3 Ibid., p. 80.
4 "Justic Roy Moore's Lawless Battle," editorial to New York Times, Dec. 17, 2002.
5 Frank Rich, "Religion for Dummies," New York Times, April 23, 2002.
6 www.gallup.com.
7 Rich, "Religion." See also F. Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle between Theocracy and Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1997).
8 E. Bumiller, "Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues Abroad," New York Times, Oct. 26, 2003.
9 C. Mooney, "W.'s Christian Nation," American Prospect, June 1, 2003. Also see the website for Americans United for Separation of Church and State (www.au.org).
10 One of the concerns with giving federal funds to religious organizations is that these organizations are not bound by the same equal employment opportunity regulations that apply to the rest of the nonprofit world. Church groups can ban homosexuals, people who have divorced and remarried, those who have married interracially, etc., and still receive federal funds. They can also find creative ways to use these funds to proselytize. Granting such funds in the first place puts the federal government in the position of deciding what is, and what isn't, a genuine religion-a responsibility that seems fraught with problems of its own.
11 M. Dowd, "Tribulation Worketh Patience," New York Times, April 9, 2003.
12 W. M. Arkin, "The Pentagon Unleashes a Holy Warrior," Los Angeles Times, Oct. 16, 2003.
13 J. Hendren, "Religious Groups Want Outspoken General Punished/'Los Angeles Times, Oct. 17, 2003.
14 G. H. Gallup Jr., Religion in America 1996 (Princeton: Princeton Religion Research Center, 1996).
15 Paul Krugman, "Gotta Have Faith," New York Times, April 27, 2002.
16 A. Scalia, "God's Justice and Ours," Tirst Things, May 2002, pp. 17-21.
17 www.gallup.com/p0ll/releases/pr030519.asp.
18 Mooney, "W.'s Christian Nation."
19 See Scalia's dissent to Daryl Renard Atkins, Petitioner, v. Virginia, on writ of certiorari to the supreme court of Virginia, June 20, 2002.
20 See Scalia's dissent to John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner, Petitioners v. Texas, on writ of certiorari to the court of appeals of Texas, fourteenth district, June 26, 2003.
21 Ted Bundy claimed, on the eve of his execution, that violent pornography had inscribed certain terrible ideas indelibly into his head. See R. Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), for a discussion of this.
22 There is a distinction between public and private freedoms that I have glossed over here. Clearly, there are innumerable behaviors that are blameless in private that we ban in most public spaces, simply because they pose a nuisance to others. Cooking food on a public sidewalk, cutting one's hair on a commercial aircraft, or taking one's pet snake to the movies are among the countless examples of private freedoms that do not translate into public virtues.
23 Happily, the ruling by the Supreme Court in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas seems to have rendered these laws unconditional (see www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/o6/26/scotus.sodomy).
24 Viewing the drug problem from the perspective of health care is instructive: our laws against providing addicts with clean needles have increased the spread of AIDS, hepatitis C, and other blood-borne diseases. Since the purity and dosage of illegal drugs remains a matter of guesswork for the user, the rates of poisoning and overdose from drug use are unnecessarily high (as they were for alcohol during Prohibition). Perversely, the criminal prohibition of drugs has actually made it easier for minors to get them, because the market for them has been driven underground. The laws limiting the medical use of opiate painkillers do little more than keep the terminally ill suffering unnecessarily during their last months of life.
25 L. Carroll, "Fetal Brains Suffer Badly from the Effects of Alcohol," New York Times, Nov. 4, 2003.
26 www.drugwarfacts.com.
27 www.rand.org/publications/RB/RB6oio/.
28 These events are described in E. Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).
29 Some 51 percent of all violent offenders are released from jail after serving two years or less, and 76 percent were released after serving four years or less (www.lp.org). At the federal level, the average sentence for a drug offense in the U.S. is 6'A years (from the Office of National Drug Control Policy [ONDCP] Drug Data Summary, www.whitehousedrug-policy.gov).
