the restriction-prerogative theodicy

I read Justin Mooney's "How to Solve the Problem of Evil: A Deontological Strategy" (https://place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2731&context=faithandphilosophy), and it's quite good.

He begins with the problem of gratuitous evil: "(1) If God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil. (2) There is gratuitous evil. So, (3) God does not exist" (442). Mooney notes that while most traditional theodicies try to deny (2), Mooney will join a small crowd in denying (1)--a strategy that I think we must take since (2) is obviously true. Mooney considers "an evil [to be] gratuitious [iff] it is either (i) not tied to a good that outweighs it [conditionally gratuitious], or (ii) impermissible regardless of whether it is tied to a good that outweighs it [unconditionally gratuitious]." (i) can be seen in stubbing one's toe; both (i) and (ii) can be seen in the Holocaust. Mooney considers three possible responses to this issue, and he ultimately affirms the third one, which is a synthesis of the first two.

First is the restriction strategy (Eric Reitan): "Just because an agent can prevent an evil without sacrificing a greater good, that doesn’t mean she is permitted to. Arguably, agent-centered restrictions sometimes require agents to permit conditionally gratuitous evils, such as when one agent is not permitted to interfere with the poor and even destructive choices of another agent..." (446). For example, if God were to categorically prevent every person from immorality, he appears to be overriding human dignity in its ability to make free choices. Mooney ultimately finds this view to fail because it seems like there is a much stronger force behind pro tanto obligations upon God to prevent gratuitious evil than permitting it. 

Second is the prerogative strategy (Mark Murphy, Michael Rea, and Brian Davies): "[L]ike us, God has an agent-centered prerogative to pursue God’s own projects instead of always preventing the world’s suffering. After all, even God will have projects that can be pursued—e.g., certain worlds that can be created—only at the expense of permitting conditionally gratuitous evil.31 So, if morality gives us some wiggle room to pursue such projects, maybe it does the same for God." (452). While advancing several objections, the main one Mooney lands on is that "it seems seriously conceptually strained to suggest that a being who permits people to suffer gratuitously and horrendously over long periods of time loves those people in any sense even distantly analogous to our notion of love" (457). 

Therefore, Mooney advances the restriction-prerogative strategy: "[I]t could be the case both that God is not obligated to prevent the gratuitous suffering in the world, as the prerogative strategy claims, and that God is obligated not to prevent that suffering, as the restriction strategy claims…God has a prerogative to create a world with gratuitous evil, but there are restrictions on how God can run it" (457). Mooney relies heavily on the commonsense moral intuition that, while it's good for persons to do what they can to solve suffering, there is no pro tanto obligation on them to solve all of them. He then concludes: "If I’m right that agents often do not have even a pro tanto obligation to do these things, then it should be easy to generate an all-things-considered obligation not to prevent the suffering in these cases" (459). 

Overall, I think this is a powerful response to the problem of gratuitous evils in the world, and Mooney provides insightful revisions to other responses that reject (1) and affirm (2). One part of Mooney's proposal that I'm confused on is this moral intuition that human persons are not required to solve all of the world's evils. Mooney borrows from Michael Rea's appeal to personhood for this argument: "“The rough idea is that a full or natural expression of personhood requires the moral freedom to pursue personal projects with some amount of independence from their overall moral value, and morality secures this moral freedom for people by permitting them to sometimes choose lesser goods" (452).

But how sound is this principle? It seems like a large part of this principle's intuitive appeal is that we also intuitively side with Kant (and more contemporarily, Bart Streumer) on the principle that 'ought implies can.' If I cannot do x, then there is no possible moral obligation upon me to do x. The way this principle would be transposed on Rea's argument is this: solving some evil is a good thing to do, and it's also a thing that most anyone has the ability to do--but what about solving all evil? This seems impossible, for all of us have limited concrete (and existential?) resources. Therefore, while we can be obligated to solve for some evil, we cannot be obligated to solve for all evil because it's not possible for us to do. 

