Maverick Philosopher

Ladderman Revisited

This post dated 17 November 2004 is from Ladderman  and ought to be preserved.  So I reproduce it here.

Maverick Philosopher posted a short sharp reply to the now common leftist claim that America is becoming a "theocracy" under President Bush. Excerpt:

"Hostility to religion, especially institutionalized religion, is a defining characteristic of the Left. We've known that since 1789. What is surprising, and truly bizarre, is the Left's going soft on militant Islam, the most virulent strain of religious bigotry ever to appear. It threatens all of their values. But their obsession with dissent is so great, dissent at all costs and against everything established, that they simply must denounce Bush and Co. as potential theocrats, all the while cozying up to militant Islam."

That must have had an awful lot of truth in it as it even got a bite from Ladderman, who was paranoid (or egotistical) enough to think that the post referred to him, even though he was not mentioned in it.

Ladderman's only substantial point in reply, however, is that some Christians WANT to have their values (such as opposition to abortion) enshrined in legislation. Wow! What news! You can certainly rely on Ladderman for the scoops! Many Christians have wanted that from the year dot but it does NOT mean that they are getting it or are going to get it. Wanting isn't getting and Bush's policy as given in the Presidential debates is thoroughly centrist: He wants to make alternatives to abortion more attractive but he certainly has no policy of getting abortion banned.

And in fact American law generally has undoubtedly been becoming more secular with every passing year. The Christian fundamentalists have LOST the battle on things like abortion, public prayer, public display of religious symbols and prohibition of homosexuality. But Ladderman (Leiter) is only a Law professor so I guess he hasn't noticed.

If he went to Saudi Arabia or Iran he would find out what a real theocracy is like. Ladderman's bile has totally cut him off from reality.

Still More on the Morality of Celebrating the Death of Evildoers

It is not just some Christians who feel the moral  dubiousness of joy and celebration at the death of evildoers.  Here is Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld.  "So our tradition is clear: Public rejoicing about the death of an enemy is entirely inappropriate."  Here is a delightfully equivocal statement by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman.

Interestingly, Dennis Prager is still pounding on this theme.  About twenty minutes ago I heard him repeat his argument against me and others.  The argument could be put like this:

1. The Israelites rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, drowning them.  (Exodus 15)
2.  This rejoicing was  pleasing to God. 
Therefore
3.   To rejoice over the death of evildoers is morally permissible.

This argument is only as good as its second premise.  Two questions.  First, does the Bible depict God as being pleased at the rejoicing?  Not unequivocally.  Prager could argue from Ex 15: 22-25 that God was indeed pleased because he showed Moses a tree with which he rendered the bitter waters of Marah sweet and potable.  The Israelites were mighty thirsty  after three days of traipsing around in the wilderness of Shur after emerging from the Red Sea.  Unfortunately, Prager provided no support for (2).

But more important is the second question. Why should we take the fact that God is depicted as being pleased at the rejoicing -- if it is a fact -- as evidence that God is pleased?  I grant that if God is pleased at some behavior then that behavior is morally acceptable.  But the fact that God is depicted as being pleased does not entail that God is pleased.

And so, as a philosopher, I cannot credit the (1)-(3) argument.  It assumes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.  But this is not to be assumed; this is to be tested.  The Bible has to satisfy reason's criteria before it can be accepted as true. If the Bible violates the deliverances of practical reason (as it quite clearly does in the Abraham and Isaac story, see my Kant on Abraham and Isaac)  then it cannot be accepted in those passages in which the violation occurs as the word of God.

We who have one foot in Athens and the other in Jerusalem face the problem of how we can avoid being torn asunder.  On the one hand, philosophy can bring us to the realization  that we need revelation; on the other hand, nothing can count as genuine revelation unless it passes muster by reason's own theoretical and practical lights.  This is not to demand that the content of revelation be derivable from reason; it is to demand that nothing that purports to be revelation can be credited as genuine revelation if it violates the clearest principles of theoretical and practical reason, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction and the principles that one may not kill the innocent or rejoice over another man's evil fate.

The problem is to reconcile divine authority  with human reason and autonomy.  Two nonsolutions may be immediately dismissed:  fideism which denigrates reason, and rationalism which denigrates faith.

Maverick Philosopher 7th Blogiversary

I began this weblog seven years ago today in 2004.  My seventh year ended well yesterday with 1717 pageviews for the day and with Dennis Prager reading from one of my posts on his nationally syndicated radio show.   

Some say that blogging is dead.  Read or unread, whether by sages or fools, I shall blog on.  A post beats a twit tweet any day, and no day without a post.  Nulla dies sine linea.   It is too early to say of blogging what Etienne Gilson said of philosophy, namely, that it always buries its undertakers, but I am hopeful.  After all, a weblog is just an online journal, and journal scribbling has flourished most interestingly for centuries. 

