Open theism and the Incarnation

Here is a very plausible pair of claims:

1. The Son could have become incarnate as a different human being.

2. God foreknew many centuries ahead of time which human being the Son would become incarnate as.

Regarding 1, of course, the Son could not have been a different person—the person the Son is and was and ever shall be is the second person of the Trinity. But Son could have been a different human being.

Here is a sketch of an argument for 1:

1. If the identity of a human being depends on the body, then if the Son became incarnate as a 3rd century BC woman in India, this would be a different human being from Jesus (albeit the same person).

2. If the identity of a human being depends on the soul, then God could have created a different soul for the Son’s incarnation.

3. The identity of a human being depends on either the body or the soul.

I don’t have as good an argument for 2 as I do for 1, but I think 2 is quite plausible given what Scripture says about God’s having planned out the mission of Jesus from of old.

Now add:

3. If the Son could have become incarnate as a different human being, which human being he became incarnate as depends on a number of free human choices in the century preceding the incarnation.

Now, 1, 2 and 3 leads to an immediate problem for an open theist Christian (my thinking on this is inspired by a paper of David Alexander, though his argument is different) who thinks God doesn’t foreknow human free choices.

Why is 3 true? Well, if the identity of a human being even partly depends on the body (as is plausible), given that (plausibly) Mary was truly a biological mother of Jesus, then if Mary’s parents had not had any children, the body that Jesus actually had would not have existed, and an incarnation would have happened with a different body and hence a different human being.

Objection: God could have created Mary—or the body for the incarnation—directly ex nihilo in such a case, or God could have overridden human free will if some human were about to make a decision that would lead to Mary not existing.

Response: If essentiality of origins is true, then it is logically impossible for the same body to be created ex nihilo as actually had a partial non-divine cause. But I don’t want the argument to depend on essentiality of origins. Instead, I want to argue as follows. Both of the solutions in the objection require God to foreknow that he would in fact engage in such intervention if human free choices didn’t cooperate with his plan. God’s own interventions would be free choices, and so on open theism God wouldn’t know that he would thus intervene. One might respond that God could resolve to ensure that a certain body would become available, and a morally perfect being always keeps his resolutions. But while perhaps a morally perfect being always keeps his promises, I think it is false that a morally perfect being always keeps his resolutions. Unless one is resolving to do something that one is already obligated to do, it is not wrong to change one’s mind in a revolution. I suppose God could have promised someone that he would ensure the existence of a certain specific body, but we have no evidence of such a specific promise in Scripture, and it seems an odd maneouver for God to have to make in order to know ahead of time who the human that would save the world is.

What if the identity of a human depends solely on the soul? But then the identity of the human being that the Son would become incarnate as would depend on God’s free decision which soul to create for that human being, and the same remarks as I made about resolutions in the previous paragraph would apply.

The Reverse Special Composition Question

Van Inwagen famously raised the Special Composition Question (SCQ): What is an informative criterion for when a proper plurality of objects composes a whole.

There is, however, the Reverse Special Composition Question (RSCQ): What is an informative criterion for when an object is composed of a proper plurality?

The SCQ seems a more fruitful question when we think of parts as prior to the whole. The RSCQ seems a more fruitful question when we think of wholes as prior to the parts.

If by parts we mean something like “integral parts”, we have a pretty quick starter option for answering the RSCQ:

1. An object is composed of a proper plurality of parts just in case it takes up more than a point of space.

I am not inclined to accept (1) because I like the possibility of extended simples, but it is a pretty neat and simple answer. Suppose that (1) is correct. Then we have a kind of simplicity argument for the thesis that the whole is prior to its parts. If the parts are prior to the whole, SCQ is a reasonable question, but doesn’t have an elegant and plausible answer (let us suppose). If the whole is prior to the parts, SCQ is not a reasonable question but RSCQ instead is, and RSCQ has an elegant and plausible answer (let us suppose). So we have some reason to accept that the whole is prior to the parts.

Natural kinds across categories

Most philosophical discussions of natural kinds concern entities in the category of substance: particles, chemical substances, organisms, etc. But I think we shouldn’t forget that there is good reason to posit natural kinds of entities in other categories.

