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This is the 45th post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. The last post finished up the compatibilist account of freedom, and this post moves on to a perplexing problem related to freedom and moral responsibility, one that philosophers have called moral luck.

Immanuel Kant thought it obvious that we're not responsible for things not under our control. Why hold people responsible for the workings of fate? Shouldn't we be responsible just for what we intend to do, or at least what we can reasonably, foreseeably expect given what we intend? It's irrational to evaluate each other based on things not under our control. Yet Thomas Nagel points out that we do it, and we will continue to do it, since it's part of our way of thinking about morality. It seems fine to us until we think more deeply about it. Nagel argues that we can be morally responsible in circumstances we have no control over. His cases involve moral evaluations that depend on things outside our control. He calls this phenomenon moral luck (I think it was actually Sir Bernard Williams who came up with the term). These are cases in which something outside my control affects our moral judgment of my actions, usually by affecting the action or its consequences.

Some of Nagel's cases might fit into different of these categories, depending on how you think of it, so keep in mind that these are loose categories. Also, Nagel has four categories, but I think the difference between two of them is not worth the time it takes to distinguish them, at least for the purpose of these notes, which come from my lecture notes for an introductory philosophy class.

1. constitutive luck: my inclinations, capacities, and temperament aren't fully in my control. Significant aspects of who I am are from genetics, experiences, etc. Yet I often act in certain ways because of these. I may have a genetic tendency to be more violent, or maybe I'm good largely because of a good upbringing. This doesn't stop moral evaluation. We still blame the violent person or praise the good person, and it seems right to do so. (Note: determinists admit this. What's important is that libertarians have to admit a large amount of constitutive luck, which on their view means freedom is a lot more limited than you might have wished.

On Thomas Aquinas' view of natural law, law is written into the fabric of the universe. On one level, everything that happens is part of divine law, since God's plan of providence includes every single event that happens across all time. Aquinas calls this eternal law. On a second level, certain things are good for us or bad for us according to our nature, according to what kind of thing we are and what would make for contributing to our welfare and the internal purpose within us as organisms and as God's creations. That's the natural law. Then human beings can issue legitimate rules that fit with what's best for us and seek the general welfare. If it meets all these criteria, then it's a human law. If it's issued by someone without care for those it includes or if it's not for the general good or reasonable, then it's a real law. Otherwise, it's just a rule. He's got high standards for when a purported human law really is a law.

One of the aspects of this that I hadn't seen until this summer, when I covered a more extensive part of his treatment of this in what's called the Treatise of Law (but is really just a section of the Summa Theologiae, and he gave it no such title) is that he also allows for custom to generate laws. When he introduces the notion of legitimate authority to make laws, he says there are two ways this can happen. One way is that someone (singular or plural) God has placed in care over a group issues a rule that really is for the common good. The other way is that people issue a regulation over themselves. In contemporary times, we hear that and think he's talking about democracy. He surely knew of the ancient democracies, since he education would have included quite a bit about the ancient world. But that turns out not to be his primary concern when he says this. He actually means custom.

We have lots of rules by custom rather than by what we ordinarily call law. I'm pretty sure there were men's and women's restrooms before there were any laws about who can go in which in public buildings. If I'm wrong, there are lots of examples that are like that. It's not illegal in the U.S. to call people ordinary insults, but it's often immoral, and it's against custom if it's a certain kind of insult or a certain kind of context (in the middle of a job interview, say). We as a society have standards not to do things that aren't illegal. They're just frowned on, and you get ostracized or socially penalized if you do them.

What I found interesting about Aquinas on this subject is that he thinks this can go the other way too. If a certain action is worth prohibiting for the common good and is made a law (a genuine law) but then becomes against the common good, what was a law becomes merely a rule. But what about when no one follows a law, and those in authority tolerate such behavior? The movie theater in the mall near us hasn't allowed backpacks in the theater since a little after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. At least that's their official policy. But no one enforces it, and lots of people don't keep it. I think Aquinas would see that as custom determining what the real human law is, and I think that's a very interesting view. It also has implications for speed limit laws in a jurisdiction where the police don't stop people for going 5 over or 10 over, and everyone drives that fast because they know where the threshold for being stopped is. On Aquinas' view, it's as if the law really is where they practice it as being, not where it's written to be. (Of course, all this depends on the custom's practice being consistent with the common good. If not, then custom couldn't modify written law in this sort of way.)

I finally finished grading for the semester, and after sleeping only three hours I haven't wanted to expend the effort to write anything I have to think much about. I do have two more student quotes from the last batch of exams and papers. One student in my Issues in Ethics class presented me with the following gem:

Democratic socialism calls for the abolition of a classless society in which the upper class rule the lower class.

Read that sentence over again, and think about what it says. First off, it's ambiguous. On one reading (the more natural one, I would say), democratic socialism (a) calls for the abolition of a classless society and (b) has the upper class ruling the lower class. This is a consistent definition but wrong on both counts. On the other reading, democratic socialism calls for the abolition of a classless society, and the classless society has the upper class ruling the lower class. This is the more natural reading, but it's also wrong on both counts and even has the additional problem of being flat-out contradictory!

I have another one from a dialogue. I believe it was actually Barack Obama's mouth that this was supposed to be coming out of (in a discussion between Obama and McCain):

I believe that there are three factors to determine the justness of war and terrorism. One would be that bad consequences are not intended. Next, the action should be a side-effect rather than a blunt end. The action can't be justifiable to victims.

The final sentence says the opposite of what it's supposed to say, but that's not what's especially funny about this quote. The second factor is an attempt to say that the bad consequence should be (a) a side-effect, as opposed to either (b) the goal of the action (i.e. the end) or (c) a means to that end. How did the idea of an end as in a goal or purpose somehow get turned into a blunt end, presumably of a weapon? And how is that a contrast to a side-effect? Is there some way to read this that I'm missing?

I assign dialogue papers to my students. They basically write a philosophical conversation between two characters who hold differing views, thus presenting both sides or multiple sides of a debate in a way that is fair to the people who hold such views. In the last batch that I graded, I noticed two particularly puzzling sentences and typed them up into my blogging file. I can't remember now if these were from the same paper, so I don't know if the same mind produced them both, but it wouldn't surprise me. The first one sets up the conversation, and the second was uttered by one of the characters in a conversation on the same topic (so they might well be from the same paper).

1. Lester walks into his house and tells his parents that he has been out [of] the closet for 10 years now and has kept it a secret in fear that they would not accept it.

Out of the closet but keeping it a secret? Any suggestions as to what that's supposed to mean? My guess is that the student thought being out of the closet had something to do with admitting to yourself that you're gay rather than its actual meaning of being publicly known as gay.

