The maximally great island

We can formulate Plantinga's modal ontological argument as follows:

1. Possibly, a maximally great being exists.
2. A maximally great being exhibits maximal excellence in all possible worlds.
3. Therefore, there necessarily exists a being that exhibits maximal excellence in all possible worlds. (By 1, 2 and S5.)

Here is a surprising fact. Gaunilo's maximally great island objection doesn't work. For let's try to construct a parallel:

4. Possibly, a maximally great island exists.
5. A maximally great island would have insularity and the maximal excellence compatible with insularity (i.e., being an island) in all possible worlds.
6. Therefore, there necessarily exists a being that exhibits the maximal excellence compatible with insularity in all possible worlds.

But premise (5) is unjustified. For while we have reason to think that a maximally great being would be maximally excellent in each world, we do not have reason to think that a maximally great island would have insularity in each world. Typical islands we know are not essentially insular. Indeed, there are pieces of ground that are islands at high tide but that are not islands at low tide, so insularity is not an essential property for them. In fact, I don't know that any island has insularity essentially. Any island could survive being joined to the mainland by a narrow land-bridge. And even if it were possible to have an island that is essentially insular, it would be unclear that a maximally great island would be essentially insular. Essential maximal excellence is very plausible a great-making property. But it is far from clear that essential insularity is a great-making property.

But without essential insularity, the most we can show in the place of (5) seems to be this:

7. A maximally great island exhibits insularity in some worlds, in which it exhibits the maximal excellence compatible with insularity, and in all other words, if any, it exhibits maximal excellence.

Note that in the worlds where the entity is not island, there is no need to limit its excellence to the excellence compatible with insularity. So what conclusion can we draw from (4) and (7)? Here it is:

8. There necessarily exists an entity which in some worlds exhibits the maximal excellence compatible with insularity and in all other worlds, if any, it exhibits maximal excellence.

In particular, we have not shown that this being is actually an island.

But isn't what (8) shows just as absurd? A being that is an island in some worlds and God-like in others? Actually, I suspect (8) is true. God is maximally excellent in all worlds and in some worlds he is literally an island. What do I mean? Well, as a Christian, I take it that it is possible for God to become incarnate as a human being. But surely not just as a human being. One might think that by the same token God could become incarnate as any sort of being, say an island, so in some worlds he is both God and an island, whereas in the actual world he is God and man. Indeed, wouldn't we expect that the maximally great island would be God, if that were possible? Now one might object that God can only become incarnate as the sort of being that can be a person. But an island can be a person. We can imagine all kinds of persons: persons of carbon and water and the like like us, persons of plasma, etc. Why not a person of earthy stuff? All kinds of complex computational phenomena could be instantiated by geological interactions within an island. Of course, such a person might end up functioning very slowly. But that's fine. And dualists like me will demand a soul for them. But that, too, is fine. Some possible islands have souls, then.

This strategy won't work for every possible parody. In particular, they won't work for parodies involving maximally great beings that exhibit some quality incompossible with divinity, like sinfulness. But it is not clear that it makes sense to talk of a maximally great among sinners, say. Sinfulness is defined by falling short of moral greatness, so a maximally great among sinners is going to be minimally sinful. But for any sin, there is a lesser possible sin, so there is no such thing as minimal sinfulness, probably.

Can morality be a system of hypothetical imperatives?

We have, it seems, a hypothetical imperative to brush our teeth:
(1) Brush your teeth if you want them to be healthy.
Suppose I do want my teeth to be healthy. What normative status does (1) have?

First, I could suppose that (1) has no relevant (the reason for "relevant" is that every fact are normative) normative force at all. It is simply a statement that:
(1a) Brushing teeth conduces to the health of teeth.
On interpretation (1a), a hypothetical imperative isn't an imperative at all--there is no 'ought', just an 'is'. However, it seems we get an imperative once we combine (1a) with the desire to have my teeth by healthy. But it makes no logical sense to "combine a statement with a desire" to get an imperative. That I have a desire is not a relevantly normative fact about me--it's just an 'is'. Rather, on this interpretation, we are implicitly presupposing an imperative like:
(2) Fulfill your desires (ceteris paribus).
(Or maybe more plausibly, we should work in terms of goals rather than desires--exactly the same points apply.) And this imperative is not hypothetical in the relevant sense (it's conditional in respect of the "ceteris paribus", but that's not the relevant sense of "hypothetical")--its force cannot be dependent on what our desires are, at pain of vicious circularity. So, on this interpretation, hypothetical imperatives are not really imperatives, but we get imperatives when we combine them with some imperative like (2).

