Ciceronian Review

Don't Know No Will

I think that the crux of van Inwagen's discussion of free will as a response to the global problem of evil is that God does not know how a creature with free will will choose.  Omniscience has a more limited meaning than expected.  As van Inwagen puts it, God has no belief about what the free fellow will do.  The time line is gnarly.  God does not have a belief about what free fellow will do but surely God has belief about what free fellow is doing and what free fellow chose to do.  I understand how that could be true of an ant-like fellow such as me, but it makes no sense to me that omniscient God does not know. God has no belief and so does not bring it about that...is that the story?  It looks awfully like there are states of affairs which God cannot being about. 

It is tied to the moral evaluation of the Deltas and Epsilons in Brave New World.  We are to think that the state of affairs in which they are conditioned to love their circumstance is morally deficient (or worse).  I don't entirely share the intuition -- well, not today -- whatever is bad there must have to do with having a free will which is somehow thwarted or stunted (else the birds are a terrible blemish on the world).  There are times when the work is redolent of Sartre and Beauvoir and Camus. 

See Q

"if it is such a good thing for a creature to have free will, why did God make so many creatures that lack free will?"
van Inwagen does not address this issue, at least as far as i have read (which is most of the way through the book) -- but he does suggest that what creatures have free will is not easily decided.  But I think that he can easily make some points concerning the limits on what creatures have free will.  I would expect that free will, whatever it is, must have a set of preconditions so to speak, i.e. and e.g., reason.  Entities which are not reasoning and rational probably are without free will.  Whether that is so will require reading another and a different book; pretty standard conditions, however.

I am disinclined in that direction -- because it is does nothing to help explain how free will gets into the causal chain, or to explain how free will is free from causation.  But those are separate debates.

It is a mistake to think of what van Inwagen is up to is theodicy; that is my fault I think.  I have not explained the project well.  van Inwagen has set his work up in a way which lays the burden of argument (persuasion) on the atheist.  His aim is not to show that we should believe in God, but that the problems of evil do not provide sufficient argument to show that there is no God -- or that it is not unreasonable to believe in God.  Even that may be misleading.  To be discussed in a bit is that van Inwagen thinks that, for all we know, the Eden story could be true -- it is not precluded by archeology and paleontology and biology.  I had to stop reading for a bit at that point.  I do not understand what he means by saying that Eden could have been true for all we know.  But whatever it is, that is the standard here for the theist.  If you can swallow that, then the arguments do what van Inwagen wants. 

I will need to hunt up a different approach to the topics are van Inwagen, something that sets the bar a bit higher.

More Will Without Charge

Back to Problem of Evil.  So, in answer to the global point that the world has plenty of evil in it, van Inwagen tells us that free will is an answer and explanation.  Evil comes into the world through free will, or the choices made under free will.  The good of free will is a great good, so we are told.  I suppose it might be.  Van Inwagen does not explain how free will is a great good, he just says it is.  One would think that if free will is a great good and great enough to offset or overweigh some or all evil in the world, there would be some explanation of how free will is so good, and an explanation of some sort explaining how it is that free will being good outweighs evil of any kind.  (I am not sure that the sides need be commensurate, but still there has to be something to say about the balancing.)  The question is how could free will outweigh evil, either in the sense that it overbalances evil, as it were, or in the sense that it looks a might close to consequentialism of a sort. 

If free will is a good that outweighs evil, what is the measure, what is the balancing?  It is not at all obvious that it possible to say anything useful or intelligent on this point.  What is it about free will that is so good?  Which is to ask what is the good there at all.  I suppose one might wave at Kant (or the like).  He thought a good will was the only unconditional good - a view that is both creepy and wrong.  (Look, what sense is there to a good will standing alone?  What is the sense of talking about will, unembodied, having any kind of value?  There just is not any way in which a person could will good without willing something in particular in the particulars of the world, and that, sad to say, is not at all what Kant had in mind.  Of course, as he was a solipsist, there isn't any world for him anyway and the whole ethics is in a pail.  Digressing.) 