2. Though I disagree with homosexuality, I do not have anything against it.

I'm trying to figure out what disagreeing with it is supposed to involve if it doesn't involve holding something against it. Maybe the idea is that the person doesn't approve of it but is nice to gay people, but notice that it doesn't say against gay people but against homosexuality. So it's not well put if that was supposed to be the idea. It might be that disagreement is finding it distasteful, while having something against it is thinking it's morally wrong (or vice versa). But that doesn't seem like a natural way to say either.

As I've suggested, there's probably something coherent that these sentences were supposed to mean, but this is a philosophy paper, and clarity and precision are crucial for the very enterprise that these students are supposed to be engaged in.

I started the semester off in my applied ethics class with a unit on abortion, so I've been thinking a lot about arguments in the abortion literature that you don't often see at the popular level. I haven't taught this subject since fall 2004, so I'm sort of coming at a lot of this from a fresh perspective and rethinking a lot of the arguments I've been familiar with. Several things have occurred to me that seemed worth blogging about, so you can look for several posts on abortion in the next week or so as I write up my thoughts on some of these things.

One highly-anthologized article on abortion is Don Marquis' "Why Abortion Is Immoral". Marquis sets out to explain why abortion is immoral without assuming the personhood of the fetus. He instead develops an account of why killing in general is wrong. Killing is wrong, says Marquis, not because of some intrinsic property of the thing being killed (e.g. its capacity to feel pain, its consciousness, its ability to plan for the future, its self-concept, and so on), but because of the future it would otherwise have or be likely to have if you don't kill it. The reason it would be wrong to kill me is because of what you're taking away from me if you do so -- my future. The reason it's wrong to kill anything is because of the future you're robbing it of.

Now it follows that you're robbing a fetus of a future, and the future you're robbing it of is one like the future you and I have. You're even robbing it of more of a future, since it won't even get what you and I have already had that's now in our past. So abortion is wrong because it robs a fetus of a future like ours. This is so even if a fetus isn't a person. It has moral status not because of its current properties but because of what you would be taking away from it if you do certain things to it. In other words, its future (or what would otherwise be its future) is what guarantees the wrongness of killing it (and what you might derivatively call its right to life, but this is now being framed in very different terms.

That's the primary argument of Marquis' article. He doesn't spend much time developing it. Most of his effort goes toward motivating his theory of why killing is wrong and explaining why it's superior to person-based accounts. In this post, I'm not going to focus in on whether his theory of killing is correct, but I do want to flag a part of his support for it that strikes me as question-begging or at least as only appealing to a relatively small subset of potential readers.

One of the features he presents for his view on why killing is wrong is that it gives the right results about a number of other issues. Philosophers often give such arguments. They present a theory about something, and then they point out that their theory fits nicely with people's intuitions about other matters, and the alternative theories they're considering conflict with those same intuitions. The problem in Marquis' use of this strategy is that he chooses some controversial intuitions, indeed a pretty strange combination of them.

A colleague of mine where I teach is sort of a stickler for assigning grades according to the traditional but now completely obsolete approach whereby a C is average. He seeks to have the median student in the class earning grades in the C range, with an equal number of people in the D range as in the B range and as many failing as earning an A. His argument is that this is what these grades have always meant, and grade inflation is a violation of the meaning of the grades.

It struck me today that this argument is very similar to the argument language conservatives give against gender-inclusive language. The English language has changed since the time the ordinary English speaker could hear a sentence like "Surely every moral man must be appalled at the judicial execution of the innocent or at the punishment, torture, and killing of the innocent" and not wonder what the author thinks about moral women and children. (The sentence is from Kai Nielsen's "Against Moral Conservatism" from Ethics 82 (1972), which my students had to read this week.) Gone are the days when a sentence like that could make it into publication in a top philosophy journal.

So too have the standards changed when it comes to what letter grades mean. A grade of a C just doesn't indicate merely satisfactory anymore. Students know this. Most faculty know this. You can pound your fists and complain about this sorry state of affairs, and maybe you're right that it's regrettable (although I see no reason why we should have to stick with any particular arbitrary assignment of letters to standards). What I don't think will ultimately pass muster is sticking to your guns and giving people grades in a way that's wholly inconsistent with what the standards in fact are by basing it on some system of giving grades that hardly anyone follows anymore. Doing so means you're not giving people the grades you think you're giving them. This is why I can't in good conscience follow my colleague's policy.

This is not to say that college students today are as competent as in the past, which may well not be the case. It doesn't mean the work that now counts as satisfactory is what should count as satisfactory. Those are completely separate issues. All I'm saying is that the meaning of the letter grades has changed in a way that those who hold onto the traditianal system of assigning grades have been resisting to the point where the grades they assign are dishonest, even if not deliberately so. Grade inflation may be a problem in other ways, but one element of grade inflation is simply a fact, and resisting it in the way my colleague does seems to me to count as academic dishonesty.

I've decided to begin a running feature on things I discover in students' submitted work that annoy me or amuse me. Usually these will be pet peeves. Sometimes they will just be odd expressions or statements. I'll begin with one that I see very regularly, and it's not just in student papers but all over the internet. It's the expression "close-minded".

It amazes me how common this is, but it doesn't make sense. No one is saying that your mind is close to something, which is what "close-minded" suggests. Even if your mind is a material object (which it isn't), this isn't about having your mind physically close to anything. What people mean is that someone is closed-minded, i.e. their mind is closed. Somehow the 'd' has become elided in how we pronounce it, and people who don't read have spelled it the way they hear it. It has become so common a way of spelling the term that there are more Google searches for "close-minded" than there are for "closed-minded".

Dictionaries do unfortunately include both, and I'm not trying to say that this is incorrect. I think it's reached a point where I can't confidently say that. But it is nevertheless stupid and annoying that it's gotten to that point. The question is whether I can justify correcting it on students' paper.

Here's one suggestion. One of the things a college course involving academic writing should teach is how not to come across as ignorant or as a non-reader. If enough people will conclude that upon seeing someone write "close-minded", then it might be worth correcting for the sake of how viewers of the writing of the student in question will see it. But I think that argument might apply to things I don't think I should correct (e.g. the singular "they", which I eagerly encourage).

I've often begun ethics classes by having my students write about something that they've done that they believe to have been wrong, explaining why they think it was wrong. It gets them into the mode of having to give reasons for their moral views. This semester I decided to supplement that assignment by having them write a week later about someone they admire and respect or some action they respect, explaining why they find that person, trait, or action admirable. It captures a kind of ethical thinking that I think a lot of ethics classes will downplay because of their focus on what factors make an action wrong. There isn't as much emphasis on good-making features of actions, character traits, and so on in contemporary ethical theorizing.

