TH E
17. Of course, there must be such a thing as a “disastrous environmental effect” in its own right in order to get the argument up and running. This seems to presuppose that the notion of proper function is applicable when thinking about ecosystems, and that assumption may be challenged. The Missoula Valley has been the location of Lake Missoula many times over in the course of the natural history of the area, as ice dams have formed and subsequently melted with “catastrophic” effects downstream. Is there any good sense in which we may identify the fl ooded condition of the valley as better or worse than its present state independently of the interests of, say, those Missoulians who now work and live there? In order to be able to say that there are some things that we ought not to do to the environment, we would seem to require the prior claim that some natural states are better than others. But the claim seems problematic given an ecocentric perspective. See Chase (2001).
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of excellence of character – or lack thereof – of the person in question. He writes, “Sometimes we may not regard an action as wrong at all though we see it as refl ecting something objectionable about the person who does it” (Hill 1991, p. 108). On this view, the “moral discomfort” that we experience at the thought of the Last Man destroying the world’s natural or cultural treasures is explained primarily by the fact that we fi nd ourselves assessing the character of a person who is capable of such an action, rather than the action itself. The ability to do such things reveals something dark about a person’s basic moral disposition.
Hill reasons that, while environmentally destructive behavior “does not necessarily refl ect the absence of virtues, it often signals the absence of certain traits which we want to encourage because they are, in most cases, a natural basis for the development of certain virtues”
(Hill 1991, p. 109). Such destructive behavior may refl ect, among other things, a lack of the kind of humility that one develops with a full realization of his place in the scheme of things, or it may betray a lack of an aesthetic sense. Since these are human excellences that we value, we recognize character fl aws in those who have failed to develop them. Routley’s Last Man may be thought to have an overinfl ated sense of self-importance – a kind of hubris. The same may be said of grave robbers, vandals, and iconoclasts. A lack of love and respect for our natural environment may be evidence of a lack of the more “generic” virtues that have application in other areas of life as well. And so, if Hill’s account holds up, then perhaps we may account for the moral intuitions to which Routley appeals without being required to extend moral standing to stands of trees.
I fi nd Hill’s application of this account of human excellences to environmental concerns to be highly plausible. But a parallel application to explain our “moral discomfort” in cases of rape or genocide – certainly nothing that Hill himself would countenance – would be highly implausible. As I write, a particularly brutal and grotesque case of kidnapping and murder along the Appalachian Trail is in the news. A suspect has been arrested, and he is allegedly linked to three other recent murders in bordering states. I do fi nd myself asking Hill’s question, “What kind of person would do a thing like that?” It is a monumental understatement to observe that the killer “lacks excellence of character.” He is, in fact, a moral monster. But, clearly, such observations do not adequately account for the “moral discomfort” that one feels on hearing news of rapes, murders, and decapitations. To appropriate Hill’s formula, intended only for the environmental contexts, and employ it here would result in a bad parody at best or an outright perversity. Nor do we fi nd an adequate resource in an adaptation of Hursthouse’s explanation given earlier of the virtue ethicist’s analysis of why one ought to help a person in need: “helping the person would be charitable or benevolent.” We ought not to explain why one should refrain from rape by pointing to the fact that “raping a person would be un charitable and malevolent.” It is these things, of course, but it is very much more. Things are no better if we invoke Johnson’s VE: it is right to refrain from rape (in C at t) just in case so refraining (in C at t) “is or would be characteristic of a fl ourishing human life.” Moral standing is clearly implicated in the case of rape, but appears to have no place in formulations such as VE. The reason rape is wrong, and, indeed, the reason that it is committed only by bad people, is that persons ought never to be treated in that way.
My objection does not amount to what Hursthouse refers to as the “egotism objection,”
namely, that consistent virtue ethicists, in behaving generously or benevolently are, in fact, acting out of a concern for their own characters. Imagining a view with such implications, Mary Midgley observes:
Anyone who refrained from cruelty merely from a wish not to sully his own character, without any direct consideration for the possible victims, would be frivolous and narcissistic. (Midgley 1986, p. 157)
And so we might imagine the would-be rapist refraining from that sordid deed solely because he wishes not to be a rapist. Or consider the M*A*S*H* episode in which, upon learning that he nearly lost a patient through some oversight, Major Winchester, always the egotist, reacts in horror: “That would have been the worst thing ever to happen to me.” To such objections, Hursthouse (2007) replies, “The virtuous agent acts as she does because she believes that someone’s suffering will be averted, or someone benefi ted, or the truth established, or a debt repaid, or . . . thereby.” I see no more reason to suppose that the egotism objection sticks here than I saw earlier for supposing that consistent utilitarians must always have “social utility” consciously before their minds and not the welfare of individuals. Surely, we can see our way to the view that generosity may be consciously altruistic regardless of what we learn about the metaethics involved in VE. But the devil is in the metaethical details.
A virtue ethic that is ultimately grounded in a notion of respect-for-persons may prove to be a rich and plausible theory. One likely interpretation of Confucianism has it as an account of human fl ourishing. But, whereas Aristotle defi ned humans as “rational animals”
(which, on one standard interpretation, has the implausible result that one fl ourishes insofar as one basically leads the life of the philosopher), Confucius defi ned them as “moral animals” (Koller & Koller 1998, p. 239). On this reading, we fl ourish insofar as we fulfi ll that nature. The chief virtue lauded by Confucius is jen, or “human-heartedness.” Jen amounts to a “love of humanity.” One fl ourishes insofar as one cultivates this virtue and the complex character that is its corollary. In one place, Confucius instructs, “If a superior man departs from humanity ( jen), how can he fulfi ll that name? A superior man never abandons humanity even for the lapse of a single meal. In moments of haste, he acts according to it. In times of diffi culty and confusion, he acts according to it” (Analects 4:5). Allowing for obvious differences in detail, the concept of the “superior man” functions in the Confucian scheme in much the same way that the “man of practical wisdom” does in Aristotle’s thought. He is the person who lives well by manifesting the desired character traits. In asking, “How can he fulfi ll that name?” Confucius is invoking one of his central doctrines, the Rectifi cation of Names: “Let the ruler be a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father and the son a son” (Analects 12:11). The idea is that each named thing has an essential function that must be fulfi lled. To “fulfi ll the name” of “superior man” is thus to fulfi ll the function, and this is done, he says, by coming to love humanity. Confucianism thus folds the concept of respect-for-persons into its account of fl ourishing so that our question, “What makes a good person good?” is answered by reference to the person’s regard for humanity and the role that such regard plays in the overall cultivation of character.
Assuming that I am correct in thinking that Confucian moral philosophy may fruitfully be regarded as a variety of VE, it would seem to differ from standard theories. Hursthouse (2007) notes that virtue ethicists largely “have eschewed any attempt to ground virtue ethics in an external foundation,” and this observation is perhaps illustrated by Politis’s criticism of Scaltsas’s proposed ground. The “external foundation” that appears in Confucianism is a principle of respect-for-persons, and it compares favorably with the celebrated Kantian formulation of such a principle. Sandra A. Wawrytko (1982), for example, notes that “both revolve around the seminal concept of respect as the root of any system of ethics, as well
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as the sine qua non of moral practice” (p. 237). And Stuart Hackett’s explanation of the role of personal worth in the thought of Confucius would work equally well were he discussing Kant’s Principle of Humanity: “Personal being is intrinsically valuable, and the locus of ultimate, intrinsic worth; while love, as recognizing and implementing the actualization of that worth, is the essential principle of ultimate moral requirement” (Hackett 1979, p. 51). This agreement between the two moral theories would seem to put both “at odds” with classical views in the Aristotelian tradition. Robert Johnson writes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2004):
Kant’s account of virtue presupposes an account of moral duty already in place. Thus, rather than treating admirable character traits as more basic than the notions of right and wrong conduct, Kant takes virtues to be explicable only in terms of a prior account of moral or dutiful behavior. He does not try to make out what shape a good character has and then draw conclusions about how we ought to act on that basis. He sets out the principles of moral conduct based on his philosophical account of rational agency, and then on that basis defi nes virtue as the trait of acting according to these principles.
I conclude, then, that standard accounts of VE have no conceptual room for the moral standing of individuals, and, as I have been arguing, this counts against such theories. We should be able to say simply that rape and genocide are wrong because people ought neither to be raped nor exterminated.
Moral standing and personal dignity
Immanuel Kant’s Principle of Humanity instructs, “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end” (Kant 1964, p. 96). The Principle of Humanity is informed by the idea that persons are of ultimate and unconditional worth, and to treat them as “ends” is just to respect their autonomy as persons who have wills and ends of their own, and thus to act toward them in a way that is consistent with that worth. Kant maintained that there are two ways in which something may be said to have value: either it has a dignity or it has a price. A thing has a (mere) price if it has a “market value,” that is, its worth may, in principle, be expressed in terms of something else. Our various possessions pretty obviously fall into this category. One feature of such value is that it is mind-dependent: such objects have value only insofar as they are valued. The market value of your home, automobile, or Fender Stratocaster is strictly determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. We can readily imagine a possible world in which gold is valued by no one and is therefore of no value. The dollar in your pocket is worth a dollar only so long as someone believes that it is.
Something has dignity just in case it resists such valuation in terms of some market value so that its worth is intrinsic. Any property is intrinsic to a thing just in case that property involves no essential reference to any other thing, which is to say that it is nonrelational.
Each and every individual human possesses the property being human intrinsically. Each and every individual husband, however, is such in virtue of a relation that he bears to his wife. Kantian dignity is a moral value or worth that individual persons possess intrinsically as persons. Since it is a nonrelational property, its value is mind-independent, and thus not reducible to or derivative of the valuings of some agent or other. If persons have dignity,
then they ought to be valued for their own sake even if, in fact, they are not. And because dignity is nonrelational, neither is it reducible to any sort of instrumental value.
Dignity thus constitutes the unconditional worth of its possessor. The worth of persons is unconditional in that it derives from their intrinsic nature as persons and is in no way contingent upon their performance or their contribution or usefulness to anyone or anything. It is certainly possible to fi nd people who are of little or no instrumental worth, or
“useless.” Consider Otis, the town drunk, who divides his time between being face up under a bottle and face down in the gutter. But there are no worthless people, because worth is not conditioned by usefulness.
Kant’s principle prohibits treating persons simply as means to ends precisely because this amounts to treating a person as though his or her value is merely instrumental, or determined by their relation to something else. And this, in turn, is to treat a person as a mere thing. The injunction to treat people as “ends” thus amounts to an imperative to act from a respect for their dignity as persons with ends of their own. Kant’s Principle of Humanity has it that the essence of an immoral action is that it treats persons as though they are mere things.
Pretty clearly, such a respect-for-persons ethic attributes moral standing to individual persons in the way that we have sought here. The theoretical form of the theory grounds the wrongness of such actions as rape in direct duties owed the person. Rape is straightforwardly a case in which a person is treated “merely as a means to an end he does not share” (Kant 1964, p. 97). Slavery is an example in which a person is regarded quite literally as having a market value.
Kant’s notion of dignity is a natural basis for according those natural, inherent, and imprescriptible rights denied by Bentham. Persons are entitled to be treated as persons and are wronged, or treated unjustly, when treated as mere things. To Mill’s question, “Why ought society to defend the rights of individuals?,” the Kantian answer is not “social utility”
but “personal dignity.” The explanation need look no farther than a concern for the person whose rights are in question.
I have argued that moral standing of the sort capable of explaining certain of our moral beliefs requires that the duties in question not be derived from any concerns deemed more basic than or peripheral to a regard for the individuals themselves. A respect-for-persons ethic appears to be suffi cient to such an explanatory task. Is it necessary? Is the intrinsic worth of the individual implied by that individual’s moral standing? It is hard to see what moral standing can mean if it does not involve such value. We are told that we have a direct duty to some individual person S so that a violation of that duty involves wronging or doing an injustice to S. I have argued that Mill’s notion of justice, with its attending idea of rights, does not amount to moral standing, derivative as it is from the more basic concern for social utility. Likewise, VE as commonly articulated appears to neglect moral standing, as the foundational concern is with the fl ourishing of the agent. Moral standing is thus not contingent upon anything extrinsic to the nature of persons qua persons, and so is unconditional. What is it to have such unconditional regard if it is not to value the person intrinsically? And to be told that one ought to value persons intrinsically would seem to imply that persons just are of intrinsic moral worth.18
18. That is, if the imperative so to value is categorical. As noted earlier, there might be utilitarian reasons for valuing persons or other things intrinsically, although I would argue that the resulting imperatives would be hypothetical, and so the regard itself would not be unconditional. (“You may stop valuing Pete intrinsically now as your doing so is no longer useful.”)
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Personal dignity and worldview assessment
Assuming that the argument of this chapter has succeeded to this point, we have arrived at the conclusion that personal dignity is implicated by the sorts of pre-theoretical moral beliefs to which we typically appeal in refl ective equilibrium. We turn now to another question. Should we suppose that whether persons have dignity is indifferent to questions of metaphysics? That is, are we entitled to believe that persons enjoy intrinsic value regardless of what worldview we take to be true? It would be surprising if this were the case.
To make a rather obvious point, the belief that persons have dignity would seem to involve the belief that there are persons, just as surely as “penguins are comical” presupposes penguins. As such, the belief in personal dignity would not seem to be a natural component of a worldview that denies that there are persons. I suppose we might begin by noting that the committed solipsist need not lose sleep over his dealings with “others”
except insofar as imaginary persons are capable of retaliating by placing him in an imaginary asylum.
But to take a more serious example, Advaita Vedanta appears to deny the real existence of persons, as discrete selves are said to be no more real than discrete spaces within jars.
Just as there is only one universal Space, there is only the Self of Brahman (Radakrishnan
& Moore 1967, p. 513). Such a worldview might easily accommodate the advice, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” as neither party to the would-be transaction exists. But it is hard to see what to make of an injunction to treat others with respect when, strictly speaking, there is no one either to respect or to do the respecting.
On Theravada Buddhism, the question of whether there are such things as persons is at least problematic. There, we are offered a view of persons as bundles of instantaneous constituents ( dharmas). A person at a given time just is a bundle of these constituents.
Personal identity over time is spelled out in terms of a series of bundles in a causal relation so that the earlier self is a causal ancestor of the later self. But at no time is there anything substantial that may be identifi ed as the self. There are only the nonpersonal constituents.
One might wonder whether a bundle of nonpersonal constituents is the sort of thing that may plausibly be ascribed dignity and taken to be the appropriate object of respect.
The naturalist may be faced with a similar problem. Can the existence of persons be accounted for on naturalism? One might have thought so. But consider this “astonishing hypothesis”:
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice may have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’ This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can be truly called astonishing. (Goetz & Taliaferro 2008, p. 22)
Francis Crick here offers a sort of bundle theory of his own, suggesting that there is no substantive, personal, and conscious element that constitutes the self. Rather, what we call
“persons” are actually vast assemblages of neurons and the like.
