Friday, September 17, 2010

What is the essential harm in murder?

Murder is wrong because it harms the victim in a particularly serious way. But what sort of harm does it impose on the victim? Some will say: takes away consciousness, severs connections with loved ones and interrupts projects. However, that on balance there is such a harm is far from obvious, while it is obvious that murder is wrong. For most people in our culture believe that the dead are conscious, and that many of the dead enjoy a life of bliss that include contact with many loved ones, and the continuation of at least the central project of one's life, namely the relationship with God. The wrongness of killing had better not be based on the controversial—and false!—thesis that there is no afterlife.

Now, one might say: Even if there is an afterlife, death interrupts many projects that involve other living people. Maybe. Yet on some views of the afterlife, the dead contribute at least as significantly to the lives of the living as they did when they were alive, for instance by praying for them. And even if death does interrupt many projects that involve other living people, that can't be central to what makes murder wrong. For consider Joe. He is a nice guy and has below average intelligence. Joe has no close friends, but he does have acquaintances. He lives a decent day-to-day life, but has no significant earthly projects that would be interrupted by death. He longs for heaven, but enjoys his daily life. By nobody's standards is he a candidate for euthanasia. Killing him would be a clear case of murder. But one cannot ground the wrongness of killing Joe in terms of projects involving other living people, because Joe just does not have enough such projects to yield the kind of moral weight that the wrongness of killing him has.

If this is right, then we should not look at the central harm in murder as involving a loss of the goods distinctive of the good human life. Rather the central harm in murder is the loss to a human being of the good of life itself—it is the destruction of the human's living body.  And hence to kill a permanently unconscious human being is wrong for the same central reason as it is wrong to kill a conscious human being.

Objection: But then the central good lost in killing the human is apparently of the same sort as the central good lost in killing a mosquito, and hence it should be just as wrong to kill a mosquito as to kill a human.

Response 1: Who loses a good can be morally relevant, over and beyond the question of what the lost good is.

Response 2: While in some sense for the mouse to breathe and for a human to breathe are the same thing, even the non-instrumental value of the mouse's breathing is not the same as the non-instrumental value of the human's breathing. For the mouse's breathing does not have as its telos the support of distinctively human activity, while the human's breathing does have as its telos the support of distinctively human activity. This value in the human's breathing is present even when, in fact, the human is unable to engage in any distinctively human activity. For there is a value in a striving for an end even when the end is not expected to be achieved, and that value derives from the value the value of the end (this is related to issues in sexual ethics), and the human's breathing strives for the end of distinctively human activity.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

The value of unconscious human life

Some think that the life of a human being who has permanently and irreversibly lost consciousness has no value. Here are three arguments against tying human value and human dignity to consciousness.

Argument 1: Leibniz and Freud have taught us that much of our mental life is unconscious. If we just look at a typical person's conscious episodes what we get is a disconnected life, a series of short film clips, rather than the rich story that a typical human life is. It would be strange, then, to make the conscious life be the sole locus of value. This argument is there just to move one's intuitions away from an excessive focus on consciousness. It won't, for instance, be relevant in the case of brain damage so severe that there is good reason to think there are no unconscious mental processes (though in practice it does caution one; we know that medical personnel can be mistaken about whether a patient is conscious, and it seems to be even more difficult to determine whether there are unconscious mental processes).

Argument 2: Some living things, like trees, exhibit metabolic activity. Other living things, like earthworms, exhibit significant movement. Other living things, like geckos (I assume), exhibit conscious awareness. Yet others, like dogs, exhibit significant and flexible problem-solving skills. And others yet, of which the only example we are empirically sure are humans, exhibit the kind of sophisticated intellectual functioning and interaction that is characteristic of persons. But the later entries in this list also exhibit the activities of the earlier ones. Earthworms not only move, but also metabolize. Geckos not only are consciously aware, but also move and metabolize. Dogs not only solve problems, but are conscious, move and metabolize. And humans do all of these—and exhibit sophisticated cognition on top of it. The life of a tree, a worm, a gecko and a dog has value, and the good that is found in each of these is found in the typical life of a human. Not all of these goods require consciousness: the good of metabolism and movement is present in many animals without, as far as we know, consciousness. Thus the life of a human who does not exhibit consciousness nonetheless exhibits a number of other goods. To deny this is basically to deny that humans are animals, or to take the implausible view that the life of a tree or a worm has no value.

