Book in Progress: Norms, Natures and God

I have begun work with a working title of Norms, Natures and God, which should be a book on how positing Aristotelian natures solves problems in ethics (normative and meta), epistemology, semantics, metaphysics and mind, but also how, especially after Darwin, to be an intellectually satisfied Aristotelian one must be a theist. The central ideas for this were in my Wilde Lectures.

There is a github repository for the project with a PDF that will slowly grow (as of this post, it only has a table of contents) as I write. I welcome comments: the best way to submit them is to click on "Issues" and just open a bug report. :-)

The repository will disappear once the text is ready for submission to a publisher.

Two ways to pursue y for the sake of z

The phrase

1. x pursues y as a means to z

is ambiguous between two readings:

2. x pursues y-as-a-means-to-z

and:

3. x’s pursuit of y is a means to z.

Case (2) is the standard case of means-end relationships: Alice goes on the exercise bike to keep her healthy.

But (3) can be a different beast. Bob’s psychologist has told him that it would be good for him to secrete more adrenaline; maybe striving to win at tennis is the most efficient of the safe methods for secreting adrenaline available to Bob; so, Bob relentlessly pursues victory in tennis. It is not the victory, however, that releases the adrenaline in my hypothetical story: it is the pursuit of that victory. In that case, it is Bob’s pursuit of victory that is a means to (mental) health. Moreover, it could be the case that what secretes adrenaline most effectively is the non-instrumental pursuit of victory:

It looks to me like in all these cases what we have are instances of final causation, where y’s endhood is caused by z’s endhood. In case (2), it is y’s instrumental endhood that is caused by z’s endhood, while in some cases of (3), like Bob’s adrenaline-releasing pursuit of victory, it is y’s non-instrumental endhood that is caused by z’s endhood.

There can also be cases where y’s instrumental endhood is caused by z’s endhood, but y is not a means to z. For instance, we could imagine that Bob’s psychologist told him that given his peculiar motivational structure, the most efficient way for him to release adrenaline would be to strive to gain money by winning at tennis. In that case, Bob pursues winning at tennis instrumentally for the sake of gaining money, but this pursuit is finally caused by his pursuit of adrenaline. So, the victory’s instrumental endhood is finally caused by adrenaline’s endhood, but the victory is instrumental to money, not adrenaline.

Note, also, that normally a case of (2) is also a case of (3): when x pursues y-as-a-means-to-z, then x’s pursuit of y is also a means to z. But there are pathological cases where this is not so.

Instances fo (3) that are not instance of (2) look like cases of higher order reasons. But they need not be cases of reasons at all. For case (3) can be subdivided into at least two subcases:

1. x voluntarily chooses to pursue y in order that z might be achieved by the pursuit

2. The unchosen teleological structure of x (e.g., the nature of x) is such that x’s pursuit of y is ordered to z.

In type (a) cases, indeed z can provide a higher order reason. But in type (b) cases, there need be no reasons involved. Lion cubs pursue play in order that they might grow strong, let’s say. But growing strong doesn’t provide lion cubs with a reason to pursue play, because lion cubs are not (let us suppose) the sorts of beings that can be responsive to higher order reasons. Nonetheless, there is final causation: the end of strength causes play to be an end.

Emotions and naturalism

On occasion, I’ve heard undergraduates suggest that naturalism faces a problem with emotions. They feel that a mere computational system would not have emotional states.

One might take this to be a special case of the problem of qualia, and I think it has some plausibility there. It is indeed hard to see how an emotionless Mary would know what it’s like to be scared or in love. Is it harder than in the case of ordinary sensory qualia, like that of red? I don’t know.

But I think it’s more interesting to take it to be a special case of the problem of intentionality or content. Emotions are at least partly constituted by intentional (quasi?) perceptual states with normative content: to be scared involves perceiving reality as containing something potentially bad for one and being in love involves perceiving someone as wonderful in some respects.

The standard materialist story about the content of perceptual states is causal: a perception of red represents an object as reflecting or emitting light roughly of a certain wavelength range because the perception is typically triggered by objects doing this. But on standard naturalist stories do not have room for normative properties to play a causal role. Post-Aristotelian scientific explanations are thought not to invoke normative features.