Of course, Crick is also notorious for his one-time advocacy of “directed panspermia,”
which has it that human DNA was transported to the earth by a race of superintelligent aliens. But before it is supposed that his bundle theory is likewise a fringe view, we should
note that it is a direct implication of what Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro call “strict naturalism,” the idea that “nature is all that exists and nature itself is whatever will be disclosed by the ideal natural sciences, especially physics” (Goetz & Taliaferro 2008). As these authors note, this appears to be what Arthur Danto has in mind when he describes naturalism as “repudiating the view that there exists or could exist any entities or events which lie, in principle, beyond the scope of scientifi c explanation” (Goetz & Taliaferro 2008, p. 14). Unfortunately, persons as substantive selves that essentially possess a fi rst-person point of view appear to lie, in principle, beyond the scope of third-person scientifi c explanation. It is for this reason that Daniel Dennett writes:
We now understand that the mind is not, as Descartes confusedly supposed, in communication with the brain in some miraculous way; it is the brain, or, more specifi cally, a system or organization within the brain that has evolved in much the way that our immune system or respi-ratory system or digestive system has evolved. Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection. (Dennett 2006, p. 107; emphasis in the original) Unless the conscious is explained without remainder by reference to the nonconscious, the personal by way of the nonpersonal, or the fi rst person in third-person terms, the task of explanation has not been accomplished. A fi nal physical theory will be exhaustive and it will give no quarter to persons.
You’ve got to leave the fi rst person out of your fi nal theory. You won’t have a theory of consciousness if you still have the fi rst person in there, because that was what it was your job to explain. All the paraphernalia that doesn’t make any sense unless you’ve got a fi rst person in there, has to be turned into something else. You’ve got to fi gure out some way to break it up and distribute its powers and opportunities into the system in some other way. (Dennett quoted in Blackmore 2006, p. 87)
For her part, Susan Blackmore seems to have followed Dennett’s advice. “I long ago concluded that there is no substantial or persistent self to be found in experience, let alone in the brain. I have become quite uncertain as to whether there really is anything it is like to be me” (Blackmore 2006, p. 9). Thus, as Jaegwon Kim notes, consciousness has been “oddly absent” from both philosophy and scientifi c psychology in much of the work of the past century (Kim 2005, p. 8). For that matter, consciousness has been “oddly absent” even in twentieth-century works bearing such promising titles as Consciousness Explained. It is rather like picking up a title such as Europe Explored and fi nding that the author has serious doubts of the existence of that continent and devotes himself to explaining how putative Europeans might mistakenly think themselves to live there.19
The strict naturalist’s inability to discover the self in either the laboratory or the fi eld is, as Yogi Berra might have put it, like déjà vu all over again. David Hume similarly and famously failed to fi nd himself despite careful search. His introspective attempts at perceiving himself as the subject of his various perceptions uniformly turned up only the 19. Of Dennett’s efforts, Mary Midgley has written, “Suggestions that Dennett should be prosecuted for his title under the Trades Description Act are attractive, but might call for action over too many other books to be practicable” (Midgley 1994, p. 186). Thanks to Dave Werther for alerting me to this note from Midgley.
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perceptions themselves, say, the appearance of the room about him, the feeling of the air against his skin, the pressure of chair to buttocks or fl oor to feet. The conclusion that he drew from his enquiry was that the only concept of a “self ” that we have is that of a kind of aggregate of perceptions but not of any subject of those perceptions (Hume 1978, p. 259). At this, Thomas Reid expressed surprise over learning that the Treatise of Human Nature was without an author! (Reid 1983, p. 21). Similarly, Goetz and Taliaferro observe,
“[ T] here would be no knowledge of mass, electric charge, or space-time unless we are enduring selves which have experiences. The very practice of science itself is unintelligible unless persons exist and have observations and thoughts, and presumably observing and thinking are experiences” (Goetz & Taliaferro 2008, p. 50; emphasis in the original).
Owen Flanagan (2002) has said recently that we must “demythologize persons,” and by this, he means that the Cartesian beliefs of the soul and of libertarian free will must be abandoned. But the project seems to have resulted instead in the mythologizing of persons so that they have come to be regarded in just the way that Flanagan and Dennett regard the Trinity. G. K. Chesterton once quipped of the secularization of society and the consequent erosion of confi dence in the reliability of human reason, “With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifi cal man; and his head has come off with it” (Chesterton 1986, p. 237). A similar procedure seems to have taken place here. Flanagan’s
“de-souling” operation was a success; the patient vanished.
C. S. Lewis seems to have had such a view in mind as he worked through his grief over the loss of his wife. He pondered the question of whether she continued on as a person, and observed that if she “is not,” “then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was already there” (Lewis 2001a, p. 28). Elsewhere, he notes that we would then have mistaken
“boxes of fi reworks” for persons. In this, Lewis was not far from Dennett’s own suggestion that human minds are “bags of tricks.” In fact, Dennett might have attempted to console the grieving widower, as he has recently ventured his own observations on grief. Evolution has wired us to assume the “intentional stance,” which amounts to a predisposition to view certain other things in the world as intentional systems – agents with beliefs and desires.
The death of a loved one confronts one with “a major task of cognitive updating: revising all our habits of thought to fi t a world with one less familiar intentional system in it”
(Dennett 2006, p. 112). Lewis confessed that his grief felt like fear and that he refused to be consoled by religion because, even on the most optimistic account, he longed for something that was now irretrievably lost. Dennett would have advised that such are symptoms of this cognitive updating, and it is all to be expected due to the diffi culty of simply “deleting the fi le” (2006, p. 122) in our memory banks. This prompted Leon Wieseltier, in his review of Breaking the Spell, to comment, “So steer clear of ‘we materialists’ in your dark hours. They cannot fortify you, say, after the funeral of a familiar intentional system”
(Wieseltier 2006).
Insofar as the intentional stance is a propensity to ascribe irreducibly conscious states and teleological purposes to “intentional systems,” it is, as we have learned earlier, misleading – much as our programmed propensity to ascribe rights to such systems is misleading according to Dennett (1995, p. 507). And a revised Kantian ethic – call it a “respect-for-intentional-systems” ethic – would be equally misleading: Always treat intentional systems, whether in your own nonsubstantial self or that of another, as ends-in-themselves and never merely as means to ends. Such would be misleading, I say, because given the eliminability of teleological purposes on strict naturalism, it is strictly false to say that intentional systems
are autonomous and thus have ends of their own. On strict naturalism, Kant’s famous distinction between things that are governed by law and those that act in accordance with their idea of law breaks down, as the latter category collapses into the former. And, presumably, there is nothing that it is like to represent a moral law to oneself.
But neither is it clear that moral agency or autonomy may be preserved on a more relaxed version of naturalism. The past few decades of work in philosophy of mind have included efforts on the part of physicalists to reconcile mental causation to an otherwise unyielding physicalism. “Broad naturalism” (Goetz & Taliaferro 2008) or “minimal physicalism” (Kim 2005) describe varieties of physicalism that appeal to some form of supervenience of the mental upon the physical. The aim is to allow room for the irreducibly mental within an exclusively physical world – property dualism. Here, one signifi cant difference between a human brain and a slab of granite – both strictly physical objects – is that, while the latter is possessed only of physical properties, the former is qualifi ed by both the physical and the mental. Kim suggests that as “seductive” as the possibility is, allowing physicalists to remain true to their name but also to declare amnesty for all of those valuable and obvious mental concepts that have lived in exile throughout much of the previous century, it is also a “piece of wishful thinking” (Kim 2005, p. 15).
Kim urges a compelling argument – “the supervenience/exclusion argument” – for
thinking that the irreducibility of the mental is at odds with the causal effi cacy of the mental.
Physicalists – and naturalists in general – are committed to the Causal Closure Principle, which insists that all causes are physical in nature. And a Principle of Causal Exclusion has it that where any event has a suffi cient cause c, then (barring causal overdetermination) no event distinct from c can be a cause of the event. Clearly then, if all physical events have physical causes, and mental events are irreducibly mental, then no mental event can be a cause of any physical event (Kim 2005, p. 19). The result is epiphenomenalism. If the idea of law is irreducibly mental in nature, it is diffi cult to see how it may result in moral behavior, despite observed correlations between Jones thinks the maxim of act A cannot be willed to become a universal law and Jones refrains from A.
These observed correlations give us an impression of causation; however, that is only an appearance, and there is no more causation here than between two successive shadows cast by a moving car. (Kim 2005, p. 21)
In one fell swoop, we seem to have eliminated – or at least seriously compromised – both the Kantian grounds and the means of treating persons as ends-in-themselves. The latter suffers because the attitude of respect – whether for a person or the law itself – presupposes the sort of mental causation that is precluded by the supervenience/exclusion argument.
The former is eclipsed by the fact that intentional systems, just like digestive and immune systems, are mechanistic. Autonomy presupposes teleology, and the latter has no purchase in the world described by naturalism, strict or broad.
The jam is created by attempting to affi rm causal closure, the exclusion principle, mental–physical supervenience, and mental–physical property dualism. The fi rst three are nonnegotiable, and so it appears that mental causation and consciousness can be salvaged only by denying property dualism, that is, reducing the mental to the physical. But, Kim warns, “reductionism may not be true” (2005, p. 22). Some might suppose that Kim, like Dickens or Twain, is a master of understatement. Consider Michael Lockwood’s disparaging assessment of such reductionist programs:
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It seems to me evident that no description of brain activity of the relevant kind, couched in the currently available languages of physics, physiology, or functional or computational roles, is remotely capable of capturing what is distinctive about consciousness. So glaring, indeed, are the shortcomings of all the reductive programmes currently on offer, that I cannot believe that anyone with a philosophical training, looking dispassionately at these programmes, would take any of them seriously for a moment, were it not for a deep-seated conviction that current physical science has essentially got reality taped, and accordingly, something along the lines of what the reductionists are offering must be correct. To that extent, the very existence of consciousness seems to me to be a standing demonstration of the explanatory limitations of contemporary physical science. (Lockwood 2002, p. 447)
As Kim notes, the prospects for a successful reduction either by way of so-called “bridge laws” that would establish a lawlike connection – necessary correlations – between mental and physical properties, or through strict identity are bleak. No amount of information regarding the physical goings-on of the brain would seem to give us a glimpse of the intrinsic features of a conscious experience. And we appear to have two irreducibly different kinds of things with different sets of properties. Conscious states, for example, defy description in terms of the spatial and compositional properties that are essential to accounts of physical states and processes.
Indeed, despite his own efforts at a functional identity of a limited class of cognitive properties (e.g. “To be in pain, by defi nition, is to be in a state which is caused by tissue damage and which in turn causes winces and groans” (Kim 2005, p. 28)), Kim suggests that qualia resist such a functional reduction. And, echoing Lockwood, we might wonder what, other than an attempt to salvage physicalism, would motivate anyone to offer such a functional reduction. Is there not more to pain – something that it is like to be in pain – than a system of inputs and outputs?
It is not the aim of this chapter to settle these complex issues in the philosophy of mind.20
But we have seen a glimpse of the diffi culty that confronts the naturalist in attempting to account for conscious moral agents. Consciousness is either eliminated altogether, reduced to the physical, or held to be emergent and irreducible. But eliminativism is altogether implausible and of dubious coherence, reductionist programs seem doomed to failure, and property dualism cannot account for mental causation and consciousness. And regarding the latter, we might observe with Goetz and Taliaferro that the assertion that there are irreducibly mental properties introduces a pluralist ontology and signals a departure from the spirit and letter of the scientifi c naturalism that is assumed by such philosophers. It begins to appear that supernaturalism must be avoided at all costs – even the cost of an unparsimonious and possibly ad hoc metaphysic. Bertrand Russell observed: A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. (Russell 1957, p. 107)
It is indeed a “strange mystery,” and the mystery remains. Just a few years before Russell penned these lines, William James confessed that, of the relation between thought and the 20. See the argument from consciousness and the argument from reason in this volume for a more detailed discussion.
workings of the brain, “no glimmer of explanation is yet in sight” (Kim 2005, p. 12). Kim has recently updated that confession, noting that qualia resist reduction so that “there is still no glimmer of explanation” (Kim 2005, p. 28). Colin McGinn is also less than impressed by the success of any attempts at naturalizing the mind. But, he says, the choices are “either eliminativism or miracles or hidden structure.” Eliminativism denies the undeniable. An appeal to “miracles” amounts to “wallowing in the supernatural.” But, of course, “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door,” as Richard Lewontin once warned. And so McGinn opts for naturalism plus “hidden structure,” or “noumenalism,” where the latter involves a monkish appeal to mystery and the assertion, without explanation, that consciousness is a natural phenomenon (Goetz & Taliaferro 2008, p. 83). It is a shame that Descartes did not think to avail himself of this “hidden structure” option in his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth.
Generally speaking, it is diffi cult to see how conscious and autonomous persons could be engineered from Big Bang debris – particularly when the would-be engineer is truant.
The insistence that such a feat has been accomplished appears merely to be a function of an entrenched antisupernaturalism combined with the commonsense recognition
that there is consciousness and that it sometimes plays a causal role. We know that the world includes persons. What we do not know is how this could be the case if naturalism were true.
But if the naturalist is confronted with a Weltknoten when attempting to derive the personal from the nonpersonal, a similar knot is involved in attempts to derive the intrinsically valuable from the valueless. In a world that fi ts Russell’s description earlier in “A Free Man’s Worship,” a world in which the human species is the product of blind forces “that had no prevision of the ends they were achieving,” in which our noblest sentiments and passions are “but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms,” and in which those collocations – those “bags of tricks” – that have come to be called “persons” are aberrant and fl eeting exceptions to the rule of otherwise insentient arrangements of matter, it is hard to see why any special and intrinsic value should be assigned to the species as a whole, much less to each and every individual specimen. Russell asks, “How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished?”
(1957, p. 107). How, indeed?
Moral agency and personal dignity
Russell thought that our dignity is found in the human ability, during our “brief years,” to
“examine, to criticize, to know, and, in imagination, to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life” (Russell 1957, p. 107). But, as we have seen, Russell later abandoned the moral realism that is implied in the “knowledge of good and evil,” which would allow us to criticize our unthinking Mother. And now, as we have further seen, we have good reason to suppose that, on Russell’s naturalism, those forces that reign over our outward life are just as “resistless” on the interior as well.
Immanuel Kant was similarly confronted by a universe without that threatened to tarnish his aspirations, but he also similarly claimed to fi nd the ground of personal dignity within himself. Contemplation of the “starry heavens above” – the immensity of a universe in which he is “a mere speck” – seems to “annihilate” his signifi cance as a creature who, after a brief tenure here, “must give back the matter of which it was formed.” But refl ection
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upon “the moral law within” has the opposite effect, as it “infi nitely elevates my worth”
(Kant 1956, p. 166). That infi nite worth is thus secured by our autonomy as moral agents capable of understanding and acting upon moral principle. Moral agency is thus what we might call a dignity-conferring property.
If such an argument is to succeed at all, one requirement is that morality itself must be of intrinsic rather than instrumental value.21 It is no mere coincidence that Kant identifi ed two sorts of things that have dignity rather than a mere price: human persons and the moral law itself. Kant saw that genuine respect for persons requires respect for the law. My respecting you calls for my acting for the sake of certain direct duties to you. I should respect you because it is the right thing to do; and it is the right thing to do because you are deserving of respect. If, however, my fair treatment of you is only a happy by-product of my concern for some further end, then I am merely acting in accordance with those duties owed you. This is to behave as though I have, at best, certain indirect duties regarding you, and such behavior hardly qualifi es as respect. But, further, suppose that morality itself is only valuable as a means to some nonmoral end. Then it is hard to see why anyone should conclude that moral agency, which would then also be of instrumental value, is a ground for attributing dignity to moral agents. The whole thing unravels unless Kant is correct in affording dignity to the moral law. Has the naturalist, then, suffi cient reason for supposing that morality itself enjoys the sort of dignity that Kant ascribes to it? Given all that we have considered, it is hard to see why one should think so. Here is where the argument of the previous essay may be brought to bear. There, we saw reasons for thinking that, on evolutionary naturalism, human morality has emerged as an evolutionary device; a strategy aimed at reproductive fi tness. One might as well argue for human dignity by appeal to the opposable thumb or to featherless bipedalism.