30 And yet, this mountain of imponderables reaches higher still. In many states, a person who has been merely accused of a drug crime can have his property seized, and those who informed against him can be rewarded with up to 25 percent of its value. The rest of these spoils go to police departments, which now rely upon such property seizures to meet their budgets. This is precisely the arrangement of incentives that led to this sort of corruption during the Inquisition (if one can even speak of such a process being "corrupted"). Like the heretic, the accused drug offender has no hope but to trade information for a reduced sentence. The person who can't (or won't) implicate others inevitably faces punishments of fantastical severity. Information has grown so valuable, in fact, that a black market for it has emerged. Defendants who have no information to trade can actually buy drug leads from professional informers (and they do not come cheap). The net result of all this is that police departments have learned to target property rather than crime. Property can be seized and forfeited even if a defendant is ultimately found innocent of any criminal offense. One national survey found that 80 percent of property seizures occur without any criminal prosecution whatsoever (www.drug warfacts.com). Under these enlightened laws, couples in their eighties have permanently lost their homes because a grandchild was caught with marijuana. For more facts of this sort see Schlosser, Reefer Madness.
The war on drugs has clearly done much to erode our civil liberties. In particular, the standards for search and seizure, pretrial release, and judicial discretion in sentencing have all been revised in an attempt to make this unwinnable war easier to prosecute. Since drug offenses are covered by local, state, and federal jurisdictions, people can be tried multiple times for the same crime-some have been found not guilty at one level, only to receive life sentences upon subsequent prosecution. On more than one occasion, members of Congress have introduced legislation seeking to apply the death penalty to anyone caught selling drugs. Unsurprisingly, our attempts to eradicate the supply of drugs in other countries have been even more detrimental to the liberties of others. In Latin America, we have become a tireless benefactor of human rights violators. (See, for example, the Human Rights Watch website: www.hrw.org.)
In environmental terms, the war on drugs has been no more auspicious. The aerial spraying of herbicides has hastened the destruction of the rainforest as well as contaminated water supplies, staple crops, and people. The U.S. government has recently sought approval to use a genetically engineered "killer fungus," designed to attack marijuana crops domestically and coca and opium plants abroad. For the moment, some rather obvious environmental concerns have prevented its use. (See www.lindesmith.org.)
31 From the ONDCP Drug Data Summary (March 2003). The war on drugs has also become a great engine of racial inequity, for while blacks constitute only 12 percent of the U.S. population and 13 percent of U.S. drug users,38 percent of those arrested and 59 percent of those convicted for drug crimes are black. Our drug laws have contributed to the epidemic of fatherlessness in the black community, and this-along with the profits and resultant criminality of the drug trade-has devastated our inner cities. (See www.drugwarfacts.com.)
32 Ibid.
33 M. S. Gazzaniga, "Legalizing Drugs: Just Say Yes," National Review, July 10, 1995, pp. 26-37, makes a similar estimate. Needless to say, the cost has only grown with time.
34 W. F. Buckley Jr., "The War on Drugs Is Lost," National Review, Feb. 12, 1996.
35 www.lindesmith.org.
36 When was the last time someone was killed over an alcohol or to
bacco deal gone awry? We can be confident that the same normalcy would be achieved if drugs were regulated by the government. At the inception of the modern "war on drugs," the economist Milton Friedman observed that "legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement." He then invited the reader to "conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order" (Friedman, "Prohibition and Drugs," Newsweek, May 1, 1972). What was true then remains true after three decades of pious misrule; the criminality associated with the drug trade is the inescapable consequence of our drug laws themselves.
37 According to the U.S. government, twelve of the twenty-eight groups that have been officially classed as terrorist organizations finance their activities, in whole or in part, by the drug trade. (See www.theantidrug.com/drugs_terror/terrorgroups.html.)
