Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Conscience, Brain, and Scientistic Pseudo-Understanding

One of the tasks of philosophy is to expose and debunk bad philosophy.  And there is a lot of it out there, especially in the writings of journalists who report on scientific research.  Scornful of philosophy, many of them peddle scientistic pseudo-understanding without realizing that what they sell is itself philosophy, very bad philosophy.  A particularly abysmal specimen was sent my way by a reader.  It bears the subtitle: "Without recognising it, Oxford scientists appear to have located the consience [sic]."  In the body of the article we read:

This isn't some minor breakthrough of cognitive neuroscience. This is about good and bad, right and wrong. This is about the brain's connection to morality. This means that the Oxford scientists, without apparently realising what they've done, have located the conscience. 

For centuries we thought that the conscience was just some faculty of moral insight in the human mind, an innate sense that one was behaving well or badly - although the great H. L. Mencken once defined it as, "the inner voice which  warns us that someone may be looking". It's been used by religions as a numinous something-or-other, kindly bestowed by God, to give humans a choice between sin and Paradise.

Now, thanks to neuroscience, we've found the actual, physical thing itself. It's a shame that it resembles a Brussels sprout: something so important and God-given should look more imposing, like a pineapple. But then it wouldn't fit in our heads.

Henceforth, when told to "examine our conscience", we won't need to sit for hours cudgelling our brains to decide whether we're feeling guilty about accessing YouPorn late at night; we can just book into a clinic and ask them for a conscience-scan, to let us know for sure.

Part of what is offensive about this rubbish is that a great and humanly very important topic is treated in a jocose manner.  (I am assuming, charitably, that the author did not write his piece as a joke.) But that is not the worst of it.  The worst of it is the incoherence of what is being proposed.

I'll begin with what ought to be an obvious point.  Before we can locate conscience in the brain or anywhere else we ought to know, at least roughly, what it is we are talking about.  What is conscience?

Conscience is the moral sense, the sense of right, wrong, and their difference.  It is the sense whereby we discern, or attempt to discern, what is morally (not legally, not prudentially) permissible, impermissible, and obligatory.  It typically results in moral judgements about one's thoughts, words and deeds  which in turn eventuate in resolutions to amend or continue one's practices.

The deliverances of conscience may or may not be 'veridical' or revelatory of objective moral demands or or objective moral realities on particular occasions.  Some people are 'scrupulous': their consciences bother them when they shouldn't.  Others are morally insensitive: their consciences do not bother them when they should.  If subject S senses, via conscience, that doing/refraining from X is morally impermissible, it does not follow that it is.  Conscience is a modality of object-directed consciousness and so may be expected to be analogous to non-moral consciousness:  if I am thinking that a is F, it does not follow that a is F.

So  just as we can speak of the intentionality of consciousness, we can speak of the intentionality of conscience.  Pangs of conscience are not non-intentional states of consciousness like headache pains.  Conscience purports to reveal something about the morally permissible, impermissible, and obligatory (and perhaps also about the supererogatory and suberogatory); whether it does so is a further question.  Suppose nothing is objectively right or wrong.  That would not alter the fact that there is the moral sense in some of us.

Can conscience be located in the brain and identified with the lateral frontal pole?  If so, then a particular moral sensing, that one ought not to have done X or ought to have done Y, is a state of the brain.  But this is impossible.  A particular moral sensing is an intentional (object-directed) state.  But no physical state is object-directed.  So, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a moral sensing cannot be a brain state. 

So that is one absurdity.  A second is that it is absurd to suggest, as the author does, that one can examine one's conscience by examining a part of one's brain.   Examination of conscience is a spiritual practice whereby, at the end of the day perhaps, one reviews and morally evaluates the day's thoughts, words, and deeds.  What is being examined here?  Obviously not some bit of brain matter.  And if one were to examine that hunk of meat, one would learn nothing as to the thoughts, words, and deeds of the person whose hunk of brain meat it is.

