of discrimination on the basis of race. Further this itself seems wrong, almost perhaps regardless of context. Perhaps this suggests to us that it is unjust for the set $F$ to contain race. We can repeat this intuition with other factors such as sex or sociological economic status. I've already addressed a number of counter examples to these cases, but I won't deny there still seems to be some sort of intuition that it is wrong to treat people differently on some of these factors. The key relating factor here seems to be the inability to change; the fact that one is unable to control their race seems to preclude one from treating them differently on that basis. This contrasts (plausibly) with discriminating on the basis of education; in theory one can change their educational attainment.

Whilst somewhat intuitive, here's a few problems. The first is of course the existence of counter examples; we do think it is okay to discriminate on the basis of sex or gender in the case of toilets. The second is that some of these factors seem in theory changeable but this doesn't seem to change the ethical impact. For example, it is in theory possible for someone to change their sex (perhaps their race) as well as their socio-economic lives. Yet we still retain this notion of inability to change in the process of why the discrimination is back. Further imagine a case where a woman is discriminated and she decides to have a sex change to become a guy. It sounds terrible to imagine that our society would in some way endorse this, in the same way that we wish to improve our level of education. In this sense, the 'inability to change' doesn't obviously preclude these properties from belonging to the set $F$. Whilst the argument is not fully complete, I think this provides us with sufficient intuition to imagine that $F$ includes the set of all properties. Saying this, there is something extremely plausible about the idea of 'protected characteristics' such that it is useful to consider them in a separate subset $P \subset F$.

Finally the important question: what is relation between $C$ and $F$ in any specific token case of $D$? An answer to this question will tell us how fixing a context C will tell us which subset of factors are okay to discrminate on the basis on. It will also tell us by fixing a factor f, which contexts it is fine to discriminate on that basis of.

In cases like this, it seems reasonable to start by looking for intuitions across a variety of cases. Lets start by fixing factor f as gender and consider which contexts seem permissible. A few cases that we seem to have made our mind up of:

1) It is wrong to discriminate on the basis of gender in the context a normal corporate hire.

2) It is permissible to discriminate on the basis of gender in the context of changing rooms (bathrooms somewhat more contentious)

3) It is fine to discriminate on the basis of gender when expressing sexual preferences.

4) It is wrong to discriminate on the basis of gender when hiring a new professor of philosophy.

Now I'm sure there is a lot to say about the opposite conclusion for each of these cases, but I think this helps develop some intuitions. Now let's try fixing context c as a normal corporate hire.

1) It is fine to discriminate on the basis of education

2) It is fine to discriminate on the basis of performance in assessment centers (although we would need a greater analysis of what this is)

3) It is wrong to discriminate on the basis of race

4) It is wrong to discriminate on the basis of sexuality.

Whilst it might seem 'obvious' in some sense, there is a rather apparent conclusion that one can draw from these cases. It seems that at least with the case of our 'protected characteristics', it is wrong to discriminate on that basis unless there is something significantly relevant about them for that context. That is, gender seems fundamentally relevant to the expression of sexual preferences and at least for pragmatic reasons, relevant for changing rooms (although easily contended). It is however wrong to discriminate on the basis of gender, race, sexuality etc in cases where they don't hold great relevance; e.g. in the context for assessment centers, academia and so on. The idea of course seems to be that in certain cases, these factors seem critical for achieving the fundamental goal of that context. The goal in education seems to be achieving the best professors and thus educational attainment seems important but not gender. The goal for corporate hire is finding the most suitable employee so perhaps promising performance in assessments is important but not race.

Note that there is some incredibly important premise that must be at work here. Whilst I claim that these factors are not significantly relevant, I have not actually proved it or even argued for it anyway. In fact, I don't believe it myself, that is I believe that some of these 'protected characteristics' are sometimes relevant and I think it's plausible to think that in some cases, significant.

Anyhow, for the purpose of this discussion, it seems that we must make the following key assumption:

Principle of distributional equality: Across protected characteristics such as race, gender, sexuality all groups have the same talent distribution.

