Skeptical Threats and Best Explanations

I distinguish between what I call skeptical threat arguments, which assume that we have the faculties we have but then say that theism, not naturalism, can answer skeptical questions we might raise about them, and best explanation arguments, where the argument is that it is rational inference is a reality that neither theist nor naturalist is inclined to deny, and then goes on to argue that if the naturalistic ontology is all there is, rational inference either cannot happen or is unlikely to happen. Bill Hasker thought I should call these arguments transcendental arguments rather than best explanation arguments, and I think he's right. Rational inference requires intentionality (aboutness), truth, mental causation in virtue of mental content, the existence of logical laws, the psychological relevance of those laws, the identity of a real person throughout the process of a rational inference, and the reliability of our rational faculties. Yet, according to most modern naturalists, the physical realm is the basic reality, it's causally closed, and at that basic level there is no intentionality (about-ness), no first-person perspective, no purpose, and no normativity. Whatever else exists has to supervene on that, and to me that means the mental has to be epiphenomenal. Naturalists respond back that in making this argument I am committing the fallacy of composition, in that what isn't true at the basic level might be true at the "system" level. But, really, to allow for rational inference you have to allow a kind of causation (for example, teleological) that is disallowed at the physical level, and if all causation is really physical causation, then how can there be mental causation on any level? Furthermore, rational inference requires that we perceive implications. But implications do not exist at any particular location in space and time, so how could we perceive them if we are purely space-time bound physical creatures.

Distinguishing two theses in Anscombe's reply to C. S. Lewis

 From an essay I am writing on the Anscombe legend. 

Now most of Anscombe’s argumentation is aimed at establishing what I will call thesis A:

A) The argument Lewis presents in the third chapter of the first edition of Miracles overlooks some crucial distinctions, and therefore fails to show that naturalism is incompatible with the validity of reasoning.

However, at the end of her piece Anscombe goes on to say the following:

I do not think that there is sufficiently good reason for maintaining the “naturalist” hypothesis about human behaviour and thought. But someone who does maintain it cannot be refuted as you try to refute him, by saying that it is inconsistent to maintain it and to believe that human reasoning is valid and that human reasoning sometimes produces human opinion.

In other words she asserts what I will call thesis B:

B) You cannot refute the naturalist position by saying his position is inconsistent to say that naturalism is true, that human reasoning is valid, and that humans reasoning sometimes produces human opinion.

This goes beyond saying that Lewis didn’t refute naturalism because he overlooked the distinctions Anscombe insisted upon, this is to say that you can’t refute the naturalist on the basis of the validity of reasoning, because of these distinctions. 

            Did Lewis concur with A? Almost certainly he did. I have known some philosophers who have thought that Lewis really didn’t need to revise his chapter at all, including the late philosopher Richard Purtill, but Lewis did not concur. (Neither would I).  Even in his initial brief response to Anscombe’s critique, which was published in the same issue of the Socratic Digest in which her essay appeared, he acknowledged the difficulty surrounding the use of the term “valid” and employed one of Anscombe’s central distinctions, between the cause and effect because, and what  he called the ground and consequent because. He indicated in his reply to Norman Pittenger that the third chapter of Miracles contained a “serious hitch” and that it “needs to be rewritten.” Establishing A is a good day’s work for a philosopher, particularly in that she persuaded the very person to whom she was responding that one of his central arguments, as stated, had serious problems and needed to be reworked.

            Now, if this is what winning the debate amounts to, Anscombe won, and Lewis agreed that she did. But she did go on to assert B, and if winning the debate requires establishing B, Lewis dissented. He wrote in his short response in the Socratic Digest:

It would seem, therefore, that we never think the conclusion because GC it is the consequent of its grounds but only because CE certain previous events have happened. If so, it does not seem that the GC sequence makes us more likely to think the true conclusion than not. And this is very much what I meant by the difficulty in Naturalism.

Lewis would go on to make this claim the centerpiece of his argument when he revised the chapter. He wrote:

But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?

            I am inclined to be resistant to talking about winning and losing in philosophical debates. They are not football games.  The Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig often does public debates on apologetical issues, and usually comes out looking better than his opponents. But skeptics have complained, with some justification, that doing well in a public debate format is not the same as proving one’s central thesis to be true from a philosophical standpoint. Now, if we are going to assess a winner in the exchange, there are, as Bassham notes a few different ways this can be assessed. Do we look just at the exchange on that day in at the Oxford Socratic Club, or do we look at the overall exchange between the two parties over time? Do we go by what the audience thought had happened? In a couple of important senses, Anscombe was the clear winner, especially if you look only at what happened on Feb. 2, 1948. There is no reason to doubt Carpenter’s report that many in the audience thought that a conclusive blow had been struck against one of Lewis’s fundamental arguments. On the narrow question of whether Lewis’s formulation of the argument is philosophically adequate, Anscombe contended that it wasn’t, and Lewis agreed. However, the most interesting philosophical question of whether or not you can refute naturalism based on the validity of reasoning cannot be settled the outcome of a particular exchange at a debating club. When Walter Hooper asked Lewis if he said he lost the debate with Anscombe, and Lewis said he didn’t, Lewis was probably thinking in terms of the question of whether Anscombe had shown that B is true. He was convinced that she had not. And looking at Anscombe’s responses to Lewis’s revised work, both in the introduction to her collected papers, and in her longer response given to the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society in 1985, she does not reassert B. So far as I can tell from her responses, she does not think that Lewis had established that B is false, but she no longer confidently asserted that B is true. I would summarize this by saying that I think Anscombe won a significant, but only partial, victory, and in this I believe Lewis would concur.

Did C. S. Lewis come to think that Christian Apologetics is a Misguided Enterprise?