If a person's feeling of guilt is correlated with an identifiable brain state, then one could perhaps determine that a person was feeling guilt by way of a brain scan.  But that would provide no insight into (a) what the guilt is about, or (b) whether the guilt is morally appropriate.  No brain scan can reveal the intentionality or the normativity of guilt feelings.

There is also a problem about who is doing the examining in an examination of conscience. A different hunk of meat, or the same hunk?  Either way, absurdity.  Examining is an intentional state.  So, just as it is absurd to suppose that one's thoughts, words, and deed are to be found in the lateral frontal pole, it is also absurd to suppose that that same pole is doing the examining of those contents.

I have emphasized the intentionality of conscience, which fact alone suffices to refute the scientistic nonsense.  And I have so far bracketed the question whether conscience puts us in touch with objective moral norms.  I say it does, even though how this is possible is not easy to explain.  Well, suppose that torturing children to death for sexual pleasure  is objectively wrong, and that we have moral knowledge of this moral fact via conscience.

Then two problems arise for the scientistic naturalist:  how is is possible for a hunk of meat, no matter how wondrously complex, to glom onto these non-natural moral facts? And second, if there are such facts to be accessed via conscience, how do they fit into the scientistic naturalist's scheme?  Answers:  It is not possible, and they don't.

Have I just wasted my time refuting rubbish beneath refutation?  Maybe not.  Scientism, with its pseudo-understanding poses a grave threat to the humanities and indeed to our very humanity.  David Gelernter is good on this. 

Burden of Proof, Appeal to Ignorance, Safety Considerations, and God

Presumption and Burden of Proof

Firearms instructors sometimes say that every gun is loaded.  This is plainly false as it stands, but a wise saying nonetheless if interpreted to mean: every gun is to be presumed loaded until proven unloaded. Presumptions are procedural rules.  To presume every gun to be loaded is to adopt a procedural rule to treat every gun as if it is loaded regardless of how antecedently likely it is that it is loaded.  Suppose the likelihood is near zero: I examined the gun carefully an hour ago and I found it to be unloaded.  Nevertheless, the presumption that it is loaded remains in force.  I continue to behave as if it is loaded.  For example, I don't point the gun at anything unless I want to destroy it.

I conclude that to presume that proposition p is not to assert that p is true, nor to assert that p is probably true, nor to assume that p is true, but to decide to act as if p is true.  A presumption, then, is not a proposition, although it embeds one.  A presumption is something like a decision.  More precisely, a presumption is the accusative or content of an act of presuming, an accusative that is not itself a proposition, but embeds one.   The accusative might be: to proceed as if the accused is innocent.  This embeds the proposition *the accused is innocent.* 

A presumption is not like a belief in the following important respect.  To presume that a gun is loaded or that a man is innocent is not to believe that it is or that he is.  To believe that p is to believe that p is true.  But to presume that p is not to presume that p is true; it is to act as if p is true without either accepting or rejecting p.  To presume that Jones is innocent until proven guilty  is not to believe that he is innocent until proven guilty; it is to suspend judgment as to guilt or innocence until sufficient evidence is presented by the prosecution to warrant a verdict one way or the other.  When I presume that p, I take no stand as to the truth-value of p -- I neither accept nor reject p -- what I do is decide to act as if p is true.

Presumptions must be defeasible.  (I suspect that an indefeasible presumption is no presumption at all.) The presumption of being loaded is defeated in a particular case by carefully examining the gun and showing that it is unloaded.  So while a presumption is not a proposition, it embeds a proposition that can be shown to be false.  Defeasible presumption and burden-of-proof are correlative notions.  (They are like rights and duties in this respect but also in that both are normative notions.)  In a court of law, for example, if the accused enjoys a presumption of innocence, as he does in the Anglosphere, then the accuser bears a burden of proof, a burden which, if properly discharged, defeats the presumption. 

Appeal to Ignorance?

