Talk against privation theory of evil

I'm giving a Zoom talk against the privation theory of evil (with an alternative provided) for Liverpool University on Thursday at 9 am Central Time / 15:00 UK time. You need to register if you are interested in attending.

Impairment and saving lives

Bob and Carl are drowning and you can save only one of them. Bob is a human being in the prime of life, physically and mentally healthy, highly intelligent, and leading a happy and fulfilling life as a physicist committed to lifelong celibacy. To look at him, Carl is Bob’s identical twin. Carl has the same physical and mental powers as Bob, and leads a very similar happy and fulfilling life as a physicist committed to lifelong celibacy.

But there is one crucial difference that you know about, but Carl does not. Carl is actually a member of a superintelligent humanoid alien species. However, due to an unfortunate untreatable genetic condition, Carl suffers from a severe intellectual impairment, having merely the intelligence of a highly intelligent human. In order that Carl might avoid the stigma of the impairment, his parents had some highly sophisticated surgery done on him to make him fit into human society, and arranged for him to be adopted by a human family and raised as a human. No one except for you on earth will ever know that Carl isn’t human. You know because you happened to see the aliens arranging this (but you haven’t told anyone, because you don’t want people to think you are crazy).

Should you save Bob or Carl from drowning? My intuition is that if the above is all that you know, you have no reason to prefer saving one over the other. If one of them is slightly more likely to be saved by you (e.g., they are slightly closer to you), you should go for that one, but otherwise it’s a toss-up.

But notice that if you save Carl, there will be more natural evil in the world: There will be a severe intellectual impairment, which won’t be present if you choose to save Bob instead. It seems pretty plausible that:

1. If you have a choice between two otherwise permissible courses of action, which result in the same goods, but one of them results in exactly one additional evil, you have a moral reason to choose the course of action that does not result in the evil.

Thus, it seems, you should save Bob.

So there is something paradoxical here. On the one hand, there seems to be no reason to pick Bob over Carl. On the other hand, the plausible general ethical principle (1) suggests you should pick Bob.

How can we get out of this paradox? Here are two options.

First, one could say that impairment is not an evil at all. As long as Carl leads a fulfilling life—even if it is merely fulfilling by human standards and not those of his species—his impairment is no evil. Indeed, we might even take the above story to be a reductio ad absurdum of an Aristotelian picture of species as having norms attached to them with it being a harm to one to fall short of these norms.

Second, one argue that principle (1) does not actually apply to the case. For there is a difference of goods in saving Carl: you are saving a member of a superintelligent species, while in the case of saving Bob, you are saving a mere human. For this to fit with the intuition that it’s a toss-up whether to save Bob or Carl, it has to be the case that what the superintelligence of his species adds to the reasons for saving Carl is balanced by what his abnormally low intelligence subtracts from these reasons.

Of these options, I am more attracted to the second. And the second has an interesting and important consequence: "mere" membership in a natural kind can have significant value. This has important repercussions for the status of the human fetus.

Online talk on privation theory of evil

I will be speaking online at the New Perspectives in Philosophy of Religion conference tomorrow, July 21, 2021, at 3:00 pm Central Time (5 pm Brasilia Time), on the privation theory of evil. Live streaming will be here.

Two privation theories

The privation theory of evil says that:

• If E is an evil, then E is a lack of a due good.

Here is a quick counterexample: Brutus's murder of Caesar. A murder is an evil but it is not a lack of a due good. It causes a lack of a due good (life) and it is caused by a lack of a due good (the virtue of justice), but the murder is not itself a lack of a due good. For a part of Brutus's murder of Caesar is the stabbing motion of his arm. But a lack is not the sort of thing that can have a stabbing motion as a part of it!

But there is a closely related theory that is not subject to the murder counterexample. We might call it the privation theory of evilmaking:

• If E is an evil, then E either is a lack of a due good or E is made evil by the lack of a due good.

Now, murder is not so clearly a counterexample. An act of murder is an act of killing, but plausibly what makes this act of killing be an evil is a lack of justice.

I am now suspecting that some people who have taken themselves to be upholding the privation theory of evil have in fact been upholding the privation theory of evilmaking.

But it is worth noting that the privation theory of evilmaking doesn’t accomplish everything Augustine needs from his privation theory. What Augustine needs to do is to save the idea that God doesn’t create evils. But if E is not itself a lack but is something that exists and is made evil by a lack, and God creates everything that exists other than God, then it follows that God creates an evil.

Pain and a hybrid privation theory of evil

According to Augustine’s privation theory of evil, evil has no positive reality, but is always a lack of something. It seems that theists are committed to the privation theory of evil. For if evil has a positive reality, then obviously that positive reality is other than God. But according to theism, every positive reality other than God is created by God. But God does not create evil. So theism is incompatible with the idea that evil is a positive reality.

However, that argument doesn’t seem to be quite right, as it assumes that the only two options for evil are that

1. Evil is a positive reality,

and

2. evil is a lack.

But in fact it is more plausible to think that

3. an evil is grounded in both a lack and a positive reality.

Consider Alice’s cowardice when she discovers that her employer is producing defective medication and nonetheless does not report this to the FDA. Alice’s cowardice is only partly grounded in by a lack of courage. It is also partly grounded in Alice’s humanity. After all, Alice’s pencil also lacks courage, but does not therefore count as a coward.

