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. 

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.

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). 

Heller's Scalia

The Supreme Court's decision in Heller has elicited the expected torrent of commentary, blogs and editorials.  The decision is eliciting praise and condemnation, mostly on ideological grounds.  I wish I could share in the joy, but, to be honest, I found Scalia's opinion slightly ridiculous.  Barnett sees a masterpiece of opinion writing, and scholarly at that.  I don't.  I see self-parody, indefensible assumptions and intellectual failure.  I think the most accurate and telling discussion is by Levinson at Balkinization (and Tushnet, for that matter).  (The series at Balkinization are quite interesting.)

Start with scholarly.  Having footnotes is not scholarship.  Footnotes which cite scholarship is not scholarly.  The notes have to be honest, cite the sources and fairly represent opposing or differing views.  Scalia does not do that.  The opinion is supported by the sort of biased selection of sources that renders the piece useless.  The sources are considered only to the extent they support his conclusions, both in the sense that only supporting sources are cited and that the sources are cited so as to identify only supporting bits.  That is not how honest intellectual work is done.  It is the sort of thing that would have gotten failing grades in any graduate program.  Honest work engages with the evidence, and with the inconvenient.  None of that here. 

It is bizarre to see Scalia playing at the historian and linguist.  Neither he nor his clerks are anything of the sort.  He has no training, and there is no reason to think him even competent on these issues.  It is ridiculous to suppose that his clerks could cure the deficit.  So either there is no dispute at all about the history and linguistics, or he is adjudicating a dispute he lacks the skills to adjudicate.  It is plain that it is the latter -- the text is hardly so simple or clear that it is beyond dispute then or now what is meant.

The intellectual committments of the decision are foolish in several respects.  Had the case coime up twenty years ago, the scholarship would have weighed overwhelming in a different direction. By Scalia's lights the decision then would go a different direction and the law would be settled now.  Or is it that the law is to be revised by the courts to follow the latest in each little field of scholarship?  Do professors of history count as binding authority?  And if the scholarship shifts again, does that destroy the foundation and force of Heller?

The project Scalia relies on - public meaning originalism - is a chimera.  It is in the opinion itself.  Scalia rejects out of hand the argument that if the Second Amendment is interpreted as the public meaning of the 1790s, then it has no application to any but weapons known in the palce at the time.  But why?  The public meaning could not have encompassed modern pistols or rifles, because such things were not known.  They could not be within the public meaning.  So at the outset, Scalia runs from his own theory.  (To beat the horse, why would people with no training in history or linguistics even want to be bound by a set of meanings they are not competent to discern?  There just is no way around a series of absurd outcomes with this sort of approach.  There is nothing at all wrong with branding or whipping or tarring or draw & quarter on this view.) 

Update:

Jack Rakove has an interesting discussion of the opinion from the perspective of a working historian.

Charles Chastain

Long ago, I had the good fortune to study with Charles Chastain.  Chastain did not publish much, just the one rather important article.  But Chastain was not just a philosophy of language philosopher.  He has wide interests and very interesting things to say about work in all of those areas.  I particularly remember discussions of the Chinese Room article by Searle, and talking with Chastain about problems of moral duty under law.  He was a tremendous teacher, at least of graduate students (I never saw him with undergraduates) because he was both extremely talented as a philosopher and smart, and very generous, if not kind.  It was a fine way to do philosophy -- engagement with ideas and people, and not focused on getting out another article too technical for all but a dozen others.  Working with Charles was a bit like the old fashioned close textual reading, but (fortunately) without the text.  It was all ideas, and sorting out how to get the pieces to fit together into something defensible.  (Being right was not the standard; it was hard enough to get to defensible ideas.)  That engagement was the sort of experience that got me involved with philosophy.  And through Charles I got to some time with John Taurek, whose PPA article is a classic -- still very interesting and exciting.  There is a conference in the fall in his memory.  Seems just the thing - philosophy at work.

I was saddened to learn of his death, partly of course for him and those close to him.  And some because it was a reminder of other directions.  But that was also a long time ago.  I had some good fortune in the philosophers I got to work or study with. 