There is, of course, nothing here to worry an Aristotelian naturalist who believes that objects have natures that are both normative and causally explanatory.

Over the past year, I’ve been coming to appreciate the explanatory power of the Aristotelian story on which the very same thing grounds normativity and provides a causal explanation.

Free parameters in physics, ethics and epistemology

It looks like the laws of physics include "free parameters", constants that we feel could well have had other values than they do. It does not appear that these parameters can all be derived from more fundamental laws that have no free parameters.

Analogous phenomena occur in ethics. If to save your life, I must suffer a minor pain for a second, it is my duty to make the sacrifice. If to save your life, I must suffer constant torture for decades, it is not my duty to do so. As one increases the amount of my suffering to be weighed against your life, at some point one transitions from duty to supererogation (and perhaps eventually to just imprudence). Similar phenomena come up when deciding between goods to people with whom one has different relationships (saving n of one's cousins versus m strangers), when deciding between risks and certainties, etc. It does not appear that these parameters can all be derived from more fundamental laws that have no free parameters. (The best proposal for doing so is utilitarianism, and that just doesn't fit the moral data.)

And there are analogous phenomena in epistemology. For instance, there is the question of how quickly one should make inductive generalizations (in the Bayesian setting this comes to questions like: how high should be one's priors for generalizations).

In physics, the existence of free parameters is strong evidence for some sort of contingency in the laws. There are two ways to have such contingency. The first is to say that there could have instead been other laws. The second is an Aristotelian story on which the laws of physics are necessary but are conditional on the natures of things (e.g., if x is an electron, it behaves thus-and-so), and there could have been other things in the universe with other natures (e.g., shmelectrons instead of electrons) and then other laws--those with antecedents concerning the things with the other natures--would have been relevant.

The first approach raises a problem of explanation: Why are these the laws? The second approach reduces the explanatory question to a different explanatory question that we had anyway: Why are these the entities that exist?

In ethics and epistemology there are two options that can't be taken seriously in physics. One might, for instance, be a subjectivist of some stripe about the parameters (say, by being a subjectivist about all of ethics or epistemology, or just about the parameters). Or one might try to bring in vagueness to solve the problem--maybe it's vague at what point the needs of a larger number of strangers take precedence over a smaller number of cousins.

Vagueness does not, I think, solve the problem. For even if it's vague what the parameters are, it's not completely vague. It's non-vaguely true, for instance, that one should save a billion innocent strangers over one close relative. And subjectivism gives up too quickly.

It would be nice if one could give the same account of the free parameters problem in all three disciplines. Some accounts do not have much hope of doing that. For instance, one might solve the free parameters problem in physics by supposing that there is a multiverse with many different laws, either selected at random or with all possible laws exhibited, and it's just rock bottom that these laws are the laws where they are laws. The idea that there would be such variation in the moral or epistemological laws, with no explanation of the variation, is very unattractive.

There is a uniform Aristotelian story about all three free parameter problems. The parameters are necessarily what they are given the natures of the beings (physical beings, moral agents and epistemic agents) involved. The explanatory burden then shifts to the question of why these are the beings that exist. There is also a uniform divine choice story: God sets the parameters in the laws of physics, ethics and epistemology in a way that makes for a particularly good universe.

But there are, of course, non-uniform stories. One might, for instance, take the Aristotelian story about laws of physics, and a divine choice story about ethics and epistemology. But uniform stories are to be preferred.

Natural law and participation in God

According to Natural Law, the right thing to do is that which accords with one's nature. But what if something really nasty accorded with one's nature? This is, of course, akin to the objection to divine command theory from the question "What if God commanded something really nasty?" Both theories can give the same answer: "That's just impossible." God couldn't command something really nasty and there just are no possible natures of rational beings that require such nastiness. As far as that goes, this is fine, though at this point in the literature there are two more steps in the dialectic to think about.

I want to, however, consider a side-step. Why is it impossible? One could think this is just a brute and unexplained impossibility, but that is unsatisfactory intellectually. Even apart from the Principle of Sufficient Reason, we don't like brute facts that look like too much of a coincidence. And it looks like too much of a coincidence that all of the nasty cases are impossible. We want an explanation.