What this means is roughly this: for a lot of our contexts that are not explicitly related to protected characteristics there is a desire to 'maximise utility' which in this sense is maximising 'talent'. I.e. achieving the best candidate for our specific situation. This assumption is saying that 'talent' is not essentially related to these characteristics. The word essential here is important: due to social reasons certain factors are statistically correlated. For example being black is correlated with lower education achievement. However the principle here is claiming that this is not necessarily connected, only contingently. As a result, we should not look at a candidates race to infer their education, instead we should look at the education of the hire directly since this is the relevant factor to discriminate on.

A theory of discrimination [2]: A basis to discriminate

Last post on this topic I concluded with the notion of our base equilibrium state $\Delta_0$, and then consider transformations to $\Delta_1, \Delta_2 . . . $ that reflect different instances of discrimination that we perceive to be permissible. I'm going to discuss these the motivations of this idea, as well as a natural analogue. 

This theory of starting from base equilibrium $\Delta_0$ I call the Base-$\Delta$ theory of discrimination. We start from nothing and we gradually formalise and build up on these principals. This of course is motivated by the following thesis:

Base-$\Delta$ thesis: Unless provided a sufficient reason we ought not discriminate.

Base-$\Delta$ theories utilise the notion that on the whole discrimination is unfair unless there is a reason to think it is justified. In other words, we take the (theoretical) base equilibrium where there are no instances of discrimination, and we engage in our transformative practice by slowly adding factors that we can discriminate with, each time providing certain reasons. 

There is of course another stance that should also be considered, a stance I call the Base-$\Omega$ theory of discrimination. Here we start from our current state, and we gradually characterise the instances of discrimination that we view as unacceptable. This is motivated by the following thesis:

Base-$\Omega$ thesis: Discrimination is not in principle problematic, singular instances of discrimination are wrong only if we are provided by sufficient reason.

Here we think that there isn't anything fundamentally wrong with differential treatment unless we can provided some special case. In other words, whilst the Base $\Delta$ theory views discrimination as 'Guilty until proven innocent', the Base-$\Omega$ theory views discrimination as 'innocent until proven Guilty'.

Both of these theories revolve around this notion of iterated states $\Delta_0, \Delta_1, . . \Delta_n$ and $\Omega_0, \Omega_1 . . . \Omega_m$ where we engage in a type of reflective equilibrium. In other words they provide an algorithm that in theory should lead to the same outcome. I don't expect anyone to ever actually execute this algorithm, but I think it provides us with a good founding. At the least I believe that both ideas are 'sound' in the sense that each iteration is 'justice preserving' thus any correct iterations should lead to a just society. So both of these theories provide us a way to reach the idealised state for a given situation, with different starting points. The Base $\Delta$ theory provides us with a method where each $\Delta_i$ is justified, whilst the Base $\Omega$ theory allows us to practically start from our current position and slowly move towards the ideal (but we might not know how 'good' our current case is).

What can we expect from this idealised state that is to be termination point for both theories? Well we would expect it to be a state of the world where discrimination exists on varying levels, over different factors. Yet there is some sort of causal relation between the factors and the intended outcomes (which are all justified in some sense). 

Theistic Atheism: God transcends possible worlds

In this final post I am going to explain why I have a belief in God and what grounds such a belief.

The first thing to say is that I call this belief a 'faith' type belief because I don't believe my reasons for justification are sufficient to meet the standards of the statistical irrationality criterion that I have discussed in my earlier posts. That is not to say that my beliefs are without justification - I just recognise that there are certain steps that perhaps appeal to certain intuitions that I have that others might not. I like to think of beliefs as having argumentative value on different levels; the belief I intend to expose here is one that I find interesting and observe, but I would not be confident that others would be convinced. Remember as well that I posited that there are no inherent issues with having such faith based beliefs. In accepting that this belief holds such a status I also renounce my ability to use such a belief as the basis of rational argument.

So to start, I would say that I find it very difficult to grasp what are the key aspects of God. The essence of God, one might say. How does one characterise what a God means or even could mean. Different religions have their own meanings, but I think one of the fundamental intuitions is that a God is something 'out there'. By this, I intend to capture the notion that there is something special or supernatural about a God. They go beyond normal understandings or limitations. This at least, is how I think about God.

