Sometimes when bad things happen to bad people, we feel like they deserve them. Suppose Alice has broken into Bob’s house to poison his beloved dog, and on her way out she trips and breaks her leg. It sure seems that she got what she deserved.
But the bad that a bad person deserves is punishment: an intentional harsh treatment by a punisher. Our feeling that Alice got what she deserved can only be right if there is some supernatural judge—for clearly no natural judge is behind this—who as a punishment has either caused her to break her leg or at least intentionally failed to prevent the leg-breaking.
I think this provides us with a little bit of evidence that God exists. For a feeling that p is some evidence that p. So, the feeling that Alice got what she deserved is some evidence that she got what she deserved.
12 comments:
I don't think it can constitute an argument for the existence of God, because we also judge that some people deserve a punishment that they don't suffer, that still others suffer punishment that they don't deserve... The argument for the existence of God is, I think, to be sought, not on the side of obtaining the punishment, which does not always come about, but on the side of the judgment about obtaining the punishment (that seems less contingent to me). So you end up with something like the moral argument I think.
I'm just as inclined to run a modus tollens and conclude that an intentional agent is not essential to punishment, but instead say something like: punishment only requires that the suffering is appropriately causally connected to the unjust action.
When I compare the way I feel about what happens to Alice after she poisons the dog with the way I feel about what happens to her after she drinks too much, here’s what I find: I am more likely to say that she deserved the hangover than that she deserved the broken leg. But I am also less likely to think about supernatural agency when I think about the hangover than when I think about the broken leg.
SMatthewStolte
Indeed, the argument risks leading to speculation as to the appropriateness or otherwise of the punishment. But what, in my opinion, remains unchanged, is the "she must undergo a punishment", independently of the additional predicates (of duration, manner, intensity ...) that can be attached to it. I think it's this "brute" feeling that can be a premise for a moral argument.
Unknown, I don’t see anything wrong with speculating about the appropriateness of a punishment, so I don’t see the fact that Alex Pruss’s argument might lead to such speculation as a problem with his argument. So that’s not part of my objection.
Hi SMatthewStolte
My English is not good. So I write in French before translating. Sorry. I surely should have translated you before reading you. Indeed it was not your objection. It was mine. But after rereading you, I think there is a little problem with your objection, that the hangover of Alice after drinking too much is more deserved and less inclined to call on God.
A hangover after drinking cannot be seen as a punishment for drinking, it is just a direct consequence of it, just as, in Pruss's example, a broken leg is the direct consequence of walking wrong and tripping. Such situations, isolated, do not call for moral judgment de facto. They must be linked to a context.
Suppose Alice does not have a hangover from heavy drinking. I would have two contradictory feelings depending on whether after drinking she goes straight to bed or whether after drinking she makes a noise at night and disturbs the neighbors. I would be inclined to be indifferent in the first case and to think that a hangover would be the minimum she should suffer in the second.
Now suppose Alice trips and breaks her leg. I would also have two conflicting feelings depending on whether she fell while being chased by a purse thief or whether she was fleeing after poisoning a dog.
So I don't think your example is a counterexample for Pruss's, because your exemple is just incomplete and does not draw the parallel where you think it does.
God tortures a baby for 7 days with a terrible illness before finally killing it:
14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. (2 Sam. 12:14-18 NAU)
Pruss said: "For a feeling that p is some evidence that p. So, the feeling that Alice got what she deserved is some evidence that she got what she deserved."
So my feeling that this baby did not deserve to be tortured, is some evidence that it didn't deserve to be tortured.
Barry:
"So my feeling that this baby did not deserve to be tortured, is some evidence that it didn't deserve to be tortured."
I agree that this feeling is some evidence that the child didn't deserve to be tortured.
I do not think, however, that the text claims that the child was tortured. The text claims the child was sick and died. The text does not say that the child suffered.
Moreover, I think the divine intentionality here could be more complex than it appears. When we read that God struck the child, that may be a poetic way of expressing divine causality, which may be entirely causation-by-omission: God refrains from saving the child from an illness that was coming to the child.
Matthew:
Just to report initial intuitions, if nothing bad happens to Alice after she poisons the dog, I am inclined to say that that's an injustice, but if nothing bad happens to Alice after she gets drunk, I am not inclined to say that that's an injustice. And that's despite the fact that I think intentional drunkenness is morally wrong (and not just because in many cases it can lead to serious additional harms; getting drunk is in itself morally wrong because it is in itself opposed to the goods of reason). I think it's because I don't have a strong intuition that harms against self deserve punishment.
To continue to report intuitions, the more I reflect on the way drunkenness is an offense against others and not just against self (it's a bad example; it offends against the Creator of our rationality; it is not unlikely to lead to other behavior harmful to others; etc.), the more I feel that the hangover is a deserved punishment, but that this only makes sense if there is a punisher.
I am now also feeling that there is an even nicer argument on the reward side. Suppose Alice repents, and grows in virtue, and enjoys the natural internal benefits of virtue such as a sharper intellect and a quiet conscience. It seems that she is getting what she deserves. But one does not deserve to get anything from impersonal nature. So, she is getting what she deserves from somebody, and God is the best hypothesis of who the somebody is.
To omit, as I understand it, is to intentionally not exercise one's own causal force and therefore to let things be done by causal series in which one does not figure as an agent.
Either there is causation or there is omission. Not both. This is the reason that leads me to think that this notion of causation-by-omission is not at all relevant, all the more so for God who appears as the first agent in any causal series. God is always acting, never omitting.
God does not refrain to heal the child the way a doctor could. By refraining to heal him, God is doing something, which is to cause the disease and make it persist until death follows.
Raf SB:
This is complicated by the privation theory of evil which is widely accepted by theists. An evil isn't a *something*, and so omission becomes more relevant.
Blogger Raf SB said...
"Either there is causation or there is omission. Not both. This is the reason that leads me to think that this notion of causation-by-omission is not at all relevant,"
-------Then to be consistent you'd have to oppose laws that criminalize parental neglect of children, after all, if a child drinks bleach because the parent wasn't supervising them, then according to you, there is either causation or omission, not both.
But of course we routinely find people immoral for their failure to act (i.e., neglect). That is true of basic human reason and courts of law.
Blogger Alexander R Pruss said...
Raf SB:
"This is complicated by the privation theory of evil which is widely accepted by theists. An evil isn't a *something*, and so omission becomes more relevant."
-----------Yes, that's how they think, but it is absurd: a man is engaging in forthright action whether he makes a cash deposit at the bank or robs the bank at gun point. Furthermore the bible doesn't teach that evil is the absence of good. So skeptics aren't being as 'unreasonable" to deny this sophistry as when they deny some "biblical" thing.
Something like the privation theory is an immediate logical consequence of the doctrine that everything other than God is created by God, and both God and what God creates is good.
Aquinas could say that what makes the bank robbery evil is not the request for money but the lack of a right to the requested money.
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