However, things are different with God: he's am omnipotent being, and surely he has the capability to solve for gratuitous kinds of evil. So, Kant and Streumer's 'is-ought' principle does not apply to God here unless there is some other pro tanto obligation upon God that outweighs his pro tanto obligation to prevent gratuitous evil. I'm not really sure what that obligation would be, especially since Mooney dismissed Swinburne's 'a world that really matters' obligation early on in his consideration of prerogative solutions. So, the question is what this pro tanto obligation would be--and I'm not sure there is one. 

The sovereignty-aseity intuition and classical theism

In Alvin Plantinga's Does God Have a Nature?, he formulates what he calls the "sovereignty-aseity intuition" about God. The intuition makes four claims: 

"[I]f God is sovereign and exists a se, then (a) he has created everything distinct from himself, (b) there is nothing upon which he depends for his existence and character, (c) everything distinct from him depends upon him, and (d) everything is within his control" (78). Plantinga thinks the most important part of this intuition is (d), and that (a)-(c) are in some way emergent from the truth of (d). God is a necessarily existent being; He also has necessary properties (e.g goodness, love, justice, mercy, etc.). If the "sovereignty-aseity intuition" is conjoined with these features, problems appear to arise rather quickly.

First, how do these divine properties exist? If they exist apart from God such that they are also necessarily existing entities that have always existed--similar to how a Platonist might say the forms or numbers exist--then it appears that every part of the intuition (Except (b)) is violated. If divine properties exist in this way, then (a) he has not created everything distinct from himself, (c) not everything distinct from him depends upon him, and (d) not everything is within his control, since the divine properties could not have failed to exist if they are necessary entities. 

So, if the sovereignty-aseity intuition is going to be maintained, we don't want to endorse this kind of platonism about abstract objects. What about nominalism, then? This is roughly the view that denies the existence of abstract objects that exist as properties. God might be omniscient because he knows all knowable facts, but this does not entail that there is an abstract property of omniscience that he can participate in. Well, Plantinga ends up rejecting this too: while abstract properties can be dismissed, characterizations cannot. If God is omniscient not in a way that requires participating in an abstract object, it still seems that the characterization 'God knows all things' still necessarily exists in some way. 

Classical theism goes a different direction. They say that God is identical to his essence so that he is one substance and is therefore identical with his properties--though these properties do not individuate the substance of God. But Plantinga claims this is an insufficient solution for two reasons:

"In the first place if God is identical with each of his properties, then each of his properties is identical with each of his properties, so that God has but one property. This seems flatly incompatible with the obvious fact that God has several properties...In the second place, if God is identical with each of his properties, then, since each of his properties is a property, he is a property--a self-exemplifying property. Accordingly...If God is a property, then he isn't a person but a mere abstract object..." (47).

I'll add a third complaint here that has to do with the sovereignty-aseity intuition: If God necessarily exists and necessarily exemplifies certain properties, even if the classical theist is able to make it such that God is merely one substance while exemplifying a variegated set of properties, it seems that (d) is violated because he had no say in his constitution--he just is simple. 

Another time this week, I want to take a look at responses to this argument from classical theists, because from what I understand, this argument of Plantinga's is known to be problematic by most metaphysicians (even non-classical theists) concerned with models of God. 

The view from nowhere in moral philosophy

C. Stephen Evans has a recent article in the newest edition of Philosophia Christi that is called "The Revolt against Accountability to God." His argument is as follows: 

There is something called a "global hermeneutical perspective" (GHP) that has emerged from philosophers like Nietzsche, which holds that every person--hence, 'global'--has ulterior motives (e.g. Nietzsche's 'will to power' or Freud's 'masters of suspicion') that influence them toward interpreting the world in accordance with these ulterior motives. For example, if Nietzsche were alive today, he would likely see the recent renaissance of Christian philosophy as an enterprise by which the church is trying to control the academy. Plantinga and Swinburne might say that they're honestly convinced by the arguments they put forth, but the GHP holds that there's good reasons to doubt this.

Evans thinks GHP is translated neatly into a Christian view of subjectivity called the "no-neutrality thesis" (NNT). Inspired largely from the work of Kierkegaard, Evans thinks that original sin causes every human person to rebel against the authority of God that they were made to respect. Thus, NNT also holds that there is an ulterior motive--namely, a desire for a person to be their own source of moral authority and consequently not be held ultimately accountable for their actions--within every human person, such that their beliefs are are heavily influenced by this condition. 