To put it romantically, blogging is a vehicle for the relentless quotidian sifting, seeking, and questing for sense and truth and reality without which some of us would find life meaningless.

This, the fourth version of Maverick Philosopher, was begun on 31 October 2008.  I thank you for your patronage.

The Reference Relation: Internal or External?

What is (linguistic) reference?  Is it a relation?  Edward the Ockhamist assumes that it is and issues the following request:  "To clarify, could I ask both you and Bill whether you think the reference relation is ‘internal’ or ‘external’?"

Here is an inconsistent tetrad:

1. 'Frodo' refers to Frodo
2. 'Frodo' exists while Frodo does not. 
3. Reference is a relation.
4. Relations are existence-symmetrical:  the terms (relata) of a relation are such that either all exist or none exist. 

Since the members of this quartet cannot all be true, which one will Edward reject?  Given what he has said already, he must reject (4).  But (4) is exceedingly plausible, more plausible by my lights than (1).  I myself would reject (1) by maintaining that there is no linguistic reference to the nonexistent.  It is not there to be referred to!

For me, reference is a relation. Is it internal or external?  Being the same color as is an example of an internal relation.  If a and b are both red, then that logically suffices for a and b to stand in the same color as relation.  Suppose I paint ball a red and then paint ball b (the same shade of) red;  I don't have to do anything else to bring them into the aforementioned relation.  You could say that an internal relation supervenes upon the intrinsic properties of its relata. 

But to bring the two balls into the relation of being two feet from each other, I will most likely have to do more than alter their intrinsic properties.  So being two feet from is an external relation.  If the balls fall out of that relation they needn't change in any intrinsic respect.  But if the balls cease to stand in the same color as relation, then they must alter in some intrinsic respect.

In sum, internal relations supervene on the intrinsic properties of their relata while external relations do not.

Suppose 'Max' is the name of my cat.  Then 'Max' as I use it has a definite meaning.  The sound I make when I say 'Max' and the cat are both physical items.  Surely they do not stand in a semantic relation.  No physical item by itself means anything.  So the semantic relation must connect a meaningful word (a physical item such as a sound or marks on paper 'animated' by a meaning) with the physical referent, the cat in our example.  Suppose the meaning (sense, connotation) of 'Max' is given by a definite description: the only black male feline that enjoys linguine in clam sauce.  Then the relation between the meaningful word 'Max' and the cat will be external since that meaning (sense, connotation) is what it is whether or not the cat exists.

If, on the other hand, the meaning of 'Max' = Max, then the semantic relation of reference is internal.  For then the relation is identity, and identity is an internal relation.

So it seems that whether reference is external or internal depends on whether reference is routed through sense or is direct. I incline toward the view that reference, since routed through sense, is an external relation. 

Geach on Proper Names: Mental Acts Chapter 16

Peter Geach, Mental  Acts, Chapter 16 (RKP, 1957) is eminently relevant to present concerns and quite sensible. Herewith, an interpretive summary. Per usual, I take the ball and run with it.

Geach rejects the Russellian view that ordinary proper names are definite descriptions in disguise, but he also rejects the notion that proper names have no connotation at all. As for the disguised   description view, it is "palpably false" since " . . . when I refer to a person by a proper name, I need not either think of him explicitly in a form expressible by a definite description, or even be prepared  to supply such a description on demand. . ." (pp. 66-67)

This seems correct. Thomas Aquinas once came up in a conversation I had with my unlettered brother-in-law. The latter said something like, "Aquinas was a big name in Catholic theology." My brother-in-law was undoubtedly referring to the same person I was referring to even though he would not have been able to supply even one definite description. Recall that to be definite a description must be of the form, the unique x such that [insert description]. 'A big name in Catholic theology' is an indefinite description.

Geach also provides an interesting critique of Quine's "intransigent" extension of the Russellian line whereby names are transformed into predicates. Thus for Quine 'Pegasus is winged' goes over into   something like 'There is exactly one x such x pegasizes, and x is winged.' Perhaps we will discuss Geach's Quine critique in a separate post.

Geach also rejects the view that ordinary proper names -- which, nota bene, are to be distinguished from logically proper names -- are devoid of connotation. On this view, "no attributes logically follow from a thing's being given a proper name." (67) Proper names are bestowed by fiat, whence it follows that there is no right or wrong  about the application of a name: there is no property possession of which by a thing is a necessary condition of the name's being attached to it. It is different in the case of a general term. If 'fat' is true of Al, it follows that there is a property in virtue of whose possession by Al the term is correctly applied to him. By contrast, on the view under consideration, we cannot speak of a name being true of its nominatum, or not true of it.

