Infinite chances and a Molinist defense of damnation

Let’s start with a line of thought that doesn’t require Molinism. Let Infinite Chances be the thesis that God never definitively damns someone: even if on some day you have chosen against God, you will still have choices on future days that can get you back to the path of virtue and hence to God.

One might think that Infinite Chances would all but guarantee that everyone is saved in the end. There is no such guarantee, however. Consider this Toy Model. On each future day n, I have level V_n of virtue, negative if I am on balance vicious and positive if I am on balance virtuous. On each day, I make a free choice. The choice will either be good or bad, and will respectively increase or decrease your virtue by one unit. The more virtuous I am, the more likely the choice will be for good, and the more vicious I am, the more likely that it will be for bad, but no matter how vicious I am, there is a non-zero probability that I will choose for good. I also assume that if I am on-balance vicious, the probability that I will choose for good is less than 1/2. Suppose for simplicity that there is some level S > 0 of virtue at which I become definitively saved.

This story is consistent with Infinite Chances. For no matter how vicious I am, there is also a non-zero probability that I will choose the good, thereby decreasing my level of vice by one unit, and the next day choose the good again, and so on, until I reach level S. So I will always have a chance to dig myself out of my vice. But at the same time, it is a mathematical fact that under the above circumstances if I am in fact vicious on day n (i.e., V_n < 0), then there is a non-zero probability that even over an infinite future I will never be better than I am on day n. My next day’s choice might be bad, and then I might bounce up and down, but never dig myself out. Remember that once my level of vice is  − m units, it would take m steps to get back to neutral.

Next, note that the Toy Model seems consistent with God’s goodness. It allows our actions to have genuine effects on our character, and it allows us genuine freedom to mold that character. Yet on this toy model there is a non-zero probability of my being damned. Thus we get a first conclusion:

1. It is consistent with God’s goodness that not everyone is saved.

This isn’t a defense of hell or damnation as it stands, though it is a defense of non-univeralism. I take it (perhaps pace C. S. Lewis) that it is a part of the doctrine of damnation that once one is damned, one doesn’t have a chance to get out of hell. In other words, the doctrine of hell implies a denial of Infinite Chances, why my toy model implies Infinite Chances.

However, given Molinism (I wish Molinism were true, but alas I think it’s not) one can turn this into a defense of damnation. Let’s imagine that God has created a bunch of people in a situation where the Toy Model is true, while with his middle knowledge God knew that given the infinite chances that the Toy Model posits, all but one—let’s call him “Judas”—would eventually be saved. This is compatible with God’s goodness by something like the line of thought that led to (1).

But now imagine that God decided to create this bunch of people, while knowing with his middle knowledge that given the infinite chances of the Toy Model they would be saved except for Judas, but hadn’t yet decided whether to give the people the infinite chances of the Toy Model. Among the things that God middle-knew is that, if he made the Toy Model true, there would a day n on which Judas will have a level of vice which he would never do better than—the next day he would choose badly, and while he might bounce back up a little, he would never be better than V_n. And so God decided that he would freeze Judas morally at the level V_n achieved on day n, taking away Judas’ freedom of choice on subsequent days. As a result, Judas was irredeemably damned on day n, as the doctrine of hell holds.

Would this be compatible with God’s goodness? Yes! Here is why. We have granted that giving Judas the infinite chances of the Toy Model would be compatible with God’s goodness, even if Judas is never saved. But freezing Judas’ moral level seems a better thing to do. For God knows that if Judas’ moral level is frozen at V_n, then Judas won’t get worse, while if Judas had the infinite choices, then he would still never be better than level V_n, and he would be worse than that on at least day n + 1 (since we have supposed that after day n, Judas is never better than V_n, so V_n + 1 is not greater than V_n, and hence it must be less, as it was assumed that all choices either improve or make worse). Since one’s level of virtue or vice is a primary constituent of human wellbeing, this freezing seems a good thing.

I wonder if there is any way to rescue this argument in the absence of Molinism? Maybe. For there may come a time when the probability of Judas ever digging himself out of his vice has gotten so small, while the probability of his digging himself deeper is pretty high, and so it even absent Molinism it might be a mercy not to give Judas more chances.

