I won't belabor this message, but as I have continued to study the economic issues that face the U.S., I believe that we are now on an unavoidable collision course with reality. It is my opinion that we will in fact, fall into depression within two years. Drastic prediction? In the white hot economy of 2006 I wrote my book predicting that there would be a housing collapse, an economic collapse, high unemployment, and in short, all that we are experiencing today. Nearly everyone at the time said that I was mad as a hatter, including those at the highest levels of leadership.

The last lumber yard in our nearby supply center of Delta has now closed. Commercial space that was built in 2006 remains vacant. We will continue to see business's fold the proverbial tent and unemployment will continue to climb as the positive feedback loop gains strength.

We have reached debt, population, consumption, and employment limits that are only being supported by our Federal government incurring a $1.5 Trillion annual deficit. There absolutely nothing that can be done to avoid our downfall. Debt capitalism has reached its mathematical limits. What we are actually experiencing is the end of a mathematically impossible system that is being exacerbated by increasing man made fiat debt.

As states, cities, counties, towns and the general citizenry simultaneously approach monetary impasses (limits to debt combined with limits to production), the politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to appease us by directing their fairy tale speeches at our normalcy bias (the inner desire to believe that we can return to our own perceptions of normal).

We pretend that the five million home owners who are behind at least two months in their house payments, is not a faction of physics, but simply a matter of political leadership. We pretend that those folks who have lost their homes, jobs, retirement, cars, hopes and dreams...can all be reinstated by electing some new morons to Congress.

But most of all, we pretend that humankind can trump the universal laws of natural physics and that Congress can repeal the Laws of Thermodynamics with a simple vote.

In short, I believe that we have precious little time to prepare for another depression, that unlike the Great Depression, will never end. We have simply overgrazed the entire range and this ain't 1929.

1. American Imperative: Keep the Applecart Rolling Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak has bowed to pressure and appointed a vice-president; in reality, a successor to take his place after his departure, which may come within a matter of days, if not hours.

But the pressure that led to Mubarak's decision came not from the revolution erupting in Egypt -- at least, not directly. No, it almost certainly came from his imperial patrons and paymasters in Washington. Even the third-rate poltroons on the Potomac can see that Mubarak is a now a decidedly dead duck, destined to end his days in luxurious exile in Saudi Arabia or some other friendly tyranny. So they are now scrambling to put Egypt under the control of the proverbial "safe pair of hands" -- someone whose main concern will be "continuity" in advancing the interests of the American power structure.

Why, that sounds like someone else we know -- a guy who took over from one of the most despised presidents in American history ... and promptly began replicating his most heinous policies.

In like fashion, Mubarak has now appointed his spymaster, Omar Suleiman, who has been at the center of the regime's brutal power structure for 20 years, as vice-president of the country. He has also named a retired military man, Ahmed Shafik, as prime minister. Perhaps not coincidentally, the New York Times published a revealing story on Saturday detailing the remarkably close interconnections between the American and Egyptian military-security complexes, going back several decades -- a relationship that has been worth billions of dollars to war profiteers, bagmen and baksheesh-peddlers in both countries, for generations.

It seems painfully obvious that the Continuer-in-Chief and the imperial militarists along the Potomac are seeking desperately to keep this golden applecart on the road. Installing a longtime chief of intelligence like Suleiman fits the bill nicely. Mubarak had better start packing his bags. For as always, whenever the American Power Structuralists find that a foreign puppet no longer serves their purposes, they are quick to toss him aside. No doubt we will soon see a steady leakage of stories from "senior White House aides," "unnamed intelligence officials in a position to know" and "Pentagon insiders who asked to remain anonymous" telling us how terrible Mubarak has been all along. This will be done either to undermine the puppet if he tries to cling to office, or else as the usual erasure of the historical record, if Hosni has already hopped a Lear Jet to new digs beyond the Nile.

But I think the people of Egypt might refuse to follow this old, moth-eaten script. The regime of Hosni Mubarak is not the only power center that is seeing its ability to control events on behalf of a corrupt elite draining away on the Egyptian streets.

2. Profiles in Wiggliness

Oh, but you know what? We even shouldn't be talking about all this. This whole Egyptian uprising business seems to be making some of our leading progressives feel a bit wiggly. Atrios, for example, has salted several of his brief squibs about these momentous events with grumpy asides. For example:

I get a bit fed up with the ultra-serious tweeting and retweeting the revolution stuff which happens when Big Events are going on.

Yes, don't you just hate that? People being all ultra-serious and stuff about a brave popular uprising in a long-repressed land? I mean, really: couldn't they just do some cat-blogging or something? That would be, like, way more cool.

Or this:

I get a wee bit uncomfortable at the way people enthusiastically cheer on revolutionary movements in other countries they don't know much about. I'm not defending bad governments, just objecting to the notion that revolution=democracy. It's never clear what will emerge on the other side.

Yeah, that makes me squirm a wee bit in my Barcalounger as well: people being all ignorantly enthusiastic about these breakthrough moments in history, these rare upsurgings of the human spirit. Why, they probably haven't even read an article from the Center for American Progress telling them what to think about it yet! People like that should just shut up. It's like back in '89, when people were enthusiastically cheering the Velvet Revolution and all that other tiresome, ultra-serious shit. I mean, how many of them really knew anything about Czechoslovakia or Romania? And anyway, you never know what the end result of any of these so-called, whoop-de-doo "Big Events" might be. So why get all wrought up about it? Seriously uncool.

The eye-rolling goes on:

I get depressed by the fact that whenever there is a major event somewhere in the world few people can manage to go past the question of, "What should we (the US) do?" I know that things are a bit more complicated, and our being involved in everything already complicates them further, but the answer, mostly, is "nothing."

Yeah, I guess our being the main international backer of a 30-year dictatorship does, like, "complicate" things a bit. So obviously, the main thing for Washington to do now is "nothing." That is, it should take no action whatsoever to change the status quo. It should not repudiate the murderous dictator -- whose American-trained, American-armed security forces have already gunned down 100 innocent people taking to the streets to demand dignity and freedom. (Although of course if these irritatingly ultra-serious people had just stayed home cat-blogging, they'd still be alive!) Washington shouldn't apologize abjectly for this atrocious record. Washington shouldn't cut off the spigot of bribery and weaponry to the Egyptian elite. Washington shouldn't stop using Egypt as an off-shore outlet for torture. Washington shouldn't pledge to support and respect the emergence of genuine democracy in Egypt -- wherever it might lead. No, Washington should do none of this, or anything like it. It should simply do nothing, make no changes at all.