This observation is closely related to the fact that a careful definition of the privation theory of evil will specify that evil isn’t just a lack, but a lack of a due good, of a good that ought to be present. And courage should be present in a human but not in a pencil, so that evil is not constituted merely by a lack but by a lack plus whatever—say, humanity—that grounds the dueness of what is lacking. So perhaps the hybrid theory (3) just is a charitable way of understanding the classic Augustianian theory.

Note, too, that (3) can be reconciled with theism just as (2) can. For we need not say that God creates such things as holes that are constituted by combinations of positive and negative realities. We can say that God makes the positive realities, and the holes, shadows and evils are just a logical consequence of what he has made and what he has not made.

Now, one of the main objections to the privation theory of evil is pain, which sure doesn’t seem to be a lack, or even a lack of something due, but rather seems to be a positive reality. But the hybrid privation theory (3) can be reconciled with the phenomenon of pain.

Here’s how. We don’t know what constitutes pain. Start by imagining that a computer could feel pain (something that seems plausible given materialism). We don’t know what kind of program and data would constitute pain, but it might well be encoded as a sequence of zeroes and ones, or lacks and presences of electrical potential. Well, then, that fits perfectly with (3): the pain is constituted by a combination of negative reality—the zeroes—and positive reality—the ones. If we were to fill in all the negative realities, the pain would disappear, as we would have just a sequence of ones, which, we may suppose, wouldn’t be sufficient to constitute pain.

Similarly, if materialism is true, we don’t know what brain states constitute a pain. It is plausible that the brain states that constitute pains are grounded in both positive and negative neural realities. After all, that’s generally how the material representational states we know of work. As I type this sentence, its inscription on the screen is constituted by a combination of absences and presences of light— the black and white pixels. (Things are more complicated with colored text, but the absence of light of particular wavelength is always going to be crucial.) When I say something, the periodic combination of pressure and lack of pressure (i.e., lower pressure) encodes the sound. So, given materialism, it is plausible that pain is grounded in a hybrid of positive and negative states (and that so is pleasure, for that matter).

Now, if materialism is false, there are multiple options. One option is that pains are simple existences, qualia. If so, that’s incompatible with the hybrid privation theory. But we do not know that that theory of pain is true, even if we know dualism to be true. Just as on materialism, pain is constituted by more fundamental states, so too on dualism, pain could be constituted by more fundamental (but immaterial) states. For all we know it is so, and for all we know the more fundamental states are partly negative in nature.

So, whether materialism or dualism is true, for all we know, pain is consistent with the hybrid privation theory. (I should add that I am not actually confident that pain is an evil in itself.)

Why are there infinitely many abstracta rather than none?

It just hit me how puzzling Platonism is. There are infinitely many abstract objects. These objects are really real, and their existence seems not to be explained by the existence of concreta, as on Aristotelianism. Why is there this infinitude of objects?

Of course, we can say that this is just a necessary fact. And maybe it’s just brute and unexplained why necessarily there is this infinitude of objects. But isn’t it puzzling?

Augustinian Platonism, on which the abstract objects are ideas in the mind of God, offers an explanation of the puzzle: the infinitely many objects exist because God thinks them. That still raises the question of why God thinks them. But maybe there is some hope that there is a story as to why God’s perfection requires him to think these infinitely many ideas, even if the story is beyond our ken.

I suppose a non-theistic Platonist could similarly hope for an explanation. My intuition is that the Augustinian’s hope is more reasonable.

Do theists have to believe the privation theory of evil?

St. Augustine argued somewhat like thus:

1. Everything that exists is sustained by God.
2. God sustains only good.
3. Thus everything that exists is good insofar as it exists.
4. Thus evil is only a privation of good.

I've found the argument compelling for most of my life. I continue to be confident of (3). But I am now not sure about the inference from (3) to (4). Here's why. Essential to Augustine's account is an ontology sufficiently sparse not to include lacks. After all, if holes, lacks and privations exist then Augustine's account is in trouble. But if the true ontology is sparse enough not to include lacks, then there will likely be other "things" that don't exist. And these other "things" will escape Augustine's argument.

For instance, why couldn't some evils instead of being privations be mismatches? The mismatch between Jones' belief that Americans never landed on the moon and the fact of the moon landing could be an evil. An ontology could, for instance, include both Jones' belief and the moon landing, but not include as a further item the mismatch between the two. One might try to argue that a mismatch is a privation of a due match. But the correct ontology might not include matches either. Or consider the example, discussed in the secondary literature, of the man with two noses. It's an evil to have two noses, but at least prima facie (sorry!) the extra nose isn't a privation. But if we do not suppose that evil has to be a privation, then we can say that the problem is the mismatch between the face and the human form.

This approach would allow one to retain the central anti-Manichean insight that Augustine has, namely (3), while at the same time escaping some counterexamples. I am not sure it escapes the biggest counterexample, namely pain. Though if we take Mark Murphy's theory that what is bad is not pain itself, but the disharmony between reality and desire that tends to correlate with pain, then the above approach helps, since a disharmony is a kind of mismatch.

I am not claiming every mismatch is an evil. The argument doesn't establish that every "thing" that doesn't exist is an evil (remember the remark that matches might not be in the correct ontology).

Final note: An alternative to the above would be to weaken (1) to the claim that everything that fundamentally exists is sustained by God, and hence everything that fundamentally exists is good insofar as it does so.

Antipresentism

Presentists think that the past and future are unreal but the present is real. I was going to do a tongue-in-cheek post about an opposed view where we have the past and future but no present. But as I thought about it, the position grew a little on me philosophically, at some expense of the tongueincheekness. Still, please take all I say below in good fun. If you get a plausible philosophical view out of it, that's great, but it's really just an exercise in philosophical imagination.