As I said, Geach rejects this theory of names according to which the meaning of a name is exhausted by its reference.  In the typical case, the same name applies to a person throughout his life from infancy to dotage. Geach takes this to imply that "the baby, the youth, the adult, are one and the same man." (69) They are not the same absolutely, or the same thing, but the same man. Here Geach sounds his theme of the sortal-relativity of identity. One cannot say sensibly of two things that they are the same absolutely; what one can say is that they are the same relative to some sortal under which both fall. If  so,

     . . . my application of the proper name is justified only if (e.g.)
     its meaning includes its being applicable to a man and I keep on
     applying it to one and the same man. On this account of proper
     names, there can be a right and wrong about the use of proper
     names. (69)

This jives with what I was saying earlier about 'God.' The notion that 'God' could denote anything at all, whether a sense of fear, a bolt of lightning, or what have you, strikes me as absurd. But that is the consequence one must swallow if one thinks of names as mere external tags devoid of sense. Geach now considers an objection:

     It has often been argued that it cannot be part of the meaning of a
     proper name that its bearer should be a man, because we cannot tell
     this by hearing the name, and because there is nothing to stop us
     from giving the same name to a dog or a mountain. You might as well
     argue that it cannot be part of the meaning of 'beetle' that what
     it is applied to must be an insect, because we cannot learn this
     meaning just from the sound of the words, and because 'beetle' is
     also used for a sort of mallet. In a given context, the sense of
     'beetle' does include: being an insect, and the sense of
     'Churchill' does include: being a man. (70)

What Geach is saying here contradicts what our friend Edward maintains, namely, that ordinary proper names are tags whose meaning is exhausted by their reference.  Suppose a one-eared rabbit wanders into my yard  and I give it the name 'Gulky.'  Just before the moment of baptism, the arbitrary sound 'Gulky' has no meaning at all.  At the moment of baptism, it acquires a meaning which is its referent.  Now suppose the rabbit wanders off and a coyote comes into the yard and I  say, 'There's Gulky again.'   You say,'That's not Gulky, Gulky's a rabbit!'  The point here is that once 'Gulky' is introduced as a name for a particular rabbit, it acquires not only a referent but also the connotation rabbit-name, a connotation that prevents me from applying that name to anything other than a rabbit.

And then one day the coyote kills Gulky. Does 'Gulky' cease to be a rabbit-name and go back to being a meaningless sound? 

As Geach says, there can be a right and wrong about the use of a proper name.  Having introduced 'Gulky' as the name of a rabbit, I misuse that name if I apply it to a coyote.  But if proper names are tags whose meaning is exhausted by their reference, then this would not be a misuse at all.  Ergo, etc.

 My point is that this is a non sequitur:

1. Reference of proper names is direct, i.e., not routed through sense.
Therefore
2. The meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its reference.   

More Mail on Prager, Osama, Judaism, and Pacifism

Hi Bill,

I was a bit surprised to read that in response to your post about tempering
one's joy at Osama's demise, "Prager pointed out that the Jews rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, and that this rejoicing was  pleasing to God."

First, I was surprised because a quick look at Exodus 15 does not say that the Israelites' rejoicing was pleasing to God. Maybe this was "lost in translation," but I very much doubt that, since the Bible is the most carefully translated book in the world.

You are right: Exodus 15 does not explicitly say that the Israelites' rejoicing was pleasing to God.  But one can infer from verse 25 that God was pleased, or at least not displeased, since God shows Moses a tree with which he sweetens and makes potable the bitter waters of Marah after they make it through the Red (Reed?) Sea and are mighty thirsty (Ex 15: 23-25). I should add that "this rejoicing was pleasing to God" was Dennis Prager's addition, as I understood him.

Second, I was surprised because I imagine that Prager was at some point exposed to a Talmudic story which is often recounted at the Passover Seder. A version that I was able to locate fairly quickly on the Web follows. As evil as Pharoah and the Egyptians were, when it came to their destruction at the hands of God through the plagues (particularly the death of the first born)and at the Sea of Reeds, the rabbis went to great lengths to temper our joy. A famous midrash in the Talmud makes the point:

When the Egyptians were drowning in the Sea of Reeds, the ministering angels began to sing God's praises. But God silenced them, saying: How can you sing while my children perish? We may rejoice in our liberation but we may not celebrate the death of our foes. To underscore the point, and re-enforce the value, the rabbis instructed that ten drops of wine be spilled from our cups [at the seder] diminishing the joy of our celebration, as a reminder of those who peished in the course of our liberation. It is said that this is also the reason why a portion of the Hallel (the great songs of praise) is omitted on the last six days of Passover.