While Evans is not out to make an ad hominem, he does think it's curious that the NNT exists, that many moral philosophers are moral antirealists--i.e., that moral facts do not exist independently from persons, and that they're in some way emergent from our own experience--and that the majority of philosophers do not believe in God. Of course, some philosophers might be genuinely convinced by their arguments, but even atheist moral philosophers such as David Enoch (although Enoch is a realist, he still considers his view to be nontheistic) and Gilbert Harman concede that many philosophers are less concerned about the coherence of their arguments and more with keeping together a worldview they're already committed to. 

So, what do we do with Evans' argument here? He ends the article by referencing Nietzsche. Nietzsche always gets a bad rap in analytic circles because he typically does not make an argument for his worldview; rather, he just asserts his worldview and describes what life is like within it. How is it that a philosopher who is known for not making positive, constructive arguments for his worldview rise to such prominence in our world today? Evans thinks the answer lies in the fact that the worldview he's constructed is deeply attractive to Nietzsche's readers. Thus, Evans ends with a hope that Christian thinkers might be able to develop a similarly attractive worldview. 

I think Evans' argument is true: people are typically much more committed to supporting their worldviews than their arguments for them (even if this distinction might be tough to make). This is why I think the push for cultural apologetics is a fruitful endeavor, since many people do not understand the beauty of what the Christian worldview entails. In regard to the virtue of accountability in moral philosophy, I suppose the endeavor might be constructive a vision of a life lived-welled because, at least in part, they had the virtue of accountability in some way. Even as a prominent analytic philosopher, Evans is write to assert that people are likely more attracted to beautiful worldviews than rigorous (albeit, correct) arguments. 

Does punishment vary according to the greatness of the victim?

One argument for eternal hell goes roughly like this: 

(1) The perpetrator of an injustice should be punished in proportion to both the moral greatness of the victim and the severity of the injustice. 

(2) We have all committed an injustice, in virtue of our sinful nature, against God. 

(3) God is infinitely great.

(4) Therefore, our punishment will be infinitely great. 

In everyday conversation, a youth pastor might explain this argument as follows: "If I break my neighbor's window, then I need to fix the window for my neighbor. Once I've done that, then we're on good terms again. But if I break something of God's (i.e., his law!), then, because he is infinitely holy, my sin has become infinitely worthy of damnation."

Now, I've always been a little uncomfortable with this notion, even if I acknowledge that it does have at least some intuitive appeal. If I commit assault, it seems much worse if my victim is a more vulnerable kind of person than a less vulnerable one, since my injustice of assault can also be coupled with the injustice of exploiting the vulnerable. Context might even give further intuitive plausibility for this argument: assault seems more justified if I do so in the context of a fist fight with a bully than if I do so in the context of a friend's wedding. But however intuitively plausible this argument is, I think it runs its course when we apply it to the person of God. 

Here's another example (inspired by Marilyn Adams, of course) of this principle:

Suppose Mother Teresa and Kierkegaard are having dinner with two prisoners they've met as they're doing prison ministry: Bill is serving a life sentence for eating every cow in the state of Kansas, and Jeff is also serving life for driving a tractor through every building in downtown Dallas. Now, during dinner, a massive debate ensues: if abstract objects exist necessarily (such that, for every possible world, each abstract object could not have failed to exist) and eternally, does this pose a problem for the sovereignty and aseity of God? The debate gets out of hand: Teresa and Jeff vigorously vote no, while Bill and Kierkegaard affirm (realistically, Kierkegaard would not care about this issue, fideist he is!). And before you know it, a fight breaks out: Bill punches Mother Teresa in the face (injustice a). Then Teresa regains balance and punches Kierkegaard (injustice b). Kierkegaard, bloodied as he is, manages to punch Jeff (injustice c). Then Jeff punches Bill (injustice d). 

Every injustice here is roughly the same: the punch is given with equal force within the same context. However, the victims and perpetrators within each sort of injustice are very different: whereas Jeff and Bill roughly have a moral greatness level of about .4 (on a 0-1 scale), Teresa and Kierkegaard have a .8. So, how do we assess these punishments? It seems like something like this would emerge: 

a = Bill is given a punishment that is .8 severe (on a 0-1 scale)

b = Teresa has Bill's punishment.

c = Kierkegaard is given a punishment that is .4 severe. 

d = Jeff has Kierkegaard's punishment. 