One way to think about antipresentism is to imagine the eternalist's four-dimensional universe, but then to remove one slice from it. Thus, we might have 1:59 pm and 2:01 pm, but no 2:00 pm. Put that way, the view isn't particularly attractive. Still, I do wonder why it would be more unattractive to remove just one time slice than to remove everything but that one time slice as the presentist does. It would, of course, be weird for the antipresentist to say that events first exist in the future, then pop out of existence just as one would have thought that they would come to be present, and then pop back into existence in the past. But perhaps no weirder than events coming out of nothing and going back into nothing, as on presentism. This way to think about antipresentism makes it a species of the A-theory.

But the antipresentisms I want to think about are ones that might be compatible with the B-theory. Start with the famous puzzles of Zeno and Augustine about the now. Augustine worried about the infinite thinness of the now. Zeno on the other hand worried about the fact that there are no processes in the now; there is no change in the now since within a single moment all is still.

One way of taking these ideas seriously is to see the present as an imaginary dividing line between the past and the future. There is in fact no dividing line: there is just the past and the future. (I think Joseph Diekemper's work inspired this thought.)

We might, for instance, instead of thinking of times as instants think of the basic entities as temporally extended events or time intervals, not made out of instantaneous events or moments. An event or interval might be past, or it might be future, or—like the writing of this post—it might be both past and future. (Thus, "past" and "future" is taken weakly: "at least partly past" and "at least partly future".) Some events or time intervals have the special property of being both past and future. We can stipulate that those events or time intervals are present. But they aren't real because they are present. They're just lucky enough to have two holds on reality: they are past and they are present. (In this framework, the presentist's claim that only present events are real sounds very strange. For why should reality require both pastness and futurity—why wouldn't one be enough?) There are no events or time intervals that are solely present.

There is a natural weakly-earlier-than relation e on events. If we had instants of time, we would say that EeF if and only if some time at which E happens is earlier than some time at which F happens. But that's just to aid intuition. Because there are no instantaneous events, every event is weakly earlier than itself: e is reflexive. It is not transitive, however. The antipresentist theory I am sketching takes e to be primitive. There is also a symmetric temporal overlap relation o that can be defined in terms of e: EoF if and only if EeF and FeE.

If we like, we can now introduce abstract times. Maybe we can say that an abstract time is a maximal pairwise overlapping set of time intervals (or of events, if we prefer). We can say that t₁ is earlier than t₂ provided that some element of t₁ is strictly earlier than some element of t₂ (where E is strictly earlier than F provided EeF but not FeE). I haven't checked what formal properties this satisfies—I need to get ready for class now (!).

Death and the Fall

It is an evil that we die. The badness of death is constituted by the cessation of the good of life. But not every cessation of a good is an evil. If I have a good conversation for several hours with a friend and then we go our separate ways, the cessation of the conversation isn't an evil. Only the cessation of a due good is an evil.

But how is it due to us not to die? Is it not a part of our very nature as human beings that we die?

Here's an argument:

1. If the empirical manifestation of our nature matches our real nature, what we are supposed to be, then death as such is not an evil, just a cessation of a good.
2. Death as such is an evil.
3. So, the empirical manifestation of our nature does not match our real nature, what we are supposed to be.

Claim (3) is already on its own a kind of doctrine of the Fall. And it calls out for explanation. The story of the Fall of Humankind provides such an explanation. The naturalist, on the other hand, cannot provide an explanation for (3). I think the naturalist should perhaps deny (2), but that is quite an implausible move.

Loving without knowing

Fred is lost in the desert and dies. Without knowing this, Sally, his loving wife who is a presentist and thinks there is no afterlife spends weeks searching for Fred in the desert, in uncertainty whether Fred is still alive, despite great hardship and danger to her own life.

Observe that a presentist who disbelieves in an afterlife thinks that the dead are simply nonexistent. So Sally is not only uncertain whether Fred is alive, but she is uncertain whether Fred exists. Yet she acts out of love. Hence:

• It is possible to love someone while being unsure whether he exists.

(Of course, one might also think that this case points to there being something defective in believing in presentism or in doubting an afterlife. )

Augustine's problem

Augustine raises this problem: What was God doing for the infinite amount of time prior to creation? Why didn't God create the world earlier?[note 1] Augustine reports the joke answer that God was busy creating a hell for people who ask such questions, and then goes on to give his famous answer that God created the universe and time simultaneously.

Augustine's answer is a good one. The start of time is a non-arbitrary answer to the question of when to create the universe. However, Augustine's answer can only be adopted if God has an atemporal existence. So if Augustine's answer is the only one or the best one, we have an argument that God has an atemporal existence.

But could someone who takes God to be only a temporal being—say, an open theist—give an answer to Augustine's problem? If God is a temporal being, then time has infinite age, as God then does (the suggestion that God is a temporal being that has finite age is incompatible with divine eternity, even if it is compatible with the claim that God exists at all times). Hence no answer that depends on time's having a beginning will do.