So if  person A claims to person B that a certain gun is unloaded, the burden of proof is on A to show that it is unloaded; person B does not bear the burden of proving that it is loaded.  It is not just that he bears a lesser burden; he bears no burden. Indeed it seems that B would be within his epistemic rights were he to claim that his ignorance of whether or not the gun is loaded is good evidence of its being loaded.  But this is an appeal to ignorance.  It has not been shown that the gun is unloaded; ergo, the gun is loaded.

It has not been shown that ~p; therefore p gives us the form of the ad ignorantiam 'fallacy.'  Construed as a deductive argument, it is clearly invalid.  Construed as an inductive argument, it will be in many cases weak.  For example, suppose the gun is straight from the manufacturer and right out of the box.  Then the probability of its being loaded is very low, and the argument: This gun out of the box has not been shown to be unloaded; ergo, this gun is loaded is very weak.

Nevertheless, safety considerations dictate a defeasible presumption in favor of every gun's being loaded, whether out of the box or not, a presumption that places the onus probandi on the one who maintains the opposite.  So one might  conclude that the appeal to ignorance in this case is reasonable even though the argument is deductively invalid and inductively weak.

The situation is similar to that in a court of law.  The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty, so the burden of proof rests on either the state in a criminal proceeding, or on the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney in a civil trial.  In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.

We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.

Safety Considerations

There are 'safety' considerations in both the gun example and the law example.  It is because we want to be on the safe side -- and not get shot -- that we presume every gun to be loaded. "Better that a hundred guns be unnecessarily examined than that one sentient being be accidentally shot."

And it is because we want to be on the safe side -- and not sentence an innocent person -- that we presume the accused to be innocent until proven guilty.  "Better that a hundred guilty people go free than that one innocent person be wrongly convicted."

But now what about God?  Don't safety considerations apply here as well? If God exists, then our ultimate happiness depends on getting into right relation with him.  So why can't one make a legitimate appeal to ignorance here?  Now of course from the fact that no one has proven that God does not exist, it does not follow that God exists.  That is an invalid deductive argument.  That would be a truly fallacious instance of ad ignorantiam.  But it is also invalid to infer than a gun is loaded because it hasn't been proven to be unloaded, or that a man is innocent because he hasn't been proven to be guilty.  It just doesn't follow in any of these cases.  And yet we reasonably consider the gun loaded and we reasonably find the accused to be innocent.  And so why can't we reasonably presume God to exist on the basis of the fact that he hasn't been shown not to exist?  If the burden of proof rests on the one who claims that gun is unloaded, why doesn't the burden of proof rest on the one who claims that God is nonexistent?  We don't want to get shot, but we also don't want to lose our ultimate beatitude -- if ultimate beatitude there be. 

You can't say that that the burden of proof rests on the theist because he is making a positive claim; for there are positive claims that need no proof.  And you can't say that the burden of proof rests on the theist because he is making an existential claim; for there are existential claims that need no proof. If you claim that extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist, then the burden is on you.  But if you claim that there are Saguaro cacti in Arizona, then the burden of proof is not on you but on the one who denies it. Nor can you say that the burden rests on the theist because he is controverting the widely-accepted viww that God does not exist; the consensus gentium is that God exists.

Earlier I argued that we shouldn't bring BOP considerations into the God discussion at all.  But if we do, why doesn't the BOP rest on the atheist?

Pigliucci's Confusion

Massimo Pigliucci thinks that if one understands who bears the burden of proof in a trial, then one ought to see right away that the burden of proof rests on the theist.  For, "the burden of proof is always on the party making a positive claim, not on the one making a negative one."  This strikes me as confused.  It is true that the party making a complaint or bringing a charge is making a positive claim, but this is not the reason why the BOP rests on the accuser.  It rests on the accuser because of the presumption of innocence that the accused enjoys.  The BOP rests on the accuser not because his claim is positive but because of the procedural rule enshrined in our system of law according to which one is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

It is not true that the BOP is always on the one who makes a positive claim.   'That hillside is studded with Saguaro cacti' said to my hiking companion needs no proof.  I shoulder no probative burden when I make a commonplace observation such as that. Therefore, the following is an unsound argument:

Everyone who make a positive claim bears a BOP.
The theist makes a positive claim.
ergo
The theist bears the BOP in his debate with the atheist.

