To get at this issue, Munro polled a set of college students about their feelings about homosexuality, and then exposed them to a series of generic scientific abstracts that presented evidence that it was or wasn’t a mental illness (a control group read the same abstracts with nonsense terms in place of sexual identities). By chance, these either challenged or confirmed the students’ preconceptions. The subjects were then given the chance to state whether they accepted the information in the abstracts and, if not, why not.

Now, for one, this is a bad question because I’d expect many college students to come in knowing that the consensus since the early ’70s has been that it is, of course, not a mental illness.  But there’s a deeper problem that emerges if you look at the history of how homosexuality was classified as a mental illness, and how that classification came to be overturned—which, if you’re not familiar with it, is the subject of a really wonderful This American Life episode. There are, of course, real empirical questions for science here.  As the narrative explains, research on homosexual psychology had long been conducted on people who were already in therapy for one reason or another—and therefore missed the rather significant empirical fact that there were plenty of gay men who were perfectly happy with who they were and otherwise psychologically indistinguishable from straights.  But the question of whether some particular psychological variation is in itself an “illness” or merely an atypical bit of weft in the human cloth does not, ultimately, strike me as a genuinely scientific question so much as a normative one. When do we call something a mental illness?  One criterion is that it’s a subjective source of distress, but that’s of limited help, since we’re often inclined to say that it’s society’s failure to accommodate the variation that should be blamed for that distress. And, on the other hand, we’d probably continue speaking of even the happiest sociopaths in the clinical terms of disease because of the distress they tend to cause the rest of us. (Would it be different if we had a general mechanism for identifying sociopaths early and channeling them into socially sanctioned roles?  Other than campaign consulting, I mean.)

Science can inform our thinking about these questions, but the core of the question is often beyond the strict scope of science. An “illness” is a kind of mismatch between an individual psychological disposition and a social norm where we are prepared to reflectively validate the norm. (It’s important to bear this in mind, because the norm itself can get an illegitimate, tautological boost from the sense that science has independently and authoritatively condemned some behavior or disposition as disordered and diseased.) A complete inventory of the scientific facts of the matter might yield agreement—as when, for instance, the mismatch is the result of other widely-held false factual beliefs.  But it might not.

I’m glad, of course, that we’ve dispensed with a lot of bogus science that served to rationalize homophobia—that’s a pure scientific victory.  And I’m glad that we no longer classify homosexuality as a disorder—but that’s a choice and, above all, a moral victory. It ultimately stems from the more general recognition that we shouldn’t stigmatize dispositions and behaviors that are neither intrinsically distressing to the subject nor harmful, in the Millian sense, to the rest of us. And that comes across clear as day in the This American Life account: The change in the psychiatric establishment’s bible, the DSM, was partly a function of new scientific information, but it was equally a moral and a political choice.  The test, if we’re trying to keep ourselves honest, is not whether we place some questions beyond the scope of science, but whether we do so in an opportunistic, ad hoc way, depending on whether the science seems to cut for or against our preferred beliefs.

The Times may believe that, but other experts –and probably most Americans — would disagree. Besides, that’s not exactly the issue. The issue is whether there’s a connection between the homosexuality of the priests and the molestation of the boys.

First, no, serious experts, unlike scientifically defrocked frauds like Paul Cameron, do not disagree. Second, Oliver has obviously—somehow—failed to grasp that the priests who molested boys were almost certainly not “homosexual” in any sense that’s relevant to the argument of the piece, because in general “the adult male who sexually molests young boys is not likely to be homosexual.” I’m not sure how he could have missed this with even trivial due diligence research, since it’s the overwhelming consensus among sexuality researchers, but let’s walk through it slowly, since some people seem to have enormous difficulty wrapping their heads around the point.

Suppose—just work with me for a second here—you are studying some men who compulsively have sex with goats. You might, out of scientific curiosity, want to discover whether there was any correlation between the sexual orientation of the men and their unusual predilection. The obviously wrong way to go about discovering this is to ask: “Well, were they mostly boy goats, or girl goats?” Because the whole goat thing is really best conceived as its own rather disturbed “orientation,” with no necessary connection to whatever preference one might have between humanoids.

