Acupuncture: Evidence

So the other day I was at a friend’s house and the topic of acupuncture came up. Now, I’m one of those hard-line skeptics about “alternative” medicine, and I happened to have read several credible sources stating that acupuncture doesn’t work (is no better than a placebo treatment). But not everyone wanted to take me on my word, so I promised to produce the evidence. Here we go.

First, a caveat for those who want to do their own internet research: there are a large number of biased websites out there, on both sides. If you go to the websites of people who practice acupuncture, you’ll find links to many articles which indicate that acupuncture is beneficial. Don’t trust them! For example, on this website:

The Fertile Soul

You’ll find the oft-cited claim that acupuncture helps with in-vitro fertilization. Yet, the study linked is a poor one, and the most systematic review to date on the subject, here:

Cochrane Collective

Concludes: “Acupuncture performed on the day of ET [Embryo Transfer] shows a beneficial effect on the live birth rate; however, with the present evidence this could be attributed to placebo effect and the small number of women included in the trials. Acupuncture should not be offered during the luteal phase in routine clinical practice until further evidence is available from sufficiently powered RCTs [Randomized Clinical Trials].”

Translation: poorly conducted studies are inconclusive. Internet researchers should also be warned about overzealous skeptic sites, which will publicize the negative results that suit them, but not take the time to consider studies which seem at-odds with their views.

The best place to get your scientific evidence concerning medicine is, of course, from recent, systematic meta-analyses of randomized clinical trials published in leading medical journals. Here is one such meta-analysis, published in BMJ. The article is: “Acupuncture treatment for pain: systematic review of randomized clinical trials with acupuncture, placebo acupuncture, and no acupuncture groups” by Matias Vested Madsen, Peter C Gøtzsche and Asbjørn Hróbjartsson and it is available for free here:

Meta Analysis

This article is recent, being published in 2009.

It is also systematic. A systematic meta-analysis looks at all the articles in a large database(s) that meet the inclusion criteria. According to the study’s authors: “We searched the Cochrane Library, Medline, Embase, Biological Abstracts, and PsycLIT. The last search included all trials published before 1 January 2008.”

Furthermore, it is published in a leading medical journal. According to wikipedia: “BMJ is considered to be one of the ‘core’ general medical journals; the others being the New England Journal of Medicine, (N Engl J Med), the JAMA, and The Lancet.”

The authors reached the following conclusions: “A small analgesic effect of acupuncture was found, which seems to lack clinical relevance and cannot be clearly distinguished from bias. Whether needling at acupuncture points, or at any site, reduces pain independently of the psychological impact of the treatment ritual is unclear.”

To sum up: acupuncture treatments for pain are not clinically significant, and they may not even be statistically significant, once bias is accounted for. That seems pretty damning to me.

Still not convinced? I knew you wouldn’t be. So I direct you to one of my favorite science bloggers, Orac, over at Respectful Insolence.

Acupuncture 1

Acupuncture 2

Acupuncture 3

Acupuncture 4

Orac is a medical doctor, and much more knowledgeable than me. In the above blog posts, he dissects a number of studies and meta-analyses. He testifies:

“When I first became interested in ‘alternative medicine’--excuse me, I mean ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ (CAM)--I viewed acupuncture somewhat differently. No, I never bought the traditional explanation that sticking thin needles into the skin somehow alters the flow of qi in order to induce a therapeutic effect. That is no more plausible than reiki or therapeutic touch. However, there are needles breaking the skin in acupuncture. It was, at least to me, not entirely implausible that that might have some sort of physiologic effect. Then I had to go and ruin that lovely kumbaya feeling towards CAM by actually going and looking at the scientific literature on acupuncture… When I actually bothered to do that, I soon realized that the evidence that acupuncture is anything more than a highly elaborate placebo is shockingly thin. More like nonexistent, actually.”

You should read his posts, or the articles he links to, and see if you aren’t equally converted.

Finally, here’s a press article to stew on:

AP Report

It begins: “Ten years ago the [U.S.] government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.”

Your tax dollars at work!