For instance, you and I are each engaging in a token activity that falls under the natural kind (say) mammalian breathing. The natural kind specifies some essential properties of the kind, namely that it is a kind of filling and/or emptying of the lungs, as well as some teleological features, such as that the filling and emptying should be rhythmic. Instances of the kind may be better or worse: given that I am congested after a long drawn-out cold, likely your breathing is better than mine.

There are, plausibly, such things as natural activities, which fall under activity natural kinds. These may kinds may include gravitational attraction, mating, fish respiration, etc.

Dispositions, too, may fall under natural kinds, indeed a nested sequence of them. We might say that some dispositions are habits, and some habits are virtues. Thus, perhaps, you and I each have a certain disposition to rationally withstand danger, a disposition that is a token of courage, a kind of virtue. Your and my courages are different: for instance, perhaps, I am more willing to withstand social danger while you are more willing to withstand physical danger. Whether indeed virtues are natural kinds seems to me to be a central question for the metaphysics of virtue ethics.

There may be natural kinds of relations, too. Thus, I think marriage is a natural kind. On the other hand, I think presidency is not.

Reasons and direct support

A standard view of reasons is that reasons are propositions or facts that support an action. Thus, that I promised to visit is a reason to visit, that pain is bad is a reason to take an aspirin, and that I am hungry is a reason to eat.

But notice that any such facts can also be a reason for the opposite action. That I promised to visit is a reason not to visit, if you begged me not to keep any of my promises to you. That pain is bad is a reason not to take an aspirin and that I am hungry is a reason not to eat when I am striving to learn to endure harship.

One might think that this kind of contingency in what the reasons—considered as propositions or facts—support disappears when the reasons are fully normatively loaded. That I owe you a visit is always a reason to visit, and that I ought to relieve my hunger is always a reason to eat.

This is actually mistaken, too. That I owe you a visit is indeed always a reason to visit. But it can also be a reason—and even a moral one—not to visit. For instance, if a trickster informs me that that if I engage in an owed visit to you, they will cause you some minor harm—say, give you a hangnail—then the fact that I owe you a visit gives me a reason not to visit you, though that reason will be outweighed (indeed, it has to be outweighed, or else it wouldn’t be true that I owe you the visit).

In fact, plausibly, that an action is the right one is typically also a moral reason not to perform the action. For whenever we do the right thing, that has a potential of feeding our pride, and we have reason not to feed our pride. Of course, that reason is always outweighed. But it’s still there. And we might even say that the fact that an action is wrong is a reason, albeit not a moral one, to perform that action in order to exhibit one’s will to power (this is a morally bad reason to act on, but one that is probably minimally rational—we understand someone who does this).

All this suggests to me that we need a distinction: some reasons directly support doing something. That I owe you a visit directly supports my visiting you, but only indirectly supports my not visiting you to avoid pride in fulfilling my duties.

But now it is an interesting question what determined what reasons directly support what action. One option is that the relation is due to entailment: a reason directly supports ϕing provided that that reason entails that ϕing is good or right. But this misses the hyperintentionality in reasons. It is necessarily true that it’s right for me to respect my neighbor; a necessary truth is entailed by every proposition; but that my neighbor is annoying is not directly a reason to respect my neighbor. One might try for some “relevant entailment”, but I am dubious. Perhaps the fact that an action is wrong relevantly entails that there is reason to do it to exhibit one’s will to power, but that ϕing is wrong is directly a reason not to ϕ, and only indirectly a reason to ϕ.

I suspect the right answer is that this direct support relation comes from our human nature: if it is our nature to be directly motivated to ϕ because of R, then R directly supports ϕing. Hmm. This may work for epistemic support, too.

Habitual action

Alice has lived a long and reasonable life. She developed a lot of good habits. Every morning, she goes on a walk. On her walk, she looks at the lovely views, she smells the flowers in season, she gathers mushrooms, she listens to the birds chirping, she climbs a tree, and so on. Some of these things she does for their own sake and some she does instrumentally. For instance, she climbs a tree because she saw research that daily exercise promotes health, but she smells the flowers for the sake of the smelling itself.