In fact, doing nothing is really the best thing all around, don't you think? Because actually doing something about these monstrous injustices would just be too "ultra-serious," wouldn't it? It would just keep making us feel strangely agitated and dissatisfied: "fed-up," "depressed," "a wee bit uncomfortable," with all this talk about people taking action against economic, social and political repression, people who are no longer content to sit back and accept a corrupt and degrading system, confining their "dissent" to a few savvy, ironic quips now and then, but are instead rising up and actually risking something -- lives, livelihoods, liberties -- in a courageous attempt to achieve genuine change. And lord knows, we can't have that, can we? After all, you never know what might emerge on the other side!

Last January, the Supreme Court handed our democracy over to corporations.

It said, in its Citizens United decision, that corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money to try to elect or defeat candidates for office.

It said that corporations are, amazingly, persons.

So long as this ruling stands, any hope of having democracy in America will fade.

But fortunately, the vast majority of the American public despises this ruling and favors the only remedy available to us: amending the Constitution.

In a recent poll by Hart Research, 87% of Democrats, 82% of Independents, and even 68% of Republicans support the passage of an amendment that would “make clear that corporations do not have the same rights as people.”

There is, of course, a problem, a classic Catch-22.

To amend the Constitution, we’ll have to get supermajorities from our elected officials. Yet most of those officials are beholden to corporations that fund them, and those that aren’t would naturally fear retribution from big business at the polls the next time around.

The only way to break this Catch-22 is to organize from the ground up: at city councils, at county boards, at state legislatures.

So please get involved in this fundamental effort to democratize the United States. Go to freespeechforpeople.org or movetoamend.org, sign a petition, and pass the word.

We can get this done.

Last Saturday, reported The Financial Times, some of the world’s most powerful financial executives were going to hold a private meeting with finance ministers in Davos, the site of the World Economic Forum. The principal demand of the executives, the newspaper suggested, would be that governments “stop banker-bashing.” Apparently bailing bankers out after they precipitated the worst slump since the Great Depression isn’t enough — politicians have to stop hurting their feelings, too.

But the bankers also had a more substantive demand: they want higher interest rates, despite the persistence of very high unemployment in the United States and Europe, because they say that low rates are feeding inflation. And what worries me is the possibility that policy makers might actually take their advice.

To understand the issues, you need to know that we’re in the midst of what the International Monetary Fund calls a “two speed” recovery, in which some countries are speeding ahead, but others — including the United States — have yet to get out of first gear.

The U.S. economy fell into recession at the end of 2007; the rest of the world followed a few months later. And advanced nations — the United States, Europe, Japan — have barely begun to recover. It’s true that these economies have been growing since the summer of 2009, but the growth has been too slow to produce large numbers of jobs. To raise interest rates under these conditions would be to undermine any chance of doing better; it would mean, in effect, accepting mass unemployment as a permanent fact of life.

What about inflation? High unemployment has kept a lid on the measures of inflation that usually guide policy. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, which excludes volatile energy and food prices, is now running below half a percent at an annual rate, far below the informal target of 2 percent.

But food and energy prices — and commodity prices in general — have, of course, been rising lately. Corn and wheat prices rose around 50 percent last year; copper, cotton and rubber prices have been setting new records. What’s that about?

The answer, mainly, is growth in emerging markets. While recovery in advanced nations has been sluggish, developing countries — China in particular — have come roaring back from the 2008 slump. This has created inflation pressures within many of these countries; it has also led to sharply rising global demand for raw materials. Bad weather — especially an unprecedented heat wave in the former Soviet Union, which led to a sharp fall in world wheat production — has also played a role in driving up food prices.

The question is, what bearing should all of this have on policy at the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank?

First of all, inflation in China is China’s problem, not ours. It’s true that right now China’s currency is pegged to the dollar. But that’s China’s choice; if China doesn’t like U.S. monetary policy, it’s free to let its currency rise. Neither China nor anyone else has the right to demand that America strangle its nascent economic recovery just because Chinese exporters want to keep the renminbi undervalued.

What about commodity prices? The Fed normally focuses on “core” inflation, which excludes food and energy, rather than “headline” inflation, because experience shows that while some prices fluctuate widely from month to month, others have a lot of inertia — and it’s the ones with inertia you want to worry about, because once either inflation or deflation gets built into these prices, it’s hard to get rid of.

And this focus has served the Fed well in the past. In particular, the Fed was right not to raise rates in 2007-8, when commodity prices soared — briefly pushing headline inflation above 5 percent — only to plunge right back to earth. It’s hard to see why the Fed should behave differently this time, with inflation nowhere near as high as it was during the last commodity boom.

So why the demand for higher rates? Well, bankers have a long history of getting fixated on commodity prices. Traditionally, that meant insisting that any rise in the price of gold would mean the end of Western civilization. These days it means demanding that interest rates be raised because the prices of copper, rubber, cotton and tin have gone up, even though underlying inflation is on the decline.

Ben Bernanke clearly understands that raising rates now would be a huge mistake. But Jean-Claude Trichet, his European counterpart, is making hawkish noises — and both the Fed and the European Central Bank are under a lot of external pressure to do the wrong thing.

The uprising in Egypt, although united around the nearly universal desire to rid the country of the military dictator Hosni Mubarak, also presages the inevitable shift within the Arab world away from secular regimes toward an embrace of Islamic rule. Don’t be fooled by the glib sloganeering about democracy or the facile reporting by Western reporters—few of whom speak Arabic or have experience in the region. Egyptians are not Americans. They have their own culture, their own sets of grievances and their own history. And it is not ours. They want, as we do, to have a say in their own governance, but that say will include widespread support—especially among Egypt’s poor, who make up more than half the country and live on about two dollars a day—for the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic parties. Any real opening of the political system in the Arab world’s most populated nation will see an empowering of these Islamic movements. And any attempt to close the system further—say a replacement of Mubarak with another military dictator—will ensure a deeper radicalization in Egypt and the wider Arab world.

The only way opposition to the U.S.-backed regime of Mubarak could be expressed for the past three decades was through Islamic movements, from the Muslim Brotherhood to more radical Islamic groups, some of which embrace violence. And any replacement of Mubarak (which now seems almost certain) while it may initially be dominated by moderate, secular leaders will, once elections are held and popular will is expressed, have an Islamic coloring. A new government, to maintain credibility with the Egyptian population, will have to more actively defy demands from Washington and be more openly antagonistic to Israel. What is happening in Egypt, like what happened in Tunisia, tightens the noose that will—unless Israel and Washington radically change their policies toward the Palestinians and the Muslim world—threaten to strangle the Jewish state as well as dramatically curtail American influence in the Middle East.