This seems not right. It might be right to say that a would make sense only because Bill broke other rules within the prison--but this is an appeal to other things within the context, not to the moral greatness of the victim. Also, this would leave us with Teresa being punished doubly harsher than Jeff for committing the same injustice! 

So, is this prison fight enough to do away with the youth pastor's over-simplified argument for eternal hell? Maybe. It probably needs a bit more fleshing out (e.g., if classical theism is right that God is not a person like us such that he is not constrained by moral obligations among human social contexts, would this argument matter to him?), but this will do for now.

Hell and Retributive Justice (Revisited)

In my last post, I focused on Adams' objection that eternal hell cannot sustain a scheme of retributive justice. I considered the case of Smith's knocking out one tooth in thirty one different people, and whether or not this warranted Smith having thirty one of his own teeth knocked out on a scheme of retributive justice. 

For a moment, let's presume Smith receives his just punishment in having all of his teeth knocked out as Adams suggests retributive justice would entail. If the doctrine of eternal hell is true, how does this scheme work in eternity--especially if persons are traditionally held to be punished for the iniquities they've committed in their postmortem lives?

One option is to kick the doctrine of eternal hell in favor of another alternative eschatology. If this is done, then we could suggest that Smith can be retributively punished for all of his antemortem iniquities and then finally be redeemed, annihilated, or whatever consequence an alternative eschatology might suggest. If the insufficiency of retributive justice is a defeater for eternal hell in the way Adams makes it out to be, then I would advocate for this option.

But Adams' argument, while insightful into retributive schemes of justice, does not ultimately convince me. Why think divine judgment is a place in which God itemizes every person's iniquities and pays out a judgment in proportion to them? There is one sense, of course, in which each person will stand before God and give an account of all the ways they've sinned against him; still, this does not entail an overly reductive scheme of retributive justice in the way Adams suggests. 

If C.S. Lewis' model of hell is remotely true--such that Hell is a place that is locked from the inside, and that persons are even free to leave hell once they've sufficiently reconciled with God again--then Adams' critique is not really all that powerful. God can be perfectly just in giving people over to their desires, even if these desires result in eternal self-condemnation. Even if we want to maintain that the justice of God is characteristically retributive, Lewis' scheme still leaves room for there to be a temporary (perhaps even purgative?) punishment upon persons, depending on the severity of their lives of iniquity. If the life of a person in heaven is in someway correlative with the virtue of their postmortem life, then I don't find it ridiculous to think that the temporary punishment of postmortem persons is correlative with the severity of their antemortem vices. 

Contra Lewis, here is a more popularized response to Adams' question: retributive justice might be a coherent scheme between two human persons. If Smith wronged Jones, then it might be right to say that Jones would be just in wronging Smith in a similar way. But if Smith wronged God--a being that is not even remotely within the class of 'human person,' and is therefore not subject to the same kinds of moral obligations and systems between human beings--then Smith can be justly condemned for eternity by God in eternal hell because Smith had wronged an infinitely good being. 

I'll have more to say about this tomorrow, but here's a question: if I were to punch a grown adult, would my punishment vary depending on the socioeconomic status of the victim?

Is God's Justice Able to Survive Hell Eternally?

Marilyn McCord Adams has become one of my favorite philosophers when it comes to answering questions about the goodness of God and evil in the world. Famously, in her Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, she ultimately answers these questions by making an appeal to universalism for several independent reasons. 

One prominent reason of universalism that is not mentioned in her original magnum opus comes from an older article of hers called "Hell and the God of Justice." In this piece, Adams suggests that eternal hell overwhelms schemes of retributive justice, and is therefore an incoherent eschatology for God to cash out his justice in. She gives several thought experiments to demonstrate such an incoherence--here is my favorite: 

Suppose Smith knocks out one of Jones' teeth. The 'eye for an eye' principle of retributive justice would suggest that the just recompense for Jones is for Smith to have one of his teeth knocked out. But let's make things more interesting: suppose Smith knocked not just one of Jones' teeth, but also one tooth in the mouths of thirty different people. On the 'eye for an eye' principle of retributive justice, it seems like the just recompense for these thirty one people is for each of them to knock one tooth out in Smith's mouth, such that Smith no longer has any teeth at the end of this beating.

