Politics and the Good Life

Why is it that when dealing with certain topics, namely political topics, arguments rarely come to any sort of satisfying conclusion? One possibility is that there is no reason or truth in matters like these; it is all just a matter of taste, sentiment, or personal opinion. Another possibility is that some people are just plain irrational and can't be convinced by good arguments. Both of these suggestions contain some small granule of truth, but generally, are too radical to serve as general explanations. We must conclude that the problem lies elsewhere.

For what it's worth, this problem of miscommunication is encountered even when political science professors and politicians are having high-level debates. And to make things worse, this problem does not seem to be encountered in other realms of life. Let's take a non-political example. Suppose I am trying to fix a door, and my friend and I are having a debate about how to properly do so. I think the door won't shut because the wood has warped and needs to be cut, while my friend thinks that the door's hinges are loose and the screws need to be tightened. We both have access to all the same information, we can both examine the other's proposed solution, and ultimately, we can try both solutions and see which one accomplished the goal.

Now let's look at a political example. Let's use gun violence, since that has been in the news lately. In this example, much like the door example, all parties have access to the relevant information (statistics, polls, and quantitative information), all the parties have access to historical attempts to solve the problem, and all the parties can look at recent attempts in our own society to curb the problem. But what is the difference? Obviously the level of complexity is different, but more importantly, the desired outcome is different. This fact is of the utmost importance and often overlooked. A libertarian, an authoritarian Catholic, and a Marxist all have very different visions of a good society, which entails different relationships to firearms, and most of those visions aren't clearly expressed when those people enter into a discussion.

Here is a very common example we have all seen. News stories that frequently make the social media circuit imply that the increased levels of crime, abuse, negligence, and poor-decision making found among the poor and destitute are explained by the more foundational economic inequality. Just to be clear, let me restate that, for the articles in question rarely make this assumption clear and explicit. It is often assumed in our society that a whole host of seemingly unrelated problems are explained by economic inequality. This may be true, although it seems outright false to me, and more importantly, the stories that typically push this narrative assume it without arguing for it. The problem is that this premise remains assumed in most modern political discourse, and so it is rarely ever discussed. The idea that crime, sexism, violence and other social ills follow from economic inequality is explicitly based on the ideas of Karl Marx, who thought that all of history moved in a linear way towards economic equality and that the prime mechanism of this movement was struggle between the different social classes. In turn, these ideas themselves are based on the conception of the human being as a primarily economic being.

What is almost always at issue in these sorts of political debates is not some mundane fact of how to allocate resources, but the much deeper problem of what constitutes a good life and what the philosophical criteria are for one deserving resources from the state. One of the problems is that in the political marketplace we typically only find three models of a good life presented to us. The first, and I would say increasingly popular model, of a good life is the one I just touched upon, that of economic equality. Marxists and progressive liberals tend to endorse this model, seeing many human problems arising from the economic sector. If this is true, then it would make sense that the goal of the state and of the majority of our domestic political action to be geared towards fixing the fundamental economic problem. A second model of the good life is based upon personal freedom. This model tends to be endorsed by both classical liberals and libertarians. This model sees happiness and flourishing as an essentially private affair, recognizing that people have different goals and standards, and that the best way to allow one to flourish is to get out of their way. By giving people the freedom to pursue what they desire, and by giving them the option to fail with no safety-net, the personal freedom model puts the burden solely in the individual to make the most of their life, whatever that may practically entail. As political pundits used to be fond of saying, libertarians support freedom of opportunity, while proponents of the first model support freedom of outcome. The third major model we encounter is based upon the primacy of morality, and is typically supported by Southern Republicans and activist Protestants. This model, it should be noted is rather skewed in contemporary culture. It is skewed for two reasons, 1) many political forces use the cover of the “moral majority” while actually pursuing ends totally foreign to it, and 2) the morals in question are interpreted in very particular sort of way, namely in the light of fundamentalist protestant Christianity. Be that as it may, this third model is prevalent, and very old. According to this model, what is most important in determining the fate of a society is virtue and vice. If a community has good people, morally speaking, it won't stand for crime and violence, nor will it let its members starve on the streets. Thus, a government should promote morality as its highest aim. As a quick aside, in recent years, a fourth model has come on to the scene. This model cares about community solidarity, tradition, and often race above all else. This model is endorsed by nationalists and the alt-right, but also by minority separatist groups and a host of other “pride” organizations. This model sees either genetics, a defining trait, or shared history as the basis of community, and the community as the basis of the meaningful lives of the members of the community. This model often tends towards an unwittingly cultural relativist attitude that says it does not matter so much what your community thinks, it is only important that that decision comes from the correct members and is rooted in history and tradition.

Until the enlightenment, the moral model was the de facto choice. But in modern times, this model has been so skewed and narrowed, that if you aren’t a Southern Baptist, it feels like you are signing up for a whole lot more than you meant to when you vote Republican. It would be interesting to see how the great philosophers of the past would vote today (that is, if you put aside the fact that most of them abhorred democracy). While many of them might give hesitant support to the moral majority Republican (seeing virtue as more important than economics or personal freedom), I think many of them (certainly Socrates!) would be appalled at how little people have thought about what makes a human life good. And that is precisely the problem. Without having an idea of what makes a society and a human life good, political debates become baffling because every person arguing says they want justice, but no one has defined what they mean by justice, and seemingly everyone wants something different.

