Siblings and moral theory

1. We have special duties, independent of communal enactments, to take care of our siblings, precisely because they are siblings.

This is true.

Notice that (1) creates problems for a number of moral theories. Utilitarians will deny (1). The mere fact that someone is our brother or sister only makes it easier for us to know how to help him or her, which does not make a for a special duty to take care of him or her precisely because he or she is our brother or sister. It is difficult to see how Kantians could justify (1) without relying on something like a dollop of Natural Law (which Kant himself, but not so much contemporary Kantians, is happy with).

Contractarians can accept (1) minus the "independent of communal enactments" proviso. For perhaps it would be irrational for us to reject a communal tradition of a network of duties of special care that is below a certain level of onerousness, and our community's network includes siblinghood. But the contractarian probably could not object if the community instead had a network of duties of special care that put similar emphasis on, say, first-cousins-of-the-same-eye-color instead of siblings: what one gets from the contractarian structure is at most the irrationality of rejecting whatever one's community network of duties of special care is.

Divine command theorists can perhaps accept (1), though one might worry if the "precisely" in (1) is correct if this happens also because of divine command.

Natural law, of the well-developed moral theories, is probably the theory that best passes the test of fitting with (1). So, (1) provides a kind of argument for natural law theory (and to a lesser degree for divine command theory).

Does (1) matter? I think so. It is an important moral insight that somehow all human beings are brothers and sisters, but this moral insight is unhelpful, and maybe harmful, apart from (1).

How could God have chosen not to create anything?

Traditional Christian thought holds that God could have refrained from creating. But this is puzzling. Whatever God does he does for a good reason. But what good reason could there be for not creating something? Granted, God might well have good reason not to create beings capable of sin. But not all beings are like that—flowers aren't like that, and maybe there could even be finite persons that aren't capable of sin.

Here is a suggestion inspired by a remark of Mark Murphy's about how all creatures imperfectly reflect God. Think of how an artist might refrain from making a work of art on a particular subject because she thinks herself unequal to the subject. You might think that it would be good to produce a work of art that does not do full justice to the subject, since perhaps all works of art fall short, and there is something to that. But there are two kinds of reasons—to promote the good and avoid the bad—as we learn from Aquinas. And by refraining from produce the work of art that does not do full justice to the subject, the artist is acting on a good reason, though she could also be acting on a good reason if she chose to produce the work of art.

Now God's reason for creation is himself: he creates to produce something that is in his image, which thereby glorifies him. But every possible creature, and indeed every collection of possible creatures, falls infinitely far short of God. Thus whatever God creates, it will be a work of art that, necessarily, falls short of its subject. This gives God a good reason not to create anything, to refrain from producing imperfect images of himself.

Of course, there will be cases where we would think an artist excessively timorous if she refrained from producing a work of art because it falls short. But there will also be times when we would think that the artist shows a proper understanding of the importance of the subject and what she can produce when she refrains from producing. A best-selling novelist who lacks much talent in characterization, but can nonetheless produce exciting plots, should perhaps not attempt a novel on the deep moral transformation of the wife of an SS officer who watches her husband's slow decay as he is assigned to Auschwitz.

Now, paradoxically, the artistic products of the infinite God will fall infinitely short of the subject matter when he creates and he so realizes. It is not that God is capable of less than the human artist. It is, rather, that the subject of his art is infinite, and he fully realizes this infinity. A human artist—say, a poet—who writes about God faces the same problem, but lacks God's understanding of just how infinitely short the work falls of its subject. There is a hint of this in the Old Testament prohibition on images of God (a prohibition no longer literally applicable once God has become incarnate and transformed the Law).

Whenever a sensitive artist creates, there is a kind of sacrifice of the artistic sensibility—the artist makes something that she knows falls short. And so we owe special gratitude to God for creating us. He had good reason not to create, though he also had good reason to create. Where there are conflicting reasons, that is where choice is needed.

Devotional use of fantasy and science fiction

The kind of fantasy and science fiction that I like describes a possible world as it were from the inside (i.e., the sentences are to be interpreted relative to that world, as if that world were actual, in the sense of two-dimensional semantics—this makes it possible for the stories to have alternate origins for "the human race" and so on). Some of these possible worlds are fairly close to ours (realistic kinds of science fiction) and some are quite far from ours. Besides the kinds of values that every kind of literature can have, such as giving us a richer picture of moral deliberation, imaginative fiction of the sort I like also performs a devotional service—it gives us a richer picture of the power of God. There perhaps are no hobbits, probably there are no vast plasma-based intelligent beings in the sun, perhaps we do not live in a multiverse, almost surely there are no vampire-like unconscious but sophisticatedly cognitive beings, and probably God did not become incarnate as a lion; but all these things might have been so, by the power of God.

