Respecting conscience

One of the central insights of Western philosophy, beginning with Socrates, has been that few if any things are as bad for an individual as culpably doing wrong. It is better, we are told through much of the Western philosophical tradition, that it is better to suffer than do injustice.

Now, acting against one’s conscience is always wrong, and is almost always culpably wrong. For the most common case when doing something wrong isn’t culpable is that one is ignorant of the wrongness, but when one acts against one’s conscience one surely isn’t ignorant that one is acting against conscience, and that we ought follow our conscience is obvious.

That said, I think a qualification is plausible. Some wrongdoings are minor, and in those cases the harm to the wrongdoer may be minor as well. But in any case, to get someone to act against their conscience in a matter that according to their conscience is major is to do them grave harm, a harm not that different from death.

Now, the state, just like individuals, should ceteris paribus avoid causing grave harm. Hence, the state should generally avoid getting people to do things that violate their conscience in major matters.

The difficult case, however, is when people’s consciences are mistaken to such a degree that conscience requires them to do something that unjustly harms others. (A less problematic mistake is when conscience is mistaken to such a degree that conscience requires them to do something that’s permissible, but not wrong. In those cases, tolerance is clearly called for. We shouldn’t pressure vegetarians to eat animals even if their conscientious objection to eating animals happens to be mistaken.)

One might think that what I said earlier implies that in this difficult case the state should always allow people to follow their conscience, because after all it is worse to do wrong—and violating conscience is wrong—than to have wrong done to one. But that would be absurd and horrible—think of a racist murderer whose faulty conscience requires them to kill.

A number of considerations, however, keep one from reaching this absurd conclusion.

1. The harm of violating one’s conscience only happens to one if one willingly violates one’s conscience. If law enforcement physically prevents me from doing something that conscience requires from me, then I haven’t suffered the harm. Thus, interestingly, the consideration I sketched against violating one’s conscience does not apply when one is literally forced (fear of punishment, unless it is severe enough to suspend one’s freedom of will, does not actually force, but only incentives).

2. In cases where doing wrong and suffering wrong are of roughly the same order of magnitude, it is very intuitive that we should prevent the suffering of wrong rather than the doing of wrong. Imagine that Alice is drowning while at the same time Bob is getting ready to assassinate a politician, but we know for sure that Bob’s bullets have all been replaced with blanks. If our choice is whether to try to dissuade Bob from attempting murder or keep Alice from drowning, we should keep Alice from drowning, evne if on the Socratic view the harm to Bob from attempting murder will be greater than that to Alice from drowning. (I am assuming that in this case the two harms are nonetheless of something like the same order of magnitude.)

3. A reasonable optimism says that in most cases most people’s consciences are correct. Thus typically we would expect that most violators of a legitimate law will not be acting out of conscience—for a necessarily condition for the legitimacy of a law is that it does not conflict with a correct conscience. Thus, even if there is the rare murderer acting from mistaken conscience, most murderers act against conscience, and by incentivizing abstention from murder, in most cases the law helps people follow their conscience, and the small number of other cases can be tolerated as a side effect. Thus the considerations of conscience favor intolerant laws in such cases. Nonetheless, there are cases where most violators of a law would likely be acting from conscience. Thus, if we had a law requiring eating meat, we would expect that most of the violators would be conscientious. Similarly, a law against something—say, the wearing of certain clothes or symbols—that is rarely done except as a religious practice would likely be a law most violators of which would be conscientious.

4. When someone’s conscience mistakenly requires something that violates an objective moral rule, there is a two-fold benefit to that person from a law incentivizing following the moral rule. The law is a teacher, and the state’s disapproval may change one’s mind about the matter. And even if it a harm to one to violate conscience, it is also a harm to one to do something wrong even inculpably. Thus, the harm of violating conscience is somewhat offset by the benefit from not doing something else that is wrong.

5. In some cases the person of mistaken conscience will still do the wrong deed despite the law’s contrary incentive. In such a case, both the perpetrator and the victim may be slightly better off for the law. The victim has a dignitary benefit from the very fact that the state says that the harm was unlawful. That dignitary benefit may be a cold comfort if the victim suffered a grave harm, but it is still a benefit. And the perpetrator is slightly better off, because following one’s conscience against external pressure has an element of admirability even when the conscience is mistaken.

Nonetheless, there will be cases where these considerations do not suffice, and the law should be tolerant of mistaken conscience.