 

The Anscombe incident is often trotted out as an object lesson for those foolish enough to engage in Christian apologetics. An example of this comes from Ruth Tucker, a Christian author from Calvin Theological Seminary who uses the Anscombe incident as part of her critique of Christian apologetics and defense of fideism. Tucker thinks it was a good thing that Lewis left some of his apologetics behind and came to the foot of the cross, taking the line that Lewis gave up apologetics for, mostly children’s fantasy tales, after the Anscombe incident.  She thinks this was good because apologetics is an enterprise that renders the Christian intellectually arrogant and domineering (and, of course, we all love Narnia). She does note that Lewis revised his chapter to repair the “serious hitch” that Anscombe had revealed (something not usually mentioned by those who use the Anscombe incident to prove some anti-apologetic point), but seems not to ask the question of why anyone would bother to revise an apologetic argument if they had been persuaded that this argument was simply bad, or that arguments for God don’t work, or that apologetics is a bad idea. In fact Lewis wrote lots of fiction prior to the Anscombe incident, and plenty of apologetics after it,

She chides me as someone who defends Lewis’s original argument (I don’t, I defend his revised argument, with amendments), and she thinks it telling that I wasn’t able to persuade my dissertation committee that my argument was a good one. Hers seems to be a version of the argument against the apologetic enterprise that says, “Well, these arguments don’t persuade people, so why spend time on them?”

But anyone who spends time in secular academic circles knows that one can be made to feel that Christianity, or even theism, is a nonstarter and that everyone is entitled to simply assume its claims are false. I remember a friend of mine once telling me about a philosophy professor who told his students “Let me clue you in. There’s no God.” Many discussions in the philosophy of mind take materialism for granted as a basic assumption. Encountering this, as many do, I asked whether this was the result of overwhelming evidence, of whether there were deep and serious problems with atheistic materialism toward which Lewis was pointing. Studying the argument in grad school (it took me awhile to be fully convinced), I concluded that the latter was true. I’ve never assumed that the case for Christianity is necessarily going to overwhelm people, or even to provide absolute certainty for the believer, but rather that, at the end of the day, there are good enough reasons for reasonable people to conclude that Christian theism provides the most adequate understanding of the world. If people are persuaded that intelligent people don’t accept Christian beliefs, then faith tends to suffocate. Austin Farrer put it very nicely in his essay on Lewis as an apologist.

It is commonly said that if rational argument is so seldom the cause of conviction, philosophical apologists must largely be wasting their shot. The premise is true, but the conclusion does not follow. For though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish. So the apologist who does nothing but defend may play a useful, though preparatory, part.

On the definition of naturalism

Here is a DI2 post on the definition of naturalism. 

Renewing Dangerous Idea 2

Here.  It's my dedicated AFR blog. 

An interview on the AFR

 An interview of me on the AFR. 

Here.

Materialism and morally motivated actions

1. No act is morally motivated if it can be fully explained in terms of nonmoral causes.

2. If materialistic atheism is true, then all actions can be fully explained in terms of nonmoral causes.

3. But some actions are morally motivated.

Therefore, materialistic atheism is false.

Abortion and stigma

 Supporters of abortion are concerned about women being stigmatized for getting abortions. I wonder if women who refuse abortions and have children under difficult circumstances now run the risk of being themselves stigmatized, i. e., women who choose to carry Down's Syndrome babies to term.

Quite apart from pro-choice, there is a pro-abortion movement that really does encourage people to get abortions. I think pro-lifers put too much emphasis on winning a political battle over abortion laws and even abortion funding. The real abortion battle takes place in the minds and hearts of women making choices about difficult pregnancies. I think the mainstream position at Planned Parenthood is to push the idea that women should never be stigmatized for getting an abortion. In this way they minimize the serious moral decision that has to be made, and I think it's going to have the effect of stigmatizing people who DON'T get abortions when other people think they should. "Well, you had a choice. You knew this was going to be difficult. Why do you go ahead and have the baby?"

This article, by a pro-choice philosopher, illustrates the problem.

What would happen if you vaporized Planned Parenthood?

 Planned Parenthood does more than abort babies. If you defunded it, or vaporized it, would the abortion rate go up or down? I think Hillary Clinton talked about a county in Texas the defunded Planned Parenthood, and the abortion rate went up. 

Of course, these consequential issues remind me of another question. Is the point of murder laws to prevent murder? What if we lived in a possible world in which murder laws actually resulted in there being more murders than there would otherwise be. Should murder be illegal if that were true? 

A debate on the argument from reason

 Between Max Baker-Hytch and the Cosmic Skeptic. 

Here. 

Chesterton on determinism

 ..you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say "thank you" for the mustard.

Orthodoxy CW1:228

J. R. Lucas on the Philosophical Climate at Oxford

 The philosophical climate in which I grew up in Oxford was one of extreme aridity. The ability not to be convinced was the most powerful part of a young Philosopher’s armory: a competent tutor could disbelieve any proposition, no matter how true it was, and the more sophisticated could not even understand the meaning of what was being asserted. In consequence, concern was concentrated on the basic questions of epistemology almost to the exclusion of other questions of larger import but less easy to argue in black and white terms. The undergraduate who wanted to write essays on the meaning of existence was told to confine himself to the logical grammar of ‘is,’ and was not even allowed to ask what truth was, or how one ought to live one’s life.

Lucas, J.R. (1976), Freedom and Grace, London: SPCK, ix. 

Lucas passed away a year ago yesterday. 

The least needed Lewis book?

 For Easter.