Personal dignity: some dead ends
Michael Martin has recently suggested a novel foundation for personal dignity. Martin defends an ideal observer theory, which analyzes moral judgments in terms of the feelings of approval or disapproval of a perfectly impartial and informed observer. Thus, “Rape is wrong” is analyzed as “An ideal observer would contemplate rape with a feeling of disapproval,” and so forth. In an exchange with Martin, Paul Copan has charged that Martin’s ideal observer theory, combined with his commitment to naturalism, has an inadequate ontology for grounding the notion of the intrinsic value of persons. Martin replies:
It is not clear why Copan thinks that the Ideal Observer Theory cannot substantiate “the requisite metaphysics of personhood and its intrinsic dignity or value.” After all, such values would be analyzed in terms of the feeling of approval or disapproval of an Ideal Observer. Moreover, the properties of an Ideal Observer are natural properties. So, metaphysically speaking, the attribute of intrinsic dignity would be a natural property. To be sure, such an analysis may be unsuccessful, but nothing Copan has said shows this. (Martin 2002, p. 92)
Perhaps we may say a few things here to show why such an analysis must be unsuccessful.
21. I attempt a defense of such an argument in Linville (2000).
Recall that a property is intrinsic only if, among other things, it is nonrelational and mind-independent. On the face of it, it is diffi cult to see why Martin supposes that sense can be made of Kim has the property of intrinsic value by analyzing it in terms of the feelings of anyone nonidentical to, or, for that matter, identical to Kim. If the property is intrinsic, then it is identical to or supervenient upon something true of Kim’s intrinsic nature, and thus to analyze language describing that property in the way that Martin suggests is hardly more plausible than an analysis of Kim is a person or Kim is trapezoidal in terms of either the cognitive or noncognitive propositional attitudes of an ideally situated Someone. If this is intrinsic value, then it is of the extrinsic variety.
And it is a bit puzzling just how the analysis of Kim has the property of intrinsic value would go. I think I understand how the analysis of X is wrong comes out. Our ideal observer
– call him Ivan – given his exhaustive knowledge of all of the relevant nonmoral facts, as well as his impartiality, has a feeling of disapproval upon contemplating the action. But about what does Ivan have feelings of approval in the case of intrinsic value? Kim herself?
I have feelings of approval when I contemplate, say, Kim Basinger, but these are not necessarily an analysis of her intrinsic value as a person. Is it particular actions that either are or are not consonant with Kim’s dignity? But this either (a) analyzes dignity in terms of some disjunction of things that it would be right or wrong to do to Kim, or (b) it presupposes dignity and thus leaves it unanalyzed. If (a), then we fi nd that we have reversed the roles of dignity and direct duties: Kim has dignity because she ought to be treated in certain ways instead of Kim ought to be treated in certain ways because she has dignity. If (b), then Martin’s proposal is simply unsuccessful. Is it the proposition itself, Kim has the property of intrinsic value that engenders the positive feelings? But in this case, either it is the cognitive content of the proposition that does the work, or it is some non-cognitive feature of the proposition that delights our observer. If the former, then is this not simply to say that Ivan takes the proposition to be true, and thus approves of it? But then moral facts obtain logically prior to Ivan’s approval so that they may not be analyzed in terms of that approval. If the latter, then what, exactly, could it be? Is it in the rhythm or rhyme or the shapes of the letters on a page? Kim carried carrots to Cambridge might elicit noncognitive approval in some, but it seems an unlikely candidate for a moral foundation. Perhaps Kim has the property of intrinsic value is to be analyzed as An ideal observer would value Kim intrinsically.
But then we have come to the heart of the matter.
The ideal observer theory faces a Euthyphro problem that has lurked in the preceding paragraphs. Does Ivan value Kim intrinsically because Kim is intrinsically valuable, or is she intrinsically valuable because Ivan values her intrinsically? Clearly, the fi rst option is precluded as it would signal the abandonment of the ideal observer theory for a straightforward respect-for-persons ethic. Of course, if persons possess intrinsic value, and Ivan is an ideal observer, then he would, I suppose, value persons intrinsically. And that would be a good thing too because to do less than that would be less than ideal, which is unbecoming of an ideal observer. So is Kim intrinsically valuable because Ivan values her intrinsically?
Presumably, this is what is called for. But why suppose that Ivan, impartial as he is and possessed of all of the relevant nonmoral facts would value Kim intrinsically unless she actually is intrinsically valuable? Russ Shafer-Landau has argued that such ideal observer theories face this dilemma: either they smuggle in moral facts that play a role in determining the ideal observer’s feelings of approval or disapproval, or they admit only a knowledge of nonmoral facts, in which case there is no reason to suppose that the outcome is the morally desired one (Shafer-Landau 2003, p. 43). I think Copan is correct. Martin’s ideal
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observer theory is doomed to failure because there is no room for a robust account of the intrinsic value of persons. If such an account of dignity is to be had at all, it must be rooted in the metaphysics of personhood.
Kai Nielsen thinks that no special account of persons is required in order to make sense of the requirements of justice. Much less is a religious account required. Anticipating the sort of argument being developed in this chapter, he observes that the “religious apologist”
will argue that the principle of respect-for-persons is rooted in “the ancient religious principle that men are creatures of God, each with an infi nite worth” (Nielsen 1990, p. 123).
Indeed, the apologist may go on to urge that even the naturalist subscribes to the core idea of respect-for-persons, but he is “surreptitiously drawing on Christian inspiration” in so doing. Interestingly, Nielsen allows that, as a matter of historical fact, the idea of personal dignity may have a religious genesis, but, he observes, the validity of an idea is independent of the circumstances of its fi rst occurrence. The religious apologist would need to show –
but “has not shown” – that respect-for-persons can only be supported on religious grounds.
But, he insists, “there is a purely secular rationale for treating people fairly, for regarding them as persons” (Nielsen 1990, p. 124). Essentially, Nielsen proposes that Kantian respect may be drawn out of Hobbesian egoism.
Each Hobbesian egoist would want others to treat him with respect, for his very happiness is contingent upon that; and he would recognize that he could attain the fullest cooperation of others only if other rational egoists knew or had good grounds for believing that their interests and their persons would be respected. Such cooperation is essential for each egoist if all are to have the same type of community life that would give them the best chance of satisfying their interests to the fullest degree. Thus, even if men were thorough egoists, we would still have rational grounds for subscribing to a principle of respect for persons. (Nielsen 1990, p. 125)
Now, Nielsen considers the problem of the “powerfully placed egoist” – that egoist who, for whatever reason, need not worry about retaliation or consequences to himself for riding roughshod over the “rights” of others. Here, he acknowledges that, in the fi nal analysis, there may just be no egoist rationale for respecting others. Here, reasoning reaches the end of its tether and “we must simply decide what sort of person we shall strive to become”
(Nielsen 1990, p. 125).
The latter is an odd thing to say in a book promising to secure a place for ethics without God. First, plenty of egoists have decided to be nasty. Plato’s Glaucon left no doubt that, were he to be so “powerfully placed” – in this case, by possession of a ring that renders its wearer invisible – he would rape, pillage, and plunder by day and then sleep like a baby by night. Indeed, Glaucon thought that anyone granted such a power who continued to work for justice would be universally regarded as an idiot. But, further, if moral values are embraced by “subscription,” then the values themselves are a facade. The structure of one’s system of values rests upon the arbitrary choice itself. Where preferences clash with chosen values, there is a built-in opt-out clause. Any imperatives that Nielsen’s agent agrees to obey will thus be conditional, hypothetical, and not categorical, as their force is always contingent upon whatever ends the agent has selected. Nielsen makes the decision to live the Good Life sound like a career choice. “And what do you wish to be when you grow up?” “I want to be either a terrorist or a torturer.”
As it happens, Nielsen’s earlier suggestion that certain moral beliefs are “bedrock” is misleading, as it is suggestive of a variety of foundationalism lending itself to moral realism.
But in a later book, Nielsen rejects foundationalism and suggests that moral realism is a
“myth” (Martin 2002, p. 82). And so, Nielsen’s project assures us that we may have ethics without God, but there is fi ne print. The “torturing of innocents” is not really evil, nor is
“wife beating or child molesting” actually vile (Nielsen 1990, p. 10), but, rest assured, “God or no God,” one is free to subscribe to a set of values that allows one to suppose that such things are evil or vile. Well, indeed. God or no God, one is free to suppose all sorts of things that are not true. One might even suppose that Kai Nielsen has written a book that accomplishes the purpose implied by its title.
What of Nielsen’s proposal to pull a Kantian rabbit from a Hobbesian hat? We have the makings of the criticism behind us in our critique of “nice egoism.” On Hobbesian egoism, one has direct duties only to oneself. Thus, any duties involving others are indirect and never direct. But, then, there is no room for affording moral standing to other people.
If “torturing innocents” is “evil” on egoism, it can only be because of some evil that is incurred by the torturer. Hobbesian “respectful behavior” is a far cry from Kantian respect.
Personal dignity and the imago dei
Perhaps there are other potential bases for dignity to which the naturalist may appeal.
Darwin quotes Kant on precisely our topic: “I will not in my own person violate the dignity of humanity” (Darwin 1909, p. 86). And he does suggest that this noblest of sentiments is most likely found in the civilized person rather than the barbarian or “uncultivated man.”
And this is because reason has a role to play in arriving at such a maxim. But the admission of a role for reason to play does not nullify the main point of Darwin’s discussion: the initial social impulse is very much the product of natural selection. And it is in this immediate context that Darwin offers his hive bee example – what I have earlier called
“Darwinian counterfactuals.” At bottom, Dennett (1995) is likely correct in his observation that, given the Darwinian account, the belief in rights, and, here, dignity, is actually a
“conversation stopper.” “Rule worship” – even where those rules are, strictly speaking,
“nonsense on stilts” – is adaptive in that it permits us to get on with the business of social intercourse.
Stephen Gould (1989) found a basis for something such as dignity in the radical contingency of the existence of Homo sapiens. It is wildly improbable that we should be here at all, and so there is wonder in this fact. Were natural history somehow rewound to play over again it is astonishingly improbable that anything like ourselves would form any of the branches on the evolutionary tree. Given Gould’s naturalism, this is almost certainly true. And refl ection upon the radical contingency of our existence is, I think, a spiritual discipline that results in a kind of astonishment which, in turn, may yield gratitude. Chesterton compared the world to the few items that Crusoe managed to salvage from the wreck, which are all the more precious for the fact that they might not have been.
It was said of Chesterton that he never quite got over the fact of his own existence, and this is surely correct, as his essays everywhere evince wonder and even astonishment over the fact that there is a creation and he happens to be in on it. But if Homo sapiens is astonishingly improbable, so are Ursus horribilis and Rhododendron arboretum. So are the Himalayas, the Isle of Crete, and, for that matter, each and every Mississippi towhead as well as the Milky Way itself. Improbability alone is not suffi cient for singling out persons as having any special signifi cance. And the difference between the worldviews of Chesterton
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and Gould is that the former has Someone to thank for purposely gifting him with wonderful life.
The naturalist’s obstacles in accounting for the dignity of persons are at least threefold, and they are interlocked: how to derive the personal from the impersonal, how to derive values from a previously valueless universe, and how to unite the personal and the valuable with the result of a coherent and plausible notion of personal dignity. But suppose that the personal and the valuable are not emergent features of reality at all, but, rather, are basic.
Indeed, suppose that personhood is the most basic feature of reality and, that, in fact the impersonal ultimately derives from the personal. Suppose that the one thing that is both metaphysically and axiologically ultimate is a person, so that personhood and value are necessarily united in that Being. Theists, of course, maintain precisely this and believe that Being to be God. Thus, “At the heart of ‘the natural order of things’ is a divine consciousness” (Goetz & Taliaferro 2008, p. 84).
Recall that Dennett and others have insisted that any explanation of consciousness that is not in terms of the nonconscious is question-begging. But one might suggest that this very assertion begs the question. Consider two kinds of explanations for some given event: teleological, which “explains a phenomenon by reference to the intentional actions of an intelligent agent” (Yandell 1984, p. 62), and mechanistic, which “explains a phenomenon by reference to physical events and a theory that relates physical events to one another by means of lawlike statements” (Yandell 1984, p. 63). Dennett assumes that all ultimate explanations must be mechanistic, so that the teleological, where it occurs, must be explained in mechanistic terms. But this is just to take naturalism as a kind of axiom, and it is far from clear that such an assumption is warranted. And it is precisely here that the theist reverses Dennett’s order of explanation. The most ultimate explanations – including an explanation of why we observe lawlike relations that obtain among physical things –
are teleological in nature because the world exists due to the creative activity of God. On theism, teleological explanations are irreducible and more basic than mechanistic explanations. And the justifi cation for taking them as irreducible in this way is found precisely in the resulting implausibility and possible incoherence of attempting such reductions.
We simply cannot explain all that calls for explanation unless there is a place for irreducible teleology in the scheme of things. For the theist, teleology factors in principally at the level of divine purpose and activity, but theism also offers an account of human persons that permits the irreducibility of human consciousness and purposes. Note, by the way, that the theist can afford to be a pluralist when it comes to explanation. Whereas Dennett’s brand of naturalist must banish all teleology from the universe, the theist fi nds a place for mechanistic explanations within the world, and the latter seems a better fi t with what we know.
According to the theist, then, God is personal and is the source of all value so that the value of personhood is found in the fact that the metaphysically, axiologically, and explanatorily ultimate Being is a person.
Kant compared the Christian command to love one’s neighbor and even one’s enemy to central features of his view, including the idea of respect, whether this is respect for a person or a reverence for the law. His immediate aim is to distinguish between actions that are done from duty and those that are merely from inclination. He writes:
It is doubtless in this sense that we should understand too the passages from Scripture in which we are commanded to love our neighbor and even our enemy. For love out of inclination
cannot be commanded; but kindness done from duty – although no inclination impels us, and even although natural and unconquerable disposition stands in our way – is practical, and not pathological love, residing in the will and not in the propensions of feeling, in principles of action and not of melting compassion; and it is this practical love alone which can be an object of a command. (Kant 1964, p. 67)
Kant’s distinction between duty and inclination is widely thought to be problematic. After all, the promptings of inclination in Aristotle’s virtuous person who is “pleased by the right things” would seem to result in actions of supreme moral worth. And it is not strictly true that one cannot be held morally responsible for one’s inclinations. Aristotle spoke of
“rational emotions,” and the idea is that inclinations may themselves be either rationally or morally appropriate or inappropriate. C. S. Lewis confessed to not being fond of small children, but also acknowledged this as a defect. If I am responsible for cultivating a certain sort of character, and if my inclinations proceed from my underlying character, then I might be thought to be responsible for my inclinations. Actually, Kant was clearly aware of such possibilities, as he suggested that we have a duty to cultivate a “moral feeling” (Kant 1956, p. 40).
But though there seem to be no extant copies of any commentaries on the gospels with Kant as their author, he appears to have this bit of exegesis right. Christ’s command to love even one’s enemies is clearly not the demand that we conjure feelings of affection for, say, terrorists and tyrants. Rather, Christian charity (αγαπη) is, I believe, favorably comparable to the Kantian idea of respect in that it is an attitude of unconditional regard for the worth of its object. As such, it “does not seek its own,” or, is not contingent upon reciprocation.