I was very surprised by the results, and I'd be interested to see if this happens with a different kind of group. I'm teaching a junior-level class, and all these students have had at least two philosophy classes that are supposed to be heavy on the history of philosophy. I wonder if newly-arrived freshmen would answer the same way. Still, it was a little unexpected to find that 19 out of 43 students who did the assignment had chosen a parent (or both parents in one case). These were about evenly split between mothers and fathers. Another 10 were other family members (a sister, two brothers, a grandmother, three grandfathers, an uncle, and a cousin). Five chose friends and one an unrelated, older role model. Two were about complete strangers they'd interacted with or observed. One was amorphous, just listing character traits. Five were famous people (Max Roach, Oprah Winfrey, Jessica Lynch, Abraham Lincoln, and professional baseball players as a whole).

For some reason it didn't surprise me that a lot had chosen family members, but this was overwhelmingly family-heavy, and the bulk of the family members chosen were parents or grandparents, with parents occupying the most (almost half of the responses). I expected a lot more than three contemporary celebrities, but I guess it's not so surprising that most people don't see celebrities as heroes to respect or admire. Most celebrities aren't all that worthy of respect and admiration.

But my question is this. Is this a reflection of a cultural change? Are college students now all of a sudden more respectful of parents than we've been led to believe? Common wisdom among those I spend a lot of time with think there's very little respect for parents among young people. Or is it something that wasn't ever really true to begin with? Or is this something due to a change as students move out from their families and live on their own, now seeing their parents in a more accurate way? Or is it something particular about this group of students because they're at a Jesuit institute of higher learning?

I've been teaching a Maymester course on Human Nature since last Monday. It's basically an entire semester in two weeks, with a four-hour class every day, five days a week. I've been able to recycle some material I've taught before, probably a little over half of it. Most of that was last week, which was nice because my grades for the spring semester were due at noon on Friday, an hour before my class. I was asked a week ahead of time, right in the middle of heavy grading season, and things haven't slowed down since then. Given that most of what's still to come the rest of this week is stuff I've never taught before, I expect probably to have even less time than I've had. Maybe it will lead to some interesting posts when I do have more time, though, because it's a lot of material that I haven't engaged with carefully before.

This is why I've been doing a bit more linking and a bit less actual discussion for the last ten days or so, and I have no reason to think that will change before Friday at 5pm, when I'm done with the intensive part of the course. I'll have some grading to do after that, because I think it's unconscionable to expect students to do a whole semester's work in two weeks when they're probably not able to put in even enough time to do all the readings carefully, never mind write about them intelligently.

I do have one series of posts planned once I have a little more time. Max Goss, who runs the politically conservative philosophy blog Right Reason, has asked me to do a guest series at that blog, and I'm going to be writing a series on Augustine, evangelicalism, and the role a Christian (and specifically Christian views) can play in politics. I'll probably post some other things there, but at least the Augustine stuff will be cross-posted here.

Other than that, I'd like to get back to my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series once I have a little more time, and I'd like to write some commentary review posts this summer. I still wanted to put some thoughts together on the Republican candidates after the debates, but that's not complete enough yet to do in the amount of time I've got at the moment. There are several posts on various blogs that I had wanted to respond to, and some of those may just slip into nowhere or get a very late response. I do want to use the majority of my time in June to work on my dissertation, however, and I'm teaching a more reasonable but still intensive summer course from July 9 to August 9, so don't expect a major, substantive post every day even during June, and things may get busy again for me not too far into July.

Mark Liberman at Language Log has come up with a term to describe one of the most idiotic plagiarism techniques I've ever heard of -- text laundering. The usual method is to save time and effort by copying someone else's work and submitting it as your own. But it's so easy to catch people doing that from online materials that some students are masking their trail by substituting words to fool Google, using a thesaurus to find synonyms and so on.

There are at least two problems with this (purely from the perspective of not wanting to get caught). One is that such use of a thesaurus is likely to lead to awkward enough sounding phrases that anyone reading it who is slightly informed will suspect something is up, and creative enough use of Google will easily find the source anyway. At least that's so unless the student is so thoroughgoing to be immune to Google, which would seem to be the point of text laundering. But such Google-proofing would take up so much time that the student might as well have learned enough of the material to begin with to write a competent essay just from class materials. Can you imagine how long it takes to replace every important keyword in a document one is plagiarizing with alternatives from a thesaurus, all of this after having combed Google for sources to begin with and spliced them together into a format that resembles an academic paper enough that they think it will fulfill the assignment? If plagiarizing is supposed to save time, and text laundering is supposed to make the time-saving effort harder to catch, there doesn't seem to be a good way to achieve both goals simultaneously.

This is the the twenty-fifth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I looked at why some people think theism serves as the best non-naturalistic foundation for ethics. This post now looks at an objection to seeing God as the basis of morality.

In Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, he has the character of Socrates raise an objection to the idea that morality has something to do with the gods. If something is good just because the gods view it as good, the gods could command anything, and it would automatically be right. You don't have to be a polytheist for that consequence. How could God's mere choice be the basis of morality? Are good things good because God says they're good, or does God just declare them good based on seeing their goodness? If they are already good, then doesn't that mean God's choice didn't make them good?

This is the the twenty-fourth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I looked at why naturalistic foundations of ethics seem unsatisfying to many people. In this post we'll now turn to what non-naturalistic accounts of ethics can do and why some take theism to be the best account of the foundations of morality.

How does this become an argument for God? What can someone say about morality if moral truths go beyond the natural world? It doesn't immediate show that theism is true. A few possible accounts of morality remain:

A) Moral truths are beyond nature but have no explanation.
B) Moral truths are beyond nature but necessary. Their explanation lies within themselves.
C) God's nature explains moral truths.

Moral truths have no explanation:

The first view is that moral truths go beyond the natural order. Science can't tell us anything about them. However, this view doesn't have anything additional beyond nature to ground these truths. They're true on their own as abstract principles, part of the very fabric of the universe, but there isn't anything that makes them true. They're just true, although they didn't have to be true. Some see this view as having an advantage over theism because it's simpler and admits to fewer entities.

This is the the twenty-third post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I finished discussing the design arguments for the existence of God, and this post begins looking at moral arguments for God's existence.

[Note: These posts on the moral argument are derived in part from discussions in Gregory E. Ganssle, Thinking About God and C. Stephen Evans, "Moral Arguments" in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro.]