Accommodationism II

Joshua Rosenau over at Thoughts from Kansas has a new post up about the accommodationist debate.

http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2009/06/more_on_accomodationism.php

It’s typical of the accommodationist genre: reinterpret Coyne so that he’s saying something he repeatedly says he’s not saying, and then have an irrelevant and one-sided debate. Here’s a taste. First, the old (old, old, getting very old) canard that: look! there are religious scientists, so science and faith are compatible:

“Fr. George Coyne is an astronomer. He was, for many years, the director of the Vatican Observatory, and was a Jesuit priest for even longer. Does he see any conflict between his study of the heavens and his belief in heaven? Not at all”

[Note: this is confusing. JERRY Coyne is the anti-accommodationist; GEORGE Coyne is the catholic astronomer.]

Yes, yes, we get it. One and the same person can say both “I believe in the divinity of Jesus” and “I believe in contemporary evolutionary biology.” That was news, like, never and a half ago. So what’s supposed to be the upshot of Fr. G. Coyne-style accommodationism?

“Theology responds to new scientific discoveries, just as it reacts to cultural shifts. Claims about theology are tested in a different way than scientific claims, indeed cannot be tested as scientific claims, but that does not mean they are invalid. He sees science and religion as connected, as informing one another in certain ways, and as rooted in the same reality, therefore incapable of contradiction. Apparent contradictions must be addressed by further study.”

What does it mean for science and religion to be “incapable of contradiction”? And what is an “apparent contradiction”? I take it the view is this: suppose current science supports theory T1, which entails that p; and current theology supports theory T2, which entails that not-p. Then science and religion are in “apparent contradiction.” But the contradiction is only apparent, because “further study” ultimately resolves the contradiction, by replacing either T1 with another theory that doesn’t entail p; or by replacing T2 with another theory that doesn’t entail not-p; or by replacing both theories in such a way to bring them into consistency.

But here’s where things get interesting. Forget whether science and religion are capable of contradiction, and focus on the question of whether they can be in conflict. I take it that some method of inquiry is in conflict with science if when science supports T1 and the other method T2, where T1 and T2 are inconsistent, it is (always or sometimes) science (that is, T1) that must be abandoned or revised. Surely we cannot tolerate methods of inquiry that conflict with science, so the real question is not whether apparent contradictions can always be resolved, but whether they are always resolved in such a way that science wins, and religion loses.

But this isn’t what we actually see from accommodationists:

“If Jesus lived, he walked the same world I do. If he was divine, the words he spoke struck ears like mine. His miracles were either sleight of hand, embellishments by later storytellers, or suspensions of natural laws. If I could take James Randi back a couple thousand years, I could figure that out, but as it is, all I can do is believe what I believe and let Christians believe what they do.”

Please, for the love of God, can’t one single accommodationist read Jerry Coyne’s New Republic piece? Let me state the argument. Among the basic principles of science is the uniformity principle (UP) as articulated by, among others, Harlequin, Emperor of the Moon: things are always and everywhere exactly as they are here*. That is, if the universal law of gravitation holds on Earth, it holds on the Moon, and the superlunary realm, and a million years ago, and a billion years ago, and a billion years hence. The assumption that nature is uniform is just the assumption that induction works, or that science is possible. And we use UP all the time to argue against creationist nonsense. We say, for instance, that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old, because we know (for instance) that radioisotope carbon-14 decays at a certain rate now and thus must always have done so, and thus some things have been around far longer than 6,000 years. Coyne’s argument, if anyone would bother to read it, is that one must reject UP to hold on to statements like “Jesus came back from the dead,” and “Mary was a virgin when she gave birth.” But if you abandon UP when it suits you, you have no principled grounds for rejecting the young Earth creationist’s claim that carbon-14 used to decay at a much faster rate. So accommodationism is on a par with young Earth creationism, at least so far as it rejects, without principle, fundamental aspects of scientific methodology.

Now, I don’t want to weigh in in favor of Jerry Coyne’s argument (here, at any rate). It certainly excited me when I first read it, and that’s what I hoped to get out of the accommodation debate: whether J. Coyne was right. But it seems that literally no-one has read the argument, or no-one has the intellectual honesty to reply to it. You can’t just baldly assert, in the face of compelling counterarguments, that there’s just nothing one ought to believe in these cases, and that accommodationist Christians are just as rational as atheists. That’s precisely the claim at issue! At least say something about the counterarguments.