In a just defensive war, to refuse to fight to defend one’s fellow citizens without special reason (perhaps priests and doctors should not kill) is wrong. But a grave harm is done to a conscientious objector who is gotten to fight by legal incentives. Let’s think through the five considerations above. The first mainly applies to laws prohibiting a behavior rather than ones requiring a behavior. Short of brainwashing, it is impossible to make someone fight. (We could superglue their hands to a gun, and then administer electric shocks causing their fingers to spasm and fire a bullet, but that wouldn’t count as fighting.) The second applies somewhat: we do need to weigh the harms to innocent citizens from enemy invaders, harms that might be prevented if our conscientious objector fought. But note that there is something rather speculative about these harms. Someone who fights contrary to conscience is unlikely to be a very effective fighter, and it is far from clear that their military activity would actually prevent any actual harm to innocents. Now, regarding the third consideration, one can design a conscription law with an exemption that few who aren’t conscientious objectors would take advantage of. One way to do this is to require evidence of one’s conscience’s objection to fighting (e.g., prior membership in a pacifist organization). Another way is to impose non-combat duties on conscientious objectors that are as onerous and maybe as dangerous as combat would be. Regarding the fourth consideration, it seems unlikely that a typical conscientious objector’s objections to war would be changed by legal penalties. And the fifth seems a weak consideration in general. Putting all these together, we do not outweigh the prima facie considerations against pressuring conscientious objectors to act against their (mistaken) conscience from the harms in going against conscience.

Moderately pacifist war

I’ve been wondering whether it is possible for a country to count as pacifist and yet wage a defensive war. I think the answer is positive, as long as one has a moderate pacifism that is opposed to lethal violence but not to all violence. I think that a prohibition of all violence is untenable. It seems obvious that if you see someone about to shoot an innocent person, and you can give the shooter a shove to make them miss, you presumptively should.

Here’s what could be done by a moderately pacifist country.

First, we have “officially” non-lethal weapons: tasers, gas, etc. Some of these might violate current international law, but it seems that a pacifist country could modify its commitment to some accords.

Second, “lethal” weapons can be used less than lethally. For instance, with modern medicine, abdominal gunshot wounds are only 10% fatal, yet they are no doubt very effective at stopping an attacker. While it may seem weird to imagine a pacifist shooting someone in the stomach, when the chance of survival is 90%, it does not seem unreasonable to say that the pacifist could be aiming to stop the attacker non-lethally. After all, tasers sometimes kill, too. They do so less than 0.25% of the time, but that’s a difference of degree rather than of principle.

Third, we might subdivide moderate pacifists based on whether they prohibit all violence that foreseeably leads to death or just violence that intentionally leads to death. If it is only intentionally lethal violence that is forbidden, then quite a bit of modern warfare can stand. If the enemy is attacking with tanks or planes, one can intentionally destroy the tank or plane as a weapon, while only foreseeing, without intending, the death of the crew. (I don’t know how far one can take this line without sophistry. Can one drop a bomb on an infantry unit intending to smash up their rifles without intending to kill the soldiers?) Similarly, one can bomb enemy weapons factories.

Whether such a limited way of waging war could be successful probably depends on the case. If one combined the non-lethal (or not intentionally lethal) means with technological and numerical superiority, it wouldn’t be surprising to me if one could win.

Against a moderate pacifism

Imagine a moderate pacifist who rejects lethal self-defense, but allows non-lethal self-defense when appropriate, say by use of tasers.

Now, imagine that one person is attacking you and nine other innocents, with the intent of killing the ten of you, and you can stop them with a taser. Surely you should, and surely the moderate pacifist will say that this is an appropriate use case for the taser.

Very well. Now consider this on a national level. Suppose there are a million enemy soldiers ordered to commit genocide against ten million, and you have two ways to stop them:

1. Tase the million soldiers.

2. Kill the general.

If you can tase one person to stop the murder of ten, then (1) should be permissible if it’s the only option. But tasers occasionally kill people. We don’t know how often. Apparently it’s less than 1 in 400 uses. Suppose it’s 1 in 4000. Then option (1) results in 250 enemy deaths.

So maybe our choice is between tasing a million, thereby non-intentionally killing 250 soldiers, and intentionally killing one general. It seems to me that (2) is morally preferable, even though our moderate pacifist has to allow (1) and forbid (2).