It is called for regardless of the behavior of the person who is its object. As I see it, the rationale for Christ’s command to love persons unconditionally is found in the unconditional value of such persons. Because each person enjoys a worth that is categorical in nature – independent of any extrinsic considerations – the morally appropriate attitude to take toward them is one of a categorical regard for that worth. In this we seem to have a parallel between the Christian concept of charity and the Kantian notion of respect – and the Confucian idea of jen, for that matter. In each case, there is the affi rmation of an unconditional personal worth paired with an injunction to value persons accordingly. And, in each case, the value and the valuing are together at the very heart of the ethical system.
The centrality of Christian charity is seen in an exchange between Jesus and a lawyer as recorded by Luke (10:25–7, NIV).
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ” “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
The conjunction of a love for God and neighbor is no coincidence, as the rationale for loving one’s neighbor – humanity in general – is grounded in the very reasons for loving God with the entirety of one’s being. And this is because the value of persons is, in turn, grounded in the personhood of God. Persons qua persons are created in the image of God in that God himself is a person. On a Judeo-Christian worldview, human personal dignity, though intrinsic, is derivative. The value of human persons is found in the fact that, as bearers of the imago dei, they bear a signifi cant resemblance to God in their very
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personhood.22 God and human persons share an overlap of kind membership in personhood itself, and human dignity is found precisely in membership in that kind.
Consider the theist’s answer to a modifi ed version of the dilemma that we urged against Martin’s ideal observer theory. Are (human) persons valuable because God values them, or does God value them because they are valuable? I argued that Martin cannot say that his ideal observer values persons because they are valuable, as this would signal the abandonment of the ideal observer theory for something more like a respect-for-persons approach. But this is precisely the option that the theist embraces: God values human persons because they are intrinsically valuable. Further, they have such value because God has created them after his own image as a Person with a rational and moral nature.
On theism, human persons have been fashioned, in one morally relevant respect, after the most ultimate and sacred feature of reality and thus participate in that sacredness.
Further, the personal is at home in such a universe. Nietzsche remarked that, contrary to a popular conception of Darwinism, “man” is actually “the most unsuccessful animal, the sickliest, the one most dangerously strayed from its instincts” (Nietzsche 1982, p. 580). I take it that the straying that he has in mind involves those very human aspirations that Russell sought to preserve untarnished. These involve a straying – and a dangerous one at that – because they have no place in a Nietzschean or Rusellian universe. Albert Camus had these same aspirations in mind when he wrote of the absurd. The absurd is born of a tension between two incongruent things. When a man armed only with a sword charges a well-armed machine gun nest, the absurdity is found not simply in the swordsman and his intentions, or in the arsenal that awaits him, but in the tension that is created by his intentions set against the reality that he is sure to face. Similarly, Camus thought, human existence is absurd because of a confrontation between “the human need” on the one hand, and “the unreasonable silence of the world” on the other” (Camus 1955, p. 21). The universe is simply silent and indifferent to our concerns.
The absurd serves in Camus’ writings as the springboard for asking what he regards as the most fundamental philosophical question, the question of suicide. Of course, the whole point of existentialism is to attempt to conjure meaning where none otherwise exists. The theist, on the other hand, fi nds no such “confrontation” or “tension” at all, and this is because human persons fi nd themselves in a world that is, at bottom, personal in nature.
If Camus thought that suicide was a serious option, the theist G. K. Chesterton described suicide – particularly the philosophical suicide that results from a despair of human existence – not simply as a sin but as the sin. And he saw it as such precisely because it implies a profound ingratitude for and disdain of a wondrous creation. “There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fl y away in fury: for each has received a personal affront” (Chesterton 1986, p. 276). Where Camus found only an unreasonable silence, Chesterton discovered, and rejoiced over, an “eternal gaiety in the nature of things”
22. Resemblance is, of course, a relation between two or more things. And so an initial puzzle may seem to arise.
Have we not said that if a property is intrinsic it is not also relational? How, then, can the intrinsic value of persons be found in their resemblance to God? But a moment’s refl ection will clear this up. Consider Plato’s scheme in which a horse is what it is in virtue of its participation in, or exemplifi cation of, the Form of equinity or “horsey-ness.” Horses are intrinsically what they are even if being such involves such a relation to the Form. Indeed, twins bear a mutual resemblance in virtue of their respective intrinsic properties.
(Chesterton 1986, p. 96) for he had the belief that, when people dance a pas de quatre, “the stars are dancing to the same tune” (p. 96).23
23. I wish to thank Paul Copan, William Lane Craig, and, especially, David Werther for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. Thanks also to Robert N. Johnson for graciously sharing helpful materials on Kantian ethics.
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The Argument from Evil
STEWART GOETZ
Evil and Contemporary Philosophical Orthodoxy
The argument from or problem of evil concludes that the existence of evil is, in one way or another, incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient being (God).1 For anyone who is a student of or familiar with modern philosophical orthodoxy in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action (I will simply refer to the three together as “modern philosophical orthodoxy”), the problem of evil can be likened to the skeletal remains of dinosaurs that are housed in the back room of a museum and occasionally brought out for reexamination and public viewing. This is the case for four reasons.
First, the problem of evil is fundamentally, in the words of C. S. Lewis, the problem of pain (Lewis 1962), where an experience of pain is an irreducible, conscious feeling or quale that hurts. The occurrence of such a psychological event is, however, vigorously contested by many adherents of modern philosophical orthodoxy. Given the seemingly outlandish nature of their position, some defenders of this orthodoxy vehemently insist they do not deny that we experience pain. Nevertheless, when one reads their accounts of pain, one cannot help but be suspicious. Almost invariably, they talk about the “functional role” of pain, which is cashed out in terms of pain’s extrinsic or relational features in the form of causal inputs and outputs. And these defenders of modern philosophical orthodoxy make clear that this functional role exhausts what pain is. The problem here is that while no one who is sane will deny that an experience of pain has certain relational features (e.g. other things being equal, one who is experiencing pain will act for the purpose that the pain be mitigated), no one who is sane will hold that an experience of pain is nothing more than its relational features. After all, pain feels a certain way. It has an intrinsic nature for which the only adequate description is that it hurts. And it is precisely because pain has this kind of intrinsic nature that it also has the relational features that it has. It is this irreducible, intrinsic qualitative nature of pain that modern philosophical orthodoxy is intent on either 1. The meanings of these concepts are widely debated, but I will assume that sense can be made of them.
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reducing to something else or outright eliminating. Were their efforts to prove successful, there would be no problem of evil because there would be no quale that is evil. Jaegwon Kim, who is one of the most articulate spokespersons for modern philosophical orthodoxy, describes the nature of the contemporary philosophical milieu as follows:
For most of us, there is no need to belabor the centrality of consciousness to our conception of ourselves as creatures with minds. But I want to point to the ambivalent, almost paradoxical, attitude that philosophers have displayed toward consciousness. . . . [C]onsciousness had been virtually banished from the philosophical and scientifi c scene for much of the last century, and consciousness-bashing still goes on in some quarters, with some reputable philosophers arguing that phenomenal consciousness, or ‘qualia,’ is a fi ction of bad philosophy. And there are philosophers . . . who, while they recognize phenomenal consciousness as something real do not believe that a complete science of human behavior, including cognitive psychology and neuroscience, has a place for consciousness in an explanatory/predictive theory of cognition and behavior. . . .
Contrast this lowly status of consciousness in science and metaphysics with its lofty standing in moral philosophy and value theory. When philosophers discuss the nature of the intrinsic good, or what is worthy of our desire and volition for its own sake, the most prominently mentioned candidates are things like pleasure, absence of pain, enjoyment, and happiness. . . . To most of us, a fulfi lling life, a life worth living, is one that is rich and full in qualitative consciousness. We would regard life as impoverished and not fully satisfying if it never included experiences of things like the smell of the sea in a cool morning breeze, the lambent play of sunlight on brilliant autumn foliage, the fragrance of a fi eld of lavender in bloom, and the vibrant, layered soundscape projected by a string quartet. . . . It is an ironic fact that the felt qualities of conscious experience, perhaps the only things that ultimately matter to us, are often relegated in the rest of philosophy to the status of ‘secondary qualities,’
in the shadowy zone between the real and the unreal, or even jettisoned outright as artifacts of confused minds. (Kim 2005, pp. 10–2)
The second reason for likening the problem of evil to the skeletal remains of dinosaurs arises out of contemporary philosophical orthodoxy’s commitment to materialism. Given the lowly status of the felt experience of pain in the contemporary philosophical climate, it is not at all surprising that the concept of an immaterial soul is viewed as an erroneous idea of a bygone, nonscientifi c age. Thus, even if one can get an adherent of contemporary philosophical orthodoxy to concede the reality of consciousness and qualia, he will insist that a soul cannot be that which is conscious and experiences pain. For example, Owen Flanagan claims that the existence of the soul simply has no place whatsoever in what he calls the “scientifi c image” of persons:
There is no consensus yet about the details of the scientifi c image of persons. But there is broad agreement about how we must construct this detailed picture. First, we will need to demythologize persons by rooting out certain unfounded ideas from the perennial philosophy.
Letting go of the belief in souls is a minimal requirement. In fact, desouling is the primary operation of the scientifi c image. (Flanagan 2002, p. 3)
To most individuals who have not been infl uenced by contemporary philosophical orthodoxy, Flanagan’s attitude toward the soul’s existence is just as counterintuitive and puzzling as denying that people are conscious and pain hurts. As William Lyons has written, the view “that humans are bodies inhabited and governed in some intimate if mysterious
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way by minds (souls), seemed and still seems to be nothing more than good common sense” (Lyons 2001, p. 9). Confi rmation of the existence of this common sense is found in the extremely successful Harry Potter books, where the author J. K. Rowling makes effective use of dualism (the idea that a human being is a body–soul combination) in portraying the worst death one can die as one where one’s soul is sucked out of one’s body by the kiss of a being called a dementor. And the contemporary nondualist philosopher John Searle reports that “[w]hen I lectured on the mind-body problem in India [I] was assured by several members of my audience that my views must be mistaken, because they personally had existed in their earlier lives as frogs or elephants, etc.” (Searle 1992, p. 91).
Just as there cannot be a problem of evil if no one is conscious and experiences pain, so also there cannot be a satisfactory solution to the problem of evil if souls do not exist and survive death. And not only must souls exist, but I will also maintain they must be free in the libertarian sense (have libertarian free will) to make undetermined choices for purposes (reasons). Not surprisingly, however, modern philosophical orthodoxy views the belief in libertarian free will as just another misguided idea bequeathed to us by our unscientifi c ancestors. The doctrinal position on free will at present is the view known as compatibilism, which is the idea that freedom and determinism are compatible and that one and the same event can be both free and determined. When adherents of contemporary philosophical orthodoxy do talk about mental actions, they almost to a person assume that the entirety of our mental lives is determined by nonmental events. Thus, even Searle, who is an outspoken critic of those who deny the reality of consciousness and qualia, insists that “all mental phenomena whether conscious or unconscious, visual or auditory, pains, tickles, itches, thoughts, indeed, all of our mental life, are caused by processes going on in the brain” (Searle 1984, p. 18). And while Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, acknowledges that we have an “undeniable feeling that our Will is free,”
he also maintains “that our Will only appears to be free” (Crick 1994, p. 10). In whatever sense it is true to say that we choose, Crick believes that a choice is completely determined to occur. Daniel Dennett agrees with Crick. According to Dennett, any kind of freedom that we have must be a kind of freedom that is compatible with the truth of determinism.
While he concedes that we are not aware of the causes of our choices, there is an explanation of this ignorance:
Whatever else we are, we are information-processing systems, and all information-processing systems rely on amplifi ers of a sort. Relatively small causes are made to yield relatively large effects. . . . Vast amounts of information arrive on the coattails of negligible amounts of energy, and then, thanks to amplifi cation powers of systems of switches, the information begins to do some work . . . leading eventually to an action whose pedigree of effi cient . . . causation is so hopelessly inscrutable as to be invisible. We see the dramatic effects leaving; we don’t see the causes entering; we are tempted by the hypothesis that there are no causes. (Dennett 1984, pp. 76–7; see also Dennett 2003)
In short, from our failure to be aware of the causes of our choices, we cannot reasonably conclude that there are none. This is because the causes are beyond our ken. Therefore, our lack of awareness of them is to be expected and in no way supports or justifi es a belief in their absence, just as the failure to observe from afar a needle on the fl oor of a fi eld house with bleachers in it does not justify a belief that no needle is lying on that fl oor.
Flanagan summarizes this point nicely:
[T]he myth of a completely self-initiating ego, an unmoved but self-moving will, [is] simply a fi ction motivated by our ignorance of the causes of human behavior. [There is] no need for the notion of a metaphysically unconstrained will or of an independent ego as an unconstrained primal cause in order to have a robust conception of free agency. For there to be agency we need the ego as a cause, possibly even the proximate cause of what we do. But the ego may serve as the proximate cause of action and still itself be part of the causal nexus.
(Flanagan 2002, p. 112)
The fourth and last reason that explains contemporary philosophical orthodoxy’s attitude toward the problem of evil stems from its commitment to the nonexistence of an irreducible teleological explanation of mental actions. Evidence of the rejection of a teleological explanation is often found in discussions of philosophical naturalism (naturalism, for short). For example, according to David Armstrong, naturalism is “the doctrine that reality consists of nothing but a single all-embracing spatio-temporal system” (Armstrong 1978, p. 261). Contemporary materialism is a form of naturalism and maintains that the single all-embracing temporal system contains nothing but the entities recognized by the most mature physics. Irreducible teleological explanation has no place in this (or any other) spatiotemporal system because it entails the existence of explanations by purposes (reasons), and explanations by purposes imply the falsity of naturalism. Thus, Armstrong says that
“if the principles involved [in analyzing the single, all-embracing spatiotemporal system that is reality] were completely different from the current principles of physics, in particular if they involved appeal to mental entities, such as purposes, we might then count the analysis as a falsifi cation of Naturalism” (Armstrong 1978, p. 262).
Now if there really are no purposes, then it is folly to spend one’s time trying to discover God’s purpose for choosing to allow evil. God could not choose to allow evil for a purpose because, ultimately, nothing can be adequately explained teleologically. Any account of God’s purpose for choosing to allow evil will be rejected, not because it fails to state correctly what that purpose is but because, ultimately, there simply are no irreducible purposeful explanations of anything. The nonexistence of such explanations has a similar implication for human choices: Given that human beings cannot make choices that are ultimately explained in terms of irreducible purposes, they cannot possess libertarian free will.
It is not my purpose in this chapter to rebut modern philosophical orthodoxy and arguments against the reality of qualia, the soul, libertarian free will, and irreducible teleological explanation. I have done so elsewhere (see Goetz 2005; Goetz & Taliaferro 2008a,b). Rather, my purpose in raising these four issues at the outset of this chapter is simply to alert the reader to the fact that if you think that there is a problem of evil, then you must, if you are consistent, break ranks with contemporary philosophical orthodoxy. At a minimum, you must think that views in the philosophy of mind such as functionalism and eliminativism are wrong and that pain is an irreducible quale with an intrinsic nature. Moreover, even if you do not believe that souls exist and make undetermined choices that are irreducibly teleologically explained in terms of purposes, you must at least be willing to give someone who believes in these things a serious hearing. You must be willing to do this because chances are that those who think that the problem of evil can be reasonably answered believe in these things and invoke their reality in their response. If you are not willing to make such a concession, then there is not much point in your reading further in this chapter.
