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There's a relatively new movement in the communities of people who deal regularly with autism and related conditions that's assigned themselves the term "neurodiversity" as a shorthand reference to their commitment to affirming atypical neurological conditions as equally legitimate. This movement shuns the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal' and instead prefers to speak of those who are neurotypical and those who are not. The neurodiversity movement seeks to identify various traits common with autism as neither better nor worse but simply different.

This movement should be praised for its recognition that respecting people with autism requires taking into account how differently they take in information, process it, use it, and produce various responses. They rightly emphasize that an atypical neurological state need not be thought of as a disease that needs a medical cure or treatment or a disability that requires taking the person to be deficient. They recommend supporting a person for who they are rather than trying to "fix" them to conform to the standards everyone else has. Some autism advocates on the autistic spectrum insist that they wouldn't want to be made "normal" if a "cure" were ever found. They like being the way they are.

There's something obviously right about most of that. The more I read stuff from this movement, however, the more disturbed I get that there's something they're just not seeing, and the good in what I just wrote is blinding a lot of well-meaning people to a serious philosophical error lying behind much of what the neurodiversity movement produces. Consider this story by Karen Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times. She is right to point out that, just because autistic people do badly on certain standardized tests, it doesn't mean they're cognitively deficient. It may well be that the reason a certain person scores low on a certain test is because the test is relying on typical patterns of language use, and someone with autism may be using a different pattern of language use. The underlying cognitive ability being tested for may be stronger than the test shows. That's all correct. But in her rush to make this point, Kaplan completely ignores the fact that the reason someone is scoring low on the test is because of a genuine deficiency in the kind of language use that most people are much better able to engage in. That means there is a lack of ability that comes with autism, even if its manifestation will be different from person to person.

Again, Kaplan speaks of those who emphasize "training kids with autism to behave like typical kids instead of allowing them to make the most of their differently wired brains." That's especially helpful, because allowing autistic people to make the most of their differently-operating brain is certainly the right goal. But that's perfectly compatible with taking their differently-wired brain to be operating at a deficient level with respect to certain cognitive skills, even if it's also operating at a higher level with regard to other cognitive skills. Some in the neurodiversity movement are willing to recognize that differences between neurotypicals and autistic people involve autism conveying certain strengths and weaknesses. But the language of "not better or worse but just different" disallows any such recognition and smacks of crude relativism, whereby we cannot recognize any difference as being better or worse. When taken to its logical implication, we'd have to say that someone who is not intelligent enough to read is not less smart in any respect than the norm, just different. I submit that such a statement is nonsense. There's a particular cognitive ability that allows for reading that most people have, and someone who doesn't have that ability (assuming they genuinely don't) is lacking a cognitive skill. Why can't we just accept that?

Similarly, there is a seeming refusal to recognize any medical condition that can be spoken of in terms of being made worse off. In some respects this strikes me as a general problem among disability communities that stems from crudely relativistic thinking. The deaf community is largely unsupportive of cochlear implants, because it gives children the ability to hear, and they take their lack of hearing not to be a genuine disability. There's nothing wrong with not hearing, so why should they support giving deaf children the ability to hear the way most people can?

If we really took this line of reasoning seriously, we'd have to apply it to other conditions that virtually no one wants to see as perfectly normal. For example, one could argue that pedophilia is just a different way of being, and we should respect it. After all, it's caused by a brain condition, and all brain conditions are equally good. In terms of the arguments I see from the neurodiversity movement, I see no way to say the things they say while avoiding such a conclusion. There are plenty of ways to distinguish between the two cases, but I don't see how those are available given the extreme sorts of statements that I regularly see among neurodiversity advocates.

People who have serious cognitive deficiencies often have serious problems seeing their own intrinsic worth. It's important to affirm that. It's important to help them see that their very existence is not wrong in the sense that we should blame them for being the way they are. It's important to help them see that their preferences may seem weird to others but that in many cases perfectly all right for them to have them. But some voices advocating for neurodiversity want us to say that someone with autism is not messed up in any sense. The fact is that we're all messed up. We're all distorted. We're all flawed. No one is the way we ought to be. Autism is one way to have various deficiencies, one that also happens in many cases to have plenty of strengths above the level typical of most people. To say that we can never evaluate being less good at something or more good at something with such value-laden language would be to overreact to a genuine problem in how many people look at people with disabilities.

But on one level, I can't blame the neurodiversity movement (and the more general relativistic outlook among other disability communities). After all, their view follows fairly easily from a particular version of secularized naturalistic thinking. Different neurological conditions stem from natural variation, and there's no other level of explanation but natural variation. There's no God who designed human beings to have certain capabilities. There are no natural purposes according to which organisms have a nature, and certain capacities are part of what a well-functioning member of their species will be able to do. There's no notion of well-functioning if your worldview doesn't allow for higher-level explanations about purposes and design, other than perhaps simply asking whether a particular organism fits into the way most members of its species are or whether it fits the patterns members of its species typically desire for themselves. There's nothing objective about what a healthy member of that species or a well-functioning member of that species would be like. There is no way we can have a notion of the way we ought to be if there's no ground for what it would be to be the way we ought to be. But such a conclusion seems to me to be so obviously false that perhaps we should just question the metaphysical underpinning of the neurodiversity movement, rather than giving in to that metaphysical picture's logical implications.

[cross-posted at Evangel and the Neurodiversity Consulting blog]

I was thinking last night about the new show Once Upon a Time, and it occurred to me that it might provide a really good illustration of the difference between externalism and internalism in epistemology. (I haven't seen last night's episode yet, so please no one spoil it for me.)

Internalism holds that what justifies our beliefs or makes them rational or what grounds our knowledge must be something internal to our thinking, in other words something where the reasons why it is justified, rational, or grounded are accessible to our conscious thought. We have to be able to see why our beliefs are grounded for those beliefs to be grounded. We have to be aware of what makes it a good belief for it to be a good belief. It wouldn't be enough to have reliable belief-forming mechanisms (such as senses that reliably give me the right information).

Externalism holds that there might be things make our beliefs justified or rational or grounding our knowledge that are not accessible to our conscious thought. We don't have to be aware of what justifies us in thinking something for it to be a justified belief. For it to be well-grounded knowledge, we don't have to know that our knowledge is grounded in reliable practices and thus why it is well-grounded knowledge. It just has to be grounded in the right sort of ways.

Perhaps the biggest place of disagreement comes over how to respond to skepticism. If internalism is true, I would have to prove that my senses are reliable for them to ground my knowledge, which of course I can't do, because I might be in a virtual reality for all I can know by internalist standards. There are internalists would would disagree, but a lot of philosophers have concluded that internalism leads hopelessly to skepticism, because I can't prove that my senses are reliable, and just having reliable senses isn't enough. I'd have to be able to prove it, which I can't do. But externalism can handle skeptical arguments by pointing out that I can know all sorts of stuff even without being able to prove it. It doesn't mean I can prove I know things. It just means that skeptical arguments fail, because the skeptic has to show that my senses are unreliable to show that I don't know things. With internalism, all the skeptic has to show is that I don't know if my senses are unreliable. With externalism, the skeptic has to show that they are in fact unreliable. So the burden of proof on the skeptic is higher with externalism.

Once Upon a Time provides a nice illustration of externalist epistemology. The basic premise of the show is that the Evil Queen has cursed all the characters in the Enchanted Forest by bringing them to a terrible place where there are no happy endings except for her. That terrible place is Storybrooke, Maine, in a world otherwise very much like our current day. The Evil Queen is the mayor. The story shifts back and forth between events in the characters' lives back in the Enchanted Forest and events in their lives now in Storybrooke, where no one is supposed to remember their previous lives except the Evil Queen.

Snow White and Prince Charming are the Evil Queen's primary targets. She wants revenge against Snow White for something we haven't seen yet (as least as of last week's episode). She wants to ensure that they are not together. They have no memory of each other, certainly not of having been married to each other. He was in a coma when the show began, and apparently he had been since the curse began. She has no memory of him. When he awakes from his coma, he has no memory, until the Evil Queen at some point seems to have interfered to give him memories of being married to someone else, someone who turns out to have been engaged to him in the Enchanted Forest before he broke it off to marry Snow White. But when they meet up, they feel such a longing for each other, as if they have always been meant to be together.

Prince Charming tries to rebuild his marriage, but he can't ignore his feelings for Snow White. This woman whom he (falsely) thinks is his wife brings out no current feelings, but he seems to have memories of feelings for her, and he tries to make it work. Technically, he's living in an adulterous relationship with her while thinking his feelings for Snow White are the adulterous ones. But Snow White is really his wife, and some process within him is leading him to think he should be with her. But he has no access to what would be leading him to that. An externalist would say that he has some process within him that he can't understand that's leading him to know that Snow White is the one for him, and his false beliefs about his past do not interfere with that knowledge. An internalist has to say that his most justified beliefs are the false ones.

So suppose there's some reliable process whereby his body's memories of his love for Snow White are leading him to know that she's really the one he's supposed to be with. His resistance to this woman who isn't his wife, whom he believes is his wife, is then grounded in processes that he has no access to. An externalist could say that his belief that he should be with Snow White (whom he knows now by another name, of course) is justified by these processes he's unaware of, and it's bogus to rely on his memories for the belief that he's married to the other woman. An internalist would say that his belief that he is married to the other woman is in fact false but is justified. Which belief is justified, then, depends on which epistemology is correct.

Which view you adopt would seem to have significant moral implications. He's doing something clearly wrong, according to internalism, by having clandestine romantic interactions with Snow White. But what if he has knowledge on some level that can somehow cancel his seeming knowledge (that isn't knowledge at all) that this is adultery? Those are false beliefs, based on false memories. If he doesn't know those things but falsely believes them, and he also knows on some level that Snow White is his true love, is it enough to remove the wrongness of the adultery? Perhaps that's too much, but it does seem to be ethically different in some ways.

I want to announce that I've signed a book contract with Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, to publish a revised and expanded version of my dissertation. My current plan is to send them the manuscript by the end of April, followed by a review process and then revisions to be due by the end of June or early July, which they say will allow them to have it in print by December. The title (for now, although it might change) is A Realist Metaphysics of Race: A Context-Sensitive, Short-Term Retentionist, Long-Term Revisionist Account.

General Overview: There are three main metaphysical positions on race. Anti-realists deny that there are races. Natural-kind positions find sub-groups of homo sapiens with scientific importance and call them races. Social-kind views consider races to exist because of contingent social practices. I argue for a view closest to the third camp, with a few wrinkles. Three distinctives of my approach are:

(a) I self-consciously argue as an analytic metaphysician, taking this to be a work of applied metaphysics in the same sense that looking at questions regarding abortion, just war theory, or the ethics of lying count as applied ethics, and its relation to theoretical metaphysics (what is most commonly called metaphysics among analytic philosophers) is analogous to how applied ethics relates to ethical theory (e.g. utilitarian, deontological, virtue, natural law, or other theoretical approaches, which was what ethics was largely restricted to until the applied ethics revolution of the late 20th century). Part of my aim is to remove the bias against seeing this sort of subject as part of what metaphysicians should be doing.

(b) I argue that race is highly context-sensitive, in more ways than most race theorists mean when they speak of themselves as holding views they call contextualist.