According to naturalism, the natural world is all there is. There are subatomic particles, waves, fields, etc. There's no room for God, souls, magical forces, angels, demons, a world-spirit that orders all creation, or anything like that. The natural world known to us through physics (and disciplines building on physics, e.g. chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, history, etc.) is all there is, and we shouldn't postulate the existence of anything else.

How can a naturalist account for morality? Consider what you learn from science. You won't find moral truths. It's not as if there are moral facts out there in the physical world together with facts about brain chemistry or nuclear physics. It's hard to find a place to fit morality in. Many theists think an account of morality that seeks to rely only on the natural world will be inadequate, superficial, or illusory. The deep kind of morality most of us believe in requires denying naturalism in some way.

Consider some particular naturalistic accounts of morality.

Greg Ganssle has produced the most fun and readable introduction to philosophy of religion I have ever encountered. His target audience runs from high school seniors to introductory college students, and I can say that I have enjoyed teaching an introductory philosophy course using this book. He presents the issues in a clear-headed way while drawing readers in with fun examples and humor.

After arguing for the value of thinking through philosophical questions in a reasonable way, Ganssle argues for open-mindedness in the sense of not being so sure of your views that you are not open to reason, but he also dismisses the idea that we must be neutral or that we must not make exclusive truth claims. Open-mindedness does not require having no views in those ways. I especially like seeing this in a book designed for younger students unfamiliar enough with philosophy to need some kind of way of heading off the simplistic kind of relativism that many students of philosophy find themselves stumbling over.

The main body of the work considers philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God. His presentation of the cosmological argument is the clearest I have ever seen, avoiding technical terminology when it is not needed but making the concepts as clear as can be done without such terms. His treatment of the design argument focuses on the fine-tuning argument after showing why very few are today convinced of biological design arguments, a choice perhaps reflecting a desire to stay out of intelligent design controversies in the political realm but nonetheless reflecting the philosophical consensus among believing philosophers today. His moral argument discussion helpfully begins by showing the difficulties in naturalistic accounts of morality, thus showing reasons why someone would turn to God as an explanation. I wish he had treated some naturalistic accounts of morality that are not relativist or eliminativist, and I really wished for a discussion of Euthyphro objections, but I do think his treatment of this argument is among the best I have read at this level.

I have a few potential posts I want to write, but things have been a bit busy around here.

1. I spent a long time troubleshooting a memory problem and then waiting a while for Dell technical support, only to find that once they've sent me my memory I still only have 128 MB instead of the 256 MB I'm supposed to have. It turns out one of the motherboard ports was bad in addition to one of the memory chips not working. I thought I tried every combination before getting off the phone with the guy, and I though both ports were working. I must have gotten things backwards in repeatedly turning the computer over to open up the bottom and then to turn it back on when done. Well, the new motherboard should solve a few minor problems that were beginning to annoy me as well, and it's nice to be operating at normal speed again. The nice thing about having a Dell complete care warranty is that they fix anything with no questions asked. I just hope they let me renew it when it expires in May. They're phasing this model out, and we're not ready to buy another computer. Sam's computer is already out of warranty, and they wouldn't let me pay ridiculous amounts of money to renew it for another year. Add to all this that my computer has been really slow lately due to the memory problem, and I've had to wait a little bit just to switch from one window to another. What's really disturbing is that Sam's computer is doing the same thing, and as far as I know she has no problem with her RAM.

2. We've finally begun our long-awaited attempt to make our windows less of a heat sink. It's good that someone who knows what he's doing is doing it, but we had to wait a while to get him. I believe we first talked to him before Thanksgiving. (There's also a currently underway renovation to this blog's design by Wink, but all I have to do is look at what he comes up with and tell him what I think. With a real life person working on our house, I have to talk to him about what he's doing and run and drive him to the hardware store when he needs stuff, since he gets dropped off by his wife.)

3. I'm spending far more time than usual wrangling three crazy kids due to having nowhere immediate to go and no immediate deadline to meet. I think I need to go to campus if I want to work, but that feels weird during a break.

This is the the nineteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I presented the cosmological argument for the existence of God. In this post, I'll address what I consider the two best objections to the argument before offering some concluding thoughts.

First, we might think that the universe itself is self-existent. Then the conclusion of the argument is true, but it doesn't give us anything like the traditional theistic God. Suppose that is right. This commits us to a certain view about the universe, namely that it is the sort of thing that couldn't fail to exist. It means it is false to say that there might not have been a universe. This is certainly not a conclusive argument, but many philosophers want to avoid this conclusion.

Suppose you are comfortable with that conclusion. Do we really have an explanation for why there are any dependent things at all? Being self-existent simply because your parts are all explained still doesn't give an explanation of why there are any such parts. The traditional conception of God explains it more fully. It's God's nature to exist. God is the sort of thing that has to exist, but God is also viewed as a creator. Would we see the universe as a creator in the same way? It's hard to see how, which might leave us thinking that the universe as a whole doesn't serve as the kind of explanation that God does. In short, theism as a view explains why God would be self-existent, but I know of no explanation of why the universe would be self-existent. I don't think of this response as a disproof of the objection, but I do think of it as a good reason to prefer the theistic account.

The second objection I have in mind is William Rowe's (see the reference in the previous post in the series). His strategy is to deny PSR altogether. He says there could be a third kind of answer to explanation questions. Something's nature could explain something about it. Something else could explain something about it. But if you deny PSR, you can also simply have facts without any explanation. Philosophers call these brute facts. If PSR is true, there are no brute facts. Every fact is explained. But Rowe wonders why there couldn't simply be one brute fact -- the existence of dependent beings. Then there's no reason why any dependent things exist. Some will think the question is meaningless (like the question of where the universe is or when the timeline is). I get the impression that Rowe doesn't think it's meaningless, but he just thinks there's no answer to it. Either way, this response takes PSR to be right about individual things but not about the kind of explanation this argument calls for.

This is the the eighteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. I've posted an earlier version of this a while ago, but the comments degenerated into a discussion of things completely unrelated to the post. That time, it was a version of my notes on this that hadn't been altered since 2001. I've decided to expand it a bit based on further study of the subject, even though I haven't taught all these issues in the course that this series is based on. I should also say that my presentation depends heavily on William Rowe's work, most importantly the short article he wrote for introductory courses that appears in Reason and Responsibility, ed. Feinberg and Shafer-Landau, with one reference to one other text I have used in that course, Jan Cover and Rudy Garns's Theories of Knowledge and Reality (abbreviated TKR).

The cosmological argument for the existence of God is one of a number of classic arguments sometimes used in conjunction with each other to establish the existence of a being with some of the characteristics generally taken to be true of God. I'm going to look at three such arguments, each contributing something different to the overall picture The cosmological argument in particular occupies a very small role in any overall picture of how some have offered argumentation in support of theism.