Now, the subjective suffering of each individual who had their tooth knocked out might be significant--let's place it at .1 out of a 0 to 1 scale. But the suffering of Smith having all of his teeth knocked out--even if he did things prior to put him in a condemnatory position--is vastly higher than .1. It seems like the swift action of having all one's teeth knocked out is more like .9 (presuming Smith's teeth have been knocked out in the same way he knocked out the teeth of the thirty one others). Is this still a just punishment for Smith?

Some might reply with the "Yes Chad" meme, biting the bullet and affirming that Smith's punishment is exactly what he deserves. But I find that most would probably think that this is a case where retributive justice has been made to be absurd; it seems prima facie wrong to knock out all of the teeth of one person who removed one tooth in thirty one different people. 

This scenario becomes even more problematic once we try to fit into a scheme that goes on for eternity. If we presume the Thomistic doctrine of "postmortem inalterability" such that persons cannot change their eternal fate after death (i.e., a rejection of the idea persons can fluidly move between heaven and hell after their judgment), then we are left with the following situation for persons condemned to Hell:

Suppose Smith was a really bad person; overall, on a scale of 1-1mil, he caused others around him about 970k pain (for the sake of argument, presume we have a clear way of tracking numerically overall pain another person has caused others). Once he dies, the 'eye for an eye' principle of retributive justice requires that Smith be inflicted about 970k pain in his postmortem life. But notice that this cannot go on for an eternity: even if Smith committed a high amount of iniquities and inflicted lots of pain on others, eventually retributive justice will have made recompense for every part of his sins. It seems, then, that not only does retributive justice lead to absurdly harsh penalties, but it also seems to not fit cleanly into an eternal hell.

For now, I'll say that Adams raises an interesting argument, but I don't think it's sufficient to kick eternal hell and buy universalism. I'll say more about this tomorrow.

Cuneo's Normative Web of Epistemic and Moral Facts

Terence Cuneo recently did an interview in which he surveys just about every one of his major publications here: https://316am.site123.me/articles/normative-webs-thomas-reid-and-liturgy?fbclid=IwAR1DfUDIZW79Ej0HE_MhstInxre-fdkvj6p1zubs9vv41clf-g7H1-FVofI. I am deeply influenced by Nicholas Wolterstorff's work, and I think of Cuneo as a younger Wolterstorff protege (and hence, I'm becoming a big fan of Cuneo's work as well). Here is a fascinating argument he makes in his Normative Web. It goes like this: 

(1) If moral facts don’t exist, then neither do epistemic ones. 

(2)But epistemic facts exist.

(3) Therefore, moral facts exist.

Clearly, the most controversial part of this argument is the condition in premise one. I don't think it's worth taking time to defend (2)--unless we're willing to do away with epistemic norms such that any proposition need not satisfy any kind of conditions for justification or rationality.

So, what to do with (1)? Well, my only exposure to Cuneo's argument is in this interview, and he does not take much time to flesh out a comprehensive case for why this is so, but I think the reasons for (1) can be expressed rather easily.

What is a moral fact? Cuneo presumes they're real; that is, similar to abstract objects, they actually, really exist. Depending on whether or not you think these facts possess a latent ability to produce obligations upon persons within them or if they require some personal agent with the appropriate authority, most who think real moral facts exist think they have obligations upon persons that require normative constraints on the way persons should act. 

Now, how do we know about such facts? Again, Cuneo does not take too much time to flesh this out, but e we can safely assume he endorses a Reidian 'common sense' epistemology that might be similar to Plantinga's externalist 'proper functionalism' or Huemer's 'phenomenal conservatism.' We can probably presume that whatever standards of epistemic justification in regard to our knowing of certain moral facts, they're either quite minimal or just have to do with believing in seemings in the absence of a sufficient defeater.