The second option is that (1) is genuinely relevantly normative: it expresses a genuine imperative. The imperative is conditional, but in that respect it does not differ from:
(3) If you have promised to whistle Yankee Doodle, you should whistle Yankee Doodle (ceteris paribus).
I do not think that when people are talking of "hypothetical imperatives" they simply mean "conditional imperatives". That isn't the relevant sense of "hypothetical". The duty to keep promises if you've made any is conditional, but not relevantly hypothetical--it applies no matter whether you desire it to or not.

Now the folks who say that morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives do not simply mean that all moral truths are conditional in form. Rather, they mean that the imperative force of morality comes from us adopting morality as a goal or having a desire to live morally. But all this once again presupposes something like (2), of which the imperatives not to murder if you want to be moral and to brush your teeth if you want to be healthy are consequences.

So, it seems to me that hypothetical imperatives presuppose categorical (in the relevant sense) ones like (2). And (2) is not all that plausible, I think. But suppose (2) is true. Then, we can ask what the status of (2) is. Why should I follow my goals? Why should I do what I want? I suspect that any plausible justification of (2) will be broadly moral in nature, based on some notion of human desires as reflective of the good, or of humans as having a duty to be true to themselves. Otherwise, it is not plausible that (2) should have any real authority. (And of course it would not do to ground the authority of (2) in terms of a higher order desire to follow my desires.) If so, then the notion of morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives has imploded.

Do non-human animals feel pain?

Assume some form of dualism--whether hylomorphic, substance or property. What is our reason for thinking that non-human animals feel pain? It is presumably that there are situations similar to those that humans find themselves in where animals both exhibit neurological responses similar to human neurological responses correlated with pain and behavioral responses similar to human behavioral responses correlated with pain. Humans in these situations feel pain, and, hence, so do non-human animals that have the same responses.

The argument has the following form: In animals of kind A, states of type C (having such-and-such neurological and behavioral states in the presence of bodily damage) are correlated with states of type D. Therefore, in every kind of animal that can find itself in a state of type C, states of type C are correlated with states of type D. This is in general a pretty weak argument. Consider: "In bats, movements of forelimb muscles are correlated with flying. Therefore, in every kind of animal that can exhibit movements of forelimb muscles, the movements when unimpeded are correlated with flying. (In particular, pigs fly.)" I do not mean that the argument is useless.   Suppose that we were alien visitors and having just landed the only animals we were able to observe were bats. We observed that movements of forelimb muscles are correlated with flying. We might well form the working hypothesis that in all other animals, forelimb muscle movements are correlated with flying. But this hypothesis would carry only a little epistemic weight.

Suppose we are still the aliens who have only observed bats. We now notice burrows on the ground. Sonar reveals that the burrows are being made by small animals--moles--that dig lots of tunnels in the ground, and further sonar observation shows that there is sufficient food for them underground. We conclude as a working hypothesis that these animals spend much of their lives underground. Sonar observations suggest that the animals indeed do have forelimbs. But--and I realize this is a bit unlikely--we cannot tell from the sonar whether or not there are wings (they might be folded back over the body). By the earlier working hypothesis we could conclude that if the moles' forelimbs were to move unimpeded (i.e., in an open space), the moles would fly. But this would be unjustified. For given what we have seen of the moles' lifestyle, we see that flying would be of little if any use to them.

Thus, a defeater to generalizing claims of the form "Animals when in state C exhibit D" from one natural kind to another is found when exhibiting D in state C has significant usefulness in the case of the former kind but has little or no usefulness in the case of the latter kind. And if dualism is true, this seems to be how it is in the case of pain. Conscious pain seems to be of no use to non-human animals. One might say that pain is useful for getting an animal to avoid certain situations. But that may well be incorrect in the case of non-human animals: neural states may well be sufficient to cause the behavior of these animals. It seems plausible that if we could do all the impossibly difficult physics calculations, we could predict what the animals will do based their physical states and the states of the environment. But if dualism is true, the pain is something over and beyond the physical states.

Humans have free will and make decisions through a process that goes beyond the physical functioning of the body. Or so at least hylomorphic and substance dualists are going to say. It is plausible that pain--which according to the dualist goes beyond the physical--is needed in order to inform this non-physical process. But this kind of a use won't be there in the case of non-human animals. Moreover, knowledge has non-instrumental value in the case of humans, and the kind of knowledge that pain conveys thus may have non-instrumental value in the case of humans. It does not seem that plausible that this kind of knowledge has much non-instrumental value for non-human animals.