By the way, I would like to question your agreement with Prager that pacifism is "immoral." Is it really immoral, or just not morally obligatory? Or perhaps it should be approached as part of an aspirational ethics. While I'm not a pacifist, I think it's something to which I ought to aspire. Perhaps one is less guilty for aspiring to, but not realizing pacifism, than for not aspiring to pacifism at all.

We agree that being a pacifist is not morally obligatory.  So the question is whether it is morally permissible.  The answer will depend on what exactly we mean by 'pacifism.'  Suppose we mean by it the doctrine that there are no actual or possible circumstances in which the intentional taking of human life is morally justified.  Someone who holds this presumably does so because he thinks that human life as such has absolute value.  Now if that is what we mean by pacifism, then I think it is morally impermissible to be a pacifist. Here is an argument off the top of my head:

1. We ought to (it is morally obligatory that we) work for peace and justice and oppose violence and killing.  "Blessed are the peacemakers."
2. It is sometimes necessary to kill human beings in order to maximize peace and justice  and minimize violence and killing. 
3. To will the end is to will the means.
Therefore
4. It is morally obligatory that we sometimes kill human beings to minimize violence and killing.
Therefore
5. It is morally impermissible that we never kill human beings to minimize violence and killing.

(1) is a deliverance of sound moral sense.  The NT verse is a mere ornament.  It is not the justification for (1).  Examples of (2) are plentiful.  (3) is an unexceptionable Kantian principle.  (4) follows from the first three premises.  (5) follows from (4).

  

Should we aspire to be pacifists?  In some senses of that term, sure. But not in the sense I defined.  It's a large topic.

Faithfully,
Bob Koepp

Ed Feser is Productive in More Ways Than One

Congratulations!

From the Mail: Christianity and Judaism

Dear Mr. Vallicella,   I want to begin by thanking you yet again for your fantastic blog. Your recent posts on Osama Bin Laden, the correct response to his death, and on evidentialism have been absolutely superb. I have linked to a great many of your posts in recent days on my facebook and I sing your praises regularly.   Thank you so much; that explains the uptick in social media traffic.   I wanted to bring up a couple of issues on your recent commentary on Prager's reaction to Bin Laden's death, and particularly your comments on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.   It is important to remember that Judaism as it is practiced today is NOT the way it has always been practiced. And first century Judaism in particular was very diverse indeed. One of the biggest challenges for Biblical interpreters has been archeological evidence that counters the view of Judaism presented in the Gospels and in Paul's letters as they are normally interpreted. Judaism was far more varied and diverse than what we once believed, at the time of Jesus and Paul. Many issues we think of as settled in Judaism were up for grabs, and arguments about and around them were common. One was the issue of intention verses action.   There are many similarities between Jesus' focus on the inner self and some parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. So thoughts could be sinful or righteous, in some sectors of 1st Century Judaism, at least. Christianity is the triumph of those sectors of Judaism, and not a new religious idea 'superseding' Judaism. I'm just not sure your characterization of Christianity 'superseding' Judaism is correct on the issue you and Peter were arguing about. I certainly do think Christianity and Judaism are possessed of important differences and Christianity gets some things right that Judaism gets wrong. But in the case of whether thoughts can be sinful, I think it is more accurate to say that Christianity is the triumph of a certain sector of Judaism.   That's an excellent objection, and you may be right.  So it is not that Christianity supersedes the whole of Judaism on the issue Peter and I were discussing, but that Christianity develops and champions a strand of thought that is already present in Judaism.  Now that I think of it, that is more plausible than what I was suggesting.   My main concern, though, was to figure out why Peter and I disagree about the moral evaluability of mere thoughts, and why Prager and I disagree about the moral appropriateness of rejoicing over a man's violent death -- even when the man in question is a mass murderer who was justly executed.   In light of this concern, I think there is some justification in viewing Judaism as a block and contrasting Christianity with it.   I think a criticism that can be leveled at Prager could be that there is a bit of literalism in his view. His proof-texting approach just doesn't make much sense to me, at least in this case. Most Biblical scholars believe, for instance, that the story of the crossing of "The Red Sea" (which is probably not the right translation for the name of the body of water), is several older stories edited together. When those stories are distentangled, some versions don't even include the death of Pharaoh's men. There are a lot of sentiments expressed in the Old Testament that I doubt Rabbis would readily suggest we can rightly hold.   So these are just some thoughts that shot through my head when I read that post, which like so much of what you write, really got the juices flowing.   Peace and Blessings Joshua Orsak

Waterboarding Led to Bin Laden Capture

One question about waterboarding is whether it is torture.  Liberals, who are generally sloppy and inflationary in their use of language, say it is.  These are the same people who think that ID checks at polling places 'disenfranchise' those without identification. (See this contemptibly idiotic NYT editorial.)  But on any responsible use of terms, waterboarding cannot be called torture.  (If that is what you call it, what do you call a Saddam-style red-hot poker 'colonoscopy'?) 