Christopher Derrick wrote: "Of all C. S. Lewis's books, I suggest the one the world needed least is Miracles." I find this statement strange. Miracles seems to be aimed not at the philosophical community, but at lay people trying to deal with modern biblical scholarship. There you find people committed to evaluating miracle claims with an explicit (in the case of Rudolf Bultmann), or an implicit methodological naturalism, and given the fact that Christianity is founded at its core on certain miracle claims being the case, Lewis, responding to a suggestion by Dorothy Sayers, was making a case against evaluating biblical accounts with a bias against the supernatural. The argument against naturalism fits in in that he is arguing that even the reasoning processes we use to reason about matters such as the miracle claims in Scripture presuppose the falsity of what would eventually be known as the causal closure of the physical, so why assume closure in biblical studies? This is an ongoing issue in biblical studies, and is has come up in Derrick’s Catholic Church, so I find Derrick’s remarks puzzling. However, the argument is also of considerable interest from the standpoint of philosophy, given the widespread presumption of materialism or naturalism in the philosophy of mind.

Lewis on retribution, revenge, and mercy

 For Lewis punishment is about retribution,  which is different from revenge. Revenge is not limited by what someone deserves, and typically when people take revenge, the do more to them than what they did to the other person. When you give someone what they deserve, you can't hurt them more than they deserve, and Lewis is open to saying that courts can be merciful and, for a good reason, give people less than they deserve. 

See here. 

Two Australian penologists responded, here, as did Australian philosopher J. J. C. Smart, here, who in spite of famously becoming an act utilitarian, seems to have been a rule utilitarian at this point. Lewis responded here. 

Materialism and determinism

If we are simply material beings, aren't our actions determined by the laws of  physics? Particles in the brain are governed by the laws of physics, and if this is so, doesn't that mean that the brain is determined by the laws of physics? 

The Catholic Church, Dawkins, and the sexual abuse of minors

 The Catholic Church clearly teaches that sexual abuse of children is a grave sin. They may have failed to penalize and remove offenders the way they should have and failed to protect their parishioners as they should have, but they do teach that this is very wrong. Atheist Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, has said that being molested as a child was not such a big deal

Does universal causation entail determinism?

 If you mean by a cause something that contributes to the occurrence of an event, then the statement "every event has a cause" does NOT entail determinism. This is why I object strongly to the textbook's definition of determinism, when the text says that if every event has a cause, then determinism is true. Now you can define a cause as a guarantor of a subsequent event, and if you do that, you can go from universal causation to determinism. But only if you do that. 

This is the textbook, if anyone is interested. 

Dawkins on science informing morality

 He seems to think anti-abortionists are misguided absolutists. 

Here. 

America first?

 It's hard to argue against the idea that you should care for you own family before others, although this goes against utilitarianism. What interests me are the people who say we should care for Americans before we spend any money trying to help people in foreign countries. Is that just national prejudice, or is there a reason for saying "America first?" 

How can you argue for universal human dignity without religious premises--if you are facing a skeptic on the issue?

Are there any "tribal" or "status"  limits to who deserves to be treated as a real human being. Cultures develop strong rules for how you treat someone, but there are all sorts of limits on who gets treated as a real person. Human inequality was thought to be a basic fact of existence. Good citizens of Greece and Rome treated boys of low birth as sexual objects, and dumped them when they were no longer desirable. Christianity played a role in changing this, in that Christians saw every person as someone for whom Christ died, so would it really make sense to believe that Christ died for human garbage? But Christians have not absorbed this message consistently, as some of them owned slaves and treated them like human garbage. We've become convinced, in theory, that every human being is worth of respect, in society as a whole, but if someone needed to be persuaded that all humans deserve respect and there is no human garbage, I am not sure how you'd argue it without religious premises. 

Is scientism self-refuting?

"Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know."

― Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science

Isn't this self-refuting? Unless of course you can devise a scientific experiment that can test the claim, that "Whatever knowledge is attainable must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know." 

Relativism vs. Objectivism

 If one person says "McDonald's hamburgers are tasty" and another person says "No, they taste awful," arguably the statements have a "for me" clause implied, which makes them not really contradictory (I like them, you don't, where's the contradiction). Moral relativists think that moral statements are statements about what an individual, or a society , prefers. And if you see it that way, the contradiction evaporates and the Law of Noncontradiction does not apply. 

Moral objectivists think that there is a real right and wrong that our moral judgments can either match or fail to match. The law of noncontradiction does apply. 

 

On what it is to be a skeptical inquirer: Not enough evidence, or a mind not open enough?

Here is an argument from an essay in psychology on psychic phenomenon. 

We did not examine the data for psi, to the consternation of the parapsychologist who was one of the reviewers. Our reason was simple: The data are irrelevant. We used a classic, rhetorical device, adynaton, a form of hyperbole so extreme it is, in effect, impossible. Ours was “pigs cannot fly”— hence data that show they can are the result of flawed methodology, weak controls, inappropriate data analysis, or fraud. (Reber & Alcock, 2019b, p. 8)

Reber, A. S., & Alcock, J. E. (2019b). Why parapsychological claims cannot be true. Skeptical Inquirer, 43(4), 8–10. 

 I once wrote this in a paper on Hume on miracles. 

Bertrand Russell was reportedly once asked what he would say to God if he were to find himself confronted by the Almighty about why he had not believed in God's existence. He said that he would tell God "Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!"[1] But perhaps, if God failed to give Russell enough evidence, it was not God's fault. We are inclined to suppose that God could satisfy Russell by performing a spectacular miracle for Russell's benefit. But if the reasoning in David Hume's epistemological argument against belief in miracles [2] is correct, then no matter how hard God tries, God cannot give Russell an evidentially justified belief in Himself by performing miracles. According to Hume, no matter what miracles God performs, it is always more reasonable to believe that the event in question has a natural cause and is not miraculous. Hence, if Russell needs a miracle to believe reasonably in God, then Russell is out of luck. Russell cannot complain about God's failure to provide evidence, since none would be sufficient. But God cannot complain about Russell's failure to believe.