(c) My overall conclusion by the end is that we should not abandon race-talk, race-theorizing, or race-classification, at least not in the short-term. We need to be able to speak of such social realities to address real racial problems. However, we ought to find ways to challenge some of the social forces that work to make racial groups racialized and to form the social realities that surround race, some of which are not the way we should want them to be.

Here is the chapter breakdown:

1. Natural Kinds and the Analogy of Species:

There's a debate in the philosophy of biology about whether species are natural kinds. This chapter looks closely at that debate to argue that it is meaningful to speak of natural kinds, although species are not natural kinds in the strong sense that Aristotle might have taken them to be.

2. Natural Kinds and Race

I look at three conceptions of race as what I call minimalist natural kinds, two from philosophers and one from biologists. Al three views have potential to pick out groups useful for categorizing people according to scientific purposes but all three have problems if we want to identify the groups they point to as the same groups that we ordinarily call races.

3. Classic Anti-Realism

I argue in this chapter against certain of the traditional anti-realist arguments (especially Naomi Zack and Kwame Anthony Appiah), especially emphasizing ordinary use (as opposed to the language of experts) and changes is race-language.

4. Glasgow's Revisionism

Joshua Glasgow develops an anti-realism that takes the groups we call races to exist as social constructions, but he doesn't think those groups should be called races. I resist his arguments and argue that some of his evidence actually support a social kind view like the one I end up adopting.

5. Social-Construction and Biological Constructionism

The contingency of the racial categories, the fact that arbitrary socially-determined facts determine the structure of racial classification, and the instability of racial categories are all good evidence that races are social constructions. I conclude that races are social kinds that take their basis in biologically-identified traits, but the selection of which biological traits we use to identify races are biologically-arbitrary.

6. Races and the Metaphysics of Objects and Groups

My view is that races exist as socially-constructed entities but that they might just as well have existed without being races. Social facts don't bring races into existence but rather make existing groups into races. This chapter looks to contemporary metaphysics to see arguments that nihilists and coincident-entity theorists might make against my view. I argue against those conceptions, but even if those views were correct, much of what I say would still follow.

7. Race and Context-Sensitivity

This chapter argues for context-sensitivity in racial constructions, with fluidity from one context to another even for the same person. Different factors might be relevant in different settings to change which racial labels might apply.This context-sensitivity is much more diverse in terms of ways of being context-sensitive than I find in most of the philosophy of race literature. The particular ways this works will support my eventual revisionism in the next chapter.

8. The Ethics of the Metaphysics of Race

Here I argue that we should use existing racial categories to identify problems within the social constructions of race, rather than seeking to eliminate the categories in any direct way, but we should also make efforts to change the conditions that generate those problematic elements, so we can retain only the unproblematic aspects, and some elements of racial identity-formation can be good.

9. Implicit Bias and the Argument for Elimination

Recent work in psychology and cognitive science shows that our patterns of forming race-judgments rely on a more general pattern in child development that leads to implicit racial bias of an invisible but harmful sort, even among people who are explicitly anti-racist in their reflective views. I argue that there is evidence in the psychology and cognitive science literature that shows that we need to retain our racial categories to address existing implicit bias, but there is also evidence that we should rethink how we speak of racial issues with small children, to reduce the perpetuation of implicit bias in further generations, and this result fits well with (and gives further details to flesh out) the conclusion of the previous chapter.

The 131st Philosophers' Carnival is up at Minds and Brains: Musings from a Neurophilosophical Perspective.

The Philosophical Gourmet Report, which ranks philosophy programs and gives specific listings of which departments are strongest in which areas of philosophy, will be adding the category of philosophy of race in its upcoming revision, which will take place this fall. Brian Leiter, who organizes the Gourmet Report, posted a quote from philosopher Tommy Curry about this long-overdue change:

Black philosophy continues to be lured toward the approval of whites as if their standards and acceptance can/do accurately describe the merit of our work. We have seen this in the work of whites like Sullivan and Bernansconi [sic], and now have it yet again regarding Leiter. They take Black conversations, market them as "legitimate" and benefit from them by controlling the academic "rigor" of the discourse.

Shannon Sullivan writes about race as it has affected her as a white woman and reflects on the nature of whiteness as she's come to understand it through dialoguing with non-whites and through applying philosophical skills she's learned by practicing philosophy. The idea that this must be seen as an attempt to control blacks is ludicrous. Bernasconi's work, from what I've seen, also seems motivated by wanting to understand a legitimate philosophical topic of inquiry rather than any sense of whipping those black philosophers into conformity.

Philosophers working in the area of race have complained to Brian Leiter that he's ignored an important area of philosophy where much good work has been done, and so he's finally (years later than I would have liked) added it to his surveys of which departments are seen by those in the loop of philosophy of race to be good programs for that area of study. Surely many of the people who will be commenting on this will be non-white, even if there are some people working in the area who are white.

I'm not exactly Brian Leiter's biggest fan. We've each criticized the other both publicly and privately. But I can't fathom the claim that he's motivated by wanting to exert power over black philosophers in particular. Even if you thought he was using the Philosophy Gourmet Report to control the discipline or to promote himself (rather than the more charitable interpretation that he does it to help students find the programs best suited to them, which I think is his actual motivation), his goals wouldn't be to have white people controlling black people. They would be to have an in-group of philosophers controlling which departments get seen as the best. It is true that his advisory board, whose rankings determine the report's rankings, is a pretty white group, but philosophers as a whole are a pretty white group. At worst, you might accuse him of not being concerned enough to include non-white philosophers in his advisory board.

Now there's a claim in the general vicinity of what Curry is saying that I think is not so removed from reality, although I think it's also wrong if applied to undermine the work of whites on race issues or to claim that it's illegitimate for white philosophers to evaluate the work of black philosophers. That claim is that black philosophers can have conversations about issues affecting them that white people won't understand as well. This is true. There's a kind of epistemic privilege that comes from having experienced certain things, and being black in America does bring with it some experiences that white people don't understand as well. So some conversations among black philosophers will be harder for white philosophers to step into and participate in the same way or to evaluate as good or bad philosophy. Sure.

However, there are also experiences white people have in America that involved race that also bring something to the table that black philosophers have less ccess to. I'm not claiming this is symmetrical in terms of an equal number of experiences or similar kinds of experiences, but I am pointing out that any social location can involve experiences that only people in that social location can understand. Some of the experiences whites have blind them to certain racial issues, but some of the experiences blacks have can make them less sensitive to certain race issues as well. There are experiences that someone who is white who is heavily interwoven with black Americans will have that most blacks and whites will not have. (See here for much more argumentation in this direction.)

Despite all this, it simply isn't impossible for white philosophers to do good work contributing to discussions of race, and just about all non-white philosophers have recognized this. It simply isn't impossible for white philosophers to look at these discussions and form reasoned opinions about whose arguments are better than whose. It simply isn't impossible for white philosophers to get a sense from these discussions whose work is having the most influence and therefore whose work is seen by the participants in these discussions as the best work.

So the idea that a white or nearly-white advisory board can't evaluate the work of non-white philosophers or the work of philosophers on issues that have come out of black discussions is not, because of the facts about epistemic privilege, a complete non-starter. There may be additional difficulties in it than what you already have in evaluating the work of philosophy of religion when most of the reviewers pay no attention to that subject (as is certainly the case with the Gourmet Report advisory board in general). But they have ways of dealing with this. A good advisory board member who doesn't know philosophy of religion will presumably ask people they know who do it which philosophers or which departments are strongest in that area. So in the end I don't think even the more reasonable claim in the area of Curry's criticism can justify his resistance to this or to the work of white philosophers on issues related to race.

In every translation I've read of Aquinas' discussion of love, I find a completely worthless translation of the two categories of love he discusses. If you translate them with a formal-equivalence model, you get "the love of desire" and "the love of friendship". What he means by those is that the love of desire is when you love someone or something for the benefit you get from it or them, and the love of friendship is when you love someone in a way that takes what they desire as becoming among your own desires, and you desire it for its own sake and not just to get something out of them.

To an English speaker, the expressions "the love of desire" and "the love of friendship" suggest no such thing. They sound more like the thing you love is desire for the first, and the thing you love is friendship for the second. A much better translation would be "desire-love" and "friendship-love". Those preserve the connection with desire and friendship rather than paraphrasing them, but they change the form of the grammatical construction in order to remove the different sense that the form carries in English.

A formal-equivalence translation has this danger. It preserves the form as a higher priority than the basic meaning of the expression in its context, and you get this kind of misleading nonsense that someone teaching the material then has to explain. Isn't it better just to translate the expression in a way that conveys its meaning? If this can be done without altering the basic linguistic units, as my translation above does, then that's ideal. The problem with most dynamic-equivalence or thought-for-thought translations is that they don't do that. They might translate this as something like "self-seeking love" and "unconditional love". Such a translation would make no sense of Aquinas' attempt to explain why love having to do with desire is self-seeking and why love having to do with friendship is unconditional. It doesn't translate what's said but adds to it based on the background knowledge about how Aquinas is using the terms. It's probably rare that you can find the happy medium that I've come to with this case, where you avoid both extremes, but that seems to me to be the goal.

The 127th Philosophers' Carnival is up at Ichthus77.

Apparently some people who are hard of reading have been misinterpreting my post, and Maryann has closed comments. I'll have to respond at my own post.

Assume

1. A psychological or brain view of personal identity. In other words, either what makes me me is the psychological features of my inner self or my brain. Both views say the same thing about survival in brain transplant cases, so either view would do.

Do a brain transplant. Switch the brains of a man and a woman. If you did that to me, would I then be female?

Keep in mind -- I have the same brain, and that brain has my original male DNA. I also have a new body, one with the sex organs of a woman.

In the last chapter of my dissertation, I make mention of instrumentalism about race, defining it as follows. "Instrumentalism is not concerned with whether there are races but focuses simply on how it is best to use the race-language. A pragmatist view that retains race-talk and racial classification without regard for whether races are real could, for pragmatist reasons, adopt a fictionalist semantics and look much on the surface like the pragmatist adoption of fictionalism that I explained above. Or the semantic theory about how race-language operates might be more purely instrumentalist, taking race-statements to be true or false according to whether they are useful statements to make."

[For those who care about what fictionalism is but who aren't familiar with the term, fictionalism about race is "a semantic thesis about how race-language works, taking there to be a fictional account of races that our race-language assumes, with some kind of operator explaining how our language about race is really about what 'race in the fiction' would be like. Such language would not be strictly speaking true, but unlike error theory it would allow us to maintain that language without having to go around correcting everyone all the time about their false and non-referring statements."]

As I was thinking about instrumentalism, it occurred to me that Harry Frankfurt's best-selling work on b.s. doesn't, as far as I know, connect up with instrumentalism, but he defines b.s. in a very similar way, as the practice of making assertions without care for whether they're true, for the purpose of impressing people rather than communicating or deceiving (i.e. disrupting communication). The motivation distinguishes b.s. from what instrumentalism is up to (about whatever domain they're instrumentalists about: in my dissertation, it would be race, but the view was developed initially about science, and some of the ancient sophists were instrumentalists about morality). It's not as if instrumentalists think we're all just engaging in b.s. all the time. But both involve a similar disregard for the truth, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen anyone point this out before.