Libertarian universalism and open futurism

Consider an interesting pair of thesis. First, consider libertarian universalism, which holds that everyone eventually freely—and with the ability to do otherwise—definitively chooses for God. On the grounds of Christian revelation, I think libertarian universalism is false, but I also think it’s clearly logically possible, so it’s only contingently false.

Second, consider open future views of time on which there either are no facts about future contingents or the facts are all-false. Both open future views are logically compatible with the truth of libertarian universalism, but only in a funny sort of way. For it could be that “everyone” (in the sense of the libertarian universalist doctrine, which includes both past, present and future people) has already freely definitively chosen for God. This would require that the end of the world is predestined to come soon, because otherwise the “everyone” includes—or at least possibly includes!—people who have yet to be conceived, and they clearly have yet to definitively choose for God. Moreover, it would require that all the people now alive have already definitively chosen for God, which seems highly implausible.

Let’s suppose that, as seems plausible, that we all agree that some people have yet to already definitively choose for God. Then open futurists cannot affirm libertarian universalism. Can they deny it? Yes, in at least two ways. They might say that God predestined some to non-freely choose for God. Or they might hold that some who have died have already definitively rejected God and that God has predestined them to have no further chances after that rejection.

So open futurists can deny libertarian universalism but cannot affirm it. Can they be open to it? Well, it initially seems hard to say what it means that one is open to a view that one believes is not true. But open futurists can say that although they believe libertarian universalism is not true, it can become true. And that’s a way of being open to it. But a kind of weakish way.

I don’t accept either open future or libertarian universalism, of course.

Hedonic adaptation

Hedonic adaptation is the theory that individual humans have different basic levels of subjective life satisfaction (SLS). When major changes in life circumstances make life change for the better (e.g., marriage) or worse (e.g., divorce or unemployment), life satisfaction goes up and down, but then over five years it creeps back to roughly where it was even if the circumstances do not change back.

Suppose this theory is true. Can we draw any philosophical conclusions from it?

Here is one thought. Suppose the right theory of human well-being is hedonism. It seems plausible to think that SLS measures one’s overall hedonic level averaged over a medium term. If so, then hedonic adaptation makes means we have less reason than we might have thought to seek out gains and to avoid losses in objective life circumstances for ourselves and others. Not that we have none. Short-term pains and pleasures are still real, and major changes in life circumstances do have a genuine effect on the life-time total hedonic level even if after five years much of the change in SLS disappears—and in the case of negative changes, even if much of the change disappears, it probably doesn’t disappear entirely.

Still, it seems plausible that if hedonism is the right theory of human well-being, then the discovery of hedonic adaptation (assuming it is real) should make us, both individually and societally, more passive than is plausible. One’s hedonic level, according to hedonic adaptation, is just not very responsive in the long-term to costly interventions. E.g., is it really worth a society’s putting a lot of effort into preventing unemployment if the unemployed would anyway return to a basic hedonic level, and hedonic level is what matters?

This suggests that hedonic adaptation provides an argument against hedonic theories of well-being, by yielding an implausible consequence of those theories. Now while this argument initially seemed to depend on hedonic adaptation being empirically true, perhaps it does not even require that. All we need, perhaps, is that hedonic adaptation is possibly true, and then we can argue:

1. If well-being is hedonic in nature, then if hedonic adaptation is true, we would have much less reason than we thought for major societal improvements.

But I think we may also find ourselves with the intuition:

2. Even if hedonic adaptation is true, we would not have much less reason than we thought for major societal improvements.

And it arguably follows from 1 and 2, together with

3. It is possible that hedonic adaptation is true

that:

4. Well-being is not hedonic in nature.

(The move from 1–3 to 4 uses modus tollens and two principles in subjunctive conditional logic, namely (a) if p → q and p → r then p → (q&r), and (b) if p is possible and p → q, then q is possible. I think (a) is true, but I am dubious of (b) in general, even though it is true on Lewis’s theory of counterfactuals. However, even if (b) is not true in general, I think it is true in typical cases, and seems likely to be true in the context of my argument agaisnt hedonism.)