Argument 3: Consider the attitude one might have towards someone that one loves who has fallen dreamlessly asleep—say, one's child or one's spouse. One may fondly kiss the beloved's head, recognizing the beloved's present value—fondness always involves an element of taking the beloved to have value. If the value of humans essentially requires consciousness, there is either a mistake here or else the value is entirely constituted by the expected future consciousness. It is implausible to say that a mistake is being made, so let us consider the future-consciousness hypothesis. Suppose that the beloved is going to be executed by a tyrant as soon as she about to regain consciousness. Then there is no future consciousness (except in the afterlife, and I do not think the attitude depends on beliefs about the afterlife). But the tragic absence of a future consciousness does not make one less fond—it does not make one value the person less—but the very opposite. Nor is one's attitude as it is towards a corpse. In the case of the sleeping person who will be executed, one dreads and mourns a future loss; in the case of the corpse, one mourns an already present loss.

Final remarks: The above establishes a weak conclusion: that there is intrinsic value in an unconscious human life. One might think that this weak conclusion avails little. But I think it establishes one thing: It is a mistake to think that one can be bestowing a good on an unconscious patient by killing her. An unconscious patient is not suffering. The evils that have befallen her are evils of privation (maybe the evil of suffering is also an evil of privation, but that is more controversial)—she lacks consciousness, speech, complex two-way interaction, etc. But she still exhibits the kinds of goods that oak trees exhibit. And to kill her is to deprive her even of these goods. (A religious person might say: "It will hasten her happiness in the next life, and that is of value." But rarely do we know that a person's afterlife will be free of suffering. Besides, the hastening is not much of a benefit, because when one is unconscious, one is not waiting. According to her subjective time, she will get the goods of the afterlife just as quickly if she is killed now as when she is allowed to live for another ten years of unconsciousness.)

One might think that it is an indignity for a human to be active only at the level of plants. That, I think, is too high a view of humans. We all begin with a life of purely metabolic activity after conception, and most of us end with a life of purely metabolic activity (if only for a few seconds).

An important question (Trent Dougherty asked me about this today), but one that is not required for my weak conclusions above, is whether the metabolic life is intrinsically more valuable in the human than in the oak tree. The answer is, I think, positive, but it is a hard question. (One argument for a positive answer comes from the hylomorphic view of the human soul—our metabolic life is energized by our rational soul.)

