January 2009 Archives

Libertarians must concede that there is always some chance that a moral agent chooses to perform A at t and fails to perform A. But not all chance is bad for libertarianism—that is, not all chance (or luck) undermines control. Here’s a (rough) idea for eliminating the bad sorts of libertarian luck. Duncan Pitchard argues that the kind of luck that undermines knowledge in Gettier cases (and Zagzebski cases) is veritic luck. He proposes a safety condition to distinguish cases of believing p that involve veritic luck from cases of knowing p. His specific condition states that,

V. If a believer knows that p, then in nearly all, if not all, nearby possible worlds in which the believer forms the belief that p in the same way as she does in the actual world, that belief is true (Epistemic Luck, 163).

But a similar condition (L) might well exclude the bad sorts of luck or chance from the libertarian accounts of free action.

Dennett (see Vallicella's discussion here) discusses an argument rather like the following, and criticizes it for being like an argument starting with the assumptions that every mammal has a mammal for a mother, and there was a finite number of mammals. But nonetheless, the argument strikes me very plausible:

1. If E is a mental state or decision that I am responsible for to any degree, then either I, as libertarian cause, am among E's causes, or else a mental state or decision that I am to some (perhaps different) degree responsible for is among E's causes, or both.
2. I have had only finitely many mental states and have made only finitely many decisions.
3. Nothing is a cause of itself, and there are no causal circles.
4. Therefore, if I am responsible for any mental state or decision, I have engaged in libertarian causation.

One could try to get out of the argument by positing an infinite number of past mental states and/or decisions. I think that would not be plausible, not just because of the implausibility of the infinitary posit, but because it wouldn't get at the heart of the worry.

It seems very plausible that a good answer to the problem of evil will require some version of the Free Will Defense (FWD). If a FWD requires incompatibilism, then there is a very plausible argument from theism to incompatibilism.
But I think it may well be that a FWD does not require incompatibilism. First of all, a FWD does not need that freedom of will and responsibility be incompatible with determination by prior non-agential causes or by laws of nature. At most what we need for a FWD is that freedom be incompatible with total determination by prior agential causes (the case that matters is that of God's creative act), a claim that I think some compatibilists will accept.
Second, even if freedom of will and responsibility are compatible with determination by divine agency, it does not follow that the FWD is completely out of steam. For it may be that certain kinds of good decisions depend on some of their value on something more than bare freedom of will and responsibility. For instance, for a promise to be valid, more is needed than that the object of the promise be good and that the promise be made with freedom of will and responsibility. A promise made at gunpoint is invalid, even if it is made responsibly and with freedom of will (one does, after all, have a free choice whether to utter the promise or to die, assuming one does not lose freedom and responsibility through panic, but this is not enough for validity).
Here would be one sketch of a FWD that is compatible with compatibilism (even compatiblism between freedom and responsibility, and determination by an agential cause): A love is of much greater value when the lover is not causally determined by the beloved to love the beloved. This claim is compatible with saying that the lover could freely and responsibly respond with love to the beloved even if determined to do so--for there is more that we want in a response to love than mere freedom and responsibility (e.g., someone with amazing powers of self-control could freely and responsibly respond with love to a threat, but that's not the most valuable kind of loving response). But a failure to respond with love to God's love is always an evil. But it might be that the only way God could ensure that there are agents all of whom respond with love to God's love is by causally determining them to do so. (One way to argue for this is to suppose Molinism transworld unresponsiveness: In every feasible world in which agents are not determined by God to respond with love to his love, some agent fails to do so.) It might then be that God is justified in creating creatures some of whom fail to respond with love to his love.
But while this example shows that a FWD need not require the incompatibility between determination and freedom/responsibility, this FWD still requires the compatibility between freedom/responsibility and lack of determination--it requires the possibility of libertarian-type choices. (Hume thinks that freedom requires determination. Fischer, on the other hand, is an even-handed compatibilist--freedom is compatible with determination adnw ith lack thereof.)

Plantinga's felix culpa theodicy turns on the following assumption--what he calls the "weak value assumption"--about the value of worlds:

WVA: Among the worlds of great value, some include incarnation and atonement.

Moreover, what explains the "great value" of the worlds mentioned in WVA is (in large part) that they contain the "towering" goods of incarnation and atonement. Plantinga says he's inclined to accept a stronger assumption, viz., that any world that includes incarnation and atonement is better than any world that doesn't; he thinks, however, that his argument can get by with WVA. The basic thought seems to be that, for any world that contains incarnation and atonement, God would be justified to create that world (it is, after all, by virtue of containing incarnation and atonement, a greatly valuable world). But of course, necessarily, a world contains incarnation and atonement only if it contains sin. So if God is justified to create a really valuable world that contains incarnation and atonement, God is justified to create a world that contains sin.