That does not mean that the fiction has to be overtly theistic or by a theistic author. Any picture of a genuinely possible world is a picture of a world in which God would exist, since God exists necessarily, in all worlds (and in the case of "God", the two-dimensional intension is constant, so we don't need to distinguish between conceivability and possibility). If the story is not compatible with the existence of God—for instance, if it contains a story of the ultimate origination of the cosmos incompatible with theism, or if it contains innocents suffering for eternity, vel caetera—then the story fails to describe a possible world.

Personally, I am made uncomfortable by imaginative fiction that does not describe a possible world. Besides rare cases of stories that appear to be clearly incompatible with theism, an offender is time travel stories that often violate metaphysical strictures against causal loops and circular explanation. I was also made uncomfortable by a Greg Egan story where mathematics itself is changed by human activity. (I think I am also made a bit uncomfortable by stories that strongly imply that what is happening is in our world—this world we live in—whereas the content of the story is metaphysically incompatible with how things are up to now. For instance, stories that give an alternate account of how "we humans" came into existence. But that is easily taken care of by reinterpreting the story without the rigidity of "our world"—that's what two-dimensional semantics is for.)

Disjunction introduction and conditionals with disjunctive antecedents

[Note: In the original version of this post, I made the embarrassing false claim that relevance logic denies disjunction introduction. This claim will explain Brandon's and my exchange in the comments. I have since edited the post.]

Consider this argument, a version of which I've already discussed:

1. I won't write a blog post today mainly on French cooking.
2. Therefore: I won't write a blog post today mainly on French cooking or tomorrow the world will come to an end (or both).
3. Therefore: If I write a blog post today mainly on French cooking, tomorrow the world will come to an end.

Premise (1) is true. Conclusion (3) sounds false. There are a couple of things that one can do about this odd argument. One can embrace the conclusion but insist that the conditional is only used materially, and is trivially true because the antecedent is false. One can—and I think this is going to be the most common reaction among philosophers—reject the inference of (3) from (2). But a lot of ordinary people will balk at (2)—the disjunction introduction step, where from p, we conclude p or q for any q.

Denying disjunction introduction neatly undercuts the above argument, as well as removing the oddity that everything can be proved from a contradiction.

But blocking disjunction introduction is a mistake, because we need disjunction introduction. Suppose that we say:

4. One has committed a violation of a school safety zone if one is (a) driving a motor vehicle in a school safety zone and (b) talking on a cellphone or driving at more than 20 miles per hour or both.

Now suppose:

5. Sam is driving a motor vehicle in a school safety zone.
6. Sam is talking on a cellphone.

We obviously want to conclude that Sam has committed a violation of a school safety zone. But to do that with modus ponens, we need to establish that the antecedent of the conditional in (4) is true for Sam:

7. Sam is (a) driving a motor vehicle in a school safety zone and (b) talking on a cellphone or driving at more than 20 miles per hour or both.

We get (7a) from (5). But the only information relevant to (7b) is (6), and to get to (7b) from (6), one needs disjunction-introduction. One can imagine the sleazy lawyer who contends:

We grant that my client was driving a motor vehicle in a school safety zone. The evidence adduced by the state, we concede, shows that he was talking on a cellphone, but no evidence was adduced by the state that he was talking on a cellphone or driving at more than 20 miles per hour or both.

This is obviously bad. We use conditionals with disjunctions in their antecedents quite regularly and so denying disjunction introduction is not very tenable.

One might try, instead, having additional inference rules for conditionals with special antecedents. For instance, one might allow this

8. From (i) if p or q, then r, and (ii) p, infer r.
9. From (i) if s and (p or q), then r, and (ii) s, and (iii) p, infer r.

Rule (9) would take care of the school safety zone case. But, first of all, lots of such rules would be needed to handle all cases. And, second, once we allowed such a rule we would be liable to let disjunction introduction in through the backdoor. For instance, if we allow (8), we can prove disjunction introduction from the plausible axiom: if A, then A.

10. p. (Premise)
11. if p or q, then p or q. (Axiom)
12. p or q. (Rule (8)).

Jon Kvanvig suggests to me that one might take care of this problem by replacing conditionals with disjunctive antecedents by conjunctions of conditionals. On this proposal, we would replace (4) with:

13. One has committed a violation of a school safety zone if one is driving a motor vehicle in a school safety zone and talking on a cellphone, and one has committed a violation of a school safety zone if one is driving a motor vehicle in a school safety zone and one is driving at more than 20 miles per hour.

