Punishment and presentism

This seems a bit plausible:

1. It is unjust to punish someone for a feature that is not intrinsic to them.

2. If presentism is true, then having done A is not an intrinsic feature of the agent.

3. Thus, if presentism is true, then punishment for past actions is always unjust.

The presentist may well question (2), insisting that presently having a past-tensed feature that was intrinsic when it was presently had counts as intrinsic. I am a bit unsure of this. It’s a question someone should investigate.

Here is a reason to think that presently having a past-tensed feature should not count as intrinsic. Suppose I am facing a free choice, with the possibilities of doing B and not doing B. Then it seems that no present intrinsic feature of me entails what I will do. But suppose that in fact I will do B. Then just as I have past-tensed properties like having done A, I presently have future-tensed properties like being about to do B. And it seems that if one is intrinsic, so is the other. Thus, if my being about to do B is not a present intrinsic feature of me, my having done A is not a present intrinsic feature of me.

The presentist might respond by embracing an open future and denying that it can be true in the case of a free choice that I will do B. But if this is right, then it seems that in order to defend the justice of punishment for past deeds, the presentist has to do something very controversial—accept an open future. Moreover, this means that a classical Jew, Christian and Muslim can’t be a presentist, since classical monotheists are committed to comprehensive foreknowledge, and hence to the denial of an open future, and the justice of retrospective punishment.

Of course, one might question (1). Here’s how one might start. We can punish Alice for punching Bob. But that’s not an intrinsic feature of Alice. We might respond by saying that Alice is punished for her internal act of will, but that doesn’t seem quite right. Probably a better move is to replace (1) by saying that there must be an intrinsic component to the feature one punishes someone for—say, Alice’s act of will. And the presentist now has trouble with this intrinsic component.

Presentism and the intrinsicness of past tensed properties

Many presentists think that objects have past-tensed properties. Thus an object that is now straight but was bent has the property of having been bent. (Some such presentists use these properties to ground facts about the past.)

But assuming for simplicity that being bent is an intrinsic property, we can argue that having been bent is an intrinsic property as well. Here’s why. If being bent doesn’t describe an object in relation to the existence, non-existence or features of any other object (assuming being bent is intrinsic), neither does having been bent. Nor is having been bent “temporally impure”—it does not describe the object in terms of anything happening at other times, since nothing can happen at other times on presentism. It does not describe the object in relation its past or future temporal slices or past or future events involving the object, since on presentism there are no past or future objects, and there are no past or future events.

But if having been bent is an intrinsic property of an object, it seems that, by a plausible patchwork principle or by intuitions about the omnipotence of God, an object could come into existence just for one instant and yet have been bent at that instant. Which is absurd.

Holes and substantivalism

Suppose substantivalism about space is correct. Imagine now that the following happens to a slice of swiss cheese: the space where the holes were suddenly disappears. I don’t mean that the holes close up. I mean that the space disappears: all the points and regions that used to be in the hole are no longer there (and any air that used to be there is annihilated). The surfaces of the cheese that faced the hole now are at an edge of space itself.

The puzzle now is that in this story we have an inconsistent triad:

1. There is no intrinsic change in the cheese.
2. The slice of cheese no longer has holes.
3. Changing with respect to whether you have holes is intrinsic.

Here are my arguments for the three claims. There is no intrinsic change in the slice of cheese as something outside the cheese has changed—space has been annihilated. The slice of cheese no longer has holes, as it makes sense to talk of the size or shape or volume of a hole, but there is no size or shape or volume where there is no space. And changing with respect to whether you have holes is change of shape, and changes of shape are intrinsic.
It seems that the above story forces you to reject one of the following:

4. Substantivalism about space
5. Intrinsicness of shape.

But there is another way out. Deny (3). Whether you have holes is not intrinsic. What is intrinsic is your topological genus with respect to your internal space and similar topological properties.

Note, also, a lesson relevant to the famous Lewis and Lewis paper on holes: the counting of holes should not involve the counting of regions, but the computation of a numerical invariant, namely the genus.