On the other side, doesn't the argument make God into a consequentialist?  Otherwise, what is the point of the great good of free will, and the necessity of imbuing some with it?  If free will is to do work in the argument, then it must not be in the mystery cloud but a set of concepts we little ant fellows can grasp and make use of.  Which ties the two sides together -- how does it balance and what is it that is being balanced. 

For myself I do not really understand what van Inwagen has in mind with the talk of free will.  I do not see how it gets into the causal chains without getting into the causal chains, which he tells us it does not.  Maybe I should get his book on free will -- I doubt very much it will solve these problems for me, but maybe I will have a better sense of what he is trying to do.   

Next, return to the standard of success in this work for the theist. 

Evil Will

I have been reading van Inwagen's Problem of Evil, listed to the side. The aim of the book is to show that the arguments from evil are not sufficient to show that there is no God.  The work is divided into section (lectures, as they are the Griffith lectures) on various general forms of the problems of evil.  The first is consideration of the general or global problem of evil, i.e., the existence of evil at all.  van Inwagen's argument here is based on free will.  (He assumes the existence of free will.)  The first version of the argument seems to come this:  God created the world (or universe, if you prefer), and so doing created a world that was good.  Part of the creation is the gift of free will (to rational or sapient agents).  Free will is a good thing, but that is not the point.  It is that free will entails choice by the agent, and choice that is free with respect to the agent.  But free will also means that God does not know how the agent will choose (whent he agent chooses).  God cannot make people such that the choices will turn out in a particular way, i.e., be known in advance by God.  (If God knows how the choices will turn out, then there is something about the agent which dictates the outcomes and then the choices are not free, at least I think that is what is going on.) 

The argument is a little puzzling to me.  Why is it that God cannot make people such that, in particular circumstances, the choices are reliably predictable (or knowable to God even if not predictable)?  We know as to any actual agent or class of agents that they are not perfect and not perfectly reasonable.  There is lots of evidence that choices can be guided, and that choice must have some physical basis or nature.  The choices are physically embodied.  Why is that not enough to make the choices knowable (to God)? Which I suppose is just a way of asking about the connection between free will and embodiment.  (It is also one of the ways in which Kant was wrong -- a good will is not good at all because a will considered in itself cannot have such a property at all; but that is also because a will is not anything considered in itself.)

This is the preliminary step.  The next steps make the argument look a bit as if God is a vaporous Bentham.  But that is another day.

Uncle Milt

The University of Chicago is working on founding a research institute in economics to be named for Milton Friedman.  Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics back in the the seventies.  (Friedman was a fairly nice guy, but no matter.)  Not surprising, the idea has encountered some resistance.  The opposition seems focused on the likelihood that the institute will be seen as a University endorsement of a certain brand of right wing politics and economics, the sort Friedman himself was long associated with, e.g., Chile, etc.  The supporters offer this as explanation of the aim of the Institute:

Mr. Hansen said that the primary connection between Friedman’s approach and the institute’s is the idea that research ought to be empirically grounded or based in real-world experiments. “We want the best research out there,” no matter what someone’s personal views are, he said.

That description may not mollify the critics, because it a research program a bit distant from Friedman's.  He had no interest in empirical research,; he consistently rejected any notion that empirical results mattered to the validity of economic theory; his own account of economic theory is about as anti-empirical as it could be.  Maybe he had a death bed conversion?  Or better, like Friedman himself, we ignore the evidence and just go forward as convenient.  

Catch-22 Is Still Good

The GitMo trials continue to produce curiosities, as this story in today's NYT attests.  Detainees who represent themselves create many problems for the trials.  The detainees have limited access to the evidence, and in some cases only to classified evidence that is introduced against them, even in capital cases.  The integrity of such a process is doubtful.  If you read through to the end of the story, you find the following:

But when it came his turn on Thursday, Mr. Mohammed, known as K.S.M., dwelled on the challenges. He said he had asked the guards for paper so that he could begin to draw up legal motions. The answer, he told the judge, was that paper was not authorized.

