Value supervenes on being

Consider this thesis, which both Augustine and Aquinas would accept:

1. Value supervenes on being (VSB): How valuable reality is is determined by what entities exist.

However:

2. It is good to have a true belief and bad to have a false belief.

We now have an argument against presentism (only present things exist) and growing block (only present and past things exist). Among our beliefs, we have beliefs about contingent future events. Some of these beliefs are contingently true and others are contingently false. (I am assuming a bivalent temporal logic.) The value of these beliefs is determined by what entities exist. But present and past entities are insufficient to determine whether the beliefs are true, and hence what the value of the beliefs is. Thus, contrary to presentism and growing block, there must be future things.

Broadening harms considered in research ethics

In typical lab research ethics, the following types of ethical considerations count against an experiment:

1. risks of harm to the world outside the lab

2. risks of harm to persons in the lab

3. risks of pain to conscious entities in the lab.

(The categories overlap: the persons in the lab are conscious entities, and pain harms them. Likewise, the persons in the lab have lives outside the lab, and harm to them in the lab can imply harm to what is outside the lab.)

Now, note that the harms to the world outside the lab can include things that neither harm persons nor cause pain to conscious entities, such as damage to a non-conscious ecosystem. Thus, an experiment that risks the escape of microbes that could cause the world-wide extinction of a plant species would be ethically problematic, even if there were only negligible risks of harm to persons or pain to conscious critters. Further, note that non-pain harms to persons in or out of the lab certainly do count against an experiment—that is why consent is so important.

But I think the above categories of harms are too narrow, as they leave out:

4. risks of non-painful harms to conscious non-persons in the lab

5. risks of harms to non-conscious non-persons in the lab.

As the extinction point shows, we do worry about such risks when they concern what is outside the lab. We should, I think, likewise worry about them when they are in the lab.

The premature death of a plant or insect is a bad thing, even if plants or insects are not conscious (I have no idea whether insects are): a good thing has been erased from the world before its time. Likewise, disabling an insect in an experiment is a bad thing, even if it does not cause pain to the insect. Indeed, depriving an organism, of whatever sort, of the kind of environment where it thrives is a a bad thing.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t experiment on plants. But the fact that a living thing is harmed, regardless of whether it is a person or it feels pain, is an ethical consideration against the experiment. This ethical consideration may be outweighed by the epistemic or pragmatic value of the information gained from the experiment. But for the experiment to be worthwhile, it needs to be so outweighed. It’s not automatic that a non-pain harm to a non-person is outweighed by information gains. Some information might be too trivial.

Aristotelian abstraction

On the Aristotelian account of abstraction, we abstract the forms of things via perception. But here is a problem. First of all, we sometimes have better knowledge of things not perceived than of things perceived. Let’s say you read a detailed scientific book about pangolins, though you’ve never encountered one, while I once saw a koala in a zoo, but don’t much know anything more about them than that they are cute marsupials. It seems quite problematic to say I have the form of the koala in my mind, but you do not have the form of the pangolin. For that would make the mental possession of the form of the thing an unimportant flourish to what really epistemically matters, since clearly you are better off epistemically for reading the book about pangolins than I am for seeing the koala.

Of course, presumably, the author of the pangolin book presumably saw the pangolin. But that doesn’t seem to matter much, either. There are many dinosaur species where the paleontologist knows more about the species than I know about koalas, and yet no human ever perceptually interacted with a dinosaur, but typically only with minerals that have displaced their carcasses.

What should someone committed to the Aristotelian story about abstraction say? Two options come to mind, a modest and an expansive one.

Modest option: It really doesn’t really matter much epistemically whether one has the form of a pangolin or a koala in one’s mind. What matters is the propositional knowledge. However, it is essential to our possession of the propositional knowledge that our thoughts have intentionality, that they refer to the world. And it is crucial to securing intentionality that we have Aristotelian abstraction at the interface between the world and the mind. The triceratops expert’s intentionality with respect to triceratopses is derivative from the causal chain from triceratopses to their corpses to their fossils to the light reflecting from the fossils into the expert’s eyes to (eventually somehow) the expert’s thoughts. Where the causal chain crosses from the world to the mind, we need a transmission of form to ensure intentionality for the whole chain. Maybe the transmission happens when the minerals that have replaced the bones transmit their mineral forms to the expert’s mind, in some mysterious way mediated by the light.

Expansive option: Everything in the world carries the forms of everything nondivine that is causally upstream from itself. The triceratops corpse somehow has the form of the triceratops in it, and so do the bones of the triceratops, and so do the minerals that replace the bones, and so does the light modulated by reflection from the minerals, and so do the electrical impulses in the nerves from the retinal receptors to the brain. It is easier to extract the form when it comes from seeing a live koala than when it comes from seeing fossils, so that a layman can do the former while the scientist is needed to do the latter. Similarly, when you read a book about pangolins, the ink on the page, being causally modulated by the author’s knowledge, carries the form of the pangolin (in addition to any forms naturally contained in the ink, say those of the particles constituting the ink).