Waterboarding led to the Bin Laden capture as Peter King (R-NY) revealed last night on the O' Reilly Factor. 

Suppose we acquiesce for a moment in the liberal-left misuse of 'torture' whereby it subsumes waterboarding.  Even under this concession, could anyone in his right mind think that it is always and everywhere wrong to use torture?  That is the kind of extremism that characterizes liberals and libertarians.  They cannot seem to realize that otherwise excellent principles often admit of exceptions.

Free speech is another example. 

 

On Joy at Osama's Demise: Dennis Prager Responds to Me on the Air

It's been an interesting morning.  At 10:30 AM I noticed that my traffic was way up for the day.  And then at 11:12 AM I heard Dennis Prager reading on the air the first paragraph of a post of mine from yesterday in which I express my disappointment at Prager for rejoicing over Osama bin Laden's death when the appropriate response, as it seems to me, is to be glad that the al-Qaeda head is out of commission, but without gleeful expressions of pleasure.  That's Schadenfreude and to my mind morally dubious.

(Even more strange is that before Prager read from my blog, I had a precognitive sense that he was going to do so.)

In his response, Prager pointed out that the Jews rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, and that this rejoicing was  pleasing to God.  (See Exodus 15)  Apparently that settled the matter for Prager.

And then it dawned on me.  Prager was brought up a Jew, I was brought up a Christian.  I had a similar problem with my Jewish friend Peter Lupu.  In a carefully crafted post, Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong?, I argued for a thesis that  I consider well-nigh self-evident and not in need of argument, namely, that some mere thoughts are morally objectionable.  The exact sense of this thesis is explained and qualified in the post.  But to my amazement, I couldn't get Peter to accept it despite my four arguments.  And he still doesn't accept it.

Later on, it was Prager who got me to see what was going on in my discussion with Peter.  He said something about how, in Judaism, it is the action that counts, not the thought or intention.  Aha!  But now a certain skepticism rears its head:  is Peter trapped in his childhood training, and me in mine?  Are our arguments nothing but ex post facto rationalizations of what we believe, not for good reasons, but on the basis of inculcation?  (The etymology of 'inculcation' is telling: the beliefs that were inculcated in us were stamped into us as if by a heel, L. calx, when we were impressionable youths.)

The text that so impressed me as a boy and impresses me even more now is Matt. 5: 27-28:  "You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. [Ex. 20:14, Deut. 5:18]  But I say to you that anyone who so much as looks with lust at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

Not that I think that Prager or Peter are right.  No, I think I'm right.  I think  Christianity is morally superior to Judaism: it supersedes Judaism, preserving what is good in it while correcting what is bad.  Christianity goes to the heart of the matter.  Our hearts are foul, which is why our words and deeds are foul.  Of course I have a right to my opinion and I can back it with arguments.  And you would have to be a  liberal of the worst sort to think that there is anything 'hateful' in what I just wrote about Christianity being morally superior to Judaism.

But still there is the specter of skepticism which is not easy to lay.  I think we just have to admit that reason is weak and that the moral and other intuitions from which we reason are frail reeds indeed.  This should make us tolerant of differences.

But toleration has limits.  We cannot tolerate the fanatically intolerant.  So, while not rejoicing over any man's death or presuming to know -- what chutzpah! --  where any man stands in the judgment of God, I am glad that Osama has been removed from our midst.

Practical and Evidential Aspects of Rationality: Is it Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

I need to get clearer about the rationality of beliefs versus the rationality of actions. One question is whether it is ever rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence. And if it is never rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence, then presumably it is also never rational to act upon such a belief. For example, if it irrational to believe in God and post-mortem survival, then presumably it is also irrational to act upon those beliefs, by entering a monastery, say. Or is it? 

 

W. K. Clifford is famous for his evidentialist thesis that "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." On this way of thinking, someone who fails to apportion belief to evidence violates the ethics of belief, and thereby does something morally wrong. Although Clifford had religious beliefs in his sights, his thesis, by its very wording, applies to every sort of belief, including political beliefs and the belief expressed in the Clifford sentence lately quoted!  I take this as a refutation of Clifford's evidentialist stringency. 

 If I took Clifford seriously I would have to give up most of my beliefs about politics, health, nutrition, economics, history and a crapload of other things.  For example, I believe it is a wise course to restrict my eating of eggs to three per week due to their high cholesterol content.  And that's what I do.  Do I have sufficent evidence for this belief? Not at all.  I certainly don't have evidence that entails the belief in question.  What evidence I have makes it somewhat probable.  But more probable than not?  Not clear!  But to be on the safe side I restrict my intake of high-cholesterol foods.  It's a bit like Pascal's Wager.  What I give up, namely, the pleasures of bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning,  etc. is paltry in comparison to the possible pay-off, namely living  and blogging to a ripe old age.