Rosenau does try to place some religious doctrines even beyond the bounds of the UP:

“Randi and I could surely figure out what the score is with the loaves and the fishes and the wine. I don't know any way that we could test Jesus' divinity, or whether Mary was born with or without original sin.”

I’m thoroughly unconvinced. It’s like saying we can never know whether there are ionizing particles in a cloud chamber, because we can’t see tiny little particles. Yes, but physical theory predicts a mist around such particles, if present, and we can see the mist. Similarly, divine people can, I don’t know, perform miracles; or their predictions are never false; or they never lie, cheat, or steal. Can’t I observe Jesus to see whether he fits the bill? Does ‘divine’ mean so little nowadays? I’ll readily admit that some claims can’t be tested—e.g. “Mr. X has special property Y, which is in principle undetectable by anyone in anyway”—but most religious claims don’t seem to be of this form.

Alright, final quote:

“[Fr. G. Coyne] believes what he believes, he doesn't impose it on others, and it would be as wrong for others to impose their beliefs about science and religion on him as it would be for him to impose his beliefs on me.”

Arg! Since when did anyone advocate imposing atheism on anyone? Let me just make this very clear: as far as I see the accommadationist debate, there are two fundamental issues: (a) are science and religion in conflict? (b) ought we to say so, if that’s true? No anti-accommodationist has ever asked the question “Ought we to force others to be atheists?” and certainly none has or would answer it affirmatively. So STOP PRETENDING THEY DO.

I leave you with Hume, from the end of On Miracles (in the Enquiries):

“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish… When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority which I discover, I pronounce my decision and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.”

*Check Leibniz, New Essays, for the reference.

Science's Claim to Truth

Here's a common trope: science is not warranted in claiming that its deliverances are true. Science doesn't "get at" the truth; rather, it "gets at" what the evidence most supports. So scientists shouldn't claim that their theories are true; rather, they should claim that their theories are what the evidence most supports.

I see this on blogs now and again (I got on someone's case just the other day for saying it), and I think here's a place where a little simple philosophy can help the non-philosopher out.

1. First objection. If anyone's warranted in asserting certain matters of empirical fact, such as that chiropractic is bogus, scientists are. Some people are warranted in asserting such matters; therefore, scientists are. Anyone warranted in asserting that p is warranted in asserting that "p" is true, because "p" is true when and only when p. Therefore, scientists are warranted in asserting, for example, that it is true that chiropractic is bogus.

2. Second objection. To be warranted in asserting that p, one must know that p. This is why it is infelicitous to say "p, but I don't know whether p" (for example: "it's raining, but I don't know whether it is or not"). So if a scientist is ever warranted in asserting anything, she must know it. But scientists are sometimes warranted in asserting things; therefore scientists sometimes know things. But knowledge is factive: if S knows p, then "p" is true. So to be warranted in asserting something, it must be true; provided scientists know this (and if they didn't before, now they do), they may infer from the fact that their assertions are warranted that what they say is true.

3. Third objection. A standard scientific reasoning pattern is abduction. Thus, we argue from the correlation between a rise in man-made greenhouse gasses and a rise in global temperatures, to the best explanation: the conclusion that humans are causing global warming. But on equally good footing is the inference from "the evidence supports p" to "'p' is true"-- for what better explanation could there be of the evidence supporting p, than "p"s truth?

So there it is, blogospheric soldiers of science: lay your claims to truth.

Accommodationism

The atheist blogs are abuzz with the accommodationist debate: are science and religion compatible, and if we think that they aren’t, ought we to say so? Jerry Coyne has a listing of all the main posts here:

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/the-big-accommodatinism-debate-all-relevant-posts/

Right now I just want to consider this one post by Chris Mooney:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/05/31/civility-and-the-new-atheists/

In it, Mooney outlines 3 reasons he attributes to Barbara Forrest for why we should not criticize the accommodationists:

1. Etiquette. Or as Forrest put it, “be nice.” Religion is a very private matter, and given that liberal religionists support church-state separation, we really have no business questioning their personal way of making meaning of the world. After all, they are not trying to force it on anybody else.