She figured all this out when she was in her 30s, but now she is 60. One day, she realizes that for a while now she had forgotten the reasoning that led to her habits. In particular, she no longer knows which of her daily activities have innate value and which ones are merely instrumental.

So what can we say about her habitual activities?

One option is that they retain the teleology with which they were established. Although Alice no longer remembers that she climbs a tree solely for the sake of health, that is indeed what she climbs the tree for. On this picture, when we perform actions from habit, they retain the teleology they had when the habit was established. In particular, it follows that agential teleology need not be grounded in occurrent mental states of the agent. This is a difficult bullet to bite.

The other option is that they have lost their teleological characterization. This implies, interestingly, that there is no fact about whether the actions are being done for their own sake or instrumentally. In particular, it follows that the standard diviion of actions into those done for their own sake and those done instrumentally is not exhaustive. That is also a difficult bullet to bite.

I am not sure what to say. I suspect one lesson is that action is more complicated than we philosophers think, and our simple characterizations of it miss the complexity.

Acting without knowledge of rightness

Some philosophers think that for your right action to be morally worthy you have to know that the action is right.

On the contrary, there are cases where an action is even more morally worthy when you don’t know it’s right.

1. Alice is tasked with a dangerous mission to rescue hikers stranded on a mountain. She knows it’s right, and she fulfills the mission.

2. Bob is tasked with a dangerous mission to rescue hikers stranded on a mountain. He knows it’s right, but then just before he heads out, a clever philosopher gives him a powerful argument that there is no right or wrong. He is not fully convinced, but he has no time to figure out whether the argument works before the mission starts. Instead, he reasons quickly: “Well, there is a 50% chance that the argument is sound and there is no such thing as right and wrong, in which case at least I’m not doing anything wrong by rescuing. But there is a 50% chance that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and if anything is right, it’s rescuing these hikers.” And he fulfills the mission.

Bob’s action is, I think, even more worthy and praiseworthy than Alice’s. For while Alice risks her life for a certainty of doing the right thing, Bob is willing to risk his life in the face of uncertainty. Some people would take the uncertainty as an excuse, but Bob does not.

Acting because of and for reasons

It seems that:

1. If you pursue friendship because friendship is non-instrumentally valuable, then you pursue friendship non-instrumentally.

But not so. Imagine a rich eccentric offers you $10,000 to pursue something that is non-instrumentally valuable. You think about it, correctly decide friendship is non-instrumentally valuable, and pursue it to gain the $10,000. You are pursuing friendship because it is non-instrumentally valuable, but you are pursuing it merely instrumentally.

More generally, is there any conditional of the form:

2. If you pursue friendship because p, then you pursue friendship non-instrumentally

that is true in all cases, where p states some known reason for the pursuit of friendship? I don’t think so. For the rich eccentric can tell you that you will get $10,000 if it is both the case that p and you pursue friendship. In that case, if you know that it is the case that p, then your reason for pursuing friendship is p, since it is given p, and only given p, that you will get $10,000 for your pursuit of friendship.

Maybe the lesson from the above is that there is a difference between doing something because of a reason and doing it for the reason. That friendship is non-instrumentally valuable is a reason. In the first rich eccentric case, you are pursuing because of that reason, but you are not pursuing it for that reason. Thus maybe we can say:

3. If you pursue friendship for the reason that friendship is non-instrumentally valuable, then you pursue friendship non-instrumentally.

In the case where you are aiming only at the $10,000, you are pursuing friendship for the reason that pursuing friendship will get you $10,000, or more explicitly for the conjunctive reason that (a) if friendship is non-instrumentally valuable it will get you $10,000 to pursue it and (b) it is non-instrumentally valuable. But you are nonetheless pursuing friendship because it is non-instrumentally valuable.

There is thus a rather mysterious “acting for R” relation in regard to actions which does not reduce to “acting because R”.

A failed Deep Thought

I was going to post the following as Deep Thoughts XLIII, in a series of posts meant to be largely tautologous or at least trivial statements:

1. Everyone older than you was once your age.

And then I realized that this is not actually a tautology. It might not even be true.