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Defense versus Theodicy
As I stated at the outset of the previous section, the problem of evil is the argument that the existence of evil is, in some way, incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient being. Because the problem of evil is a philosophical argument that God’s existence is incompatible with the existence of evil, it is a theoretical problem. There is, to be sure, a practical problem of evil, which is, broadly speaking, the practical diffi culty of learning how to cope with one’s own experience of evil (e.g. the pain experienced from either the loss of a loved one or a severe bodily injury). There is, unfortunately, no guarantee that a plausible response to the theoretical problem of evil (assuming that there is such a response) will prove practically helpful. Indeed, when in the throes of sorrow, silence is often far more appropriate or fi tting than words. But while silence sometimes suits us better than words, many if not most of us are all too aware that the theoretical problem will abide silence for only so long before it once again raises its voice and demands our attention. Hence, it must be dealt with in its own time and place.
A moment ago, I wrote that the problem of evil is the argument that the existence of evil is, in some way, incompatible with the existence of God. Over the course of the last 50+ years, it has become common practice to distinguish between two kinds of incompatibility, namely, the logical and the evidential. According to the logical problem of evil, the mere existence of evil is inconsistent with or logically contradicts the existence of God. The evidential problem of evil, while it concedes that the existence of evil is logically compatible with God’s existence, maintains that the amount and/or kinds of evil in this world provide evidence against the existence of God such that belief that God exists is unjustifi ed and probably false.
In response to the logical and evidential arguments from evil against the existence of God, a forceful line of argument has been developed by some theists (I will assume that a theist is a person who affi rms that God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient) to the effect that while it is desirable to know God’s justifi cation for permitting evil, reasonable theists (I will call them “defenders”) need not2 and ought not3 do any more than provide a defense, which is a statement of what God’s justifi cation for permitting evil might be. Because of our limited epistemic powers, a defender believes that God’s justifi cation for permitting evil is beyond our ken.4 As Peter van Inwagen has recently pointed out, it 2. “No doubt the theist would rather know what God’s reason is for permitting evil than simply that it’s possible that He has a good one. But in the present context (that of investigating the logical consistency of [God is omnipotent, wholly good, and evil exists], the latter is all that is needed” (Plantinga 1974, p. 28; emphasis in the original).
3. Plantinga says the following: “If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good, why is there any evil? . . . The Christian theist must concede that she doesn’t know – that is, she doesn’t know in any detail. . . . And here I must remark that many of the attempts to explain why God permits evil – theodicies, as we might call them – seem to me shallow, tepid, and ultimately frivolous” (Plantinga 1996a, p. 70). Peter van Inwagen notes that “Plantinga is rather down on theodicies. I have heard him say that to give a theodicy is ‘presumptuous’ ” (van Inwagen 1988, p. 161).
4. “Our grasp of the fundamental way of things is at best limited; there is no reason to think that if God did have a reason for permitting the evil in question, we would be the fi rst to know” (Plantinga, 1996a, p. 70; emphasis in the original). Stephen Wykstra explains that our supposed ignorance of the goods that outweigh instances of suffering is expected because God’s wisdom in relationship to ours in this matter is analogous to that of an adult human’s and that of a 1-month old infant’s. “So for any selected instance of intense suffering, there is good reason to think that if there is an outweighing good . . . we would not have epistemic access to [it] . . .” (Wykstra 1990, p. 156).
has become quite common for defenders initially to treat the argument from evil by showing that the belief that both God and evil exist is free from internal logical contradiction (there is no logical problem of evil). Once they have successfully done this, however, they usually see the need to respond to the evidential problem of evil by providing a defense that is a real as opposed to a mere logical possibility. Van Inwagen illustrates his point about the difference between these two kinds of defense in terms of a defense counsel in a court of law:
If defense counsels followed a parallel strategy in courts of law, they would fi rst try to prove that their clients innocence was logically consistent with the evidence by telling stories (by presenting ‘alternative theories of the crime’) involving things like twins separated at birth, operatic coincidences, and mental telepathy; only after they had shown by this method that their clients’ innocence was logically consistent with the evidence, would they go on to try to raise real doubts in the minds of jurors about the guilt of their clients. (van Inwagen 2006, p. 67; emphasis in the original)
As a defender, van Inwagen seeks to present a defense that is a real possibility, one that there is some reason to think might very well be true (and, thus, is stronger than a defense that stops with mere logical consistency). His defense is in the form of a story in which God exists and has reasons for allowing the existence of evil of the kind that occurs in the actual world. The story is a real possibility in the sense that upon hearing it one would respond with “‘Given that God exists, the rest of the story might very well be true. I can’t see any reason to rule it out’” (van Inwagen 2006, p. 66). There is, however, a response to the problem of evil that is yet more robust than one that presents a defense that is a real as opposed to a mere logical possibility. This response claims to know not only that a justifi cation for evil’s existence is a real possibility but also that this real possibility is God’s actual justifi cation for permitting evil. I will call theists who believe they know (in part or in whole) God’s justifi cation for permitting evil “theodicists.” If we stick with van Inwagen’s illustration from a court of law, a theodicist is like a defense counsel who convinces jurors of the innocence of his client by presenting facts about where his client actually was at the time of the crime, which make clear that it was impossible for his client to have committed the crime. A theodicist presents God’s (his client’s) actual reason for allowing evil with the result that it is clearly seen that evil does not present evidence against God’s existence.
Now it is no doubt true that a defender might know God’s reason for permitting evil and yet be under no obligation to disclose it to someone else or refer to it in an argument about the problem of evil. For whatever reason, a person might be a defender in public and a theodicist in private. This is not the position of the defenders whom I will discuss in this chapter. The assumption behind their defensive position is that if they knew God’s justifi cation for permitting evil, they would gladly refer to it in their response to the problem of evil, regardless of whether or not they were obligated to do so. Moreover, as Eleonore Stump has pointed out, knowing God’s justifying reason and, thereby, being a theodicist, can be important to some theists outside the context of responding to the problem of evil:
The problem with [the defender’s] arguments and strategies . . . is that they leave people on both sides of the issue unsatisfi ed. . . . [F]or the theist struggling with the problem of evil,
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even if he entertains no anxieties about the rationality of his theistic belief in consequence of the existence of evil, he may well still be weakened in his religious belief by the consideration that the deity in whom he is to place his trust seems to act in ways which are unintelligible to him at best and apparently evil at worst. (Stump 1985, pp. 394–5; emphasis in the original)
Given this brief overview of the distinction between a defense and a theodicy, I develop a theodicy in the rest of this chapter. A theodicy requires knowledge of a good that is great enough to justify God’s permission of evil. Knowledge of that good is found, I believe, through consideration of the question of the purpose of life. In essence, I argue in the section “Life’s Purpose and Perfect Happiness” that the purpose of an individual’s life is that he experience the great good of perfect or complete happiness, and it is the possibility of his experiencing this great good that justifi es God’s allowing him to experience evil. To set the stage for my discussion of the purpose of life in the said section, I briefl y summarize and discuss in the next section one theodicist’s attempt to persuade a prominent defender to become a theodicst. While I conclude that this theodicist’s particular argument fails, I believe that the general form of his argument is worth remembering when it comes time to develop my own theodicy in the section “Developing a Theodicy.”
The Free Will Defense
As part of an argument to show that God’s existence and the existence of evil are logically compatible, the defender Alvin Plantinga develops the free will defense, which maintains that “[a] world containing creatures who are signifi cantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all” (Plantinga, 1974, p. 30). Given that this is the case, we know that the existence of evil is compatible with persons possessing signifi cant freedom (libertarian free will) and that the possession of this freedom might be God’s justifi cation for permitting evil. The aim of the free will defense, however, is not to say that we know that the possession of this freedom is God’s justifi cation or reason for permitting evil.
The theodicist Jerry Walls has argued that contrary to what Plantinga maintains, the free will defense requires a commitment to the reality of libertarian free will as God’s actual justifi cation for permitting evil, thereby making Plantinga a theodicist. Walls argues that Plantinga is committed to the truth of the principle (call it P) that in all worlds where persons are either not free or have compatibilist free will, God could eliminate all moral evil, where moral evil is the experience of pain and/or deprivation of pleasure that results from morally wrong choices and/or actions of free beings, whether human or nonhuman.
In other words, in a world that lacks persons with libertarian free will it is impossible for moral evil to exist. A certain kind of evil requires a certain kind of justifi cation, and any possible world that contains moral evil must also contain beings with libertarian free will.
Given that we know there is moral evil in our world, the only possible justifi cation God can have for permitting the existence of this moral evil is the existence of beings with libertarian free will. Walls concludes that Plantinga is committed to a theodicy where he knows that God permits moral evil in our world because God knows that “[libertarian]
freedom and its related goods outweigh the [moral] evil in our world” (Walls 1992b, p. 333). Plantinga can avoid moving from a defense to a theodicy only by unreasonably refusing to affi rm that it is impossible for God to allow persons to experience moral evil and those individuals not have libertarian free will.
In response to Walls, Plantinga claims that it is not obvious to him that P is true. For all he knows:
[m]aybe a certain amount of evil is necessary to every really good possible world. Perhaps among the really good possible worlds, there are some in which there is no creaturely freedom, but there are creatures capable of knowledge. Perhaps it is a good thing that those creatures be able to appreciate the great value of the world in question; but perhaps they couldn’t appreciate its great value unless there were some evil with respect to which to contrast that value; and perhaps that evil could be of several kinds, including evil due to the free (in the compatibilist sense) activity of creatures. (Plantinga 1992, pp. 336–7)
Plantinga concludes that if a certain amount of evil is necessary to every really good possible world in the way that he suggests, then libertarian freedom is not necessary in order for God to be justifi ed in permitting the existence of moral evil in a world. Perhaps, then, our possession of libertarian free will is not God’s justifi cation for allowing moral evil in our world.
At this point, Plantinga recognizes that Walls might grant, for the sake of argument, that any really good possible world requires the existence of some evil, and maybe some of the evil in those worlds includes moral evil produced by beings with compatibilist free will.
Thus, we do not know that the possession of libertarian free will by creatures is God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evil per se. But what about a world such as our own which contains moral evils of a horrendous or very terrible sort? Must it not be the case that worlds with such terrible moral evils must also contain beings with libertarian free will, where that free will is the justifi cation for permitting such horrible moral evils? In other words, while it might generically be the case that any really good possible world requires the existence of some evil, when we get down to the specifi c evil(s) of a particular really good possible world such as ours, theodicy becomes inevitable.
Plantinga concedes the force of this line of thought: while it might be the case that some evil is necessary for the existence of any really good possible world, it is implausible to believe that the horrifi c moral evils of this world are necessary, say, for the proper appreciation of what is good. Thus, he says that he is inclined to think that some principle analogous to P, which makes reference to appalling moral evils, is true. That is, he is inclined to believe that in all worlds in which persons either are not free or are free only in the compatibilist sense, God could and would eliminate all horrendous moral evil. But being inclined to believe that something is true is not the same thing as being committed to its truth. Thus, even with respect to the appalling moral evils of this world, Plantinga maintains that he is not committed to the truth of an analog of P in giving his free will defense. Granted, he fails to see a justifying good other than libertarian free will that God could have for permitting the horrifi c moral evils we fi nd in our world. He points out, however, that “there is a big difference between failing to see that something is possible and seeing that it is impossible” (Plantinga 1992, p. 338). Therefore, for all he knows, there may be a justifi cation other than libertarian free will that God has for allowing the appalling moral evils in our world.
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Life’s Purpose and Perfect Happiness
Given their shared assumption that libertarian free will is either itself a good that can, at least in part, justify God’s permission of both nonhorrendous (nonappalling) and horrendous (appalling) moral evil (henceforth, moral evil, for short) or is required for the preponderance of morally good actions that can justify God’s allowance of moral evil,5 it seems to me that Plantinga has given a persuasive response to Walls. Although I think that Walls’s argument fails, I will follow his theodical strategy and argue that defenders can avoid moving from a defense to a theodicy only by unreasonably refusing to acknowledge that a certain scenario is impossible. [Walls thinks Plantinga can avoid moving from a defense to a theodicy only by unreasonably refusing to acknowledge the impossibility of God allowing moral evil (or moral evil of a horrendous sort) without libertarian free will.] In my argument against defenders, I assume, like Plantinga and Walls, that created persons possess libertarian free will, but unlike them I explicitly deny that this freedom is a good that can, even in part, justify God’s permission of moral evil.6
To understand why the move from defense to theodicy is rationally required, it is necessary to spend some time considering the question of the purpose of life, where I will always understand the “purpose of life” as the purpose of an individual’s life. The issue of the purpose of life is one that defenders rarely, if ever, address. Perhaps the explanation for their not doing so is the same as that which explains their reluctance to become theodicists, namely, that we humans possess only limited epistemic powers. This limitation ensures not only that God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evil is beyond our ken but also that the purpose for our existence is epistemically inaccessible to us. It is perhaps of some consequence that defenders such as Plantinga and Stephen Wykstra are Protestant philosophers in the Calvinist tradition, a tradition that understands the effects of Adam’s fall to include the fact that the human mind is darkened.7 As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, with the rise of Protestantism, the view developed that “[r]eason can supply
. . . no genuine comprehension of man’s true end; that power of reason was destroyed by the fall of man. ‘Si Adam integer stetisset’ [If Adam has stood or remained whole or upright], on Calvin’s view, reason might have played the part that Aristotle assigned to it”
(MacIntyre 1981, p. 51; emphasis in the original). The part that Aristotle assigned to reason 5. “A world containing creatures who are signifi cantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all” (Plantinga 1974, p. 30); and
“[I]f we are so free [in the libertarian sense], then it naturally follows that God must think that freedom and its related goods outweigh the evil in our world” (Walls 1992b, p. 333).
6. Thus, I agree with the following comment by the atheist William Rowe: “The fi rst question we need to ask is whether the possession of free will is something that is in itself of such great value as to merit God’s permission of the horrendous moral evils in the world. I think the answer must be no. We should distinguish the intrinsic value of possessing free will from its extrinsic value. The mere possession of free will does not strike me as itself having much in the way of intrinsic value” (Rowe 1996, p. 279; emphasis in the original). My only quibble with Rowe is that I believe that free will does not have any intrinsic value.
7. It is important to make clear that I do not consider pointing out that Plantinga and Wykstra are philosophers in the Calvinist tradition as any kind of argument against defenders. After all, Calvinism, or certain elements of it, might be correct. My purpose in pointing out Plantinga’s and Wykstra’s association with Calvinism is only to make clear that their approach to the problem of evil is consistent with the more general Calvinist position that the powers of the human mind have been seriously undermined by sin.
included knowing man’s telos or end. But Adam did not stand or remain whole, and the result according to Protestant thought was that unaided reason can no longer know man’s true end.
What if, however, the result of the fall was not as epistemically disastrous as Protestantism maintains and it is possible to know the purpose of life? And what if knowledge of life’s purpose is not only available but also provides insight into God’s actual reason for permitting moral evil? Because I am a lapsed Protestant when it comes to the doctrine of the Fall, I believe it is possible to know the purpose of life, and I also believe this knowledge gives us insight into God’s actual justifi cation for permitting evil. Therefore, in the rest of this section I state what I think the purpose of life is and consider several objections to my view. Given a successful treatment of the issue of life’s purpose, I will turn in the next section to developing a theodicy.