So it is with pedophilia. If by “male homosexuality” we mean a general sexual attraction to other men, then pedophiles—including the abusive priests Oliver discusses—are not homosexual. Research shows that men who molest young boys overwhelmingly either have no sexual interest in adults, or are heterosexual in their adult orientation. So consistent is this finding that one group of researchers posited that “homosexuality and homosexual pedophilia may be mutually exclusive.” Evey now and again, a phony “study” purports to “discover” a link between homosexuality and pedophilia, and invariably these “studies” proceed by simply classifying male abusers of male children as “homosexual” without inquiring into any adult attraction. So when Oliver asks “Are most child molesters in the Catholic Church homosexuals?”—the correct answer, if you have the first notion what you’re talking about, is that probably few or none of them are.

Folks like Oliver, who do not have the first notion what they are talking about, invariably find this argument maddening: “Homosexual” means what they damn well say it means, and on that definition a man who molests a boy is “homosexual” as a matter of pure deductive logic, whatever those dumb old “scientists” say. One would be tempted to humor this sort of foot-stamping if it were a purely semantic question, but Oliver obviously thinks it has predictive value:

Isn’t this the key question: Are homosexual priests more likely to molest children than non-homosexual priests? If we don’t know, shouldn’t we find out? Because if they are, wouldn’t it make sense to pay special attention to the assignments given to homosexual priests.

But we do already know the answer to this question, and the answer is an unequivocal “no”—a point on which American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists and the American Psychological Association agree. If by “homosexual” we mean “people who are known to be attracted to adult men,” then we know that they are not more likely, and indeed, quite possibly less likely to molest children. If we expand the term to cover “men who are known to be attracted to young boys”—then, obviously, those people should not be allowed within a country mile of a child unsupervised. But at this point presumably even the Church has figured that much out. Oliver’s question only makes sense if he means “homosexual” in the first sense. And fortunately, we don’t need to ask the question or “find out,” because all the research shows there’s essentially no overlap between “homosexuals” in that sense and abusers of young boys. So again, in the only sense of the term that makes the core argument of the piece intelligible, the abusive priests Oliver is talking about are almost certainly not “homosexual.” That is, they probably lack any adult same-sex attraction by which they might have been identified before their obsessions with children were discovered. Even if you want to insist on the broader sense of “homosexual,” the argument would obviously collapse if Oliver had been constrained to specify, in each case, whether he meant “men known to be attracted to boys” or “men known to be attracted to adult men” or both.

This is not, to put it mildly, terribly obscure or secret information. It is the sort of thing a minimally competent high school student doing a research paper would have discovered via a Google search. Even if Oliver wants to claim the scientists have somehow got it all wrong, there is no intellectually honest way to make the argument he wants to make without at least facing up to this finding explicitly.

So there are two possibilities. The first is that Oliver is miraculously innocent of this point, because he did not do even this minimal sort of research, and nobody at the Spectator saw fit to exercise a scintilla of editorial oversight before running the piece. The second possibility is that Oliver is aware of this scientific consensus that same-sex pedophiles typically lack any adult same-sex attraction, but that he and the Spectator are sufficiently contemptuous of both their readers’ intelligence and basic journalistic standards that it seemed safe to simply refuse to mention this fact—let alone make any substantive attempt to address it—lest it get in the way of some gay-bashing, Times-bashing red meat. I leave it to the reader to decide which alternative is more embarrassing.

Addendum: At a second look, it’s even worse that I’m making it out to be.  Oliver’s basis for concluding that one of the abusive priests in question “is homosexual” comes from a memo in which a superior suggests that he “could be allowed to teach religion ‘at a girls’ school.’”  Here, the kind of confusion Oliver engages in could well have put more children in danger. Because while it’s possible that the pedophile priest in question was only interested in molesting boys, it is also possible that he had simply had greater access to boys at that point. In that case, failure to understand the distinction between a male abuser of (thus far) male children and “a homosexual” could well have put more children at risk. How blinkered and morally dead inside do you need to be to read this grotesque suggestion that a known child rapist be placed in a position of authority over more children and react with outrage… at The New York Times?