I argued above that if BOP considerations are relevant to the God debate, then the BOP is on the atheist.  To appreciate the argument I gave, you have to realize that the God question is not merely theoretical.  It is a practical question.  In that respect it is like the gun safety and court room cases.  My interest in whether or not a particular firearm is loaded or unloaded is not merely theoretical, or I should say, not at all theoretical.  It is a practical interest in maintaining the health and physical integrity of myself and the people around me.  Similarly with the law.  If you are accused of homicide you are in deep trouble and face the loss of your liberty or your life.  Arguably, the God question is in the same boat.

So I invite you to accept one or the other of the following conclusions.  The BOP is borne by the atheist.  BOP considerations should be kept out of the theist-atheist debate altogether. 

Mary Midgley on Complaints about Clarity

Mary Midgley in The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir, Routledge, 2005, p. 13, reminisces about her headmistress, Miss Annie Bowden:

I also remember something striking that she had said when I had complained that I knew the answer to some question but I just couldn't say it clearly. 'If you can't say a thing clearly,' she replied, 'then you don't actually know what it is, do you?' This is a deep thought which I have often come back to, and it is in general a useful one. It lies at the heart of British empiricism. Though it is not by any means always true, I am glad to have had it put before me so early in life. It's a good thought to have when you are trying to clarify your own ideas, but a bad one when you are supposed to be understanding other people's. Philosophers are always complaining that other people's remarks are not clear when what they mean is that they are unwelcome. So they often cultivate the art of not understanding things -- something which British analytic philosophers are particularly good at. (Bolding added.)

My added emphasis signals my approbation.

We owe it to ourselves and our readers to be as clear as we can. But the whole point of philosophy is to extend clarity beyond the 'clarity' of everyday life and everyday thinking. The pursuit of this higher clarity, the attempt to work our way out of Plato's Cave, results in a kind of talking and thinking that must appear obscure to the Cave dweller. Well, so much the worse for him and his values. To demand Cave clarity of the philosopher is vulgar and philistine.  Got that, Ludwig?

For more on this topic, see Adorno on Wittgenstein's Indescribable Vulgarity.

A. E. Taylor on F. H. Bradley on Religion

The following quotations are from A. E. Taylor's "F. H. Bradley" which is an account of his relation with the great philosopher, an account published in Mind, vol. XXXIV, no. 133 (January 1925), pp. 1-12. A. E. Taylor is an important philosopher in his own right whose works, unfortunately, are little read nowadays.

Bradley as a Religious Man

I am confident that no one who knew Bradley personally at any time would have supposed him to be anything but what he actually was, an intensely religious man, in the sense of a man whose whole life and thought was permeated by a conviction of the reality of unseen things and a supreme devotion to them.

Bradley on Bibliolatry

In the last conversation I had with him . . . He spoke bitterly of the Christian Church in our country, chiefly on the charge of an alleged 'idolatry' of the text of the Bible, a fault not, I think, really common among Anglicans at the present. He commended the Roman Church for its discouragement of promiscuous Bible-reading, but held that it did not go far enough. He would have the Church, he said, cease to appeal to any literature from the past and insist directly upon its own inherent authority as the living voice of the divine Spirit.

Bradley on Purgatory

Possibly some of my readers who know Bradley only from his books may be surprised at a remark called from him by a passing reference in the same conversation to Purgatory. "But what do you mean by Purgatory? Does it mean that when I die I shall go somewhere where I shall be made better by discipline? If so, that is what I very much hope." In another mood, no doubt, he might have dwelt on the intellectual difficulties in the way of such a hope, but it was characteristic, or at least I thought so, that he evidently clung to it.