One way to see a problem is to imagine God deliberating annually, say a million years before creation. God has good reason to create that year—after all it, is good that there be a created world. Maybe he has good reason not to create as well (maybe creation entails that there is imperfection; at least, creation makes reality less simple). But in any case, there intuitively should be some moderate probability, say 1/2, that he would create that year. But he doesn't. That's fine: he also had a probability of 1/2 that he wouldn't. But likewise he doesn't next year. He had probability 1/4 of creating in neither year. That's fine: events of that probability aren't very surprising. But keep on running this. He doesn't create in any of a 1000 years. That's much less likely. The probability of that is 2⁻¹⁰⁰⁰. So, it seems, on the assumption that God is in time and there is an infinite past, we have very good reason to expect that God would have created the world earlier than he did—no matter when he created it!

There are two difficulties with this line of thought. The first is that numerical probabilities can't be assigned too divine deliberation. That's fine: they are still heuristic and highlight the extreme unlikeliness of the scenario of God waiting for an infinite amount of time before creating. The second is that it presupposes a particular model of how God deliberates whether to create, namely that he continually deliberates whether to create there and then.

Can we solve Augustine's problem if, instead, we accept a model on which God from eternity (i.e., at every past time) decides on a particular time t at which to create? Well, if God is changeable, that still leaves open the question of why God didn't change his mind—why God kept on waiting, even though he had reason to change his mind (namely, the reason that creation could come earlier if he changed his mind). If he had probability one in a million of changing his mind in any given year, we'd expect that over a million years he'd have changed his mind, and a again an intuitive argument like before can be run. Maybe, though, a changing God can unchangeably determine his will (by making a promise to himself, maybe?), and at every time he always already had done so, given that he knew there would never be any new information becoming available? Or maybe God, while in time, is unchangaeble, and hence his decisions cannot change? Or maybe God, from eternity, efficaciously willed that creation should occur at t₀—God's efficacious willing need not be contemporaneous with what is willed.

So there are some things that can be said about the changeability subproblem. Our best model right now for a God-in-time story is that God from eternity has unchangeably decided that creation would come at t₀. It is tempting to say "And then God waited until t₀." But waiting is what you do when you have little else worth doing, and God is ever infinitely active in his intratrinitarian communion. So we shouldn't say that. Let's focus, however, on a different subproblem. Why did God eternally choose t₀, rather than say t₀−1 year, for the date of creation? Absent distinctions coming from notable events within creation, all times are, presumably, exactly alike. I suppose two answers are available. First, that it is a reasonless divine choice. Second, that there is a reason, in that there is a particular incommensurable value associated with each possible time for creation. I think these are tenable answers, but it must be noted that neither is uncontroversial. The subproblem of why God chose this time rather than another is a hard one.

There is another subproblem, however, related to the changeability subproblem. Take an answer to the changeability subproblem. Consider the proposition p_n which says that in year n B.C., God was decided that he would create at t₀. What explains p_n? Presumably it's p_n+1. I.e., God was decided in year n B.C. because he was decided in year n+1 B.C. But this generates a vicious regress.

All of this suggests that Augustine's answer is the best answer to Augustine's problem. And we have reason to reject views on which God is a temporal being.

This leaves two kinds of views. The first are ones on which God is solely atemporal (except in virtue of an Inarnation) and the second are ones on which God exists atemporally, but with creation comes to be omnitemporally present as well, as an aspect of his omnipresence. I do not know if either view is compatible with the A-theory. Certainly, I don't think presentists can make sense of atemporal divine existence. So theists (at least ones who, like Christians and most relevant scientists, think that the universe has finite age) shouldn't be presentists.

St. Augustine's alternative to the use-mention distinction

1. Man consists of three letters.
2. Man is a rational animal.

Both (1) and (2) are perfectly fine sentences of spoken English, and they are true. But we don't want to conclude from (1) and (2) that:

3. Some animal consists of three letters.

The standard contemporary solution is to say that "man" in (1) is only mentioned, while in (2) it is used, and in writing to distinguish by using quotation marks.

St. Augustine was aware of the difficulty, but his solution was, at least on its surface, different. He posited that the word "man" (or at least "homo") has two meanings. One of its meanings is something like rational animal, while the other meaning is something like the word consisting of the sequence of letters M, A and N. We have a systematic ambiguity running through our language: each word, in addition to its dictionary meaning, also means itself. (An interesting consequence which Augustine I think did not note is that each verb is also a noun.)

We could imagine accepting Augustine's solution, and then when necessary marking the distinction by the use of subscripts: man₁ is a rational animal and man₂ has three letters.

But perhaps we have accepted Augustine's solution? Instead of subscripting a "2", we superscript a quotation mark before and after when we mean the word, and instead of subscripting a "1", we leave the word unadorned. Thus, man is an animal, but "man" is not.

So, is there any difference between Augustine's proposal and the use-mention distinction? Maybe this much: Identifying the concept of the mention of a bit of language saves us from multiplying our vocabulary indefinitely by having to introduce the infinite set of nouns "'man'", "'a man sits'", "'a man sits or floats'", "'a man sits or floats or sits'", and so on.

But since "'a man sits'" surely is a noun denoting "a man sits", we still have introduced an infinite number of nouns. However, we did so by means of a quotation-functor which systematically takes any bit of language and returns a new bit of language denoting that bit of language. So all that the use-mention distinction comes down to is that sometimes bits of language are in the scope of a quotation-functor and sometimes they're not. And it is an accident of the quotation-functor of English, both spoken and written, that the sounds of the denoted bit of language are contained in the noun denoting the bit of language, and this accident we describe by talking of the "use-mention distinction". We could have had a different kind of quotation-functor, for instance using the Goedel number of a bit of language in golden ink to denote that bit of language, and forbidding the use of golden ink for anything else. And then it wouldn't make much sense to talk of use-mention. So the fundamental phenomenon here isn't use-mention, but meta-language.