The failure of the United States to halt the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel has consequences. The failure to acknowledge the collective humiliation and anger felt by most Arabs because of the presence of U.S. troops on Muslim soil, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but in the staging bases set up in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, has consequences. The failure to denounce the repression, including the widespread use of torture, censorship and rigged elections, wielded by our allies against their citizens in the Middle East has consequences. We are soaked with the stench of these regimes. Mubarak, who reportedly is suffering from cancer, is seen as our puppet, a man who betrayed his own people and the Palestinians for money and power.

The Muslim world does not see us as we see ourselves. Muslims are aware, while we are not, that we have murdered tens of thousands of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have terrorized families, villages and nations. We enable and defend the Israeli war crimes carried out against Palestinians and the Lebanese—indeed we give the Israelis the weapons and military aid to carry out the slaughter. We dismiss the thousands of dead as “collateral damage.” And when those who are fighting against occupation kill us or Israelis we condemn them, regardless of context, as terrorists. Our hypocrisy is recognized on the Arab street. Most Arabs see bloody and disturbing images every day from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, images that are censored on our television screens. They have grown sick of us. They have grown sick of the Arab regimes that pay lip service to the suffering of Palestinians but do nothing to intervene. They have grown sick of being ruled by tyrants who are funded and supported by Washington. Arabs understand that we, like the Israelis, primarily speak to the Muslim world in the crude language of power and violence. And because of our entrancement with our own power and ability to project force, we are woefully out of touch. Israeli and American intelligence services did not foresee the popular uprising in Tunisia or Egypt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, Israel’s new intelligence chief, told Knesset members last Tuesday that “there is no concern at the moment about the stability of the Egyptian government.” Tuesday, it turned out, was the day hundreds of thousands of Egyptians poured into the streets to begin their nationwide protests.

What is happening in Egypt will damage and perhaps unravel the fragile peace treaty between Egypt and Jordan with Israel. It is likely to end Washington’s alliance with these Arab intelligence services, including the use of prisons to torture those we have disappeared into our vast network of black sites. The economic ties between Israel and these Arab countries will suffer. The current antagonism between Cairo and the Hamas government in Gaza will be replaced by more overt cooperation. The Egyptian government’s collaboration with Israel, which includes demolishing tunnels into Gaza, the sharing of intelligence and the passage of Israeli warship and submarines through the Suez Canal, will be in serious jeopardy. Any government—even a transition government that is headed by a pro-Western secularist such as Mohamed ElBaradei—will have to make these changes in the relationship with Israel and Washington if it wants to have any credibility and support. We are seeing the rise of a new Middle East, one that will not be as pliable to Washington or as cowed by Israel.

The secular Arab regimes, backed by the United States, are discredited and moribund. The lofty promise of a pan-Arab union, championed by the Egyptian leader Gamal Abd-al-Nasser and the original Baathists, has become a farce. Nasser’s defiance of Washington and the Western powers has been replaced by client states. The secular Arab regimes from Morocco to Yemen, for all their ties with the West, have not provided freedom, dignity, opportunity or prosperity for their people. They have failed as spectacularly as the secular Palestinian resistance movement led by Yasser Arafat. And Arabs, frustrated and enduring mounting poverty, are ready for something new. Radical Islamist groups such as the Palestinian Hamas, the Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon and the jihadists fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are the new heroes, especially for the young who make up most of the Arab world. And many of those who admire these radicals are not observant Muslims. They support the Islamists because they fight back. Communism as an ideological force never took root in the Muslim world because it clashed with the tenets of Islam. The championing of the free market in countries such as Egypt has done nothing to ameliorate crushing poverty. Its only visible result has been to enrich the elite, including Mubarak’s son and designated heir, Gamal. Islamic revolutionary movements, because of these failures, are very attractive. And this is why Mubarak forbids the use of the slogan “Islam is the solution” and bans the Muslim Brotherhood. These secular Arab regimes hate and fear Hamas and the Islamic radicals as deeply as the Israelis do. And this hatred only adds to their luster.

Barack Obama was supposed to be a transformational president. Remember that?

He certainly marketed himself as such. He certainly – like an FDR or a Lincoln – was handed a context of crisis which simultaneously demanded of him and permitted him to be transformational as the leader of the country at this fraught historical moment.

Watching him deliver his state of the union address this week revealed anything but that, however. This is a shrunken president, playing small-ball at a moment of peril. Watching Obama talk before a global audience, I could not help but think of the weakness and irrelevance of this human platitude production machine, so out of touch with the threats and concerns of our time.

Is it possible to imagine that people will be still talking about this speech twenty years from now? Were they even talking about it twenty minutes after he gave it?

The measure of a presidency is the degree to which it responds, and responds effectively, to the issues before the country. This is why Lincoln is almost universally regarded as the greatest of American presidents. Faced with the greatest of American crises, he responded. (I actually happen to disagree with Lincoln’s violent response to secession, just as I opposed, and for the same bloody reasons, President Bashir’s violent initial reaction to secession in southern Sudan, but that’s another essay.) Similarly, until nation-wrecker par excellence George W. Bush came on the world stage, Lincoln’s predecessor James Buchanan was largely regarded by history as the worst American president, precisely because he failed to deal with exactly the same crisis he would then bequeath to Lincoln.

This is the test of presidents – Can you rise up to the challenges of your moment? – and it’s a fair one. And, given that benchmark, we can ask how history will evaluate Barack Obama. The way to answer that question is to catalogue our great challenges, and to ask how is the president addressing those? Some of these are obvious. Some are obvious, but less immediately threatening. And some, ironically, are so fundamental that they are generally not even perceived, like water is to fish.

What was so amazing about Obama’s speech was his sheer gall in not addressing the most prominent and urgent questions in our political sphere, right here and right now. How is it that the guy can go on about the murderous killing spree in Tucson, and yet utter not a word about a solution? I mean, after all, only about 30,000 Americans die every year, year in and year out, from gun violence. I suppose the president is just waiting for it to get serious – then he’ll advocate for a solution? As long as the NRA doesn’t mind, that is (hint: they do).