But while we could, indeed, stop using locution (4) and use (13) instead, that is a pretty revisionary proposal. We do think Sam has violated a school safety zone given (4)-(6)—we don't need (13) to get that conclusion.

So, the upshot is this: in this case we have a pretty good argument that we would be mistaken to deny disjunction introduction.

Vagueness and God

Can it be vaguely true that God believes p? Maybe not. For if it's vaguely true that God believes p, then God is unable to have perfect self-knowledge. Perfect self-knowledge requires definitely knowing, for every proposition, whether one believes it and if so how one believes it, and more generally what one's doxastic attitude towards the proposition is. This means that God will definitely know, for every proposition, whether he definitely believes, or whether he has for it the doxastic attitude appropriate to cases of vagueness, or whether he definitely does not believe it. But God's beliefs perfectly mirror reality. So, in particular, for every proposition, God will definitely know whether that proposition is definitely true, vague or definitely false.

It follows that if God exists, then there is no higher order vagueness, except perhaps epistemically for us: it is never a vague matter whether a proposition is definitely true, vague, or definitely false.

But the arguments for higher order vagueness are just the same as those for first order vagueness. So if we're going to bite the bullet and accept that higher order vagueness is merely epistemic, maybe we should bite the bullet and accept that first order vagueness is merely epistemic, too.

I suppose the point to attack here is my notion of perfect self-knowledge. Still, the following remains true (and I got this general idea from Jon Kvanvig): it's a puzzling question what sorts of epistemic attitudes an omniscient being is to have towards vague truths.

T-schema and bivalence

Tarski's T-schema says that for any sentence "s":

1. "s" is true if and only if s.

Suppose that "s" is neither true nor false. Then the left hand side of (1) is false, but the right hand side is neither true nor false. It seems to me that a reasonable multivalent logic will not allow an "if and only if" sentence to be true when one side of it is false and the other side is not false. So, it seems that the T-schema requires bivalence.

It's odd that I never noticed this before.

Asserting what you don't grasp

Some people think that to assert a proposition you need to grasp it.

I think they are mistaken. Suppose my wife asks me: "Can you take the car to the garage to have xyz done to it?" I have no idea what "xyz" means. It's some complicated thing having to do with internal combustion engines. I ask her: "How long do you think it'll take them to do xyz?" She says: "It shouldn't take more than two or three hours." So I say: "OK, I'll have them do xyz." I take the car to the garage and ask them: "Could you do xyz to the car?" Two hours later they tell me: "We did xyz" and hand me a bill for $250. I call up my wife and say: "They did xyz and it cost $250."

I engaged in four speech acts where I used "xyz": a question to my wife about how long xyz takes, a promise to my wife to have xyz done, a request of the mechanic that xyz be done, and finally something that looks like an assertion that it cost $250 to have xyz done. Clearly, I asked my wife about how long xyz takes, I promised my wife to have xyz done and I requested of the mechanic that xyz be done. For it is under the supposition that I asked my wife how long xyz takes that her response that it takes an hour or two is salient, and plainly it is salient. That I promised to have them do xyz is also clear--if instead I ask them to change the oil (assuming xyz isn't in fact an oil change--the two to three hour time estimate suggests it's not), I haven't done what I promised, and I owe my wife an apology. And if I didn't ask the garage to do xyz, then they performed an unauthorized repair.

But if my apparent question, promise and request are what they seem, despite my lack of grasp of "xyz", surely the same should be said about my apparent assertion that they did xyz and it cost $250. Indeed, if instead I had the shop do an oil change, then I lied when I told my wife that they did xyz. But how could I have lied unless I asserted? Moreover, if I spoke sincerely but later a friend looked in the engine and told me: "They didn't do xyz!", then I should withdraw what I said to my wife. Again, the best explanation of why I should withdraw it is that it was an assertion that has since turned out to be incorrect.

Fertility and Gender book from the Anscombe Bioethics Centre

I got this in the mail.  It should be a really good book.

Dear Colleagues, 

What is sex and why is it important?  Does marriage have a basic rationale?  How should couples manage their fertility, and when and how should pregnancy be achieved?  How should we respond to 'embryo adoption', teenage pregnancy, population growth or decline, HIV/AIDS and other STIs, same-sex attraction?  