The next question of course is why I believe that such a being exists. The reason is because I believe in a degree of Modal Realism; a possible world semantics. Essentially I think that there are infinitely many possible worlds that are extremely similar to ours. When I flip a coin, the coin can be heads or tails. Suppose in our 'actual' world, the coin lands on heads, then this is the history that we are tracing. Yet I think that there exists these additional worlds when in fact that the coin flipped tails, and a new history was created. Essentially, I think of these worlds as all existing on some form of timeline, where at every instance or decision, a new branch is created and new worlds are created.

How would I go about convincing rationally one of this position? I think it is difficult, although there are certainly many attempts at doing so. Some of these arguments may in fact be quite convincing. My belief in modal realism however I take to be a faith since I find the whole notion just interesting and perhaps my justification is insufficient on a statistical rationality grounds.

Anyhow, my thought is that in these infinitely many possible worlds, there are also infinitely many counterparts of ourselves that exist in these worlds. Now, I also think that most of these worlds will be unable to access each other, largely based on intuitions that it seems we have not met any extra-world beings. By this, I mean that there are essentially rules that ordinary beings will have to obey in terms of possible worlds. In normal situations, we are unable to transcend worlds or affect individuals in other worlds. The possible worlds are distinct and unconnected in some sense even if they have a similar basis.

I also believe in the idea that we can have a number of different universes, a multiverse if you will. This bears some strong similarities with our possible worlds semantic expect it perhaps also leaves open the existence of worlds or universes that seem to obey fundamentally different rules. The possible worlds that I discussed earlier generally refers to 'close worlds', which makes sense if I'm basing it on a world that occurs or is even created when I flip a coin. The two worlds that arise from the coin flip are of course going to be extremely similar in that they have the exact same history up until that point. Different universes allows for the rules to change a bit more.

I think furthermore, that because these different universes can exist, that it is possible that special beings, 'out there' can exist. The possibility is that these special beings are able to in some sense tr transcend the possible worlds. These beings might be able to come to different universes and might not be limited by the same rules that ordinary agents such as ourselves are subject to. Due to this, we might call such beings 'supernatural', or even Godly.

Thus when I say that I believe in God, I refer to a belief that there exists these beings that could exist in other worlds or universes, that may have the special ability to transcend such possible worlds or universes and enter others (not necessarily ours).

To someone reading this, this might sound completely absurd. I think that there are actual reasonable arguments that can be made to convince about this claim, but I don't see it as my responsibility to do so. The reason is because I believe this, but do not intend to use it as a justification for other things because the 'Gods' are rather different. In religions, that might want to justify their God's existence to convince others to do certain things (e.g. to worship him). They might say that their God is omniscient, omnibenevolent etc. I make no such claims about the God(s) that I describe. I do not know if they have any special knowledge, love or if I will ever experience them. I see no special reason to worship them or talk to them via prayer. I simply believe in their existence, in a faith based manner.

One main reason is because I find these notions of modal realism and multiverses rather uncertain. I do not have a grasp myself of the extent to which I believe such claims. My characterisation of Godlike being is also vague because I do not know the requirements for a God, if there even is such a set. Instead, I am merely attempting to capture intuitions about something 'out there', 'supernatural'.

Theistic Atheism: Faith is a type of belief

This is the second part of my exposition of Theistic Atheism. Recall that the position holds that one ought to be an atheist on the grounds of a statistical rationality view of belief, yet one can plausibly still hold the belief that God exists regardless. In this post I'm going to discuss how one believe in God whilst being Atheist under the statistical rationality view of belief.

The first thing to note is that belief's don't necessarily require justification. It seems at least, that I can believe that Earth is round, or that 2+2 = 5, regardless of whether it is justified or not. Now, simultaneously, it seems that a belief that possesses this type of justification (making certain reference to internalist theories of knowledge) are virtuous in some sense. To some people, it might be argued that a person can only be rational if their beliefs are justified or at least obey a certain type of logic.