Or how about Egypt? The country is exploding before our eyes, and the “Leader of the Free World” cannot use the occasion to tell “President” Mubarak to stand down? He can’t inform the Egyptian dictator that the massive amounts of American aid he receives are being cut off? Or does he even recognize Mubarak as such? I saw PBS anchor, Jim “Softball On Quaaludes” Lehrer, interviewing the Vice President, who couldn’t even admit that Mubarak is a dictator. I guess the Egyptian leader has just been extraordinarily lucky, winning landslide “elections” for thirty years running now. That can happen, you know.

Well, at least the president was better in his speech when it came to the one thing Americans really care about right now (and, foolishly, that probably doesn’t include the proliferation of guns or US support for Middle Eastern potentates) – jobs, jobs, jobs. Did you catch the president’s jobs program in his speech? No? Golly, I didn’t either. I just heard endless platitudes about education, infrastructure and light rail. You know, that’s all really cool stuff, and maybe, if we’re lucky, it will raise GDP by six-tenths of a percent in the year 2040 (though, of course, if it did, all of that revenue will go to the rich, as it has for the last thirty years).

But right now real humans are suffering the real pains of job loss and foreclosure, and all this president can muster in terms of a solution is the hiring of yet more Clinton administration retreads, the very same people who turned the Democratic Party into a Ladies Auxiliary of the GOP, and whose deregulatory fervor brought us precisely to where we are today. Out goes Emanuel, in comes Daley. Out goes Summers, in comes Sperling. How inspirational. I’m gonna go start knocking on doors for the Obama-Biden 2012 campaign first thing tomorrow morning! We need real solutions in this country! Yes, coming soon to an election campaign near you: “Clinton II: The Folks Who Brought You WTO, the Annihilation of Welfare, and Bank Deregulation Now Carry the Hope and Change Flag!”

Charles Blow noted in the New York Times this week that Obama’s State of the Union speech was only the second one by a Democratic president since Harry Truman in 1948 that did not mention the poor and the need to fight against poverty. This continues the trend started by Bill Clinton to pander to the middle class and that cohort’s insufferable and seemingly endless capacity for selfishness. Gone, in the 1990s, was the commitment to those most in need, and every reference instead was to serving the middle class, though in fact Clinton and his team were really looting them on behalf of the plutocracy, as Obama is now doing as well. Blow goes on in his article to show the absolute inverse statistical correlation between income level and support for Obama in the 2008 election (The less money you make, the more likely you were to vote for Obama), which makes the president’s priorities even more egregious. There he is in his speech talking about the stock market “roaring” back, while ignoring the needs of the hardest hit Americans, who just happen also to be the ones that most ardently supported him when he wanted what he wanted – to be president.

I’m quite sure the calculus in the White House is “What the hell do we care? Where’re these people going to go in 2012? What are they going to do, vote for Ralph Nader?” And, I guess if that whole morality thing isn’t an issue for you, then such a cynical political calculation is probably not so far off the mark. If, like Bill Clinton, you just want to be president at all costs, you probably should sell-out the poor, as Clinton did with the unconscionable welfare bill he signed in order to guarantee his reelection. Especially if you’re Obama, who can pretty much count on getting every black vote in the country, no matter what he does, along with a lot of white liberal guilt votes as well.

But I suspect that Obama, even if he can pull out a second term, will wind up were Clinton manifestly has, and it’s pathetic to see. Bad Bill gets all the adulation of a political Mick Jagger, and he gets to hang out in the Hamptons with all the real Mick Jaggers of this world. But you can see that he’s a profoundly unsatisfied man, now in the latter years of a life dwindling toward conclusion. He desperately wanted to be great, and he just wasn’t. Even if you leave out the tawdry stuff.

Clinton, in what surely wins the world prize for the absolute pinnacle of narcissistic self-obsession, once lamented that he didn’t have the good fortune to have a crisis during his presidency, so that he could join the pantheon of Lincoln and FDR as one of the greats in American history. George W. Bush will never have Clinton’s remorse problem, of course, because he drowns his insecurities in booze or the alcohol-free version of the same, otherwise known as religion. But Obama is likely too introspective to avoid his fate. Clinton governed during more or less stable and munificent times. Bush was a crisis walking in the door, had a crisis on his watch, and turned everything he touched into crisis. Obama’s situation is a bit more subtle. He actual has multiple crises on his plate, but they are somewhat less obvious. Obama will know, when it’s all over, what he could have done, what he should have done, what history is screaming out needs to be done. And he – like Clinton, but lots more so because eight years of Bush have made these much more perilous times – will know what he did and especially didn’t do.

You might think that the global warming issue was an obvious candidate for presidential leadership, now that we’ve noted that nine of the ten hottest years ever recorded occurred during the last decade-and-a-half. But the scepticism-for-fun-and-profit industry has managed to muddy the waters of public perception sufficiently so as to prevent anything remotely resembling a serious response to what is unquestionably the greatest crisis in all of human history. If you look at what real scientists are saying about this, then it appears that we’re headed for a planetary catastrophe of epic proportions. This is here, and it is now. And, given the unfortunate opposing array of special interest profiteers and legitimate developing country desires to industrialize, it is going to take global leadership to wake people up to what we’re facing. But did the president even mention this greatest of all challenges in his speech?

At home, we are a society sickened by a cancer of greed, which has rendered our political process broken and profoundly dishonest on a good day, and utterly predatory all the rest of the time. And there aren’t many good days in American politics right now. Here’s a place where Obama could have really had a serious impact. Once again, what is required here is presidential, moral, bully pulpit leadership to define the problem, wag the finger, call our enemies our enemies, demand a solution, and push it across the goal line. Given the direction that the Supreme Court has been going of late, it would appear that nothing short of a constitutional amendment will any longer suffice in breaking the death-grip of money on public policymaking in America. Politically, that is an extremely tall mountain to climb, though there may be enormous reserves of public support that could line up behind such an initiative. But it is almost wholly unimaginable today, in the absence of presidential leadership, for that to be successfully placed on the national agenda and then driven through.

This is, in so many ways, the single key that unlocks all the doors to solutions for our various national ailments in the United States. If we could get special interest influence out of governing, we could deal with our spiraling debt, for example. We would not have had this Great Recession we’re all living through (all living though except, of course, those who are dying). We could address global warming. We could get the guns off our streets. We could scale back our military and our wars dramatically. We could depopulate our for-profit prisons. We could end any reason for the Republican Party to continue to exist.