The Dead Do Talk

The recent run of well-reported natural disasters has prompted me to get a study or two on the problem of evil.  The existence of evil and natural disasters seems to me an awfully compelling argument against the existence of a caring or loving God.  Obviously, such facts are not important if the subject is an indifferent or hostile God.  But that Christian fellow seems more than a little inconsistent with the affairs of the world.  It is no answer to talk about the mysterious mind, or not within our understanding, etc.  God is omnipotent and so can create the universe it wants.  This world could be otherwise, and, as God is omnipotent, there is no reason it could not be a world without such stuff.  As there is plenty of evil and plenty of misfortune, God must approve such turns.  There is no reason to doubt such things are bad.  (I suppose one might deny it, but I do not see how anything could qualify then, which causes a series of problems of its own.)
But I have never tried to frame the argument with any real care.  Conveniently enough a sale at Seminary Coop is going on, so I decided to buy Van Inwagen's book on the problem.  I know he will find the argument ultimately unsatisfactory -- but I know that just from the author, who always manages that conclusion.  I expect it will be carefully developed analysis, however, which is what I want.  I gave up trying to find something from the religious side -- none of the reviews I read suggested any good understanding of the issue or what might constitute an reasonable sort of answer -- which will not include 'faith.

Donna Dog

Harraway's book is divided into three sections, by subject and style.  The middle and final sections are the most accessible, and they were the most interesting for me.  Harraway is a biologist at UCSC  (the loveliest university in the county).  The book is not so much about when and how species interact, but rather about interactions between human beings and dogs (with some side stories and thoughts).  That is why I bought it.  When not being a theorist, she has interesting things to say; when talking biology theory she has interesting to things to say.  Philosophy, not so articulate.  I think one of the key messages is that species meet, interact.  In other words, there is somebody, albeit rather different, on the other side.  Dogs are intelligent and interesting creatures, as are lots and lots of other creatures.  (I think bees are in the category, too.)  So how to interact in ways that respect the conscious fellow over there?  She has things to say about that which consider the dog without anthropomorphizing the monsters.  A good and proper balance, respecting the drives different sorts of dogs experience.  That comes through much more clearly in the last two sections.  The second is mostly about her experiences with her dog in agility competitions.  (Basically, running obstacle courses -- a sport virtually designed for Australian shepherds.)  A bit much about the place in Sonoma -- clearly someone is getting paid well -- but that is envy (Sonoma is gorgeous).  That part of the book should be of interest to all sorts of dog nuts, like me.  The last section is more personal reminiscence about her family and career and so on.  I found the discussions of family touching.  The career story was different.  Touching in a different way because, in the middle of a discussion of some (in my view, not hers) remarkably silly people, she discusses Gary Lease, who recently died and from whom I took some classes long ago.  That discussion reminded me of that time.  But it also included a very kind discussion of contrasting misunderstanding.  One discussion starts out with meeting some graduate students who are soon off to a celebration of a birth, the celebration involving, inter alia, eating the placenta (cooked, apparently -- gourmet cannibals I guess), followed shortly by a dinner hosted by Lease who served freshly killed wild boar (my that would have been great) and the hostility of some to such meat (and maybe to meat tout court).  I guess mass destruction of insects does not matter.  Cannibalism is okay but eating the wild is not.  Not clear what theory moved these people. 

The first section is a discussion of theory informed by Foucault and Freud.  Fraud and fake.  It does provide an opaque apparatus that looks smart.  But neither should be taken that seriously.  Freud was a failure as a scientist, and largely a fraud.  Foucault is no better -- an archeology without historical accuracy.  With some Lacan thrown in.  If you spend the time, the ideas in this section match well enough to the other, and there is a theory of sorts.  But the language is not only an obstacle, the theoretical apparatus is a mess, and, ultimately, wrongheaded. 

Philosophy is a scam.

According to my email filter, Philosophy is a scam.  Should have known. 
I get announcements from Oxford about several different categories of books.  The emails re books on law and on classics come through fine, but the email for new books in philosophy is always marked as a potential scam.  The humanities really have fallen into disrepute.  Or maybe it is just the prevalence of books about Hegel?