Note that a version of this argument goes through even if the moderate pacifist backs up and says that tasers are too lethal. For suppose instead of tasers we have drones that destroy the dominant hand of an enemy soldier while guaranteeing survival (with science fictional medical technology). It’s clearly right to release such a drone on a soldier who is about to kill ten innocents. But now compare:

3. Destroy the dominant hand of a million soldiers.

4. Kill the general.

I think (4) is still morally preferable to causing the kind of disruption to the lives of a million people that plan (3) would involve.

These may seem to be consequentialist arguments. I don't think so. I don't have the same intuitions if we replace the general by the general's innocent child in (2) and (4), even if killing the child were to stop the war (e.g., by making the general afraid that their other children would be murdered).

Broad and narrow pacifism

Narrow pacifists (about lethal violence) hold that it is wrong to intentionally kill. Depending on the correct answer to Double Effect questions, narrow pacifism may be compatible with fighting in a war in ways that one foresees to be quite lethal. On the most extreme version, defended by people like Germain Grisez, one can pretty much do any foreseeably lethal warlike activity, such as shooting enemy soldiers in the head, as long as one’s intention is to stop the enemy rather than kill, and killing is a side-effect rather than a means. On less extreme versions, one might have to put some limits on the methods of waging war, but nonetheless one will be able to wage war in ways that one foresees to be lethal. For instance, it might not be permissible to shoot the enemy in the head, but shooting them in the stomach might be acceptable, even if one foresees that a significant percentage of the time this is lethal.

Broad pacifists, on the other hand, will forbid any foreseeably lethal violence, even if the lethality is not intended. Broad pacifism better fits, I think, with what we normally mean by “pacifism”. In Woody Allen’s Love and Death, a character says: “My brother was killed in the line of duty; bayoneted to death by a Polish conscientious objector!” This is obviously funny, and it stays funny if you replace “conscientious objector” with “pacifist”. We do not expect pacifists to lethally bayonet people. Yet a narrow pacifist can do that, at least given what I think are plausible views about Double Effect.

But broad pacifism is mistaken. Here is why.

1. Either the prohibition on foreseeably lethal violence is specific to violence or not.

2. A prohibition specific to foreseeably lethal violence is ad hoc.

3. A prohibition against all foreseeably lethal action is untenable.

Let me start with premise 3. There are many counterexamples to a prohibition on all foreseeably lethal action. The most obvious cases are actions that involve a large number of people. For instance, manufacturing automobiles is foreseeably lethal. A sufficiently large construction project can be foreseen to result in someone’s death. Instituting a policy of pursuing tax frauds will lead to some suicides on the part of those on whom justice is closing. Manufacturing or requiring vaccinations, while saving many lives overall, will result in a small number of deaths due to adverse side-effects.

But perhaps the idea is that what is forbidden are actions that have a probability greater than 1/2 of resulting in the death of a specific person. This surely isn’t right. Sending an armed robot that is foreseen to kill one random enemy combatant is not morally different from sending an armed robot that is foreseen to kill one specific enemy combatant. Yet in the case of the randomly killing robot, the chance of any particular enemy combatant being killed is apt to be less than 1/2.

Let’s move on to premise 2. Suppose we prohibit foreseeably lethal violence but not other foreseeably lethal actions. For this not to be ad hoc, we would need a good moral explanation for why a foreseeably lethal action’s being an instance of violence makes it impermissible, while if it were non-violent, it would be permissible.

Here is what I think the best case is: the cases where foreseeably lethal activity are permissible are ones where consent is given or presumed on the part of those who are victimized by the activity. It is permissible to give painkillers that are expected, but not intended, to hasten the death of a terminal patient. But consent is needed. On the other hand, enemy soldiers do not consent to being killed.

Maybe, but it feels to me like something is off in grounding the impermissibility of lethal action in wartime in the lack of consent given by enemy soldiers. Whether a murderous invader consents to being repelled by lethal force or not seems morally irrelevant. And we can imagine cases of consent: for instance, an enemy might enjoy the “heroism” of fighting against lethal force. It surely makes no difference to the permissibility of lethal self-defense whether one is facing an enemy who consents to lethal resistance or one who does not.

Moreover, if we go back to the counterexampels to prohibitions on foreseeably lethal action, some of these do not involve much in the way of consent. Small children are rightly vaccinated. (It is true that we have proxy consent in that case. But proxy consent is not really consent.) Tax frauds do not consent to being pursued.

Thus, I think broad pacifism is untenable, and narrow pacifism doesn’t give the pacifist what the pacifist wants.