Presentism and Epicurus' death argument

Becoming friendless is a harm, even if one does not know that one's last friend has just betrayed one. Likewise, one is harmed when the persons or causes one reasonably cares about are harmed, again whether or not one knows about the harm. But we also, I think, have the intuition that this is a different sort of harm from that which one undergoes when one loses an arm or when one is tortured. Call the first set of harms, extrinsic, and the well-being that they detract from extrinsic well-being, and call the second set of harms intrinsic. Apart from an incarnation, God is not subject to intrinsic harms, but he may be subject to extrinsic harms, such as when someone he loves (i.e., anyone at all) is harmed.

Now, introduce the intuitive notion of a temporally pure property. A temporally pure property is one that is had by x only in virtue of how x is at the given time. Thus, being circular is temporally pure but being married to a future president of the United States or being fifty years old are temporally impure. (If the fact that x has Fness is a soft fact, in the Ockhamist sense, then F is temporally impure.)

Then:

1. (Premise) Only the having of an intrinsic property can constitute an intrinsic harm.
2. (Premise) Ceasing to exist can be an intrinsic harm.
3. (Premise) If presentism is true, only temporally pure properties can be intrinsic.
4. (Premise) Ceasing to exist cannot be a property constituted in virtue of how x is at a particular time.
5. Ceasing to exist cannot be constituted in virtue of one's temporally pure properties. (4 and definition)
6. If presentism is true, ceasing to exist cannot be an intrinsic property. (3 and 5)
7. If presentism is true, ceasing to exist cannot be an intrinsic harm. (1 and 6)
8. Presentism is not true. (2 and 7)

This is of course in the same spirit as Epicurus' argument that death isn't bad because when you're dead, you don't exist and hence can't be badly off, and when you're not dead, you're not dead. But notice that Epicurus' argument fails to show that death isn't extrinsically bad. Also, I formulated the argument in terms of a (hypothetical) cessation of existence rather than death, since in fact death is not a cessation of existence for human beings, and it is not completely clear that death is an intrinsic harm to non-human animals.

Interestingly, the growing block theorist, who thinks only past and present events and things are real, has a similar problem. For if growing block is true, only hard properties (ones that depend only on how things were or are) can be intrinsic properties, and ceasing to exist is not a hard property.

The eternalist, however, can say that the property of being such that one ceases to exist is an intrinsic property, at least on one interpretation of "ceases to exist". It is an intrinsic property of oneself as a temporally extended being, the property of one's life being futureward finite. It is just as much an intrinsic property as the property of being circular or of finite girth. And if someone were to cause one to have the property of one's life being futureward finite, or a more specific property like that of one's life being being no more than 54 years long, she would thereby be imposing a harm on one.

And even the cessation of existence at age 54 as such isn't an intrinsic harm, the eternalist can talk of such intrinsic harms to someone as that one's life does not include any joys after the the age of 54, thereby doing some justice to the intuition that cessation of existence is intrinsically harmful.

Substance and intrinsic properties

A standard necessary condition for a property P of a substance x to be intrinsic is the loneliness condition: x could have P without anything other than x existing. There is good reason to doubt the necessity of this condition. For if the condition holds, and if there is a contingent substance that has an intrinsic property, then (a) there are no necessarily existing substances (like God), and (b) the principle that, necessarily, every contingent substance is caused to exist by a substance is false. It is implausible that a mere account of intrinsicness should immediately have such consequences.

Here, however, is a simple replacement for the loneliness condition: a substance x has P (where "P" is a name of a property, not a definite description of a property) intrinsically only if the truthmaker of the proposition that x has P does not involve any substances other than x. To explicate this further, one needs to say something about what it is for a truthmaker to "involve" y. Since all I'm trying to give is a necessary condition on intrinsicness, all I need to do is give some sufficient conditions for involvement. Here are three:

1. If y is a part of the truthmaker of p, then the truthmaker of p involves y.
2. If y's having Q is a part of the truthmaker of p, then the truthmaker of p involves y.
3. If x's standing to y in R is a part of the truthmaker of p, then the truthmaker of p involves y.