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Writing about propositions

After reading up on the truth literature last fall, I've discovered some embarrassing problems in my past writing, which I've also seen in student writing, when propositions are used. Now when I see these, I cringe. It's mostly just a matter of grammar. Here are some cases of the sort of error I mean:
  1. "If p is a true proposition, then someone could know that p."
  2. "Given the truth that p, we can ask whether p is contingent or necessary."
  3. "If p explains q, and p explains r, then p explains (q and r)."
  4. "If someone knows that p, then p is true."
The easy way to see that these are ungrammatical is to substitute "that snow is white" and the like for variable letters that range over propositions and to substitute "snow is white" for variable letter that abbreviate sentences or that should be understood via substitutional quantification. If one does that, one gets ungrammaticalities:
  1. "If that snow is white is a true proposition, then someone could know that that snow is white."
(The antecedent is fine, but the consequent is ungrammatical.) And sometimes one realizes that one doesn't know how to interpret a variable letter. For instance, in (4) we could take p to be a substitutionary sentence variable, in which case the antecedent would be fine ("If someone knows that snow is white") but the consequent would be ungrammatical ("then snow is white is true"), or we could take p to be a proposition, in which case the antecedent is ungrammatical.
Many cases of this grammatical error are easy to fix. For instance, in (1) and (4), one should simply change "knows that p" to "knows p". (This introduces an ambiguity between knowing p in the "to be the case" sense, and being acquainted with the abstract proposition p, but context should take care of that.) In (2), one changes "the truth that p" to "the truth p". Alternately, in (1), (2) and (4), one can use sentential variables instead, perhaps changing p to s to mark this, and making the requisite changes ("If that s is a true proposition..."; "... whether it is contingent or necessary that s"; "then it is true that s").
However, (3) is trickier to fix up. The problem is that "and" is a sentential operator, while q and r are propositions, so we get "(that snow is white) and (that grass is green)", say. An easy thing is to use sentential variables, and then say a little more verbosely:
  1. If that s explains that u and that s explains that v, then that s explains that s&v.
However, this limits the generality of (3) to those propositions that can be expressed by a sentence. Maybe that's all propositions, but this is not obvious. (This is a general problem with using sentential variables instead of propositional ones.) Another move is to replace "p and q" with "the conjunction of p and q". This fine in this case, and may be stylistically the best solution, but it won't work well with more complex logical forms.
I think the right move to take is to make "&" not be a connective, but a function that takes a pair of propositions and returns their conjunction. If one uses this convention, then one can replace "p and q" with "p & q", and all is well. One may not even need to be explicit about using this convention.
Poor writing as in (1)-(4) may lead to philosophical problems, though hopefully usually it doesn't. Here is a somewhat more serious issue. One way that some authors—and I am pretty sure I've done this myself—handle the problems in (1)-(4) is by using truth. Thus, they might replace (4) by:
  1. "If someone knows that p is true, then p is true."
This neatly avoids the ambiguity of "knows p". However, (6) does not say that if someone knows a proposition p, then p is true, which is what (4) was intended to say. Rather, (6) says that if someone knows the second-order proposition that p is true, then the first-order proposition p is true. This is, of course, true, but does not capture (4). For instance, from (4) one should be able to derive:
  1. If someone knows that snow is white, then it is true that snow is white.
But this does not follow from (6), since someone who knows that snow is white might not know that the proposition that snow is white is true (e.g., a small child or a philosopher). In general, one cannot in a non-extensional context replace a first order proposition p with the second order claim that p is true.
This is all obvious, but somehow it wasn't taught to me when I was in grad school.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Rites of initiation and the problem of evil

As an initiation rite, Brazil's Satere-Mawe people make gloves with hundreds of bullet ants woven in, stinger pointing inward, and the boy who wants to become a man is expected to wear them for ten minutes, and the incredible pain lasts for hours. According to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, the bullet ant sting is the worst of the Hymenopteran stings. Schmidt describes the experience of a single sting as follows: "Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel." (Here is a man dedicated to science.)

Now, consider this. The boy suffers horribly for a large part of a day, but then he's a man for half a century. The memory of having stood up to close to the worst pain that nature fling at him has a deep value. How much value? It need not be so great, actually, for the ordeal to be worth it. Let us suppose that the disvalue of the suffering is 10,000 units. Then as long as he gets a mere four units of value from the suffering for every week of his life (say, he remembers the experience four times a week, and it gives him one unit of value each time), it is worth it. The longer his future life as a man, the greater the value. (This is just for priming intuitions. In fact, we need to contend with incommensurability.)

Now, maybe, in this case the pain is just much too great to pay off sufficiently in added meaningfulness over a future 50 years. Having skimmed (too painful to read carefully!) the description of the pain, I myself doubt it is worth it. Though it has to be noted that unless the adult men of that community are by and large sadists, in their judgment it is worth it, and they're better judges than wimpy I! Still, let us grant that it's not worth it.

But still, maybe a minute of wearing the ant-gloves would be worth it, if it made more meaningful a future manhood of fifty years. Scaling, ten minutes might be worth it if it made more meaningful a future manhood of five hundred years.

The point here is that a painful initiation ritual will be worthwhile if it makes more meaningful a future state of sufficient length. But now suppose that I am going to live for a million years. Then it does not seem absurd to say that a year of quite severe suffering could be worthwhile as an initiation ritual. Suppose I am going to live for a billion years. Then a hundred years of suffering might well be worthwhile, given the added value over the course of the subsequent 999,999,900 years.

But in fact if theism is true, then very likely we will live forever, since it is very likely that a good God would want persons to live forever. If so, then a suffering-filled initiation ritual that lasts for about a century would surely be justified, even if it only added a little value to each subsequent day (as long as the value did not quickly tend to zero in the limit as time goes to infinity).