Bradley a Mystic

Bradley's own personal religion was of a strongly marked mystical type, in fact of the specific type common to the Christian mystics. Religion meant to him, as to Plotinus or to Newman, direct personal contact with the Supreme and Ineffable, unmediated through any forms of ceremonial prayer, or ritual, and like all mystics in whom this passion for direct access to God is not moderated by the the habit of organised communal worship, he was inclined to set little store on the historical and institutional element in the great religions.

Bradley on the Incarnation

Thus while the conception of the meeting of the divine and the human in one 'by unity of person' lay at the very heart of his philosophy, he was wholly indifferent to the question whether the ideal of the God-Man has or has not been actually realised in flesh and blood in a definite historical person. Like Hegel, he thought it the significant thing about Christianity that it had believed in the incarnation of God in a definite person, but also, like Hegel, he seemed to think it a matter of small importance that the person in which the 'hypostatic union' was believed to have been accomplished should be Jesus the Nazarene rather than any other, and again whether or not the belief was strictly true to fact. The important thing, to his mind, was that the belief stimulates to the attempt to the achievement of 'deiformity' in our own personality.

The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates

A reader opines:

I like animals because I think they're a higher form of life. They have no pretenses about what they are; a dog can achieve levels of serenity and fulfillment of which I cannot conceive by merely being a dog and doing dog things. Myself, on the other hand, I could be the next Einstein with the face of James Dean and still very likely be miserable all my life.

I like animals too, but not because they are a higher form of life.  They are lower forms of life.  The ascription of pretentiousness to a cat or dog is of course absurd, but equally so is the ascription of serenity and fulfillment to them if these words carry the meaning that we attach to them. It is because man is a spiritual being that he can pretend and fake and dissemble and posture and blow up his ego like a balloon to blot out the sun.  And it is because man is a spiritual being that he can know serenity, fulfillment, and in rare cases the peace that surpasseth all understanding.  Man has not only the power of thought but also the mystical power to transcend thought.  All of this is beyond the animal.  If you disagree, then I will ask you to produce the mathematical and metaphysical and mystical treatises of the dolphins and the apes. Who among them is a Paul  Erdös or a Plato or a Juan de la Cruz?  As Heidegger says somewhere, "An abyss yawns between man and animal."

On the other hand no animal knows misery like we do.  Barred our heights, they are also barred our depths of wretchedness and despair. 

So while I have many bones to pick with John Stuart Mill on the score of his utilitarianism and his hedonism and his psychologism in logic and his internally inconsistent attempt at distinguishing higher from lower pleasures, his is a noble soul and I agree with the sentiment expressed in this well-known passage from Utilitarianism, Chapter II:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied  than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.  The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

I wonder if Mill can validate  this noble thought within his paltry hedonist scheme.  It is in any case a value judgment and I am not sure I would be able to refute someone who preferred the life of a cat or a dog or a contented cow to that of a man, half-angel, half-beast, tormented, crazed, but possibly participant in highest bliss.   But I agree with Nietzsche that man is something to be overcome, though not along the lines he proposes. He needs perfecting.  I cannot forbear to quote his marvellous jab at the English hedonists from The Twilight of the Idols:

If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.  Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does. ("Maxims and Arrows," #12, tr. W. Kaufmann.)

The Problem of Dirty Hands

I am trying to understand the structure of the problem of dirty hands.

A clear example of a dirty hands situation is one in which a political leader authorizes the intentional slaughter of innocent non-combatants to demoralize the enemy and bring about the end of a war which, if it continues, could be reasonably expected to lead to the destruction of the leader's state.   The leader must act, but he cannot authorize the actions necessary for the state's survival without authorizing immoral actions.  He must act, but he cannot act without dirtying his hands with the blood of innocents.  In its sharpest form, the problem arises if we assume that certain actions are absolutely morally  wrong, wrong in and of themselves, always and everywhere and regardless of circumstances or (good) consequences.  The problem stands out in sharp relief when cast into the mold of an aporetic triad:  

A. Moral reasons for action are dominant: they trump every other reason for action such as 'reasons of state.'

B. Some actions are absolutely morally wrong, morally impermissible always and everywhere, regardless of context, circumstances, or consequences.