Judge Kohlmann seemed to acknowledge the challenge of writing a motion without paper. Nevertheless, he told Mr. Mohammed, even such a small thing as a request for a pad of paper had to follow procedure.

“There’s going to have to be a motion,” the judge said, “in accordance with our rules."

KSM must file a motion to get paper.  To file a motion, he must write a motion, which requires the paper he can only get if he first files a motion.  It is hard to tell if the report is accurate -- one hopes the reporter has made some error rather than that the judge is a broken brick.

Power and Good

I have started on van Inwagen's The Problem of Evil.  Lecture 2 (the book is based on his Gifford Lectures) is about the meaning of God.  van Inwagen is interested in the traditional Abrahamic God of Jews, Christians and Muslims.  Two of the properties of this God are omnipotence and good.  What omnipotence means is pretty hard sorting, which is not going to be done in this book.  God can do anything possible means such stuff as he can lie, which seems an odd ting to say.  I am fine with that decision, as it is certainly a book in itself trying to describe and sort the notions of possibility necessary to make sense of the claim.  God is also good, that is, morally perfect.  That is also weird.  It is weird because it seems to mean that God does and can do only good.  But certainly the world is not under that description.  Van Inwagen tells us that

Suppose, for example, that a human being inflicts pain on others--without consulting them--to produce what is, in his judgment, a greater good.  Many of us would regard this as morally wrong, even if the person happens ot be right about the longterm consequences of the pain he inflicts.  Let us suppose that judgment is correct.  My point is that it does not follow from the correctness of this judgment that it would be wrong of God to inflict pain on human beings -- or angels or beasts-- to produce some greater good.

Is it that the wrongness depends on some property of the actor?  That is very odd thing for a theist of his sort to say I think.  It cannot be that A is good because done by God.  That makes the property of moral perfection vacuous.  Moral assessment must be tied to something about the conduct or the effects.  Why then would it matter who did the act?  Surely it is not like some institutional authorization (that leads to A is good because God did it or says so, which cannot be, at least not in this context).  So it looks like it is a claim to the effect that there is (at least) one morality or good for folk like us and a different morality or good for other things.  God is under a different set of rules, so to speak.  That won't work either.  There is no sense to the claim that God is morally perfect but we have no idea what morality he is perfect in.  If it is not the morality we work under, then the property of moral perfection is useless.  It really is like saying God is not subject to morality.  I suppose van Inwagen is saying that there is no formal entailment from the claim that state of affairs or conduct A is immoral for human beings to A is immoral with respect to God.  Maybe.  Why is that any help?  If the entailment conditions are tight, one can get the same result by changing the person involved, and there is no God part at all.  If the entailment is weak enough to do some work in this world, it seems to be a commitment to the view that morality is different for different kinds of things.  That is a view that would seem to be very difficult to square up with theological context.

So it is a fun book so far.

Standards

When an academic copies texts from others without acknowledgment or attribution, if the academic is a student it is called plagiarism.  Usually results in same serious sanction.  When a law school faculty member does it, it is not plagiarism but copying.  So the NY Times, and so George Mason School of Law.  The famously leftwing NYT apparently isn't so much when it comes to rightwing academics -- a search of the Times under "plagiarism" will not return this story, which is quite interesting in itself.  What is described is without doubt plagiarism. And the word even appears in the story.  I wonder why it is not pulled up by a search? The focus of the Times story is the effect of the plagiarism on O'Neill's prospects for confirmation to the bench.  The fact that George Mason has done almost nothing about the misconduct is mentioned only in passing.  The story really seems a case study in special pleading and intellectual dishonesty.