In other words, thinking about hedonic adaptation might well shift us to thinking that a major portion of our well-being is more objective than hedonism would make it be. The reason for fighting unemployment isn’t primarily its deleterious effects on subjective life satisfaction, but its (typical) deleterious effects on objective human flourishing.

But there is also another even more speculative consequence of hedonic adaptation. Even if we reject hedonic level or SLS as the measure of human flourishing, it is clear that that we all want SLS, and indeed want long-term SLS. Hedonic adaptation tells us that improving our life-circumstances won’t get us long-term SLS: after half a decade, we’ll go back to where we were. Plausibly, our desire for long-term SLS is a normal and central human desire. Plausibly, normal and central human desires are fulfillable. Yet this desire for long-term SLS is not fulfillable in this life. Hence there is life after death.

In other words, the phenomenon of hedonic adaptation would empirically bolster the argument from desire considered as an argument for an afterlife.

Some Fitch-style arguments

Let strong physicalist supervenience (SPS) be the view that necessarily all truths supervene on first-order truth about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff.

Here is a plausible thesis:

1. Every first-order truth about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff is possibly known.

Add this premise:

2. If a conjunction is known, so are its conjuncts.

It follows from SPS, 1 and 2 that:

3. Every actual first-order truth about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff is actually known.

For suppose that p is any actual first-order truth about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff. Let q be the conjunction of all other actual first-order truths about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff. Let r be the conjunction of p and q. Then r is a first-order truth about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff. By 1, there is a possible world w where r is known. Since r contains all actual first-order truths about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff, w and the actual world have the same first-order truths about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff. By SPS, it follows that w and the actual world have the same truths. Thus, since it’s true at w that r is known, it’s actually true that r is known. And since r is actually known, so is p by 2. Hence, we have 3.

In exactly the same way, given:

4. Every first-order truth about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff is possibly explained

5. If a conjunction is explained, so are its conjuncts

and SPS, we get:

6. Every actual first-order truth about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff actually has an explanation.

But given physicalism, it is clear that 3 and 6 are false. Regarding 3, it is clear that if physicalism is true, nobody knowns how many hairs I have on my head. Regarding 6, given physicalism, there is no explanation of the sum total of physical reality. Thus:

7. Given either 1 and 2, or 4 and 5, at least one of physicalism and SPS is false.

It is tempting to turn this into an argument against physicalism by holding that:

8. If SPS is true, physicalism is true.

But actually I can imagine someone denying 8. Imagine a classical theist who thinks that everything other than God has to be physical. Such a classical theist will actually believe SPS. For on classical theism, facts about God supervene on facts about everything other than God, since classical theism includes divine simplicity according to which there are no contingent facts intrinsically about God, so any two worlds that differ in their facts about God will have to differ in something other than God. And according to our classical theist, everything other than God has to be physical. So any two worlds that differ must differ in facts about the arrangement of physical stuff, which is what SPS says. However, the classical theist is not a physicalist, because God is not physical on classical theism.

Still, I think an argument against the conjunction of physicalism and SPS is still interesting.

My first (and last?) computer science paper

Some years back I was searching for a better method to play lightgun games like Duck Hunt under emulation by using a Wii remote as a light gun.

The standard Wii remote way of pointing at a TV with a sensor bar underneath is not precise enough. The Wii remote has an infrared camera that tracks the LEDs in the sensor bar, and uses that to estimate where the remote is pointing. But since all the LEDs in the sensor bars lie in a single line, there is no way to determine from the camera image exactly how the Wii remote points. (It’s easy to visualize how rotating the Wii remote about the axis defined by the sensor bar won’t change the camera image in it.) The Wii just guesses, but that’s not good enough for lightgun games.

I already had a way that involved putting four infrared LEDs around my TV, but I was wondering if one could do this with a standard sensor bar by leveraging the additional information from the accelerometer in the Wii remote. A web search came up with a paper by d’Alfonso et al. on determining camera pose using two landmarks and accelerometer. The paper claimed a theorem that, except in certain singular cases, one could determine the pose up to a two-option ambiguity—i.e., there will be two camera orientation/position setups that would result in the same landmark images and accelerometer data.