What, then, is the purpose of life? I believe that the answer is fairly obvious: the purpose of life is to experience perfect or complete happiness. What, however, is perfect happiness?
Intuitively, it is an experience of what is intrinsically good (what is sometimes thought of as subjectively felt happiness), where something is intrinsically good if it is good and does not derive its goodness from the goodness of something else to which it is related.
Because the problem of evil fundamentally concerns the experience of pain, where pain is a fundamental (fi rst-order), metaphysical (nonmoral, where nonmoral ≠ immoral), intrinsic evil that does not derive its evil nature from the evil of something else to which it is related, it is plausible to think that an experience of pleasure is a fundamental, metaphysical, intrinsic good that does not derive its goodness from the goodness of something else to which it is related. Happiness, then, is related to the intrinsic goodness and evilness of pleasure and pain, respectively, in a way that makes it the case that the less pain and more pleasure that a person experiences, the happier he is. So there are degrees of happiness, and perfect or complete happiness is a condition in which a person experiences nothing but pleasure (a quale), where this positively good qualitative state continues without end.
That perfect happiness is the purpose for which a person exists is indirectly supported by the existence of the problem of evil itself. After all, what is the problem of evil except the quest for an explanation as to why, if God does exist, this apparent purpose for a person’s existing (that he experience perfect happiness) is not fulfi lled or realized? Given that God has the requisite attributes to guarantee the fulfi llment or realization of this purpose, why is it not accomplished? Thus, when an atheist such as J. L. Mackie asks “why could
[God] not have made men such that they always freely choose the good?” (Mackie 1990, p. 33), he assumes that always freely choosing the good is more in keeping with the achievement of perfect happiness, where the experience of that happiness is a person’s purpose for existing.8
I assume, then, in what follows, that an individual’s well-being is or consists of subjectively felt happiness, which is to say that happiness in its complete or perfect form is essentially experiences of pleasure (a positive hedonic state) and the absence of pain (a 8. In criticizing a solution to the problem of evil, which claims that the universe is better with some evil in it than it could be if there were no evil, Mackie is explicit about the connection in his own mind between pleasure, happiness, and the good: “Let us call pain and misery ‘fi rst order evil’ or ‘evil (1)’. What contrasts with this, namely pleasure and happiness, will be called ‘fi rst order good’ or ‘good (1)” (Mackie 1990, p. 31).
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negative hedonic state). During the course of my examination of the problem of evil in subsequent sections, I will make various points in support of this assumption. For now, I simply emphasize that on the understanding of happiness that informs this chapter, it simply is not possible that a life largely devoid of felt happiness is worth living for its subject.
I realize that not everyone will agree with me about this point. For example, Flanagan has suggested that “[p]erhaps happiness is not necessary even [for a worthwhile life]. One might live a life largely devoid of happiness but still live a good and worthwhile life – even as seen from the subjective point of view” (Flanagan 1996, p. 5). The argument of this chapter simply assumes that Flanagan is mistaken.
Because (perfect) happiness is intrinsically good, it is a feature of human nature that a person cannot help but desire it for himself. St Augustine expressed this point quite succinctly when he wrote that “It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains that all men desire to be happy” (Augustine 1993, 10.1). One might, however, raise the following objection:
[T]he desire satisfaction theory of human welfare [a person’s well-being is a function of his satisfying his strongest desires concerning his own experiences] has counterintuitive implications. Suppose that (for whatever reason) a person strongly wanted to suffer mental anxiety and physical torment for the sake of satisfying no other want. The desire satisfaction theory implies that such a person would be doing quite well for having such a desire fulfi lled, which seems absurd. (Metz 2003, p. 168)
This implication of the desire satisfaction theory is absurd. I am not, however, presupposing the desire satisfaction theory. Rather, I am assuming that a person’s well-being consists of his experiencing happiness and that it is because this is the case that he ultimately desires his perfect happiness. In other words, the intrinsic goodness of happiness constrains what a person can and does desire for himself. No individual can desire that he suffer mental anxiety and physical torment for their own sakes because no one can desire what is intrinsically evil or bad for its own sake. Desire is necessarily ultimately directed at the intrinsic goodness of perfect happiness.
If the experience of perfect happiness is the purpose of life, a meaningless or absurd life is one in which a person fails to experience that degree of happiness. As Thomas Nagel has pointed out, the idea of absurdity is essentially the idea of a discrepancy or mismatch, which is illustrated by both a scenario in which a notorious criminal is made president of a major philanthropic foundation and a romantic moment in which one declares one’s love over the telephone to a recorded announcement (Nagel 2000, p. 178). So if the purpose of life is to have a certain experience and a person fails to have it, there is a discrepancy or mismatch in that individual’s life.
On the view of the purpose of life I am setting forth, life is not necessarily absurd. While some lives might be absurd, others might not. Nagel thinks otherwise, and his argument deserves careful consideration. According to him, we are beings who take things, including our lives, seriously. We have, however, the capacity to step back and survey ourselves and the lives that we take seriously and inevitably exercise that capacity. For example, an individual like Mother Theresa took seriously a life of helping the poor and destitute in Calcutta. And, like anyone else, she had the capacity to step back and survey her life. According to Nagel, when she stepped back and surveyed her life she was inevitably led to ask the
question, “Is a life of helping the poor and destitute in Calcutta worth taking seriously?”
Or take a person who lives for trying to impress other people. He too has the capacity to step back and survey his life. When he does so, he will ask, “Is a life of trying to impress others worth taking seriously?” What makes Nagel’s argument important is that he believes no question asked by a person about the worthwhile nature of the life that he takes seriously has an answer that is immune to unanswerable doubt. Every answer to such a question is, therefore, ultimately unjustifi ed. In other words, Nagel believes that no matter what kind of life an individual takes seriously, it will always be subject to a discrepancy in the form of a question about that life that does not have a justifi ed answer. No matter what kind of life one has lived, it is not worth taking seriously: “There does not appear to be any conceivable world (containing us) about which unsettlable doubts could not arise” (Nagel 2000, p. 181). Therefore, any kind of life involving us is ultimately absurd or meaningless, even one involving perfect happiness. Thus, if we assume for the sake of discussion that a person both takes seriously the idea of being perfectly happy and actually experiences this happiness, Nagel’s point is that such a person will realize, upon stepping back and asking,
“Is a life of being perfectly happy worth taking seriously?” that he will always have unanswerable doubt about an affi rmative answer. No affi rmative answer to his question will ultimately justifi ably settle his doubt.
Nagel’s argument, however, surely fails when it is directed at the life of perfect happiness.
Given that perfect happiness is intrinsically good, someone who asks whether it is worth taking seriously and believes that there is no good reason to think that it is is seriously confused. As Paul Edwards points out, “It makes sense for a person to ask about something
‘Is it really worthwhile?’ or ‘Is it really worth the trouble?’ if he does not regard it as intrinsically valuable. . . . It does not make sense [however] to ask such a question about something he regards as valuable in its own right. . . .” (Edwards 2000, p. 141). Thus, on the understanding of the purpose of life that I am assuming, the most serious discrepancy or mismatch involving an individual would be a failure on his part to give perfect happiness the utmost attention that it is due. If anything is absurd, such a failure is.
Because perfect happiness is intrinsically good, an argument that is sometimes raised against God’s existence can be answered. This argument is a variant of Euthyphro’s dilemma and asks, “Is perfect happiness good because God commands or says that it is good or does God command or say that perfect happiness is good because it is good?”9 Given that perfect happiness is intrinsically good, its goodness has essentially nothing to do with what God commands or says. It just is good, period. Of course, if God is omnibenevolent, then He will want to provide us with perfect happiness because it is intrinsically good. But for that to be the case, it is not necessary that the goodness of perfect happiness depend upon what God commands or says about it.
Given, therefore, that complete or perfect happiness is the purpose of life, there is a sense in which God has something to say about its being so and a sense in which He does not. The sense in which God does have something to say has to do with God’s granting perfect happiness to those who deserve it, and I will take up this issue in subsequent sections. The sense in which God has nothing to say has to do with the fact that because perfect happiness is intrinsically good, it does not derive its goodness from anything else, where
‘anything else’ includes anything God might command or say about the matter. Perfect 9. See West and West (1998, p. 52; 10a), where Socrates asks Euthyphro “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved?”
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happiness just is good and it does not take the command or word of anyone, including God, to make it so.
If it is the case that perfect happiness is intrinsically good and that God creates human persons for the purpose that they experience this happiness, then another objection sometimes raised against theism can be answered. According to Kurt Baier, there are two senses of the word “purpose”:
In the fi rst and basic sense, purpose is normally attributed only to persons or their behaviour as in ‘Did you have a purpose in leaving the ignition on?’ In the second sense, purpose is normally attributed only to things, as in ‘What is the purpose of that gadget you installed in the workshop?’ The two uses are intimately connected. We cannot attribute a purpose to a thing without implying that someone did something, in the doing of which he had some purpose, namely to bring about the thing with that purpose. Of course, his purpose is not identical with its purpose. In hiring labourers and engineers and buying materials and a site for a factory and the like, the entrepreneur’s purpose, let us say, is to manufacture cars, but the purpose of the cars is to serve as a means of transportation. . . . To attribute to a human being a purpose in [the second] sense is not neutral, let alone complimentary: it is offensive. It is degrading for a man to be regarded as merely serving a purpose. If, at a garden party, I ask a man in livery, ‘What is your purpose?’ I am insulting him. I might as well have asked, ‘What are you for ?’ Such questions reduce him to the level of a gadget, a domestic animal, or perhaps a slave.
I imply that we allot to him the tasks, the goals, the aims which he is to pursue; that his wishes and desires and aspirations and purposes are to count for little or nothing. We are treating him, in Kant’s phrase, merely as a means to our ends, not as an end in himself. (Baier 2000, pp. 11–120; emphases in the original)
The two senses of purpose to which Baier calls our attention are real and important. Some of the conclusions he draws from the distinction between these two senses, however, are highly questionable. For example, it is not necessarily offensive or degrading to regard a man as merely serving a purpose. Whether or not it is offensive to regard a person as serving a purpose depends upon what the purpose is. If that purpose is the experience of perfect happiness, then its bestowal is not degrading but ennobling. Moreover, why cannot it be the case, contrary to what Baier claims, that an individual’s purpose in acting, the goal at which he aims in acting, is identical with God’s purpose for him? The two purposes can be the same when a person’s wishes and desires and aspirations are the same as God’s wishes and desires and aspirations for him. Lewis had no problem understanding this point: “God not only understands but shares . . . the desire for complete and ecstatic happiness. He made me for no other purpose than to enjoy it” (Lewis 2004, p. 123; emphasis in the original).
In addition to his objection stemming from the two senses of “purpose,” Baier raises two other concerns that intersect with the understanding of life’s purpose that I am defending. The fi rst problem “is to fi nd a purpose grand and noble enough to explain and justify the great amount of undeserved suffering in this world” (Baier 2000, p. 122). Now if the experience of perfect happiness is the great good that it is and the greatest good possible for an individual, it would seem that if any good is good enough to justify the great amount of undeserved suffering of this world, then it is this good. Whether or not a theodicy that makes use of this greatest possible good is defensible will be the subject matter of the subsequent sections of this chapter.
The second diffi culty raised by Baier presupposes that perfect happiness is an individual’s greatest good. The trouble as Baier sees it is that this good is too good:
The Christian evaluation of earthly lives is misguided because it adopts a quite unjustifi ably high standard. Christianity singles out the major shortcomings of our earthly existence: there is not enough happiness; there is too much suffering; the good and bad points are quite unequally and unfairly distributed; the underprivileged and underendowed do not get adequate compensation; it lasts only a short time. It then quite accurately depicts the perfect or ideal life as that which does not have any of these shortcomings. Its next step is to promise the believer that he will be able to enjoy this perfect life later on. And then he adopts as its standard of judgment the perfect life, dismissing as inadequate anything that falls short of it. . . .
This procedure is as illegitimate as if I were to refuse to call anything tall unless it is infi -
nitely tall, or anything beautiful unless it is perfectly fl awless, or anyone strong unless he is omnipotent. Even if it were true that there is available to us an after-life which is fl awless and perfect, it would still not be legitimate to judge earthly lives by this standard. (Baier 2000, p. 127)
In response to Baier, it is important to point out that in “adopting” the experience of perfect happiness as the purpose of life one is not making a choice of any kind, let alone an arbitrary choice (one made for no purpose or reason whatsoever). One is simply recognizing perfect happiness for what it is, namely, a great intrinsic good. And as I have already pointed out in reference to Euthyphro’s dilemma, the goodness of perfect happiness is not a matter of what anyone commands, says, or chooses.
As to whether perfect happiness is a legitimate standard for judging the goodness of this life, it seems that Baier is trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, he seems to assume this standard himself when he raises the problem of evil and claims that there is no purpose that is good enough to justify God’s permitting the amount of evil that is present in this world. Presumably, Baier believes that had our Earthly existence been thoroughly pleasurable and free of pain and suffering (perfectly happy), then there would not have been a problem of evil. That quality of existence would have been good enough to preclude any such problem. And it remains to be seen in following sections whether it is also good enough to answer the problem of evil that we actually face. On the other hand, when someone else makes use of this standard to judge the quality of our Earthly lives, Baier asserts that that person is guilty of setting the bar too high. If Baier is right, one is damned if one does and damned if one does not use the standard of perfect happiness. In the end, the facts of the matter are as follows: no one makes a choice about whether or not perfect happiness is good. It just is good and is intrinsically so. Moreover, it is the experience of the goodness of happiness in this life, imperfect as it may be because of the existence of evil, which makes us yearn for that which is perfect.
Perfect happiness, then, is just that: perfect. It excludes all experiences of what is intrinsically evil and includes only experiences of what is intrinsically good. I have, however, also claimed that perfect happiness includes another aspect, which is that it is unending. The consideration which leads to the inclusion of this aspect of perfect happiness is twofold in nature.
First, because perfect happiness is intrinsically good, one cannot help but desire its continuation. In other words, the idea of desiring a temporally fi nite complete happiness or an unending but incomplete happiness is conceptually suspect, if not incoherent. Because desire is conceptually ultimately aimed at the experience of what is intrinsically good and the avoidance of the experience of that which is intrinsically evil for their own sakes, no sane person can desire the cessation of perfect happiness or prefer the experience of an
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imperfect happiness over that which is perfect, given the availability of the latter. As Thomas Talbott has written, “[i]t is simply not possible . . . not to desire supreme happiness for its own sake” (Talbott 2001, p. 423). Walls adds the following thoughts in support of this point:
Nothing short of [endless joy and satisfaction] will suffi ce to give us what we most deeply crave. The fact that we seek happiness is axiomatic. . . . Clearly, if some partial experience of happiness is desirable, perfect happiness is even more so. Either we have such happiness, or we do not. If we do not, then it is something we want, and if we never get it, our lives will end in some degree of frustration. On the other hand, if we have it, we would not want it to end.
If it did end, then again, our lives would end in frustration. The only alternative to a frustrating end to our lives is perfect happiness, happiness without end. (Walls 2002, p. 195) A comment by the atheist Kai Nielsen provides additional confi rmation of the present point: “As I am now in possession of the normal powers of life, with things I want to do and experience, with pleasure in life and with people I very much care for and who care for me, I certainly do not want to die. I should very much like, in such a state, to go on living forever” (Nielsen 2000, p. 154).
The second reason for believing that perfect happiness is unending presupposes the fi rst point about the kind of happiness that we desire and assumes that God is omnibenevolent.