Atheist philosopher Jonathan M. S. Pearce maintains that materialism is an article of faith (compared to idealism)

 Idealism was the position that C. S. Lewis adopted (not Christian theism) when he was persuaded by the argument from reason. 

Here. 

As for the role of idealism in Lewis's history, see here. 

RIGHT-WING CANCEL CULTURE

Obama: “Like if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself. ‘Cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was? I called you out’.” “That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change.”

RWCC: Sorry, Barack, you’re cancelled. You are part of the Left, and the Left supports cancel culture.

Biden: Black Lives Matter protestors have a concern about systemic racism that is well taken. But property crimes or acts of violence in support of BLM is still criminal, and should be punished by law.

RWCC: Sorry, Joe, you’re cancelled. You are part of the Left, and the Left excuses violence and looting on behalf of the causes it supports. It is only crimes on behalf of Donald Trump that are inexcusable.

Biden: I oppose Medicare for All. I defended my opposition to it in the primary campaign against its leading advocate, Bernie Sanders.

RWCC: Sorry, Joe, you’re cancelled. You are part of the Left, and the Left supports Medicare for All.

Biden: I oppose defunding the police. We need to fund the police more in order to better equip them to handle sensitive and difficult racial situations.

RWCC: Sorry, Joe, you’re cancelled. You are part of the Left, and the Left wants to defund the police.

Biden: Even though I support a woman’s right to choose abortion as a matter of law, as a Catholic I nevertheless believe abortion to be morally wrong.

RWCC: Sorry Joe, you’re cancelled. You are part of the left, and the left loves abortion, and wants women to shout their abortions.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

I keep hearing Biden (and Obama, and other Democrats) attacked for what they don't believe, and have said they don't believe, because we know they're on THE LEFT and hence if you vote for one of them, you must somehow support everything THE LEFT supports, even if you don't support it and the don't support it. Why?

Pro-choice vs. Pro-abortion: does it matter

Apparently there is a split in the pro-choice camp. Some reject the idea that they are pro-abortion, others embrace it.  Apparently to be truly pro-abortion, it implies that you see the fetus as outside the range of moral consideration, so that abortions are morally equivalent to other kinds of medical procedures.  Someone who is merely pro-choice, I take it, opposes efforts on the part of the state to outlaw abortion, but believe that nonetheless, the fetus's life is valuable and that abortions can certainly take place of immoral reasons. I heard of a case in which a woman got an abortion because she didn't want to appear fat in her wedding pictures. To refrain from disapproving of that, you would really have to be pro-abortion and hold an strict interests view of the value of the fetus's life (the fetus is not valuable because it is not well-enough developed to have an interest in its own survival). 

One could make the case that the President and Vice-President are split on this matter, although Harris has never, to my knowledge, indicated whether she considers some abortion to be immoral, or not. Biden I know thinks they are pretty much all morally unacceptable, in spite of his pro-choice politics. Harris just throws out pro-choice rhetoric when the issue comes up. 

For those who are pro-life, should this matter? Pro-choice or pro-abortion, the legal outcome is the same. But there is another abortion debate, the debate occurring in the minds of pregnant women who have to decide whether to get an abortion. And the difference comes there.

Space, Time, and Logic

 Causal and sorting processes seem to me to be qualitatively different processes from reasoning. Reasoning involves the knowledge of logical truths and the capacity to be affected by logical truths. Naturalistic processes have causes that are restricted to entities within space and time. But logical truths are not located in space and time. If you believe something because you perceive an entailment, this implies that a) there are entailments, and b) we can perceive them. But since these entailments do not exist in space and time, something other than nature has to exist to enable us to perceive them.

Unless, of course, we recollect perceiving those entailments ina past life, as suggested by Plato. I suppose that's possible, too. 

Taner Edis on chance-and-necessity physicalism-a bottom-up understanding of the world

 This is from atheist Taner Edis: 

Physical explanations combine rules and randomness, both of which are mindless…Hence quantum mechanics has an important role in formulating chance-and-necessity physicalism, according to which everything is physical, a combination of rule-bound and random processes, regardless of whether the most fundamental physical theory has yet been formulated…Religions usually take a top-down view, starting with an irreducible mind to shape the material world from above. Physicalism, whatever form it takes, supports a bottom-up understanding of the world, where life and mind are the results of complex interactions of fundamentally mindless components.

If this is true, how could it be possible, at the same time, to say that you believe this because the evidence is good. If everything that happens in the world is, in the final analysis, the result of mindless causes, then your belikef that this is so is also the result of mindless causes, and is therefore unjustified. 

An exercise in political science

 Here's an exercise for people. Provide definitions of liberalism and conservatism, or definitions of socialism and capitalism, in such a way that no one will be able to tell after you are done what position on these matters you yourself hold. And while you're at it, do the same thing for pro-life and pro-choice.

Is it justifiable homicide if you kill abortion providers? Is abortion itself justifiable homicide?

 Some states—including South Dakota—consider homicide justifiable when it is an act of self-defense or in defense of another person. But HB 1171 would expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include homicide that is intended to prevent harm to a fetus in certain circumstances. Abortion is not only legal in this country, but is a constitutionally protected right. As worded, this bill is an invitation to murder those who provide these legal health care services.

Here. 

Is it wrong to kill abortion providers? I would have thought prolifers would want to keep the range of justifiable homicide narrow. 

For an argument that defends abortion as justifiable homicide, see here. 

Murders, justifiable homicides, and other killings of persons

 What do you mean by murder? There are malicious acts of murder, there are justifiable homicides, but then are there homicides that are not justified, but not murder either?

The grand miracle

 The central miracle of Christianity isn't the Resurrection. It's the Incarnation, according to C. S. Lewis. 