Let's put it this way. It seems not improbable that if God made a person that was going to blissfully exist for a year, God could have justification to allow that person to suffer intensely for a second first. If he made a person that was going to blissfully exist for a ten years, he might easily find justification to allow that person to suffer for ten seconds first. And, by the same reckoning, if the person were to exist for three billion years, he might find justification to allow her to suffer intensely for about 90 years. After all, 90 years is to 3 billion years as a second is to a year.

Or consider it this way. Suppose you're going to live for three billion years, but every year you will experience a second of intense suffering, in a way that contributes to the meaningfulness of the rest of your life. It does not seem absurd to suppose that God could have a reason to arrange things so. But if so, then it likewise should not seem absurd to suppose that God could arrange it so you'd suffer 90 years, and then live out 2,999,999,910 years of bliss. And if we live not just for three billion years, but forever, this is even easier to imagine.

In the face of eternity, a finite amount of suffering is just a blip.

But does it not beg the question to suppose eternal life in responding to the problem of evil? Not at all. The problem of evil is an argument against theism. Theism makes eternal life for any created persons very likely. Thus, if the problem of evil is to make a significant dent in the probability of theism, the problem of evil has to work even if there is eternal life, or else a good argument against eternal life is needed.

Internet Explorer 8 problems

One or two users reported problems accessing my blog with Internet Explorer 8.  I use Google Chrome (highly recommend!) or Firefox on all the x86 systems I use regularly, so I wasn't seeing any problems.  IE 7 is also fine.  I downloaded IE 8, and the problem was with the tag cloud.  So I had to replace it with a list, not wanting to learn javascript to debug it.  But it should be fine.  I've also decreased the number of posts that show up when you just go to alexanderpruss.blogspot.com.  This might be helpful with respect to decreasing load time for users who are viewing with phones.  Please comment with any other usability changes you'd like.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Backwards causation

It is commonly thought that a cause C metaphysically cannot have an effect in its past. I see two simple ways of making sense of this principle in a relativistic framework:
  1. A cause can only have effects in the future half lightcone centered on it.
  2. A cause cannot have effects in the past half lightcone centered on it.
But I think neither of these is a plausible candidate for a metaphysical principle. Consider what (1) and (2) respectively say in a flat spacetime:
  1. A cause at (x,t) can only have an effect when the effect is at a spacetime location (y,u) such that |xy|<c(ut).
  2. A cause at (x,t) cannot have an effect at a spacetime location (y,u) when |xy|<c(tu).
But these just don't seem to be plausible candidates for a metaphysical principle, though I suppose one might think that they could be consequences of a physical principle. The same applies to the more complicated versions we'd need in a non-flat spacetime.
If we want (1) or (2) to be non-trivial metaphysical principles, we need to replace the references to lightcones by something of more metaphysical than physical significance. A plausible approach is to define the future half lightcone of a as the set of spacetime points states of affairs at which can be affected by a cause at a. But then (1) becomes simply the claim that causes can have effects only in spacetime, which is controversial and fails to capture the backwards causation intuition.
Now (2) is the claim that that a cause at a spacetime location b cannot affect anything at a spacetime location a when a is such that something at a could affect something at b. This is, in effect, a principle tailored to rule out causal loops. But if that's the intuition behind it, we might as well just say there are no causal loops, and be done with it. And if we do that, then we will have ruled out some, but not all, instances of backwards causation.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Gratuitous evils

  1. (Premise) There are no gratuitous evils.
  2. (Premise) If there is no God, some evils are gratuitous.
  3. Therefore, there is a God.
Here, a gratuitous evil is one that doesn't serve some greater purpose, or something like that. Now, one might think this is question-begging: that the only reason to believe (1) is that one believes (3). But I think not. A lot of people have the intuition that "there is a reason for everything". And they don't mean by that that there is an explanation for everything—they aren't just asserting the standard Principle of Sufficient Reason. They mean that there is a justifying reason—that the evils in their lives contribute in important ways to the value of the lives, etc.