Double Effect and (narrow) pacifism

Suppose I see a sniper sniping at innocents, and if not stopped, she will kill a dozen innocents. Near the sniper are three enemy personnel who are standing around. I have two weapons, a precision rifle and a rocket-propelled grenade, and I can stop the sniper in one of two ways: (a) shoot her in the head or (b) fire the RPG.

Suppose that I hold this combination of views:

1. Narrow Pacifism: It is always wrong to intentionally kill.

2. The Principle of Double Effect is true.

3. Broadness of Intention: Shooting the sniper in the head would be an intentional killing.

Then I am not permitted to to use the rifle to stop the sniper. But here is a paradoxical consequence: a strong Double Effect case can be made that I am permitted to use the RPG. For in firing the RPG, I can be credibly intending to destroy the sniper’s rifle, which is a legitimate target even for a (narrow) pacifist. (I am assuming that I couldn’t destroy the sniper’s rifle with my rifle shot, perhaps because my aim isn’t good enough, or because it’s protected by a sandbag.)

So, here is an odd dilemma for the narrow pacifist who accepts Double Effect. Either the narrow pacifist accepts Broadness or rejects it.

Acceptance of Broadness, together with the above argument, leads in a number of cases to significantly more violence: the RPG will not only kill the sniper but also her comrades. Note that this is not an issue that comes up just in “small” cases involving snipers and RPGs. Narrow Pacifism plus Broadness would lead to a perverse preference to shoot a tactical nuke at the area occupied by enemy infantry—of course, just in order to destroy their weapons—over a conventional infantry attack.

Rejection of Broadness, on the other hand, means that the narrow pacifist need not actually be all that pacific: she can allow soldier to lethally shoot the enemy as long as they intend to stop the enemy rather than to kill. The narrow pacifist who rejects Broadness is a very narrow pacifist indeed.

Objection: If one accepts Broadness, one will also think that firing the RPG is an intentional killing.

Response: Thinking that firing the RPG is an intentional killing seems to me to be rejecting the central ideas behind Double Effect. The point of Double Effect is to distinguish the target of the action from side-effects. It seems perfectly reasonable to take the sniper’s rifle as one’s RPG target. Unlike in the case where one aims at the sniper’s head, there is no intention to impose any harm on the sniper, or even to physically affect the sniper’s body in any way. There is simply the intention to destroy the weapon which the sniper is using. Unfortunately, the explosion that will destroy the weapon will also kill the sniper.

Pacifism and casuistry

Pacficists who think that all lethal violence is wrong have a moral imperative to think creatively about ways in which the innocent can be protected from assault without recourse to lethal violence. These creative ways will be both preventative and reactive, and may be technological, physical (e.g., martial arts training), verbal, spiritual, self-sacrificial (e.g., hunger strikes), etc. Moreover, the pacifist needs to engage in careful philosophical discrimination to determine the boundaries of the concept of lethal violence (e.g., does it allow the use of Double Effect to engage in violent acts that are foreseen but not intended to cause death?) in order to figure out which actions of defending the innocent are permissible. The duty to engage in such thought comes from our duty to protect the vulnerable and to provide moral guidance for our neighbor.

I am not a pacifist about lethal violence. But I am, to coin a phrase, a pacifist about lying: I think lying is always wrong. Nor am I alone: pacifism about lying is the predominant Catholic position. Those of us who are pacifists about lying need to do the same thing as the pacifists about lethal violence: we need to think creatively about ways in which the innocent can be protected from assault without recourse to lying. This will involve both preventative and reactive approach, and will be of a broad variety of kinds. And we need to engage in careful philosophical discrimination. Our duty to do all this comes from our duties to the vulnerable and to our neighbor.

The tradition of casuistry about speech involving such concepts as mental reservation has been much maligned. But whatever one may think about the detailed ideas from that tradition, one has to remember that this tradition is an outgrowth of the duty to protect the vulnerable, while remaining within the confines of pacifism about lying. One should see engagement in this tradition as akin to a pacifist about lethal violence studying non-lethal martial arts.

Lying, violence and dignity

I've argued that typically the person who is hiding Jews from Nazis and is asked by a Nazi if there are Jews in her house tells the truth, and does not lie, if she says: "No." That argument might be wrong, and even if it's right, it probably doesn't apply to all cases.