The divine command theorist has a pretty immediate explanation. We're talking about God's commands, and necessarily God is perfectly good or, if one prefers, perfectly loving. (Of course, those divine commands who want to define the good, and not just the obligatory, in terms that involve divine choices cannot give this answer. But so much the worse for that version of divine command theory.)

I think the Natural Law answer can be similar. A nature is an essential (in the medieval sense, maybe not the modal sense) mode of participation in God. It's impossible for a rational being's essential mode of participation in God to require nastiness, because of the nature of God. (Why is God's nature that way? Maybe here we have a brute necessity. A single brute necessity is much less problematic than a whole slew of them. Or maybe we can talk of God's perfection here.)

So there is an explanatory gap that Natural Law points to, and bringing in God closes that explanatory gap. Are there other ways of closing that gap? Maybe. One would be a heavily Platonic theory on which natures are modes of essential participation in the Form of the Good. The Platonism here would be more like Plato's own Platonism than our more anemic contemporary Platonism. The participation relation would not be exemplification as in contemporary Platonism, but something ontologically meatier, more like the participation in the theistic version of Natural Law.

In any case, the question of why something nasty couldn't be required by one's nature points towards serious metaphysics.

Colocationism and the Incarnation

According to abundant forms of colocationism, where I sit, there sit an infinity of other individuals. One of these individuals is a human-shaped mound of flesh and blood. Another is a philosopher. Yet another is something one might call a "rigid human figure" (which I will explain below). These individuals are all related to me in having the same matter. Their distinctness can be seen from the fact that they have different persistence conditions. Thus, the mound of flesh and blood can survive my death, while the philosopher came into existence significantly after I did. The rigid human figure does not survive changes in the orientation of bodily parts. According to sparser forms of colocationism, we may have a more limited number of individuals present here—only the objects that fulfill some philosophically explanatory role will be posited. Thus, the sparse colocationist will probably admit the human-shaped mound of flesh and blood, but probably will not admit the philosopher or the rigid human figure.

Colocationism, whether abundant or sparse, multiplies individuals where there is a multiplicity of what one might with significant propriety call "natures". This creates a prima facie problem for the Incarnation. For if such things as being a human and being a mound of flesh and blood count as individual-defining natures, surely so will being a human and being divine. But then the colocationism seems to imply that where Jesus is, there are two distinct individuals, one of whom is human and the other of whom is divine. This is Nestorianism. (We are used to formulations of Nestorianism that use the word "person" instead of "individual". But we could also have used "individual" as our gloss on "hupostasis"—the Greek does not have the personal implications of the Latin. In any case, both of the individuals will be persons, so there will be two persons.)

This is a prima facie problem for colocationism (I assume, of course, that the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation is true). Colocationism's multiplication of individuals seems to multiply Jesus into at least two individuals. One attempted solution to the problem might be to say that there is only one nature there, maybe "Godhumanhood". But that, of course, threatens monophysitism, unless one can argue that the sense of "nature" here is sufficiently different from that of the Council of Chalcedon. Maybe if one makes the right distinctions, one can get out of this problem. But it's going to be hard (every account of the Incarnation is hard, but here there seems to be an additional difficulty).

Abundant colocationism has a further problem. There will be an infinitude of individuals where Jesus is. A human, a teacher, a carpenter, the King of Israel, the Messiah, etc. Even if somehow we manage to collapse the human and the divine individuals into one—if not, we get Nestorianism—what do we say about all these other individuals? Are they, for instance, individuals worthy of our worship? Presumably not all—for only three individuals in existence are worthy of worship (in the sense of latria): the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The carpenter, the teacher, the King of Israel, the Messiah and the mound of flesh and blood all share the matter of the (incarnate) Son, but are distinct from the Son, and a fortiori from the Father and the Holy Spirit. But there is something more than a little odd about saying that the Messiah is not to be worshiped. Moreover, while this particular multiplication of individuals may not violate the letter of the Council of Ephesus, it seems to be very much in the Nestorian spirit. If it was bad to have two individuals, having an infinitude surely is also problematic. We want to be able to say that the individual that Jesus' disciples were taught by was the Son of God. But when Jesus' disciples were taught by the teacher (whom else do we attribute teaching to in the primary sense but the teacher?), then it seems they were taught by someone other than the Son of God on the colocationist view.