And so on. The list is endless. This is the great issue of our time. It is hardly new, but the degree of institutionalized greed has reached astonishing proportions today, and a once fat context of American world dominance, unending resource availability, and relatively benign environmental consequences for plundering has ended. Our current practices are anything but sustainable, but nobody is talking about it. A great president would have made this debilitating greed the defining issue of his presidency. Indeed, a great president would have realized that by changing, at the beginning of his administration, the nature of who the political class in Washington actually serves, everything else would have become possible in subsequent years of his presidency. A Congress owned by Goldman Sachs will never pass meaningful financial system reform. But a Congress that actually serves its constituents instead would easily do so. A government owned by the NRA will never deal with gun violence. But a government answerable to the public interest rather than special interests would. And so on.

We also fail to appreciate the level of danger entailed by the character and quantities of sick invective coursing through the veins of our political system. Even worse, if we do ever talk about that – as the Tucson shootings have caused us to do, for five minutes, anyhow – we get it entirely wrong, especially by imposing a false equivalence to the supposed sources of the problem. That would be ridiculous if it weren’t so pernicious. There is no Glenn Beck of the left, nor a Rush Limbaugh, nor the equal of any of the other even more caustic freaks of right wing radio. The closest one could come to that (and still not get very close at all) would be Keith Olbermann, and look what happened to him. Amongst the political class, the same is true. There is no Satan Plain or Michelle Bachmann of the left.

The rhetoric of these monsters, sustained over decades now, is incredibly corrosive to the national esprit de corps. The ramifications of this destructiveness will be felt powerfully, and for a long time to come. But the ascendance of such damaging lunacy has only been possible because of the silence of anyone and everyone carrying the flag of political sanity. When Democrats aren’t busy being coopted, they’re busy being cowardly, something I find especially remarkable given the sheer buffoonery of targets like those mentioned above. I mean, just how hard would it be to ridicule a serial-divorcee and drug addict like Limbaugh, when the guy runs around lecturing the rest of us on family values?

Nobody fails this test quite like Obama, either. Even Clinton did better than this cat. Barack just seems to want to be liked, just wants to get along with everybody, even when they’re trashing his mama in public. There seems to be virtually nothing you can say about him – even if you’re a Republican leader in Congress – which he will not fail to respond to. Question his citizenship, his religion, his patriotism – it’s endless, and all too unfortunately, loads of numbies out there in Americaland believe this nonsense.

On the other hand, if all Obama wants is a second term, then perhaps he is being strategically smart. As vacuous as his speech was, the response by GOP would-be wunderkind Paul Ryan turned out to be just another in the party’s continuing string of embarrassments (remember Bobby Jindal?). Ryan looked small and petty coming after Obama. And the amount of explicit and implicit deceit in his party’s newly-found hostility to debt (he seems to have conveniently forgotten Cheney’s “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”, an indictment of all Republican administrations of the last thirty years) was only exceeded by that in Michelle Bachmann’s ludicrous tea bag rant.

Unfortunately, what makes good politics for Obama makes disaster for the country. The GOP – either the Radical Mouthfoamer wing or the Even More Radical Mouthfoamer wing – is likely to continue making the president look sensible by comparison. Given that unemployment probably will not fall significantly between now and November 2012, the White House has probably figured out that being the less insane option for voters in that contest is their only prayer of winning reelection. They may be right, though it depends on who the GOP nominates. Traditionally, however, the economy is nine-tenths of the equation. An incumbent president sitting on top of a crappy economy is almost always heading for the door.

But even if he wins, what for? Every time I look at this president, I wonder what the hell he wanted the job for.

Hartung just published a book, “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.” He went on:

“Lockheed Martin has been the leader in deals worth $3.8 billion over that period of the last 10 years; General Dynamics, $2.5 billion for tanks; Boeing, $1.7 billion for missiles, for helicopters; Raytheon for all manner of missiles for the armed forces. So, basically, this is a key element in propping up the regime, but a lot of the money is basically recycled. Taxpayers could just as easily be giving it directly to Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics.”

Likewise, Egypt’s Internet and cell phone “kill switch” was enabled only through collaboration with corporations. U.K.-based Vodafone, a global cellular-phone giant (which owns 45 percent of Verizon Wireless in the U.S.) attempted to justify its actions in a press release: “It has been clear to us that there were no legal or practical options open to Vodafone ... but to comply with the demands of the authorities.”

Narus, a U.S. subsidiary of Boeing Corp., sold Egypt equipment to allow “deep packet inspection,” according to Tim Karr of the media policy group Free Press. Karr said the Narus technology “allows the Egyptian telecommunications companies ... to look at texting via cell phones, and to identify the sort of dissident voices that are out there. ... It also gives them the technology to geographically locate them and track them down.”

Mubarak has pledged not to run for re-election come September. But the people of Egypt demand he leave now. How has he lasted 30 years? Maybe that’s best explained by a warning from a U.S. Army general 50 years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He said, MU<“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

No matter that I cannot find a single, substantive point in Appiah's review not already addressed in my book, McGinn appears to know otherwise through the power of clairvoyance. Many other philosophers and scientists have begun to play this game with The Moral Landscape, without ever engaging its arguments. And so, mindful of the dangers, I have decided to answer the strongest criticisms that have appeared to date. Failure beckons on both sides, of course, as my response will be all-too-brief for some and far more than others can stomach. But it is worth a try.

As far as I know, the best reviews of The Moral Landscape have come from the philosophers Thomas Nagel, Troy Jollimore, and Russell Blackford. I will focus on Blackford's (along with a few of his subsequent blog posts) as it strikes me as the most searching. It also seems to echo everything of interest in the others.

For those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds -- and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomenon, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

Blackford and others worry that any aspect of human subjectivity or culture could fit in the space provided: after all, a preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream is a natural phenomenon, as is a preference for the comic Sarah Silverman over Bob Hope. Are we to imagine that there are universal truths about ice cream and comedy that admit of scientific analysis? Well, in a certain sense, yes. Science could, in principle, account for why some of us prefer chocolate to vanilla, and why no one's favorite flavor of ice cream is aluminum. Comedy must also be susceptible to this kind of study. There will be a fair amount of cultural and generational variation in what counts as funny, but there are probably basic principles of comedy -- like the violation of expectations, the breaking of taboos, etc. -- that could be universal. Amusement to the point of laughter is a specific state of the human nervous system that can be scientifically studied. Why do some people laugh more readily than others? What exactly happens when we "get" a joke? These are ultimately questions about the human brain. There will be scientific facts to be known here, and any differences in taste among human beings must be attributable to other facts that fall within the purview of science. If we were ever to arrive at a complete understanding of the human mind, we would understand human preferences of all kinds. Indeed, we might even be able to change them.