I am not saying animals don't feel pain. I am simply saying that dualists have good reason to find the argument for animals having pain to be evidentially weak.

An objection to the above is that God exists, and we would be deceived in seeing animals apparently feel pain, and God would not allow for such deception. This objection has some force, but we had better not take the claim that God would not allow deception to imply that in all cases of something seeming a certain way, it is in fact that way. We already know that some animal behaviors seem humanlike but in fact have a different significance in non-humans, so we know to be cautious in inferences from humans to other animals. (Interestingly, the deception argument does not apply in the case of animals who lived before human beings came on the scene. Thus, someone impressed by this argument could hold that before the Fall, there was no animal pain.)

As an application, what I have said implies that the argument for the non-existence of God from the evil in animals' suffering pain is quite weak for dualists. It is weak first of all because the argument for animals' suffering pain will be rightly judged weak by dualists. But it is even weaker than that. For the main reason that could remain, after the above arguments, for a dualist to keep on presuming that animals feel pain is that perhaps something of the non-instrumental value that pain has in human life could be there in animals--maybe truth about the state of one's body is innately valuable. But if that is the argument, then the pain is not an evil, at least not in itself.

A partial fix to Lewis's account of counterfactuals

A serious problem with Lewis's account of counterfactuals is that as Elga and Pruss have shown, Lewis's similarity account licenses errant counterfactuals of the form "Were B to occur at t₁, A would have occurred at t₀", where t₀ < t₁. A quick argument for this conclusion is as follows. We have good reason to think the universe's future is longer than the past. On the grounds of divine revelation this is clear: the future is forever but the world was created a finite amount of time ago. On the grounds of science this is also likely: the universe is expanding, and either it will extend forever, or it will eventually reverse and collapse, but even in the latter case we're not yet at the half-way point. Therefore, it seems, a world that exactly matches our world in all of the future but in very little of the past will always be more like our world than a world that matches our world in all of the past but in very little of the future. Hence, if we look at worlds close to ours in which the antecedent of a subjunctive holds, we will do better to look at worlds whose future matches the future of our world, and then retrodict to the past from the antecedent of the subjunctive.

But here is an interesting partial solution to this problem. Suppose we abandon Lewis's counterpart theory. Suppose, further, that we assume that all of the causal history of an event is essential to the event's identity. (It is plausible that some of the causal history is essential, but the possibility of drawing a line as to what is and what is not essential is implausible.) Now if exact match of spatiotemporal regions of worlds requires the numerical identity of the events in these regions, it is impossible for two worlds in which causation goes orthodoxly from past to future to match in the future but not in the past. The asymmetry in causation together with the essentiality of origins of events thus induces an asymmetry in counterfactuals, ruling out most backtracking counterfactuals. Of course Lewis wouldn't have liked this, since it means that causation is prior to counterfactuals.

Of course, other problems for Lewis remain.

Is eternal suffering in hell infinite?

The damned will be in hell suffering forever. Does it follow that their overall sufferings will be infinite? I will argue in the negative. (I am not claiming that the suffering sin hell are finite, just that infinity of suffering does not follow from everlastingness.)

Argument 1: Suppose that the amount of suffering decreases exponentially to zero as time goes on. Then, it seems, the total suffering (the integral of momentary suffering) is finite, even though the suffering goes on forever.

This argument has some weaknesses. One of them is that total suffering is not just the sum of momentary sufferings. Such phenomena as boredom, dread of the future and hopelessness also have to be factored in.

Argument 2: What determines how much total suffering one has gone through is not the objective length of time that the sufferings have taken, but the subjective length of time. If one had a painful operation that in fact lasted an hour, but neurological manipulation made that hour seem subjectively like ten seconds, then one really had only ten seconds' worth of suffering. Now imagine that the internal clock of one of the damned is continually slowed down. During her first year of objective time in hell, she undergoes a year's subjective time of suffering. During her second year of objective time in hell, she undergoes half a year's worth subjective time of suffering. During her third objective year, she has a quarter of a year's worth of suffering. And so on. Even though she suffers for eternity, her total subjective time of suffering is two years. So, assuming that the intensity of her sufferings doesn't go up with time, her total suffering is finite.

An oddity about this scenario. If her future is subjectively finite, does that mean that her life feels like it is cut short early? But in fact she objectively lives forever. This is weird.