Suppose time is discrete in an Aristotelian way, so that the intervals between successive times are not always the same. Basically, the idea is that times are aligned with the endpoints of change, and these can happen at all sorts of seemingly random times, rather than at multiples of some interval. But in that case, (1) is likely false. For it is unlikely that the random-length intervals of time in someone else’s life are so coordinated with yours that the exact length of time that you have lived equals the sum of the lengths of intervals from the beginning to some point in the life of a specific other person.

Of course, on any version of the Aristotelian theory that fits with our observations, the intervals between times are very short, and so everyone older than you was once approximately your age.

One might try to replace (1) by:

2. Everyone older than you was once younger than you are now.

But while (2) is nearly certainly true, it is still not a tautology. For if Alice has lived forever, then she’s older than you, but she was never younger than you are now! And while there probably are no individuals who are infinitely old (God is timelessly eternal), this fact is far from trivial.

Punishment, causation and time

I want to argue for this thesis:

1. For a punishment P for a fault F to be right, P must stand in a causal-like relation to P.

What is a causal-like relation? Well, causation is a causal-like relation. But there is probably one other causal-like relation, namely when because of the occurrence of a contingent event E, God knows that E occurred, and this knowledge in turn explains why God did something. This is not exactly causation, because God is not causally affected by anything, but it is very much like causation. If you don’t agree, then just remove the ``like’’ from (1).

Thesis (1) helps explain what is wrong with punishing people on purely statistical grounds, such as sending a traffic ticket to Smith on the grounds that Smith has driven 30,000 miles in the last five years and anyone who drove that amount must have committed a traffic offense.

Are there other arguments against (1)? I think so. Consider forward-looking punishment where by knowing someone’s present character you know that they will commit some crime in ten days, so you punish them now (I assume that they will commit the crime even if you do not punish them). Or, even more oddly, consider circular forward-looking punishment. Suppose Alice has such a character that it is known that if we jail her, she will escape from jail. But assume that our in society an escape from jail is itself a crime punishable by jail, and that Alice is not currently guilty of anything. We then jail her, on the grounds that she will escape from jail, for which the punishment is us now jailing her.

One may try to rule out the forward-looking cases on the grounds that instead of (1) we should hold:

2. For a punishment P for a fault F to be right, P must come after F.

But that’s not right. Simultaneous causation seems possible, and it does not seem unjust to set up a system where a shoplifter feels punitive pain at the very moment of the shoplifting, as long as the pain is caused by the shoplifting.

Or consider this kind of a case. You know that Bob will commit a crime in ten days, so you set up an automated system that will punish him at a preset future date. It does not seem to be of much significance whether the system is set to go off in nine or eleven days.

Or consider cases where Special Relativity is involved, and the punishment occurs at a location distant from the criminal. For instance, Carl, born on Earth, could be sentenced to public infamy on earth for a crime he commits around Alpha Centauri. Supposing that we have prior knowledge that he will commit the crime on such and such a date. If (2) is the right principle, when should we make him infamous on earth? Presumably after the crime. But in what reference frame? That seems a silly question. It is silly, because (2) isn’t the right principle—(1) is better.

Objection: One cannot predict what someone will freely do.

Response: One perhaps cannot predict with 100% certainty what someone will freely do, but punishment does not require 100% certainty.

Punishment, reward and theistic natural law

I’ve always found punishment and (to a lesser extent) reward puzzling. Why is it that when someone does something wrong is there moral reason to impose a harsh treatment on them, and why is it that when someone does something right—and especially supererogatory—is there moral reason to do something nice for them?

Of course, it’s easy to explain why it’s good for our species that there be a practice of reward and punishment: such a practice in obvious ways helps to maintain a cooperative society. But what makes it morally appropriate to impose a sacrifice on the individual for the good of the species in this way, whether the good of the person receiving the punishment or the good of the person giving the reward when the reward has a cost?

Punishment and reward thus fit into a schema where we would like to be able to make use of this argument form:

1. It would be good (respectively, bad) for humans if moral fact F did (did not) obtain.

2. Thus, probably, moral fact F does obtain.

(The argument form is better on the parenthetical negative version.) It would be bad for humans if we did not have distinctive moral reasons to reward and punish, since our cooperative society would be more liable to fall apart due to cheating, freeriding and neglect of others. So we have such moral reasons.