After thinking about the paper, I realized that the claimed theorem was incorrect: there were singular cases the authors didn’t know about, but more interestingly I discovered cases where one could determine camera pose from two landmark images and accelerometer data without any ambiguity. Moreover, one of these cases was precisely the one relevant to me: the two landmarks are on the same horizontal line (the Wii sensor bar supplies precisely that) and the camera is above or below the plane of that line (easy to arrange). Sadly, experiments showed that Wii remote accelerometer precision was insufficient to determine camera pose in this way.

Anyway, I don’t like the idea of there being a published “theorem” that is incorrect. At some point I worked out all the details with trigonometry, and found a precise characterization of the exact conditions under which in theory (i.e., given a sufficiently precise accelerometer, unlike the one in the Wii remote) one could determine camera pose from two landmark images and gravity data with no ambiguity, with an ambiguity of two, or with an ambiguity of infinity (in some singular cases).

I just got a paper with all the details published.

Sadly, as noted, the Wii remote application didn’t pan out. However, I did write some proof of concept code for my Pixel 7 Pro, and found that it worked pretty decently with its accelerometer. Here’s a screenshot where the accelerometer data plus the screen positions of the (centers of) the bottom two Aruco markers, together with data about the camera and the dimensions of my display board, is used to calculate the screen positions of the upper two Aruco markers (the calculated positions are marked in red).

I kind of suspect that the accelerometer in the right-hand Nintendo Switch joycon might be sufficiently precise for use as a lightgun with two infrared LEDs for positioning, but I haven’t had time to implement this. (Part of the problem is that the infrared LEDs that I have at home are the wrong wavelength for the joycon.)

While this may be my last computer science paper, if some computer science grad student or the like is interested in working with me, we could do some empirical work on seeing how applicable the algorithm is.

From one divine person to two or more

1. Personhood is teleologically relational in the sense that a person is the kind of being that necessarily can only be fulfilled in relationships with other persons.

2. Necessarily, any person other than God is a creature.

3. So, if God is a single person, this person necessarily can only be fulfilled in relationships with creatures.

4. If a being only finds its fulfillment in relationships with Fs, then the being’s fulfillment depends on Fs.

5. So, if God is a single person, God’s fulfillment depends on creatures.

6. God’s fulfillment does not depend on creatures.

7. Thus, God is not a single person.

8. thus, if God is a person, God is two or more persons.

(I think most non-Christian monotheists these days will say that God is a single person. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be a better view for them to deny that God is a person at all, and to insist that the centrality of personhood to the understanding of God is a mistaken Christian approach.)

Here is another variant on the argument:

9. Necessarily, a person can only flourish in relationship to another equal person.

10. It is possible that God flourishes.

11. If God is a single person, then it is impossible for there to be another person equal to God.

12. So, God is a single person, it is impossible that God flourishes. (9 and 11)

13. So, God is not a single person. (10 and 12)

14. So, if God is a person, God is two or more persons.

Now, granted, it is a standard view in Christianity that one cannot prove the doctrine of the Trinity by reason. If the arguments above are sound, have I contradicted that view? No, for several reasons. First, the arguments don’t establish that God is three persons. Second, the arguments only establish that if God is a person at all, then God is two or more persons—but a further argument is needed that God is a person at all. (Perhaps perfect being theology can yield that.)

Value supervenes on being

Consider this thesis, which both Augustine and Aquinas would accept:

1. Value supervenes on being (VSB): How valuable reality is is determined by what entities exist.

However:

2. It is good to have a true belief and bad to have a false belief.

We now have an argument against presentism (only present things exist) and growing block (only present and past things exist). Among our beliefs, we have beliefs about contingent future events. Some of these beliefs are contingently true and others are contingently false. (I am assuming a bivalent temporal logic.) The value of these beliefs is determined by what entities exist. But present and past entities are insufficient to determine whether the beliefs are true, and hence what the value of the beliefs is. Thus, contrary to presentism and growing block, there must be future things.