However, morality and values appear to reach deeper than mere matters of taste -- beyond how people happen to think and behave to questions of how they should think and behave. And it is this notion of "should" that introduces a fair amount of confusion into any conversation about moral truth. I should note in passing, however, that I don't think the distinction between morality and something like taste is as clear or as categorical as we might suppose. If, for instance, a preference for chocolate ice cream allowed for the most rewarding experience a human being could have, while a preference for vanilla did not, we would deem it morally important to help people overcome any defect in their sense of taste that caused them to prefer vanilla -- in the same way that we currently treat people for curable forms of blindness. It seems to me that the boundary between mere aesthetics and moral imperative -- the difference between not liking Matisse and not liking the Golden Rule -- is more a matter of there being higher stakes, and consequences that reach into the lives of others, than of there being distinct classes of facts regarding the nature of human experience. There is much more to be said on this point, of course, but it is not one that I covered in my book, so I will pass it by.

Let's begin with my core claim that moral truths exist. In what was a generally supportive review of The Moral Landscape, strewn with strange insults, the philosopher Thomas Nagel endorsed my basic thesis as follows:

Even if this is an exaggeration, Harris has identified a real problem, rooted in the idea that facts are objective and values are subjective. Harris rejects this facile opposition in the only way it can be rejected -- by pointing to evaluative truths so obvious that they need no defense. For example, a world in which everyone was maximally miserable would be worse than a world in which everyone was happy, and it would be wrong to try to move us toward the first world and away from the second. This is not true by definition, but it is obvious, just as it is obvious that elephants are larger than mice. If someone denied the truth of either of those propositions, we would have no reason to take him seriously...

The true culprit behind contemporary professions of moral skepticism is the confused belief that the ground of moral truth must be found in something other than moral values. One can pose this type of question about any kind of truth. What makes it true that 2 + 2 = 4? What makes it true that hens lay eggs? Some things are just true; nothing else makes them true. Moral skepticism is caused by the currently fashionable but unargued assumption that only certain kinds of things, such as physical facts, can be "just true" and that value judgments such as "happiness is better than misery" are not among them. And that assumption in turn leads to the conclusion that a value judgment could be true only if it were made true by something like a physical fact. That, of course, is nonsense.

Many critics claim that my reliance on the concept of "well-being" is arbitrary and philosophically indefensible. Who's to say that well-being is important at all or that other things aren't far more important? How, for instance, could you convince someone who does not value well-being that he should, in fact, value it? And even if one could justify well-being as the true foundation for morality, many have argued that one would need a "metric" by which it could be measured -- else there could be no such thing as moral truth in the scientific sense. There seems to be a unnecessarily restrictive notion of science underlying this last claim -- as though scientific truths only exist if we can have immediate and uncontroversial access to them in the lab. The physicist Sean Carroll has written a fair amount against me on this point (again, without having read my book), and he is in the habit of saying things like, "I don't know what a unit of well-being is," as though he were regretfully delivering the killing blow to my thesis. I would venture that Carroll doesn't know what a unit of depression is either -- and units of joy, disgust, boredom, irony, envy, or any other mental state worth studying won't be forthcoming. If half of what Carroll says about the limits of science is true, the sciences of mind are not merely doomed, there would be no facts for them to understand in the first place.

It seems to me that there are three, distinct challenges put forward thus far:

1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value well-being, our own or anyone else's. (The Value Problem)

2. Hence, if someone does not care about well-being, or cares only about his own and not about the well-being of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)

3. Even if we did agree to grant "well-being" primacy in any discussion of morality, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure well-being scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of morality. (The Measurement Problem)

I believe all of these challenges are the product of philosophical confusion. The simplest way to see this is by analogy to medicine and the mysterious quantity we call "health." Let's swap "morality" for "medicine" and "well-being" for "health" and see how things look: 1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value health, our own or anyone else's. (The Value Problem)

2. Hence, if someone does not care about health, or cares only about his own and not about the health of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)

3. Even if we did agree to grant "health" primacy in any discussion of medicine, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure health scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of medicine. (The Measurement Problem)

While the analogy may not be perfect, I maintain that it is good enough to obviate these three criticisms. Is there a Value Problem, with respect to health? Is it unscientific to value health and seek to maximize it within the context of medicine? No. Clearly there are scientific truths to be known about health -- and we can fail to know them, to our great detriment. This is a fact. And yet, it is possible for people to deny this fact, or to have perverse and even self-destructive ideas about how to live. Needless to say, it can be fruitless to argue with such people. Does this mean we have a Persuasion Problem with respect to medicine? No. Christian Scientists, homeopaths, voodoo priests, and the legions of the confused don't get to vote on the principles of medicine. "Health" is also hard to define -- and, what is more, the definition keeps changing. There is no clear "metric" by which we can measure it, and there may never be one -- because "health" is a suitcase term for hundreds, if not thousands, of variables. Is an ability to "jump very high" one of them? That depends. What would my doctor think if I wanted a full neurological workup because I can only manage a 30-inch vertical leap? He would think I had lost my mind. However, if I were a professional basketball player who had enjoyed a 40-inch leap every day of his adult life, I would be reporting a sudden, 25 percent decline in my abilities -- not a good sign. Do such contingencies give us a Measurement Problem with respect to health? Do they indicate that medicine will never be a proper science? No. "Health" is a loose concept that may always bend and stretch depending on the context -- but there is no question that both it and its context exist within an underlying reality which we can understand, or fail to understand, with the tools of science.

Let's look at these problems in light of Blackford's review:

The Value Problem

My critics have been especially exercised over the subtitle of my book, "how science can determine human values." The charge is that I haven't actually used science to determine the foundational value (well-being) upon which my proffered science of morality would rest. Rather, I have just assumed that well-being is a value, and this move is both unscientific and question-begging. Here is Blackford:

If we presuppose the well-being of conscious creatures as a fundamental value, much else may fall into place, but that initial presupposition does not come from science. It is not an empirical finding... Harris is highly critical of the claim, associated with Hume, that we cannot derive an "ought" solely from an "is" - without starting with people's actual values and desires. He is, however, no more successful in deriving "ought" from "is" than anyone else has ever been. The whole intellectual system of The Moral Landscape depends on an "ought" being built into its foundations.