As I have said on a number of occasions, we want a metaethics on which this is a good argument. Rule-utilitarianism is such a metaethics. So is Adams’ divine command theory with a loving God. And so is theistic natural law, where God chooses which natures to exemplify because of the good features in these natures. I want to say something about this last option in our case, and why it is superior to the others.

Human nature encodes what is right and wrong for. Thus, it can encode that it is right for us to punish and reward. An answer as to why it’s right for us to reward and punish, then, is that God wanted to make cooperative creatures, and chose a nature of cooperative creatures that have moral reasons to punish and reward, since that improves the cooperation.

But there is a way that the theistic natural law solution stands out from the others: it can incorporate Boethius’ insight that it is intrinsically bad for one to get away unpunished with wrongdoing. For our nature not only encodes what is right and wrong for us to do, but also what is good or bad for us. And so it can encode that it is bad for us to get away unpunished. It is good for us that it be bad for us to get away unpunished, since its being bad for us to get away unpunished means that we have additional reason to avoid wrongdoing—if we do wrong, we either get punished or we get away unpunished, and both options are bad for us.

The rule-utilitarian and divine-command options only explain what is right and wrong, not what is good and bad, and so they don’t give us Boethius’ insight.

What is an existential quantifier?

What is an existential quantifier?

The inferentialist answer is that an existential quantifier is any symbol that has the syntactic features of a one-place quantifier and obeys the same logical rules of an existential quantifier (we can precisely specify both the syntax and logic, of course). Since Carnap, we’ve had good reason to reject this answer (see, e.g., here).

Here is a modified suggestion. Consider all possible symbols that have the syntactic features of a one-place quantifier and obeys the rules of an existential quantifier. Now say that a symbol is an existential quantifier provided that it is a symbol among these symbols that maximizes naturalness, in the David Lewis sense of “naturalness”.

Moreover, this provides the quantifier variantist or pluralist (who thinks there are multiple existential quantifiers, none of them being the existential quantifier) with an answer to a thorny problem: Why not simply disjoin all the existential quantifiers to make a truly unrestricted existential quantifier, and say that that is the existential quantifier? THe quantifier variantist can say: Go ahead and disjoin them, but a disjunction of quantifiers is less natural than its disjuncts and hence isn’t an existential quantifier.

This account also allows for quantifier variance, the possibility that there is more than one existential quantifier, as long as none of these existential quantifiers is more natural than any other. But it also fits with quantifier invariance as long as there is a unique maximizer of naturalness.

Until today, I thought that the problem of characterizing existential quantifiers was insoluble for a quantifier variantist. I was mistaken.

It is tempting to take the above to say something deep about the nature of an existential quantifier, and maybe even the nature of being. But I think it doesn’t quite. We have a characterization of existential quantifiers among all possible symbols, but this characterization doesn’t really tell us what they mean, just how they behave.

Combining epistemic utilities

Suppose that the right way to combine epistemic utilities or scores across individuals is averaging, and I am an epistemic act expected-utility utilitarian—I act for the sake of expected overall epistemic utility. Now suppose I am considering two different hypotheses:

• Many: There are many epistemic agents (e.g., because I live in a multiverse).

• Few: There are few epistemic agents (e.g., because I live in a relatively small universe).

If Many is true, given averaging my credence makes very little difference to overall epistemic utility. On Few, my credence makes much more of a difference to overall epistemic utility. So I should have a high credence for Few. For while a high credence for Few will have an unfortunate impact on overall epistemic utility if Many is true, because the impact of my credence on overall epistemic utility will be small on Many, I can largely ignore the Many hypothesis.

In other words, given epistemic act utilitarianism and averaging as a way of combining epistemic utilities, we get a strong epistemic preference for hypotheses with fewer agents. (One can make this precise with strictly proper scoring rules.) This is weird, and does not match any of the standard methods (self-sampling, self-indication, etc.) for accounting for self-locating evidence.

(I should note that I once thought I had a serious objection to the above argument, but I can't remember what it was.)

Here’s another argument against averaging epistemic utilities. It is a live hypothesis that there are infinitely many people. But on averaging, my epistemic utility makes no difference to overall epistemic utility. So I might as well believe anything on that hypothesis.

