Jim Ryan of Philosoblog posts infrequently, but always interestingly. Ryan is both a conservative and an atheist. Being a conservative, he appreciates the importance of gratitude. Being an atheist, he sees no reason to take gratitude and its importance as supportive of theistic belief. Herewith, some commentary on his post A New Error Theory for Theism.
1. Gratitude and human flourishing. Ryan rightly suspects a connection between gratitude and human flourishing: "The ordering of attitudes and dispositions in the soul is dysfunctional if at or near the center of these there is no deep gratitude, by which I mean gratitude that this world exists and that one lives in it." I believe this is a genuine insight.
2. The nature of gratitude. Let us first note that gratitude exhibits a triadic structure. To feel grateful is for someone X to feel grateful to someone Y for something or someone Z. If I receive a gift, I am grateful to the donor for the gift. 'To whom?' and 'For what?' are both questions it is appropriate to ask in ordinary cases of gratitude. And as the grammar of 'To whom?' suggests, the donor must be a person. I cannot be grateful to a vending machine for disgorging a can of Pepsi upon the insertion of a few coins. Here too we have a triadic relation: the machine gave me a can of soda. But I cannot be grateful to a machine, though I could perhaps be grateful to its installer or manufacturer or inventor. It would be a case of incorrect or inappropriate emotion were one to feel grateful to a vending machine. I hold, with Brentano, that one can distinguish between correct and incorrect emotion.
Note also that what one is grateful for, the gift, must be gratuitously given. I can be appropriately grateful only for that which is freely given, which implies that the donor is both a free agent and an uncoerced free agent. If Robin Hood forces you to give me your money, I cannot be appropriately grateful to you, though I may be to Robin Hood. For there to be gratitude, there must be a donor, and it is necessary that the donor be a person; but it is not sufficient that the donor be a person: the donor's donation must be a free act.
3. Can one be grateful to a not presently existing donor? If I am grateful to a person P at time t does it follow that P exists at t? Or can one appropriately feel gratitude only to persons who presently exist? Suppose someone likes what I write and mails me a check as a gift for my blogging endeavours. Unbeknownst to me, the donor dies before I receive the check. I am grateful to him for the check even though at the time of receiving the check and feeling the gratitude he no longer exists. This suggests that gratitude to a person P does not entail the present existence of P. And certainly it does seem that gratitude to past persons is appropriately felt. A child, student, philosopher might appropriately feel gratitude in respect of his deceased parents, teachers, predecessors. If one feels grateful to a person surely the gratitude does not end when the person does. My gratitude to you can survive your death though it cannot survive mine. (I am assuming for the moment that we are not immortal souls.)
4. Gratitude to a never existing donor? Can one appropriately feel grateful to a nonexistent person? A child, for example, feels grateful to Santa Claus for her Christmas presents. This looks to be a genuine case of gratitude despite the nonexistence of the person to whom the child feels grateful. But note that for the child the existence of Santa Claus is an epistemic possibility. If the child were convinced of the nonexistence of the fat guy, then she couldn't feel grateful to him. Note also that the triadic structure is preserved. The girl is grateful to Santa Claus for her presents despite his nonexistence. If a theist is grateful to God for his existence, his gratitude is what it is whether or not God exists. But a person who disbelieves in God cannot be grateful to God.
5. Must the relata of a relation all of them exist? #4 points up a fiendishly difficult philosophical question that turns up in many different contexts: Can a relation obtain if one or more of its relata do not exist? #3 points up the same problem on the assumption of presentism, the doctrine that (the contents of) the present alone exist, that past and furture items to do not exist.
6. Metaphysical gratitude. What Jim Ryan is talking about, however, is not ordinary gratitude -- gratitude to some intramundane person for some intramundane object -- but what we might call metaphysical gratitude or what he calls "deep gratitude": gratitude for the existence of the world and our lives within it. Now if this is a genuine case of gratitude, it seems appropriate to ask to whom we feel grateful. This person can only be God, as Ryan realizes, since only God could bestow the gift of the world's existence. So it would seem that a metaphysically grateful person is grateful to God. A theist might try to argue from gratitude to God as follows:
a. We are appropriately grateful for the existence of the world
b. To be grateful is to be grateful to someone
c. The only person to whom one can be appropriately grateful for the
existence of the world is God
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d. God exists.
7. Ryan's rejection of this argument. Ryan will of course reject this argument by rejecting premise (b). He maintains:
P: There is no entailment from the proposition that one feels gratitude to the proposition that there is someone to whom one feels gratitude.
That could be read, not as a denial of the triadic structure of gratitude, but as saying that, from the mere fact that one feels grateful, it does not follow that the person to whom one feels grateful exists. (Compare the Santa Claus example above. The child is grateful to someone, namely, Santa Claus; but it does not follow that Santa Claus exists. Or consider the situation in which presentism is true and one is grateful to a dead parent. One would then be grateful to a nonexistent donor.) So from the mere fact that one feels grateful for the existence of the world, it does not follow that God exists, even in the presence of the auxiliary premises that gratitude is by its very nature gratitude to a person, and the only possible donor of the world is God.
This seems right and refutes the (a)-(d) argument. But it raises an interesting question. Suppose the following: subject S is grateful for some object O; O can only be the gift of some person P and S knows
this to be the case; S either knows or else is subjectively certain that P does not exist. Are these suppositions consistent? Can I be grateful to a person I am subjectively certain does not exist? Ryan is subjectively certain that God does not exist. How then can he feel grateful for the existence of the world given that he knows that gratitude is by its very nature gratitude to a person and that in the
present case the person can only be God?
8. Gratitude and Gladness. I say that Ryan cannot be grateful that the world exists given his atheism. For if he is grateful, he is grateful to someone, and this someone can only be God given that the object of the gratitude is the existence of the world. I grant that gratitude for the existence of the world does not prove the existence of God. But the gratitude to be gratitude must allow the existence of God: the existence of God must be epistemically possible for the subject of gratitude. But Ryan's 'gratitude' is blended with subjective certainty of God's nonexistence: the existence of God is not an epistemic possibility for Ryan. So I say that what Ryan feels is not gratitude. Ryan concludes,
Atheists can feel deep gratitude, as well, however. When we construe the emotion as deep gladness and modesty, the personal object (God) drops out. One is simply glad that this universe exists and that one lives in it. There need be no one to whom one is grateful. So, the error theory doesn't cast any aspersions on deep gratitude. It is perfectly consistent with holding, as I do, that deep gratitude is indeed part of proper functioning for human beings.
I deny that atheists can feel deep (metaphysical) gratitude, gratitude for the very existence of the world and our lives in it. An atheist is one who explicitly denies the existence of God. For such a person it is not epistemically possible that there be a person to whom to be grateful for the existence of the world. Since the existence of God is a priori ruled out, what the atheist feels cannot be gratitude. Gratitude by its very nature is gratitude to a person. Granted, the existence of the person is not guaranteed by the presence of the emotion; but it can't be excluded by it either. It is incoherent to feel gratitude to a person one believes did not ever exist. Ryan can no more feel gratitude for the existence of the world than I can feel gratitude for Christmas presents whose existence could only be explained by Santa's having dropped them down my chimney.
An atheist can be glad that the world exists, but gladness is not gratitude.
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