The most obvious hypocrisy is the failure of the university to impose any sanctions at all for the misconduct.  (Putting of tenure decision for a year is not a sanction -- it happens for lots of reasons wholly unrelated to misconduct and does not address the misconduct at all.)  It is hard to believe that a student found to have engaged in a pattern of dishonesty of this type would be left in such a good spot -- the university's reaction here is not even equivalent to retaking the class.  But it is clear enough that a student would be expelled or maybe suspended for a year.  Here, Mr. O'Neill keeps his job, keeps his pay, continues with full privileges and teaching.  This is shameful.  But of course he is such a nice guy and his friends and neighbors are sure the pattern of plagiarism is nothing much, just a bit of negligence or messy record keeping.  Really now, that is ridiculous.  Tracking sources is awfully easy.  If that is too hard, why would one trust anything out the mouth or hand?  Would we accept such a story from a student?  Have her friends line up and attest to good character?  Write it off as a bit of negligence?  Doubtful.  These are violations of core aspects of the man's job. 

But, sadly, there is plenty of recent precedent for law schools ignoring faculty misconduct.  Harvard for example thinks it is fine for tenured faculty to plagiarize.  A firm reprimand with perhaps a bit of finger wagging in private ought to be sufficient.

The short of it -- the George Mason law faculty and administration should be ashamed.  Or maybe the deal is that he has paid for the position.  That at least would fit with the libertarian bent of the place; but then they should say that.

Embargo Again

An arms embargo has been announced against Zimbabwe, and yesterday the German government asked Zimbabwe’s supplier of paper for money to stop shipments.  Monetary sanctions against leading members of government have been announced by the United States, and the United States is urging UN action against Zimbabwe.  (On Africa, Bush policies have been reasonable on the whole, even laudable.)  Zimbabwe is one of a class of problems – an example of a class of problems – in politics.  Mugabe and his government are illegitimate, their rule disastrous for the country on almost every scale.  (There are weird stand-outs – literacy seems to have continued to rise.)  Pretty much wrecked the place, and it was once for a while an alluring place.  But the problem:  what to do?  How to bring about a better and reasonable state of affairs there?  I think the embargo on arms is good thing.  Certainly doing what is possible to limit the force available to the state will be for the better, at least marginally.  (Maybe only marginally – consider Myanmar.)  It is also quite clear that arms embargo alone will not lead to any change in government.  Even with no change, absent large scale intervention (a la Angola or Nicaragua), there will be neither change nor an effective insurgency.  And I very much doubt n insurgency would be to the good.  Such wars are almost always long and extremely bloody and destructive.  So something else – other and additional embargoes or sanctions.  The place where it gets hard to commit to a course as likely to have positive effect. 

 

Large scale economic sanctions do not seem to have an impressive record.  Seem to have because I am just going on recollection and not any recent research.  Maybe they do work.  But some examples.  Iraq, before the invasion, was long under UN sanctions.  Did not seem to move the state at all, nor have sanctions been much noticed as altering the policies of Iran.  There are other similar examples.  But what changed in South Africa?  Was it all internal?  Isolation seems not to have moved Cuba, and engagement does seem to have some correlation with change in Russia and China.  I wonder how much, though, and how it worked (if it did). 

Typography and Constitutional Law

Although there has been a great deal of commentary on the Heller decision, all of it assumes there is no question about the text of the Second Amendment. Me too, I had not considered the possibility that there is not a canonical text.  But, if the last several issues of Green Bag are to be believed, there in fact is a question about the text.   See the Summer 2007 article by van Alstyne and Winters piece in the Winter 2008 issue.  In particular, whether and where commas.  Seems to have been that there are three or five different versions presented and approved by the several States, etc.  The absence of commas seems to me to make a difference in what is said.  Without them, it seems harder to make out the purposes of the clauses, or that there are clauses.  At least all less certain, and so lesser grounding for the great boom of Antonin.  I found the articles fascinating, albeit morbid.  

I don' t know that the articles are to be believed; never done a lick of research on the typographical question, and have not checked any of the footnotes.  Maybe the articles are jokes, in which case I must admit being among the (or even the only one) fooled.