I'm not sure Plantinga can get by with WVA. Since WVA is consistent with there being worlds of great value that don't contain incarnation and atonement, it seems to me that we would need to hear more about what other worlds of great value there are before we can conclude that God would be justified to create a world that contains atonement. If some other world of great value contains neither incarnation and atonement nor sin, God might act better by actualizing that world. Moreover, I think even Judeo-Christian theists should be suspicious. Here is a distinctively Christian way to push the objection.

Some of you may have missed this debate between Richard Gale and Alvin Plantinga held at University of Tennessee, October 2008, The Existence of Evil and the Problem of God. It gets informal pretty quickly with Gale speculating on what’s in the water at Notre Dame and insisting (again) on a “modal intuition bowl”.

Suppose God offers you the following choice.

(1) He will actualize you in world W where you will be in hell along with infinitely many others. The infinite set of persons P in hell is mapped onto the set of naturals; whatever number n that is assigned to you is the number of minutes you spend in hell. You then go permanently to heaven.

(2) He will actualize you in W’ where you will be in heaven along with infinitely many others. The set of persons P in heaven is mapped onto the set of naturals; whatever number n that is assigned to you is the number of miniutes you will spend in heaven. You then go to hell permanently.

Suppose you try determine what to do by taking the point of view those who are very bad off. As it happens, for any P in W whose point of view you take, you are better off being P in W than being any person P’ in W’. For any person P in W, the expected value of being in W is equal to the badness of a terminating period of time in hell + the goodness of an endless period of time in heaven. For any person P’ in W’, the expected value of being in W’ equals the goodness of a terminating period of time in heaven + the badness of an endless period of time in hell. So, every person in W is better off than anyone in W’. On the other hand, W will always have an infinite number of people in hell (and a finite number in heaven) and W’ will always have an infinite number of people in heaven (and a finite number of people in hell). So the overall value of W is lower than the overall value of W’, yet the expected value of every person in W is much higher than the expected value of anyone in W’. Clearly, something has gone wrong in assessing the overall value of worlds, since any rational and impartial person would prefer W to W’, and yet we have claimed that W’ is overall better than W.

What’s gone wrong, I say, is the following inference: there is permanently an infinite number of people in hell in W and there is permanently an infinite number of people in heaven in W’, therefore W is overall worse than W’. Not so! Every rational person would prefer being in W (no matter what natural number they are assigned) to being in W’ since everyone in W is better off than anyone in W’.

Relevant Prosblogion discussions:

Kvanvig

Almeida

Bishop Gene Robinson has been chosen to give the invocation at the "We are One" concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as part of Barack Obama's inauguration.  Bishop Robinson gave an interview with NPR regarding the invocation, which can be heard here.  In the interview, Robinson describes reading the past 30-40 years of inaugural prayers in preparation and being

"schocked at how aggressively Christian they are.  And my intention is not to invoke the name of Jesus, but to make this a prayer for Christians and non-Christians alike.  Although I hold the Scripture to be the word of God, you know those Scriptures are holy to me and to Jews and Christians, but many other faith traditions have their own sacred texts.  And so rather than insert that and exclude them from the prayer by doing so, I want this to be a prayer to the god of our many understandings and a prayer that all people of faith can join me in."*

I've heard other people claim similar intentions in other contexts, so I'm taking Robinson as an example of a wider phenomenon. 

It seems to me that what we have here in an instance of the following schema:

• x claims to be a person of religious tradition T1
• x offers a prayer which is explicitly formulated to be acceptable to people not only of T1, but also of other religious traditions T2, T3 (and perhaps more) [assuming that T1, T2, and T3 are contraries]

I wonder how we're to understand such prayers, as it seems to me that they involve one form or other of either bad faith or confusion:

Bad Faith 1: x publicly claims to belong to religious tradition T1, but does not actually consider himself to belong to T1

Bad Faith 2: x really does belong to T1, but offers a prayer which he realizes is not to the god of T1.

Bad Faith 3: x really does belong to T1 and intends the prayer to fall under T1 rather than T2 or T3, and hopes that the members of T2 and T3 who 'join in' with x in the prayer fail to notice the tacit promoting of T1.

Confusion 1: x thinks that he belongs to religious tradition T1, but is confused about what commitment to T1 requires of him (e.g., the promotion of the god of T1 rather than the god of T2 or T3).

Confusion 2: x really does belong to T1, but is mistaken in thinking that a prayer can be neutral with respect to the god of T1, the god of T2, and the god of T3.

Confusion 3: x really does belong to T1, but is mistaken in thinking that members of T2 and T3 can pray to the god of T1 without violating their own traditions.

I'm not claiming that Robinson himself is acting in bad faith or under such a confusion.  But I'm having a hard time seeing how prayers which fit the schema above don't involve either some element of bad faith or confusion. 

Thoughts? 

----

(*the transcription is my own, but I think I've got it correct.)