Relative necessity and the ontological argument

The standard modal ontological argument (e.g., in Plantinga, with roots in Leibniz) says basically:

1. Possibly, necessarily God exists.
2. Therefore, necessarily God exists.

But here is something neat that hasn't been explored sufficiently and that I've learned from some remarks by my colleague Todd Buras. The modal ontological argument works with relative necessity in the place of necessity, where we say that a proposition p is necessary relatively to q iff q entails p. Relative necessity is weaker than necessity. In the cases I will be interested in, q is true, since anything that is necessary relative to a true proposition is true. The following argument then is valid:

3. Possibly, the proposition that God exists is necessary relative to q. (Premise)
4. Therefore, the proposition that God exists is necessary relative to q.
5. q holds. (Premise)
6. Therefore, God exists.

The inference from 3 to 4 holds because, by S5, if an entailment possibly holds, it actually holds. It's worth noting that the "Possibly" in 3 is not relativized, which is a good thing because relative possibility is stronger than possibility (just as relative necessity is weaker than necessity).

So, to make a modal ontological argument work, we don't need to establish that possibly necessarily God exists. All we need to establish is that possibly, God exists relatively necessarily, relative to some true proposition q.

One plausible candidate for q is the proposition is that I exist. For it might be that I find it conceivable that I essentially depend on God for my existence, and conceivability is evidence for possibility, so possibly I essentially depend on God for my existence. Thus, possibly, God necessarily exists (relative to the proposition that I exist), and hence God exists.

An argument against psychological identity theories: accuracy and reliability of copying

According to the psychological identity theorist, if the contents of your mind (e.g., brain or soul) are copied into another mind (brain or soul), with the original mind destroyed, you will survive and come along with the copied contents. Now, plausibly, perfection is not needed in the copying. If one digit in the memory of your phone number is not copied over, and everything else is, then surely you will survive that, if you would survive any such copying operation at all. But some fidelity in copying is needed.

We can measure a copying operation in several ways. For any portion of the information to be copied (think of a 0/1 value or a continuously variable value, for instance), we can talk of the accuracy of the copying, which says how similar is the output of the copying procedure in fact was to the input, and the reliability of the copying, which is a measure of how likely it was that the output would have a given accuracy. (We can come up with various ways of quantifying this, but it doesn't matter.) Now, for a mind-copying to at all plausibly move a person from one mind to another, there has to be both overall accuracy and overall reliability. One won't do without the other. One could, after all, have very high reliability in copying, i.e., a high probability of accuracy, but be unlucky so that the the output is completely unlike the original. The psychological identity theorist would not say the person was moved then, since few of the memories and character traits would have survived. Nor would high accuracy with very low reliability transfer a person. Take a limiting case of low reliability where the output is entirely random and independent of the input. Nonetheless, one might be lucky, with the output by chance being just like the input. That wouldn't result in person-transfer, either. After all, if my mind is destroyed, and completely by chance a man arises randomly after lightning hits a swamp in Transylvania and that many by chance has the same mental states as I did, that man wouldn't be me.

So, we need both high accuracy and high reliability for person-transfer to occur. But now note that reliability is in part an extrinsic criterion. It measures the probability of accuracy. Suppose that you're undergoing a mind-content transfer procedure, and Dr. Black, the evil neurologist, after having starred in Frankfurt's Neurologist, XIII, happens to be sitting around in the lab. Now, almost all of the time when Dr. Black is in a lab when a mind-content procedure takes place, he hijacks the procedure, and ensures that while the subject's original mind is destroyed, the data transfered to the output mind in fact is a very poor copy of the subject--in fact, it is a copy of Dr. Black's vicious mind. This time, however, Dr. Black is distracted, and forgets to hijack the procedure, and only remembers once the operation is done. The reliability of the copying process is very low--Dr. Black was very likely to hijack it.

This leads to the following absurd conclusion. If person-transfer through copying of content is possible, then whether Dr. Black is in the room when the procedure happens determines whether the subject survives the procedure--even if Dr. Black in fact is distracted and in no way causally interacts with the process. Since this absurdity comes from psychological identity theories, we should reject psychological identity theories.

But what if one bites the bullet and says that whether Dr. Black is in the room when the procedure happens does determine whether one survives. Now I have a second move. What happens in copying is a causal process whereby an earlier mind causes a later mind to have the same content. The same thing is happening in us all the time. Our brain's having a certain neural state at t₁ (e.g., a state correlated with a belief that 2+2=4) will often cause that brain to have the same state at t₂. Our brains are always in a state of flux, and the brain's preserving of information is relevantly very much a process of copying. (Plato says something like this in the Symposium.) Suppose now that you live your ordinary life, but Dr. Black keeps on shadowing you, with his neurological equipment, and he keeps on planning to subvert your brain's data preservation processes, but whenever he is about to do so, by a very small chance, he is distracted and does not. In fact, Dr. Black does not interact with you causally. But his presence makes the reliability of the transmission of data from the past to the future in your mind be very low. By the same reasoning as above, it follows that the mere presence of Dr. Black kills you--even though he in fact does not interact with you.