Augustine's view of evil

According to Augustine, a predication of an evil—say, the Sam is blind—is made true by a conjunction of two states of affairs. The first of these is a purely negative state of affairs, that the subject lacks a feature F. The second of these is a positive state of affairs, that the subject is of a sort that ought to exhibit F. Thus, Sam lacks sight but has the property of being of a sort that ought to exhibit sight.

If memory serves me (and if it doesn't, then it's still an interesting view), Augustine will then say this about Sam's blindness. Consider Sam*, a person much like Sam, except that he isn't of a sort that ought to have sight. Then, just like Sam, Sam* lacks sight. But Sam* also lacks the positive property of being of a sort that ought to exhibit sight. Therefore, Sam is better off than Sam*, despite the fact that Sam has an evil while Sam* does not. Now the problem of evil doesn't come up in regard to Sam* not having sight. And Sam is better off than Sam* in respect of sight, so why should it come up with regard to Sam?

Or let's put it differently. Take Sam*, and give him a new purely good property. How can Sam* become worse off simply by virtue of acquiring a new purely good property? Well, then, if we give Sam* the good property of being such that he ought to have sight, he doesn't become worse off. But then he's just like Sam. So the problem of evil shouldn't come up with regard to Sam.

Here's a problem with this reasoning. Suppose Sally believes that she lacks some very minor good G. Now, we give Sally the good G. By the above reasoning Sally should be better off. But perhaps not. For now Sally has a false belief that she previously didn't have. And the disvalue of that false belief may outweigh the minor good G.

However, we might distinguish between narrow and broad well-being. Things that do not causally interact with one or aren't intrinsic properties of one only belong to broad well-being. For instance, that my friends aren't saying bad things about me behind my back only contributes to my broad well-being. But that I am healthy is a part of my narrow well-being. So here is a suggestion. Now, narrowly, Sam* is narrowly no better and no worse off than Sam. And if Sally doesn't narrowly become worse off for being wrong about G. So maybe with regard to narrow well-being the principle that gaining a good by itself doesn't make one any worse off is true.

If this is right, then Augustine's arguments may work with regard to the problem of evil specialized to narrow ill-being. But that still leaves the problem of evil in the case of broad ill-being. However, maybe with the latter we may suppose that for all we know we really are very well off broadly speaking, because our broad well-being may include things very far beyond us.

Augustine quote

Just came across this in Augustine's The Teacher:

Who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks?

Good and evil: An asymmetry

According to St. Augustine, an evil is a privation of a due good. This makes for an asymmetry between goods and evils: there are due goods and non-due goods. For instance, the ability to run a mile in less than 3m 45s is a good, but it need not be a due good. Those who have that ability are well off for it, but, plausibly, while the vast majority who lack it are less well off for the lack, the lack of the ability is not a harm or bad to them. (Maybe this example doesn't work, because maybe before the Fall we could all run really, really fast or something like that. The example is only illustrative.) So, on Augustine's view, while there are due goods and undue goods, there is no similar distinction between the evils (or bads—to my knowledge Augustine does not distinguish the two), as all evils are opposed to due goods.

This asymmetry thesis for evils is plausible independently of the Augustinian view of evil as a privation. Among the goods, there is a distinction between due goods and what one might call supererogatory goods. There is no such distinction among evils. We might say that the distinction between bads and evils is such a distinction, but I am sceptical of that distinction when people make it. The good/evil distinction seems to basically line up with the distinction between non-moral evils and moral evils or maybe the distinction between minor evils and major evils. Besides, the distinction seems to me to be an accident of English. (For instance, the Latin malum covers both, as does the Hebrew ra` and the Polish zlo.) Moreover, even if there is a distinction, it does not cut the relevant way. A runner who can't run a mile in 3m 45m is not a bad runner.

Here is one minor reason the distinction matters. Tooley when trying to calculate the probability that a given evil has a justification assumes that an action is a priori as likely to have a wrongmaking property as a rightmaking one. However, if there are three basic axiological properties: supererogatory good, due good and evil, then plausibly there are three kinds of "-making" properties of reasons corresponding to these, two of them positive and one negative, so a priori an action is twice as likely to have one of the positive ones than the negative one in the Carnapian probability scheme he adopts. Basically the point is that "rightmaking" really should be "permissiblemaking" in Tooley's context, and there are two significantly distinct ways a property could be permissiblemaking: it could be dutymaking or merepermissiblemaking.

The ontological argument from desire

Augustine says that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. This is a desire for God, but it is not at all explicit, which is why humans restlessly seek after other things, hoping to satisfy the desire, unaware that it is a desire for God. In this way, it is like hunger in a young child: hunger is a desire for food, but the child may only know that she is miserable, and not that what she desires is food. I shall call this kind of desire "deep theological desire". The argument form now is this:

1. (Premise) Every desire has an intentional object.
2. (Premise) If there is no God, deep theological desire has no intentional object.
3. (Premise) Deep theological desire exists.
4. Therefore, God exists.

Premise (1) is a consequence of the standard view of desire which entails that a desire is a state that inclines one in the direction of the intentional object. Observe, that the object is only intentional, so one can have desires for non-existent things. (If presentism were true, such desires would be very common.) I am sceptical of aspects of the standard view of desire, but I say that (1) is still correct. Premise (3) is justified by the lived experience of attentive persons like Augustine.

