Natural hope

One of the striking things to me about Aristotle is the pessimism. For instance, in Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, we’re told that vicious persons shouldn’t even love themselves, and that when one friend sufficiently outstrips another in moral excellence—whether through the one improving or the other declining—the friendship must be dropped. I do not see the virtue of hope in Aristotle, say, hope that the vicious may improve, too. For the wicked, there is just despair. (Aristotle’s odious doctrine of “natural slavery” has some similarities.)

Christianity, on the hand, professes hope to be a virtue. But the hope that Christianity talks of is a supernatural infused virtue, a virtue that comes only as a gift of God’s grace. And Aristotle, of course, is interested in the natural virtues.

But grace builds on nature. So one would expect there to be a natural counterpart to the supernatural virtue of hope. Compare how there are natural loves that are a counterpart to the supernatural virtue of charity. There should be a natural virtue of hope, too.

But given the dark empirical facts about humanity, a habit of hope apart from grace would seem to be an irrational optimism rather than a virtue.

Perhaps, though, there is something in between irrational optimism and supernatural hope: perhaps there is room for a hope grounded in natural theology. Natural theology teaches that there is a perfectly good God. Yet there is so much that is awful in the world. But given theism there is good reason to think that the future will bring something better, and hence there is a natural justification for hope.

I am not sure I want to say that natural hope requires actual belief in God. But for that hope to be a virtue and (hence) a part of a rational state of mind, it may well require that the hoping individual be in an epistemic position to rationally believe. Thus, for natural hope to be a virtue seems to require that hopers be in a position to believe that there is a God.

Aristotle, of course, did believe in a God, or gods. But these gods were uninvolved with human affairs, and hence not a good ground for hope.

Reflecting on the above, it seems to me that to overcome the pessimism of Aristotle, one needs more than just a remote hope, but a seriously robust hope.

Hope vs. despair

A well-known problem, noticed by Meirav, is that it is difficult to distinguish hope from despair. Both the hoper and the despairer are unsure about an outcome and they both have a positive attitude towards it. So what's the difference? Meirav has a story involving a special factor, but I want to try something else.

If I predict an outcome, and the outcome happens, there is the pleasure of correct prediction. When I despair and predict a negative outcome, that pleasure takes the distinctive more intense "I told you so" form of vindicated despair. And if the good outcome happens, despite my despair, then I should be glad about the outcome, but there is a perverse kind of sadness at the frustration of the despair.

The opposite happens when I hope. When the better outcome happens, then even though I may not have predicted the better outcome, and hence I may not have the pleasure of correct prediction, I do have the pleasure of hope's vindication. And when the bad outcome happens, I forego the small comfort of the vindication of despair.

The pleasures of correct prediction and the pains of incorrect prediction are doxastic in nature: they are pleasures and pains of right and wrong opinion. But hope and despair can, of course, exist without prediction. But when I hope for a good outcome, then I dispose myself for pleasures and pains of this doxastic sort much as if I were predicting the good outcome. When I despair of the good outcome, then I dispose myself for these pleasures and pains much as if I were predicting the bad outcome.

We can think of hoping and despairing as moves in a game. If you hope for p, then you win if and only if p is true. If you despair of p, then you win if and only if p is false. In this game of hoping and despairing, you are respectively banking on the good and the bad outcomes.

But this banking is restricted. It is in general false that when I hope for a good outcome, I act as if it were to come true. I can hope for the best while preparing for the worst. But nonetheless, by hoping I align myself with the best.

This gives us an interesting emotional utility story about hope and despair. When I hope for a good outcome, I stack a second good outcome--a victory in the hope and despair game, and the pleasure of that victory--on top of the hoped-for good outcome, and I stack a second bad outcome--a sad loss in the game--on top of the hoped-against bad outcome. And when I despair of the good outcome, I moderate my goods and bads: when the bad outcome happens, the badness is moderated by the joy of victory in the game, but when the good outcome happens, the goodness is tempered by the pain of loss. Despair, thus, functions very much like an insurance policy, spreading some utility from worlds where things go well into worlds where things go badly.

If the four goods and bads that the hope/despair game super-adds (goods: vindicated hope and vindicated despair; bads: frustrated hope and needless despair) are equal in magnitude, and if we have additive expected utilities with expected utility maximization, then as far this super-addition goes, you are better off hoping when the probability of the good outcome is greater than 1/2 and are better off despairing when the probability of the bad outcome is is less than 1/2. And I suspect (without doing the calculations) that realistic risk-averseness will shift the rationality cut-off higher up, so that with credences slightly above 1/2, despair will still be reasonable. Hope, on the other hand, intensifies risks: the person who hoped whose hope was in vain is worse off than the person who despaired and was right. A particularly risk-averse person, by the above considerations, may have reason to despair even when the probability is fairly high. These considerations might give us a nice evolutionary explanation of why we developed the mechanisms of hope and despair as part of our emotional repertoire.

However, these considerations are crude. For there can be something qualitatively bad about despair: it makes one not be as single-minded. It aligns one's will with the bad outcome in such a way that one rejoices in it, and one is saddened by the good outcome. To engage in despair on the above utility grounds is like taking out life-insurance on someone one loves in order to be comforted should the person die, rather than for the normal reasons of fiscal prudence.

This suggests a reason why the New Testament calls Christians to hope. Hope in Christ is part and parcel of a single-minded betting of everything on Christ, rather than the hedging of despair or holding back from wagering in neither hoping nor despairing. We should not take out insurance policies against Christianity's truth. But when the hope is vindicated, the fact that we hoped will intensify the joy.

I am making no claim that the above is all there is to hope and despair.

Deep Thoughts XLI

Despair is hopeless.

Despair, virtue and the afterlife

1. If it is physically guaranteed that virtue will perish, despair is the right attitude.
2. If there is no life after death at least for the virtuous, it is physically guaranteed that virtue will perish.
3. Despair is not the right attitude.
4. So there is life after death at least for the virtuous.

Making this argument precise would take some work. One would want to say something about the scope of "virtue" (human virtue? individual virtue?), and one would want to say a little more about "right attitude".

Despair

1. If there is no hope of an afterlife, all is hopeless.
2. If all is hopeless, ultimate despair is the right attitude.
3. Ultimate despair is not the right attitude.
4. So there is hope of an afterlife.

I will argue for 1 and 3. If there is no hope of an afterlife, any redeeming value we might hope for is overshadowed by the ultimate evil of both the end of our individual lives and of the human race. But despair is not the right attitude, since despair makes it impossible for us to live our moral lives, both in terms of the motivation to pursue the good and in our duty to comfort others. Despair saps our motivation. And faced with ultimate hopelessness, any comfort we might offer to others is insincere and dishonest. In despair at ultimate hopelessness, we could only live the good human life through self-deceit and the deceit of others. But that is not right. So ultimate despair cannot be the right attitude as it makes the good life impossible.

So there is hope.

Hope and afterlife

The following argument is valid, and is sound if we take the conditional in (2) to be material.

1. (Premise) In despairing, one engages in a vice.
2. (Premise) If there is no afterlife, it is sometimes appropriate to despair.
3. (Premise) It is never appropriate to engage in a vice.
4. So, there is an afterlife.

Let me say a little about (2). Despair is appropriate in situations of objective hopelessness. But if there is no afterlife, then when one has misspent one's life in wickedness, and is now facing death with no opportunity to make things up to those whom one has mistreated, then despair is appropriate.

If there is an afterlife, then one can hope for mercy or justice.