The statistical rationality view can be thought of as providing a framework for rational argument and justified beliefs. It is not the only framework, and perhaps not the best one for dealing with most cases. Yet I think it has a certain intuitive strength when tasked with assessing a belief in God. There is a strong intuition by many who would identify as Atheists, that whilst they may not be able to directly prove the non existence of God, they are still allowed to reject God, or at the least the variety of religions that surround it. A note here that some Atheists adopt the position in order to express a negative attitude towards religions, whilst maintaining an agnostic position with regards to God's existence. I assume in this essay that the Atheist we are dealing with has a negative stance towards God's existence, beyond an agnostic position.

So the statistical rationality view was how I justified that rationally I think that we should adopt the Atheist position. When we're trying to discuss God's existence, I simply don't think there is enough evidence for us to accept an alternative hypothesis that God exists. Thus on these grounds, one rationally ought to be an Atheist. A key word here; ought. We note that there are many things we ought to do, but we nevertheless might not do. Perhaps I ought to clean my bed everyday, or to get up early in the morning. It does seem however that perhaps by definition, to say that I ought to have this belief on these grounds, suggests that there is something wrong in not doing so. That I am being in some sense, doxastically irresponsible. Thus at the moment, there still seems to be something questionable about having a belief in God, if one adopts this Atheist rationale.

To resolve this, at least rationally, I seem to have to appeal to a contextualise argument. Essentially I would argue that it's fine for me to adopt the Atheist position on grounds of rationality, and it's also fine for me to believe in the existence of God, as long as this second belief is on different grounds. Thus here I appeal to the notion of faith. 

Faith I define as a belief that is not necessarily grounded in rationality. One can have a faith that there are flying pigs circling the moon, that there is an alien conspiracy or that there is a floating man in the sky. Faith does not require the type of justification that statistical rationality does. There is not this supposedly objective measure of evidence that is required for me justify this belief. I can justify a faith using any reasons, or even no reasons at all.

 Now, note that whilst I can plausibly have a faith in any claim, the status of of my faith belief appears to be much weaker when expressed to others. For example suppose I had a faith that homosexuality was immoral. Whilst it seems reasonable for me to believe this myself even perhaps without justification, I encounter a significant difficulty when I try to convince others of my position. It might even be thought that a direct expression of my faith is a political statement and is unjustified, especially due to my (possible) inability to provide arguments. The main thing is that because is without justification, it seems that I also lose the ability to use such a belief as justification for other actions. That is, again if I had a faith that homosexuality was immoral, in virtue of this belief being ungrounded in rationality, such a belief would not properly justify an action such as a potential choice to send all homosexuals to prison. If I wanted to justify this action, my belief of homosexuality being immoral would need to be justified rationally.

So broadly speaking, when I say that I have faith in God, the claim is actually rather meaningless from an outsiders perspective. Because with regards to them, I need no justification when discussing my faith to them, and I am also not entitled to use this faith as any justification for an action that would affect other agents. This doesn't take anything away from my ability to believe of course. I can still believe in God given the 'contextual' modifier of faith, and simultaneously adopt the Atheist position when confronted with doxastic demands of rationality. To sum things up, one could be an Theistic Atheist if their theistic belief, and their atheistic belief belong to different belief classes, generally one rational and the other simply faith based.

This sounds rather complicated. So here's perhaps a simpler example. Consider a football fan, who hopes that their local team will win. Now we ask the fan whether their team actually will win, and what they actually believe. The fan responds that when discussing this topic seriously, if you look at the statistics of all of the other teams and engage in a degree of analysis, the odds of the local team winning are rather slim. Thus when we are discussing a type of belief that demands such evidence, the fan says that the local team is unlikely to succeed. Yet plausibly, the fan still has a degree of belief in his teams victory. Even though he knows the odds are against him, the fan still believes in his team. His faith in his teams victory goes against the rational evidence, and he certainly doesn't think he'd have the ability to convince someone else (especially one who is less emotionally invested) into believing in the local teams victory. Yet he believes regardless.