The really controversial assumption is premise (2), and I haven't said anything in favor of it yet. It would be mistaken to try to derive (2) from some premise like: "The intentional object of a desire has to exist", since one can desire a golden mountain. In general, it is possible to have desires with non-existent objects. What is special in the theological case?

Here is one line of thought:

5. (Premise) If there can be no God, deep theological desire has no intentional object.
6. (Premise) If there is no God, there can be no God.
7. Therefore, if there is no God, deep theological desire has no intentional object.

The justification of (6) uses S5, God's necessity and the essentiality of divinity, as in the ontological argument.[note 1]

So now we're down to having to argue for (5). The general schema for arguments for (5) is this:

8. (Premise) All desires of type K are such that their intentional object can exist.
9. (Premise) Deep theological desire has God as an intentional object.
10. (Premise) Deep theological desire is a desire of type K.
11. Therefore, if there can be no God, deep theological desire has no intentional object.

Here, "intentional object" is to be broadly understood—it could, for instance, be an event, like being rich, but it could also be a person. In this schema, the argument for (9) is based on the testimony of those persons like Augustine who have made a serious attempt to be attentive to deep theological desire, and who have tried various ways of satisfying the desire, including religious ways.[note 2]

What we now need to do is to identify types K that make both (8) and (10) plausible. Todd Buras and Michael Cantrell have explored (8) (in a slightly different context; they were working with the desire for happiness, and a subsidiary argument that happiness is only possible if there can be a God). They even considered making K include all desires. There is some plausibility to this. After all, a desire motivates one to do actions that promote it. But an impossible object, it seems, is not promoted by anything. An obvious kind of counterexample, though, is a mathematician who desires to prove p, but unbeknownst to her p is in fact false (and hence—we hope—incapable of proof). However, Buras and Cantrell have tried to handle this kind of counterexample by saying that this is more a wish than a desire. However, I think that then the difficulty shifts to (10) (or maybe to (3), if one takes deep theological desire to be a desire by definition): why isn't deep theological desire a mere wish? I think there are resources for an answer here. A mere wish is conceptually articulated. A desire for food can be deep and unarticulated, but a mere wish seems to be more a creation of language or discursive thought. But deep theological desire is not conceptually articulated, or at least not always so—that is why it is sometimes not recognized as a desire for God. A different move that Buras and Cantrell have tried is to make K be "natural": all natural desires have possible objects. I think (8) has plausibility then, but (10) has a theological problem for Christians: the desire for God may itself be a gift of grace, and hence not "natural".

Let me try a different kind of move. Say that a desire is "visceral" provided it is in itself not formulated discursively so its intentional object is not constructed out of other ideas (here, think of how Hume thinks complex ideas are made up of simple ones). Hunger and thirst are visceral. Let K be "visceral". (Observe that it is normal for people to talk of a hunger or thirst for God, which supports the idea that the desire for God is visceral.) A visceral desire can become the subject of reflection and experimentation, and then we can find out what its object actually is. Early in life we find out that the intentional object of hunger is food and of thirst is drink (or eating food and drinking drink—I shall not worry about the distinction here, and in the case of God). Augustine's great existential discovery was that the intentional object of what I have called deep theological desire is God. So, (10) is plausible.

What about (8)? I think so. Here is a line of thought on this. What makes a visceral desire D be a desire for x? Roughly, it is that, necessarily, when an agent y who has D gets x, y's desire D is satisfied by x. But this condition is trivially satisfied if x is impossible. To make it non-trivial, we have to say:

12. A visceral desire D is for x if and only if x is possible to get, and, necessarily, when an agent y who has D gets x, y's desire D is satisfied by x.

Note that the satisfaction of a desire is different from believing oneself satisfied (one may desire a friend to be loyal, and falsely believe the desire satisfied). But then (8) follows.

Here is the line of thought. A conceptually articulated desire gets its intentionality from the intentionality of the concepts in terms of which the desire is formulated. If I desire to prove that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes, that desire gets its intentionality from the intentionality of my concepts of evenness, primeness, etc. Not so in the case of a visceral desire. There we need a different condition, like (12).

Another answer is that what makes hunger a desire for food is that hunger is a state with a certain teleology—a teleology directed at food. But how could there be a non-conceptually articulated teleology directed at something impossible? One account of teleology that we have is evolutionary. But there can be no evolutionary teleology directed at something impossible, since evolutionary teleology is based on the fact that the object of the teleology has in fact contributed to fitness. But that requires that the object be possible. Another account of teleology is agential. But that would require us to be designed, and our best design-based theory is theism, and hence even if we do not get an argument (12), we still get an argument for (4). Finally, there is Aristotelian teleology: things have natures, and their nature has a certain kind of fulfillment. The fulfillment is a kind of final cause of the development—they develop in order to get to the fulfillment. But it does not seem possible to have an Aristotelian teleology directed at something impossible—for in what direction would the organism be progressing if it were progressing towards something impossible? A square circle is also triangular (argument: a square circle has at least three sides, because it's a square; it has at most three sides because it's a circle; hence, it's a triangle). So, to make a square circle, should I start by making a square, a circle or a triangle? (Or by doing nothing at all, since a square circle, if it existed, would also be nothing at all, since nothing is both square and circular?)