38 S. Weinberg, "What Price Glory," New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2003, pp. 55-60.
39 All of this folly persists, even though the legalized and regulated sale of drugs would most effectively keep them out of the hands of minors (when was the last time someone was caught selling vodka in a schoolyard?), eradicate organized crime, reduce the annual cost of law enforcement by tens of billions of dollars, raise billions more in new sales taxes, and free hundreds of thousands of police officers for the job of fighting violent crime and terrorism. Against these remarkable benefits stands the fear that the legalization of drugs would lead to an epidemic of drug abuse and addiction. Common sense, as well as comparisons between the United States and places like Holland, reveals this fear to be unfounded. As more than 100 million of the estimated 108 million Americans who have used illegal drugs can attest, addiction is a phenomenon distinct from mere use, and users merely require good information to keep from becoming addicts. Addicts require treatment, of course-for which there are at present insufficient funds.
This is not to deny that a small percentage of people who use drugs (both legal and illegal) have their lives powerfully disrupted by them. We generally think of this problem as having two stages of severity: "abuse" and "addiction." It remains true, however, that most people who use drugs do not abuse them, and many illegal drugs do not readily become sources of addiction even in the hands of abusers (marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, etc.). To say that a drug is addictive is to say that people develop both tolerance to it (and therefore require progressively higher doses to achieve the same effect) and withdrawal symptoms upon stoppage. It is not hard to see why well-intentioned people would worry that others might become inadvertent slaves of such biochemistry. While opium and its derivatives (like heroin and morphine) are the classic examples of drugs of this sort, nicotine and alcohol can fall into this category as well (depending on usage). Given our laws, however, all users of illicit drugs-whether dysfunctional or not, addicted or not-are considered criminals and subject to arrest, imprisonment, property seizure, and other punishments by the state.
Our drug policy has created arbitrary and illusory distinctions between biologically active substances, while obscuring valid ones. No one doubts that the use of certain drugs can destroy the lives of certain people. But the same can be said of almost any commodity. People destroy their lives and the lives of their dependents by simply overeating. In 2003 the Centers for Disease Control declared obesity to be the greatest public health problem in the United States, and yet few of us imagine that new criminal laws should be written to control the use of cheeseburgers. Where drugs are a problem, they are a problem whose remedy is better education and better health care, not incarceration. Simply observe the people in public life who are incapable of having a rational discussion on these matters (start with John Ashcroft and work your way down), and you will find that religious faith does much to inform their view of the world.
40 See, e.g., D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, "On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions," Psychological Review 103 (1996): 582-91.
41 "Misguided Faith on AIDS" (editorial), New York Times, Oct. 15, 2003.
42 N. Kristof, "When Prudery Kills," New York Times, Oct. 8, 2003.
43 Ibid.
44 Kristof also misinterprets Einstein's famous statement "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind," suggesting that Einstein was voicing respect for religious credulity. Science without religion is lame, merely because "science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion." Whereas religion without science is blind because religion has no access to the truth -it was, to Einstein's mind, nothing other than this "source of feeling," this striving for something greater that cannot itself be scientifically justified. Faith, therefore, is hunger only; while reason is its food.
Einstein seemed to consider faith nothing more than a eunuch left to guard the harem while the intellect was away solving the problems of the world. By pretending that it could proceed without any epistemic aspirations whatsoever, Einstein robbed religion of the truth of its doctrine. In so doing, he also relieved it of its capacity to err. This is not the faith that evangelicals, or any other religious believers, have ever practiced. See Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Wings Books, 1954), 41-49.
Chapter 6 A Science of Good and Evil
1 N. Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 543.
2 This linkage between happiness and ethics is not a mere endorsement of utilitarianism. There may be ethical questions that escape a utilitarian analysis, but they will be questions of ethics, or so I will argue, only to the degree that anyone is in a position to suffer on account of them. I have elected to bypass the categories of moral theory that usually frame any discussion of ethics- utilitarianism (or consequentialism) and deontology being the most common. I do not believe that these categories are as conceptually distinct, or as useful, as their omnipresence in the literature suggests.
3 One could argue that these behaviors do "victimize" others in more subtle ways. If a compelling argument of this sort exists,1 am not aware of it. There is undoubtedly something to say about the relationship between such behavior and one's own happiness, but this becomes a matter of ethics only when the happiness of others is also at stake.