Eifelheim

I recently read, and very much enjoyed, Eifelheim (can be bought from amazon, or downloaded for free in pdf format from the author's literary agency), Michael Flynn's novel of aliens landing outside a Black Forest village in the 14th century. The best parts--from my point of view--of the novel were the interactions between the village's pastor, a man of formidable Parisian education (yes, this might seem unlikely, but there is a story there) and a friend of Ockham, and the aliens. Flynn captures cutting-edge 14th century scientific and philosophical thinking with great sympathy and surprising fidelity, and shows how a smart 14th century scholastic with Ockhamist tendencies would interact with 21st (or later) century science. We see the flexibility of scholastic categories, a flexibility that is going to be of interest to those of us still interested in a reconciliation between contemporary science and scholastic metaphysics.

I did not expect to read a novel that alludes to an Ockhamist argument against the possibility of nested accidents. (This is in support of an argument that the pastor gives against light having a velocity. The idea is that light is an accident of fire, so if light had a velocity, that velocity would be an accident of an accident, which is impossible.)

The medieval and alien characters are well-drawn and develop over the course of the novel. I was somewhat less happy with the portions set in the 21st century, but they were relatively briefer (and they may have been written first). All in all, quite an excellent piece of science fiction.

A defense of an ontological argument

Given an appropriate notion of maximal greatness, maximal greatness entails maximal greatness in all worlds. By the S5 axiom of modal logic, it follows that that if possibly there is a maximally great being, there is a maximally great being. Thus discussion of the modal ontological argument focuses on the possibility premise, the claim that possibly a maximally great being exists.

1. If a belief that p is within the center of the motivational life of a person or community, and that life is generally flourishing, then, probably, p is possible. (Premise)
2. There have been persons and communities that have led generally flourishing lives within the motivational center of which there was the belief that a maximally great being exists. (Premise)
3. Possibly, a maximally great being exists. (By 1 and 2)
4. A maximally great being exists. (By 3 and S5, as per opening remarks)

The idea behind (1) is that a life within whose motivational center there was an incoherent proposition would be unlikely to be flourishing. It would be a life that would, most likely, come apart. The flourishingness of a life is evidence of the coherence of the concepts by which that life is lived. And coherence is either identical with or evidence for possibility. In favor of (2), I cite such people as Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Calcutta, Jean Vanier or Thomas Aquinas, and perhaps such communities as the first generation Franciscans. And I even think the synchronic and diachronic Christian community over the ages, despite sins of many individuals, qualifies.

One might try to come up with parallel arguments for incompatible premises. For instance, deeply committed pantheists like Ghandhi appeared to live flourishing lives, and if pantheism is possibly true, it is true, a conclusion incompatible with (4). Two responses can be made. First, pantheists may well believe that a maximally great being exists, and think that the whole of existence is necessarily identical with it. So maybe what is at the motivational center of their lives is just the belief that a maximally great being exists, and the further claim that the whole of existence is necessarily identical with it is less central. This may not be very plausible, though. It seems that the divinity of everything is motivationally crucial to them.

A second response is to admit this. Yes, the existence of pantheists leading flourishing lives at whose motivational center pantheism was found give evidence for the truth of pantheism. So we have evidence for theism and evidence for pantheism. And maybe as far as this goes, the evidence is balanced. But, note that both the evidence for theism and the evidence for pantheism is evidence against atheism. We have evidence for theism and evidence for pantheism. Now we need to see what independent considerations we can bring against theism and against pantheism. (Note, for instance, that the problem of evil is more pressing given pantheism, if the world-deity is good.)

I doubt that there are people living flourishing lives at whose motivational center lies atheism. I do not here deny that atheists may lead flourishing lives, but I deny that if they do, their lives have atheism at their motivational center. For one (this suggestion is due to a grad student here), atheism is a negative doctrine, and lives centered on negative doctrines are unlikely to be flourishing. More likely, the motivational center is morality, love of fellow man, loyalty to friends, etc. In the committed theist or pantheist, these things are closely tied to the theism or pantheism. But in the atheist, these things are, I think, largely independent of the atheism, except maybe in the case of a kind of tragic loyalty in the face of the terrors of the unfeeling world, as in Russell, which I think is not going to lead a fully flourishing life, falling short in respect of the joyous aspects.