As I was revising this section earlier this week, it occurred to me that it might be funny to put in a footnote citing Frankfurt's work as a contemporary development of instrumentalism and then sending that version to the members of my committee who might get a kick out of it, but I think that would be a bit too much. My long footnote on Tolkien and mixed race is already skirting the edge.

This is on an NPR show I've never heard of. Our local station doesn't carry it. But I'm listening to the episode right now, and the authors do are doing a good job presenting the barebones issue they're dealing with. I'm not hearing much in the way of arguments, though, just quick summaries of positions. But it's done in an imaginative way, just because of the Doctor Who context. The particular issue is the genocide of the Daleks issue from the Fourth Doctor serial "The Genesis of the Daleks" (along with the general issue of pacifism and the Doctor's resistance to violence). There's more about the show itself than the philosophy, but I won't complain about any intelligent publicity for the show and for what I hope to be an excellent book.

I really wanted to submit something on the ethics of time travel for this book, but the editors wanted full submissions, and I can't afford to devote the time to write an entire chapter that might not get published. Most editors in this series and the similar Wiley-Blackwell series sort through a larger number of proposals, select their chosen entries, and then commission the people they choose to write the chapters. These editors wanted entire chapters that would likely not get published anywhere if they weren't accepted.

The word 'type' is a self-antonym.

As used in Christian theology, a type is something that looks forward or back to an anti-type. The usual idea is that the type is a partial or incomplete reality looking toward a more complete reality. So David is a type of Jesus as a precursor of a Messiah with some messianic elements, or the temple is a type of Christ as taking a form that looked forward to what he would institute in the church. The temple is also a type of the church (the people, not the building), where the church is God's dwelling.

I was listening to a Bloggingheads conversation between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, and McWhorter used the term 'type' in this way. He said Jesse Jackson is a type, meaning that he exemplifies some elements found within a generalized group of black leaders.

In philosophy, a type is not the specific instance, where someone has some elements of some general form. The type is the general form, and the tokens are the specific instances. The type would be black leaders of a certain sort, and Jesse Jackson would be the token.

I don't think it's just immersion in philosophical circles for 15 years that makes me think the philosophical use is the closer of the two to ordinary usage. I've always found the theological use to be strange, but it's only just occurred to me that it's not just strange but backwards. Every time I hear someone use it in a sermon without explaining it, I think the ordinary person isn't going to get it, and it's just occurred to me why. If you say David is a type of Christ, people will think that means he's a kind of Christ. In loose usage, that doesn't mean he's a category rather than a person, but theologians who say such things don't remotely mean that David's a messiah. They mean he's a precursor of the Messiah.

I don't think the ordinary usage is exactly opposite the theological usage, but this kind of funny use, which becomes second-nature for some with a lot of theological training, is at odds with how most people will hear the term, and that's something preachers would do well to keep in mind.

An example I'm using in my dissertation is a modification of Donald Davidson's Swampman example, which is a standard enough example in philosophy to have its own Wikipedia entry.

The Wikipedia description of the Swampman example is as follows:

Suppose Davidson goes hiking in the swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt. At the same time, nearby in the swamp another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules such that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death. This being, whom Davidson terms 'Swampman', has, of course, a brain which is structurally identical to that which Davidson had, and will thus, presumably, behave exactly as Davidson would have. He will walk out of the swamp, return to Davidson's office at Berkeley, and write the same essays he would have written; he will interact like an amicable person with all of Davidson's friends and family, and so forth.

My modification targets the view that being a member of a certain race requires having an ancestor of that race. Besides having an infinite regress problem (since races have to come into existence at some point), that view is at odds with what I think our intuitions would be with a Swampman-like case. Suppose an exact duplicate of Chris Rock were to appear out of nowhere, with no causal history and certainly no ancestry, never mind black ancestry. I think most people, even knowing this origin of the Chris Rock duplicate, would take the duplicate to be as black as Chris Rock. I've discussed this case with a lot of people, and almost everyone takes that to be the implication.

Alan Turing famously devised the Turing test, which was intended to test whether a machine can think. If it could show enough behavior consistent with thinking, Turing claimed that it really does think.

Turing tests have come under quite a lot of criticism for relying on the fallacious inference from something appearing to have a certain property to the conclusion that it does have that property. Turing tests take the behavior that follows from genuine thinking to be sufficient to establish that there is such thinking, even if the same behavior can be produced by a computer program. I would take the fact that it comes from a computer program to be sufficient reason to think such behavior can occur without genuine thinking.

So the usual criticism of Turing tests is that they assume thinking is occurring just because the usual behavior resulting from thinking is occurring. While I'm not interested in diminishing that objection, it occurred to be recently that Turing tests aren't just not sufficient for thinking (things that pass the test might not be thinking). They're not even necessary (things that think might fail the test). For one thing, someone who thinks might simply refuse to comply with the test and thus could fail. But more poignantly, someone with a communication-related disorder, e.g. someone with autism and dyspraxia who is completely non-verbal, simply cannot display the behavior the test is looking for. Being unable to communicate is certainly not a sign of being unable to think.

I would argue that more harm is caused by those who take passing a Turing test to be necessary for intelligent thought than is caused by those who take passing such a test to be sufficient for intelligence. We recently attended a communication seminar for parents and educators of non-verbal and mostly non-verbal children. At one session an autistic college senior was present. He can now speak in a somewhat limited manner, but he can communicate by typing on a portable device at a level that's almost certainly far beyond what most kindergarten teachers would have ever expected if they had seen his communication level in his younger years. He had no verbal language until age 12, but because his teachers taught him to type they knew that he was able to grasp much higher levels of thought than most teachers would have even speculated. At last night's session, there was a guy with Down Syndrome and autism who, as far as I could tell, can even as an adult do little more than grunt was typing out sentences that indicate a pretty high-level grasp of some pretty abstract and complex phenomena.

With a son who can't speak much more than five syllables at a time (unless he's singing or engaging in echolalic repetition of Veggie Tales or some other TV show), we've been able to see something like this firsthand. We knew in kindergarten that he was reading fairly complex words for the level of verbal behavior we normally saw, because he'd occasionally see a word and say it. (I remember him saying "banana" one time when there were no pictures of a banana, just the word.) But it's been very hard to get him to demonstrate his intelligence with writing, until this year, with his teacher and support staff working very hard with him to get him typing. Six months ago we could get him to trace over words we wrote out with a highlighter, or we could get him to point to words sometimes on a communication device, which could then pronounce them for him (but they had to be programmed in first, since he wasn't typing them). Now he's showing reading comprehension by completing "because" clauses to answer why certain characters did certain things. It makes me wonder how much he's been wanting to be able to communicate for years but unable to get his mouth or hands to do anything to show it.

The Turing defender might now say that he is able to show it, so it's not an objection to the test, but he's only now able to show it, and there's no reason to think he just started to be able to think on this level. I suspect most teachers would have assumed he couldn't handle the level of math that he's doing (basically right on second grade level) or the vocabulary and reading that he's doing (which is, as I said, at a pretty good level for demonstrating reading comprehension, better than his older brother could demonstrate at that age). He happens to have a teacher with 25 years of experience working with kids like him, who is informed about technology and methods to get kids like him communicating. Many educators encountering a kid like him might well assume low ability levels and not work to get him to communicate. In effect, they're using a reverse Turing test and concluding that someone isn't intelligent because they can't show it in the typical ways.

Andy Naselli has posted a short excerpt from D.A. Carson and Tim Keller's Gospel-Centered Ministry, one of the new series of Gospel Coalition booklets. The excerpt explains why the Gospel Coalition's statement of faith begins with God rather than with scripture. I hold both Carson and Keller in high regard, and it's very rare that I can identify anything to question from either of them. But this excerpt strikes me as being either ignorant about the meaning of a basic philosophical term or completely mistaken in how to apply it.

Carson and Keller's reasoning is basically that they want to resist what they see as a fault in the elevation of reason in the Enlightenment. Evangelical statements of faith in the past begin with a doctrine of scripture and then proceed to derive theological commitments in a systematic way via exegesis of that scripture. The result, according to Carson and Keller, is the presentation of a system of thought that gives the appearance of being deduced by unquestionable reasoning from the starting point of scripture.

It's their next move that I find problematic. They criticize such an approach by calling it foundationalist. The only hint as to what they mean by that is what they go on to say. They resist it because our cultural location affects our interpetation and relies too much on a rigid subject-object distinction, and we need to pay attention to historical theology, philosophy, and social reflection.

I'm not sure what any of that has to do with foundationalism. I have no problem with pointing out that our cultural location affects our interpretation. The subject-object distinction is a bit rigid if we ignore that we can be both subject and object in different respects, and being one can influence the ways in which one is the other. We certainly do need to pay attention to historical theology, philosophy, and social reflection. But how is any of that non-foundationalist? Foundationalism in epistemology is the thesis that our knowledge has a structure with a foundation, a basis upon which everything else is built. The beliefs in the foundation ought to be the best sort of beliefs we could have, ones that we can know to be true or have very good reason to believe. Some such beliefs would be self-evident or knowable just by thinking about them. Others might be learned by reliable processes that we can't prove to be true or reliable but that are genuinely reliable and thus lead to knowledge or justified beliefs.

I can't figure out how foundationalism creates any problem for any of what Carson and Keller are worried about. If the idea is that we shouldn't start with the foundation of scripture and instead start with the foundation of God, then that's still foundationalism, just with a different foundation. If the idea is that there are sources of information that we assume to be perfectly good that can be bad and lead us to false information, then foundationalism accepts that. Our biases can influence what we take to be a good foundation and thus end up with beliefs in our foundation that shouldn't be there. If the idea is that it's legitimate to have sources in the foundation that philosophers of the Enlightenment wouldn't want there, it's still foundationalism. It's just arguing for a different foundation.

The alternative to foundationalism is coherentism. Coherentism uses the raft model to contrast with the pyramid model of foundationalism. The idea behind coherentism is that your beliefs can be perfectly justified or a set of knowledge even if they're not based on anything legitimate. All it takes is for your beliefs to cohere. If they're not inconsistent, if there's no contradiction anywhere in there, then you know everything you believe. Such a view is so radically incompatible with Christian teaching in scripture that I can't imagine Carson or Keller seriously entertaining it. They hold that you can't know God without your information coming from God in some way, either by scripture or by coming through the testimony of a believer (or, in rare cases, by a more miraculous way of coming to understand, but the source would nonetheless be God). In fact, Carson and Keller are both Calvinists, and their Reformed theology has it that any of our beliefs leading to salvation are put in place by God, either directly or by some human means. What grounds them as knowledge is that God places them there and allows them to serve as a legitimately-held belief. The basis of any Christian's theology is therefore beliefs bestowed upon us by God that are epistemically grounded by God's miraculous working in our hearts and minds. Knowledge and belief-justification in Reformed theology strike me as particularly foundationalist. Coherentism is basically relativism about truth or knowledge (depending on whether you're a coherentist about truth or knowledge). I'm 100% sure that both Carson and Keller would consider coherentism incompatiible with their understanding of truth, knowledge, what justifies our beliefs, and so on.