Addendum II: I should note that if we’re talking about cases where the victims of abuse were teenagers, then the abusers might not be “true” pedophiles in the clinical sense. It is, of course, rightly frowned upon for adults to be attracted to 16-year-olds of either gender, but it is not pathological. Since the victim of the priest in question here was 11 years old, however, that’s not relevant to this case.

At first, I was just irritated. What bonehead had redacted this? They’d cut out the statutory definition of “basic subscriber information” found in the U.S. Code!  Even if you don’t happen to have §2703(c)(2)(E) seared into your memory, the citation to the law is right there! The missing bit reads:

(E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and

What sort of jackass (I fumed) had concluded that the contents of American public laws were some kind of operational secret? But of course, once I got over my pique at this obnoxious excess of secrecy, I started thinking: Why, exactly were they worried about someone reading that?  I had, perversely, just gained a bit of new information.  Not the statutory definition—that was already sitting on my desk in yet another pile—but the fact that the investigative technique they’re taking pains to conceal (that’s what “b7e” means, it’s the code for the FOIA exemption they’re invoking) involved exploiting that part of the statute in some crucial way.

Now, this was not exactly an epiphany. This is, after all, a model application for getting cell site and sector information to reveal location, and knowing what kinds of orders they typically use to get this information, I had figured they would invoke the part that enables them to request a “temporarily assigned network address.” But it does point toward the larger problem—or strategy for reading, if you spend your time outside the federal government poking through this stuff—that I want to call the Redactor’s Dilemma.

Imagine you’re given the task of censoring documents like these for public release. There are some bits that you just obviously cut out—whole paragraphs describing operational details that, for good reasons or bad, you want to keep secret. But that won’t be quite enough. Because you’re probably going to have folks reading the documents who know a little something about the law, a little something about the relevant technology, and a little something about surveillance tactics generally. Folks who might piece together one of those facts you’ve excised, not from an explicit statement, but from individually innocuous clues that would nevertheless reveal something if an attentive reader pus them together in the right way.

This is where the dilemma arises.  Because if anyone does happen to determine, by other means, what lies behind one or two of those black boxes, you’ve actually given them a much bigger clue. You’ve pointed them to the precise facts that, assembled in the proper order and with the right background knowledge, hint at what you were trying to hide—facts they might otherwise have skimmed over without a second glance. But it’s worse than that, even. Because the facts really are more or less innocuous in isolation, a lot of that information won’t be secret per se. The choice of just which lines to redact involves a fair amount of imaginative guesswork—which bits might a reader combine in a chain of inference?  That means if similar documents are being censored by different redactors, you’re apt to get the worst of both worlds—many pieces of the puzzle left exposed in one document or another, sufficiently parallel in structure to make them mutually completing, with the potential significance of each one highlighted by its absence from the others.  Compare, from the Nevada template:

And now, from a similar template used in California:

Now compare these two, both from the same California dump, but presumably redacted by different hands, judging by the handwriting marking the excised bits in each:

Now, the question again, what are they worried someone might pick up on?  The fact that they can track the phone whenever it’s on with a probable cause warrant? Seems unlikely.  It really looks like they’re skittish about what someone might infer from the fact that they get cell site/sector data while the call is in progress, not just at the beginning. But why is that important?  Here it does help a bit to turn to that “Hodor declaration” they mention—the unredacted parts, anyway. It’s a convenient primer on the ins-and-outs of cellular telephony, the gist of which is to reassure the judge that mere cell site/sector data (1) is ordinary addressing information the telco has to record anyway for their own routing purposes, and (2) is really quite vague location data, not nearly as precise as you’d get from GPS or even the cell tower triangulation methods some phone companies use to provide location-based services. (If you have a first-gen iPhone, that’s how the pseudo-GPS works; later models have real GPS.)  Now, that’s important because for that really precise location information, they get kicked up to the much more onerous restrictions that apply to tracking devices. That vague cell site information?  Practically a rubber stamp—they just need to certify “relevance” to an investigation. Ah, but what if they can turn that vague information into something a little more precise, even without the multi-tower timing data the telcos use for triangulation?  Again, Hodor’s “declaration” here is helpful.  Here’s a crude diagram of how mobile networks work:

The solid hexagons are the “cell sites,” each with a tower at the center. Each arrow is a “face” defining a 120-degree “cell sector.”  The central hex in dotted lines, defined by the overlap of the surrounding sector borders, is the actual “cell.”  Even in an urban area, where each cell radius might be a few hundred meters, if you’re just getting the receiving cell tower and face, you’ve only narrowed your target’s location down to a sector—in the vicinity of a few city blocks at best. [Note: Not sure whether this was my misreading or an error in the document, but a correspondent says I originally flipped the definitions of "cell" and "cell site," now fixed.]

Now let’s go back to thinking about why it’s so important that they get additional addressing information—still, by hypothesis, just site/sector (or tower/face) information—while a call is in progress. We’ve got two distinct documents where (one assumes) two different censors thought that ought to be redacted.  Well, that information would be recorded, as Hodor explains, when the system “hands off” a call from one tower to another.  Partly it knows when to do this because it’s also measuring signal strength, but assume you’re not getting that; just tower/face updates.  Well, at the moment of that handoff, or when the “face” changes, suddenly your location range just got a whole lot smaller: You know your target is somewhere along the border of two cells or two sectors. Now suppose your site/sector changes again—you’ve got a vector!  A third crossing and, given either a streetmap or the assumption that the target is moving roughly in a straight line, and you can start making educated guesses about your target’s speed and trajectory. Two handoffs in quick succession suggests he’s moving through a cell near the vertex; a longer gap suggests he’s closer to the center.

Now, did this possibility first cross my mind when I looked at these documents?  No, not really—but thinking about this stuff breeds paranoia, and so a lot of possibilities cross my mind. The pattern of redactions above make me a good deal more confident that this is probably a popular method of getting moderately detailed location info on the “cheap” in terms of legal process. In the criminal context, anyway—for intel, who knows. They make it explicit in some of these documents that the Justice Department’s legal position is that they can get realtime full-GPS with a mere “relevance” court order, but they go ahead and apply for that kind of tracking under stricter rules because they don’t want to risk suppression. Probably they’re less worried about that when they’re operating under FISA pen/trap orders. But if this is right, they may be pulling a bit of a fast one on judges here. Because a lot of these applications to judges—and certainly the Justice Department’s legal briefs in the cases where courts have been reluctant to approve tracking on such a loose standard—imply that this cell site/sector data, why, it’s so rough and approximate that it barely counts as tracking at all. Certainly, at any rate, it’s not so precise as to invade any sort of privacy interest.  Except that for a target in steady motion, it begins to seem as though they can probably get a substantially more precise fix.

This is a bit speculative, of course—I might be wrong, or maybe this is all old news to people who focus intently on location tracking, and I just haven’t seen the document where it’s all spelled out explicitly yet. What’s more interesting to me is the method… a method that also, alas, suggests a limit to crowdsourcing with these document dumps, since it depends on the person who sees information in the clear in one document recognizing that it’s probably the same text that was redacted in another.  Harder, but not impossible, for a swarm tackling a docdump in small pieces: It might mean that swarm analysts want to summarize redacted bits no less than the contents of the documents they read, so that their teammates can spot the other places where the blanks are filled in.

Addendum: Apparently my own prior reporting on this slipped my mind. The further reason this might be useful is that if you can get a reasonable idea of the trajectory of a target in motion, you can get close enough to use a triggerfish-enabled van to home in precisely. As Ryan Singel at Wired has reported, it works roughly like this:

FBI agents investigating a case prepare a court order saying a cellphone number is likely relevant to an ongoing investigation, and a judge signs off on it.

The court order is faxed to a mobile carrier, which then turns on surveillance in its switches, and begins delivering call data and cell site information to the FBI’s DCS 3000 software.