So, when a person is prepared to reject the existence of real moral facts, they have two options: a) they can endorse an antirealist view of moral facts or b) they endorse a radical kind of skepticism. Cuneo has independent refutations of antirealist views of moral facts for a), and also independent arguments for skeptic epistemologies (i.e. expressivism and nihilism) in the interview that are worth reading. 

I like this argument because I have interests in both epistemology and meta-ethics, but I was somewhat confused on how I could bridge them. Great interview!

Analyzing Walls' Reply to Cross' Tu Quoque Defense

In Roman But Not Catholic, Jerry Walls addresses Bryan Cross' objection that Protestants appear to be their own popes (see original piece here: https://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/05/the-tu-quoque/).

The charge goes like this: the way a Protestant comes to join her respective ecclesial community is by way of judging the community's claims and making an individual evaluation of those claims in regard to whether or not they appear correct from the perspective of the Protestant. In this way, Protestants are effectively their own Popes because the authority of the respective ecclesial community is emergent from the Protestant herself. 

Cross differentiates the Catholic from such a scenario: Catholics, after reading Scripture along with the tradition of interpreters and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, they discover the true Church in a similar way that we discover Christ in scripture. This means that, contrary to Protestants who are (allegedly) their own popes, Catholics discover an already-existing authority that makes a claim upon themselves rather than conferring authority unto the community based on an individual judgment. 

Walls makes several responses to Cross' attempt to avoid tu quoque: first, it's impractical to expect every reasonable Christian to take time to do rigorous study of church history and biblical studies in the way Cross suggests is necessary to discover the Catholic Church. Secondly, it's telling that there are plenty of Protestant theologians who have done something resembling the kind of work Cross suggests and still have not discovered the RCC as the true church. I suspect Cross would have to deny these scholars have actually done the work he suggests, and that probably won't go over very well. Third, it's absurd to think that Scripture would not be clear about doctrines that are necessary for a person's salvation if they're really divinely inspired. If RCC's really want to make correct ecclesiology a salvific issue, then why would Scripture need to be accompanied by such rigorous study? Fourth, Cross presents a false dilemma for Protestant interpreters of Scripture outside the RCC: he insists that "every interpretation that is made by men-without-divine authorization is the product of mere-man, and thus has no divine authority over man." Big if true. Walls responds: "It is a false dilemma to suggest that any authority must be either (1) utterly free of any sort of error or imperfection or (2) a mere human interpretation with no real authority." As long as Scripture carries a "self-authenticating" nature such that its divine authority lies within itself (as Michael Kruger suggests in Canon Revisited), it seems like interpreters need not have this infallibility. 

I agree with most of Walls' criticisms, though he does have one additional objection that I don't think I can get behind. Recall that Cross thinks that RC's can discover the RCC through rigorous study and the guidance of the Holy Spirit in a similar way that we can discover Christ in Scripture. In response, Walls compares the beauty and splendor of Christ that draws us to our discovery of him in Scripture to the moral corruption of the historical RCC (that is probably not worth recounting). He concludes by noting that "The reality of the morally ambiguous history of the Church of Rome further undermines Cross's claim that 'the Church' can be discovered int he pages of Scripture." I am doubting that such an argument is sufficient to reject Cross's claim about the comparative discoveries of the Church and Christ for the following reason:

Christ claimed that nothing would prevail against his Church, and along with the great commission and the epistles of Paul (Esp. Ephesians 1), it's clear that the Church is supposed to be one of the main ways God works in the world. But neither of these claims entail a moral perfection about the church; indeed, it allows space for much moral failure to occur in the history of the Church due to the fact that it's made up of fallible humans. So, for the sake of argument, let's presume that a person is engaging in the kind of rigorous study that Cross suggests is sufficient to discover the Church: the fact of historical immorality appears to be a facet of a community that she should expect in investigating questions about ecclesiology. If that's the case, then Walls' objection appears to lose force; it's certainly not lost on Walls that every church community will eventually have a checkered history, but such history does not constitute a defeater for the idea that God might make his true ecclesial body one that is discovered in a way that is basic--even if it has a checkered history.

In sum, however, Walls appears to sufficiently defeat Cross' original argument; it turns out that there is "an inescapable element of individual judgment is involved for all persons who join any church or convert to one of them."