Here is a hypothesis. For some (a few? many? I have no idea) atheists, the conviction that there are gratuitous evils is a consequence of, not reason for, atheism. There is the natural intuition that there is a reason for everything, but a belief in atheism is rationally incompatible with that intuition, so the intuition is abandoned.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Do I believe the multiplication table?

Most entries, like 8x8, in the multiplication table I know off the top of my head. But some may require a quick calculation. If you ask me what 7x8 is, I may do 49+7=56, and if you ask me what 6x9 is, I might do 70-6=54.

But is there really an important distiction here? You ask me what 8x4 is. Just about right away, 32 comes to mind. But what if, in fact, my mind (or brain?) unconsciously calculated it: 64/2=32? After all, I am more confident of my knowledge of 8x8 than of 8x4, and I think it comes to mind faster and more naturally. And even in my 7x8 calculation, there were unconscious elements. I don't have to consciously think: 7x8 = 7x(7+1) = 7x7 + 7x1 = 49+7 = 56. I just consciously think: 7x7=49, 49+7=56. So along with the conscious processing, there is unconscious application of the distributive law. And hence it is quite a reasonable hypothesis that when I am asked about 8x4, I might indeed be making a quick unconscious calculation. And that would help explain why I can call to mind 8x8 faster than 8x4. Furthermore, if the brain is at all like a computer and if the brain is where memories are housed, information is stored in some encoded and maybe even compressed form. There will thus always be a computational process of some sort when making stored data usable.

Actually, in the above I wasn't completely correct. I think I actually do have 7x8 and 6x9 memorized. But normally (though not now, since the examples are fresh in mind) recalling them from memory takes more time and effort, and I feel it is less reliable than doing the quick calculations. However, one could easily imagine that I don't have them memorized at all, and in the following I will counterfactually assume that.

Now, it is tempting to say that I don't believe that 7x8=56 if I have to actually compute it. But if computation is involved in almost all processes of recall, then it seems we believe very little at all, except the things we're occurrently thinking. And that's absurd. For one, it seems plausible that beliefs are needed for justification, and so if we have so few beliefs, and yet many of our beliefs require many other beliefs for their justification, then fewer of our beliefs end up justified than is right.

Perhaps, then, we should say that there is a difference between calling and recalling to mind. But that distinction is going to be hard to draw.

So maybe what we should say is this. When calling something to mind would involve an unconscious process, then we have a case of belief, but when the process would be conscious, there is no belief until the proposition is called to mind. Now the idiot savant who can do very big arithmetical calculations unconsciously counts as believing all the answers ahead of calculation. That doesn't seem intuitively right. However, whether we call it a belief or not, I do think we should not in any important way distinguish the case of unconscious arithmetical computation from more ordinary cases of recall. And once we realize that unconscious computation can be very complex, we really shouldn't distinguish conscious from unconscious computability in any normatively important way.

Here are some potential consequences. First, we might be pushed to some sort of reliabilism, perhaps of a proper function sort. For there ought to be a distinction between justified and unjustified belief, and if we do not distinguish belief from what one has a skill to compute, then we need a similar account of the justification of the outputs of that skill. But that account, very likely, will involve the reliability of the skill. Second, if we want to maintain some distinction between non-occurrent belief and skill at generating occurrent belief, this distinction is likely to be a vague one, involving the amount of computation. In particular, I suspect that the distinction may not match up with what we want to say about knowledge. So it may be that knowledge doesn't entail belief—maybe knowledge merely entails the possession of a skill of calling to mind.

I am not particularly attached to the conclusions. I just want to provoke some discussion about the phenomena.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Do Aquinas and Scotus disagree on univocal predication of God?

Duns Scotus defines univocal predication as follows: P is univocal provided that Px&~Px is always a contradiction, and hence P can be used in multiple lines of a syllogism. Famously, Aquinas says that no positive term can be univocally predicated of a creature and of God, while Scotus says that some can be univocally predicated, for instance "being". I suggest, however, that the disagreement could be merely verbal, due to the two philosophers using the word "univocal" differently.