Now there is a tendency among emergentists and pseudo-postmodernists on the fringes of evangelicalism to use the word 'foundationalism' to refer to a very narrow version of foundationalism held by Enlightenment philosophers and then to mis-label all evangelicals as foundationalist and thus living in the dark ages. But foundationalism itself is much broader, and it surprises me to see Keller and Carson giving the term up so easily while defending a view that seems as far as I can tell to be just as foundationalist as the view they're criticizing. I find their reference pretty puzzling, unless they're taken in by this group that they've both spent a good deal of time not giving in to, co-opting a mistaken understanding of what foundationalism is merely because some of their philosophically amateurish opponents have adopted a jaundiced view of what foundationalism is in order to strike it down with little argument. If that's what's going on here, then I would have expected better of both Keller and Carson. If that's not what's going on, I'm at a complete loss.

Joel S. has an informative and thoughtful review of Miroslav Volf's new book Allah: A Christian Response [ht: Justin Taylor]. This post is adapted from a comment I left on Joel's review, with significant expansions and modifications.

I like a lot of what Volf is saying, but I think Joel's concerns about the book are important things to be concerned about, especially the ones numbered 2 or higher. I disagree with his take on the substantive issues for concern 1, and I've been on record defending my view on the matter for quite some time.

The issue is whether I refer to the same being a Muslim refers to when we both talk about God. The Muslim uses the word 'Allah'. I use 'God'. Volf apparently argues that the Christian view of God and the Muslim view of God are sufficiently similar to ensure that they both will refer to the same being. I think that's a terrible argument. Any argument based on sufficient similarity is going to fail pretty quickly once we look to the essential Trinitarian nature of God. That's a pretty core element of the Christian view, if we're basing the reference of terms on actual metaphysics.

But of course language doesn't work that way. When people starting talking about water, they weren't doing so with full understanding of its chemical structure. If two groups with competing scientific theories about what water really is still referred to the same stuff and called it water, it would be nothing short of obtuse to claim that they referred to different stuff. Their historical and causal connection with that stuff is what grounds their reference to it with their terms, even though they had conflicting theories about what it is in its nature.

Similarly, the general Abrahamic tradition, confused as it is at some historical points, grounds the Islamic reference to God when they use the word 'Allah'. They refer to the being who interacted with human beings in the patriarchal period, through the human king they call the prophet David, and (and this is key) through that guy that they call the prophet Jesus. Surely they believe false things about Jesus, by any Christian standard. But it's the historic Jesus whom they claim to be a prophet, whom they claim to be returning someday, whom they claim did not die on the cross but was replaced by Jesus. They get Jesus' nature very wrong, but they refer to him when they do so, just as scientists got the nature of heat wrong when they thought it a substance but still referred to it (the kinetic energy) when they talked about it.

So if the question of whether Muslims worship the same God means whether the being they call Allah is the same being we call God, then the answer is obviously yes. But Volf is wrong to base it on similarity. He doesn't seem aware of causal theories of reference or any such thing.

On the other hand, if the question of whether Muslims worship the same God means whether their worship is correct worship, then that's another question entirely. It shouldn't be confused with the metaphysical question of whether the same being is referred to by Christians and Muslims. I've seen too many people start with their stance that Muslim worship of God involves actual reference to the same God Christians worship and then conclude that Muslim worship is equivalent to Christian worship. That inference seems to me to be utterly fallacious.

Philosophy TV posted several reflections on issues related to Christmas during Christmas week last year. Jason Brennan's contribution presents the Christmas story (i.e. the gospel) as a bad story about an immoral divinity.

I chose not to post this actually near Christmas, but when I saw this I thought it would be a great exercise to identify exactly where Brennan gets the gospel message wrong (and Brennan's final question actually invites that).

In particular, there seem to be two general kinds of responses to a criticism like Brennan's. You might disagree with his portrayal of what the gospel message actually says, or you might think he gets the message right but applies a problematic moral framework. (And you might think he makes mistakes in both arenas). But if you're a Christian, you ought to think he does at least one of the two. The question is exactly which elements does he get wrong in what the gospel says or in the moral theory he applies to it, and I'm curious what people would say about that. What do you think?

[cross-posted at Evangel and Prosblogion, whose commenters will likely have very different things to say in response to this]

I've had occasion to complain before about a problematic discussion of Calvinism in a book review by William Klein (in that case in discussing David Peterson's commentary on Acts). His more recent review of David Allen and Steve Lemke's Whosoever Will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five-Point Calvinism critiques D.A. Carson in a way that I also think is a bit unfair, and he doesn't represent the terms of debate accurately, even apart from the fairness issue.

Here's what he says:

In various places the authors expose misunderstandings that Calvinists sometimes exhibit about those who oppose them, or how they confuse categories in their uses of terms. As one example, S. Lemke exposes D.A. Carson's misuse of the category of "compatibilism" (pp. 150-152). It does not mean that human freedom and divine sovereignty are compatible (this is the way that Carson uses it). Everyone--whether Calvinist, Arminian, or open theist--affirms that. Rather, as correctly understood, compatibilists assert that true human freedom is compatible with hard determinism. Those are more difficult to reconcile.

This is at once both right and wrong. He's right in saying that Carson uses the term 'compatibilism' differently from how philosophers typically use it. But I think he's wrong in offering this as a criticism, and he's certainly wrong in how he says the word is generally used. His misuse of the term is, to my mind, much worse than Carson's.

Compatibilism, as philosophers use the term, is the view that freedom is compatible with one's choices being predetermined. Carson doesn't seem to me to use it that way. His actual definition is in terms of divine sovereignty, not in terms of predetermination. If God is entirely sovereign over anything that occurs in a way that whatever happens is exactly as God intended, then it need not be predetermined by God but just anticipated by God in a way that, had God wanted something else to happen, God could have intervened. Carson's definition of compatibilism leaves that open.

To be fair, though, Carson's discussions of this all include expressions along the lines of "absolute freedom to the contrary" to describe the kind of view of sovereignty that he's denying. If someone has the absolute freedom to do something that even God can't intervene with (without removing the person's freedom), then it's not the kind of divine sovereignty he has in mind. Carson, then, is indeed denying libertarian freedom of the sort that provides the only way besides predetermination. So his definition itself does allow for this, but what he goes on to say shows that he doesn't really intend that result.

Klein's mistake is much worse than that, though. That's just being unfair to Carson's whole approach by focusing on the terms of his definition, ones that the rest of his discussion does clarify. But in trying to correct Carson, Klein makes a much worse blunder. He gets the definition of compatibilism entirely wrong and defines it as to be totally contradictory. He says compatibilism claims the compatibility of free will and hard determinism (as opposed to the correct definition, which is that it's the compatibility of free will and determinism).

Hard determinism is the view that determinism is true and incompatible with freedom. Soft determinism is compatibilism, i.e. the view that determinism is true but compatible with freedom. Both hard and soft determinism accept the same metaphysical view of determinism. What makes hard determinism hard determinism is that it adds the separate claim that determinism and freedom are incompatible. What makes soft determinism soft determinism is that it's compatibilist. So to claim that compatibilism (i.e. soft determinism) is the view that freedom is compatible with hard determinism is to charge compatibilism not just with holding two views that conflict (which incompatibilists do think of compatibilism) but asserting of it that it holds such an explicit contradiction as to leave no room for argument. Of course anyone claiming hard determinism is compatible with freedom is holding contradictory views, because hard determinism simply is the view that determinism is true and not compatible with freedom. But that doesn't make compatibilism contradictory, because compatibilists specifically deny hard determinism.

I wrote a little a couple weeks ago about the early 1960s Supreme Court cases Abington School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett (and perhaps to a lesser degree Engel v. Vitale). I said at the time that I have two further posts planned, one on substantive issues that weren't central to the cases and another on the central questions the Court dealt with. This post is the first of those two. Here are four relatively independent observations from the oral arguments I listened to that affect the main argument to some degree but aren't very closely about the central issue. I have some more thoughts on the fundamental issue to come at some point.

More or Less Sectarian to Comment?

There's an interesting argument among the various lawyers and justices during the oral arguments for these cases, about whether it's more sectarian or less sectarian to read from the Bible without comment or with comment. One argument is that reading without comment is more like studying the Bible as literature, since it doesn't involve endorsement or criticism, whereas commenting on it expresses a viewpoint. On the other hand, some argued that simply reading it seems more like endorsement, since there's no room for critiquing anything in the text or showing room for interpreting in different ways, whereas commenting on it allows for critical discussion or demonstration of different interpretations. I suspect the two views have something different in mind for what the commenting would be like, but I thought it was an interesting debate. The two lawyers defending two different Bible-reading laws were making these opposite claims. One law explicitly disallowed comment, and the other allowed for it. But the justices seemed to disagree among themselves about which claim was more correct.

Absolute or Potentially-Conflicting Rights?

Two lawyers on the same side on the general questions disagreed about whether the Constitution is vague (in the following sense, anyway). One insisted that any particular policy (1) either is or is not an establishment of religion and (2) either is or is not a violation of someone's free exercise of religion. Another countered that whether something falls into either category comes in degrees. Justice Stewart joined in on this, also pointing out that the free exercise clause and the establishment clause are sometimes at odds with each other, presumably implying that it's the job of the Supreme Court to figure out which applies more strongly in a particular case. (This, I think, is a sign of what later came to be seen as his moderate approach as a swing voter on key cases in the more ideologically-diverse Supreme Court to come. But he comes across as a hard-line conservative in this case, given where everyone else on the Court was. I'm not sure Justices Thomas and Scalia differ from Justice Stewart on these questions very much.)

Augustine gives an argument (City of God Book V chapter IX, among other places) that I've always had little patience with. Here is R.W. Dyson's translation of the City of God occurrence of it:

Moreover, even if a certain order of causes does exist in the mind of God, it does not follow that nothing is left to the free choice of our will. For our wills are themselves included in the order of the causes which is certain to God and contained within his foreknowledge. For the wills of men are causes of the deeds of men, and so He Who has foreseen the causes of all things cannot have been ignorant of our wills among those causes, since he foresaw them to be the causes of our deeds.

The reason I find such reasoning frustrating is because it comes across as if Augustine is trying to respond to the foreknowledge problem by saying that God foreknows our free choices, and if God knows our free choices, and God can't know something false, then they must be true. So foreknowdge of free choices actually establishes them as free rather than undermining it. The problem with such an argument is that it's question-begging. The opponent of foreknowledge will insist that God can't foreknow a free choice. So the very assumption of the argument is what the argument is trying to prove.

As I re-read the sections of City of God that I taught this semester in Dyson's translation (now that I've finally managed to get a copy), it occurred to me that Augustine might actually be doing something different in this text, something much less problematic. It looks to me as if what he's saying is that, even if there is this order of causes leading up to our wills, that's compatible with our choices being free, and then he gives a reason. The reason is that our wills are the causes of our actions. God's foreseeing of what we choose is God's foreseeing of our causing our actions. It's not God foreseeing our freedom that makes freedom compatible with foreknowledge, as the bad argument above has it. It's that God's foreseeing our freedom is God's foreseeing our own causing of our actions. Such causing is what explains our freedom.