The sparse colocationist has less trouble, perhaps. She might only have the flesh and blood and the human being to deal with. To avoid literal Nestorianism, she will say that the human being is the same individual as the Logos. The mound of flesh and blood will still be problematic, though, in light of the fact that we are told by Scripture that the Logos became flesh. We do not want to leave the flesh and blood too far outside the bounds of the Incarnation.

Evil, privation and disability

Theism entails that evil is not a positive reality, since all positive reality either is God or is continually sustained in existence by God. Augustine thinks that evil is a privation of good. A privation is more than a lack. Leglessness in a dog is a privation, but in a snake is just a lack. If evil were just a lack, then the problem of evil would be easily solved by the consideration that, of necessity, everything other than God is lacking, since only God is infinite. I want to suggest that seeing evil as a privation of good still helps vis-a-vis the problem of evil. This argument continues two earlier posts of mine on prosblogion which discuss an Augustinian theodicy (Part I; Part II).

Imagine two closely related alien species, the flerts and the grents. Both are four-legged, and have basically the same habits. Flerts and grents are solitary and reproduce asexually, never knowing their parents (e.g., the parents produce spores which mature away from them), but the flerts have wings in addition to their four legs and can fly away from predators, while the grents are confined to the ground. Suppose now that Gribby is a normal grent, while Flibby is a flert that, due to a genetic defect, never developed wings.

Winglessness is a lack in Gribby and a privation in Flibby, but unless Gribby and Flibby observe their conspecifics, they are not going to know this. It is not an evil that Gribby is stuck on the ground, but it is an evil that Flibby can't fly. But Gribby and Flibby look and behave in pretty much the same way. They eat the same food, they have to run from predators and cannot fly from them, and so on. They have the same joys and the same pains, and they live pretty much the same lives. All this makes plausible the following:

Claim: Flibby is not worse off than Gribby.

I think this claim is plausible. One might think that Flibby is worse off because he suffers from an evil from which Gribby does not suffer. But "suffers" here is a tendentious choice of word. There is no conscious suffering here, we may suppose. We could imagine that when Flibby is faced with a predator he feels an urge to fly and the inability to fly is painful to him; but we can also suppose--and let us do so--that Flibby also has a second privation, namely that his instincts to fly are missing. Flibby suffers from an evil merely in the sense that he is subject to an evil. But his life is just like Gribby's, and the concrete goods that Gribby's life instantiates are also instantiated by Flibby's life. Another way to see this is to imagine some minor concrete good that Flibby has but Gribby does not. Maybe, Flibby happens to be a slightly better at fishing than Gribby is. Then, if per impossibile we were choosing whether to be Flibby or to be Gribby, we would be very reasonable in choosing to be Flibby. But if Flibby is worse off than Gribby, he is significantly worse off--winglessness is not a minor evil. So if Flibby is worse off than Gribby, it wouldn't be all that reasonable to choose to be Flibby just for some minor concrete good.

Still, it's undeniable that Flibby is subject to an evil, while, as far as the story goes, Gribby is not. We now have two conflicting intuitions: first, that Flibby is no worse off than Gribby, and, second, that Flibby is worse off than Gribby, because Flibby is subject to an evil that Gribby is not subject to. I want to argue that the second intuition is mistaken. For Flibby has a more distinguished nature--by nature he has the dignity of being a winged creature. This good that he possesses, the good of being by nature winged, is a good that Gribby does not have. Because he has this good, he is capable of being subject to an evil that Gribby is not--viz., the evil of being deprived of wings. The additional good outweighs or cancels out the additional evil. Hence, we can consistently say that Flibby is no worse off than Gribby even though Flibby is subject to an evil that Gribby is not.

I want to suggest, now, that if Gribby would have no right to complain to God about being created a grent, likewise Flibby would have no right to complain to God about being created a flert without wings.

Evil is not just a lack but a privation. However, possessing an evil also means one possesses a certain good, namely the dignity of being such as to naturally have the good that the evil deprived one of.

In particular, it follows that while an adult whose intellectual functioning is like that of a child thereby is subject to an evil, the developmentally challenged adult is not thereby less well off than the child. (She may be thereby worse off if she compares herself to others, or if others treat her poorly.)

How far one can take these thoughts in the direction of a theodicy, I do not know.