Broadening harms considered in research ethics

In typical lab research ethics, the following types of ethical considerations count against an experiment:

1. risks of harm to the world outside the lab

2. risks of harm to persons in the lab

3. risks of pain to conscious entities in the lab.

(The categories overlap: the persons in the lab are conscious entities, and pain harms them. Likewise, the persons in the lab have lives outside the lab, and harm to them in the lab can imply harm to what is outside the lab.)

Now, note that the harms to the world outside the lab can include things that neither harm persons nor cause pain to conscious entities, such as damage to a non-conscious ecosystem. Thus, an experiment that risks the escape of microbes that could cause the world-wide extinction of a plant species would be ethically problematic, even if there were only negligible risks of harm to persons or pain to conscious critters. Further, note that non-pain harms to persons in or out of the lab certainly do count against an experiment—that is why consent is so important.

But I think the above categories of harms are too narrow, as they leave out:

4. risks of non-painful harms to conscious non-persons in the lab

5. risks of harms to non-conscious non-persons in the lab.

As the extinction point shows, we do worry about such risks when they concern what is outside the lab. We should, I think, likewise worry about them when they are in the lab.

The premature death of a plant or insect is a bad thing, even if plants or insects are not conscious (I have no idea whether insects are): a good thing has been erased from the world before its time. Likewise, disabling an insect in an experiment is a bad thing, even if it does not cause pain to the insect. Indeed, depriving an organism, of whatever sort, of the kind of environment where it thrives is a a bad thing.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t experiment on plants. But the fact that a living thing is harmed, regardless of whether it is a person or it feels pain, is an ethical consideration against the experiment. This ethical consideration may be outweighed by the epistemic or pragmatic value of the information gained from the experiment. But for the experiment to be worthwhile, it needs to be so outweighed. It’s not automatic that a non-pain harm to a non-person is outweighed by information gains. Some information might be too trivial.

Aristotelian abstraction

On the Aristotelian account of abstraction, we abstract the forms of things via perception. But here is a problem. First of all, we sometimes have better knowledge of things not perceived than of things perceived. Let’s say you read a detailed scientific book about pangolins, though you’ve never encountered one, while I once saw a koala in a zoo, but don’t much know anything more about them than that they are cute marsupials. It seems quite problematic to say I have the form of the koala in my mind, but you do not have the form of the pangolin. For that would make the mental possession of the form of the thing an unimportant flourish to what really epistemically matters, since clearly you are better off epistemically for reading the book about pangolins than I am for seeing the koala.

Of course, presumably, the author of the pangolin book presumably saw the pangolin. But that doesn’t seem to matter much, either. There are many dinosaur species where the paleontologist knows more about the species than I know about koalas, and yet no human ever perceptually interacted with a dinosaur, but typically only with minerals that have displaced their carcasses.

What should someone committed to the Aristotelian story about abstraction say? Two options come to mind, a modest and an expansive one.

Modest option: It really doesn’t really matter much epistemically whether one has the form of a pangolin or a koala in one’s mind. What matters is the propositional knowledge. However, it is essential to our possession of the propositional knowledge that our thoughts have intentionality, that they refer to the world. And it is crucial to securing intentionality that we have Aristotelian abstraction at the interface between the world and the mind. The triceratops expert’s intentionality with respect to triceratopses is derivative from the causal chain from triceratopses to their corpses to their fossils to the light reflecting from the fossils into the expert’s eyes to (eventually somehow) the expert’s thoughts. Where the causal chain crosses from the world to the mind, we need a transmission of form to ensure intentionality for the whole chain. Maybe the transmission happens when the minerals that have replaced the bones transmit their mineral forms to the expert’s mind, in some mysterious way mediated by the light.

Expansive option: Everything in the world carries the forms of everything nondivine that is causally upstream from itself. The triceratops corpse somehow has the form of the triceratops in it, and so do the bones of the triceratops, and so do the minerals that replace the bones, and so does the light modulated by reflection from the minerals, and so do the electrical impulses in the nerves from the retinal receptors to the brain. It is easier to extract the form when it comes from seeing a live koala than when it comes from seeing fossils, so that a layman can do the former while the scientist is needed to do the latter. Similarly, when you read a book about pangolins, the ink on the page, being causally modulated by the author’s knowledge, carries the form of the pangolin (in addition to any forms naturally contained in the ink, say those of the particles constituting the ink).