Quentin Smith (cf. ‘Moral Realism and Infinite Spacetime Imply Moral Nihilism’, in Dyke, Heather (ed.), 2003, Time and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 43-54) has an ingenious argument for moral nihilism that he derives from global moral realism and value aggregation. Assume global moral realism is true,

GMR. Global moral realism is true if and only if all organisms, inanimate mass and energy, and space and time, and states of these entities, have value nondependently upon whether conscious organisms believe they have value.

GMR is an odd moral view, since it entails that even empty spaces have positive value. He does argue for that view elsewhere (cf. his Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) but I’m not sure such a position could be made plausible. Assume value aggregation is true,

VA. Aggregative value theory is true if and only if units of value can be totalised in some way, either by adding them, averaging over them, measuring the equality of their distribution, measuring the minimum, etc.

I just finished a draft of a paper with this title, and I could use the expert assistance of Prosblogion members to make it better!

Here's a brief summary of the paper: After describing the two main cognitive science of religion theories for why humans have religious beliefs and arguing that the two can be combined into a more powerful theory, I present an argument that the evidence for these theories gives reasons for thinking that belief in God is unjustified because this evidence shows that our religious belief-forming processes are unreliable. After defending this argument against a handful of objections, I then criticize this argument by arguing that these theories give an unrealistically abstract account of the belief-forming and sustaining processes of religious believers. A more detailed description of these processes reveals that we cannot argue that the belief-forming and sustaining processes of religious beliefs - even when the cognitive science findings are taken into account - are unreliable without previously showing that standard arguments for the existence of God fail. The cognitive science of religion thus presents no independent reason for thinking that belief in God is irrational.

Here is the paper:
CogSciandRelBel.doc

Feel free to post comments here or to email me with comments at joshua.thurow@mtmc.edu.

Let me be the first to welcome Wes Morriston to Prosblogion. I’m delighted to announce that Wes accepted our invitation to join the group of contributors at PB. As most of you know, Wes is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and has published extensively on, among other things, God and freedom, the cosmological argument, omnipotence, moral perfection and the power to choose. Some of his online papers are here and his webpage is here. Welcome to PB, Wes!

Kelly Clark of SCP notes that this entry was not included in the APA program.

Philosophy of Religion Group: Friday evening, 7:00-10:00 (Session GIV-12).

Patristic Conceptions of the Trinity

Chair: Michael Rea, Notre Dame

Presenters:

Richard Cross, Notre Dame, Lewis Ayres, Emory, J. T. Paasch, Oxford

This forum, taking place at Azusa Pacific University, aims at promoting the project of Christian philosophy and recognizing those who have substantially contributed to that project.

This year's forum recognizes the work of Dr. Marilyn McCord Adams. She will be presenting two lectures:

March 25, 2008 - 'Harrowing the Horrors"
March 26, 2008 - 'Eucharistic Drama, Sacramental Effect'

Co-sponsored by the Azusa Pacific University Philosophy Department and the Faith Integration Department. For more information contact Laura Smith Webb: lwebb@apu.edu or 626-815-5496

Looking at the program for the upcoming meeting of the Central APA I noticed the names of a number of Prosblogion contributors, commenters, and readers. I know those on the program need no further excuse to be in Chicago in February, but the rest of you might be interested in coming for some of the talks listed below the fold.

I saw this post by Colin McGinn (recently linked from Leiter's site) where he ends with quite a strong knowledge claim "We indeed don't know everything, but some things we know quite well--and the complete falsity of religious doctrine is one of them."

Let me try out this proof of universalism in which perfect goodness and perfect justice seem to coincide. (Inspired by points made in discussion with Ric Otte and AP—neither is responsible for my use of the points).

1. For all x, no matter how morally evil x chose to be, it is possible that God says, after x’s death, “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life.”

2. For all x, were God to utter, after x’s death, “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life”, then x would have led a morally perfect life.

3. If God were (i) to utter, after x’s death, “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life” and (ii) to send x immediately to heaven, then it would display perfect justice and perfect goodness.

4. For all x, no matter how morally evil x chose to be, God should and does say, after x’s death, “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life” and God should and does send x immediately to heaven.

5. :. Universalism is true.

The Society of Christian Philosophers Western Conference

October 22-24, 2009
Fort Lewis College
Durango, Colorado

Plenary speakers:
Michael Bergmann (Purdue University)
Wes Morriston (University of Colorado)

Papers on any topic of philosophical interest will be considered. The SCP welcomes both Christians and non-Christians as presenters, commentators, and participants. Submissions should be 3,000 words or less, prepared for blind review, and saved in an accessible format (hard copy submissions will not be accepted). Please indicate in your cover letter whether, should your paper not be accepted, you would be willing to serve as a commentator.

Deadline for submission: August 15, 2009.

For further information on both conference details and Durango attractions, visit the conference website at: philosophy.fortlewis.edu/scp.html

Submissions, inquiries, and requests to comment can be sent to Justin McBrayer at mcbrayer_j@fortlewis.edu