So, let's think about the case of the Nazi asking Helga if she is hiding Jews, when she is in fact hiding Jews, and when it would be a lie for her to say "No" (i.e., when there isn't the sort of disparity of languages that I argued is normally present). The Christian tradition has typically held lying to be always wrong, including thus in cases like this. I want to say some things to make it a bit more palatable that Helga does the right thing by refusing to lie.

The Nazi is a fellow human being. Language, and the trust that underwrites it (I was reading this morning that one of the most difficult questions in the origins of language is about the origination of the trust essential to language's usefulness), is central to our humanity. By refusing to betray the Nazi's trust in her through lying, Helga is affirming the dignity of all humans in the particular case of someone who needs it greatly--a human being who has been dehumanized by his own choices and the influence of an inhuman ideology. By attempting to dehumanize Jews, the Nazi dehumanized himself to a much greater extent. Refusing to lie, Helga gives her witness to a tattered child of God, a being created to know and live by the truth in a community of trust, and she he gives him a choice whether to embrace that community of trust or persevere on the road of self-destruction through alienation from what is centrally human. She does this by treating him as a trusting human rather than a machine to be manipulated. She does this in sadness, knowing that it is very likely that her gift of community will be refused, and will result in her own death and the deaths of those she is protecting. In so doing she upholds the dignity of everyone.

When I think about this in this way, I think of the sorts of things Christian pacifists say about their eschatological witness. But while I do embrace the idea that we should never lie, I do not embrace the pacifist rejection of violence. For I think that just violence can uphold the dignity of those we do violence to, in a way in which lying cannot. Just violence--even of an intentionally lethal sort--can accept the dignity of an evildoer as someone who has chosen a path that is wrong. We have failed to sway him by persuasion, but we treat him as a fellow member of the human community by violently preventing him from destroying the community that his own wellbeing is tied to, rather than by betraying with a lie the shattered remains of the trustful connection he has to that community.

I don't think the above is sufficient as an argument that lying is always wrong. But I think it gives some plausibility to that claim.

Pacifism and trolleys

In the standard trolley case, a runaway trolley is heading towards five innocent people, but can be redirected onto a side-track where there is only one innocent person. I will suppose that the redirection is permissible. This is hard to deny. If redirection here is impermissible, it's impermissible to mass-manufacture vaccines, since mass vaccinations redirect death from a larger number of potentially sick people to a handful of people who die of vaccine-related complications. But vaccinations are good, so redirection is permissible.

I will now suggest that it is difficult to be a pacifist if one agrees with what I just said.

Imagine a variant where the one person on the side-track isn't innocent at all. Indeed, she is the person who set the trolley in motion against the five innocents, and now she's sitting on the side-track, hoping that you'll be unwilling to get your hands dirty by redirecting the trolley at her. Surely the fact that she's a malefactor doesn't make it wrong to direct the trolley at the side-track she's on. So it is permissible to protect innocents by activity that is lethal to malefactors.

This conclusion should make a pacifist already a bit uncomfortable, but perhaps a pacifist can say that it is wrong to protect innocents by violence that is lethal to malefactors. I don't think this can be sustained. For protecting innocents by non-lethal violence is surely permissible. It would be absurd to say a woman can't pepper-spray a rapist. But now modify the trolley case a little more. The malefactor is holding a remote control for the track switch, and will not give it to you unless you violently extract it from her grasp. You also realize that when you violently extract the remote control from the malefactor, in the process of extracting it the button that switches the tracks will be pressed. Thus your violent extraction of the remote will redirect the trolley at the malefactor. Yet surely if it is permissible to do violence to the malefactor and it is permissible to redirect the trolley, it is permissible to redirect the trolley by violence done to the malefactor. But if you do that, you will do a violent action that is lethal to the malefactor.

So it is permissible to protect innocents by violence that is lethal to malefactors. Now, perhaps, it is contended that in the last trolley case, the death of the malefactor is incidental to the violence. But the same is true when one justifies lethal violence in self-defense by means of the Principle of Double Effect. For instance, one can hit an attacker with a club intending to stop the malefactor, with the malefactor's death being an unintended side-effect.

This means that if it is permissible to redirect the trolley, some lethal violence is permissible. What is left untouched, however, by this argument is a pacifism that says that it is always impermissible to intend a malefactor's death. I disagree with that pacifism, too, but this argument doesn't affect it.