Merry Christmas. 

The resemblance fallacy and the death penalty

  I think it is a fallacy to think that in order to fit the crime, a punishment has to resemble the crime. People think that way about murder, but what about theft, rape, or torture? 

Abortion in the interests of the fetus?

 Well, if a fetus is aborted, it goes to heaven. If it is not aborted, it might live long enough to commit a damnable sin. 

But that isn't the argument that is discussed here.  The child's earthly life is likely to be miserable, so would it be better to abort it rather than condemn it to a short life of suffering. 

utilitarianism and the value of life

 I once knew someone who was such a utilitarian that he thought human life was not a value at all. A friend of mine once asked him "Well, if that is your view, what would be wrong with me killing you now?" His answer was "Only if you could do it painlessly. 

One kind of pro-choice argument

 In the 2005 article “Most Abortions Are Morally Legitimate,” Bonnie Steinbock puts forward an argument stating that abortion is in fact morally justified in most cases. Steinbock begins by declaring that her belief on the morality of abortion is based on two considerations which are the moral status of the embryo and the fetus and the burdens imposed on women through pregnancy and childbirth. Steinbock also puts forward the interests view, which limits moral status to people who have interests in their future and restricts the possession of interests to people who are conscious of the world around them. Following the logic presented by the interest view, Steinbock argues that fetuses are not conscious enough to understand their interests and that it is not morally wrong to kill a fetus when there is an adequate reason for doing so. Steinbock further discusses the view on abortion possessed by Don Marquis and argues that it is wrong because it attempts to claim that a fetus is a conscious living being and that it would be immoral to kill an unborn child even though they have no awareness of their interests and the outside world.

Abortion and future technology

 An interesting sidebar to the abortion issue would be this. People who are pro-choice often say that  the intent of getting an abortion is not the death of the fetus, it is instead the termination of the pregnancy. At the present time we don't have the means to keep fetuses alive, so fetal death is normal inevitable result of abortion, but strictly speaking, it's collateral damage from the pregnancy termination. We can imagine technology developing to where anyone who wanted to terminate their pregnancy could have the fetus removed and then put into an artificial incubator where they will be kept until birth, after which they will by put up for adoption. If such technology develops, would pro-lifers still hold that it is wrong to get abortions? Would pro-choicers still insist that a woman has the right to secure the death of the fetus (Judith Jarvis Thomson says otherwise)?

The faith of President-elect Biden

 Here.  For those who are just interested in the abortion stuff, it's around 13 minutes in. Apparently he had a discussion with Pope Benedict on the issue. 

Can the law punish all wrongs?

 There are certainly things that most of us regard as immoral that we wouldn’t want criminal laws against. For example, I think most of us would consider it wrong to make false promises to someone in order to get them into bed with you. But do you really want the long arm of the law poking into your dating life in order to detect and punish this offense.

Christian political independence

 I think you can make pragmatic and tentative choices of party as a Christian, but Christian ought to be, in an important sense, independent of any party. Parties are coalitions that combine godly and ungodly interests, almost by definition.

A great but neglected Lewis essay is one called Meditation on the Third Commandment. When I was writing a column in the bulletin for the church I worked at back in 1980 (!) the Moral Majority was just taking shape. I wrote an essay in which I basically cribbed Lewis's essay to argue that the Moral Majority was a misguided enterprise. 

Determinism is determinism

Determinism is determinism. There is only one kind of determinism. It is not the case that hards believe in outside forces and softs believe in inner states. No, both affirm that a causal chain going back before the agent was born is causally responsible for every action. The difference is whether that is relevant in determinism moral responsibility. Hard determinists say that this causal chain means people are not free and not morally responsible for their actions. For soft determinists the causal chain is real, but irrelevant to moral responsibility. Same determinism, different implications of determinism.

Determinism and responsibility in the final analysis

 If determinism is true, if one person is a murderer and another person is a law-abiding citizen, the ultimate reason goes back before the people were born. In what sense is it really, ultimately, the murderer's fault, at least in the final analysis?

Substitutionary atonement and intuition

It might seem counterintuitive to some people that punishing an innocent person can satisfy the demands of justice against a guilty person. It may be correct, but there is an intuitive barrier to get over.

The Death Penalty and Exonerating the Innocent

 Although the death penalty is appealing in a lot of ways, it is irreversible, which means that if it turns out there is a miscarriage of justice and someone is executed for something they didn't do, nothing can be done about it. For 30 years Anthony Ray Hinton was on death row for a murder he didn't commit, until the Equal Justice Initiative picked up his case and got him exonerated. Knowing what I know about the tendency to rush to judgment, and the racism inherent in the justice system in our country, I have trouble trusting the system enough to retain the death penalty.

On an eye for an eye

Jesus stated it in order to cancel it and introduce a higher law which rejects vengeance and payback. He instructs us to respond to our injustices with a higher form of response —- love. Jesus then gives illustrations in the passage which indicate how we should respond in love.
One, “But I tell you not to resist an evil person…” (Vs. 39). This doesn’t mean not to defend yourself. The meaning of the Greek text is “don’t payback evil with evil means.” It means don’t be aggressive in retaliating by evil means. Don’t escalate the situation by trying to get even.
Jesus continues, “But whoever slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Vs. 39).
There is of course a limit to this but it means, “be very patient and don’t respond aggressively or rudely”. It means to respond in a positive courteous way to show an attitude and speak in such a way as to show the spirit of Jesus. The Bible say we are to be slow to anger. Jesus forgave even those who crucified Him.

Nov. 22, 1963

 Aldous Huxley died on this date in 1963. So did a couple of other famous people.

Abortion: Something to shout about?