Thus Augustine is making the Stoic point that our choices do happen even if there are causes of them that God can see ahead of time, and it's that they happen as choices that makes them free. Augustine does later distinguish his view from the Stoic position, but at this point he seems to be giving basically the same argument they give for compatibilism about being caused to do something and being free in doing it.

[Completely as an aside, what is going on with Dyson's capitalization in that passage? He capitalizes not just the personal pronoun but even the relative pronoun when it refers to God, but then he leaves even the personal pronoun in lower case in the very net clause. It's almost as bad as some Bible translations when trying to deal with psalms that don't clearly refer to just a messanic figure who thus to a Christian refers to Christ.]

Last year PhilPapers ran a survey among professional philosophers about their views on various philosophical issues, and the results have been online for a while now. They've just posted an update, including public listings of answers by people who want their answers public. Mine are here. There's even a feature to compare your views (if you took the survey) with those of others who took it, and I turned out not to agree with anyone more than 2/3 of the time. There are a lot of people who agree with most of my answers, but I guess they're not the same people as each other. No one shares more than 20 of the 30 answers with me, so I guess I've got a pretty idiosyncratic set of views.

The following passage is sometimes taken to teach that suffering and death aren't always because of the sins of the individuals who suffer or die:

There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish." [Luke 13:1-5, ESV]

This passage does not teach that. You can find a teaching close to that in the book of Job. It isn't quite that, though. What Job teaches is that the immediate cause of suffering need not be the particular sins of the person suffering. It never says that there's any suffering that's not because of the presence of sin in the world, though. This passage in Luke, in particular, strikes me as in fact teaching something in the opposite direction of Job's point.

What is says is that the people who died weren't any worse sinners than the ones who didn't die. This wasn't to illustrate they were innocent and suffered anyway. Jesus' point is for his hearers to repent so that too won't perish, as if the reason for the perishing was indeed because of sin but that many of the people hearing his message were simply spared that out of God's mercy, at least so far, but they should not presume upon that mercy continuing for much longer. So the point does seem to me to mitigate the Job point. While it may well be that suffering can occur without its being directed against someone because of that person's sin, this passage isn't teaching anything about the suffering of innocents. It's teaching that those who die because of their sin aren't any worse than those who haven't yet met God's judgment as fully as they might. Consider the very next words of Jesus in Luke:

And he told this parable: "A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, 'Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?' And he answered him, 'Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'"[Luke 13:6-9, ESV]

This seems to be a clear presentation of the patience point above. God is merciful, and that's why some continue to live despite deserving death. God puts it off to give them time to repent, but God need not do this. God doesn't owe this to us.

I've been thinking about two different themes that run together here, both of which came out in the still-ongoing discussion of the Canaanite genocide issue. One is the Punishment Theodicy, and the other is the Patience Theodicy. These aren't where theists typically start when dealing with the problem of evil, but I think that's unfortunate. The Punishment Theodicy is usually dismissed by contemporary philosophers pretty quickly, mainly because of the Job point. If there's innocent suffering, then the Punishment Theodicy won't do all the work. Also, you need a reason why God allows the sin that's being punished for a large amount of evil to constitute punishment. But I think the Punishment Theodicy does do a lot more work than contemporary philosophers want to give it credit. The claim isn't that every bit of evil is punishment directed against someone for a particular sin that's being punished by that particular bit of suffering. It's that the vast majority of evil in the world today is the result of sin's being in the world, and one reason God allows it to the point it gets to is because we deserve it (and indeed much worse). It's allowed, at least in very large part, in order to punish us.

Another reason this isn't popular, I suspect, is because punishment is not popular, at least not for retributive reasons. But retributive justice is very popular when you put it the right way. It's unpopular to suggest that we deserve suffering for anything when you talk in terms of sin and God, but just try telling a graduating senior who didn't get hired that it's perfectly all right for someone who had lower qualifications to get the job, as if any choice would have been equally good, and you get responses that assume some notion of retributive justice. We can't make sense of the notion of an ironic punishment if we don't think people can deserve suffering because of their sins.

The Patience Theodicy is an explanation why evildoers seem to get away with it, why God doesn't judge sin immediately. Habakkuk worried deeply about that question, and God's response is that the sinner seeming to get away with it will indeed be judged. I don't think we ever get in Habakkuk why he's delaying, though. One place we do see an answer to that is II  Peter 3, where we're told that it's out of God's patience, to allow more time for people to repent. This theodicy explains a kind of evil that seems counterintuitive from one perspective. Normally, we want a reason why God allows evil. In a sense, this is an explanation of why God continues to allow a certain kind of evil. But on another level, this is an explanation of why God refrains from doing something that causes something that's intrinsically bad -- suffering and death. So it's a funny kind of theodicy, but it's a theodicy nonetheless, and it's also a pretty powerful one in that it explains quite a bit. The Punishment Theodicy explains a good deal of suffering on a very general level (without offering any claim about the details of particular cases, which is where those who apply it often end up mistaken). The Patience Theodicy explains a more specific kind of suffering by giving a reason why it might be allowed to continue when there's an easy way of cutting short evil by ending its existence altogether. It's an answer to the "how long" kind of question, i.e. the duration of evils, in Peter van Inwagen's way of putting it.

I'm not sure I had any specific point here, just some stewing thoughts after reading Luke 13 this morning, but I wanted to record some of these thoughts.

Paul Copan's "Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?" presents what struck me, on my first exposure to it, as a relatively novel (to me, anyway) thesis defending God as presented in the Hebrew scriptures from the charge of genocide. He claims that the commands to wipe out Canaan and not leave anyone standing, including women, children, and even livestock are hyperbole and that such expressions were commonly used to indicate a severe attack but did not literally mean that no one at all would survive.

I was a bit hesistant to rely on such a view, because it seemed to be to require more evidence than Copan gave, and there are certainly some occurrences when the expression in question simply cannot mean what Copan wants it to mean, e.g. when Saul is roundly condemned by Samuel in I Sam 15 for not fully carrying out the wiping out of the Amalekites. Saul's failure in that chapter was precisely his willingness to leave some alive, as Wes Morriston pointed out in the comments on Robert Gressis' Prosblogion posting on this last year. That objection struck me as decisive.

It occurred to me very recently, however, that Morriiston's objection doesn't quite do it. I'm still a little skeptical of Copan's thesis without more evidence than I've seen, but I'm not sure anymore that Morriston's objection really defeats the thesis. Consider the following version of Copan's claim. There's the literal meaning of the expression to wipe out everyone and everything. Saul did not do that. He spared Agag and the best of the livestock. Copan could then come along and point out that the passage doesn't include in Saul's failure that he spared women and children, for example. So it's compatible with what the text says that (a) Saul did wipe out all the women and children (and spared just Agag and the best animals) and that (b) Saul didn't wipe out all the women and chilfdren (but never was supposed to kill all of them, just all of the animals and King Agag).

So I'm not sure anything in I Sam 15 disproves Copan's thesis. Saul did sin, according to I Sam 15, by sparing Agag and the best livestock. But it may well have been that Agag and the livestock should have been killed according to the correct Copan-modified translaton or paraphrase of whatever the hyperbolic command really insisted on. In other words, Saul really should have killed Agag and these animals according to the command of God, but that doesn't mean he literally was expected to wipe out the whole Amalekite people. So I don't think I Sam 15 is really a counterexample to Copan's proposal.

[cross-posted at Prosblogion]

This is from Kwame Anthony Appiah's In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, p.11:

...there are arguments in the works of the pre-Socratic Sophists to the effect that it is individual character and not skin color that determines a person's worth.

He has an endnote that deals entirely with the first half of this sentence, which was about Homer. He gives no source for this claim, and there's no other mention of anything remotely helpful in the context.

This is a little surprising to me, because the only Sophists I know of who we have any record of what they thought about ethics were Protagoras in his relativism and Antiphon in his egoistic nihilism. I wouldn't expect either to put forward such a view as a genuine moral truth, and the others we have any indication about (Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Callicles) seem to have been with Antiphon at least in terms of the basic view.

So does anyone know of any information that Appiah must be aware of that I'm not?

Justin Taylor has reposted David Powlison's critique of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Powlison is the author of the so-called Biblical Counseling chapter of the IVP Five Views book on psychology and Christianity.

I'm not going to worry about the issue, pointed out several times in the comments, that the Bob Newhart video has pretty much nothing to do with CBT. I have two main things to contribute to the discussion, (1) as a philosopher and (2) as a parent of a child who has taken part in cognitive behavioral methods.

Powlison bases a lot of his critique on the fact that CBT uses (sometimes consciously) methods that can rightly be described as Stoic in that they do have a strong enough similiarity to key ideas of the ancient Stoics that I don't think the comparison is inapt. Stoicism, at least on the issues relevant here, involves one key claim. The Stoics didn't think it's worth worrying about something outside your control. The reason is that your life is made worse off by your worrying, but you can do something about the worry. You can't do anything about the fact that George W. Bush won the presidential election in 2004 or Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008. You can't change the fact that lots of people died recently in China from landslides. You can do something to help those who remain, and you can do something to change people's minds on policy issues and perhaps help elect a different sort of person next time, but there's no point in worrying about something you can't do anything about.

That element of Stoic philosophy seems entirely reasonable to me. The Stoics do go on to say that we should remove all emotions, but it's important to be clear on what they meant. They defined emotions more or less as bad reasoning. Things we call feelings that aren't bad reasoning and are compatible with good reasoning would not be emotions for the Stoic. So there's no reason to complain about that view on the ground that it's healthy to have emotions and inhuman not to. We should eschew the things they called emotions without actually eschewing emotions as we understand the term. They had a strange view about what we should call emotions, but the substance of their view is mostly right, as Augustine so deftly argued in his critique of the Stoics. Feelings of any sort should be submitted to reason, and those that are irrational are best removed. Augustine shows that the Stoic view, when reworked into ordinary language without their odd view of what counts as an emotion, is largely correct and fully compatible with Christian teaching.

Where the Stoic goes wrong, as far as Christianity is concerned, is in not submitting things to the lordship of Christ. I can't even say that they don't equate submission to reason with submission to God. They do. They just have a false view of what God is like. Does that affect the practical level? Not so much. Does it affect CBT? Not remotely. The reason is that CBT is really a method, a placeholder in which you insert the content you intend to replace the unhealthy and irrational beliefs. The Stoics insisted that irrationality comes from false thinking. They may have been wrong about that as a fully adequate explanation of all irrationality. But they were certainly right that a whole lot of irrationality comes from false beliefs. I know at least two cases of chronic depression that in large part involves flat-out false beliefs, even if there may also be neurological causes. In one case it's someone who consistently interprets any possible information that could be stretched to show that people don't like him or that he's a failure as if everyone doesn't like him and as if his abilities are the problem, when in many of these cases no one is even evaluating him negatively, and often enough their evaluations aren't seen that way by the people doing the evaluating. Such a person might benefit from neurochemical supplements, but CBT would encourage him to replace those false beliefs with a more hesitant approach to such negative interpretations, one much more like how most people would respond.