Again, the same can be said about medicine, or science as a whole. As I point out in my book, science in based on values that must be presupposed -- like the desire to understand the universe, a respect for evidence and logical coherence, etc. One who doesn't share these values cannot do science. But nor can he attack the presuppositions of science in way that anyone should find compelling. Scientists need not apologize for presupposing the value of evidence, nor does this presupposition render science unscientific. In my book, I argue that the value of well-being -- specifically the value of avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone -- is on the same footing. There is no problem in presupposing that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding and that normative morality consists, at an absolute minimum, in acting so as to avoid it. To say that the worst possible misery for everyone is "bad" is, on my account, like saying that an argument that contradicts itself is "illogical." Our spade is turned. Anyone who says it isn't simply isn't making sense. The fatal flaw that Blackford claims to have found in my view of morality could just as well be located in science as a whole -- or reason generally. Our "oughts" are built right into the foundations. We need not apologize for pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps in this way. It is far better than pulling ourselves down by them.

Blackford raises another issue with regard to the concept of well-being:

There could be situations where the question of which course of action might maximize well-being has no determinate answer, and not merely because well-being is difficult to measure in practice but because there is some room for rational disagreement about exactly what it is. If it's shorthand for the summation of various even deeper values, there could be room for legitimate disagreement on exactly what these are, and certainly on how they are to be weighted. But if that is so, there could end up being legitimate disagreement on what is to be done, with no answer that is objectively binding on all the disagreeing parties.

Couldn't the same be said about human health? What if there are trade-offs with respect to human performance that we just can't get around -- what if, for instance, an ability to jump high always comes at the cost of flexibility? Will there be disagreements between orthopedists who specialize in basketball and those who specialize in yoga? Sure. So what? We will still be talking about very small deviations from a common standard of "health" -- one which does not include anencephaly or a raging case of smallpox.

[Harris] acknowledges the theoretical possibility that two courses of action, or, say, two different systems of customs and laws could be equal in the amount of well-being that they generate. In such cases, the objectively correct and determinate answer to the question of which is morally better would be: "They are equal." However, he is not prepared to accept a situation where two people who have knowledge of all the facts could legitimately disagree on what ought to be done. The closest they could come to that would be agreement that two (or more) courses of action are equally preferable, so either could be pursued with the same moral legitimacy as the other.

This is not quite true. My model of the moral landscape does allow for multiple peaks -- many different modes of flourishing, admitting of irreconcilable goals. Thus, if you want to move society toward peak 19746X, while I fancy 74397J, we may have disagreements that simply can't be worked out. This is akin to trying to get me to follow you to the summit of Everest while I want to drag you up the slopes of K2. Such disagreements do not land us back in moral relativism, however: because there will be right and wrong ways to move toward one peak or the other; there will be many more low spots on the moral landscape than peaks (i.e. truly wrong answers to moral questions); and for all but the loftiest goals and the most disparate forms of conscious experience, moral disagreements will not be between sides of equal merit. Which is to say that for most moral controversies, we need not agree to disagree; rather, we should do our best to determine which side is actually right.

In any case, I suspect that radically disjoint peaks are unlikely to exist for human beings. We are far too similar to one another to be that different. If we each could sample all possible states of human experience, and were endowed with perfect memories so that we could sort our preferences, I think we would converge on similar judgments of what is good, what is better, and what is best. Differences of opinion might still be possible, and would themselves be explicable in terms of differences at the level of our brains. Consequently, even such disagreements would not be a problem for my account, because to talk about what is truly good, we must also include the possibility (in principle, if not in practice) of changing peoples desires, preferences, and intuitions as a means of moving across the moral landscape. I will discuss the implications of this below.

Generally speaking, I think that the problem of disagreement and indeterminacy that Blackford raises is a product of incomplete information (we will never be able to know all the consequences of an action, estimate all the relevant probabilities, or compare counterfactual states of the world) combined with the inevitable looseness with which certain terms must be defined. Once again, I do not see this as a problem for my view.

The Persuasion Problem

Another concern that prompts Blackford and others to invoke terms like "ought" and "should" is the problem of persuasion. What can I say to persuade another person that he or she should behave differently? What can I think (that is, say to myself) to inspire a change in my own behavior? There are, in fact, people who will not be persuaded by anything I say on the subject of well-being, and who may even claim not to value well-being at all. And even I can knowingly fail to maximize my own well-being by acting in ways that I will later regret, perhaps by forsaking a long term goal in favor of short term pleasure.

The deeper concern, however, is that even if we do agree that well-being is the gold standard by which to measure what is good, people are selfish in ways that we are not inclined to condemn. As Blackford observes:

[W]e usually accept that people act in competition with each other, each seeking the outcome that most benefits them and their loved ones. We don't demand that everyone agree to accept whatever course will maximize the well-being of conscious creatures overall. Nothing like that is part of our ordinary idea of what it is to behave morally.

Why, for example, should I not prefer my own well-being, or the well-being of the people I love, to overall, or global, well-being? If it comes to that, why should I not prefer some other value altogether, such as the emergence of the Ubermensch, to the maximization of global well-being?... Harris never provides a satisfactory response to this line of thought, and I doubt that one is possible. After all, as he acknowledges, the claim that "We should maximize the global well-being of conscious creatures" is not an empirical finding. So what is it? What in the world makes it true? How does it become binding on me if I don't accept it?

If we want to persuade Alice to take action X, we need to appeal to some value (or desire, or hope, or fear, etc. ... but you get the idea) that she actually has. Perhaps we can appeal to her wish for our approval, but that won't work unless she actually cares about whether or not we approve of her. She is not rationally bound to act in the way we wish her to act, which may be the way that maximizes global welfare, unless we can get some kind of grip on her own actual values and desires (etc.)... Harris does not seem to understand this idea... there are no judgments about how people like Alice should conduct themselves that are binding on them as a matter of fact or reason, irrespective of such things as what they actually value, or desire, or care about... If we are going to provide her with reasons to act in a particular way, or to support a particular policy, or condemn a traditional custom - or whatever it might be - sooner or later we will need to appeal to the values, desires, and so on, that she actually has. There are no values that are, mysteriously, objectively binding on us all in the sense I have been discussing. Thus it is futile to argue from a presupposition that we are all rationally bound to act so as to maximize global well-being. It is simply not the case.