And then there is a problem  whether Clifford has sufficient evidence for his evidentialist thesis.  It is obvious to me that he doesn't but I'll leave that for the reader to work out. 

Consider now the case of a man dying of thirst in a desert. He comes upon two water sources. He knows (never mind how) that one is potable while the other is poisonous. But he does not know which is which, and he has no way of finding out. Should the man suspend belief, even unto death, since he has insufficient evidence for deciding between the two water sources?

On one way of looking at the matter, suspension of belief would clearly be the height of irrationality. The desert wanderer must simply drink from one of the sources and hope for the best. Clearly, by drinking from one (but not both) of the sources, his chances of survival are one half, while his chances of survival from drinking from neither are precisely zero. By simply opting for one, he maximizes his chances of reality-contact, and thereby his chances of survival. Surely a man who wants to live is irrational if he fails to perform a simple action that will give him a 50-50 chance of living when the alternative is certain death.

Cases like this are clear counterexamples to theories of rationality according to which rationality requires always apportioning belief to evidence. In the above case the evidence is the same for either belief and yet it would be irrational to suspend belief. Therefore, rationality for a human agent (as opposed to rationality for a disembodied transcendental spectator) cannot require the apportioning of belief to evidence in all cases, as Clifford demands. There are situations in which one must decide what to believe. Will I believe that source A is potable? Or will I believe that source B is potable? In Jamesian terms, the option is live, forced, and momentous. (It is not like the question whether the number of ultimate particles in the universe is odd or even.) An adequate theory of rationality, it would seem, must allow for believing beyond the evidence. It must return the verdict that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational.

Let us consider another such case. What evidence do I have that my new neighbors are decent people? Since they have just moved in, my evidence base is exiguous indeed and far from sufficient to establish that they are decent people. (Assume that some precisifying definition of 'decent' is on the table.) Should I suspend judgment and behave in a cold, skeptical, stand-offish way toward them? ("Prove that you are not a scumbag, and then I'll talk to you.") Should I demand of them 'credentials' and letters of recommendation before having anything to do with them? Either of these approaches would be irrational. A rational being wants good relations with those with whom he must live in close proximity. Wanting good relations, he must choose means that are conducive to that end. Knowing something about human nature, he knows that 'giving the benefit of the doubt' is the wise course when it comes to establishing relations with other people. If you begin by impugning the integrity of the other guy, he won't like you.  One must assume the best about others at the outset and adjust downwards only later and on the basis of evidence to the contrary. But note that my initial belief that my neighbors are decent people -- a belief that I must have if I am to act neighborly toward them -- is not warranted by anything that could be called sufficient evidence. Holding that belief, I believe way beyond the evidence. And yet that is the rational course.

So again we see that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. A theory of rationality adequate for the kind of beings we are cannot require that belief be always and everywhere apportioned to evidence.

And now we come to the Big Questions.  Should I believe that I am libertarianly free?  That it matters how I live?  That something is at stake in life?  That I will in some way or other be held accountable for what I do and leave undone?  That God exists?  That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions?  That a Higher Life is possible? 

Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not. 

But here's the thing.  I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it.  It is like the situation with the new neighbors.  I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them.  I have to believe beyond the evidence.

Suppose I'm wrong.  I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing.  I was just a bag of chemicals after all.  It was all just a big joke.  Electrochemistry played me for a fool.  So what?  What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value.  But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny.

It is Good that Osama is Dead, but No Gloating

I was a bit disappointed with Dennis Prager this morning.  He said he was "certain" that bin Laden is in hell.  No one can be (objectively) certain that there even is a hell, let alone that any particular person has landed there.  (Is Prager so en rapport with the divine nature that he understands the exact relation of justice and mercy in God and the exact mechanisms of reward and punishment?) And although there is call for some celebration at the closure this killing brings, I can't approve of Prager's joy at this event.  This attitude of Prager's plays right in the hands of leftists  and pacifists who confuse retributive justice with revenge and oppose capital punishment and the killing of human beings on that ground.

Anyone who doesn't see that capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain circumstances is morally obtuse.  I agree with Prager on that.  I also agree with his statement this morning that pacifism is "immoral" though I would withhold his "by definition."  (I've got a nice post on the illicit use  of 'by definition.')  And of course I agree that terrorists need to be hunted down and killed.  But there should be no joy at the killing of any human being no matter who he is.  It would be better to feel sad that we live in a world in which such extreme measures are necessary.