2. Diversity. There are so many religions out there, and so much variation even within particular sects or faiths. So why would we want to criticize liberal Christians, who have not sacrificed scientific accuracy, who are pro-evolution, when there are so many fundamentalists out there attacking science and trying to translate their beliefs into public policy?

3. Humility. Science can’t prove a negative: Saying there is no God is saying more than we can ever really know empirically, or based on data and evidence. So why drive a wedge between religious and non-religious defenders of evolution when it is not even possible to definitively prove the former wrong about metaphysics?

[Note, all three reasons are copied directly, and are not summaries of mine.]

I want to take these reasons in turn.

1. Etiquette. I don’t feel the force of this reason at all. Suppose I believe that accommodationism is false, and I base my belief on a certain array of reasons and evidence. If I write up my position and give my defenses, I will have criticized the accommodationists, because any criticism of accommodationism is ipso facto a criticism of accommodationists. So the “etiquette” principle entails I must shut up. But why should I have to shut up, while the accommodationists run around presenting their reasons and their evidence for the truth of accommodationism? That’s a sorry state for a public debate to be in, where one side is allowed to marshal its defenses and the other has to just be quiet and put up with it.

Maybe the alternative is that I’m allowed to present my case, but I must do it far away from where any accommodationist is, to avoid offense. But why? We’re told that “religion is a very private matter.” I don’t really know what that’s supposed to mean, but I imagine it’s something like: people cherish their religious beliefs, and are very upset when those beliefs are taken to task. If that’s what it means, then I can think of some other things that are very private matters: morality and well-being. But surely no-one thinks that we should just let the anti-abortionists, or the vaccine denialists and conspiracy theorists have the only say on those issues, because morality and well-being are “private matters.” And if religion is so freaking private and Ken Miller is after a “personal way of making meaning in the world” why does he have so many high profile books on accommodationism? This seems like nonsense.

Elsewhere Mooney & Co. argue that we need accommodationists like Miller as allies in the battle against religious fundie anti-science wackaloonery. I agree, and I’m all for accommodationist allies. But I say this: no-one is an ally of mine who is so afraid of any reasons or evidence that runs contrary to their view, that if presented with such would turn tail and run to the other side. That’s not an ally, that’s a passive-aggressive control freak with reality issues. Anybody who actually has respect for science and the scientific method will not be turned off but rather invigorated by critical scrutiny of their positions.

2. Diversity. I find the claims under the “diversity” heading staggeringly silly. If you read Coyne’s New Republic piece, here:

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=1e3851a3-bdf7-438a-ac2a-a5e381a70472

You’ll find that Coyne’s charge is precisely that the accommodationists do sacrifice scientific accuracy. He presents three specific charges (probably more, I haven’t read the piece for months): Miller-style accommodationism violates (a) the law of biology that says dead people don’t come back to life (b) the law of biology that says virgin births in mammals are impossible and (c) the (admittedly contestable) claim that human-like intelligent creatures are not inevitable products of evolution by natural selection. (a) is presumably necessary for natural selection at all, because death is the method of selection precisely because of its finality; (b) is a precondition of Fischer’s demonstration of the sex ratios; and (c), though it could be false, is certainly worth looking into and it would be absurd to suppress arguments for it on the grounds that otherwise Ken Miller is going to cry.

In fact, I don’t even know what Forrest and Mooney are thinking here. How could there be a scientific critique of accommodationism that wasn’t of the form: accommodationism sacrifices scientific accuracy?

3. Humility. Allow me to me non-humble for a moment, but what Forrest/ Mooney says here is literally stupid. Of course science can prove negatives. Here’s a go: it’s not the case that vaccines cause autism. Or, if negative existentials are your bag: it’s not the case that there exists matter at the top of a mercury barometer. Does Forrest think that it’s impossible to prove the existence of vacuums? Who is she, the Catholic Church circa 1200? What’s more, even in intuitionistic logic, you get the theorem: p → not-not-p, so a proof of anything is a proof of a negative. Suck on that!