Given God’s omnibenevolence, He cannot help but wish for us our greatest good, which is perfect happiness. Talbott puts the point quite succinctly: “If God is supremely loving, then He wills for us exactly what, at the most fundamental level, we want for ourselves; He wills that we should experience supreme happiness. . . .” (Talbott 2001, p. 421).
While a perfect happiness that does not end is what we desire, some have questioned whether what we desire is intelligible. One of the most well-known challenges is that of Bernard Williams in his essay “The Makropulos Case: Refl ections on the Tedium of Immortality” (Williams 1973). In summarizing and discussing Williams’s essay, I draw heavily from John Martin Fischer’s paper “Why Immortality Is Not So Bad” (Fischer 1994).
Williams sets forth two necessary conditions of immortality: (1) that the future person must be numerically identical with the individual concerned, and (2) that the future life of that individual must be attractive to him in the sense that his future goals and projects and values and interests must be suitably related to his present goals and projects and values and interests. If they are not suitably related, then there is a risk that he will now (in the present) fi nd it diffi cult to regard them as suffi ciently interesting to support a present desire that he have them as his own in the future.
Given that I am assuming that souls exist and are capable of persisting self-identical from this life into the next, condition (1) is fulfi lled. What about condition (2)? Can it be fulfi lled? Williams thinks not. With regard to (2), Williams poses a dilemma: either an individual’s fundamental desires, interests, purposes, and projects (his character) remain the same over time, or they do not. If they do remain the same, then given that their number is fi nite they will eventually be satisfi ed or fulfi lled and boredom will ensue. If they do not remain the same (they change too much), then Williams suggests that the individual’s future desires, interests, purposes, and projects will not be similar enough to his present psychological makeup and the projects it supports to make him now desire to survive to be the subject of what is so different. The person will simply prefer to go out of existence.
What about the fi rst alternative? As Fischer points out, there is a distinction between self-exhausting and repeatable pleasures. A self-exhausting pleasure is one associated with an activity, the performance of which terminates any further need to do it again. An example Fischer provides is of an activity that you desire to do just once to prove to yourself that you can do it:
Imagine . . . that you are somewhat afraid of heights, and you have been working hard to overcome this phobia. You form the goal of climbing Mt Whitney just to show yourself that you have overcome the fear – just to show yourself that you can control your life and overcome obstacles. Upon climbing the mountain, you may in fact be very pleased and proud. Indeed, you may be deeply satisfi ed. But also you may have absolutely no desire to climb Mt Whitney (or any other mountain) again. You have accomplished your goal, but there is no impetus toward repeating the relevant activity or the pleasure that issues from it. (Fischer 1994, pp. 262–3)
Although Fischer does not mention the following point in response to Williams, it does seem coherent to suppose that even if there were no other kind of pleasure than that which is self-exhausting, the intelligibility of the idea of perfect happiness would still not be undermined. What would be required for perfect happiness would be a potentially infi nite number of unrepeatable activities, each of which provided its subject with pleasure. And given that there is nothing incoherent in this concept, it would be possible for a person to be perfectly happy for eternity by means of the performance of an unending series of unrepeatable activities with their accompanying self-exhausting pleasures.
But as Fischer notes, there is another kind of pleasure. There are repeatable pleasures: Here an individual may well fi nd the pleasure highly fulfi lling and completely satisfying at the moment and yet wish to have more (i.e., to repeat the pleasure) at some point in the future (not necessarily immediately). Certain salient sensual pleasures leap immediately to mind: the pleasures of sex, of eating fi ne meals and drinking fi ne wines, of listening to beautiful music, of seeing great art, and so forth. . . . Given the appropriate distribution of such pleasures, it seems that an endless life that included some (but perhaps not only) repeatable pleasures would not necessarily be boring or unattractive. (Fischer 1994, pp. 263–4; emphases in the original)
As Fischer goes on to point out, religious persons (and who is more likely to believe in perfect happiness than a religious person?) can experience not only repeatable pleasures of the sort just mentioned but also repeatable pleasures that come with the repeatable activities of worship of and thanks to God. Thanking God for the repeatable pleasures that He has granted is itself a source of additional pleasure.
Consider, now, the second alternative, which is that an individual’s future goals and projects and values and interests must be suitably related to his present goals and projects and values and interests in life so that the former will now (in the present) be attractive to him. If they are not presently attractive, then he will now fail to fi nd them suffi ciently interesting to desire to have them as his own in the future. Without such an interest, nonexistence will seem preferable to immortality. In response to this horn of the dilemma, Fischer writes that:
it seems that an individual could value such an [unending] existence if he or she felt that the change in character would result from certain sorts of sequences. . . . Surely in our ordinary,
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fi nite lives we envisage certain changes in our values and preferences over time. For example, one may currently value excitement and challenge; thus, one might wish to live in an urban area with many career and avocational opportunities (but with lousy weather and a high crime rate). Still, one might envisage a time in the future when one will be older and will prefer warm weather, serenity and security. . . . Thus, there are quite ordinary cases in our fi nite lives in which we envisage changes in our characters – our values and preferences – and which are not so unattractive as to render death preferable. Why, then, could not the same be true of immortal existence? (Fischer 1994, pp. 267–8; emphasis in the original)
While what Fischer says is surely correct, I think it is important to note that Christians (and, I would assume, Jews and Islamists) actually expect a signifi cant change in character in the afterlife that will not render unending existence unattractive. Indeed, if such a change did not occur something would be amiss. What Christians expect is not only that they will experience perfect happiness, which is in and of itself suffi ciently attractive now to make immortality desirable, but that they will also experience this happiness without their present sinful nature and its vices. Indeed, it is the absence of sin and vice that will, in part, make perfect happiness possible.
Williams, then, provides no convincing reason to think that the idea of perfect happiness is unintelligible. Indeed, rather than change threatening the intelligibility of the idea of perfect happiness, the experience of that happiness is linked to a signifi cant change in moral character.
At this point, the relevance of libertarian free will to the problem of evil begins to emerge because the signifi cant change in moral character that is a prerequisite for the experience of complete happiness comes about because of a choice. What kind of choice is it that implies such a profound change in a person’s future character, values, and interests?
Christians describe the relevant choice as the mental act of repentance. Repentance involves a renunciation of an old way of life of unrestrained pursuit of what is good and an embracing of a new way of life of restraint in pursuit of what is good. Such a choice is an instance of the kind of choice that Robert Kane has termed a “self-forming willing”
(Kane 1996, pp. 124–5) and that I will term a “self-forming choice” or SFC. In light of the concept of repentance and a renunciation of a former way of life with its character traits, I think a reasonable case can be developed for the view that an agent’s most broadly infl uential SFC ultimately has a bearing on when he will maximize his happiness and the kind of life plan he will adopt in pursuit of that happiness. Moreover, because happiness is intrinsically good, I will term this most wide-ranging SFC a good-seeking SFC. To illustrate what I have in mind here, consider the case of St Augustine, who lived at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fi fth centuries. The following quote from Flanagan about Augustine’s life nicely illustrates by example what I have in mind with the idea of a good-seeking SFC:
St. Augustine was the ultimate party animal until his early thirties, at which point he changed his ways and became an exemplary moral person, a great philosopher, a bishop, and eventually a saint. We might say that Augustine was ruled by his passions until he saw the light in his early thirties. But according to the [libertarian] picture, we would not mean that he couldn’t control himself. We would mean that he chose not to control himself or chose to control himself badly. (Flanagan 2002, p. 58; emphasis in the original)
What Flanagan is suggesting about Augustine’s life is something like the following. At a certain point in his life, Augustine made a good-seeking SFC that entailed he would not
restrain himself from pursuing certain means to maximizing his immediate or short-term happiness. Then some years later, he made a different good-seeking SFC that implied he would restrain his pursuit of goods that promoted his short-term happiness, where exercising this restraint involved his avoiding the performance of certain kinds of actions. Augustine’s own account of this latter good-seeking SFC supports Flanagan’s description of it.
While Augustine says he was converted to God, in whom he believed he would fi nd long-term, perfect happiness, it is clear from his summary of the events leading up to that conversion that he understood that this good-seeking SFC entailed that he would no longer seek to satisfy certain desires for goods that would promote his short-term happiness.
But now . . . as I heard how [two men] had made the choice that was to save them by giving themselves up entirely to your care, the more bitterly I hated myself in comparison with them. . . . [N]o more was required than an act of will. But it must be a resolute and whole-hearted act of the will. . . . I was held back by mere trifl es, the most paltry inanities, all my old attachments. They plucked at my garment of fl esh and whispered, ‘Are you going to dismiss us? From this moment we shall never be with you again, for ever and ever. From this moment you will never again be allowed to do this thing or that, for evermore.’ (Augustine 1961, VIII, 7, 8, 11)
It is plausible, then, to understand Augustine’s conversion as a good-seeking SFC, in which he chose a life plan that he believed would maximize his later experience of happiness (this belief, which is implicit in Augustine’s comment that the choice of the two men would save them, will be made explicit a few paragraphs hence), where that choice entailed a commitment on his part to restrain himself from pursuing his short-term happiness in certain ways. Although Augustine’s good-seeking SFC involved a conversion to Christianity, there is nothing essentially Christian about the idea of a good-seeking SFC that requires restrained pursuit by an agent of his short-term happiness for the sake of that which lies in the future. This is because any individual, as or qua human being, has a desire for his short-term happiness. Given his desire for his happiness in the short term, he has a reason to act for the sake of (to promote) his own immediate well-being. If, however, such an individual also believes that other persons exist who have a similar desire for their own short-term happiness, then in certain circumstances he will believe that were he to act in certain ways he would undermine their opportunity to satisfy their desire for their own short-term well-being, an opportunity to which they have as much right as he has to his own. As a result of what he believes about the potential impact of his actions on the immediate well-being of others, he comes to have beliefs about the moral impermissibility of performing certain kinds of actions. The upshot of this line of reasoning is that a person, as or qua human being, comes to possess beliefs about morally permissible and impermissible ways of pursuing what he believes is good and will promote his short-term happiness, where he views the former ways of pursuing what is good as just and the latter ways as unjust.
Given these ideas about just and unjust ways of pursuing what is good, a person forms ideas about two corresponding life plans, one which consists of ongoing restraint in pursuit of what conduces to his short-term happiness and the other which does not. A good-seeking choice of the former kind of life plan, which is the kind that Augustine made in his early 30s, is what I will call a just-good-seeking SFC, while a good-seeking choice of the latter way of life is what I will term an unjust-good-seeking SFC. In simplest terms, a
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just-good-seeking SFC is a choice (a) to live a life of restraint in pursuit of what is good, where this restraint includes avoiding as best as one can situations in which one believes one will be tempted to pursue what one believes is a morally wrong way of obtaining what is good; (b) to give thanks to God for the good that one experiences, assuming one has a belief that one is created by God; (c) to ask for forgiveness from those whom one wrongs when one chooses to pursue what one believes is a morally wrong way of obtaining what is good; and (d) to forgive others who ask for forgiveness when they freely wrong one in their pursuit of what is good. An unjust-good-seeking SFC is for all intents and purposes one which entails the denial of each of (a)–(d).
Before proceeding, it is important to answer one objection. It might be protested at this juncture that what a person believes about permissible and impermissible ways of pursuing what he takes to be good could be erroneous. In other words, what a person subjectively regards as just and unjust might not be objectively so. Hence, it is possible for a person to choose a life plan that he believes (subjectively) is just when in reality (objectively) it is (in whole or in part) unjust, and for a person to choose a life plan that he thinks (subjectively) is unjust when in reality (objectively) it is (in whole or in part) just.
While the distinction referred to in this objection is a real one, it is not relevant to the issue at hand. What is important is the fact that a person makes a just- or an unjust-good-seeking SFC in light of his beliefs about what is just and unjust, regardless of whether those beliefs are true or false, and he understands that he is obligated to make a just-good-seeking SFC in light of those beliefs by virtue of what is appropriately called his conscience, where his conscience is best thought of as an inner voice or judge that pronounces a verdict of innocence or guilt upon him depending on whether he makes a just- or an unjust-good-seeking SFC. St Paul frequently appealed to this notion of conscience, as in the following comments in his letter to the Romans: “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.
They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their confl icting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them. . . .” (Romans 2:14–5). Kant, too, recognized the importance of conscience:
[T]he accusation of conscience cannot be . . . readily dismissed, neither should it be; it is not a matter of the will. . . . Conscience is an instinct to judge with legal authority according to moral laws; it pronounces a judicial verdict, and, like a judge who can only punish or acquit but cannot reward, so also our conscience either acquits or declares us guilty and deserving of punishment. (Kant 1963, p. 131)
And as Austin Farrer noted, “Conscience claims absolute authority, if you are to have it at all; you can’t tell conscience not to speak out of turn” (Farrer 1973, p. 78).
By way of summary, then, a person desires the happiness that by nature constitutes his well-being and is his ultimate end. Given this human nature, he must make a good-seeking SFC that is concerned with how and when he will maximize the happiness he cannot help but desire to experience. A just-good-seeking SFC will delay through restraint maximizing satisfaction of his desire for happiness, where this maximization is perfect happiness, until the next life. An unjust-good-seeking SFC will seek to maximize satisfaction of his desire for happiness in the short term, even at the expense of undermining the short-term happiness of others and, as I will argue in the section “Adams and Horrendous Evil,” his own experience of perfect happiness in the future.
As a way of closing this section and transitioning to the development of my theodicy in the following section, I consider an objection of Marilyn Adams which, if sound, would undermine that theodicy. The theodicy that I will develop in the next section will make use of the idea of complete or perfect happiness that I have developed in this section. This idea includes the value claim that perfect happiness is intrinsically good. Adams believes, however, that once one starts to theorize about possible justifi cations for God’s allowance of evil: the hope of universal agreement in value theory is shattered. . . . Insofar as the highest human happiness is usually conceived of as involving some relation to the best good(s), . . . different ontologies will produce different accounts of the human good. . . . Secular value theories can offer only packages of immanent goods; some religious theories posit an infi nite transcendent good and invite relationship to it; while mainstream Christianity believes the infi nite good to be personal and locates the happiness of fi nite persons in loving personal intimacy with the divine persons. (Adams 1999, pp. 11–2)
While it is true that there are differences among theories about where and how the experience of happiness is to be found – what the source of this good is (e.g. philosophizing, worshipping God, playing the horses, engaging in sexual escapades) – it is doubtful that the concept of happiness itself as an experience that is intrinsically good varies signifi cantly in its essentials (e.g. it includes the absence of pain and the experience of pleasure) from theory to theory. In her own writings about the problem of evil, Adams assumes that all individuals recognize the evilness of pain, and she explicitly insists that the concept of horrendous evil (evil, the participation in which provides prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant’s life is a great good to him on the whole such that it would be worth living) is an objective or religion-neutral value (Adams 1999, p. 27). If evil is objective and neutral in this way, however, then why think that good is any less so? Mackie, in setting forth his argument against the existence of God, had no trouble in seeing that pleasure and happiness are what contrast with pain and misery (Mackie 1990, p. 31), and I will follow Mackie and assume that pleasure and happiness, like pain and misery, are objective or religion-neutral values. Because they are religion-neutral, the concept of perfect happiness is values objective or value neutral.