That software keeps track of which cellphone towers a phone uses or pings. A central FBI database translates a mobile carrier’s cell tower code to latitude and longitude coordinates.

The software sends the coordinates to the agents and technical personnel in the mobile unit who then drive to the general area. But since cell tower information is not precise, agents in the van use antenna array connected to tracking software to zero in on the cellphone.

This is actually somewhat less troubling, because it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that could easily become a routine practice— it’s got to be important enough to find this specific guy right now that you’re going to send a van full of agents chasing after him. But clearly you’d need the realtime data to make this method feasible; otherwise your target is likely to be out of range by the time your tracking team gets to the original location.

The short version is that he didn’t think much of the new recommendations either. He thought the conclusions were driven by bird’s-eye meta-analysis that glossed a lot of important details. For instance, he suggested that some of the data driving that conclusion came from Canadian studies showing few benefits because they disproportionately drew on cases from institutions whose antiquated equipment had a much higher error rate than that currently in widespread use in the United States. From an econometrician’s perspective, he told me, the studies are methodologically exemplary, but few clinicians would regard them as relevant to contemporary practice. He also thought the analysis was too quick to play down the value of follow-up biopsies that uncovered atypical but not-currently-malignant tissue.

Needless to say, that doesn’t mean “I have this friend who caught a tumor at 35…” is a good argument for setting a particular population-wide default, or that less testing won’t sometimes be the right answer. But it does sound like there’s some reason to be skeptical about this one.

Addendum: Since, as commenters note, my hazy recollection of our ten minute chat in the car is not exactly a fully rigorous argument, Dad passes along this more detailed statement from the Society of Breast Imaging.

Now, what’s possible is that the film’s producers are only getting much smaller offers than they want to accept, because U.S. distributors see it as the kind of film that would do limited theatrical release in the slightly more offbeat theaters of metro areas—think In the Loop or The Hurt Locker.  But I suspect that goes to the kind of films that do well in the U.S. market, not any particular theological controversy. If it were a biopic of (say) theist Immanuel Kant, it would still probably end up drawing the kind of educated audience that constitutes the audience for a Darwin flick.  The thinly-supported claim that this is about our national ambivalence about evolution strikes me as an attempt to gin up enough publicity that some distributor will meet the producers’ asking price.

“I heard this lady, she was like, ‘Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?’ She’s like, ‘I’m scared they might do something to my child,’” said camper Dymire Baylor….

“When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool,” Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. “The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately.”

The next day the club told the camp director that the camp’s membership was being suspended and their money would be refunded….

The club itself, for whatever it’s worth, claims that it’s not about race—that a number of similar deals with summer camps were revoked because members were unhappy about the crowding.  Maybe that’s at least partly true, though I wonder whether those members would have felt similarly “crowded” by white campers.  Either way, the club obviously botched the situation very badly—but I think it’s striking that the fiasco took them by surprise. I think the reason that it did may be a belief in the common sentiment that inevitably cropped up in the comments at Mother Jones:  “Children are not born racists, they are taught to be racists.”

This is true in the narrow sense that kids are not born preloaded with any particular set of racial stereotypes—but for practical purposes, it’s bollocks. Acceptance of human difference—like sharing your toys and not hitting—is one of the many liberal virtues that will not manifest automatically unless they’re taught.  There’s an obvious appeal to this sort of Rousseauian notion that all our ugly tendencies come from bad social programming, but in this case it meant the club failed to expect an awkward reaction that should have been wholly predictable: “When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool.”

So… why did the kids do that? Because they’d imbibed racist attitudes from their parents?  Maybe, but even if they hadn’t, that’s about how we might expect them to behave.  We know from social science research that young children will, if you give them even a thin basis for considering themselves members of discrete group, develop strong patterns of in-group favoritism and, conversely, construct disparaging narratives about members of the out-group. We also have evidence from  Lawrence Hirshfeld’s work that we’re primed to think of the world in terms of “natural human kinds”—and that even fairly young children are keyed to look for physical markers that will help them to construct and identify those types. That’s not to say they’ll automatically grab on to conventional racial markers as salient, but I’m betting it’s a good deal more likely when people are already heavily clustered along racial or ethnic lines.