For here is a way of developing Aquinas' position. When I attribute wisdom to God and when I attribute wisdom to Socrates, the truth grounds of my attribution are different but related. In the case of God, the truth ground of my attribution is the simple God, who is identical with wisdom. In the case of Socrates, the ground is Socrates' accident of wisdom inhering in Socrates. We have a ground or truthmaker heterogeneity here: the same claim is true for different reasons. If the grounds were completely different, the word "wisdom" would be equivocal. However, the grounds are not different but analogically related, and hence "wisdom" is analogical.

Now, let us plug this into Scotus' definition. "Wisdom" will be univocal in Scotus' sense if and only if it is a contradiction to suppose of x that x is wise and that x is not wise. But on Aquinas' view, as I read him, this is a contradiction. For either x is God or x is not God. If x is God, then "x is wise" and "x is not wise" are claims that are true if and only if, respectively, x is or is not identical with wisdom, and hence x cannot both be wise and non-wise. If x is not God, then "x is wise" and "x is not wise" are claims that are true if and only if, respectively, x has or does not have wisdom, and hence x cannot both be wise and non-wise. In either case, a contradiction ensues from supposing that x is wise and not wise.

The analogy thesis on my reading is about the grounds of the predication. What grounds there must be for the predication to be true differs depending on whether the subject of predication is divine. But this does not allow for a contradiction.

Consider the following predicate H: "if ___ is an animal, then it is a healthy animal, and if it is urine, then it is indicative of health, and if it is food then it is productive of health, and ..." This is meant to be an expansion of Aquinas' and Aristotle's favorite example of an analogical predicate, "is healthy". But now notice that while the grounds of "x is H" differ depending on what x is, nonetheless no x can both satisfy H and not satisfy H. That a horse is healthy and that its urine is healthy tell us different things about the horse and urine, respectively, but in the case of the horse, only one thing is said by attribution of H, and in the case of urine, only one thing is said by attribution of H.

Granted, we might expand the example and allow that there are two senses of "The horse is healthy". In the primary sense, it means that the horse is in good physical condition, while in the secondary sense, it means that if the horse were made into food, that food would be healthy. I am not aware of Aquinas allowing such a case, however. So it is quite possible that Aquinas thinks that in analogical predication, only one kind of ground is allowed for each particular subject of predication. And if so, then the predicate satisfies Scotus' definition of univocity, and can be used as the middle term in a syllogism.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Tensed propositions and conversation

According to the doctrine of Tensed Propositions (TP), which is accepted almost all presentists, when I say "It is night" at noon and when I say it at midnight, I express the same proposition, which is true at midnight and false at noon. The opponents of TP are apt to say that "It is night" is indexical, and as said at noon and at midnight expresses different propositions. TP is compatible with there being untensed propositions, like <It is night at t7>, but typical tensed sentences in English express tensed propositions.

Here is an argument against tensed propositions:

  1. (Premise) To be in agreement with what someone has said is to accept the proposition that she expressed.
  2. (Premise) If p is a tensed proposition, then x's accepting p at t1 and y's accepting p at t2, where t1 and t2 are different, does not constitute agreement between x and y.
  3. There are no tensed propositions.

Argument for (1): To agree is to accept what was said. But what was said was the proposition that was expressed.

Argument for (2): Suppose I say: "It is now exactly 7 p.m." and twenty seconds later you sincerely say: "It is now exactly 7 p.m." If there are tensed propositions, then both of our utterances express the same tensed proposition. But surely your assertion expresses a disagreement with me. The point generalizes to all tensed propositions. Granted, sometimes, especially if t1 and t2 are within a relevant time period (say, on the same day, and p is about "today") x will be right in believing p if and only if y is right in believing p, but nonetheless x and y's agreement does not consist in mutual acceptance of p.

Even if one does not think that (1) is always true, it is very plausible that typically in communicating we are trying to communicate a proposition. But also typically, our sentences are tensed. So if TP is true, then typically we are communicating tensed propositions. But it seems essential to communicating a proposition that agreement should be constituted by mutual acceptance of that proposition. But in the case of tensed propositions that isn't what agreement is constituted by (maybe it's constituted by accepting the second-order claim that the proposition was true when it was expressed). So it can't be that our typical communication involves tensed propositions. Hence, TP is false.