One might toy with another option. Instead of averaging epistemic utilities, we could average credences across agents, and then calculate the overall epistemic utility by applying a proper scoring rule to the average credence. This has a different problematic result. Given that there are at least billions of agents, for any of the standard scoring rules, as long as the average credence of agents other than you is neither very near zero nor very near one, your own credence’s contribution to overall score will be approximately linear. But it’s not hard to see that then to maximize expected overall epistemic utility, you will typically make your credence extreme, which isn’t right.

If not averaging, then what? Summing is the main alternative.

Closed time loop

Imagine two scenarios:

1. An infinitely long life of repetition of a session meaningful pleasure followed by a memory wipe.

2. A closed time loop involving one session of the meaningful pleasure followed by a memory wipe.

Scenario (1) involves infinitely many sessions of the meaningful pleasure. This seems better than having only one session as in (2). But subjectively, I have a hard time feeling any preference for (1). In both cases, you have your pleasure, and it’s true that you will have it again.

I suppose this is some evidence that we’re not meant to live in a closed time loop. :-)

Shuffling an infinite deck

Suppose infinitely many blindfolded people, including yourself, are uniformly randomly arranged on positions one meter apart numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, ….

Intuition: The probability that you’re on an even-numbered position is 1/2 and that you’re on a position divisible by four is 1/4.

But then, while asleep, the people are rearranged according to the following rule. The people on each even-numbered position 2n are moved to position 4n. The people on the odd numbered positions are then shifted leftward as needed to fill up the positions not divisible by 4. Thus, we have the following movements:

• 1 → 1

• 2 → 4

• 3 → 2

• 4 → 8

• 5 → 3

• 6 → 12

• 7 → 5

• 8 → 16

• 9 → 6

• and so on.

If the initial intuition was correct, then the probability that now you’re on a position that’s divisible by four is 1/2, since you’re now on a position divisible by four if and only if initially you were on a position divisible by two. Thus it seems that now people are no longer uniformly randomly arranged, since for a uniform arrangement you’d expect your probability of being in a position divisible by four to be 1/4.

This shows an interesting difference between shuffling a finite and an infinite deck of cards. If you shuffle a finite deck of cards that’s already uniformly distributed, it remains uniformly distributed no matter what algorithm you use to shuffle it, as long as you do so in a content-agnostic way (i.e., you don’t look at the faces of the cards). But if you shuffle an infinite deck of distinct cards that’s uniformly distributed in a content-agnostic way, you can destroy the uniform distribution, for instance by doubling the probability that a specific card is in a position divisible by four.

I am inclined to take this as evidence that the whole concept of a “uniformly shuffled” infinite deck of cards is confused.

Four-flour pancakes

I was watching an old Aunt Jemima pancake mix commercial which touted it as being made from four flours: wheat, corn, rye and rice, and I decided to see what pancakes made them are like. I started with this wheat flour pancake recipe, but tweaked some things, and made them this morning. Pretty good. Perhaps more hearty than standard pancakes, and the texture was a bit more crunchy, which I liked.

• 1/2 cup of wheat flour

• 1/2 cup of whole-grain rye flour

• 1/2 cup of corn flour

• 1/2 cup of (non-glutinous) rice flour

• 4 3/4 teaspoons baking powder

• 4 teaspoons white sugar

• 1/3 teaspoon salt

• 1 2/3 cup milk

• 4 tablespoons melted butter

• 1 large egg

• 4 teaspoons apple sauce (or skip and use 1 1/3 egg, if you have some use for the remaining 2/3 of the egg)

• cooking spray (I used canola spray)

• optional: chocolate chips

Mix dry ingredients. Add wet ingredients. Mix well. Heat pan to medium heat. Spray with oil. Put a big serving spoon of mix on the pan. If you want to add chocolate chips, drop them in on top. Wait until the edges are getting dry. (It was surprisingly fast, about 1-2 minutes, and they would burn easily when I wasn’t fast enough.) Flip and brown the other side (again, it’s fast).

Yields 9-10 not very large pancakes. The frying took half an hour with two pans in simultaneous use. I measured out all the ingredients the night before and pre-mixed the dry ingredients so I could be fast in the morning before a pickleball game.