 

It seems to me that there are a lot of situations in which a woman might make a decision to get an abortion. They could be doing it because having a baby would compromise their party lifestyle. They might be doing it because they were raped. They might to do it because they don't want to put off their college degree. They might do it because they know they can't afford to care for the child once it's born, or because they won't be able to afford to get the prenatal care they will need to complete the pregnancy. Or they could choose abortion because they don't want to bring a disabled child into the world (implying that disability makes a life not worth living). The only way you can argue that abortion is OK across the board is to maintain that the fetus, prior to birth, is a blob of tissue that has no intrinsic value. Many people who might not be prepared to equate all abortion with murder might nonetheless think that in an abortion you cause the loss of something of considerable value, and that decision to abort, at minimum, should not be taken lightly. (But others actually think abortions are something to shout about). https://shoutyourabortion.com/book/

Soft Determinism and moral responsibility

 Soft determinism says that even if (and even though) determinism is true, we are still responsible for our actions. What does that mean exactly,  that we are responsible for our actions? Moral responsibility seems to have two distinct meanings, and you might answer the question of soft determinism differently depending on which one you mean.  One meaning it might have is that, even if determinism is true, our motives cause our actions, therefore actions that attempt to correct our motives in order to change our future actions are warranted. Whatever might be causing me to contemplate  committing a cold-blooded murder, if you don't want me committing that cold-blooded murder, then whose motive needs to be modified? Well, mine. So you may want to attach penalties to cold-blooded murder so that have a countervailing motive to whatever my motive for murder might be, and not commit the act. If I do commit the act, then you are going to want to find out who did it, and maybe do something to me that will deter others from doing the same thing. But what if determinism is true, and the fact that I am a murderer and you are a law-abiding citizen is, in the final analysis, the result of factors beyond my control, or yours. If you are trying to correct someone's motives and change their behavior, pushing the question of "responsibility" further back like that doesn't make sense. But what if what you are doing is first and foremost trying to give me what I really deserve, to approximate in human terms what presumably God, if there is one, will be doing at the Final Judgment? Then it seems to me that being concerned about determinism is more plausible, since it seems to be a matter of cosmic luck that I happened to end up on the end of a causal chain that made me a murderer, but made you a law-abiding citizen.

In what sense are we responsible for our actions?

An interesting aspect of the free will controversy has to do with the kind of moral responsibility that is at stake. Is it the kind of moral responsibility that can justify retribution, or maybe even eternal retribution? Or is it something else, such as knowing who to motivate through reward or punishment. I first encountered the free will problem in the context of debates of Calvinism. Calvinists and their opponents agree concerning the sense in which we are responsible for our actions--if someone goes to hell because of sin, they deserve to go to hell because of sin. So, in that context, you have to ask whether being predestined by God to, say, commit murder renders you still responsible, sub specie aeternitatis, for committing that murder. And it seemed to me that if determinism were true, and circumstances, (such as a divine eternal decree) rendered it impossible for me to do otherwise from commit a murder, I am not responsible for that murder, but that whoever issued that eternal decree, as the ultimate source of my action, would be.

Consider the fact that "the devil made me do it" is considered an almost comic example of a lame excuse. The reason we are usually given for this is the idea that the devil tempts us, but we have the free will to resist the devil, in which case the devil will flee. This seems to assume that we have libertarian free will. No one made you do anything.

Later, when I wrote my master's thesis on free will, I realized that many compatibilists were secularists, and who were not ascribing responsibility to agents in the same sense that Christians were. They were asking questions, perhaps, of the utility of punishment in ascribing moral responsibility. And here, I thought, their "compatibilist" position was at least consistent. They weren't saying that people were responsible for their actions in some "last judgment" sense, they were saying that we need to know who to motivate and how when we punish, and that the question of ultimate moral responsibility need not be asked.

However, weakening the sense of moral responsibility can have some potentially dangerous consequences that Lewis notes in his famous essay on the humanitarian theory of punishment. What happens if we say that what someone deserves doesn't matter, and what we must do is simply do what will protect society, deter crime, or rehabilitate the criminal. Will this give us the license to reform criminals any way we see fit, regardless of their freedom and dignity? Do we have the right to brainwash people into not committing crimes? Do we have the right to "fix" people we might think will commit crimes for the benefit of society? Does the abandonment of free will lead to fundamental changes in who we think we are?

This is related to the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment."

Was the election stolen?

At the risk of sounding like Loftus, Let's look at this from the point of view of an outsider. Suppose I come here from a foreign country. I am not a Republican or a Democrat. There are all the sources of information out there. I am trying to figure out whether the election was stolen. How would I assess the evidence on this matter? By what neutral criteria should I take, say Sean Hannity seriously and Rachel Maddow not seriously? Both, no doubt, have an axe to grind. But you can grind your axe with facts, or with "alternative facts." Or are we stuck with the Nietzschean conclusion there are no facts, only interpretations of facts. (Is that a fact?)

Compatibilism, the devil, and Jeffrey Dahmer

 

Free will, along with the existence of God and perhaps the mind-body problem, is one of the philosophical issues that is of great interest to a lot of people. One idea that offends many of us would be the idea that someone should be treated differently, or even punished, because of the color of their skin. Martin Luther King’s dream was that his children would one day be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Judging someone by the content of their character is not arbitrary in the way that judging someone by the color of their skin is. But why?

            Well, because arguably, our character is, to a large extent, a product of the choices we make. We do not choose our race, but we do choose our actions. Thus, we treat bank robbers differently than we treat non-bank robbers, and that’s not discrimination, because people chose to rob a bank, but did not choose to be white or black.