In my final post, I'm going to discuss my reasons for actually believing in a God on grounds of faith and why I call it faith as opposed to any other term. To conclude this post, I want to briefly discuss whether one is justified in having beliefs that appear to belong to different classes - statistical rationality and faith. I think the justification for rational beliefs is rather uncontentious, so the main issue is whether we think one justifiably have faith based beliefs. Rephrased we ask whether there is any issue with one having a belief that they know is purely faith based and may lack rational justification. I think the thing to note is that many faith based beliefs are non entirely without justification, it just happens to be justification that would be insufficient to convince a present non believer. Yet it seems that we have many such beliefs that one might class as faith on a daily basis. Many of our emotions for example seem to belong to this category. One might of course view emotions in a rather negative light as opposition to the sort of cold logic of rationality that we have discussed, but I think such a view is mistaken. At the least there doesn't seem to be anything innately wrong with one having emotions, and to deny this seems to dismiss an inherently human element of ourselves. I'll discuss the importance of emotions in another post, but for now I hope I have provided some intuition on why we should not immediately object to people having faith based beliefs, as long as they do not use such belief in justifying actions that would actually affect other agents.    
      

Theistic Atheism: Rejecting the alternative hypothesis

In this post I am going to express my view on God's existence and the particular religious stance I have. The position that I endorse I have called theistic atheism, which to many sounds fundamentally contradictory. I argue however that one can hold beliefs for multiple reasons, and that one can justifiably hold what one might take to be 'contradictory' beliefs if such beliefs belong to what I would view as different belief classes.

Briefly, my thesis is that the way an atheist rejects the existence of God is not based on asserting God's non existence but instead that there is insufficient evidence. As a result, their belief belongs to what I call Class SR (for statistical rationality). At the same time, a theist who believes in God will using a different type of belief known as Class F (Faith), which use an entirely different type of justification. Due to this, it is possible for one to be both an Atheist in that there is insufficient evidence for proving that God exists, but simultaneously recognise that they belief in God regardless.

I recognise that there are a number of claims going down here and thus I will split this essay over a few posts. In this post I am going to discuss what I take to be an Atheistic position and why we should adopt a Class SR approach.

Before we begin, let me make an important note. I use an extremely liberal notion of God here; I won't assume that God necessarily has traits such as omniscience, omnipotence etc. I don't assume uniqueness, accessibility or being a creator. Instead I will use a broad notion of God as something that is in some sense supernatural. Many will likely be critical of such a vague definition, which I think would be justified. I do however think that most of us will be able to have a sufficient intuition on what I mean by supernatural. For now, just think about your favourite God from literature and grant them the benefit of doubt that their existence is not an immediately contradictory notion.    
 
Now, Atheists often ask believers why they believe in God. The Atheists ask what evidence the believers have to justify their position. "How can you prove that God exists?" The atheist might question. Suppose now that the believer responds "How can you prove that God does not?". We might think that it is impossible to empirically detect whether God exists, especially when certain versions of God includes its ability to be 'beyond the understanding of humans'.

Whilst some will take such a discussion to be direct reason to be agnostic, I think such a position is hasty. There is of course a debate with regards to defining these different positions. However I think it is fair to characterise the Agnostic position as one where a person believes that nothing can be known about the existence or nature of God. In some sense one might think this is decidedly neutral. The atheist however often agrees with the claim that they can not prove that God does not exist, yet they seem to nevertheless express a negative stance towards the existence of God. One might think that such atheists are being irrational, and that we should instead all be agnostics. I think however that the atheists are instead adopting a certain standard for their belief, that I call statistical rationality.

Let us carry on the conversation. The Atheist might respond to the believer by asking the believer whether they think that there is a Giant Squid in outer space. The Atheist tells the believer that even though the believer is unable to verify whether the Squid exists or not, surely they do not need to remain neutral towards Giant Squids in outer space. One could carry on by inventing further ludicrous objects that might exist somewhere we lack the resources or ability to verify and yet one does not need to be neutral about each of such objects. The Atheist instead claims that whilst we are unable to show that the Giant Squid doesn't exist in outer space, the lack of any evidence or plausible reasons to suspect its existence is enough for us to express a negative attitude towards its existence. In a similar way, the lack of evidence of God or inability to prove God's existence (or so it is claimed) is sufficient for one to take the position of Atheism; to reject the existence of God.