I suspect the heart of the issue is that it’s not possible to prove the non-existence of God. But again, I think Forrest/ Mooney is trotting out methodological claims without thinking about them. It’s impossible to prove the non-existence of a deistic God; but one can certainly prove the non-existence of the accommodationist God. The accommodationist God by definition has causal traffickings with the physical world. He’s a watered down Christian God. I mean, Coyne’s whole point, again, is that science (in his opinion) tells against accommodationism. If it tells against accommodationism, it tells against the accommodationist God. Now, Coyne may be wrong in the end, but you don’t get that result for free by saying “humility.”

Just to head off one bit of criticism: yes, I know, I’ve been using “scientific proof” as a standard that delivers less than 100% credence, so it is always conceivable that accommodationism is true. But (a) if Coyne is right about the evidence, then this conceivability is on a par with, say, the conceivable propositions that the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn created the world; and (b) if Forrest/ Mooney is really saying we shouldn’t make scientific cases for claims we can’t establish beyond any doubt whatsoever, then they’re saying we shouldn’t make scientific cases at all.

OK, that’s the end. I’m sure all of these points have been made by posters and commenters elsewhere. But I plan to post more on accommodationism as the debate develops, and I thought a good first start was deconstructing this Forrest/ Mooney crap in detail.

P.S. Sorry I never got around to posting every Friday. This is difficult!

Armchair Evolutionary Psychology is Quackery

I haven't read the entirety of this piece of stupidity in (Pseudo)Scientific-American, it was just too painful:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=skeptic-agenticity

Now, I guess I shouldn't expect much from someone who uses the words "patternicity" and "agenticity", but this was linked over at RichardDawkins.net, and people there seemed to like it. So I think there's some merit in spelling out why armchair evolutionary psychology is woo, plain and simple. Here's a quote:

"[W]e make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real."

The reasoning is silly. Suppose I said: "If you believe the rustle in the grass is an indication of food when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are LESS likely to survive than if you believe the rustle in the grass is just the wind, when it's actually food (A type II error). Both times you get no food, but the in the first case you spent energy and effort that could've been used to look elsewhere. Because the cost of making a type II error is less than the cost of making a type I error, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that NO patterns are real."

Or, a parody more to the point: "Because I can think of one case where thinking X is better than thinking Y, and the thought that X has property F and the thought that Y has property not-F, it follows that evolution makes it the case that having thoughts with property F is always better and evolution made us prefer them in all cases."

Yes, people say this sort of crap. And get published in Scientific American. And fawned over at RichardDawkins.net. It's unsettling.

Let's set the record straight. The argument assumes (in particular, provides *no* evidence) that pattern-forming is in general better or less costly. We know this to be false, because Bayesianism is the true account of ideal rationality. If you don't set your present credences equal to your prior subjective probability distribution conditional on your evidence, and you don't act so as to maximize expected utility, you will be more likely to die. That's a theorem. Sometimes your evidence confirms a correlation, sometimes it doesn't. But picking "all patterns, all the time" as your update rule is not optimal, and therefore we've no reason to *a priori* expect it.

Now maybe we do form patterns more than it is rational to. It would be nice to have an explanation for that. Presumably it's because cobbling together agents that can survive for more than a few seconds is difficult, and evolution had to jury-rig some aspects of our psychology from non-optimal other bits. But pursuing any particular theory of what went on requires looking at the damn facts. We need to know what psychological traits are heritable (if any), we need to know which among them were available in the ancestral population to be selected for, which competed with which, what the selection pressures were, etc. And we don't freaking know any of that.

All right. End of rant. FYI I plan to update the blog on Fridays this summer. And I do genuinely plan on blogging, so check in, say, every Saturday

Concept-Script

Here's some rap I wrote as my alter-ego Gottlob Frege on Facebook (all-new rap at the end):

No condition-stroke, this ain't no joke, my rhymes is categorical, I'm a metaphorical soldier, inventing logic like I told ya, granting my thought access to eternal, mind-independent mathematical objects, bringin pain down on the haterz, neo-Kantians and fakerz, formalists like Hilbert get cubicle jobs like Dilbert. Russell's paradox set? I ain't finished yet. When I come back alive, I'll fix my axiom five. Word.