Blackford's analysis of these issues is excellent, of course, but I think it still misses my point. The first thing to notice is that the same doubts can be raised about science/rationality itself. A person can always play the trump card, "What is that to me?" -- and if we don't find it compelling elsewhere, I don't see why it must have special force on questions of good and evil. The more relevant issue, however, is that this notion of "should," with its focus on the burden of persuasion, introduces a false standard for moral truth.

Again, consider the concept of health: should we maximize global health? To my ear, this is a strange question. It invites a timorous reply like, "Provided we want everyone to be healthy, yes." And introducing this note of contingency seems to nudge us from the charmed circle of scientific truth. But why must we frame the matter this way? A world in which global health is maximized would be an objective reality, quite distinct from a world in which we all die early and in agony. Yes, it is true that a person like Alice could seek to maximize her own health without caring about the health of other people -- though her health will depend on the health of others in countless ways (the same, I would argue, is true of her well-being). Is she wrong to be selfish? Would we blame her for taking her own side in any zero-sum contest to secure medicine for herself or for her own children? Again, these aren't the kinds of questions that will get us to bedrock. The truth is, Alice and the rest of us can live so as to allow for a maximally healthy world, or we can fail to do so. Yes, it is possible that a maximally healthy world is one in which Alice is less healthy than she might otherwise be (though this seems unlikely). So what? There is still an objective reality to which our beliefs about human health can correspond. Questions of "should" are not the right lens through which to see this.

And the necessity of grounding moral truth in things that people "actually value, or desire, or care about" also misses the point. People often act against their deeper preferences -- or live in ignorance of what their preferences would be if they had more experience and information. What if we could change Alice's preference themselves? Should we? Obviously we can't answer this question by relying on the very preferences we would change. Contrary to Blackford's assertion, I'm not simply claiming that morality is "fully determined by an objective reality, independent of people's actual values and desires." I am claiming that people's actual values and desires are fully determined by an objective reality, and that we can conceptually get behind all of this -- indeed, we must -- in order to talk about what is actually good. This becomes clear the moment we ask whether it would be good to alter people values and desires.

Consider how we would view a situation in which all of us miraculously began to behave so as to maximize our collective well-being. Imagine that on the basis of remarkable breakthroughs in technology, economics, and politic skill, we create a genuine utopia on earth. Needless to say, this wouldn't be boring, because we will have wisely avoided all the boring utopias. Rather, we will have created a global civilization of astonishing creativity, security, and happiness.

However, some people were not ready for this earthly paradise once it arrived. Some were psychopaths who, despite enjoying the general change in quality of life, were nevertheless eager to break into their neighbors' homes and torture them from time to time. A few had preferences that were incompatible with the flourishing of whole societies: Try as he might, Kim Jong Il just couldn't shake the feeling that his cognac didn't taste as sweet without millions of people starving beyond his palace gates. Given our advances in science, however, we were able to alter preferences of this kind. In fact, we painlessly delivered a firmware update to everyone. Now the entirety of the species is fit to live in a global civilization that is as safe, and as fun, and as interesting, and as filled with love as it can be.

It seems to me that this scenario cuts through the worry that the concept of well-being might leave out something that is worth caring about: for if you care about something that is not compatible with a peak of human flourishing -- given the requisite changes in your brain, you would recognize that you were wrong to care about this thing in the first place. Wrong in what sense? Wrong in the sense that you didn't know what you were missing. This is the core of my argument: I am claiming that there must be frontiers of human well-being that await our discovery -- and certain interests and preferences surely blind us to them.

Nevertheless, Blackford is right to point out that our general approach to morality does not demand that we maximize global well-being. We are selfish to one degree or another; we lack complete information about the consequences of our actions; and even where we possess such information, our interests and preferences often lead us to ignore it. But these facts obscure deeper questions: In what sense can an action be morally good? And what does it mean to make a good action better?

For instance, it seems good for me to buy my daughter a birthday present, all things considered, because this will make both of us happy. Few people would fault me for spending some of my time and money in this way. But what about all the little girls in the world who suffer terribly at this moment for want of resources? Here is where an ethicist like Peter Singer will pounce, arguing that there actually is something morally questionable -- even reprehensible -- about my buying my daughter a birthday present, given my knowledge of how much good my time and money could do elsewhere. What should I do? Singer's argument makes me uncomfortable, but only for a moment. It is simply a fact about me that the suffering of other little girls is often out of sight and out of mind -- and my daughter's birthday is no easier to ignore than an asteroid impact. Can I muster a philosophical defense of my narrow focus? Perhaps. I might be that Singer's case leaves out some important details: what would happen if everyone in the developed world ceased to shop for birthday presents? Wouldn't the best of human civilization just come crashing down upon the worst? How can we spread wealth to the developing world if we do not create wealth in the first place? These reflections, self-serving and otherwise -- along with a thousand other facts about my mind for which Sean Carroll still has no "metric" -- land me in a toy store, looking for something that isn't pink.

So, yes, it is true that my thoughts about global well-being did not amount to much in this instance. And Blackford is right to say that most people wouldn't judge me for it. But what if there were way for me to buy my daughter a present and also cure another little girl of cancer at no extra cost? Wouldn't this be better than just buying the original present? Imagine if I declined this opportunity saying, "What is that to me? I don't care about other little girls and their cancers." It is only against an implicit notion of global well-being that we can judge my behavior to be less good than it might otherwise be. It is true that no one currently demands that I spend my time seeking, in every instance, to maximize global well-being -- nor do I demand it of myself -- but if global well-being could be maximized, that would be better (by the only definition of "better" that makes any sense).

It seems to me that whatever our preferences and capacities are at present, our beliefs about good and evil must still relate to what is ultimately possible for human beings. We can't think about this deeper reality by focusing on the narrow question of what a person "should" do in the gray areas of life where we spend much of our time. However, the extremes of human experience throw ample light: are the Taliban wrong about morality? Yes. Really wrong? Yes. Can we say so from the perspective of science? Yes. If we know anything at all about human well-being -- and we do -- we know that the Taliban are not leading anyone, including themselves, toward a peak on the moral landscape.

Finally, Blackford asserts, as many have, that abandoning a notion of moral truth "doesn't prevent us developing coherent, rational critiques of various systems of laws or customs or moral rules, or persuading others to adopt our critiques."

In particular, it is quite open to us to condemn traditional systems of morality to the extent that they are harsh or cruel, rather than providing what most of us (quite rationally) want from a moral tradition: for example that it ameliorate suffering, regulate conflict, and provide personal security and social cooperation, yet allow individuals a substantial degree of discretion to live their lives as they wish.