            Or did we? A well-known African-American comic from my youth, Flip Wilson, used to have a character who frequently used a punch line, “The devil made me do it.” A country song entitled “Speak of the Devil” includes the following lyrics:

Speak of the devil
He took me out again last night
He got me drunk and he got me in a fight

He was chasing women
I was just there for the ride
Speak of the devil
He took me out again last night

            I won’t here attempt to adjudicate the question of whether or not there is a devil. But I would ask why this might be perceived by its intended audience as a lame excuse, even if people in the audience believe that the devil is real. Those who believe in the devil normally think that while the devil can tempt you to do something, he ordinarily does not make you do it. You could, and should, have chosen to resist. The devil may highlight in your mind the attractiveness of wrongdoing, but he cannot by his temptations guarantee that you will do the wrong thing.

            But we can imagine the devil doing a great deal more than just tempt. Suppose the devil were to literally cause your body to engage in numerous acts that you believe to be evil, while your mind watched helplessly in horror, unable to prevent your body from committing a series of horrible crimes. If that were true, then surely you would not be responsible for those crimes, it would really be the devil.

            But now suppose that what the devil does is something different. He finds an eight year old boy, Little Jeff, and alters his brain chemistry in such a way that it guarantees that  he will grow up to be notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey forms the desire to commit the horrible murders he committed, and those desires cause him to commit those murders. The devil made him do it, in that the devil’s actions guaranteed that he form the desires and commit the murders. But there was not Real Jeffery inside thinking that he was being driven against his will to commit crimes. So if this is true, who is responsible for the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer? The devil, Jeffrey, or both?

Is religion for me?

 If you say religion is not for me that seems odd in the following way. Religions make assertions about God, Christ, how one comes into relation to God through Christ (or some other way), etc. Now it seems to me that either God is real or not, either Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity who rose from the dead or he is not, and either Christ has established the Catholic Church and sacraments as the way to be in relation to God. If these things are all true, then everyone should be a Catholic, and if they are false, then no one should be a Catholic. I don't see how these things can possibly be a matter of personal preference. These are claims that something is true, and these claims are either true or false. 

Abortometrics, or what is the real pro-life goal?

 Is getting abortions as close to zero as possible the pro-life goal, or is it something else?

From the point of what I would call abortometrics, the idea of trying to figure out what policies will produce the most nonabortions, it is not clear to me that the Republicans are any better than the Democrats. Democrats supported the idea that employers don't have the right to fire employees for getting pregnant, allowed for unpaid medical leave in the Family and Medical Leave Act, and try to make sure that everyone, including pregnant women, get health care. They support paid medical leave, and that would give women a reason not to get an abortion. All Republicans try to do to produce nonabortions is to prevent access by reversing Roe and allowing states to ban abortion. In other words, they think the only way to get rid of abortion if to use force to prevent women from having access to abortion. But because we are a nation governed by the people, this would only be possible in a few red states. In other words, the attack the supply side of abortion. On the other hand, they seem contemptuous of any policies that would decrease the number of abortions by decreasing the need for them. Many pro-choice people in the Democratic party strongly dislike abortion (Biden certainly, though I am not so sure about Harris). Historically, abortion rates don't go down any faster under Republicans than under Democrats. The old slogan for Democrats was safe, legal, and rare, although there has been some, to my mind disturbing backing away from this perspective. But, in practical terms, a safe legal and rare strategy might in fact produce fewer abortions that a strict pro-life position, given the impracticality of getting anything close to an across-the-board prohibition of abortion. So, if the goal is to get the abortometrics as close to zero as possible, (a goal shared by pro-lifers and anti-abortion pro-choicers and no, that's NOT an oxymoron.) Now, maybe pro-lifers think that the abortometric approach is the wrong way to approach abortion. I suppose they think that pro-life laws and the supply strategy are more deontologically adequate even if they are infeasible and less effective abortometrically than the demand strategy. But if the goal is to get as close to zero on abortions as is feasible, then it is less that clear which party is really more pro-life.

Controversial claim?

Either God exists or God does not exists. If God exists, then the people who say that God exists are right, and the people that say that God does not exist are wrong. On the other hand, if God does not exist, then the people who say that God does not exist are right, and the people that say that God does exist are wrong. 

Originalism and Judicial Activism

The Constitution says I have the right to bear arms. Does that mean a) a musket (which is what the Founders surely had in mind, 2) a handgun, 3) a machine gun, 4) an assault weapon like an AR-15, or 5) a hand-held nuclear device? We are supposed to look at the original meaning of the words and just go by that. But the founders had no idea what types of weapons would be in existence 200 + years after they wrote. So, no matter what we decide aren't we stuck with some damn activist judge, liberal or conservative, deciding what is in the spirit of the Second Amendment? Originalism offers no answer that I can see.

Is it OK to use deceit in opposing abortion?

 Here is an interesting problem. Working from the point of view of pro-life politics, putting a replacement for Ginsburg on the court with the present President and Senate would be a victory, as was refusing to the nomination of Merrick Garland and leaving the seat open to be filled by Neil Gorsuch.  It could have been done on the basis of straightforward power politics, we have the majority in the Senate, we want a conservative majority that will overturn Roe and do other things we want, so we are leaving the seat open. We will do it because we can.  But they didn't do that. 2016, like 2020, was an election year, and they specifically argued for the Garland refusal by insisting that in an election year the people should decide. They used this rhetoric,  no doubt, to help Republican candidates in tight Senate races look good. And they didn't qualify it, that is what they said. They didn't say it applied only if the President and the Senate majority were of opposite parties. Lindsey Graham said if this happened with a Republican President the same principle would apply, and if he changed his mind, you could use his words against him. Well, he changed his mind, and he is in a re-election race. Or maybe he didn't, maybe it was power politics from the beginning for him, and he was gambling on this never coming up. In any event, Jaime Harrison should be able to use it this to his advantage. 

If we act on principle, the idea of this is that we are going to be willing to employ the principle when it is convenient for us as well as when it is inconvenient. 