Josh Rasmussen said that arguments along these lines came up independently in conversation with Peter van Inwagen.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Unconsciousness and the problem of evil

Suppose there is no afterlife, and God offers you a deal. He'll put you in a coma for a year, but give you two extra years of conscious life to compensate. Pretty good deal, you go for it. Moreover, God surely has the right to do the year of coma plus two years of conscious life thing even without asking you. We have no rights of autonomy before God. He may need a good reason to do it, but it does not have to be a very serious reason. Your family's learning to appreciate you a little might easily suffice.

Elevate this to a principle:

  1. God does not need a very serious reason to make you unconscious for a year when he gives you two years of conscious life to compensate.
Suppose now that God has already promised you eternal life in part to compensate for various evils that might befall you. In that case, it seems to follow that he does not need a very serious reason to make you unconscious for a year. This makes the task of theodicy for comas much easier. We can just partition the infinite number of years in the afterlife in such a way that different bits of it compensate for different bits of unconsciousness in this life.

Here's another way of putting the point. If you are going to have an infinite conscious future, your infinite conscious future is no less for your sleeping through a year. Granted, that exact year that you slept through has been missed. But the subsequent years are different for your having slept, and you wouldn't have had those years had you not slept through that one.

Now, one might think: Therefore we have the right to make others unconscious without a very serious reason, if we think everybody has eternal life. But that does not follow. First, we can have rights of autonomy against each other that are not rights against God. Second, by making a person unconscious for a year, we typically do decrease the amount of her conscious earthly life. Of course, so does God if he makes a person be unconscious for a year. But what is most problematic in decreasing the amount of someone's conscious earthly is that it decreases the time available for the tasks that God calls the person to. But God can easily take all that into account (e.g., by increasing the intensity of grace during the other years).

If this is right, it makes it much easier to generate a theodicy for comas. But I think the same reasoning may apply to anything that is less bad than being unconscious for life. For instance, it is clearly better to be conscious but mentally challenged than to be unconscious for life. And many pains are better than being unconscious for life.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Haecceities and presentism

The following argument is valid:

  1. (Premise) If there are no haecceities, then there are no propositions de re about non-existent individuals.
  2. (Premise) If presentism is true, then Seabiscuit is a non-existent individual.
  3. (Premise) That Seabiscuit was essentially a horse is a proposition de re about Seabiscuit.
  4. Therefore, if presentism is true, there are haecceities.
If we add that there are no haecceities, we can conclude that presentism is false.

However, I think (1) is false, because I think contingent entities are wholly individuated by the histories of their origins, where their histories are described in wholly general terms (i.e., without de re reference to any individuals). Consequently, if H is such a history of Seabiscuit, the proposition in (3) can be expressed: "Necessarily, if H is instantiated, it is instantiated by a horse."

Thursday, September 2, 2010

My Best Friend

I just finished watching My Best Friend while running on the treadmill. I really liked it. It's like a romantic comedy, but about philia, not eros. Touching.

Non-cognitivism and probability

I was looking at a paper of Pruss in the latest issue of Faith and Philosophy, and he ends it with an interesting remark. He says that probabilities are in general a problem for non-cognitivist accounts. For instance, he says, that if emotivism is right, then it's hard to assign a sense to abortion's being wrong having such-and-such a probability.

I was thinking about this, and it could make a useful template for anti-non-cognitivist arguments. For instance, suppose you think that necessity claims are an expression but not assertion of ungiveupability. But what sense, then, would there be in saying that the evidence indicates with moderate probability that necessarily freedom requires alternate possibility?

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Acting under the guise of the good

Suppose you pay me a thousand dollars to do something evil, and I lie to a friend to earn that thousand dollars. Why did I lie? Because it was evil. Why was I doing something evil? Because it would earn me a thousand dollars. This shows that it is possible to do something evil because it is evil. However, note also that this example does not challenge the doctrine that one always acts under the guise of the good. For one lies because it is evil, yes. But, if we give more detail, we need to say: because the evil of the lie is instrumentally good. So, interestingly, the doctrine that one acts under the guise of the good is quite compatible with intending something under the description "is an evil", and choosing it because it is an evil, as long as that is not a description of the ultimate end.