Medievals already said something like this about the modulated light, so it’s just a matter of extending the story. And while the problem I am concerned about is one that does not require any science or technology beyond what the medievals had—the medievals knew about the gaining of expertise from books (if anything, they might have overestimated it!)—in a modern setting we it feels like an Aristotelian has to do this. After all, it is hard to deny that one can gain the same kind of knowledge of koalas by looking at them through high-end augmented reality goggles as from directly seeing them with our eyes. Thus, on a form-transmission story, the electrical potentials of the capacitors in the computer memory in the goggles have to somehow carry the form of the koala. But given the many ways that computer memory can be realized (think of magnetized rings versus capacitors versus markings on a CD), it seems plausible that any effect will have to have to be admitted to carry the form of its cause. It is tempting to say the form is only found in substances where there is sufficient data to reconstruct significant information about the causally-upstream object the form is of, but I think is not tenable. Presumably each bacterium is a substance, and we could have a type of biological memory in augmented reality glasses where each bit of information is stored in a different bacterium.

This story coheres very nicely with the essentiality of origins. It is a kind of a reversal of the principle of proportionality of causation on which the reality of the effect is actually or eminently found in the cause: the formal reality of a cause is found in the effect. I think it’s a defensible story. But I also find it hard to believe.

From chickens and eggs to a cosmological argument

Suppose we have an infinite regress of chickens and eggs, with no first item, and suppose that if there is any last item, it’s not a chicken.

Plausibly, then:

1. The plurality of the chickens explains the eggs.

But also plausibly:

2. If x has an explanation, then x has a fundamental explanation.

However:

3. No plurality of chickens and eggs fundamentally explains the eggs.

4. So, something that is other than a plurality of chickens and eggs fundamentally explains the eggs.

Why is (3) true? Well, there are two kinds of chicken and egg pluralities.

1. Pluralities with an earliest item.
2. Pluralities with no earliest item.

A Type I plurality does not explain the chickens and eggs, because it does not explain any chickens and eggs earlier than the earliest item in the plurality.

A Type II plurality at best non-fundamentally explains the eggs. For given a Type II plurality, choose any item x in the plurality. Item x is a chicken or egg, and there is an earlier chicken or egg y in the plurality. Since y explains x, by a plausible case of transitivity, the subplurality where we drop x also explains the eggs. So the initial Type II plurality did not fundamentally explain the eggs.

Since every plurality of chickens and eggs is of Type I or Type II, we have (3).

The argument above applies beyond chickens and eggs. Suppose:

5. Every physical item in the world is caused.

Then:

6. Either there is a physical item with a non-physical cause or every physical item has a physical cause.

Add:

7. There are no loops of physical causes.

8. Physical causation is transitive.

As I show in my 1999 paper using Zorn’s Lemma, if every physical item has a physical cause, it is then possible to partition the physical items into an “even” and an “odd” subset, where every item in the even subset causes an item in the odd subset, and every item in the odd subset causes an item in the even subset. Call the odd items “eggs”. Call the non-final even items “chickens” (a non-final item is one that causes a further physical item). Then, plausibly, the chickens explain the eggs. By the argument above, something non-physical thus explains the eggs. Anything non-physical that explains the eggs explains all of physical reality (because for any physical item, it is either an egg or there is an egg prior to it). So:

9. There is a non-physical item that explains all of physical reality.

I think the thing that needs the most defense is premise (2). It’s somewhat close to causal finitism.

Virtues in heaven

Here are two Aristotelian theses:

1. Complete human flourishing requires the exercise of all the human virtues.

2. Courage is a human virtue.

Add a highly plausible thesis that likely everyone will accept:

3. The exercise of courage requires apparent or real danger.

Now add some theses that a Christian will surely accept:

4. In heaven, there are no apparent danger.

5. In heaven, there is no real danger.

6. In heaven, there is complete human flourishing.

Contradiction!

I find it nearly impossible to deny 3-6. That leaves 1 and 2.