These are some of the issues explored in the Anscombe Bioethics Centre's new book Fertility & Gender: Issues in Reproductive and Sexual Ethics -  see http://anscombebioethics.bigcartel.com/product/fertility-and-gender for more information and to order.  Contributors from the fields of philosophy, theology, psychology and economic science include Bishop Anthony Fisher, John Berry, Kevin Flannery, Mary Geach, Luke Gormally, Dermot Grenham, Paul Mankowski, Anthony McCarthy, Kevin O'Reilly, David Paton, Alexander Pruss, Philip Sutton and Helen Watt. The book offers an original contribution to a range of discussions in the sensitive and important area of sexual/reproductive ethics. 

For a list of other Anscombe Centre publications, see our Bookshop at http://anscombebioethics.bigcartel.com. You may also be interested in a conference the Anscombe Centre is holding on 8 September 2011 on Human Embryo Research:  Law, Ethics and Public Policy.  See our website at http://www.bioethics.org.uk/static_content.php?key_id=conferences&page_id=news_and_events for more information and to make an 'early bird' discounted booking (available until 30 June).   

With all good wishes,

Dr Helen Watt

Senior Research Fellow

The Anscombe Bioethics Centre, Oxford

www.bioethics.org.uk

Wild and domesticated animal pain

It seems to me that our attitudes to the pain of animals are three-fold:

1. It is important for humans not to cause severe pain to non-human animals.
2. It is not important for humans to prevent severe pain to animals not under human care.
3. It is important for humans to prevent severe pain to animals under human care.

The importance of not causing severe pain to animals, whether these animals are wild or pets or farm animals is manifested, for instance, in our laws against cruelty to animals and in our moral outcry against cruel hunting methods.

On the other hand, scientists routinely observe wild animals causing severe pain to other animals in the wild, and do not intervene in the process, and I have never heard anyone criticize them for this failure to intervene. Likewise, nobody makes it their life-work to legalize a special kind of safari where marksmen who have passed accuracy tests relatively painlessly shoot lions' prey in the head just before the lions reach the prey, as well as seeking out and killing animals that look like they are suffering from painful diseases. Yet such safaris would prevent instances of severe pain to wild animals.

Finally, the importance of preventing severe pain to animals under our care is exhibited by a whole host of practices such as the use of anesthesia in veterinary care or the euthanizing of elderly pets.

I think the best way to make sense of the data is to postulate us accepting a view on which (a) severe pain to animals is not a great evil in and of itself, but (b) to cause severe pain to animals is to behave in a particularly vicious and censure-worthy fashion, and (c) we have special duties of care towards some animals often in exchange for goods we receive from the animals (labor, milk, meat, entertainment, companionship, etc.)

Points (a)-(c) fit with the Kantian idea that what makes cruelty to animals wrong is not primarily the harm to the animals, but the dehumanization of the cruelly behaving person, though I don't want to endorse the Kantian idea.

The truth shall set you free

Jesus tells us that "the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32). I had a very interesting conversation with Richard Gale recently about this. Richard Gale expressed scepticism about the value of leading the examined life and of self-knowledge, and this led us to the idea that whether the truth indeed shall set us free, and whether knowledge of oneself will be a good thing, depends on what in fact the content of the truth is.

I find this very interesting (and the use I shall make of it is definitely not endorsed by Richard Gale). Suppose for instance the ultimate truth about us is that our lives are necessarily meaningless. In that case the truth will not set us free. If anything, our lives would be more bearable if they were lived by the fiction of meaning, nor can one consistently say "Maybe so, but freedom from social fictions is worth having", since if our lives are necessarily meaningless, there is no point to such freedom.

So it seems that in concluding that one should embark on the Socratic quest for self-knowledge and the truth about the deep things of life one is optimistically supposing that the probability of finding soul-crushing despair is not so great as to make the quest too risky.

I think one is right to have this kind of optimism, but justifying it is not so easy. One might reason like this: Either theism or naturalism is true. If theism is true, the truth about the deep things of life is probably very much worth having. If naturalism is true, then probably neither knowledge nor ignorance has great significance. And then one applies something like Pascal's Wager.

Is it good to be the sort of person who is never willing to lie?

There are cases where it seems that great harm comes from a refusal to lie. Thus there appears to be a strong consequentialist case against an absolutist position against lying. But I think that if we shift from act-consequentialism to what one might call character-consequentialism, there may be a case for an absolutist position. At least it has not been shown otherwise.

Act-consequentialism says that of all the acts available to one, one should perform the kind of act that will maximize good consequences. Character-consequentialism says that out of all the characters that one might develop, one should have that moral character having which will maximize expected good consequences. (This is a variant on rule-utilitarianism, of course.) There are differences in recommendation between the two consequentialisms. For instance, suppose there is no afterlife. Then there will be cases where act-consequentialism will recommend condemning the innocent to death in order to prevent riots seeking the innocent's death. But character-consequentialism may require one to have a character that never gives in to injustice. For having such a character will make it less likely that people will riot to blackmail one into condemning the innocent to death, plus it will make one more strongly committed to the cause of justice.

