Socrates and thinking for yourself

There is a popular picture of Socrates as someone inviting us to think for ourselves. I was just re-reading the Euthyphro, and realizing that the popular picture is severely incomplete.

Recall the setting. Euthyphro is prosecuting a murder case against his father. The case is fraught with complexity and which a typical Greek would think should not be brought for multiple reasons, the main one being that the accused is the prosecutor’s father and we have very strong duties towards parents, and a secondary one being that the killing was unintentional and by neglect. Socrates then says:

most men would not know how they could do this and be right. It is not the part of anyone to do this, but of one who is far advanced in wisdom. (4b)

We learn in the rest of the dialogue that Euthyphro is pompous, full of himself, needs simple distinctions to be explained, and, to understate the point, is far from “advanced in wisdom”. And he thinks for himself, doing that which the ordinary Greek thinks to be a quite bad idea.

The message we get seems to be that you should abide by cultural norms, unless you are “far advanced in wisdom”. And when we add the critiques of cultural elites and ordinary competent craftsmen from the Apology, we see that almost no one is “advanced in wisdom”. The consequence is that we should not depart significantly from cultural norms.

This reading fits well with the general message we get about the poets: they don’t know how to live well, but they have some kind of a connection with the gods, so presumably we should live by their message. Perhaps there is an exception for those sufficiently wise to figure things out for themselves, but those are extremely rare, while those who think themselves wise are extremely common. There is a great risk in significantly departing from the cultural norms enshrined in the poets—for one is much more likely to be one of those who think themselves wise than one of those who are genuinely wise.

I am not endorsing this kind of complacency. For one, those of us who are religious have two rich sets of cultural norms to draw on, a secular set and a religious one, and in our present Western setting the two tend to have sufficient disagreement that complacency is not possible—one must make a choice in many cases. And then there is grace.

National self-defense

I think many of us have the intuition that it is permissible, indeed often morally required, for a decent country to defend itself against invaders when there is a reasonable hope of victory. The “decent” condition needs to be there: it was not permissible for Nazi Germany to defend itself against the Allies—they had the duty of surrendering. The “reasonable hope” condition needs to be there as well: if the consequence of fighting is nuclear attacks on all one’s cities, one should probably surrender.

If the Ruritanians invade Elbonia, a decent country, with the goal of killing all Elbonians, then at least if there is a reasonable chance of repelling the invaders, it is permissible for the Elbonians to defend themselves with lethal force. Only slightly less clearly, if the Ruritanians intend to cause no physical harm to Elbonians if the Elbonians surrender, but will wipe out Elbonian culture—they will forbid the use of the Elbonian language, ban the national pastime of painting intricate landscapes on pigeon feathers, and so on—then lethal self-defense is still likely to be permissible.

But what if the Ruritanians invade Elbonia simply in order to take away Elbonia’s sovereignty, so that if the Elbonians surrender, they lose sovereignty but nothing else? The Ruritanians won’t kill anyone, won’t disposs any individuals or corporations of their property, won’t interfere with any aspects of Elbonian culture, won’t conscript Elbonians into their military (the Ruritanians have an all-vounteer army), will not harm the Elbonian economical, educational and healthcare systems, etc. But they will take over national sovereignty. Moreover, the Elbonians are confident of this because the Ruritanians have a centuries-long record of expanding their empire on such terms, and many neighboring countries have lost their sovereignty but had no other losses. Furthermore, it is the Elbonians alone that are at issue. For geographic reasons, the Ruritanians are unable to expand any further, and so Elbonians in defending themselves cannot say that they doing so to protect other countries. And there are no other countries in the world capable of imperialism.

It is only permissible to wage war for the sake of a good that is proportionate to the great evils of war, after all. The question here is this: Is maintenance of national sovereignty worth the deaths—both Elbonian and Ruritanian—and manifold other harms of war?

I don’t know. A state is a valuable form of human community. The destruction of a state is prima facie a bad thing. But if the goods of culture and ordinary life are maintained, it does not seem to be a great bad. Suppose that there was no invasion, but the Elbonians voluntarily voted to join the Ruritanian Empire. Then while there would be some bad in the loss of the Elbonian state, it need not be a tragedy, and on balance it could even be for the good. It is, of course, gravely wrong for the Ruritanians to bludgeon the Elbonians into joining their Empire. But the good of sovereignty just might not be great enough for the Ruritanians to have a moral justification to resist to the death.