I just (for some reason) received the hard copies of my teaching evaluations for last spring, and the online versions I looked at months ago didn't have the reverse side with the written comments, so I was able to see some of the much more useful information finally. One comment stands out as especially noteworthy: "If you didn't read you had no idea what was going on, did not present info in an easy to follow manner"

I read that to one of my teaching colleagues, and he laughed. This is what we try to get across to students in the first week of class. Isn't it a bit lame to omplain that it's true at the end of class, as if that reflects badly on the instructor? In a philosophy class, the instruction time assumes that you've already done the reading. I'm not there to summarize the reading for them just so they won't have to do it. I'm there to help them reflect on it in a way that they would have a harder time doing without someone aware of the broader philosophical tradition, to inform them of whatever the readings did not happen to cover, and to engage in methods of approaching these issues that will clarify things in ways not addressed in the readings. What would be the point of assigning reading if I didn't want them to have thought about these issues before coming to class?

What's especially funny about this is a set of further factors that I didn't notice until I turned the page over to the front. It's a comment on the following question: "How would you rate the contributions of the assigned reading materials to the course? Please explain." The choices were Excellent, Very good, Good, Fair, Poor, or Not applicable. This student chose "Very good". In fact, all of the student's answers on the computer-graded section were pretty good (except for the one about prompt grading, the bane of my teaching existence). I should also note that the student indicated that they expected to receive a C+ in the course and indicated putting in average effort to make the course a success. I'm guessing that the student vicariously experienced the very good contribution of the reading material to the course through seeing that the other students who did it tended to do well in the course. Or something.

I had another instance of what looks to be cheating on a take-home exam. See this post for the first case. It involves the same two students. The first time I couldn't be sure if they were cheating or just working from close notes from class. They didn't even answer all of the same questions, but the ones they answered in common (maybe 60-70% of them) were very similar. They tended to start out with identical wording, but it was because it was based on the exact wording of the question they were answering. From there the answers tended to follow similar paths but with different wordings from each other, sometimes with a sentence by one that wasn't close to anything in the other but largely consistent with working from the same outline as each other, which is what I'm guessing happened. I couldn't rule out that they had simply availed each other of each other's class notes, which I told them they could do as long as they didn't help each other arrive at their answers in any way further than that.

Well, the third exam came along, and I was right to be suspicious. The same two have submitted exams that are very similar again, but this time they did exactly the same questions. I'm guessing that they did work together on the second exam and figured I didn't notice, so they went all out this time thinking they'd be home free. The sad thing about it all is that their answers tend to be among the best in the class. I think it would have been immoral to fail them the first time, given that I couldn't really have ruled out an alternative explanation besides cheating, but it seems to me that the second time gives me enough evidence to do something.

I've decided not to fail them outright. I'd like to encourage them to come forward and admit it to me, so I'm offering a lower penalty for them if they come forward. I'm going to tell the class the basic information about the first and second occurrence and why I did nothing the first time but think it's too clear now the second time. I'll then say that I'll give half credit on each exam to each student if they don't come forward (after all they did presumably each do half the work; both are good students, as demonstrated by other work). That will still be a failing grade, but it won't be a zero. But if they come forward I'm going to be willing to let them improve their grade by answering more questions to be able to avoid failing. I won't have graded the exams yet when I say this, so they won't know if they're the ones I'm talking about, and it really will be on them to come forward. I think this is a strong enough warning to them to show that cheating is serious while giving freshmen in their first college experience a chance to make up for it if they're honest about it and willing to do the work they should have done in the first place.

I have two students whose take-home exams seem to follow the same lines of argument in a few questions. They use different sentence structure but use largely the same vocabulary and make mostly the same points in the same order. They didn't answer all the same questions, and sometimes one said a lot more than the other, but it really looks as if they were working together on some of the questions and deliberately trying to avoid looking as if they did. So here's my question. I had the thought to grade a couple of their similar answers with drastically different grades. If indeed they cheated, and I rob one of them of a whole bunch of points, the student probably deserves a lot worse. But it's not fair. I should do it to both. That's the downside of my plan. The upside is that it would almost assuredly motivate them to come to me to complain, and then I could point out how remarkably similar their exams were with both exams right in front of them. I'm not asking for advice here. I'm not going to do this. What I'm interested in is the ethical question. Would it be wrong to do something like this?

This is the the sixteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

As with the other no-evidence argument posts in this series, some of my presentation is influenced by the chapter by John Hawthorne called "Arguments for Atheism" in Michael Murray, Reason for the Hope Within. This post in particular also takes a good deal from Peter van Inwagen's "It Is Wrong Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone to Believe Anything on Insufficient Evidence" and "Quam Dilecta" (part 1; part 2), which are two different presentations of the same core paper, expanded upon differently for different audiences (I assume).

In previous posts I've tried to make the strongest case for arguing that we shouldn't believe in God, on the grounds that there isn't enough evidence. There are a number of points that I'd like to make in response. This post will look at how standard responses to skepticism of any sort can enter into this debate, given that the no-evidence argument is very much like the arguments for skepticism (see the end of the last post). I have a few other points to make after considering the responses to skepticism as applied here, and those will follow in the next post.

This is the the fifteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. As with the other no-evidence argument posts in this series, some of my presentation is influenced by the chapter by John Hawthorne called "Arguments for Atheism" in Michael Murray, Reason for the Hope Within. This post in particular also takes a good deal from Peter van Inwagen's "It Is Wrong Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone to Believe Anything on Insufficient Evidence" and "Quam Dilecta" (part 1; part 2), which are two different presentations of the same core paper, expanded upon differently for different audiences (I assume).

I also want to issue a reminder that this series' material was largely written over a few years of teaching the course that these are lecture notes for, but I haven't organized them into blog posts except as I'm going. I've been forecasting how many posts are left on certain issues, and with each post in the No-Evidence Arguments section I've thought that I had one or two posts left. Then I've had to subdivide some of the posts as I've expanded some thoughts that I discuss in class but didn't have in my handouts. That's why the numbers of the posts I've predicted hasn't always matched up with how many posts I've gone on to produce.