What about lying? Bracketing the afterlife, there will be circumstances where the absolutist anti-lying character will produce poorer consequences than the more pragmatic character who generally tells the truth but lies sometimes. But there will also be circumstances where the absolutist will produce better consequences than the pragmatist. These will be circumstances where the good consequences depend on one's sincere testimony being believed. If Professor Kowalska is known to be an absolutist and a student is about to jump off a tall building, and Professor Kowalska yells to the student "Don't jump—I thought your last paper was good", that carries weight. If Kowalska were known to have the more pragmatic character, the student could say: "You're just saying that to make me not jump."

Of course, there is also the case where the student's last paper was no good, and in that case the pragmatist's lie at least has some chance of averting suiciding. But the pragmatist's lie is less likely to work than truth from the absolutist would be.

The question whether the consequences of being an absolutist or being a pragmatist then depend on the relative frequencies, as weighted by what is at stake, of the following two kinds of situations:

1. Cases where (a) one believes p and (b) good consequences follow from one's interlocutor's accepting p.
2. Cases where (a) one disbelieves p and (b) good consequences follow from one's interlocutor's accepting p.

Now, I think that cases of type (1) are more common, because I am inclined to think that (i) there is a positive correlation between what one believes and what is true (this is an anti-sceptical principle of credulity) and (ii) there is a positive correlation between what is true and what is beneficial (not just to the believer) to believe, so there is, probably, a positive correlation between what one believes and what it would be beneficial if one's interlocutor believed.

Granted, there are spectacular paradigm cases of (2), such as when the Gestapo comes to one's door and asks if one is hiding some Jews (and let us suppose no clever solution like I try in this paper works). But these cases are fortunately rare (and even in those cases, there is the practical consideration how likely one's lie is to convince the interlocutor—if we were doing principled ethics, we could ignore this consideration, but we're doing character-consequentialism and can't ignore it). And corresponding to these cases there will be cases where the Gestapo comes to one's door and asks if one is hiding Jews, and one is not hiding Jews but nonetheless the consequences of the Gestapo searching the house would be grave (maybe one is hiding a Gypsy or a Slav, or one has forbidden books). In those cases there may be a serious benefit from having a reputation for absolutism in regard to lying.

In any case, we don't live in Nazi society. And there probably are many cases in our courts where the prevention of grave injustice requires that some sincere witness be believed.

Moreover, there are many small everyday type (1) cases where we can expect the absolutist to produce better results because, say, her praise is more likely to be believed.

It is ultimately a serious empirical question whether the absolutist or pragmatist character in regard to lying can be expected to be the more beneficial one. But the point I want to make is that has not been shown that the absolutist character does worse on average.

The sacramentality of assertion

Some Catholic thinking about sexuality goes something like this:  There is a sacramentality to the marital act.  The giving of self to another, and the seeking of the other's receiving and reciprocation, is a symbol of the union between God and his people, and maybe even has a Trinitarian significance of imaging the self-giving and generative nature of God.  This, in turn, suggests that mixes up holding-back with self-giving and expresses love in a context in which one is fighting against one's generative striving, producing a parody rather than image of Trinitarian love.

I think it is worth thinking about the sacramentality in assertion as well.  In assertion, one reaches out to offer one's testimony, inviting the other to receive one's testimony in trust.  This is some sort of an image of the Father's sending his Word to us in time, to offer his truth to sinners, some of whom will accept him with trust and some of whom will reject him.  It is even an image of the Father's eternal generative speaking of his Word.  There is a kind of sacrilege, then, when one knowingly asserts falsely.  One is parodying the life of the Trinity rather than imaging it.  One is being faithless to those whose faith one is inviting by one's testimony.

It does not matter that the end for which one contracepts or lies is good.  To do something that parodies the life of the Trinity is wrong regardless of what further end it subserves.

Of course, in both the case of marriage and speech prudence is called for.  One can legitimately refrain from marital union or from assertion when it would be imprudent to generate children or communicate truth.  To do that does not image, in the relevant respect, the life of the Trinity, but also does not parody it.  We cannot image the life of the Trinity in all its respects anyway--we are but finite.  And when refraining for the sake of a virtue V, say, the virtue of prudence, from imaging the life of the Trinity in one respect, we are thereby imaging the life of the Trinity in a respect shown by V.  And even when cannot image the life of the Trinity in some respect, we can and must refrain from parodying it.