Here is one final suggestion: Maybe a desire can get an object from society. You desire A non-viscerally, and in imitation of you, I get a visceral desire for A. However, it is not clear that my desire is actually visceral. It may, instead, be a conceptually articulated desire for that which you desire. Moreover, I think the social account does not match the phenomenology Augustine describes. Augustine isn't just imitating other people—the need is really there, deep in his heart, rather than inherited in the way we may inherit a "need" for TVs and telescopes from others.

Augustine on evil

The problem of evil that Augustine struggled with so mightily was neither the inductive problem of evil that so exercises contemporary philosophers of religion nor the deductive argument from evil that the ancients worried about. Augustine's problem of evil was a metaphysical paradox generated by four plausible claims:

1. Evil exists.
2. Everything that exists is God or created by God.
3. God has not created evil.
4. God is not evil.

Unlike the ancient and modern problems, this isn't a deductive argument against the existence of God. Nor was Augustine, as far as I can tell, ever drawn to a fully atheistic solution. The Manichean solution was to revise (2) to say that everything that exists is a God or created by a God, and to similarly modify (3) and (4): there is a God who has not created evil and there is a God who is not evil.

Augustine's famous solution was to deny (1). Evil is but a privation of good. Granted, this does not mean that evil is a lack of good, but a lack of a due good. Hence, a claim that some evil has occurred is ontologically reduces to a claim of the form: (a) a good g does not exist, but (b) g is due. To my knowledge, Augustine does not say quite enough about what grounds (b), but what grounds (b) is not the evil in question, since (b) hold even if g existed. Claim (a) is true not in virtue of a truthmaker but in virtue of there not being a falsemaker. To make all this go, we need to also say something about what "g" stands for—presumably, a definite description of some good.

Augustine in his solution was not addressing either the deductive or the inductive problem of evil. That he was not addressing the inductive problem is obvious. That he was not addressing the deductive problem is also clear from the fact that a crucial premise in the deductive problem of evil, viz., that God is omnipotent, is not present. We need not, thus, think that Augustine's solution tells us anything very helpful with regard to these two problems. However, the fact that it was this problem that Augustine found difficult, and not the deductive or inductive, may be significant. Why was he unmoved by the arguments from evil? He does, of course, address these arguments, but it is not a matter for existential struggle. His response is basically that if we do black deeds, God will use us to paint the mustache in the cosmic painting that he is painting. It is a kind of sceptical theist move, based on the fact that we are in no position to see the whole picture.

More on the meaning of life

Both of the following claims are plausible to me but appear to be in tension:

1. A full finite "Aristotelian" life of seriously attempting to practice the intellectual and ethical virtues could be satisfactory.
2. I rightly find a finite purely natural life unsatisfactory (our hearts are rightly restless until they find rest in God).

When thinking about this, one can put the focus on the finite length of life or on the lack of a supernatural component in the Aristotelian life.

But now observe that (1) and (2) are not logically contradictory. To see that, notice that there are several logically possible stories to be told on which both (1) and (2) are true. The first story is that of grace and fallenness: I am fallen, and without the supernatural component of grace in my life, I couldn't actually lead a life of seriously attempting to practice the virtues—I would, instead, slide into vice unless I happened to die early (in which case the life wouldn't be "full"), and eventually I would abandon the serious attempts to practice the virtues. If that story is true, then (2) is true, because any finite purely natural life would be a life without grace (by definition of "natural") and hence could not be a full "Aristotelian" life.

A second, complementary way to reconcile (1) and (2) is this. I have received the grace of longing for the joy of supernatural union with God. The grace of Christ both makes me long for that joy and directs me to it. As a result of that grace, my heart is restless unless it rests in God. (I don't know if Augustine would allow that the truth of his dictum is dependent on grace.) Given the grace to have the intensively infinite beatitude of union with God, any purely natural life would indeed be objectively unsatisfactory. But, nonetheless, an Aristotelian life could be fully satisfactory—not to me as I am, but to a hypothetical human being who is both unfallen (and hence can live the Aristotelian life) and has not received the grace of that longing.

A generalization of the second way to reconcile (1) and (2) is this. We read (1) in this way: There are possible beings in many ways like us who would be rightly satisfied by a finite Aristotelian life. But these possible beings are not us. Here, "are not us" can be read in two ways. First, as we did in the second way: they are not us who are graced with a longing for God. Second, we could have a completely different reading: they are not human. On this reading, the finite Aristotelian life is not a life for human beings, but for perhaps hypothetical non-humans who do not have the infinite beatitude of union with God as their telos. This gives us a third way to reconcile (1) and (2).

However, a natural human life is indeed sufficient to fulfill the human being's natural needs. It takes grace to long for more than the natural needs. So human beings should, in fact, be able to be satisfied with a natural life, absent grace, at least if they are unfallen. This makes the third way to reconcile (1) and (2) problematic. However we can focus not on the naturalness of the Aristotelian life in (1), but on its finitude. It may be that living forever is actually natural to us. (That we needed the fruit of the tree of life is compatible with this, because there is nothing absurd about needing external goods to live out our nature.) If so, then the beings that would rightly be satisfied with a finite Aristotelian life (note that Aristotle himself was open to the possibility of an afterlife) are not humans.

These three answers appear compatible with one another, and all appear plausible, so the full story is that an infinite Aristotelian life would be satisfactory to us, if we were unfallen and ungraced, but fallen as we all are, and by and large graced as we are (I think grace is offered to all at some point, but for some that point may not yet have come), we rightly find the thought of such a life insufficient. And a finite Aristotelian life would be satisfactory only to humanoids who are not human. The story also explains why some people might find an infinite Aristotelian life satisfactory—for they have not received grace—and why some might feel satisfied by the thought of a finite Aristotelian life—for their aspirations are lowered by the fall.