Medievals already said something like this about the modulated light, so it’s just a matter of extending the story. And while the problem I am concerned about is one that does not require any science or technology beyond what the medievals had—the medievals knew about the gaining of expertise from books (if anything, they might have overestimated it!)—in a modern setting we it feels like an Aristotelian has to do this. After all, it is hard to deny that one can gain the same kind of knowledge of koalas by looking at them through high-end augmented reality goggles as from directly seeing them with our eyes. Thus, on a form-transmission story, the electrical potentials of the capacitors in the computer memory in the goggles have to somehow carry the form of the koala. But given the many ways that computer memory can be realized (think of magnetized rings versus capacitors versus markings on a CD), it seems plausible that any effect will have to have to be admitted to carry the form of its cause. It is tempting to say the form is only found in substances where there is sufficient data to reconstruct significant information about the causally-upstream object the form is of, but I think is not tenable. Presumably each bacterium is a substance, and we could have a type of biological memory in augmented reality glasses where each bit of information is stored in a different bacterium.

This story coheres very nicely with the essentiality of origins. It is a kind of a reversal of the principle of proportionality of causation on which the reality of the effect is actually or eminently found in the cause: the formal reality of a cause is found in the effect. I think it’s a defensible story. But I also find it hard to believe.

From chickens and eggs to a cosmological argument

Suppose we have an infinite regress of chickens and eggs, with no first item, and suppose that if there is any last item, it’s not a chicken.

Plausibly, then:

1. The plurality of the chickens explains the eggs.

But also plausibly:

2. If x has an explanation, then x has a fundamental explanation.

However:

3. No plurality of chickens and eggs fundamentally explains the eggs.

4. So, something that is other than a plurality of chickens and eggs fundamentally explains the eggs.

Why is (3) true? Well, there are two kinds of chicken and egg pluralities.

1. Pluralities with an earliest item.
2. Pluralities with no earliest item.

A Type I plurality does not explain the chickens and eggs, because it does not explain any chickens and eggs earlier than the earliest item in the plurality.

A Type II plurality at best non-fundamentally explains the eggs. For given a Type II plurality, choose any item x in the plurality. Item x is a chicken or egg, and there is an earlier chicken or egg y in the plurality. Since y explains x, by a plausible case of transitivity, the subplurality where we drop x also explains the eggs. So the initial Type II plurality did not fundamentally explain the eggs.

Since every plurality of chickens and eggs is of Type I or Type II, we have (3).

The argument above applies beyond chickens and eggs. Suppose:

5. Every physical item in the world is caused.

Then:

6. Either there is a physical item with a non-physical cause or every physical item has a physical cause.

Add:

7. There are no loops of physical causes.

8. Physical causation is transitive.

As I show in my 1999 paper using Zorn’s Lemma, if every physical item has a physical cause, it is then possible to partition the physical items into an “even” and an “odd” subset, where every item in the even subset causes an item in the odd subset, and every item in the odd subset causes an item in the even subset. Call the odd items “eggs”. Call the non-final even items “chickens” (a non-final item is one that causes a further physical item). Then, plausibly, the chickens explain the eggs. By the argument above, something non-physical thus explains the eggs. Anything non-physical that explains the eggs explains all of physical reality (because for any physical item, it is either an egg or there is an egg prior to it). So:

9. There is a non-physical item that explains all of physical reality.

I think the thing that needs the most defense is premise (2). It’s somewhat close to causal finitism.

Virtues in heaven

Here are two Aristotelian theses:

1. Complete human flourishing requires the exercise of all the human virtues.

2. Courage is a human virtue.

Add a highly plausible thesis that likely everyone will accept:

3. The exercise of courage requires apparent or real danger.

Now add some theses that a Christian will surely accept:

4. In heaven, there are no apparent danger.

5. In heaven, there is no real danger.

6. In heaven, there is complete human flourishing.

Contradiction!

I find it nearly impossible to deny 3-6. That leaves 1 and 2.

One move available to the Christian Aristotelian is to weaken 1. Perhaps complete human flourishing only requires the exercise of fundamental virtues, and courage is a non-central virtue. But traditionally fortitude also counts as a cardinal virtue, cardinal seems to imply fundamental, but fortitude is a virtue of dealing with evil—whether in the form of real or apparent danger, or of suffering, or of hardship, while there is no evil in heaven. So the problem comes back for fortitude. One solution is to deny the traditional cardinal virtues as being fundamental, and insist that the only fundamental virtue is love. Fortitude is just a central situational way for love to manifest.

Another move is simply to deny 1 altogether, of course, denying the whole link between virtues and flourishing. This is probably too radical.

And of course one might just deny 2. The most plausible move would be to say that only love is a virtue.