C. Among absolutely morally wrong actions, there are some that are (non-morally) permissible, and indeed  (non-morally) necessary: they must be done in a situation in which refusing to act would lead to worse consequences such as the destruction of one's nation or culture.

It is easy to see that this triad is inconsistent.  The limbs cannot all be true.  (B) and (C) could both be true if one allowed moral reasons to be trumped by non-moral reasons.  But that is precisely what (A), quite plausibly, rules out.  

The threesome, then, is logically inconsistent. And yet each limb makes a strong claim on our acceptance. To solve the problem one of the limbs must be rejected.  Which one?

(A)-Rejection.  One might take the line that in some extreme circumstances non-moral considerations take precedence over moral ones. Imagine a ticking-bomb scenario in which the bomb planter must be tortured in order to find the location of the bomb or bombs. (Suppose a number of dirty nukes have been planted in Manhattan, all scheduled to go off at the same time.)  

Imagine a perfectly gruesome form of torture in which the wife and children of Ali the jihadi have their fingers and limbs sawn off in the presence of the jihadi, and then the same is done to him until he talks.  Would the torture not be justified?  Not morally justified of course, but justified non-morally to save Manhattan and its millions of residents and to avert the ensuing disaster for the rest of the country?   One type of  hard liner will say, yes, of course, even while insisting that torture of the sort envisaged is morally wrong, and indeed absolutely morally wrong.  I am in some moods such a hard liner.

But am I not then falling into contradiction? No.  I am not maintaining that in every case it is morally wrong to torture, but in this case it is not.  That would be a contradiction.  I am maintaining that it is always morally impermissible to torture but that in some circumstances moral considerations are trumped by -- what shall I call them? -- survival considerations.  These are external to the moral point of view.  So while morality is absolute in its own domain, its domain does not coincide with the domain of human action in general.  The torture of the jihadi and his wife and children are justified, not morally, but by non-moral reasons.

(B)-Rejection.  A second solution to the triad involves rejecting deontology and embracing consequentialism.  Consider the following act-type:  torturing  a person to extract information from him.  A deontologist such as Kant would maintain that the tokening of such an act-type is morally wrong just in virtue of the act-type's  being the act-type it is.  It would then follow for Kant that every such tokening is morally wrong.  A consequentialist would say that it all depends on the outcome.  Torturing our jihadi above leads or can be reasonably expected to lead to the greatest good of the greatest number in the specific circumstances in question, and those on-balance good consequences morally justify the act of torture.  So, contra Kant, one and the same act-type can be morally acceptable/unacceptable depending on circumstances and consequences.   Torturing Ali the jihadi is morally justified, but torturing Sammy the jeweler to get him to open his safe is not.

On this second solution to the triad, we accept (A), we accept that moral considerations reign supreme over the entire sphere of human action and cannot be trumped by any non-moral considerations.  But we adopt a consequentialist moral doctrine that allows the moral justification of torture and the targeting of non-combatants in certain circumstances.

Now we must ask:  Do the consequentialist torturers of the jihadi and their consequentialist superiors who order the torture have dirty hands?  Suppose the hands of the torturers are literally bloody.  Are they dirty?  I am tempted to say No.  They haven't done anything wrong; they have the done the right thing, and let us assume, at great psychological and emotional cost to themselves. Imagine snapping off the digits of a fellow human being with bolt cutters or high-torque pruning shears.  Could you do that to a child in the presence of his father and do it efficiently and with equanimity?  Could you do your job, your duty, despite your contrary inclination?  (I am turning Kant's phraseology against him here.)  But you must do it because the orders you have been given are morally correct by the consequentialist theory.