There is a cost to doing the right thing here, and the tragic cases are where the cost will be borne by others.  But that is how it is in our world.  The cost of Christ's birth was borne by many a newborn and his family.  Yet we honor them as the Holy Innocents, for they have received the salvation that came through Christ's incarnation.  And likewise the benefit of the Christian's imaging in truthfulness and sexual integrity the life of the Trinity extends mysteriously to all by the communion of the saints.

This is some sort of a reply to Janet Smith's article on lying in First Things, which saddened me much as I greatly respect her work in sexual ethics.

Epiphenomenalism and the problem of animal pain

Assume (a) dualism and (b) that the correlation between physical properties and mental properties is metaphysically contingent.

Now, epiphenomenalism about human conscious states is not a very plausible position.  It seems extremely plausible that some of our second-order beliefs about our conscious states, and indirectly many of our reports of these, are caused the conscious states.  But in the case of non-human animals, this argument is not so compelling, because it is not clear that non-human animals have second-order beliefs about their conscious states.  This can be true even if the non-human animals have beliefs about the mental states of other animals.  So, given dualism, epiphenomenalism about non-human conscious states seems to me to be a live option, though it becomes less plausible the higher up the cognitive scale we go.

Say now that "epis" are those animals in principle capable of feeling pain and for which epiphenomalism about pain states is true.  Then all the overt behavior of an epi can be explained without making reference to any pain states of it.  Let's say Bambi is an epi, and let E be the evil, actual or not, of Bambi being in horrible pain in forest fire F at t1.  

Now, suppose that E would be gratuitous, in the sense that God would not have sufficient moral reason to permit E.  Since God would not have sufficient moral reason to permit E, he'd have to prevent it somehow.  How?  There are two options:

A. Prevent Bambi from being burned or from having the neural correlates of pain.

B. Prevent Bambi from feeling pain while being burned.

Which would we expect God to do?

Well, let's consider A first.  How could God do that?  Well, there are many possibilities.  God could set up very different laws of nature.  It's not clear whether that would be a benefit to Bambi, since with very different laws of nature, surely Bambi's species wouldn't have evolved, barring some weird miracles.  Or God could prevent the forest fire, whether by inspiring the campers not to leave a smoldering fire or by causing a rainfall or in one of many ways.  Or God could prevent Bambi from being in the forest fire, for instance by ensuring that Bambi finds nice leaves to eat on the other side of a river.  Or God could prevent fire from burning Bambi, with Bambi being in the midst of the fire and unharmed (a type of miracle reported in the case of a bush and in the case of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the Old Testament).  Or God could prevent the nerve impulses from reaching Bambi's brain.  Or God could just painlessly kill Bambi.  There are many ways of God's doing A.

But there is another thing God could do, and that's B.  He could apply a dualist anelgesic, leaving the neural functioning of Bambi intact, but just ensuring that the correlated pain simply does not occur.  In case B, Bambi behaves exactly as if in horrible pain, but isn't.  

Which would we expect God to do?  There is a kind of elegant minimalism about B: it precisely targets the problematic aspect of the situation, while leaving intact the rest of the causal nexus, without any kind of fixing up of the causal nexus.  I think we have the intuition that Providence would proceed by some economy of miracles principle that makes B elegant.

On the other hand, there is a consideration against B if there are human observers, in that the human observers will have the justified false belief that Bambi is pain.  But that some action will give rise to a justified false belief in someone is a pretty weak (though real, I think) reason against the action.  

I am not saying we should positively expect God to do B.  But it wouldn't be very surprising if B turned out to be the best option at least on occasion.

This means that if one wants to argue that a particular instance of Bambi's apparently suffering horrible pain in a forest fire is a gratuitous evil, one needs to both argue that (a) the horrible pain would be a gratuitous evil, and (b) that if God existed, he would respond in manner A rather than in manner B.  And the theist need only defend the disjunction: either there is a theodicy for the pain or God has prevented the pain.

But what if epiphenomenalism is false?  Well, the elegant minimalism of B together with the fact that it is empirically just as we observe didn't require epiphenomenalism.  It required the disjunction of epiphenomenalism with causal overdetermination.  If pain behavior is causally overdetermined by pains and neural states, that's enough, because if God takes away precisely the pain, the pain behavior will remain.  

However, I think we can modify the point to work, albeit less well, even without this disjunction.  Let's grant that we're dealing with a species where pains really make a difference to overt behavior.  Nonetheless, we do not know exactly how much of a difference it makes.  It may only make a difference by contributing to second order beliefs about one's own pain states.  But I would expect it is rare for a non-human animal's behavior to be observably affected by such second order beliefs, especially in the case of severe pain (which is surely the most problematic case).  An animal in severe pain is surely not primarily moved by second order beliefs.  

