This seems a bit plausible:
It is unjust to punish someone for a feature that is not intrinsic to them.
If presentism is true, then having done A is not an intrinsic feature of the agent.
Thus, if presentism is true, then punishment for past actions is always unjust.
The presentist may well question (2), insisting that presently having a past-tensed feature that was intrinsic when it was presently had counts as intrinsic. I am a bit unsure of this. It’s a question someone should investigate.
Here is a reason to think that presently having a past-tensed feature should not count as intrinsic. Suppose I am facing a free choice, with the possibilities of doing B and not doing B. Then it seems that no present intrinsic feature of me entails what I will do. But suppose that in fact I will do B. Then just as I have past-tensed properties like having done A, I presently have future-tensed properties like being about to do B. And it seems that if one is intrinsic, so is the other. Thus, if my being about to do B is not a present intrinsic feature of me, my having done A is not a present intrinsic feature of me.
The presentist might respond by embracing an open future and denying that it can be true in the case of a free choice that I will do B. But if this is right, then it seems that in order to defend the justice of punishment for past deeds, the presentist has to do something very controversial—accept an open future. Moreover, this means that a classical Jew, Christian and Muslim can’t be a presentist, since classical monotheists are committed to comprehensive foreknowledge, and hence to the denial of an open future, and the justice of retrospective punishment.
Of course, one might question (1). Here’s how one might start. We can punish Alice for punching Bob. But that’s not an intrinsic feature of Alice. We might respond by saying that Alice is punished for her internal act of will, but that doesn’t seem quite right. Probably a better move is to replace (1) by saying that there must be an intrinsic component to the feature one punishes someone for—say, Alice’s act of will. And the presentist now has trouble with this intrinsic component.
1 comment:
1) To defend presentism: Why assume that past-tensed properties and future-tense properties are symmetrical? Surely past tensed properties are related to future ones as well as created things differently, and besides this past-tensed properties are about past actions of actual creatures.
Retrospective punishment is wrong precisely because past-tensed facts have a special relation to the actions of free agents than future-tensed ones, because the past is the realisation and completion of a bad action and/or intention.
2) What are your thoughts on future tensed properties as grounds for God's foreknowledge of the future under presentism?
I've been tinkering for a while with foreknowledge models, and it seems to me a presentist can appeal to future tensed facts grounded by free creatures for this
3) Speaking of which, if contingent facts about what free creatures are going to do are grounded by the very same creatures and their actions, this means that the very actions of free creatures are the truthmakers of contingent facts about them
But if this is so, then if God's foreknowledge is based on Him knowing these facts, then it seems God's knowledge would be partially constituted by facts whose truthmakers are creatured agents and their acts. And some could complain this is in tension with immutability or simplicity
Of course one could say that God's knowledge of such facts is externally constituted. But I wonder if we could perhaps have an intrinsic-knowledge model that avoids the immutability concern. Maybe there could be a way for God to know contingent facts but NOT because free agential choices are the truthmakers of these. Maybe there could be a layer or level of knowledge that transcends those yet includes those in such a way that it could be intrinsic to God yet not such that one could worry that creatures modify God's knowledge indirectly.
What do you think?
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