So far I've presented the no-evidence argument in one popular form and looked at whether there is sufficient evidence for God, with some evaluation of how atheists and naturalists would view the evidence presented in favor of God. I'm now moving into the issue of what we should say if we decide that the evidence is inconclusive. Should we accept the skeptical argument against believing in God? This post focuses on the explanatory adequacy that naturalism claims for itself and the use of the principle Ockham's Razor to favor atheism rather than just agnosticism. In the next post, I plan to work through how various responses to skepticism will apply to skepticism about God. Then I expect to conclude this portion of the series with a few final thoughts. After that, I'll move on to arguments for theism that might better be thought of as arguments against naturalism, and then I'll look at the problem of evil, the second major argument against belief in God. That will wrap up the first half of the material for the course these posts are taken from, which has been on knowledge/skepticism and God, and the second half will cover free will, the nature of the mind, and personal identity.

This is the the fourteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

In the last post I looked at an argument for atheism that requires a higher standard than will easily convince many people (one I happen to think is incredibly implausible). There is a weaker argument available to an agnostic or atheist against believing in God, given in its most famous form by W.K. Clifford. Some philosophers call this the no-evidence argument:

1. It is wrong to believe something without sufficient evidence.
2. We don't have (and shouldn't expect ever to have) enough evidence for belief in God.
3. Therefore, we should not believe in God.

As with any philosophical argument whose premises really do guarantee its conclusion (as seems true of this argument), the key work in defending the argument will be supporting each premise, and the efforts of those who criticize the argument will focus on questioning either premise (or both). In this post, I'll focus on the second premise, whether there is enough evidence. In the next post, I'll assume there is not enough evidence and see what follows.

As with the last post in this series, some of my presentation is influenced by the chapter by John Hawthorne called "Arguments for Atheism" in Michael Murray, Reason for the Hope Within. This post isn't as close to what Hawthorne focuses on as the last one was or the next one will be, but the general framework I'm working with in these posts is from him, and this post falls within that framework.

This is the the thirteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

So far I've discussed more expansive skepticisms, including skepticism about knowledge from the senses, and I've looked at particular problem raised against knowing about scientific laws. The one other particular problem I'll work through is skepticism about knowledge of religious matters, in particular knowledge of God. As I see it, there are two main types of arguments against the existence of God. The first kind is the no-evidence variety, and the second is the attempt to find a contradiction in what people say about God. The only serious one of the latter type that I know of is the problem of evil, and I'll come to that in due time, after considering three arguments for the existence of God. Before I do any of that, I'll look at the other type of argument against the existence of God, the no-evidence kind of argument. I know of two general kinds of no-evidence arguments. The one with a much stronger conclusion is sometimes called the divine silence argument, and it seeks to show that there cannot be any being like the one Christians and many other theists believe in and call God. One with a weaker conclusion simply relates to there not being enough evidence to justify believing in such a being, but that argument doesn't attempt to show that there can't be such a being. I'll spend the two posts after this one looking at the more general kinds of no-evidence arguments. In this one I'll look at divine silence.

Here is one version of the divine silence argument offered by the atheist [note: my presentation of this follows very closely the chapter by John Hawthorne called "Arguments for Atheism" in Michael Murray, Reason for the Hope Within]:

1. If a being with roughly the features of what people mean when they talk about the Judeo-Christian God exists, then such a being would make this absolutely clear to us.
2. We don't have such palpable evidence.
3. Therefore, there must not be such a God.

This is the the tenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

Reliabilism responds to skepticism by challenging one of Descartes' key methodological assumptions. He claims that you can't know anything unless you have absolute certainty of that thing, not just having a subjective sense of feeling certain but an absolute, objective understanding of why that thing must be true. No one, of course, has such certainty about most things we believe. Reliabilists just argue that we don't need to. Knowledge just doesn't involve that kind of certainty. Reliabilists simply deny the premise that everyone else seems to assume, that knowledge requires this idea of absolute certainty. Reliabilists consider such a notion ridiculous.

We know all sorts of things without being able to prove them to ourselves and without being able to rule out all the alternatives. How do we ordinarily use the word 'know'? We say we know all sorts of things. How do we find out what words generally mean? We see how people use them. In this case, people use the word 'know' when they don't have certainty.

Many of my students don't bother to use spell-checker, and it shows. Occasionally, I can tell that someone did use it, because some word they obviously didn't intend appears and was probably its suggestion for a word they spelled wrong but simply the wrong suggestion. In an exam I'm grading at the moment, a student says the following about Augustine's view of what takes place with the disordered state of our emotions at conversion:

"Conversion involves a reordering that starts in this life and explains how people become more vitreous."

This was from one of my best students, someone at the top of a class composed entirely of above-average students. She got a perfect score on this essay question, as it happens, and that's not easy in my classes. She just wasn't paying enough attention when her spell-checker suggested this for however she misspelled 'virtuous'. It's never good not to use spell-checker, but you have to be careful. Things like this happen, and misspellings that are real words never show up.

This is the the seventh post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

How perception works is relevant to skepticism about knowledge through the senses, so it might be nice to get a little background on theories of perception. There are three general views in the history of philosophy on the nature of perception. I'm going to be talking in terms of three prominent philosophers in the earlier modern period who held the three diffferent views. How you interpret some of the responses to skepticism will depend in some cases on which view of perception you have (and one of them, as we saw in the last post, is itself a sort of response to skepticism).

[Note: I'm less confident with this post than with some others that I'm representing the historical figures as carefully as I'd like to represent them. In some ways these figures are standing for the overall view, and I'll sometimes refer to a contemporary response as if it's what the historical figure would say. I'm not really pretending to be accurate to the historical figure when I do this. I'm more trying to explore the view. I do think most of what I say is close enough to what they say, but I don't want to look as if I'm doing history of philosophy. This post is just to get a sense of what these views can look like.]

One way to understand the three views is to consider the following inconsistent triad of claims:

1. We perceive ordinary objects.
2. What we perceive are ideas (something internal to our minds).
3. Ordinary objects exist outside of us -- external to our minds.

Any view will have to deny at least one of these claims. If 1 and 2 are true, 3 comes out false. If 1 and 3 are correct, 2 must be false. If 2 and 3 are right, then 1 must be wrong. This is how the three views we are considering will work. These three claims are inconsistent because they can't all be true.

This is the the fifth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

(Note: My presentation of these issues is somewhat influenced by Peter van Inwagen's chapter on idealism in his Metaphysics. I agree with his statement that the view Berkeley develops might better be thought of as ideaism, but he's also right that since there is a traditional label for the view, it's probably best to stick with it.)

George Berkeley gives what I consider to be the most creative response to Cartesian skepticism. He argues that we do know of the ordinary objects we believe exist, because those objects are just ideas in our minds. We certainly know of those ideas. I'll save the arguments for and against his view for the next post. In this post I just want to explain what the view amounts to.

Julia Annas has produced a remarkable volume intended as a reader for introductory ancient philosophy classes. I'm using it in my class right now, and I'm finding it to be exactly what I was looking for.

