Aristotle's optimism and pessimism

Aristotle seems to accept these three claims:

1. For the most part, things behave in a natural way.

2. Most people are bad.

3. To behave well is to behave in accordance with your nature.

I always thought there was a contradiction between (1) and (2) given (3). But actually whether there is a contradiction depends on the reference class of the “For the most part” operator in (1). Suppose the reference class is all behaviors of all things. Then it is quite likely that most of these behaviors are natural, bad human behaviors being far outnumbered by the natural behaviors of insects and elementary particles.

Back when I thought there was a contradiction, I assumed the reference class was the behaviors of a particular kind of thing, a sheep or a human, say. That may be correct exegetically, but even so it does not yield a contradiction. For morally significant activity is only a small fraction of the activity of a human being. Leibniz thought that about three quarters of the time we behaved as mere animals. That’s likely an underestimate. So even if all our morally significant activity is bad, it may be far outnumbered by non-moral activity, and hence it may well be that most activity of humans is good. But when we say that a human is good or bad, we only refer to their moral activity.

The only hope for a contradiction is to take the reference class of (1) to be all the activities of every subsystem type. Even so, I do not know that there is a contradiction. For to say that a person is bad is not to say that the majority of their morally significant actions are bad. Suppose that Monday in the morning Bob kicked a neighbor’s puppy. At noon, she sent a harsh and false email to a struggling student saying that he had never seen worse work than theirs. At three, he googled for articles in obscure Romanian journals that I could translate and plagiarize. And in the evening he cheated while playing chess with his daughter in order that she might never win. It would be fair to say that Bob am very bad person indeed, but that’s only on the strength of four morally significant actions. There were many other morally significant actions Bob engaged in. Each time he was asked a question, he had the possibility of lying. When driving, he had the possibility of murder. He did many things that were morally neutral and no doubt a number of things that were good. But the four bad things he did were enough to show that he was a bad person.

Our standards for moral okayness are much higher than the standards for a hard calculus exam where you just need to get more than half the questions right.

See also the quote from George MacDonald here.

Beauty and goodness

While listening to a really interesting talk on beauty in Aquinas,I was struck by the plausibility of the following idea (perhaps not Aquinas'): The good is what one properly desires to be instantiated; the beautiful is what one properly desires to behold. So the distinction between them is in how we answer Diotima's question about desire (or eros): what do we want to do with the object of desire?

Limiting God to solve the problem of evil

Long ago, I remember reading with great curiosity Rabbi Kushner's Why Bad Things Happen to Good People? How disappointing that Kushner's intellectual answer seemed to be that God isn't omnipotent. (His practical answer not to worry about the question but just to do good is much better.) The idea of limiting divine attributes in part to answer the problem of evil has recently had some defense (e.g., here and in the work of open theists), so I guess it's time to blog the objection to Kushner—which applies to the others as well—that I had when I read him, with some elaboration.

Basically, the objection is that as long as God remains pretty good, pretty smart (he was smart enough to create us!) and powerful enough to communicate with us (Kushner at least accepts this), then serious cases of the Problem of Evil remain. Moreover, these cases do not seem significantly easier to solve than the cases of the Problem of Evil that were removed. Consequently, the intellectual benefit with regard to the Problem of Evil is small. And the intellectual loss with regard to the simplicity of the theory is great—the theory that God has all perfections is far simpler.

Start by considering a deity whose goodness is unlimited but whose knowledge and power are fairly limited.

Consider, first, the problem of polio. This is certainly a horrendous evil. And the limited deity could have alleviated a significant portion of the problem hundreds of years earlier simply by whispering into some people's ears how to make a vaccine—surely any deity smart enough to create this world would be smart enough to figure out how to make vaccines. Maybe the limited deity couldn't have prevented all cases, in the way that an unlimited God could. But given that neither did the wholesale prevention happen nor did the partial prevention by vaccines happen as early as it could have.

Consider, second, the many cases where innocent people suffered horrendously at the hands of attackers, where the attack could have been prevented if the people had been warned. Even a deity of limited power and knowledge should be able to see, for instance, that the Gestapo are talking about heading for such-and-such a house, and could then warn the occupants. (I am not saying that such warnings were never given—for all I know, they were in a number of cases. But I am saying that there are many cases where apparently they were not.)

Moreover, even if one limits the goodness of the deity, and only claims that he is pretty good, the problem remains. For unless the deity had a very serious reason not to tell people about vaccines and not to warn the innocent victims of horrendous attacks, it seems plausible that the deity did something quite bad in refraining from helping, so bad as to be incompatible with being pretty good. (If the deity had a reason that fell a little short of justifying the refraining, then that might be compatible with being pretty good; but a reason would have to be pretty serious for it to fall only a little short of justifying the refraining when the evils are so horrendous.) So even if one thinks that the deity has limited power and knowledge and is only pretty good, the problem of finding very serious reasons for the deity's non-interference remains.

Granted, the problem is diminished, especially if one has decreased the belief in divine goodness. But notice that the decrease in belief in divine goodness is the most religiously troubling aspect of a limited God doctrine. And even that does not make the problem go away.

Moreover, the sorts of things one can then plausibly say about the remaining problems of evil are things that, I suspect, the traditional theist can say as well about this and many other cases. Perhaps God does not prevent all attacks on innocent people (for all we know, he prevents many) because he wants humans to have effective freedom of will. Perhaps he wants to give victims opportunities for forgiveness of their aggressors in an afterlife. Perhaps God does not prevent disease because he wants us to help our neighbor and to develop medical science to this purpose. Or to give us an opportunity to join him on the cross in redeeming humankind. Or perhaps God prevents many evils, but his purposes do not allow him to prevent all, and some arbitrary line-drawing is needed. I am not saying that these answers are sufficient (though I think some contain a kernel of something right), but only that they can be equally used in the case of a limited and unlimited God, and in the case of an unlimited God such answers may well have rather general applicability.