One move available to the Christian Aristotelian is to weaken 1. Perhaps complete human flourishing only requires the exercise of fundamental virtues, and courage is a non-central virtue. But traditionally fortitude also counts as a cardinal virtue, cardinal seems to imply fundamental, but fortitude is a virtue of dealing with evil—whether in the form of real or apparent danger, or of suffering, or of hardship, while there is no evil in heaven. So the problem comes back for fortitude. One solution is to deny the traditional cardinal virtues as being fundamental, and insist that the only fundamental virtue is love. Fortitude is just a central situational way for love to manifest.

Another move is simply to deny 1 altogether, of course, denying the whole link between virtues and flourishing. This is probably too radical.

And of course one might just deny 2. The most plausible move would be to say that only love is a virtue.

The thesis of the uniqueness of our self-consciousness

I am toying with the thesis that each person’s self-consciousness is qualitatively different. Perhaps all persons have uniquely individuating properties, something like haecceities, and for each such individuating property there is a different quale of seeing oneself as an instance of it. One might even think the quale is the unique individuating property. Or, alternately, it might be that each person’s qualia are different: my quale of red is a quale of me-seeing-red, my quale of middle-C is a quale of me-hearing-middle-C and your quale of red is a quale of you-seeing-red while your quale of middle-C is a quale of your-hearing-middle-C. There is, presumably, something that all of my qualia have in common, and all your qualia have in common, and so on.

What consequences might there be of such a view?

First, some people have the intuition that there is something mysterious about self-consciousness, something that goes significantly beyond mere consciousness (pace my thoughts here). The qualitative conscious difference thesis could be a way of capturing that mysterious extra in self-consciousness.

Second, this would be a way to support and explain intuition of the non-fungibility and irrepeatability of persons. There is something irrevocably unique about all our perceptions of the world.

Third, we might get a neat account of second-person knowledge. What happens in second-person knowledge—very mysteriously!—is that we come to see that special qualitative feature of the other, albeit in a different mode, from the outside.

Fourth, the thesis might make one even more cautious about some thorny epistemological matters. There cannot be such a thing as two people with the same qualitative evidence: each person’s evidence must be qualitatively different from that of every other person. The concept of being an epistemic peer becomes dubious: you unavoidably see the world differently from me. The application of Bayesianism to fundamental matters becomes even more fishy. Plausibly, we have essentiality of origins, so that if there is a God, you and I couldn’t have existed in a world without God. On the qualitative uniqueness thesis, this means that there are qualitative features of our mental lives that cannot be exemplified in a world without God. We can then expect that we will have some trickiness when we ask questions like: “How likely is it that the evidence I have would obtain if God didn’t exist?” Similar issues come up for fundamental laws of nature. In particular, we cannot really do Bayesian reasoning on our total evidence, and we should probably see Bayesianism as a mere toy model.

A false trilemma

Kant writes:

only three [forms of sovereignty] are possible: namely, either only one, or some in association, or all those together who constitute the civil society possess sovereign power (autocracy, aristocracy, and democracy …).

The division of the sovereigns into “one”, “some” or “all” members of a society sure sounds like an exhaustive division, at least assuming that there is a sovereign rather than anarchy, which is a fair assumption, since an anarchy probably doesn’t count as a “civil society”.

But not quite! For what if there is a sovereign, but the sovereign is not a member of the civil society? I can think of at least two possibilities like that.

For, a civil society is a mutually interacting body of persons. Thus, first, we could have a personal sovereign with a one-way relationship with the civil society, where the sovereign rules but is in no way affected by what happens in the society. Since causal interaction among embodied beings is always bidirectional, the sovereign would need to be a supernatural being, such as God.

Second, we could have a sovereign that is not a person—a robot overlord. Since only persons can be members of society, such a sovereign would not be a member of society.

One might object that the robot overlord isn’t really a sovereign, since it doesn’t have a will of its own. But it is evident that one could have a fairly functional civil society run by the dictates of a robot overlord, enforced by human or robotic minions, or simply by people’s confidence that the robot overlord’s plan is a good one. If so, and if a robot overlord is not a sovereign, we have a counterexample to the thesis that anarchy is not a civil society.