And it might be that even given physicalism (about non-divine minds) something like the above might work.  For God would know the true physicalist theory, and would know exactly what would need to happen for a neural state to be a pain.  Then the analogue to option B would be God's making the minimal modification to Bambi's neural state so as to ensure that that neural state is not a pain.  And it is quite epistemically possible that the resulting neural state would be very hard for us, and perhaps impossible for us, to distinguish from a pain.

So, what's the upshot?  It's just that I think in the problem of animal pain we really need to ask ourselves: How would we expect God to prevent gratuitous pains?  And then the argument from animal pain needs to take these answers into account.  

Objection: If the argument is right, then:

(*) If I poke a non-human animal with a sharp stick, either (a) the animal doesn't feel pain, or (b) the pain is non-gratuitous.

So what's wrong with poking an animal with a sharp stick?

Response: Yes, the argument commits me to (*) (on an appropriate understanding of "non-gratuitous"). But that's not special to my argument. Every theist is committed to (*), and in fact one can drop "non-human" from (*), since, necessarily, if theism is true, there are no gratuitous pains (on an appropriate understanding of "non-gratuitous").

But "E is non-gratuitous" in this context has to mean: "God is justified in permitting E." And it does not follow from the fact that God is justified in permitting E that I am justified in causing E. The reasons that justify God in permitting E need not apply to justify my causing E, and there are multiple explanations of why they need not apply. Here are three examples: First, God's role as creator may give him rights I don't have. I think that's true and important, but I want to put no stress on it here. Second, God's justification for permitting E could be that it gives me scope for an effective exercise of free will, but that fails to justify my causing E, since I could just as well exercise free will be refraining from causing E. Third, we can sometimes permit what we must not cause.

JFK's assassination

Here's a theory about JFK assassination:

1. a speedily moving bullet came into existence out of nothing for no cause at all an inch from JFK's body.

This theory is crazy. It is crazy given what we know about Oswald, but it would also have been crazy if no assassin had ever been found.

Yet this theory isn't that different from the atheist's theory of the origins of the cosmos (the sum total of all contingent existence).

And notice that it is, intuitively, easier for a speedily moving bullet to come into existence ex nihilo than for a cosmos with the low entropy and high energy of our cosmos to do so.

Where is my utterance?

I tell you: "I've been thinking about philosophy of language."  Where is my token utterance?  (With apologies to Dennett.)

The obvious answer is that my utterance is in the air between us, constituted of patterns of higher and lower density molecules.  It is a temporally extended entity, perhaps an event.

But where in the air?  The waves can be detected all around me, at many different points.  And suppose I am talking to you through a wall.  The time-varying patterns of air pressure changes produce pressure changes in the wall, which in turn result in more vibrations of the air on the other side of the wall, all the way into your ears.  We can't exclude the wall--we shouldn't say that the utterance straddles the wall.  Plus, I we could talk, with great difficulty and poor audibility (glug, glug, glug), under water, and we wouldn't want to exclude the water, so we shouldn't limit to the air.  And I could attach my eardrum right to the wall with a metal rod and hear the utterance in the wall, though I don't recommend the experiment.  So the utterance is found in the wall, too.

But what if we're talking on cell phones?  The sound waves get converted into movements of a magnet in a coil, thence into electricity, then into radio waves, and then into electricity in wires, light in fiber optics and/or radio waves going to and from satellites, and finally into radio waves, electricity, movements of a magnet, and finally sound waves again.  Perhaps my utterance stops at my phone's microphone.  But you hear my utterance when you listen at your phone.  So my utterance is found on both ends of the communication.  Does it straddle the electromagnetic middleman, or is it there, too, just as it was in the wall?  Should we limit the utterance to vibrations of matter?  This does not seem plausible once we've noticed that utterances are found in walls, but let me try a different tack.

I could talk with you even if you were deaf and knew how to lip read.  In lip reading, you don't perceive the vibrations.  Rather, you perceive the shape of the mouth that helps form the vibrations.  If we do not count an utterance as found in the shape of the mouth, then utterances become inessential for human communication, which would be absurd.  Now, perhaps you could say that when I am speaking with a lip reader, I am using a different modality--I am lipping.  However, I could speak to several people, and unbeknownst to me one of them is a lip reader.  Each of them perceives the same utterance of mine, and I speak in the same modality to them all.  It's just that the lip reader accesses my utterance differently from those who hear it.  Plus, we could speak to each other subvocally.