An upper level ancient philosophy course should be more directed toward examining the whole of a philosopher's thought, and reading longer works in context with the entire philosopher's outlook is ideal in that environment. In an introductory course, however, students are taking philosophy for the first time, and the ancient philosophers are merely a means to learning philosophy for the first time. Focusing on issues is thus more important than getting the whole of a philosopher's thought down in every way.

This book presents six topics, with ancient philosophers' writings on the topics organized as a conversation. The six topics are (1) Fate and Freedom (which includes divine foreknowledge and the fixity of the future), (2) Reason and Emotion, (3) Knowledge, Belief, and Skepticism (including relativism), (4) Metaphysical Questions (including paradoxes, the Forms, cause/explanation, and time), (5) How Should You Live?, and (6) Society and the State.

This is the the fourth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

The first response to Descartes' particular version of skepticism didn't take very long to surface. Indeed, Descartes was its author. He wasn't a skeptic himself. His goal in writing the Meditations on First Philosophy, where his most extended treatment of skepticism is found, was to argue that our knowledge is indeed well-founded. It's just that his view that knowledge requires absolute certainty pretty much required him to present reasons for doubting before he could reconstruct the certainty of knowledge from its basis. His argument is nowadays seen to be wholly unconvincing in more than one place, but I'll sketch the general outline of it anyway so you can see how he tried to respond, because any response that might be successful would have to avoid the problems with his attempt.

Descartes picked up on Augustine's argument that there's got to be at least one thing that we know, no matter how much doubt we engagw in. Augustine was dealing with the ancient skeptics who claimed not to have any beliefs. They saw belief as a way to open yourself up to error, since nothing can be trusted as reliable. Certain things appear to be the case, and the skeptics might assume those things in some sense, but they won't believe them. Augustine argued that this very reasoning process involves thinking, and someone's got to be doing that thinking. How can you doubt something if you don't exist? I'm raising doubts, so I must exist. I think, so I must exist. The most famous formulation of this is "I think; therefore I am", which doesn't occur in Descartes' Meditations as such but is in one of his other works, and the main argument does occur in the Meditations. It's not originally his argument, though, despite the popular notion that he came up with it. It's really Augustine's argument. Descartes did make use of it, though, to begin his way back up the path to knowledge. He at least knows that he exists, because he knows he thinks.

This is the the third post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

One bad objection to the arguments in the previous post is that the cases it involves are fairly extreme and seem unlikely. It's a bad objection because the point doesn't involve any assumption that the cases are likely. The point is very simple and straightforward. You can't rule these cases out. They're within the realm of possibility as far as our evidence is concerned. Our evidence is just as consistent with the Matrix or an evil demon's deception as it is with what most of us believe to be true. All that matters is that it's possible. If it's possible that something is true, even something you think incredibly likely, then you can't rule it out. If it were true, it would mean your beliefs are false. That means you can't rule out the possibility that your beliefs are false, and you don't know those things that you believe. How likely the skeptical scenarios are plays no role in the argument. If the argument is bad, it's not because the skeptical scenarios are far-fetched. Some other error in reasoning must have taken place.

Nonetheless, the skeptical argument can easily be framed in very mundane circumstances that aren't all that far-fetched at all. In fact, they're things that happen all the time. For instance, I might walk to campus and then wonder if I know where my car is. I know where I parked it. Do I know it's still there? I haven't moved it. Maybe it's moved from where I put it, however. How would it do that? Well, it's possible that someone broke into it and stole it. What's more likely is that my wife got into it and drove it somewhere when I wasn't expecting her to do so. Can I rule that out? So I don't really know if my car is where I left it. It may not be all that probable that she'd go somewhere on a day when I don't know she's going somewhere, but that doesn't mean she didn't. Even if she didn't, I don't know that she didn't, so I don't know that the car is where I left it.

This is a list of posts in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series, based on my lecture notes from a class I have taught by that name. I will add links to posts as I post them:

1. Intro

Knowledge
2. Cartesian Skepticism
3. Skepticism from Ordinary Cases
4. A Priori Responses to Skepticism
5. Berkeley's Idealism
6. Idealism: the Arguments
7. Sidebar: Theories of Perception
8. Pragmatism
9. Contextualism
10. Reliabilism
11. Skepticism About Science
12. Responses to Skepticism About Science

Knowledge and God
13. No-Evidence Arguments: Divine Silence Argument
14. No-Evidence Arguments: Evidence for God?
15. No-Evidence Arguments: Explanatory Adequacy and Ockham's Razor
16. Responses to No-Evidence Arguments
17. No-Evidence Arguments: Some Final Thoughts

Arguments for the Existence of God
18. Cosmological Argument
19. Cosmological Argument: Objections
20. Design Argument I: the General Argument
21. Design Argument II: The Fine-Tuning Argument
22. Design Argument III: Many Worlds or a Designer?
23. Moral Argument I: The Inadequacy of Naturalistic Ethics
24. Moral Argument II: Non-Naturalistic Ethics
25. Moral Argument III: The Euthyphro Dilemma

Problem of Evil
26. The Logical Problem of Evil
27. Against the Logical Problem of Evil
28. The Evidential Problem of Evil
29. Explanations for Evil, Part I
30. Explanations for Evil, Part II
31. Explanations for Evil, Part III
32. Explanations for Evil, Part IV

Philosophical Theology
33. Omnipotence and Possibility
34. Omniscience and Time
35. Omniscience and Freedom
36. Goodness and Revelation

Freedom and Determinism
37. Determinism and Fatalism
38. Arguments for Determinism
39. Arguments for Free Will
40. Freedom and Determinism: Possible Views
41. Libertarian Freedom and Incompatibilism
42. Problems with Libertarian Freedom
43. Arguments for Compatibilism
44. Compatibilist Freedom
45. Moral Luck: The Cases
46. Moral Luck: Evaluation

This is the the second post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for the introduction to the series that explains what it's all about and the list of posts in the series, which I will update as they appear.

Perhaps the most famous line in the history of philosophy is Descartes' "I think therefore I am". What's often misunderstood is what he meant and why he was saying it. He wasn't saying that only things that think exist, as if thinking is what makes us exist, though many jokes rely on that mistake. [Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks him if he wants a drink. He says, "I think not" and promptly disappears.] What Descartes was up to with that line, often called the Cogito (from the Latin "cogito ergo sum"), was a response to a particular skeptical claim, and it was the beginning of an extended response to skepticism that most philosophers today believe was completely ineffective. They do, however, tend to think that the skeptical questions he raised are very difficult to get around, and they attribute the persistence of skepticism to him, even if his goal was to refute it. This is how these things go sometimes.