So you take a group of kids who have at least some prior social exposure to each other, and suddenly introduce a new group of kids who look different—and likely speak and interact differently too. What did they think would happen?

Fortunately, the same social science research suggests some ways to mitigate that result. You can combine the kids into a larger group, for instance, and present them with some structured activity that involves working together on a common task or goal.  But it won’t occur to you to do that if you don’t expect a problem. In a way, it’s the same fallacy that produced such shoddy planning for post-invasion Iraq: If you think democracy and universal human brotherhood must be “natural”—maybe because you equate “good” with “natural”—you fail to recognize them as pretty significant achievements that need a lot of hard-won cultural and institutional infrastructure. If racial and ethnic conflict were purely cultural artifacts imposed on our naturally colorblind dispositions, it would be something of a puzzle why so many distinct human societies have again and again decided to invent them. If we assume kids will fall into these patterns by default, we might actually be prepared to take steps to prevent them.

Update: Just to clarify, I don’t mean to deny that kids are often less afflicted with the racial hangups adults accumulate. There is, for instance, research suggesting that younger kids show much less racial clustering in their choice of playmates at school.  In this case, if the incident happened as described, I think it probably made a big difference that this was a group of “outsider” children arriving at once, rather than a bunch of minority kids who arrived at different times, which would be a lot more likely to trigger a sense that there’s some coherent “them” coming in to claim “our” space.

Belief in a deity (or deities), and the desire to worship it or them, is an almost universal aspect of human nature. This not something that can be wished or indoctrinated away, and it’s pointless and maybe even destructive to try. It’s far better, surely, to channel that impulse by giving children some sort of gentle religious grounding, preferably in a well-established, undemanding, culturally useful (understanding all that art and so on) and mildly (small c) conservative denomination that doesn’t dwell too much on the supernatural and keeps both ritual and philosophical speculation in their proper place. Better the vicar than Wicca, say I.

I’m suspicious of my own gut reactions to claims like this, because if there is some nigh-universal human religious impulse,  I’m one of the aberrations born without the gene for it. Still, it’s intuitively more plausible to me that someone raised to accept the supernatural in an innocuous guise (unlike Stuttaford, I’m inclined to include Wicca in that group) would be rendered more susceptible to one of the more malign versions. Having accepted a deity, it seems a smaller leap to change your view about what It demands of us. Those raised within a religion also change at fairly high rates, after all, so whatever prophylactic effect such an upbringing has is limited, though it would be interesting to look more closely at how the starting point affects the destination for those who do switch.

It looks like we have some data here, in the form of the Pew survey (and the ensuing New York Times op-ed) to which Stuttaford is responding. That poll found that while the “unaffiliated” are the fastest growing “religious” group, children raised without an affiliation are more likely to end up with one than those raised within a faith are to switch religions (or abandon it altogether).  The problem is, “unaffiliated” isn’t all that helpful a category—it’s easy to conflate with “secular,” but a closer look makes clear that this isn’t the case: Lots of people who lack affiliation to any particular church hold religious, or at least “spiritual” beliefs, and even attend religious services at least sporadically. And in the other direction, there’s no need to fear “ritualistic replacements for ritual, cults of Reason, readings from Dawkins and endless, achingly tedious hours of discussion about the meaning of life,” because plenty of organized religions are not overly concerned with the contents of members’ beliefs.  Neither of my parents are believers, and I was an atheist more or less from the instant I understood what religion was and that (contrary to my first assumption) the adults were not having an elaborate game of pretend for our benefit. But I was arguably “raised Unitarian” at least insofar as, for several years, I was bustled off each week to Sunday School at the Ridgewood UU society, composed chiefly of other atheists and agnostics with a fondness for stained glass and organ music. One was welcome to believe in God, to be sure, but on the rare occasions when the subject came up, it was always with a certain NPRish air of indulgent detachment.