Yo yo yo Frege's puzzle can't be solved by Russell, introducing quantification and skipping modes of presentation, you need the bedeutung like dung-beatles need dung, need the sinn like my po ass needs twenny twen twen-- dollaz, holla I be on a roll, taught Carnap all he know, put Husserl on the flo, he used to be a psycho-logicist but not no mo, I put his ass in place while oppressing the Jewish race (sorry about that, btw) got the competition scared stiff like funktion und begriff, now my rhymes bear interpretations like the higher-order calculus of relations. Beeotch!

Frege's gonna shake ya, I know youz a hater, I'll show you who's a mensch with my infinite hierarchy of sense, your objections lost and now your thoughts denote the false, the concept of my skillz is not a concept, it's fo realz. It's presupposed I'm best, just try the negation test, I'll redefine your punkness as the set of all individuals with the same punk chumpness, hit you with the ancestral, befo you got successor, Gottlob was rockin ice before yo mama let ya. You 'n all your dogs can, check the Grundlagen, get the proper foundations... and a solution to the problem of multiple relations.

You Have No Rights. Now Stop Worrying and Get on with Your Life.

I count myself among the “New Athiests,” and I don’t even object to the label, as some do. But let’s forget labels for a second. The particular beliefs I share with, say, PZ, Dawkins, Coyne, etc. are (a) science tells against religion and (b) religion, in being anti-reason, makes the world a worse place.

How does science tell against religion? Well, either God’s existence and activity are supposed to have something to do with the events that occur in the natural world, or they aren’t. If they are, then we can directly falsify religion. If God caused a worldwide flood, we can check the geological record for evidence. If God made the earth stand still, we can use physics to tell us what that would entail and look for evidence. And whenever and wherever we look for evidence, revealed religion will lose. It won’t even be accidentally right, because now we (materialists) are in an excellent position to explain every phenomenon by adverting solely to natural laws.

So if God exists either (a) he* is causally inert (b) he causes natural phenomena, but always in a way that was overdetermined—that is, the world would have gone the same even without God (c) he caused the initial conditions or (d) he did the initial conditions and some overdetermined causation. But (a) and (b) both meet the edge of Occam’s Razor: don’t multiply entities beyond necessity. Occam’s Razor is part of scientific practice, so it’s science itself that rules out these options. And (c) and (d) meet with what I take to be Dawkins’ master argument (though I haven’t read his book, so I just picked up on this somewhere): if the initial conditions need a cause, because everything does, then God too needs a cause; if they don’t need a cause, then postulating God as their cause again violates Occam’s Razor.

I believe something like this, but I don’t want to defend it in this post. Here I won’t be pointing the finger at Believers and saying “ye fools!” Instead, I’ll be pointing the finger at my fellow New Athiests and saying “ye hypocrites!” Why are we hypocrites? Because we accept that science tells against God, but not that it tells against inalienable natural rights. But it tells against them too!

The argument against God goes: we have a complete story of the world, and it doesn’t involve God; and sticking him in is irrelevant and unnecessary. And my argument against inalienable natural rights is that we have a complete story of the world, and it doesn’t involve rights; and sticking them in is irrelevant and unnecessary.

We’re told that we have a fundamental right to believe whatsoever we want to believe, to not be coerced in matters epistemic. But how do we know we have this right? Do we train our rightometers on the oppressed, and notice a spike when they’re forced to keep silent? The other day I read a discussion regarding some individuals’ claims that they had a right to not be offended. Predictably, people said they didn’t have such a right. But how did they know that? How could they know that? It seems as though they couldn’t. This is because rights don’t have effects. They are causally inert. If you have a right to free speech and I make you shut up, the situation is exactly the same as if you don’t have the right and I make you shut up.

Inalienable natural rights are magic. Jefferson thought that God gave them to us, in a magic ceremony one might suppose, and that we can know about them through ‘the light of reason’ or some other equally spooky faculty. But we don’t have spooky faculties that tell us about magic, because magic doesn’t exist. In particular, rights don’t exist.