The administration of justice ought to be a dispassionate affair. 

Is Osama bin Laden in Hell?

Jeremy Lott, Osama bin Laden in Hell:

To keep Osama's purported martyrdom from inspiring others, the point needs to be made, loudly and repeatedly, that killing innocent people is not the path to heaven. This will put the US government, and Barack Obama in particular, in an an awkward spot. It is undoubtedly a theological statement and an uncomfortable one at that.

It is uncomfortable because to assert that Osama did not go to heaven is to suggest that he went to hell. That could be a problem, given the current state of America's religious ferment. As the controversy over Rev. Rob Bell's new book has shown us, a great number of religious Americans do not want to believe in eternal damnation.

1.  The notion that there is heaven but no hell smacks of the sort of namby-pamby feel-good liberalism that I feel it my duty to combat.  Of course there may  be none of the following: God, afterlife, post-mortem reward, post-mortem punishment.  But if you accept the first three, then you ought to accept them all. 

2. One reason to believe in some form of punishment after death is that without it, there is no final justice.  There is some justice here below, but not much.  One who "thirsts after justice and righteousness" cannot be satisfied with this world.  Whatever utopia the future may bring, this world's past suffices to condemn it as a vale of injustice.  (This is why leftist activism is no solution at all to the ultimate problems.)  Nothing that happens in the future can redeem the billions who have been raped and crucified and wronged in a thousand ways.  Of course, it may be that this world is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Life may just be absurd.  But if you do not accept that, if you hold that life has meaning and that moral distinctions have reality, then you may look to God and beyond this life.  Suppose you do.  Then how can you fail to see that justice demands that the evil be punished?  Consider this line of thought:

a. If there is no making-good of the injustices of this life, it is absurd.
b. There is no making-good of the injustices of this life in this life.
c.  Only if there is God and afterlife is there a making-good of the injustices of this life
d.  This life is not absurd.
Therefore
e.  There is a making-good of the injustices of this life in the afterlife, and this requires the punishment/purification of those who committed evil in this life and did not pay for their crimes in this life.

This is not a compelling argument by any means.  But if you are a theist and accept (a)-(d), then you ought to accept the conclusion.

3.  A second reason to believe in some sort of hellish state after death for some is because of free will.  God created man in his image and likeness, and part of what that means is that he created him an autonomous being possessing free will and sensitive to moral distinctions.  In so doing, God limits his own power: he cannot violate the autonomy of man.  So if Sartre or some other rebellious nature freely decides that he would rather exist in separation from God, then God must allow it.  But this separation is what hell is.  So God must allow hell.

4. Is hell eternal separation from God?  Well, if Sartre, say, or any other idolater of his own ego wants to be eternally separated from God, then God must allow it, right?  Like I said, man is free and autonomous, and God can't do anything about that.  But if Stalin, say, repents, how could a good God punish him eternally?   The punishment must fit the crime, and no crime that any human is capable of, even the murdering of millions, deserves eternal punishment.  How do I know that?  By consulting my moral sense, the same moral sense that tells me a god that commands me to murder my innocent son cannot be God.  See Kant on Abraham and Isaac.

There is a response to this of course, and what I just asserted is by no means obvious; but this is a topic for a separate post.

I suppose I am a bit of a theological liberal. Theology must be rationally constrained and constrained by our God-given moral sense. Irrationalism is out.  Fideism is out. No fundamentalism.  No Bibliolatry.  No  inerrantism.  None of the excesses of Protestantism, if excesses they are.  No sola scriptura  or sola fide or, for that matter, extra ecclesiam salus non est.  The latter  is also a Roman Catholic principle.

5.  As I see it, then, justice does not demand an eternal or everlasting hell. (In this popular post I blur the distinction between eternity and everlastingness.)  But free will may.  Again, if Russell or Sartre or Hitchens refuse to submit any authority superior to their own egos, then their own free decision condemns them everlastingly.  Justice does demand, however, some sort of post-mortem purification/punishment.

6.  Will I go directly to heaven when I die?  Of course not (and the same goes for almost all of us.)  Almost all of us need more or less purgation, to even be in a state where we would unequivocally  want to be with God.  If your life has been mainly devoted to piling up pleasure and loot, how can you expect that death will reverse your priorities?   In fact, if you have solely devoted yourself to the pursuit and acquisition of the trinkets and baubles of this world, then punishment for you may well consist in getting them in spades, to your disgust.  If the female ass and the whiskey glass is your summum bonum here below, you may get your heart's desire on the far side.  I develop this idea in A Vision of Hell.