Which brings us around to the core problem with Stuttaford’s claim. As James Joyner observes, it’s a little doubtful whether the need to worship deities can really be an ineradicable, hardwired human trait when polls show that in much of Western Europe, the proportion of the population describing itself as atheist or agnostic approaches or exceeds the 50 percent mark. (My own experience is that self-described agnostics are, pretty much to the last man, just polite atheists: functional unbelievers eager to telegraph that they don’t wish to be jerks about whatever you believe.)  Either they’ve split off into a new species over there, or Stuttaford’s chief assertion is just plainly empirically false: In many human societies, this universal impulse is indeed fading away, and indeed, probably prevented from fading still faster only by high rates of immigration. Bracketing the question of whether this is good or bad, or whether it’s associated with other harmful social trends, it’s clearly possible. The next question, then, is why religion might seem like such an inextricable part of the human condition, and

“But wait,” you cry, “what about all those Scientific American cover teasers I’ve glimpsed over the years about how we’re hardwired for religion?” Well, look again at the reasons people give for joining or switching religions in that Pew poll and you’ll see, not symptoms of some one unified religious impulse, but a variety of rationales. Many people cite what amounts to a desire for community and fellowship, which I have no doubt is close behind food, water, and oxygen on the list of universal human needs. Insofar as it usually takes something a bit thicker than a shared occupational or real estate choice to anchor a stable community, religion does the job well enough, but there’s no obvious reason other forms of civic association are incapable of picking up the slack.

Then there’s that large and nebulous category of “spiritual needs,” which probably comes closer to what Stuttaford’s referring to—though to the extent this is a common complaint, I’d expect it to be leveled against the sort of etiolated pro forma religious observance he’s recommending. I’m never sure I know exactly what people are talking about when they use language like this, and I’m skeptical that it’s a well-formed category at all. You can lump together fatigue, illness, impotence, and depression under the heading “diminished qi” or “orgone deficit,” which gives you two dubious assumptions for the price of one: First, that these three very real phenomena are of the same basic type or share a common cause (though of course they sometimes do), and second, that some version of the theory implicit in the label accounts for many such phenomena, even if one or two are misdiagnosed in the instance. We routinely feel bad about a lot of things, and because most religions posit an invisible order or a future realm where everything works out for the best somehow or other, they have an adaptable means for making us feel better about many of them. I doubt any godless carbon-copy of organized religion, as Stuttaford imagines, will do the job as well across the board as the time-tested champs,  but if “spiritual” is a category error, it may turn out that we have an array of better means of dealing with the component problems that make up the ersatz class. Put it this way: Every society has knives and bladed tools, but not because we’re hardwired for knifiness, or because there’s a fundamental, universal human bladed impulse. What’s universal are a variety of diverse problems and situations that knives are good at solving. In a modern society, though, you’ve probably got a dozen task-specific knives that stay in your kitchen, and you manage to get by without a sword or a dagger strapped to your belt.

Finally, to the extent it’s distinct from the previous category, there’s what we call the “religious experience,” the kind of ineffable ecstatic feeling that may be common to some of the respondents who described themselves as “called by God” to their prefered denomination. No doubt that, as a consequence of how we’re wired, a fair number of people will continue to have such experiences for the foreseeable future. There will be epileptics and people who take drugs in every society for a long while to come yet as well, but it doesn’t follow that we’re therefore compelled to think of the former as possessed by demons and the latter as shamans.  On the contrary, those interpretations are pretty much extinct among educated people. Universal phenomena may frequently be read through similar cultural lenses—but the phenomenon does not determine or demand the lens.

If this is roughly on point, a secularist who wants to ensure his kids aren’t easy prey for nutty doctrines has an alternative to inoculating them with some gelded lo-carb form of faith. Instead, he can try to supply them with the array of tools required to address the needs religion satisfies, to interpret the experiences religion purports to explain, and to grapple with the questions to which religion promises pat answers. Inevitably, a thoughtful and independent child will reject some of the parent’s preferred tools and lenses. But they’ll probably end up looking for ways to improve or replace those particular tools and lenses, not for the wonder tonic that does it all. They’ll have the same holes in their hearts we all do from time to time, but less use for the blunt God-shaped plug we carve when we’re trying to fill them all at the same time.