Pacifism

The pacifist believes that one ought not engage in problematic violence in war even if all the standard jus ad bellum conditions are satisfied. "Problematic violence" here means the level of violence that is prohibited. Probably few pacifists would think it would be wrong to push violent foreign soldiers away without hurting them. So, presumably, pushing someone painlessly away doesn't rise to the level of "problematic violence." Where the pacifist draws the line may differ from pacifist to pacifist, but I take it that lethal violence, i.e., violence that, if successful, has a high probability of resulting in the opponent's death, counts as problematic, even when the death is not intended. Thus, I take it that the pacifist will be opposed to shooting at an enemy soldier's heart even when one is using double effect and intending the disablement rather than the death of the enemy soldier. This is all stipulative of what I mean by "pacifist".

Question: Can the pacifist consistently permit problematic violence in law enforcement situations?

If not, then pacifism is seriously problematic, since it seems pretty clear that it is practically impossible to have a decent, self-sufficient community enduring over time without lethal violence to contain violent criminals.

But I think the answer to the question is in fact negative. For how could one draw a line between war and law enforcement? When the invading army marches in, burning crops and murdering citizens, they are breaking the victim country's laws. If problematic violence is permitted to enforce the laws of one's territory, it should be permissible to use problematic violence to stop them. But this seems to be a case of war. Hence, some lethal violence is permitted in some wars, contrary to what I stipulated as the view of the pacifist.

Perhaps, though, the pacifist could claim that it is only permissible to enforce a country's laws with problematic violence on the country's subjects, and an invading army does not consist of subjects. But this is deeply implausible. If it is permissible to use problematic violence to stop a citizen wife from murdering her citizen husband, it should also be permissible to use problematic violence to stop a non-citizen woman who sneaked into one's country to murder her citizen husband. Moreover, this should be permissible even if the woman was commissioned by another state to kill her husband. But if we allow that it is permissible to use problematic violence against criminals acting on behalf of foreign states, then there seems to be no way to deny that it is permissible to use problematic violence to stop invaders.

There is, though, a consistent position the someone could hold here: Problematic violence by agents of a state must be confined to that state's territory. This is not a pacifist position by my stipulation of what a "pacifist" is. But it may be thought to be a pacifist position in a broader sense. But I am not so sure. It seems that this is not so much a position against violence, as a position about jurisdiction.

Art as argument

I once ran a panel discussion between an Islamic theologian and a philosopher of art. The Islamic theologian was defending what she claimed was traditional Islamic jurisprudence, that for the sake of freedom of inquiry it is legally permitted to write anything in the context of intellectual verbal argument (even really nasty things about the founder of Islam, as long as long as they were supported by argumentation), but that there are restrictions on, say, what is permitted in art. The idea was that in intellectual inquiry, verbal expressions have a privileged status.

It seems to me that this account of inquiry is somewhat impoverished. While argument can be made in words, it can also be made in other ways. In their fun Handbook of Christian Apologetics Kreeft and Tacelli give this argument for the existence of God:

There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Therefore there must be a God.
You either see this one or you don't.

I may not see it, because my own appreciation of music is most deficient[note 1], but I see the kind of argument that is made here, and it is not an argument in words—simply asserting that there is the music of J. S. Bach doesn't do the job. The music is an essential part of the argument itself.

Or consider the following argument:

1. 
2. Therefore, war is wrong.

Does it make sense to simply incorporate a work of art as a premise to an argument. One problem—and this may be the reason for the apparent Islamic privileging of verbal arguments—is that arguments that incorporate a work of art as a premise are hard to criticize. I am not a pacifist. So I accept that the above argument is unsound. But it is really hard to see what I deny. Do I deny premise (1), i.e., deny Guernica? That seems to be a category mistake. Or do I deny that (2) follows from (1)? So there is something unfair about the use of art in argument—one is putting oneself beyond criticism, except maybe by a competing work of art.

Difficulties with this notwithstanding, I do think the idea that a work of art can express an otherwise ineffable proposition is defensible. Perhaps Guernica expresses the proposition that war is like this (isn't it fun to use hyperlinks to indicate referrents of demonstratives?). If so, then while denying Guernica is a category mistake, denying the proposition expressed by Guernica is no category mistake.

If so, then poems, songs, novels, etc. can express propositions that have truth value. This might be relevant to an account of Biblical inerrancy that includes the full range of genres found in Scripture.

Final note: I think the Bach and Guernica arguments may have different logical forms. It may not be that the music of Bach itself expresses something that implies the existence of God, so that the music is not a premise, but only a part of a premise—the premise that there is this [mp3 download is from here].