CBT is offered as a correction to the biggest problem Applied Behavior Analysis therapy. ABA insists on treating only behavior without dealing with anything internal, e.g. unhealthy beliefs. It stems from the behaviorist model of psychology, according to which we shouldn't postulate anything internal that can't be measured empirically, and thus any psychologist who talks about beliefs, desires, and so on is engaging in unscientific behavior (notice that even the way I've constructed that sentence admits only to the behavior of such a psychologist; a behaviorist shouldn't even say that such a psychologist has false beliefs about how psychology should be done, just that the speech and methods of such a psychologist are unscientific).

Behaviorism is crazy, and CBT is an improvement. It seeks causes in wrong thinking rather than trying to do psychology by ignoring its existence. Doing psychology by dealing only with behavior and ignoring the cognitive elements that lead to the behavior seems to me to be closer to the Bob Newhart video that Powlison holds up as an example of CBT, where the major therapy technique is to tell people to stop it. But CBT insists on changing false and harmful beliefs and replacing them with true and beneficial beliefs. It's a methodology, not a comprehensive theory of which beliefs are good and healthy. The trick is getting the beliefs right.

Not all CBT therapists will, but some will do much better than others, even if the ones who aren't believers won't be going fully deeply enough when the issues that come up are ones that Christians have deeper insight into (and not all issues are like that, e.g. dealing with my autistic son's attachment to his hat or his collection of pocket lint that he calls his fuzzy. It's hard for me to imagine a serious effort trying to make such issues out to be primarily about sin, and Powlison's critique of CBT as avoiding the sin issue in order to make people feel better misses the point. The point, at least sometimes, is simply to remove an irrational anxiety. CBT isn't comprehensive, because sometimes the problem is just a neurological malfunction that can be corrected with medication that doesn't have significant enough side-effects to be worth worrying about. In other cases, the problem is largely due to false and harmful beliefs that CBT can help someone to remove via unproblematic methods. The Christian should only worry about cases where actual sin is involved and the CBT therapist is pretending no one is doing anything wrong or elements Christians might disagree with the general populace would cause disagreement between a Christian receiving CBT and the therapist about those particular beliefs that the CBT therapist is encouraging to use as replacements for the unhealthy ones. But those are particular problems in how CBT might be practiced by an individual, not inherent difficulties with the model itself.

But what about cases where there really is a deeper issue that the CBT therapist is ignoring due to an attempt to be neutral on religion? Is it a band-aid if there's a deeper solution? As Powlison says near the end, it might be. But he also says it's better than nothing. I would say that it may be just what you need. If my autistic son is having fits over losing his hat, and he's not at a point where telling him to trust God will do a thing, then CBT may be the band-aid that helps him handle the symptoms and stop worrying about it. If that's the best that's neurologically possible at his developmental level, then I would argue that it's unbiblical to insist that counseling not use CBT methods, I would even say that such insistence would itself contradict more general biblical commands.

I would say, similarly, that ABA is wrong much of the time for ignoring the internal, but with a kid who is so impulsive and unable to communicate as my other autistic son it might actually be the only thing that will help him, because even CBT doesn't work if you can't talk about your thoughts, never mind the so-called biblical counseling that doesn't work when you've got someone with severe enough disabilities to prevent understanding of what sin even is. I sure hope no one tells me to tell my two-month old to stop crying because it's sinful not to appreciate his parents enough to wait patiently for that diaper change. It's not much different when you've got an eight-year-old with severe enough impulsivity issues that much of his behavior is more like what you would expect of a toddler, just with the physical capabilities of a much older child and thus a much greater level of danger.

Reductionist approaches don't capture the variety of causes of problems that people might want counseling or mental health professionals for. You could be reductionist about any of these methods. Many ABA practitioners won't consider other methods worthwhile. Many MDs won't consider non-pharmaceutical solutions. Sometimes medication helps a neurological deficiency enough to be worth it. With genuine cases of the overdiagnosed condition of ADHD, sometimes a stimulant is exactly what's needed, because the frontal cortex functions much more healthily when it can be stimulated, and you get much greater ability to attend to tasks. Sometimes that approach can be disastrous. Sometimes false beliefs are operative in such a way that some CBT can help someone remove them without necessarily inputting anything differently-harmful. Sometimes ABA is what's needed when physical impulsivity is the driving force, and physical changes are needed to habituate different responses to certain stimuli or to control for sensory integration problems or high sensory input needs. Sometimes someone just needs to repent of wrong behavior, but sometimes it's tied up with some of these other things, and it's worth considering different methods for dealing with these problems in different cases. It doesn't seem to me that Powlison recognizes this.

[cross-posted at Evangel]

In this discussion, one of the commenters makes the following argument against Reformed views of divine providence:

On a related topic, I still don't quite get Reformed theology. God desires all to repent, but He doesn't desire all to repent. How does one believe something one is incapable of understanding? It's like saying I "believe" that the round plate before me is also a square, as if my saying it makes it so.

What follows is an expansion of my response in the comments there.

What the commenter has hit on is a formal contradiction, at least if no fallacious equivocation is going on. If the word "desire" is being used in the same sense, then the statement that God desires all to repent and the statement that God does not desire all to repent do indeed result in a formal contradictiom.

But there's no problem if the two uses of "desire" are in fact different senses in which God desires. That is in fact what the Reformed view means by both claims, but the basic distinction required to take such a view isn't limited to Reformed theology. Any adequate response to the problem of evil needs something like that, as has been known at least since Thomas Aquinas. (At least you need something like this if you want to avoid open theism, but I've long thought open theism doesn't really have the resources to respond to the problem of evil anyway, because it can't guarantee a full victory over evil, not to mention being overkill, so that becomes a null option.)

You need to have some sense in which God wants to evil to happen if God in any sense knowingly allows it, so those with models of divine sovereignty that are more commonly associated with Wesleyan or Arminian theology will need to say the same thing this commenter is criticizing. God allows something rather than preventing it. Why? Perhaps the reason is because God thinks human freedom is more desirable than the desire to prevent that particular evil. You need not be a Calvinist to appeal to this sort of thing. But you better not say that God wants it to happen in every sense. God certainly disapproves of the evil, and wouldn't desire it if it weren't for whatever issue led God to allow the evil.

Once you have that distinction between desiring for its own sake and desiring for some other reason, when for its own sake God would want it removed, you have exactly the thing you're criticizing. God can desire something and not desire the same thing.

I would say that Arminians need to say this even about the salvation of non-believers if they want to avoid universalism. If anyone dies in their sins and goes to hell as a result, then God will be desiring that fate for them given their rejection of him, even if God desired them to repent and thus avoid that fate. So God both desires it and desires that it not happen, even with Arminianism. Only an open theist or a universalist can avoid saying something like that about these cases, and I don't think either can avoid saying it entirely. Even to allow one bit of evil or even the risk of it is a tradeoff in one sense, with God choosing one thing over another that would be good and desirable if all things were equal.

[cross-posted at Evangel]

I think I've hit on one of the things that's been lurking in the background in my resistance to the idea of an age of accountability. Now this post will largely be assuming some things many here will not grant, e.g. exclusivism about who gets saved, Christian particularism about how they get saved, perhaps Protestant soteriology, and traditional or classical models of divine knowledge (as opposed to open theism). One reason I assume these is because I think they're all true, but it's more important for this post that most people who hold to the age of accountability as I'm about to explicate it do in fact assume all these things. Perhaps denying any of them, or at least certain ways of denying them, will get around the problems I'm about to raise. I think it might still take some work to do so, however.

The standard age-of-accountability view includes the following claims:

1. At some age (which may not be the same for everyone), each person becomes morally responsible.
2. Before that point, (a) it would be unjust for God to hold the person responsible for their sins, or (b) they aren't really sins until that point, or (c) God would always be merciful in such cases when justice might still be deserved.
3. After that point, the gospel message applies, and those who repent and follow Christ are saved, while those who don't are not.

Now there's an unspecified fourth issue that an age-of-accountability view might go either way on. What criteria determine what the age of accountability is, and do the criteria admit of vagueness such that there isn't a clear line between being morally responsible and not being morally responsible? So we get the following two views:

Suppose there is no such vagueness. Take the case of a hypothetical child Fergus. Fergus is currently below the age of accountability, and thus if he dies he'll be saved eternally. Once he hits that age, he'll magically become morally responsible overnight, even though that transition is based in capacities that admit of vagueness such as cognitive abilities, recognition of one's own sin, grasp of the concepts necessary to understand the barebones gospel message, and so on. Thus the age of accountability seems arbitrary.

What if there is vagueness, then, in how God determines whether someone is accountable? The capacities undergirding the age of accountability are matters of vague boundaries, and thus also is the age of accountability. Children become more accountable as they become more able to understand the gospel message and apply it to themselves. This means the degree of responsibility they have for their own sin and for not responding to the gospel depends on how far along they are in their moral development.

The problem with the first view is that it's arbitrary and thus seems unjust. If God draws the line of salvation at a certain point of responsibility, when one iota less would bring someone into salvation, it seems as if the consequence is far more severe than the difference in level of responsibility should warrant. With two possible outcomes of infinite difference in value, a tiny difference in how responsible someone is shouldn't be enough to put someone in one and someone of slightly greater moral awareness, say, in the other.

The problem with the second view is that it doesn't fit well with the exclusivist position that most people who believe in an age of accountability accept. I don't happen to think vagueness problems are a problem for exclusivism in general, because in my view the basis for those who are past the accountability age is still objective and clear: Is there a genuine work of divine grace in the person's life? That doesn't come in degrees. God intends salvation for someone or doesn't. God doesn't sort-of-intend things. Those with a weaker view of God's sovereignty in salvation have to say more here, but I have no problem with vagueness problems and exclusivism per se.

But once you add in the age of accountability, there is a problem, because it becomes vague whether the person is responsible for having to trust in Christ and be committed to him. Such people are on the borderline for whether they ought to be sent to hell if they haven't repented.

Now there are a couple ways someone might still hold to an age of accountability despite this problem. God could simply ensure that no one dies while in the vague area of moral responsibility where it (a) isn't clearly enough to count as a fully participating morally responsible child but also (b) not clearly small enough to count as not yet responsible. So God could avoid the unjust outcome by working it into his providential plan that no one ends up in that position.

You could instead think there are degrees of punishment and good in the afterlife. A lot of people think that anyway. But to make this work, you'd have to think the level of punishment in hell for those in the borderline of responsibility would be so close to zero that it's very near the level of good in heaven for those who are near the borderline of responsibility and end up just making it into heaven.

I wouldn't rule out the first, but the second sounds implausible given the accounts of the afterlife that you see in scripture, and even the first has to attribute to God a lot of activity that is never spoken of anywhere in Christian scripture. It brings in considerations that we're expecting God to care about that aren't countenanced anywhere in scripture. A lot of people are so resistant to the idea that infants are morally accountable for the sin nature they're born with that they might be willing to accept these sorts of things, but it's not clear at all to me that we should prefer these adjustments to the idea that there's no age of accountability and children with no capacity to reflect on their lives morally are nonetheless morally accountable to God for their sin.