4 See M. D. Hauser, "Swappable Minds," in The Next Fifty Years, ed. J. Brockman (New York: Vintage, 2002).
5 B. Russell, Why 1 Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), vi.
6 This observation formed the central strand of Carl Jung's famous study of Job, Answer to Job, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958).
7 The belief that human beings are endowed with freedom of will underwrites both our religious conception of "sin" and our judicial ideal of "retributive justice." This makes free will a problem of more than passing philosophical interest. Without freedom of will, sinners would just be poorly calibrated clockwork, and any notion of justice that emphasized their punishment (rather than their rehabilitation or mere containment) would seem deeply incongruous. Happily, we will find that we need no illusions about a person's place in the causal order to hold him accountable for his actions, or to take action ourselves. We can find secure foundations for ethics and the rule of law without succumbing to any obvious cognitive illusions.
Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less) in that it cannot even be rendered coherent conceptually, since no one has ever described a manner in which mental and physical events could arise that would attest to its existence. Surely, most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this. If, for instance, a man believes that his dental fillings are receiving radio broadcasts, or that his sister has been replaced by an alien who looks exactly like her, we would have no difficulty specifying what would have to be true of the world for his beliefs to be, likewise, true. Strangely, our notion of "free of will" achieves no such intelligibility. As a concept, it simply has no descriptive, or even logical, moorings. Like some perverse, malodorous ro
se, however we might attempt to enjoy its beauty up close, it offers up its own contradiction.
The idea of free will is an ancient artifact of philosophy, of course, as well as a subject of occasional, if guilty, interest among scientists-e.g., M. Planck, Where Is Science Going? trans, and ed. J. Murphy (1933; reprint, Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1981); B. Libet, "Do We Have Free Will?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 8-9 (1999): 47-57; S. A. Spence and C. D. Frith, "Towards a Functional Anatomy of Volition," ibid., 11-29; A. L. Roskies, "Yes, But Am I free?" Nature Neuroscience 4 (2001): 1161; and D. M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). It has long been obvious, however, that any description of the will in terms of causes and effects sets us sliding toward a moral and logical crevasse, for either our wills are determined by prior causes, and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance, and we are not responsible for them. The notion of free will seems particularly suspect once we begin thinking about the brain. If a man's "choice" to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, and this neural activity is in turn the product of prior causes-perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of an unhappy childhood, bad genes, and cosmic-ray bombardment-what can it possibly mean to say that his will is "free"? Despite the clever exertions of many philosophers who have sought to render free will "compatible" with both deterministic and indeterministic accounts of mind and brain, the project appears to be hopeless. The endurance of free will, as a problem in need of analysis, is attributable to the fact that most of us feel that we freely author our own actions and acts of attention (however difficult it may be to make sense of this notion in logical or scientific terms). It is safe to say that no one was ever moved to entertain the existence of free will because it holds great promise as an abstract idea.
In physical terms, every action is clearly reducible to a totality of impersonal events merely propagating their influence: genes are transcribed, neurotransmitters bind to their receptors, muscle fibers contract, and John Doe pulls the trigger on his gun. For our commonsense notions of agency to hold, our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict them-and yet, were our actions to be actually divorced from such a causal network, they would be precisely those for which we could claim no responsibility. It has been fashionable, for several decades now, to speculate about the manner in which the indeterminacy of quantum processes, at the level of the neuron or its constituents, could yield a form of mental life that might stand free of the causal order; but such speculation is entirely oblique to the matter at hand-for an indeterminate world, governed by chance or quantum probabilities, would grant no more autonomy to human agents than would the incessant drawing of lots. In the face of any real independence from prior causes, every gesture would seem to merit the statement "I don't know what came over me." Upon the horns of this dilemma, fanciers of free will can often be heard making shrewd use of philosophical language, in an attempt to render our intuitions about a person's moral responsibility immune to worries about causation. (See Ayer, Chisholm, Strawson, Frankfurt, Dennett, and Watson-all in G. Watson, ed., Free Will [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982].) Although we can find no room for it in the causal order, the notion of free will is still accorded a remarkable deference in philosophical and scientific literature, even by scientists who believe that the mind is entirely dependent upon the workings of the brain.