If my utterance is found in the wall and on the lips and in subvocal communication, it will also be found in the electromagnetic modalities of cell phone conversations.  Now it looks like the utterance includes the whole causal process mediating between the speaker and the listener, broadly understood.

But what if there is no listener?  "My hearing must be poor as I didn't hear what she said."  Yet there is something she uttered.  There are unheard utterances.  But how far do they go?  As I speak on the bottom of a high rocky mountain, the vibrations spread throughout the rock.  By the time they reach the top, no human can hear, but perhaps an alien with very sensitive ears can.  We could try to bite the bullet and deny that there are unheard utterances.  It takes a speaker and a listener to make an utterance (they might be the same if the speaker is speaking to herself).  But that doesn't seem right.  Is it really true that when the alien at the top of the mountain starts listening, that suddenly makes the vibrations in the rock to have been (after all the vibrations happened before the alien listened, since they take non-zero time to propagate) part of the utterance.

So it seems my utterance is throughout the rock, wherever an alien might listen in.  If so, then more generally, we need to say that my utterance is everywhere in the universe where in principle one could decode it.  If I am speaking over a cell phone, the electromagnetic radiation spreads throughout the forward lightcone of the communication, and goes on for lightyears into space, perhaps being in principle decodable for quite a great distance.  Our utterances, then, are really large and go far--we cannot stop what we said.  (This reminds one of James 3:5.)

The proposal, then, is that my utterance token is wherever there is sufficient information allowing decoding.  But what is it to decode what I said?  It seems to be to classify the utterance token under its type.  "Oh, he was saying that we should develop the theory, not that we should devil-up the theory!"  (One of my grad students had this kind of aha! moment; my odd accentuation of "develop" made him think through much of the fall semester that I was metaphorically talking of devilling up theories)  So, an utterance token is wherever it can be decoded into an utterance type.  But of course, by this we mean correctly decoded.  So we need a notion of the correct decoding of an utterance token.

Suppose I misspeak, and say: "Snow is right."  You say: "Did I hear you correctly?  Did you say 'Snow is right.'"  I say: "Yes, but I misspoke.  I meant to say that snow is white."  So, in this case, it seems that the correct decoding is "Snow is right", even though I meant to say that snow is white.  The sound from my misspeaking propagates through rocks and up a mountain whereon an alien is listening.  At that point, the alien hears "Snow is white."  The alien mishears, and if there is no way to correctly decode where the alien is, there is no utterance there.

So when we try to evaluate what the correct decoding of an utterance token is, we don't look in the speaker's mind but we don't look very far away either.  Maybe the idea is this: the correct decoding of an utterance token is the one that we would get in a normal environment.  But that's not right, either.  For a speaker can compensate for an abnormal environment.  If there is some weird background noise which is making rs be heard as ws and ws as rs, the speaker can move her vocal cords in a way that in a normal environment would produce the utterance "Snow is right" but under the circumstances produces the utterance "Snow is white."  And she isn't misspeaking.

Perhaps, then, the story is this.  The correct decoding of an utterance token is that decoding which the intended (expect?) listener would get if she and the communication were functioning in the way in which she is functioning according to the speaker's implicit or explicit model of the listener's functioning and environment.  (What if the speaker intends two people to hear different utterances, for instance because they have different hearing impairments?  Then the speaker makes two different utterances.)

Our story about utterance tokens and decodings is getting complex.  Where the utterance is depends on what its correct decoding is.  What its correct decoding is depends both on the speaker's model of the communication process and on what the speaker in fact produces.

That's the best I can do for utterances, and it's not so bad, I think.  But at this point, or even earlier, the concept of an utterance is apt to seem rather unnatural.  Such a messy mishmash of the intentional and external shouldn't be central to our concept of language.  Instead of talking of utterances, we should simply talk of the causal mediation between the mental states of people: e.g., between the speaker's intending to communicate A to y and the listener's having apparently had A communicated by x (here, A is the message; in some cases we can model it as an ordered pair of a proposition and an illocutionary force).  Sometimes things misfire.  Aliens listen in who weren't intended to.  (Caveat audiens is particularly applicable when the audiens is not intended to be an audiens.)  Sounds get made that aren't intended.  These are defective cases of communication.  Classifying certain kinds of defects, like defects of decoding, may require a notion of utterance.  But concepts that appear in the analysis of defects should not be expected to be particularly natural.  We should, rather, start our analysis with the correctly functioning case, the case of proper communication.  The philosophically crucial thing is we have mental states of intending to communicate and being apparently communicated to, typically in different people, and what we call "language" is the story about the connection between these mental states.