Now perhaps a more helpful way to capture what I think is motivating the age of accountability idea is to recognize that what an act of divine regeneration might look like will be different for those with diminished capacities. Presumably we're not being told that John the Baptist understood the full implications of who the Messiah was to be when we're told that he leaped for joy when his pregnant mother came into the vicinity of Mary when she was pregnant with Jesus. We're being told that he was excited somehow, and perhaps a work of regeneration at that early age included an additional sensitivity even in his pre-natal state to being in the presence of divinity. Nothing I've said here tells us one way or the other about how many infants or how many of those with diminished capacities into adulthood experience something like what John the Baptist did (or at least whatever part of it was sufficient for salvation).

So it doesn't follow at all that all infants go to hell or anything like that. That's consistent with everything I've said, but it's also consistent with all this that none do, or perhaps some do. I'm not really commenting on that issue in general, just on this one approach that I think ends up with problematic elements. So I'm not sure we should try to handle this kind of problem with the idea of an age of accountability that bases moral deservingness on capacity to understand. That doesn't mean I have a clear view on the best way to approach it, though. But positive views have never been my philosophical strength.

[cross-posted at Evangel and Prosblogion]

I've seen several criticisms of Simon Critchley's "What Is A Philosopher?" (e.g. here and here). Several points occurred to me that I haven't seen in any of the criticisms I've read. Critchley presents philosophers as being in the grand tradition of Socrates and Plato, which he construes as consisting of:

(1) being clumsy in worldly affairs and willing to appear silly
(2) taking time to move from topic to topic (as opposed to a lawyer who is assigned a task) or to examine a topic fully (rather than being restricted to the time limit given to a lawyer arguing a case
(3) embracing non-traditionalism by rejecting the norms of the society around them and shunning social groups and structures, by adopting impious and politically suspicious views and practices

Critchley's portrait of Socrates and Plato and his picture of philosophy seem to me to be incredibly one-sided. Plato is certainly not arguing for going against the status quo as if that's some absolute good. In fact, his opponents here, what Critchley calls the pettifoggers (following Seth Benardete's translation) were not lawyers as we understand them but the Sophists, who were famous for their claims to be able to argue for any view, no matter how crazy. Socrates points out that all philosophers could be called crazy for their views, but that's because careful thought and willingness to consider where arguments lead for the sake of good reasoning is going to lead you to unpopular views at times (like his theory of Forms, which sounds crazy to some people). He says the ordinary person will consider the philosopher ignorant and arrogant, when in reality it's the popular critic of philosophy who is more often ignorant and arrogant in that very act.

Socrates and Plato both held views that would seem silly and wrong to many people. But that hardly makes them non-traditionalists of the sort that Critchley seems to be praising, those who are counter-cultural and counter-traditional merely for the sake of being different or contrary. It's not that being odd or against one's culture is the goal. The goal is having the right beliefs and living the best kind of life one can lead. Sometimes that will lead Socrates and Plato to criticize the non-traditional views of the Sophists with heightened vehemence. They rightly considered many Sophists' views dangerous in the same way the popular mindset of Socrates' day wrongly considered his views dangerous. The Sophists' own moral relativism or moral nihilism (depending on the Sophist) is one certainly non-traditional, but Plato was pretty harsh with it in defense of a more traditional moral realism. Socrates and Plato, therefore, must be pettifoggers, according to Critchley's account, for defending traditional views on such matters. That wasn't remotely what Plato was talking about, though. Critchley has got Plato very wrong here.

What Plato is really criticizing here isn't defending traditional views. He isn't even that concerned with how much time you can devote to them, although he does think philosophers will attempt to spend the time it takes to think through something fully. The people he opposes are those who take on a view and defend it no matter what, even if the arguments eventually lead to another conclusion. Philosophers are always open to being convinced otherwise. This is compatible with defending a view, however, and it's compatible with defending a traditional view, as long as you think the arguments lead to that view rather than another view and as long as you're listening to arguments to the contrary and willing to consider them. You might still reject those arguments and maintain the traditional view. Plato is fine with that and often did that himself. Critchley seems to be resisting traditional views merely because it's traditional in his own culture (i.e. contemporary academia) to do so. It's interesting to consider, then, whether he is in fact being the pettifogger, both on Plato's account and on his own.

This is the 57th post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. The last post concluded discussing the psychological account of personal identity. This post moves on to the bodily account. 1. I could have been born without a brain.

Here's another one from Jonathan Glasgow that I'll just quote his own description of:

We are all simultaneously struck by an agent that causes us forget our systems of racial classification. Any time we start to racially classify ourselves, our cognitive apparatuses short-circuit. One hour later, cognition reverts to its pre-amnesiac state, and racial classification resumes.

(Again, as with several of these, if you think races don't exist, you'll say they continue not to exist through this. But this question is for those who think they do exist.)

Do races stop existing for that period of time and then come back into existence, or does something keep them in existence during the interim period? If so, what generates their existence?

My friend and sometime co-blogger Wink likes to think of God as the author of creation in a much more literal way than most people do. He sees God as writing a story, with human beings as some of the main characters, and one response he has to the problem of evil is that the story overall justifies certain instances of badness occurring throughout the story.

This also serves as a helpful analogy for him in thinking through the relation between divine sovereignty and human freedom, since the characters in a book can easily have free will of whatever sort you'd like even if every step of their fictional lives is written by an author. Within the story, their choices are all free. They make choices, and those choices need not be determined in any way by anything outside their control (although if it's a story in a deterministic world, then of course something outside their control does determine their actions, and they at most have only compatibilist free will).

It was hard to resist thinking about the author theodicy when I heard this quote on a recent podcast (see writeup here) by the executive producers of Lost:

We're sorry that it happened, but we're not sorry that we did it, and we make no excuses for it. It is a very intense and dark time on the show. Obviously the deaths of these characters provides a tremendous emotional catalyst for the survivors, because now they're at war. The sides were a little hazy before now. Now, there's great clarity. -- Damon Lindelof

Then consider the specific reasoning given:

We felt it was really important that the audience understand that, going into the end of this show, nobody is safe. One of the problems in television is that you innately know that certain characters aren't going to die, and that strips certain shows of their jeopardy. We want there to be a feeling that anything is possible, and that going into the end of the series, that is very much true. There will be some surprising things.

It's the author-theodicy version of a point made by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in sections of their work that I've taught in my history of philosophy intro class. Augustine asks us to consider a painting. There will likely be spots that, taken apart from the whole, would look ugly. But in the context of the whole painting they fit and make the painting itself more beautiful than it would be without them. Aquinas similarly says that the occurrences of evil in the world are indeed intrinsically bad. The fact that they occur is unfortunate, and other things being equal a good God who could prevent them would do so. But other things aren't equal, because the macroscopic picture of the history of the universe (which, of course, goes on forever into eternity according to Aquinas, with evil defeated forever after a certain point) is better as a whole if that evil occurs, even if the microscopic look at just that bit of evil should lead God to declare it bad and worth avoiding.

Lindelof seems to be making a similar point. It's unfortunate that these beloved characters had to die, but they thought things would be best for them to die at this point given the story they are trying to tell. The macroscopic look determines whether it's worth doing. They're not sorry they did it, because of that macroscopic effect. The microscopic look determines whether the event is unfortunate in itself, and in this case they admit that it is. But the macroscopic effect is what matters for storytelling, even if sometimes honesty requires acknowledging the microscopic picture as Lindelof does in this quote.

Note: Some of these thought experiments are my own, and a number of them appear throughout the philosophical literature on race. Charles Mills was a source for some of them, I think. Sveral of them have come from Jonathan Glasgow, and a few are unique to him, so I should at least give some credit here for that. I've never seen this one in particular anywhere else. Given that I'm giving him credit in this post, I'll just quote his own description of the case:

Everyone above the age of ten months is being killed by a virus that itself will expire as soon as it kills the last person who is more than ten months old. In a furious effort as they await their doom, the remaining scientists devote themselves to finding a way to finding a device that can keep the infants alive until they are old enough to survive on their own. [Jonathan Glasgow, A Theory of Race, p.121]

Do races cease to exist upon such a disaster?

Suppose we finally reach a point where we don't treat races differently in any sense that matters. There's no more even unconscious discrimination. The structural barriers that in most contexts favor whites more than other races and some non-whites over other non-whites are gone, even those instances when no one intends to do harm. There are no more people who have negative attitudes toward people because of race. (So far this is all the same as #9.) Suppose further we have abandoned the use of racial terms, not just terms like 'race' but even terms like 'black', 'white', 'Asian', and so on.

If you don't think races exist now, you'll obviously not think they exist in such a circumstance. But if you think races exist now, will they still exist under such circumstances?

Suppose we finally reach a point where we don't treat races differently in any sense that matters. There's no more even unconscious discrimination. The structural barriers that favor whites more than other races and some non-whites over other non-whites, even when no one intends to do harm, are gone. There are no more people who have negative attitudes toward people because of race. Yet people continue to use racial terms the same way we continue to use ethnic terms (e.g. Italian) even when there's no prejudice or societal structures making things difficult for those ethnic groups.

If you don't think races exist now, you'll obviously not think they exist in such a circumstance. But if you think races exist now, will they still exist under such circumstances?

When we were about to leave for church on Sunday, we had to turn the TV off in the middle of an episode of something Ethan was watching. I told him I'd record the West Coast version when it played three hours later, but it's hard for him to pull away from anything he's started.

As we rounded the corner, instead of doing a usual temper tantrum he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and said in his fully frustrated about-to-lose-it voice, "God, please rewind the day!"

I don't know if he was seriously bringing his problem before God or if this was an autistic scripting incident substituting his concern for one in whatever TV show script he was acting out. This is the first time he's done this rather than just crying out to the sun to go back (to give him more time before bedtime) or to the rain to stop.

But it was no use trying to explain to him that it wouldn't work. If God rewound the day, the part of the show Ethan had already watched would be playing, and then he'd be watching it again and stopping at the same point so we could go to church, all without remembering that he'd watched it already, and then he'd say the same thing, "God, please rewind the day!"

What we think we want isn't always what we want, and if we got it we'd discover that it wasn't really what we had wanted. The kind of impossibility involved in his desire is on a level he can't understand. But why should we think something similar isn't true with some of the things we want, even demand, or some of the things that we'd expect should happen if an all-powerful, omniscient God has a plan for how events in our lives will unfold?

This is the 56th post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. The last post began looking at the psychological account of personal identity. This post presents a further objection against the psychological account: the problem of duplication.

The psychological view claims that someone is the same person as an earlier person when there's sufficient continuity between the two in terms of memory, personality, beliefs, desires, and character traits. The duplication problem 

Suppose God creates a person in the afterlife who has memories duplicating mine. Is it me? God's choice of those memories is because they were mine at death, so there's a dependence on my memories. Is that enough, or is this an imposter? Could I look forward to being this person? Or is this is just a duplicate, not me?

To make the problem more vivid, consider the story of William Riker, from the sixth season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Second Chances". Lieutenant Riker was attempting to transport off a planet with difficult atmospheric conditions. Because of the risk of not getting through, the transporter technician decided to run two beams from the transporter, in case one didn't get through or in case information needed to be compiled from both beams to reconstruct the full signal. These extra measures were intended to insure Riker's survival. It turned out they did something entirely different, because on beam successfully made it back to the ship, and Riker was rematerialized there (it seems), but the other beam was reflected back to the planet, where Riker was also rematerialized there (it seems).