Making the happiness of others our end

Kant says that a virtuous persons has the happiness of others as an end.

Note that this is not an end in the sense of a goal which we try to achieve. For the goal can’t be that all others are happy. If that were the goal, we might as well not even try: we’re not going to achieve it. Nor can the goal be that some others are happy. For that’s already so, and so nothing need be done. Could the goal be that many others are happy? I suppose that my actions could make a difference between not-many and many being happy. But it seems rather unlikely that they could. And if a careful examination of the world were to show that independently of my actions many others are happy, again such a goal would lead to my not having to do anything.

Maybe the Kantian end of happiness is distributive. For each person distinct from yourself, you aim at this person’s being happy. So you have a large number of goals, one for each person distinct from yourself. But that’s not right, either. For suppose that Alice is miserable, and you know you can’t make her happy. But you can make her happier. Surely that’s a part of what the virtuous person aims at. So is it, perhaps, that in the case of each person distinct from yourself, you aim to make them happier than they currently are? However, imagine that Alice is miserable, but you know that her condition will at least slightly improve over time, no matter what you do. Then you don’t need to do anything to make her happier, and so a goal of making others happier doesn’t make you do anything for Alice—even if you could make Alice much happier.

Perhaps, though, the end of happiness is doubly distributive: it distributes over persons and over what you might call “possible pieces of happiness”. For each person x and each possible piece H of happiness, you aim at x having H. But now the virtuous person’s aims are vast, since there are many, many possible pieces of happiness—maybe even infinitely many. Maybe this is right, but it seems implausible.

All this makes me think that when Kant talks of the happiness of others as our end, he is not talking of an end as a set of specific goals to be achieved. Maybe he is saying that in general a virtuous person has a tendency to perform actions with specific goals of the form: Make Alice happier with respect to her toothache. The “end” of happiness isn’t an end, or a multiplicity of ends even, but a kind of architectonic pattern in our goals.

Self-locating evidence and bearers of epistemic good

In the case of non-epistemic goods, it’s an obvious feature of life that someone there is a choice to be made by an individual between their own first-order good and the first-order good of the community—each requires the sacrifice of the other. In the case of epistemic goods, this is less obvious.

In the pragmatic case, the typical reason for such competition between goods is due to limited resources. This, of course, also happens in the epistemic sphere. Suppose Alice is much more intellectually talented than Bob, but only Bob has the money to go to university. If Bob spends the money on himself, he will gain private epistemic goods, but will contribute little epistemically to society as a whole. But if he gives the money to Alice, she may become a brilliant scholar or scientist, significantly contributing to society’s knowledge.

More interesting than these, however, are cases of competition between private and communal epistemic goods that are not due to epistemic resources. I find it interesting that some cases of self-locating evidence appear to be such.

Suppose there are ten billion people in the world, currently isolated from one another. A device produced by a mad scientist has a 99.9% chance at noon today of triggering a death ray that randomly kills 99.9999% of the world population. Noon has just passed. You are still alive. Should you think the device worked? Sleeping Beauty style arguments say “No”. This time I want to think about this in terms of individual epistemic goods. In N runs of the device, 0.001N runs will have you survive because the device doesn’t trigger and 0.999 ⋅ 0.000001N runs will have you survive despite the device triggering. Thus, the vast majority of the runs where you survive are runs where the device didn’t trigger. Hence, it’s best for you individually to adopt the epistemic policy of thinking the device didn’t trigger.

But on the other hand, suppose we all adopt the epistemic policy of thinking the device didn’t trigger. Then 99.9% of the time, we are unanimously collectively wrong. And if we all adopt the epistemic policy of thinking the device did trigger, then 99.9% of the time, we are unanimously collectively right. It seems thus that if we look at the epistemic goods of society, then a policy of thinking the device did trigger is best.

If this is right, it points to a potential diagnosis of why the problems about self-locating evidence (doomsday, multiverses, Sleeping Beauty, etc.) are so difficult. For there may be different bearers of epistemic goods at play—say, society vs. the individual—and it could be that different answers are appropriate depending on whose goods we are pursuing. Maybe.