Now, I’m not necessarily arguing that it’s right [in the famous Trolley Problem] to push the fat man — or for the government to “push the fat man.” But the two variants of this dilemma show how our irrational social emotions interfere with how we dispense justice. In fact, a study found that a certain type of brain damage could affect how people judged scenarios such as these. According to the study, “damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC)” — a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions, such as empathy — “increases ‘utilitarian’ choices in moral dilemmas — judgments, that is, that favor the aggregate welfare over the welfare of fewer individuals.”

Which judge would you rather have? The brain-damaged judge who can put aside social feelings and arrive at the formally correct answer? Or the judge who won’t push the fat man when the fat man needs to be pushed?

The opening caveat notwithstanding, I wouldn’t have gone with this example precisely because whatever one thinks of it from a strictly ethical point of view, I think there are excellent institutional reasons for drawing some sharp distinctions between what the government may deliberately do to people and what it may countenance as a side effect of otherwise permissible actions. More generally, the law is an evolved and evolving pastiche of domain-specific rules; there is almost certainly no higher-order moral theory into which they all coherently fit. In some sense, then, you can probably  characterize certain groupings of “correct” rulings as jointly irrational, but I’m not terribly sanguine about judges who see it as their mission to correct this defect in some systemic way.  One of many ways to interpret the trolley problem is as illustrating a distinction between “rational” and “emotional” decision making. Another, however, is as highlighting the difference between telic and nomic decision procedures: Is the ultimate authority here a goal (maximize welfare) or a rule (don’t intentionally harm others)?  Broadly speaking, our system’s division of labor suggests that we want more goal-focused legisators and more rule-observing judges.

Anyway, it seems unnecessary to fuss with trolleys, since Sager’s central point (absent the neurological trappings) is extremely well put by Hume in the Treatise of Human Nature:

A single act of justice is frequently contrary to public interest; and were it to stand alone, without being follow’d by other acts, may, in itself, be very prejudicial to society. When a man of merit, of a beneficent disposition, restores a great fortune to a miser, or a seditious bigot, he has acted justly and laudably, but the public is a real sufferer. Nor is every single act of justice, consider’d apart, more conducive to private interest, than to public; and ’tis easily conceiv’d how a man may impoverish himself by a signal instance of integrity, and have reason to wish, that with regard to that single acct, the laws of justice were for a moment suspended in the universe.

Or, briefer still: Hard cases make bad law. As Sager points out, while it’s usually leftish folks who think empathy is desirable in a judge, litigators on the right know how to look for sympathetic plaintiffs too: the small farmer ruined by a spotted owl; the rape victim who couldn’t buy a gun to defend herself. Whichever way it cuts ideologically, your feelings about the litigants in particular case don’t seem like a reliable guide to either good policy or sound legal interpretation.

The main advantage I see to more “empathic” judging is highlighted by a case that’s been much discussed recently as an example of why the court’s gender balance matters: A school’s unconscionable decision to strip search a 13-year old girl (wrongly) accused of having given a friend prescription ibuprofen. Insofar as the Court employs “balancing tests” to resolve conflicts of constitutionally protected interests, you need judges who are capable of actually understanding the interests at stake. The idea is not that the judge should dispense with concern for the legally correct outcome and seek the more emotionally satisfying one, but that determining the legally correct outcome requires a measure of emotional intelligence in order to correctly weigh the claims that need balancing. It’s hard to determine whether a certain type of intrusive search is “reasonable,” or whether a law has a sufficiently strong chilling effect to trigger First Amendment scrutiny, if you can’t really imagine yourself in the position of someone subject to either. That said, I tend to think it would be better if the Court came up with decision procedures a bit more fully specified than “eyeball it and do a gut check,” relied less on balancing tests, and had commensurately less need for empathetic justices.