The Riker who made it back to the ship lived for years, continuing his career in Starfleet and eventually becoming Commander William Riker, first officer on the Enterprise-D. The Riker who ended up back on the station had to wait years before the Enterprise-D showed up in this episode and rescued him, since no one had known he was there. From the moment there were two of them, you could no longer assume that either was the original. After all, nothing makes either seem like a better candidate for being the original. Both originated from beams that was exactly the same, from a process that seems as if it would ensure survival of Riker if only one beam had succeeded in rematerializing him. According to the psychological view, all you need is a resulting person who has all the right psychological characteristics. Either version of Riker would have met that criterion, and thus either Riker (if he were the only one) would have been the same Riker as the original, as long as the other hadn't existed, according to the psychological view.

But with two of them, the psychological view has a problem. We have two thinking things. Each has a different body; each thinks "I'm Riker, the guy who did ... beforehand". But that can't be right, because these guys aren't the same as each other . So is this kind of knowledge of who we are as firm as it seems to be? They can't both be the original. Let's assign them distinguishing names to make it clear what's going on here. We'll call the original guy Riker. Commander Riker returning to the planet is Will. Lieutenant Riker, who had been stuck on the planet all these years, is Tom (based on Riker's middle name, which the planet-version goes on to take to distinguish him from the other one).

So we've got Tom and Will. Can they both be the original? Each has as much right to that claim as the other. However, assume they both are the original. Tom is Riker, and Will is also Riker. But Tom is not Will. How can Tom be the same guy that Will is without Tom being Will? Will and Tom are two separate individuals. If it's true of both of them that they're the same guy as Riker, then they're the same guy as each other, and we already know that's false.

There are a couple crazy things a psychological theorist might say to avoid this contradiction. One proposal would be to say that there were always two people in the Riker case, and they were present in the same body all along, thinking the same thoughts as each other, both doing everything the original body did. Then when the split occurred, each one went his separate way. This does seem crazy, though. What made one of them go one way and the other the other way? Why wouldn't both go to both new bodies, creating the same problem again? Also, if there would only have been one without the accident, then how does the mere existence of a duplicate in the future make there be two beings in the same body earlier? That's a funny causal relationship. The future duplication makes there have been two all along.

Another crazy view that a psychological theorist might hold to avoid the contradiction is that there never ends up being two. Riker still exists as one person. He just has two bodies from that point on. It's not that there are two of him. There's only one of him. But he has two bodies, two brains, four arms, and a bi-located existence. He's just as present in each place where he exists, and he might be running in one body while sitting down in the other body. He might be thinking Captain Picard is a jerk with one brain while thinking Captain Picard is not a jerk with the other brain. He might be thinking with one of his brains that the guy with the other body is a jerk, not realizing that in such an instance he's thinking of himself as a jerk, since the guy that he's thinking about is himself. There's actually no contradiction here. It's a coherent view. It's not as if he'd be both sitting and not sitting when one body is sitting and the other standing. After all, in that situation one body is sitting, so he is sitting. He's not not sitting. He's just standing too while he's sitting. It's not a contradiction unless you can generate something of the form "P and not-P", and you can't do that with this view. But the view is indeed crazy. There obviously seem to be two people after the transporter accident.

A third crazy view to avoid the contradiction while maintaining the psychological view seems less crazy when you first consider it, but I actually think it's more crazy. What you say is that there would normally have been a continuing Riker if the transporter had worked to materialize one Riker (in either place), but given that there are two of them he ceases to exist, and now there are two people who think they're Riker, but neither really is. This seems less crazy than the above two crazy views. After all, neither Tom nor Will can claim to have a better right to being the original guy, and they can't both be him, so it must be that neither is Riker. Riker is dead. That seems like the right thing to conclude, after looking at the arguments I've already discussed.

However, there's a serious problem remaining. Someone holding a psychological view should want to maintain that with an ordinary use of a transporter the original person does survive. It's only in these weird cases of duplication that you kill the person. But why would the same exact occurrence produce a surviving person most of the time, but then kill the person in these weird cases? The only difference in these weird cases is that some other occurrence, completely outside the causal path of the transporter, occurs. If you just had one transporter beam successful, say Tom's, then Tom would be Riker. If you just had the other successful, then Will would be Riker. But if both success, Riker dies. The exact operation that makes him survive kills him if this additional occurrence takes place in addition to the operation that would otherwise make him survive. If the events within the original transporter beam should make him survive, how can the appearance of an additional transporter beam invalidate that survival? And how can it be that any beam would count as survival if any of the others would invalidate the survival? If you're going to say that more than one beam prevents survival, why should it occur with just one beam? You're better off saying that you don't survive with this kind of transporter to begin with, and thus every time anyone on the show steps into a transporter and gets disintegrated, someone else appears on the other end of the beam. But then the psychological account would be wrong. So it seems the duplication problem is areal difficulty for the psychological account. Anything it has the resources to say to avoid the problem results in a pretty crazy view.

This problem can arise without futuristic technology, also. Go back to Locke's original example. He wanted to say that God could make someone in the afterlife be me just by giving the person my memories. A more robust psychological view would include other psychological properties than just memories, but anyone holding the psychological view could say the same thing. But what if God creates two duplicates of me? They can't both be me, because they begin to have different thoughts and be in different places. But how could you pick one over the other unless one appears first? What if both occur at once? How could facts like the existence of a duplicate or when it was created affect whether the other is me, anyway? Shouldn't it just be facts about the one that determine if it's me? The psychological view, then, fails to determine whether some proposed candidate for being me really is me, unless you're willing to say something that, upon closer examination, seems intolerable.

In the next post, I'll move on to the bodily view, the first biological account of personal identity that I'll be covering.

This is the 55th post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. The last post looked at dualist accounts of personal identity. This post begins discussing the psychological account of personal identity.

Remember that an account of personal identity seeks to explain what it is about me that makes me continue to be me over time and through change. There must be something that grounds my continuation as me despite the fact that various things change over time. Psychological views begin with the insight that, when you wake up in the morning, you know who you are without looking at yourself or seeing if anything is physically the same compared with yesterday.

Like dualists, those who hold psychological views think it's coherent to imagine the possibility of waking up in some other body. But they don't want to insist that personal identity has to do with an immaterial soul. Some of them don't want to believe in such things to begin with, and others prefer to remain silent on the issue so that their theory of personal identity doesn't require taking a stand on that issue. What makes me me is the same whether materialism is true or false.

In particular, pychological views rely on things like memory, personality, beliefs, desires, and character traits to continue from your previous set of memory, personality, beliefs, desires, and character traits, with perhaps some change but not a very drastic change. Some continuity of these properties must be present for the person to continue.

The earliest version of the psychological account, in fact from the earliest explicit discussion of personal identity that I even know of, is John Locke's memory account of personal identity. Locke claimed that memory alone is enough to make someone me, and without memories of my doing something, God couldn't hold me responsible in the afterlife for having done it, since it wasn't me who did it.

But Locke's view faces several problems. One is that we do think of amnesiacs as people who can't remember things that they themselves did. It doesn't seem as if we generally take people to be a new person just because they can't remember having done something.

Another is that there seem to be possible ways of having memories of something that shouldn't have anything to do with being the person who did the things those memories seem to be of. In other words, there are fake memories. If memory determines the continuation of the same person, we need to agree on what counts as a genuine memory. Consider someone implanting memories into my brain (by hypnotism, neuroscience, or some other method we can't as easily think of). I didn't do the thing I seem to remember. So memory alone can't make me the person who did it. What if we had the technology to remove from my brain all memories I've got, replacing them with all of Michael Jordan's? Which is the real Michael Jordan? Obviously the original is. But why is he the original and not whoever is there in my body? It's circular to base your account of personal identity on memory and then to explain which one is the original person based on which one has the original memories. If you define the person in terms of memories, you can't also define the memories in terms of some prior notion of which person is the original. Personal identity was defined in terms of memory, and now real memory is defined in terms of who the original person is. We haven't explained anything.

One way to fix the memory account is to say that what makes a memory genuine is that it's caused in the right sort of way. Fake memories are not caused in the right way, not caused by the events remembered but, e.g., by a hypnotist faking it. Real memories are caused in the right way, i.e. by the events themselves as they occurred. Then personhood is defined in terms of real memories (and so ultimately in terms of being caused in the right way. This is no longer circular.

However, does it solve the problem? What method of being caused in the right way results in my surviving death? When you copy memories from Michael Jordan, and put them into my brain, it seems as if they're being caused by the events in question (as opposed to, say, making up memories of something that never happened). You need some criterion for when such memory-creation from real events is sufficient to make the person be the original and when it isn't. Perhaps that's not an insurmountable problem, but it will be tricky to do this kind of thing without generating a circular account. You can't base your response on anything that has any assumption of which person is the original. I don't have a lot of hope for this, but that might be due to my deep-seated intuition that this account gets things backwards. The reason the memories in my brain aren't real memories, is because I didn't do the things they seem to be about. Michael Jordan did, and I'm not him. The tendency to try to define real memories in terms of the person doing them seems to me to be natural, because that probably is at least part of what explains which memories are genuine. But that means the psychological account is wrong, since it gets the order reversed.

In the next post, I'll present an even more disturbing problem for the psychological view: the duplication problem.

For Zion's sake I will not be still, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until her righteousness goes forth like brightness, and her salvation is like a burning torch [Isaiah 62:1, John Oswalt's translation (p.576)]

John Oswalt, in his commentary on Isaiah, says of this verse:

However it might appear, God insists that he will be at work unceasingly for Zion's sake. The emphatic position of this phrase Underlines a significant point. As important as God's name is, he is not delivering Jerusalem for himself, for the sake of his reputation, but for the love of his people. (Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 400-66, p.578)

Then he adds this footnote:

The other side of the position is given in Ezek. 36:19-27, where God makes plain that he is not delivering Israel because of anything it has done to deserve such deliverance. The deliverance is strictly an expression of his own holiness.

Here is that passage:

I dispersed them among the nations, and they were scattered through the countries; I judged them according to their conduct and their actions. And wherever they went among the nations they profaned my holy name, for it was said of them, 'These are the LORD's people, and yet they had to leave his land.' I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel profaned among the nations where they had gone.

"Therefore say to the house of Israel, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: It is not for your sake, house of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone. I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the LORD, declares the Sovereign LORD, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes.

" 'For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. [Ezekiel 36:19-27, TNIV]

Here are three views that someone might hold to try to fit these texts together:

A. God does things for the sake of his glory, and God does things for the sake of his people (or those he will bring into his people). But these motivations are distinct (but at times simultaneous), and neither is wholly reducible to the other.

B. God does things for the sake of his glory, but all this means is that he acts based on his character and promotes what's good. The reason God promotes what's good is for the sake of others. So God's doing things for the sake of his glory is explainable in terms of God's doing things for the sake of others, which is the more primary and ultimate motivation for God.

C. God does things for the sake of others, but the reason God's love is important is because it demonstrates the perfection of God, the most perfect being. It's always good to promote good, and promoting the most perfect is better than anything else you might do. So God does things for the good of others because God does everything for the sake of his glory, and doing things for others does that.