Mathematics and causal theories of knowledge and content

Note: I am on a new faculty retreat until Friday. I will have no Internet access. My home server is going to automatically make posts every morning (unless something goes wrong), but I will only be able to respond to comments when I return. But, dear readers, feel free to engage in discussion among yourselves. And please pray for me while I am on retreat, that the Lord will give me a listening heart and a humble mind.

A standard problem for causal theories of knowledge or content is the case of mathematical knowledge. It is widely held that Platonic entities like the number seven are not causally efficacious, and hence if knowledge requires a causal relation, or if it is required for having content in a particular subject area that some beliefs in that subject area have been caused by entities in that subject area, then it seems mathematical knowledge or event contentful mathematical belief is impossible. One way out is to follow St. Augustine and make mathematical entities exist in the mind of God. Then as mental entities, they may enter into causal explanations.

But I want to offer a second suggestion. Causal priority is a special case of a more general relation: explanatory priority. If A causes B, then A's occurrence is explanatorily prior to B's. But not all instances of causal priority are instances of explanatory priority. For instance, why is it wrong to tell lies? On a Kantian story, because it fails to respect the other as an end. Explanatory relations yield the same kind of counterfactuals as causal ones, though the counterfactuals may be counterpossible: if lying respected the interlocutor as an end, it wouldn't be wrong.

But let us suppose we generalize the causal requirements for knowledge or content to corresponding explanatory requirements. Thus, if one required for knowledge that the object known should partly cause the belief, now one requires merely that the object known should partly explain the belief. If the causal requirement was more complicated, the explanatory requirement would build in this additional complexity.

This helps. Mathematical facts clearly enter into explanations. Central Limit Theorems explain the bell-shaped distributions of many natural features. Mathematical facts about algorithms explain features of the behavior of computers. And so on. Likewise, mathematical facts can explain features of our mental behavior, and in particular of why we hold certain beliefs. Now whether in fact the right mathematical facts explain our mathematical beliefs in the right way is a difficult (and partly empirical) question, but to explore that would go beyond this sketch.

Generalizing from causation to explanation also damages the argument from mathematical knowledge against naturalism. One way to put that argument would be that our mind would have to be non-natural to be "affected" by mathematical facts. But a purely physical mind would be explanatorily, though maybe not causally, "affected" by mathematical facts.

Of course a purely physical mind is a problematic concept for other reasons.

Music and the problem of evil

Suppose I have superhuman hearing. While you are listening to Beethoven's Ninth, I hear, with great precision, every single sound wave impacting each of my eardrums. But I do not actually assemble them into a coherent piece of music.[note 1] As far as aesthetic appreciation goes, I might as well be looking at a CD under a scanning electron microscope.

It is quite easy to see all the physical details of a work of art without seeing the work as a whole, which work gives meaning to the parts. The details may look nothing like the whole. And suppose now that we did not even see all the details, first, because our perceptual processes already processed the data in some lossy way, perhaps a way irrelevant to the aesthetic qualities (think of someone who, whenever a piece of music came into his ears, received instead a visual representation of a Fourier transform of a distorted version of the sound), and, second, because we did not perceive the whole. Then our judgment as to the aesthetic qualities of the whole, as to the fittingness of parts, would be of very dubious value.

Now it is plausible that a universe created by God is very much like a work of art. A work of art we see only a portion of and in a way that involves perceptual pre-processing of a sort that may lose many significant aspects of the axiological properties of the work.

If that is how we saw things, then we would find a portion of the "sceptical theism" position quite plausible: we would find it quite plausible that various local evils we see fit into global patterns that give them a very different significance from what we thought. I am not saying the local evils disappear, that they are not evil. But the meaning is very different. We see this in music, in literature, in painting.

[A]ll people are under control in their own spheres; but to everyone it seems as if there is no control over them. As for you, you only have to bother about what you want to be, because whatever and however you want to be, the craftsman knows where to put you. Consider a painter. Various colors are set before him, and he knows where to put each color. The sinner, of course, wanted to be the color black; does that mean the craftsman is not in control, and doesn't know where to put him? How many things he can do, in full control, with the color black! How many detailed embellishments the painter can make! He paints the hair with it, paints the eyebrows. To paint the forehead he only uses white. - St. Augustine, Sermon 125

And just as there may be aesthetic values we are unaware of, there may be moral values we are unaware of.

All this points towards a version of sceptical theism. But I think we should not go too far in that direction. For unlike a piece of music, the work of art that the universe is is executed not out of soundwaves that have little individual worth, the universe is a work that incorporates persons--beings in the image and likeness of God. This makes the divine work much more gloriously impressive especially if God doesn't determine our free actions, but it also means that there is real, intrinsic meaning in the local situations we find, in the pains, joys, sufferings and ecstasies of life. While the meaning of these can be transformed, evils will still be evils. The problem of evil is not solved in this way, but it is, I think, mitigated significantly.

Moreover, thinking in this way solves a problem that plagues standard sceptical theist solutions, namely that they undercut design arguments for the existence of God. For although we might be unable to perceive the significance of the whole, we might perceive significance in the part, and the beauty of a figure in a painting, a chapter in a novel or musical movement can be sufficient to establish something about the talent of the artist.

I explore some of these themes in this piece I once presented at a conference, but the online version is sadly bereft of its illustrations in part for copyright reasons.