You might think I’m joking, but I’m not. I’ll give you the alternative proposal: the only morally relevant features of any situation are human happiness and human suffering**. Notice that whether someone is happy or is suffering is determinable by scientific investigation. We can tell whether an action mitigates suffering or increases happiness. There is no magic here.

You might think that talk of rights can be cashed out in terms of suffering and happiness. But I don’t think so. The other day I was reading about a woman in Afghanistan who had had acid thrown in her face by a scorned suitor. Normally, men who throw acid in women’s faces in Afghanistan can get out of jail by merely paying the woman’s family some compensatory sum. This is not a great deterrent, and that’s why so many women are disfigured by misogynist monsters. Now, the law allows for the woman to ask for an “eye for an eye,” that is, that acid be used to blind her attacker. In this particular case, the woman was demanding just that punishment. The interest of the story was that “human rights groups” were up-in-arms. Somehow there is a magical right people have not to be cruelly and unusually punished. Again, I have yet to be presented with the evidence for this.

Now my thinking goes as follows. Some men in some parts of the Arabic world believe that it is not morally abhorrent to throw acid at women. Because this is the case, women must walk down the street in constant fear that these idiots will disfigure them permanently, with little to fear from the law. And many women must live having been permanently disfigured by idiots. If a law allowing these women to demand an eye for an eye were on the books and were applied when applicable, there would be overall less suffering. So it is moral to enact such a law and to apply it, at least until overturning it would bring about a decrease in suffering and an increase in happiness—presumably when men stopped thinking disfiguring women was all in good fun. So please take your human rights elsewhere; I care about people, not about magic.

I think that we’ve become bogged down in nonsensical ‘rights’-talk. Consider the case of abortion. The debate often revolves around what rights fetuses have and what rights women have, etc. But these debates are intractable precisely because there’s no way of determining who has a right to what. One side says “I imagine such-and-such” and the other says “I imagine so-and-so.” But you can keep your imaginings, and you can keep your rights. Fetuses don’t have a right to life, because no-one does; and women don’t have a right to choose, because no-one does. There’s only one morally relevant question here: will there be an overall decrease in suffering if abortion is allowed, as opposed to if it is not allowed? And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist, or even a social scientist, to know that the answer is yes.

One more: Do homosexuals have the ‘right’ to get married? Of course not: no-one does. The question before us is clear: will there be an increase in happy lives if gay marriage is allowed? Yes. Case closed.

I’ve been a little polemic in this post. Good, maybe you’ll comment. But I want to end by pointing out a few things. First, my case against rights does not rest on the truth of act utilitarianism. Rights don’t exist because they’re magic, and they lie beyond the realm of evidence or even fruitful speculation.

Second, you might reply “oh, but there are sophisticated deontological theories of rights that look into both the metaphysical and epistemological issues you’re raising.” Perhaps. But this is a version of the Courtier’s Reply. Your man on the street whining about his right-to-this and his right-to-that does not gain his knowledge of rights by discovering a contradiction in universalizing maxims. There also would not be much in common between what rights he said he had and what rights a scrupulous application of the Categorical Imperative said he had. I am calling him out. I’m saying “what allows you to know that these claims you’re making are true? What makes you think these rights even exist?” I’ll save my battles with the sophisticated deontologists for another day.

Finally, I haven’t given any arguments for utilitarianism. I held it up as an example of a moral theory that does not quantify over magic. Happiness and suffering are real, and measurable. Thus, they are potential candidates for morally-relevant properties. They are not the only potential candidates, and it is a deep question how we determine what matters for ethics. But I know what doesn’t matter. Invisible, undetectable, inalienable natural rights.

Conclusion: the Enemies of Reason™ aren’t limited to those who persist in believing bronze-age myths. Some persist in believing enlightenment-era myths. These myths were important and helpful to our forebears, and they brought about many positive changes in politics and law. But it is time to kick away the latter of myth we climbed in on, and embrace the one obviously true moral principle: nothing cramps your moral powers like not existing!

[* Yes I know God isn’t supposed to have genitals. But that’s what they call it: ‘he.’]

[** I should add animal happiness and animal suffering, but for rhetorical force I’ll ignore animals for the moment. This should not be taken to indicate that I think animal happiness or animal suffering is not morally relevant.]