So to clarify, what I am arguing is essentially that the Atheist position is one where doesn't think there is sufficient evidence to believe in the existence of God, and due to this rejects the position. The claim here is that the Atheists think that the onus in some sense lies on the believer to prove that God exists. If there is insufficient evidence or reason to think this, then one should be an Atheist. This position is incredibly similar to what one might do when they engage in hypothesis testing. Essentially if one wishes to argue for a position that deviates from the 'base' or 'null' position, then they need sufficient evidence for that. If they fail to achieve that level of evidence, then there is insufficient reason to deviate from the null hypothesis. I've discussed it before, but imagine a multiple choice (4 choices) test with 100 questions. Perhaps the teacher thinks that their students have learnt the material. However if the average mark is 25, then the teacher's position doesn't seem to be backed by the data. Only once it reaches a certain point (dependent on the level of rigour) perhaps in the 30s or 40s would we think her claim reasonable.

Joining these things together, the Atheist position is the following:
1) The null hypothesis is that God's lack of existence, with the alternative hypothesis that God does exist
2) There is insufficient evidence to be swayed towards the alternative hypothesis.
3) As a result, one should not deviate from the null hypothesis and thus should reject the notion of God.

Now there are some important things to note in this argument. I've already justified 3, which I think follows directly from 1) and 2). Claim 2) also seems quite reasonable; there just isn't enough evidence to confirm that God exists. Whilst some might claim that various natural phenomena could only be the result of God, there seems to be reasonable scientific explanations that argue otherwise. The Atheist position relies on a certain type of belief system that prides itself on evidence or logical reasoning, and thus will naturally bias itself towards supporting scientific explanations. The theist that denies 2) will often argue for evidence of God that is difficult to verify scientifically under the approach that Statistical Rationality would think necessary. There are of course difficulties in deciding what we mean by 'swayed'. In statistics we would of course be referring to a confidence level, but such notions might not translate directly in our discussion. As a result we will need to assume a reasonable level, with agents that are largely epistemically responsible with respect to scientific explanations. Given all these factors  It think that 2) is fair.

Thus the difficult is now in justifying 1). We can note that one could easily reverse the argument if we were able to show that the Null hypothesis ought to be God's existence, and the alternative the lack of. Plausibly we would be unable to provide sufficient evidence to support God's lack of existence and thus we would adopt the null. Now the question is whether such a reversal is tenable. What we are really asking is whether we should adopt the existence of God as a tenable 'initial position'. I think that there is considerable reason to think that it is not. The null hypothesis is what we want to be our 'base', before we start positing additional theories. Although we are willing to allow for certain 'obvious' intuitions, the existence of a God does not seem to be one of them. One might be willing to allow in the past for the people to claim that there must be something 'supernatural' out there, on the basis of things like the Sun. Yet now there are explanations of Sun movements, rain etc without requiring such a theory. In this sense, I think that whilst we might not be able to prove that God does not exist, we are able to show that we would not need a supernatural being to explain certain natural factors. One might counter arguing that it is actually a God that is controlling the rain or who made the sun in this way, but I think this proposes an additional claim, which would seem to have to go through the exact same process; why should we posit this additional complexity of there being a God over a different explanation? The main point is that because we don't need to posit the existence of a God to explain certain things, why should it be our null position? Presumably our null position should be the simplest or most 'obvious' explanation for a phenomena?

I think that 1) is actually rather difficult to justify. To some, it is an obvious position. To those more sceptical, I hope to have provided some initial motivating reasons in thinking it.    

Anyhow, I have now characterised the Atheist position, and the reasoning that might motivate one to adopt it. I can say that I personally take this position in that I don't think there is sufficient evidence for us to think that God exists. In the next post I will go on to expand my position in terms of faith based belief.