7.  Is Osama bin Laden in hell?  Anyone who claims to know the answer to this is a 'damned' fool.  But not even he (Osama or the fool) deserves eternal separation from God -- unless he wants it.  But it is good that the al-Qaeda head  is dead.

Inquiry, Doxastic Equipose, and Ataraxia

Seldom Seen Slim writes,

I'm very happy to see you writing (so well) about the summum bonum.

 

I don't have the text of Sextus at hand to cite you chapter & verse, but I think I recall this correctly.

 

It would be pretty ironic for a skeptic to denigrate inquiry since skeptikos means precisely one who inquires. The skeptic arrives at adoxia (if he does) not by deciding or choosing to walk away from an issue like AGW [anthropogenic global warming], but by inquiring into it assiduously. If he does so, then something begins to happen in his mind as he accumulates many many arguments pro and con. He eventually finds himself in a state of equipoise, as inclined to believe as to disbelieve. Adoxia is the spontaneous product of assiduous inquiry.

 

Slim is alluding to, and taking issue with, the last sentence of Ataraxia and the Impossibility of Living Without Beliefs.  What I said there implies that the Pyrrhonian denigrates inquiry.  Slim rightly points out that the skeptic is by his very nature an inquirer.  And as I myself have said more than once in these pages, doubt is the engine of inquiry.  So my formulation was sloppy.  It is not that the skeptic denigrates inquiry; it is is rather that he denigrates the notion that inquiry will lead to a truth that transcends appearances.

 

The Pyrrhonian skeptic inquires, not to arrive at the truth, but to achieve doxastic equipoise and adoxia, belieflessness.  This in turn is supposed to engender ataraxia.

 

It's a bold conjecture, and, alas, a completely false one, in my experience at least. The more I inquire into an issue, the more likely I am to settle on one side or another, and not find myself floating in tranquil equipoise betwixt them. Maybe your experience is different? In any case, the skeptical remedy for partisan belief is study, study, study. They believe studying something to death will take you to equipoise and ataraxia. Willfully choosing to ignore an issue like AGW, they believe, will not buy you ataraxia at all. You remain disposed to believe or disbelieve according to your prejudices, and only the therapy of inquiry can work these doxastic prejudices out of you.

 

Slim here offers an excellent and accurate summary of The Skeptic Way, which is also the title of a fine book by Benson Mates.

 

One can doubt whether ataraxia is the summum bonum and whether it is achievable in the skeptic manner.  But one thing to me is clear: insight into just how inconclusive are the arguments on both sides of many if not all issues leads to a salutary decrease in dogmatism. 

Direct Reference: On the Intention to Use a Name as Previously Used

Most direct reference theories of proper names would seem to be committed to the following four theses:

1. A proper name denotes, designates, refers to,  its nominatum directly without the mediation of any properties. There is no description or disjunction of descriptions satisfaction of which is necessary for a name to target its nominatum.  Accordingly, ordinary proper names are not definite descriptions in disguise as Russell famously maintained.  The reference of a name is not routed through its sense or any component of its sense.  A name may have a sense, but if it does it won't play a role in determining whether the name has a referent and which referent it is.

2. Proper names are first introduced at a 'baptismal ceremony' in  which an individual is singled out as the name's nominatum.  For example, a black cat wanders into my yard and I dub him 'Max Black.'   Peter Lupu reminds me that names can get attached to objects also by the use of reference-fixing definite descriptions.  

3. The connection established between name and nominatum at the baptism is rigid: once name N is attached to object O, N designates O in every possible world in which O exists.  On the DR theory, then, 'Socrates' designates Socrates even in possible worlds in which Socrates is not the teacher of Plato, the husband of Xanthippe, etc.  This is because the reference of 'Socrates' is not determined by any definite description or disjunction such descriptions.

Indeed, the DR theory has the strange implication that the following is possible: none of the definite descriptions we associate with the use of 'Socrates' is true of him, yet the name refers to him and no one else.  Well, if the sense of the name does not determine reference, what does? What  makes it the case that 'Socrates' designates Socrates? 

4. A speaker S's use of N refers to O only if there is a causal chain extending from S's use of N back to the baptism, a chain with the following two features: (a) each user of N receives the name from an
earlier user until the first user is reached; (b) each user to whom the name is transmitted uses it with the intention of referring to the same object as the previous user.

Problem: How is (1) consistent with (4)? Suppose I first encounter the name 'Uriel Da Costa' in a book by Leo Strauss. If I am to refer to the same man as Strauss referred to, I must use the name with the   intention of doing so. Otherwise I might target some other Uriel Da Costa. It seems to follow that my use of 'Uriel Da Costa' must have associated with it the identifying attribute, same object as was   referred to by Strauss with 'Uriel Da Costa.' But then the reference is not direct, but mediated by this attribute. (4) conflicts with (1).