[Note added later: This was, of course, written before the revelations about Jean Vanier's abusiveness. I would certainly have chosen a different example if I were writing this post now.]

Every fact is normative

A sufficient condition for a fact to be normative is that it is a reason to do or not to do something. But a fact F is a reason not to deny that F obtains. Hence, every fact is normative.

Parts and ownership

Some Aristotelians believe the following thesis: When a bit of matter comes to be a part of a substance, it ceases to exist. I.e., the bit of matter comes to be a part of a substance in the way in which a horse comes to be a corpse--the horse and the corpse are distinct entities, the corpse originating in the horse. If they believe this thesis, they have to give some explanation of why particles ingested can still be scientifically detected. They will do this either by saying that the particles no longer exist literally, but "virtually" do, or by saying that new particles just like the old ones come to exist out of the old ones, except the new ones have the essential property of being a part of substance that they have joined. There are two different reasons why one might believe such an outlandish thesis: (1) because one doesn't believe in parthood (Patrick Toner and Alexander Pruss incline in this direction), or (2) because one thinks that parts receive their identity from the whole (there is some textual basis in Aristotle for this).

I want to offer two arguments for this thesis, one metaphysical and Aristotelian, the second ethical and eccentric. I find the first plausible, and much less so the second, but the second is kind of neat, so I'll give it, too:

• Matter receives its identity--that which makes it be the entity that it is--from the substance that it makes up. Therefore, if a bit of matter x is a part of substance A and a bit of matter y is a part of substance B, then if A is distinct from B, it follows that x is distinct from y. Therefore, no bit of matter can be a part of two substances. But everything that exists is a substance or a mode, relation, trope, accident or the like. A proper part of a substance is not a mode, relation, trope, accident or the like. Hence, if a substance has a proper part, that proper part is a substance. But the matter of a proper part A of a substance B would then be a part of both substance A and substance B, which contradicts the thesis that a bit of matter can't be a part of two substances.
• This argument uses two main assumptions:
  1. Without receiving special normative power from you or some higher authority, the only way I can by myself make an item x that you presently literally own to cease to be literally owned by you is by destroying x.
  2. It is impossible for one person to literally own a part of another.
  Suppose now you literally own a carbon atom x (e.g., it's part of a steak that you own), and I without having received any special normative power eat the atom x so that it becomes a part of my body. By (2), I have made it happen that you no longer own x. But by (1), it follows (assuming I have received no grant of authority or the like), the only way I could have done this is by destroying x. Hence, when an atom becomes a part of my body, it is thereby destroyed.

Evil, privation and disability

Theism entails that evil is not a positive reality, since all positive reality either is God or is continually sustained in existence by God. Augustine thinks that evil is a privation of good. A privation is more than a lack. Leglessness in a dog is a privation, but in a snake is just a lack. If evil were just a lack, then the problem of evil would be easily solved by the consideration that, of necessity, everything other than God is lacking, since only God is infinite. I want to suggest that seeing evil as a privation of good still helps vis-a-vis the problem of evil. This argument continues two earlier posts of mine on prosblogion which discuss an Augustinian theodicy (Part I; Part II).

Imagine two closely related alien species, the flerts and the grents. Both are four-legged, and have basically the same habits. Flerts and grents are solitary and reproduce asexually, never knowing their parents (e.g., the parents produce spores which mature away from them), but the flerts have wings in addition to their four legs and can fly away from predators, while the grents are confined to the ground. Suppose now that Gribby is a normal grent, while Flibby is a flert that, due to a genetic defect, never developed wings.

Winglessness is a lack in Gribby and a privation in Flibby, but unless Gribby and Flibby observe their conspecifics, they are not going to know this. It is not an evil that Gribby is stuck on the ground, but it is an evil that Flibby can't fly. But Gribby and Flibby look and behave in pretty much the same way. They eat the same food, they have to run from predators and cannot fly from them, and so on. They have the same joys and the same pains, and they live pretty much the same lives. All this makes plausible the following:

Claim: Flibby is not worse off than Gribby.