What I want to do in this post is motivate the kind of skepticism Descartes raised. I'll proceed to other kinds of skepticism and responses to skepticism in further posts.

I've been wanting to work through some of the material in the introduction to philosophy course (Theories of Knowledge and Reality) that I've now taught seven different times (five of those seven with two sections, so really twelve times of teaching the material). On most of the topics I've got well-organized and carefully written class handouts. If I do this, I can basically have much of my course materials online so that those who want to can look at the substance of what I teach in that class, which is not only my favorite course to teach but the one that I think I'm best at teaching. I'd love to be able to point people to that if they want to get a sense of how I cover certain issues and so on. It will also give me a chance to get feedback from a wider variety of people than just my students on how this material can be presented and on whether my evaluations of certain positions and arguments are correct.

I want to stress that this isn't what you would get by taking my course. Much of the learning that goes on in the classroom comes from direct interaction. I will tease out certain ideas, often getting students to come up with them. For some reason my teaching style lends itself well to the process of presenting some bits, being hit with an objection, responding to the objection, using that response to lead into the next bit, with its own objections to follow, and so on. Some of that might come across in handouts, but the idea is that the student's own objections will be part of this process. Sometimes that requires my clarifying questions to see what someone really has in mind. You can have these back-and-forth processes in comments on a blog post, but you can't do it in the middle of a post before you read the rest of the post the way you can do it in a live conversation. So I want to say that these notes don't duplicate what goes on in the classroom. What they do is present much of the content of what I want to get across in this class, and they give some sense of how I think about the various arguments and positions that arise, of how I organize the information and the issues, of how I think certain answers to certain questions will have some bearing on how you might answer other questions.

I got my final grades submitted with 40 minutes to spare and nearly three hours of sleep. Now all I have to do until Monday is prepare my syllabus, put up a link in the online section of my course to an online reading once the library puts the reading up, and make a handout on accessing online materials. Compared to the stacks of grading I've had sitting on my desk for about two weeks, that seems like nothing, even though it might take a couple hours.

Well, I met my first major grading deadline yesterday and my minor one today (for graduating seniors) with little difficulty. Usually I cut it much closer than I have been this semester. I finished the stuff for yesterday before 10pm the night before the deadline, which gave me the whole day to get the archaic grade sheet in to where it needed to be. I finished my Le Moyne seniors today with almost two hours to spare, and since Le Moyne is technologically up to date I didn't even have to leave my office.

I'm now about 40% of the way through my exams and papers (by number of people, and since they have roughly the same amount of work that's fair), and the final deadline for the rest is a little over 49 hours away. My grading to other things ratio will need to be a little higher than it's been if I want to make it to the one event on my schedule between now and then, but I'm now at the point where I'm moving much more quickly after grading an entire class of exams and papers that were virtually the same assignments that the class still to be graded did.

I'm still working on some replies to comments on the slavery stuff, both here and at other sites. It's going to take more work than I could do in the couple hours since we got back from the city. I don't have much energy for any post today, but I do have some questions that came up as I was preparing for teaching about lying tomorrow night. I'm curious to see what people think about these.

1. Is it lying to say something you believe to be false, to say it in order to deceive, but to be wrong about it. In other words, if you attempt to lie, but the thing you say turns out to be true, was it a lie? Can you lie by saying something that's true but that you mistakenly believe to be false?

2. Are actors lying when they perform. They're deliberately saying false things. Two views seem possible to me. One is that it's not a lie if people would be expected not to believe you. But then the perpetual liar isn't really a liar, right? The other view is that it's a lie but not a morally wrong lie. It's only wrong to lie if the people you're lying to aren't in on the lie, and here they're included in it by knowing it's all a fiction and by consenting to the lies. It's still a fiction, and therefore a lie, but it's a morally legitimate lie. I suspect most people don't like this idea, but it seems quite possible to me.

3. How does consent affect lying? In particular, I'm wondering if hypothetical consent makes a difference. Most people seem to think it's ok to lie to someone to get them to a surprise party while keeping it a surprise. Some will insist that they can do so without stating anything false, and thus it's not technically a lie if you just leave out all the information, but you can deceive someone quite well by stringing together a bunch of truths in the right way, and that seems just as immoral as lying is in cases when lying is unquestionably wrong. So the deceit here, if it's ok, should be ok whether the statements are technically lies or are just deceitful truths. What I'm wondering is why it's ok and if it has something to do with consent. If people would reasonably consent to being lied to in such cases, is that what makes most people think it's ok to lie for such purposes? Is that really a justification of lying in such cases?

I wanted to write something more personal for my 700th post, but this is a really heavy grading week, so I had to find something I wrote a while ago. Syracuse University has an Outstanding TA award every year, and I was awarded it in the spring of 2003 during my last semester as a teaching associate (basically a TA in terms of pay and benefits who teaches a class, which means they consider me faculty at TA pay with no benefits). I've since moved down the lowerarchy into adjunct status. I had to write a statement about my teaching, and this is it. I haven't edited what I submitted very much except to paste together aspects from different parts of the overall portfolio and to remove references to items in other parts of the portfolio.

What follows is my reflection on why I teach, why I teach philosophy, why I do it the way I do it, and what I've learned in the process. I've also added a few items of what I've done since then in brackets. In other words, it's a window into my thoughts about one of the top two or three things I put my energy into, and I've therefore got a lot to say about it. Most academic jobs require a statement like this, which is one reason they require it for this TA award to save people work later. By the time I go on the market I think I'll have to revise it significantly.

If you make it to the end (it's not short), you'll notice that it starts to degrade into summaries of particular kinds of teaching not related to university teaching. Those come from summaries on later pages in my teaching portfolio. I wanted to include them here, but be warned that it seems to end quite suddenly. My conclusion of my main teaching statement ends before that stuff starts. So don't think anything got cut off.

Ray Pritchard links to some fairly extensive lists of Christian books online, a few of which I'm very glad to recommend. You can browse through yourself to see the comprehensiveness of what's now online.

F.F. Bruce's The Historical Reliability of the New Testament is the first comparison I know of between the New Testament documents and other literature at the same time, concluding that the standards classicists use for determining authenticity make the New Testament come out as the most likely to be authentic of any ancient documents (where authenticity isn't about the proof of all its content but the reliability of its transmission and the origin in the general time period and setting it claims to be from and therefore its value as a source about early Christianity).

Two works by Jonathan Edwards come with my strongest recommendations. On the Freedom of the Will played a large part in my early thinking on the issue (though my views as they stand are much