If this is right, then sometimes the mere fact that a war is one of just national self-defense is not enough to justify fighting. Do such perfectly clean cases occur? I doubt it: imperialist countries aren’t likely to be as nice as my hypothetical Ruritanians. However, one might have cases that are slightly less clean, where the expected damage to local culture is likely to be small relative to the expected harms of a protracted war, even if that war can be won by the defenders. Moreover, in real-life cases one needs to consider the value of policies that discourage future such attacks by this and other imperialist countries. If all small countries surrendered as soon as there was a Ruritanian-style invasion, then we could expect Ruritanians and others to mount a lot more invasions, which could indeed be harmful.

So our initial intuition about the permissibility of national self-defense is, I think, roughly right, though only roughly.

Cultural differences

[This post got out of order, due to issues related to the Blogger outage last week.]

It occurred to Narfi that it was not a good idea to keep the killing secret and so be guilty of murdering the man.... (Saga of Ref the Sly)

Johnson's framework for theistic arguments

Occasionally, I've been offering theistic arguments that border on begging the question. Here, for instance, is one that's basically due to Kant, but transposed into an argument in a way that Kant would not approve of:

1. (Premise) We should be grateful for the wondrous universe.
2. (Premise) If something is not the product of agency, we should not be grateful for it.
3. Therefore, the wondrous universe is the product of agency.

The argument is indisputably valid.[note 1] Moreover, if theism is true, it is also sound, and I do take theism to be true. But soundness is, of course, not enough for a good argument. While premise (2) is pretty plausible (in the objective sense of "should"), it feels like premise (1) "begs the question".

Nonetheless, I think there could be something to (1)-(3). Dan Johnson, in the January 2009 issue of Faith and Philosophy has a fascinating little article on the ontological and cosmological arguments. He argues that a certain kind of circularity is not vicious. Suppose that I know p₁. I then infer p₂ from p₁ in such a way that I also know p₂. I then non-rationally (or irrationally) stop believing p₁, but as it happens, I continue to believe p₂. It will then often be the case that there will be a good argument from p₂ back to p₁ (perhaps given some auxiliary premises), and if I use that argument, I will be able to regain my knowledge of p₁. This is true even though there is a circularity: from p₁, to p₂, and back to p₁. Here is an uncontroversial example: I am told my hotel room is 314. I infer that my hotel room is the first three digits of pi. I then forget that my hotel room is 314, but continue to believe it is the first three digits of pi. I then infer that my hotel room is 314.

Johnson proposes that by the sensus divinitatis one may come to know that God exists (actually, throughout this, I can't remember if he talks of knowledge or justified belief). One may then infer from this various things, such as that possibly God exists. Then, one irrationally rejects the existence of God (it does not have to be a part of the theory that every rejection of the existence of God is irrational), but some of the things one inferred from that belief remain. And arguments like the S5 ontological argument then make it possible to recover the knowledge of the existence of God from the things that one had inferred from that belief. Johnson also applies this to the cosmological argument.

This same structure may be present in my Kantian argument. By the sensus divinitatis one comes to know that God exists (obviously this is not a Kantian idea!). One infers that the universe is such that we should be grateful for it. One then irrationally comes to be an atheist (again, there is need be no claim that every atheist is irrationally such), but one continues to believe that gratitude is an appropriate response to the universe. And if that belief is sufficiently deeply engrained, one can reason back from it to theism or at least to agency behind the universe.

Now let me move a little beyond the Johnson paper. I think it is not necessary for this structure that the initial knowledge of God's existence come from the sensus divinitatis. Any other way of having knowledge of God's existence will do—say, by argument or testimony. In fact, it is not even necessary for this structure that one oneself ever had the knowledge or even belief that God exists. Suppose, for instance, one's parents knew that God exists (in whatever way), and inferred from this that the universe is worthy of gratitude. They then instilled this belief in one, and did so in such a way as to be knowledge-transmitting. (Surely, value beliefs can be instilled in such a way.) But they did not instill the belief that God exists (maybe because they thought that the existence of God was something everybody should figure out for themselves). One then knows (1), and can infer (3).

This transmission can be mediated by the wider culture, too. Culture can transmit knowledge, whether scientific or normative, and arguments can work at a cultural level. It could be that a theistic culture where the existence of God was known grew into a culture where (1) was known. The knowledge of (1) can remain even if the culture non-rationally rejects the existence of God (as American culture has not done, and might or might not do in the future). And then the individual can acquire the knowledge of (1) from the culture (we don't need to attribute knowledge to the culture if we don't want to; we can just talk of knowledge had by individuals participating in the culture), and then infer (3).

I think there are probably many consequences of theism that are embedded in the culture, from which consequences one can infer back to theism. If the participants in the culture knew theism to be true when these consequences were derived, then it is perfectly legitimate to reason back from these consequences to theism.