Enemies and opponents

When Jesus said to love one's neighbor, he was asked who was one's neighbor. When he said to love one's enemy, he wasn't asked who was one's enemy. But while it may be unhelpful to work hard to identify people as our enemies, it is helpful to work hard to identify people who are not our enemies. After all, (a) it's hard to love those we take to be our enemies, and we shouldn't try to engage in this difficult task when it can be avoided simply by realizing that these people are not our enemies, and (b) love comes in a variety of forms, and the way one loves one's enemy differs from the way one loves a friendly or neutral person--and to love a friendly or neutral person as an enemy is to do them an injustice. So we should work to avoid incorrect identifications of enemies.

In particular, I think it's important to avoid identifying mere opponents as enemies. I am not quite sure how to define an opponent, but roughly x is y's opponent when x tries to prevent what she knows to be a goal (final or subsidiary) of y and, roughly, x is y's enemy when x tries to prevent y's flourishing. (And it's part of the concept of flourishing that it is a goal of that of which it is the flourishing.) I suppose that all enemies are opponents. But not all opponents are enemies. After all, there are multiple ways one might try to prevent what one knows to be a goal of y without intending to take away from y's flourishing.

An opponent can even be a friend. If I play chess against you, we are opponents: we each intend to keep the other from checkmating us while each knowing that the other intends to checkmate us. But that which constitutes the opposition itself can be a sign of friendship. We may play chess precisely because it is mutually enjoyable to one another, and it is only mutually enjoyable (barring deceit) when each is trying to win. I think this is the ideal case with sports and other games: each is extending to the other the opportunity of engaging in this worthwhile mutual enterprise precisely in opposing the other. Playing a game should, thus, be a kind of bid for friendship. (I understand that sports and games sometimes don't work that way--that's sad.)

Of course not all cases of non-enmity opposition are ones where the opposition constitutes a bid for friendship. One can have opponents who are neutral with respect to one's good: they pursue a cause and see one as pursuing an incompatible one and hence the oppose one's pursuit. But hopefully one can presume that the opponent only disagrees about a subsidiary end. And if so, that's a basis for friendship.

So perhaps we can say: Love your enemies, but don't mistake mere opponents for enemies. Strive for friendship with mere opponents.

Limitations, art and evil

It's a standard thought that art thrives on limitations. These may be imposed by the technical capacities of the medium (I was reading this today) or by repressive authorities (think here of communist-era Eastern European literature), or they may be limitations imposed by the artist or her artistic community. In this regard art is like sport, where there are rules that constrain one from what might otherwise be thought of as efficient ways to achieve the goal, such as using a car to "run" a marathon.

Let's not think of God as setting out to create the best possible work of art. The idea of a best possible work of art divorced from model on which God "first" institutes for himself a set of limitations which both constrain and constitutively make possible a particular kind of artistic achievement, and "then" tries to produce the best work within those limitations. For instance, among these limitations there might be a small number of laws of nature and of fundamental kinds of things (compare pixel artists who limit their palette), perhaps with a limited number of self-allowed deviations from the laws. But in addition to such "technical" restrictions, there might be restrictions coming from the content of an artistic vision: what kind of thing it is that God is trying to say in the work.

If we have this sort of a model, then two things happen. The first is that the worry that a perfect being couldn't create since there is no best of all possible worlds disappears. For it is not so hard to think that within certain genre constraints there could be an optimal work (after all, some genre constraints may constrain a work to a finite size; see also this).

The second is that some progress is made on the problem of evil--though by no means is this a solution. For we can answer some "Why did God not do it this way instead?" questions by pointing to the self-imposed artistic limitations. Nonetheless, caution is required. One is very uncomfortable with the thought of God allowing horrendous undeserved suffering for art's sake. Though maybe if the sufferers eventually fully appreciate the art...?

Football excellence

I sent the following in an email to a former student. He knows a lot more about the subject—both first-order and second-order—than I do, and for some reason he found it hilarious, and perhaps true, so I'm posting it (with some typos fixed):

Jon K and Mike B were talking football. And I was finding their discourse very interesting. It was a mix of descriptive and evaluative language, with the two inseparable, in the way natural law theorists like. Understanding almost none of the first order content of their conversation, I wondered what sorts of claims they were making. My first thought was that the evaluative language could be reduced without remainder to means-end stuff: a criticism might be a claim that such and such an action did not contribute to winning, or was not likely to contribute to winning, etc.

But on reflection, no such reduction is possible. Suppose player x does not take an action A such that x's taking A would have increased the chance of victory. This is only a criticism if we add some further claims. For instance, it is not a criticism of a player that he did not run at 90% of the speed of light, though had he done so, it might have increased the chance of victory. Maybe we want to say: we criticize x for not doing A only when x could have done A. But while that may be the case for moral evaluation, it's not the case for sports evaluation. For instance, if I was due to some freak in a football game, it would be appropriate to criticize me for not doing all sorts of things that I am incapable of doing. For while I'm incapable of doing them, they're expected of a football player. The criticism might be phrased: "That Pruss guy shouldn't have been put on the team." But it could just be phrased: "He didn't run fast enough."
 
Moreover, some of the criticism is probably rather mild. The person isn't being criticized for falling short of what it takes to be a competent football player. The criticism is for falling short of excellence. Maybe that's not entirely fair, but maybe it is. So we need a concept of football excellence. Football excellence is a concept that goes beyond the empirical. [I]f all the players in the world were as incompetent as I'd be, we should say that even the best players fall short of excellence. There may be games like that, say newly invented games that no one is excellent [as] yet. So what measures excellence here? I can't help but think it's some kind of a notion of human nature. Football excellence is a kind of human excellence. Thus, it is not a part of football excellence to run at 90% of the speed of light or to throw a ball with millimeter accuracy at 100 meters. For that's asking for more than human nature can be expected to yield even in the truly excellent. That would be asking for the superhuman, and we don't ask for that (though in a way God does—but he also gives the grace for it). This means that the notion of football excellence depends on a notion of human nature. Moreover, this notion of human nature does not appear to be merely empirical: there is an irreducible normative component. 

This means that a naturalist can't consistently talk football. 

How's that sound? I may be fudging too much, since I didn't really understand many, or maybe any, of their first order claims.