Do the torturers have dirty hands?  It depends on what exactly it is to have dirty hands which, of course, is part of the problem of dirty hands.   On a narrow understanding, a dirty hands situation is one in which the agent acts, and must act,  while both accepting all three limbs of our inconsistent triad and appreciating that they are inconsistent.  A dirty hands situation in the narrow and strict sense is an aporetic bind of the practical and not merely theoretical sort.  You must act and you must act immorally in violation of absolute moral prohibitions, and you cannot justify your actions by any non-moral considerations that trump moral ones.  That's one hell of a bind to be in!  Some will be tempted to say that there cannot ever occur such a bind.  But if so, then there cannot ever occur a dirty hands situation.  So maybe talk of 'dirty hands' is incoherent.

If this is what it is to be in a dirty hands situation, then a consequentialist cannot be in a dirty hands situation.  He is not in an aporetic bind since he rejects (B).  And the same goes for those who reject (A) or (C).

(C)-Rejection. A third solution to the problem involves  holding that there is no necessity to act: one can abstain from acting.  A political leader faced with a terrible choice can simply abdicate, or simply refuse to choose.  He does not order the torture of the jihadi and and hence does not act to save Manhattan; but by not acting he willy-nilly aids and abets the terrorist.

Interim Conclusion

For now I will conclude that if we leave God and the soul out of it, if we think in purely immanent or secular terms, then we are in a genuine aporetic bind, and the problem of dirty hands, narrowly construed, is a genuine one, but also an insoluble one. For rejecting any of the limbs will get us into grave trouble.  That needs to be argued, of course.  One entry leads to another, and another . . . .

Philosophia longa, vita brevis. 

Recommended reading:

C. A. J. Coady, The Problem of Dirty Hands

Michael Walzer, Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands 

Univocity, Equivocity, and the MOB Doctrine

Here is another argument that may be banging around in the back of the heads of those who are hostile to the doctrine that there are modes of being, the MOB doctrine to give it a name:

1. If there are modes of existence, then 'exist(s)' is not univocal.
2. If 'exist(s)' is not univocal, then it is equivocal.
3. If 'exists(s)' is equivocal, then existents are partitioned into separate and unrelatable domains.
4. It is not the case that existents are partitioned into separate and unrelatable domains.
Ergo
5. There are no modes of existence.

I believe that this argument can be fairly imputed to Quentin Gibson. (See The Existence Principle, Kluwer 1998, p. 26 et passim) Of course, the above is my reconstruction; he is nowhere near as clear as I am being. 

The argument is seductive but unsound.  (2) is false: if a term is not univocal it does not follow that it is equivocal in the sense of 'equivocal' needed to make (3) true.   I believe I have already demonstrated this.  'Exists(s)' is not univocal as between

6. Jewish philosophers exist
and
7. Kripke exists.

But it doesn't follow from this lack of univocity that we have sheer equivocity of the river bank /financial bank sort.  (6) makes an instantiation claim while (7) doesn't.  'Exist' in (6) is a second-level predicate while in (7) 'exists' is a first-level predicate.  So the predicate is used to say different things of different things.  In (6) being-instantiated, but not singular existence,  is being predicated of the concept Jewish philosopher.  In (7) singular existence, but not being-instantiated, is being predicated of Kripke.

And yet there is a systematic connection between the two sentences and the two senses of 'exist(s).'  If a first-level concept 'exists,' i.e., is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual that exists.  And if an individual exists, then there is some concept it instantiates.

Call this equivocity if you like, but it is not the sort of equivocity that has the unacceptable consequence that is recorded in the consequent of (3).  It doesn't lead to a partitioning of existents into separate and unrelatable domains.

Or take the substance/accident case.  Substances exist and accidents exist.  If so, they exist in different ways.  Or so say I.  Accidents exist-in substances while substances do not.  Does 'exist(s)' have two different senses as applied to substances and accidents?  Yes, but they are connected senses.  So it doesn't follow from this lack of univocity that substances and accidents belong in separate and unrelatable domains.  Quite the contrary!  It is precisely because they exist in different ways that we can render intelligible how they are related.

We are drifting in the direction of the old analogia entis.  I can feel it.