In conclusion, I will henceforth assume that experiences of pleasure and pain are, respectively, intrinsically good and evil. I will also assume that a necessary condition of there being a problem of evil is that individuals who experience pain be aware of themselves as experiencing that pain. It is in virtue of this self-awareness that they can have higher-order mental attitudes (e.g. thought, belief, fear) about themselves as the subjects of experiences of pain. Furthermore, I will assume that it is in virtue of this self-awareness that it is possible for experiences of pain to be unjustifi ed. For subjects of pain who lack such self-awareness, it is not possible for experiences of pain to be unjustifi ed. The matter of self-awareness will be of utmost importance when I discuss the suffering of beasts (animal pain) in the last section.
Developing a Theodicy
Although I will have a few more comments to make about the concept of complete happiness in this section, what I have said about it in the previous sections will suffi ce for the purpose of constructing a theodicy in this section. By way of brief summary, at a minimum, the concept of perfect happiness involves the idea of a person existing forever or eternally
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in a state of beatitude or bliss which, at the least, involves the absence of all pain and the experience of pleasure. Such a state is an intrinsic good that satisfi es or fulfi lls a person’s most basic desire and is his greatest possible good.
Given the nature of perfect happiness, it is the case that it decisively outweighs or overbalances any moral evil that a person experiences in this life. If we think of an individual’s experiencing perfect happiness because he makes a just-good-seeking SFC as the intrinsic good of his retributively justly experiencing complete happiness, then the central idea of this section is that a justifi cation for God’s permitting a person to experience moral evil is that that person justly experience perfect happiness. Because the just experience of complete happiness is conditional in nature – a person will justly experience complete happiness, if he chooses rightly – I will sometimes say that a justifi cation for God’s permission of moral evil is the possibility of a person’s experiencing perfect happiness.
It is important to underscore at this juncture that while throughout this section I will often talk about God’s purpose of granting to persons the just experience of perfect happiness, this purpose is a good for each person as an individual. Thus, if one thinks of the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness as a good that justifi es God’s permission of moral evil (which is the kind of evil that will occupy my attention in this section), what justifi es God’s permitting a particular person P to experience moral evil is God’s purpose (good) for P, which is that P experienced perfect happiness.
Why think that the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness is a justifying good for permitting a person to experience moral evil? The following remark by William Rowe provides the rationale for such a belief:
[I]t is reasonable to believe that the goods for the sake of which [God] permits much intense human suffering are goods that either are or include good experiences of the humans that endure the suffering. I say this because we normally would not regard someone as morally justifi ed in permitting intense, involuntary suffering on the part of another, if that other were not to fi gure signifi cantly in the good for which that suffering was necessary. We have reason to believe, then, that the goods for the sake of which much human suffering is permitted will include conscious experiences of these humans, conscious experiences that are themselves good. . . . So if such goods do occur we are likely to know them. (Rowe 1986, p. 244) As I have already pointed out, perfect happiness is a person’s greatest possible good because it consists of his endlessly experiencing nothing except what is intrinsically good.
In light of the eminently reasonable nature of Rowe’s remarks, it is plausible to think that if the possibility of experiencing complete happiness were not at least part of God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evil, something would be amiss. In support of this position, suppose the following scenario S obtains: I am a defender who can provide a possible justifi cation (such as either the goodness of libertarian free will itself or the preponderance of morally good over bad actions that it makes possible) that God has for allowing moral evils to be experienced by human beings (persons) with libertarian free will. For all I know, however, there might be some other possible justifi cation of these moral evils. I am now told that all of these possible justifi cations are compatible with the truth that no persons with libertarian freedom will experience complete happiness,10 regardless of the kinds of choices they make in this life, even a just-good-seeking SFC.
10. Strictly speaking, the existence of only one such person is suffi cient for my argument, but for the sake of simplicity of presentation, I will assume that no person experiences complete happiness.
Unlike a scenario in which a free will defender such as Plantinga can concede the possibility of God’s having, for all he can see, a justifi cation other than libertarian freedom for allowing moral evils, I believe that a defender who is reasonable must maintain it is impossible both that God has a justifi cation for permitting the moral evils that human beings with libertarian free will experience and that none of these persons will experience perfect happiness, regardless of how he has chosen. It is reasonable to think that a defender must deny this possibility because of a belief of his that God’s permitting moral evils would be unjustifi ed in such a scenario. And this belief can itself plausibly be thought to be grounded in a defender’s knowledge that God’s actual justifi cation for creating persons with libertarian free will and allowing them to experience moral evil includes11 the possibility of their experiencing complete happiness.12 In short, a defender knows that the possibility of experiencing complete happiness is included in God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evils because, like anyone else, he knows that experiencing perfect happiness is a person’s greatest good that outweighs any moral evil he might experience. Thus, it seems that a defender must move to being a theodicist, if he is to maintain the impossibility of scenario S.
In the spirit of Plantinga’s response to Walls’s attempt to move him (Plantinga) from defense to theodicy (see the third section), a defender might say in response to my argument that while he fails to see how S is possible (maybe it is, although he does not see how it is), he does not see that it is impossible. At this point, I can only say that I believe that a reasonable defender will maintain that he sees that S is not possible. This is because a reasonable defender believes that God is concerned with bringing about a person’s greatest possible good and S describes a situation in which that good is not realized.
Or consider the following suggestion: in an effort to avoid the extreme position of claiming to know nothing about God’s justifi cation for allowing moral evils while at the same time avoiding the theodicy I am suggesting, a defender might claim to know something about what God’s justifying reasons are not. For example, a defender might confi -
dently state that God’s reason for allowing a horrifi c act of rape is not so that the rapist could experience pleasure from his act. Beyond knowing what some of God’s justifying reasons are not, however, a defender is ignorant about what God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evils is.13
Is this via negativa theodicy plausible? Can a defender know what some of God’s justifying reasons for permitting moral evils are not without knowing what any of them are? I believe that such a position is suspect. To see why, consider a version of scenario 11. I say “includes” and not “is” at this point because my argument so far leaves open the possibility that there are other reasons God has for permitting created persons to experience moral evil. Later in this section, I provide an argument that suggests that the purpose of giving to persons the just experience of complete happiness is God’s only justifi cation for allowing them to experience moral evil.
12. There is evidence that Walls is sympathetic with the idea that it is the purpose of granting to persons the just experience of complete happiness that justifi es God’s allowing persons to experience moral evil. In addressing the issue of hell, he states that “[i]t is because the good [the extraordinary opportunity to live before God in conscious relationship to him] is so wonderful that something as objectively terrible as hell is possible” (Walls 1992a, p. 137). Because the problem of hell is just a logical extension of the problem of evil, if the good of a possible conscious relationship with God (i.e. complete happiness) justifi es God’s permission of hell, it justifi es His allowing human beings to experience moral evil in this life.
13. Michael Bergmann suggested this possible response to me on behalf of a defender.
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S: a defender knows what some of God’s justifying reasons for allowing moral evils are not and also that any justifying reason He has is compatible with created persons, for reasons that have nothing to do with how they choose, either (1) spending an eternity in hell (for the sake of argument, I assume that hell is a form of existence in which there are signifi cant experiences of pain), (2) spending a fi nite period of time in hell after which they are annihilated, or (3) being annihilated at death (no afterlife of any kind). On the one hand, if a defender maintains that any justifi cation God has for permitting moral evils is compatible with one or more of these alternatives, then he is a defender, but not a reasonable one. On the other hand, if he maintains that God’s justifi cation for allowing moral evils is not compatible with any of these alternatives, then it is plausible to think that this is because he knows that God’s justifying reason for permitting moral evils includes the possibility of persons experiencing perfect happiness.
At this juncture, a defender might claim that while it is true that God cannot justifi ably permit moral evils under any scenario such as (1), (2), or (3), it does not follow that he knows that God’s justifi cation for allowing moral evils is what I have proposed. Consider two versions of such a claim.
First, a defender might claim not to know that God’s granting to persons the just experience of complete happiness is the justifi cation for permitting moral evils because it is not clear that the greatest possible good for a person is the experience of complete happiness.
After all, it might be the case that the experience by a person of complete happiness is not possible. For example, William Hasker has suggested to me that the experience of complete happiness might not be possible if created persons have a fi nite capacity for absorbing new experiences such that after a few thousand or million years, the further existence of those persons becomes pointless.
For the reasons that I mentioned in the previous section when discussing Williams’s
“The Makropulos Case: Refl ections on the Tedium of Immortality” (Williams 1973), it seems to me (and, as I will point out in a moment, to several prominent defenders) that the experience of perfect happiness is possible. Even if I am wrong about this, however, it is still plausible to maintain that a defender must become a theodicist. This is because the essence of my argument is as follows: In order not to move from a defense to a theodicy, a defender must refuse to acknowledge the impossibility of a scenario in which there is a possible justifi cation for permitting moral evils and it is the case that no persons with libertarian freedom will experience the greatest possible happiness for them regardless of what kinds of choices they make in this life. In other words, even if the greatest possible happiness for an individual cannot (for some reason) be perfect happiness, then whatever that greatest possible happiness is, a defender can avoid becoming a theodicist only by refusing to acknowledge the impossibility of a scenario S specifi ed in terms of that happiness. I believe this shows that a defender knows that God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evils includes the possibility of persons experiencing their greatest possible happiness.
Second,14 a defender might claim that even if the experience of eternal, complete happiness is the greatest possible happiness for a person, it is not clear that God must grant it 14. Michael Bergmann suggested the following argument to me on behalf of a defender.
to created persons who choose rightly by making a just-good-seeking SFC. Perhaps God only need be committed to the purpose of granting to a person who chooses rightly a degree of happiness in the afterlife that makes his life such that on balance it is a good thing. Although it is true that the possibility of justly experiencing perfect happiness is a possible justifi cation for God’s permission of moral evils in this life, perhaps the possibility of justly experiencing either a temporally fi nite complete happiness in the afterlife (where the good experienced in it outweighs the evil experienced in this life) or a temporally unlimited incomplete happiness with a modicum of pain15 might also be God’s justifi cation for allowing moral evils. Thus, because we do not know that the possibility of experiencing eternal, complete happiness is included in God’s actual justifi cation, a defender need not become a theodicist.
I believe that this argument, like the fi rst, is inadequate, and for a similar reason. A defender who makes this argument must at least know that the possibility of experiencing a certain degree of happiness is included in God’s justifi cation for permitting persons to experience moral evils. To this extent, he is a theodicist. There is, however, a reason for thinking that a defender knows that the possibility of experiencing eternal, perfect happiness is included in God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evils. This reason is that eternal, complete happiness is what persons actually desire and they desire this because (as I argued in the previous section) a desire for a temporally fi nite complete happiness or a temporally infi nite but incomplete happiness is conceptually suspect, if not incoherent. If one fi nds the idea of an experience of happiness desirable, then one cannot fail to desire its eternality and completeness. One must desire that it be unending and complete. Given that it is only the desire for eternal, complete happiness that makes sense and this kind of happiness is possible, then provided a defender believes that God is omnibenevolent (completely morally good) and will fulfi ll our deepest desire (which He gave us) if we choose rightly, it is reasonable to think that he knows that it is the just experience of this kind of happiness that is God’s justifi cation for allowing moral evils.
Up until now, I have spoken about what reasonable defenders would say regarding the idea of perfect happiness. It is now appropriate to examine what some of them actually say about it. Consider what Plantinga says that relates to the issue of complete happiness. In response to the evidential argument from evil, he writes “I also believe in eternal life.
The precise contours of this are certainly obscure, but it includes an eternity of bliss for 15. Thomas Flint has suggested to me that some persons might well question whether the absence of all pain is possible or desirable for a creature that has sinned. Even in heaven, should not such a creature have some memory of having freely done moral evil? And should not that memory continue to cause it at least some discomfort?
Such a memory does not seem to be incompatible with genuine complete happiness, but it is on my account.
Would it not be enough for my theodicy to say that complete happiness would involve the kind of bliss that would make pain, if present at all, seem very mild in comparison?
My claim that complete happiness involves the absence of all pain is rooted in the fact that this conception of happiness seems to me to describe the purpose for which I was created. It is without question the kind of existence that I ultimately desire. Even if complete happiness includes memories of having freely done moral evil, it seems to me that they need not cause discomfort (compare how time affects the impact of our memories on us in this life) and that they should not (God’s forgiveness requires no suffering by us for our moral wrongs). If readers do not share my point of view about the nature of complete happiness, then they can, as Flint suggests, think of this happiness as a kind of bliss that makes pain, to the extent that it is experienced, mild in comparison.
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enormous numbers of God’s creatures” (Plantinga 1996b, p. 257).16 Plantinga writes as a Christian theist, but it is reasonable to maintain that the points he makes relating to complete happiness are part of theism per se and not just of Christian theism. This is because the idea of an omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent being who created persons with the desire to experience complete happiness is at the heart of any reasonable theism, and such a being has the knowledge, moral goodness and power to ensure the satisfaction of that desire (provided that the necessary conditions of its satisfaction are met). Now suppose that Plantinga is told by a fellow defender that it is true that his suggested free will defense is thoroughly reasonable, and that it is possible that libertarian free will (or something else) is God’s justifi cation for allowing moral evils and that no persons who have this freedom will experience complete happiness regardless of how they choose. I think Plantinga would respond that his fellow defender is surely mistaken.17 Provided that he would answer in this way, I believe this indicates that he must become a theodicist who believes that God’s justifi cation for allowing the moral evils that human beings experience includes the possibility of their experiencing complete happiness.
William Alston is another defender who comments on the issue of perfect happiness.
According to Alston, Christian theism maintains that:
one’s life on earth is only a tiny proportion of one’s total life span. . . . [W]hy suppose that we are entitled to judge that justifying goods, if any, would be realized during the sufferer’s earthly life, unless we have specifi c reasons to the contrary? . . . Why is the burden of proof on the suggestion of the realization of the goods in an afterlife? (Alston 1996b, pp. 104, 123, endnote 17)
For present purposes, it is important that Alston believes that the goods of the afterlife include “experiencing complete felicity in the everlasting presence of God” (Alston 1996a, p. 324). According to him, the problem for formulating a theodicy is that these goods of the afterlife belong to the kinds of goods of which we have no experience and only a minimal grasp of their value. Thus, “we are in a bad position to determine whether the magnitude of [complete felicity in the everlasting presence of God] is such as to make it worthwhile for God to permit a certain evil in order to make its realization possible”
(Alston 1996a, p. 324).
How would Alston respond to the possible scenario where moral evils experienced by human beings have a justifi cation and it is the case that no person will experience complete happiness even if he makes the requisite just-good-seeking SFC? Given the belief that we 16. Although he believes in perfect happiness, Plantinga does not invoke it in his free will defense. Andrew Chignell notes that “[m]any versions of the Free Will approach are not concerned with the problem of God’s goodness to individuals. . . . Plantinga is less worried about how all horrors can be defeated in an individual’s life than with how the maximal state of affairs that includes these horrors may be the best that can be actualized”
(Chignell 1998, p. 213; emphasis in the original). Charles Seymour points out that Plantinga does not mention the afterlife in giving the free will defense and that the silent implication is that libertarian free will is of such value that it outweighs all the evil in the world, even if there were no afterlife to look forward to (Seymour 1997, p. 259).
17. Cf. the following comment of Plantinga’s: “[T]he Christian theist will no doubt concur with St. Paul: ‘For I reckon that the sufferings we now endure bear no comparison with the splendor, as yet unrevealed, which is in store for us.’ (Romans 8:18). . . . From a Christian point of view, there is immortality and the expectation of a better world. . . .” (Plantinga 1979, pp. 46–7; quoted in Adams 1999, pp. 23–4).