But we can also ask this question: If you are a pro-life Christian, should you be happy about the use of deceit to promote the prohibition of abortion? In this context there is also the payment of a huge sum of money to Norma McCorvey, the Roe of Roe v. Wade, who was paid that money because her support for the pro-life cause was thought to be wavering, who really didn't support the pro-life position, and who wrote a book convincing millions of people that she had changed her mind. It was called "Won by Love," but was she really won by money? A committed pro-lifer could say that the deceit involved was a small price to pay considering the fetuses that were (presumably) saved. And they might say that same thing about deceitfully implying that Republicans were following principle, as opposed to practicing power politics, in refusing to allow Merrick Garland's nomination to be considered. 

One response would be to say that people on the other side are deceitful in this or that way, so it's hypocritical to bring this up. But hypocrisy arguments are inherently weak and are often beside the point. But what that suggests is that if a rule is being violated on the other side, it is no longer valid. What you are saying is that deceit in the interests of pro-life is justified, since people on the pro-choice side practice deceit. But does that follow in any sort of logical way?

And this ties in with the whole Trump issue. How many deceits and transgressions of basic Christian values are Christians willing to tolerate because, after all,  he's "pro-life." (This is in scarequotes because I find it impossible to believe he cares about fetuses. This is a transactional deal with the pro-life movement--you scratch by back and I'll scratch yours.) This is a man who straightforwardly mocked the fundamental value of loving and forgiving one's enemies, something the Bible says a lot more about than it says about abortion. 

Some evangelicals, if confronted with the news that Trump had just shot three people to death on Fifth Avenue, would just say "Well, I still support him. At least he's pro-life." 

But let me ask this question as pointedly as I can. If you are pro-life, to what extent is deceit justified in pursuing that goal. If the right to life is a good end, what means are justified in pursuing it?

Anscombe's final response to Lewis's revised chapter in Miracles

 This is a paper Anscombe did for the Oxford C. S. Lewis society, which I have not seen until recently. 

Will reversing Roe save fetuses? Maybe a couple.

Reversing Roe will NOT outlaw abortion, unless you use legal arguments that say that we can show that fetuses are persons in every relevant sense and that laws permitting abortion are in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. That is what the argument would be if you follow pro-life logic out to its logical conclusion, but that is not the argument that people like Scalia use against Roe. They claim, not that the fetus's right to life was denied by Roe, but rather that a woman's right to privacy is not as absolute as Roe implies that it is. Hence, Scalia says, abortion should be decided by democratic choice. He may be right, but democratic choice in most states is going to be on the side of the pro-choice position, except in some Bible Belt states, and even there I doubt that such strong abortion laws are going last very long.

 I've also found it somewhat puzzling that since 1980, most of the Supreme Court Justices have been nominated by Republican Presidents who have been pro-life, and yet Roe is still going strong, supported in many cases by the decisions of those justices put there by Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump. Even Brett Kavanaugh, who did vote with the dissenters in the Louisiana case, tried to send it back to the lower courts to avoid having to rule on it, which is not the actions of someone eager to overturn Roe. And Roberts, well, he didn't even want to overturn precedent on a ruling he opposed a few months earlier, because of stare decisis. What chance is there that he would overturn Roe? I conclude that maybe if Roe had not happened, fetuses might have been saved, but overturning it now would save two fetuses in the State of Mississippi. The horse is out of the barn and not coming back.

I would add that the abortion rate DROPPED during both the Clinton and the Obama administrations. In real practice, Republicans do worse than Democrats at keeping fetuses from being aborted. 

Who are the police defunders?

 Republicans keep accusing Democrats of wanting to defund the police. But Biden, in particular, has been crystal clear about his opposition to violence. And his running mate has spent most of her career putting people in jail. So, you have Biden saying that he opposes defunding the police, and wants more money devoted to them because better police training will prevent police brutality, and that takes funding. You have the Republicans refusing to fund state and local government, which is causing a money crunch for the very entities who FUND the police. Republicans TALK about Democrats wanting to defund the police, but they are not helping state and local governments because they don't like the ideology of governors and mayors. But state and local government is how police get funded. Period. There's no other way they get funded. The pandemic has created a fiscal crisis for state and local government, and while the Democratic House has passed legislation supporting state and local government, the Republican Senate under Mitch McConnell has said no. So, let me ask again, who are the real defunders of the police?

I support Obamacare--for selfish reasons?

 I would never have been able to get get cancer prevention surgery in 2017 under the old system. It would have been sufficiently "emergent" only if I had come in with cancer, which means I might be dead now if the Affordable Care Act had not been passed. I contracted a chronic auto-immune disease at 23, and no one has wanted to sell me health insurance since. Unfortunately, I haven't had employment situations that allowed me to get health care through an employer, so I was on self-pay through much of my adult life. Until Obamacare.

I suppose you can say my reasons for supporting Obamacare are self-centered, though I no longer need Obamacare. If you could show me that the interests of others as a whole would be improve by a repeal of Obamacare and a return to the old system, I am more than willing to consider it.

Do you believe in the physical world? Where's your evidence?

 If we need proof for a belief, then we will need proof for the proof, and then proof for the proof, and then proof for the proof for the proof, ad infinitum ad nauseum. The demand for evidence has to stop somewhere. Take your belief that there is a physical world. Suppose I told you that only minds exist, and the you need to prove that there is something physical in existence. Lots of people think they don't have to prove the existence of the physical world, but belief in the physical world is a belief just like any other belief. If we must accept NO belief without supporting evidence, then we ought not to believe in the existence of the physical world without evidence.

Wingnuts of all faiths

 This is a wingnut anti-masker who happens to be a Christian.  But wingnuts come from all religions, including the atheist religion.