I think this claim is plausible. One might think that Flibby is worse off because he suffers from an evil from which Gribby does not suffer. But "suffers" here is a tendentious choice of word. There is no conscious suffering here, we may suppose. We could imagine that when Flibby is faced with a predator he feels an urge to fly and the inability to fly is painful to him; but we can also suppose--and let us do so--that Flibby also has a second privation, namely that his instincts to fly are missing. Flibby suffers from an evil merely in the sense that he is subject to an evil. But his life is just like Gribby's, and the concrete goods that Gribby's life instantiates are also instantiated by Flibby's life. Another way to see this is to imagine some minor concrete good that Flibby has but Gribby does not. Maybe, Flibby happens to be a slightly better at fishing than Gribby is. Then, if per impossibile we were choosing whether to be Flibby or to be Gribby, we would be very reasonable in choosing to be Flibby. But if Flibby is worse off than Gribby, he is significantly worse off--winglessness is not a minor evil. So if Flibby is worse off than Gribby, it wouldn't be all that reasonable to choose to be Flibby just for some minor concrete good.

Still, it's undeniable that Flibby is subject to an evil, while, as far as the story goes, Gribby is not. We now have two conflicting intuitions: first, that Flibby is no worse off than Gribby, and, second, that Flibby is worse off than Gribby, because Flibby is subject to an evil that Gribby is not subject to. I want to argue that the second intuition is mistaken. For Flibby has a more distinguished nature--by nature he has the dignity of being a winged creature. This good that he possesses, the good of being by nature winged, is a good that Gribby does not have. Because he has this good, he is capable of being subject to an evil that Gribby is not--viz., the evil of being deprived of wings. The additional good outweighs or cancels out the additional evil. Hence, we can consistently say that Flibby is no worse off than Gribby even though Flibby is subject to an evil that Gribby is not.

I want to suggest, now, that if Gribby would have no right to complain to God about being created a grent, likewise Flibby would have no right to complain to God about being created a flert without wings.

Evil is not just a lack but a privation. However, possessing an evil also means one possesses a certain good, namely the dignity of being such as to naturally have the good that the evil deprived one of.

In particular, it follows that while an adult whose intellectual functioning is like that of a child thereby is subject to an evil, the developmentally challenged adult is not thereby less well off than the child. (She may be thereby worse off if she compares herself to others, or if others treat her poorly.)

How far one can take these thoughts in the direction of a theodicy, I do not know.

Taking up into language (Language, Part III)

We can take items in the world up into language. An easy, though very unlikely, example would be if I came across a bunch of rocks randomly deposited by an avalanche, and noticed that they were arranged into the shape of the word "here". I then took more rocks and added to the left of the ones already there "There was an avalanche" and then to the right of them I put a period. The resulting production would count as my inscription of the sentence "There was an avalanche here." That one of the words in the sentence was not shaped by me is irrelevant. I took something in nature which wasn't a word though it was shaped like a word, the word "here", and made a token of the word "here" out of it, without actually touching it. The bunch of rocks thus got taken up into a linguistic item, much like a stump can be taken up into being a chair just by my treating it as a chair--which can happen without my even touching it (e.g., I can treat it as a chair by trying to sit on it, but tripping forward accidentally).

Likewise, word tokens from one language can be taken up into linguistic items in another language. I can write a note by gluing in words cut out from newspapers, including foreign newspapers, and I can do so with no regard for what meaning the snippets had in their original language. Thus, I can take a German newspaper story about a poison, and cut out the word "GIFT" (which means "poison") from the headline, and then take some words from an English-language newspaper, and put together the note "YOU HAVE BEEN A GREAT GIFT IN MY LIFE." And, no, I wouldn't be saying that you've been a poison! The snippet would thus have been taken up into a new linguistic item. The original meaning of the snippets I use is irrelevant. New linguistic items are made of them.

We could say that the rocks in my initial example already were a token of the English "here" even before I got to it, and the token "GIFT" in the German headline was already both a token of the German "Gift" and the English "gift". I suspect this is mistaken. It makes sense to ask of a sentence token in isolation what language it is in, even if the orthographically or phonologically same sentence could figure in more than one. So that won't do. My suggestion is that we are mistaken in identifying the token with just the inscription. The token includes the inscription, but includes the context--and hence the intentions of the speaker--into which that inscription was taken up. If this is right, then once again linguistic tokens are more than just inscriptions and sounds, but include context, as in my earlier posts on language.

The Church of Christ "subsists in the catholic Church"

Vatican II's Lumen Gentium 8 says:

This is the one Church of Christ which in the Creed is professed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic, which our Saviour, after His Resurrection, commissioned Peter to shepherd, and him and the other Apostles to extend and direct with authority, which He erected for all ages as "the pillar and mainstay of the truth". This Church constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure. These elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.

(I changed the capitalization to match the Latin.) Much discussion has been expended on the claim that the Church in the world "subsists in" the Catholic Church. Some interpreters took this as a weakening of the traditional teaching that the Church of Christ is the Catholic Church. On this reading, the Church of Christ is a larger entity, and the Catholic Church is a part of it. A fairly recent Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) statement states that "subsists in" indicates "full identity".

I want to argue that the CDF is right on textual grounds (though the CDF is presumably also drawing on non-textual information about the intentions of the Council Fathers).

What does the mysterious phrase "subsists in" mean? Here we have to remember that at the time of Vatican II, the lingua franca of Catholic thought was Thomism. Even those who did not philosophically or theologically agree with St. Thomas would use thomistic vocabulary to express their views. The phrase "subsists in" is a scholastic phrase that Aquinas uses a number of times. Here are the claims I've found in my search of a lot of Aquinas' works (admittedly in English, but I am trusting the translators):

• God subsists in his essence
• The divine understanding subsists in itself
• The essence of the Father subsists in the Son
• Human beings subsist in their essences
• Christ subsists both in a human and a divine nature
• Things subsist in their being
• A substance subsists in its species
• The form of the angel or the separated soul subsists in the being

The first thing to note is that "subsists in" is linguistically compatible with identity; the divine understanding subsists in itself, and it is Aquinas' doctrine that God is identical with his essence. Most of Aquinas' uses of the phrase state the relationship between an entity and its essence or existence. A thing exists in and through its essence and existence, deriving its essential operations from that essence, and, except in the case of God, is wholly dependent on that essence and existence, incapable of existing apart from it. So, it seems, the Council is saying that the Chruch of Christ is either identical with the Catholic Church or exists in and through the Catholic Church, wholly dependent on the Catholic Church, incapable of existing apart, and deriving its essential operations from the Catholic Church, not as one thing from another, but as a human derives intellectuality from being human.

The phrase, thus, is compatible with identity as well with a very intimate relationship that isn't quite identity. We need to turn to context now. First, take the paragraph as a whole. The first sentence says that the "one Church of Christ" is "one, holy, catholic and apostolic". To read the text as saying that the Church of Christ is not identical with the Catholic Church is to attribute to the text the absurdity of saying that the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic" Church is not the catholic Church. One might try to distinguish between "catholic" in the sense of "universal" and "catholic" in a sense that indicates the Roman Catholic Church, but the text makes no such distinction, and it is fair to assume that the same word is used in the same sense in the same paragraph.

Next, take the phrase "although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure", which elements are described as "gifts belonging to the Church of Christ". This text, I think, does not fit well with the idea that the Church of Christ is the larger entity that includes the Catholic Church as a part of it. For if the Church of Christ were the larger entity, there would be no need to emphasize that the elements of sanctification and truth (I assume these are the many true and good things found in non-Catholic congregations) do in fact belong to the Church of Christ.

Moreover, the preceding paragraph introduced a distinction between the Church as a "society structured with hierarchical organs" and the "mystical Body of Christ", which two natures it says are not separate but form a complex entity, and are like the two natures of the incarnate Christ. The "society structured with hierarchical organs" surely is the Catholic Church. It cannot refer to some alleged larger Church of Christ that includes Protestants, since Protestants do not have hierarchical organs as Lumen Gentium understands them (Lumen Gentium understands the hierarchy as constituted primarily by the Pope and Bishops). But at the same time, this discussion of the Church as a structured society surely is the same entity as the Church of Christ "constituted and organized in the world as a society". Lumen Gentium's overall understanding of organic structure is hierarchical: the Pope is the principle of organic unity, and from him proceeds the unity of the Bishops.

So, the context leads us to accept that in the thought of Lumen Gentium the Church of Christ is the Catholic Church. But why, then, the use of "subsists in"? Here is a suggestion that may be completely wrong: Some of the operations of the Catholic Church (e.g., the sacrament of baptism) extend beyond the Catholic Church. Yet they always are the operations of the Church of Christ, and derive their efficacy from Christ's promises to the Catholic Church. It is not that the Church of Christ extends beyond the Catholic Church, but the operations of the Church of Christ do. And the use of "subsists in" makes possible such a distinction. This fits with the CDF's explanation, I think.

Free philosophy ebooks

Yesterday, I came across a link to wowio. They have a catalogue of free ebooks, including ones from major publishers. The ebooks are in PDF format, and come with an advertising page at the beginning and end. You can download three a day. Their philosophy catalog includes a handful of good OUP titles, by authors like Thomas Nagel, Terence Irwin, Philip Kitcher and Roy Sorensen. They also have Aquinas' De Malo. Other goodies, outside the philosophy section, include Hawking's The Theory of Everything. A good way to get to good books is to go to different subject areas, and then choose "Oxford University Press" as the publisher.