God and Russell's Problem of General Truths

(i) Truthmaker Maximalism: All truths have truthmakers.
(ii) Divine Simplicity: God is absolutely simple.
(iii) God-only World: A world where only God exists is possible, but not necessary.

This isn't a genuine aporia, but it's interesting to think about anyway. (i) is the premise that every truth has a truthmaker, and some of us who find truthmaker theory attractive find it attractive too, (ii) has good arguments supporting it, and (iii) is an entailment of most Abrahamic religions.

If (i) and (ii) hold, by most truthmaker principles (iii) doesn't hold; if (i) and (iii) hold, God must sometimes differ between worlds and (ii) doesn't hold; if (ii) and (iii) hold, it can be true that only God exists without a corresponding truthmaker in the God-only world and (i) doesn't hold.

Truthmaker Necessitarianism?

Is there a way out by rejecting the underlying principle that truthmakers necessitate their truths? Here is an argument from Armstrong (by reductio) that we shouldn't do this:

Suppose that a suggested truthmaker T for a certain truth p fails to necessitate that truth. There will then be at least the possibility that T should exist and yet the proposition p not be true. This strongly suggests that there ought to be some further condition that must be satisfied in order for p to be true. This condition must either be the existence of a further entity, U, or a further truth, q. In the first of these cases, T + U would appear to be the true and necessitating truthmaker for p. (If U does not necessitate, then the same question raised about T can be raised again about U.) In the second case, q either has a truthmaker, V, or it does not. Given that q has a truthmaker, then the T + U case is reproduced. Suppose q lacks a truthmaker, then there are truths without truthmakers. The truth q will 'hang' ontologically in the same sort of way that Ryle left dispositional truths hanging (Ryle, 1949). (Truth and Truthmakers, pp. 6–7)

Most correspondence and truthmaker theories are going to demand a principle at least as strong as truthmaker necessitarianism.

Negative entities? 

What about negative "entities", like absences and limits? Then we have our truthmakers and can safely claim that God is the only existent in the God-only world, but I doubt this is in the spirit of what most Abrahamic religions want to affirm by (iii).

Theists' best bet is to reject (i)—truthmaker maximalism. But is it really okay for those who find truthmaker theory convincing to just give up on it as soon as the going gets tough?

Ontological Literacy

We can easily imagine traveling to a country where every time we talk to someone about quarks, or chemical bonds, or evolution, or what have you, they look at us like we have two heads or think we're stupid.

I put to you that this is the actual situation with ontology in most of the world right now. Most people are scientifically literate, but ontologically illiterate.

Fadograph of a Yestern Scene

Fadograph of a Yestern Scene was written by a friend who died in February 2016. It's rough and unfinished, but good anyway.

This Fleeting, Slippery Thing

Do that, dear Lucilius: assert your own freedom. Gather and guard the time that until now was being taken from you, or was stolen from you, or that slipped away. Convince yourself that what I write is true: some moments are snatched from us, some are filched, and some just vanish. But no loss is as shameful as the one that comes about through carelessness. Take a close look, and you will see that when we are not doing well, most of life slips away from us; when we are inactive, much of it—but when we inattentive, we miss it all. Can you show me even one person who sets a price on his time, who knows the worth of a day, who realizes that every day is a day when he is dying? In fact, we are wrong to think that death lies ahead: much of it has passed us by already, for all our past life is in the grip of death.

And so, dear Lucilius, do what your letter says you are doing: embrace every hour. If you lay hands on today, you will find you are less dependent on tomorrow. While you delay, life speeds by. Everything we have belongs to others, Lucilius; time alone is ours. Nature has put us in possession of this one thing, this fleeting, slippery thing—and anyone who wants to can dispossess us. Such is the foolishness of mortal beings: when they borrow the smallest, cheapest items, such as can easily be replaced, they acknowledge the debt, but no one considers himself indebted for taking up our time. Yet this is the one loan that even those who are grateful cannot repay.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters on Ethics.

Five Proofs Amazon Review

Here follows a review of Five Proofs which I recently posted to Amazon.com. It was written with a more general audience in mind but still represents a fair summary of my thoughts regarding the book's vices and virtues. Although I shall discuss many of the issues raised within (Thomism is all pervasive) my ongoing critique of the book will conclude with the third installment, an analysis of his presentation of the argument from eternal truths ('the Augustinian Proof').

Edward Feser presents a crisp and highly readable summary of several arguments for God’s existence. The author’s goal is to present in-depth but accessible summaries of several arguments for God’s existence, followed by an account of the divine attributes and a general defence of natural theology. At the former task he excels and at the latter he fails badly.  Those who are familiar with basic philosophy of religion material or have read Feser’s other works should skip the closing section.

The five arguments are presented in step by step form accompanied by a discussion and an overview of various objections. Only a basic philosophical vocabulary is required, as Feser explains most of the technical concepts he appeals to in the course of the discussion (the capacity to introduce arguments whilst at the same time familiarising readers with the wider philosophical apparatus behind them is one of Feser’s great strengths and has been evident since his first published book). Both casual and technical readers will benefit greatly from the detailed schematic presentations of each argument.

 

A full discussion of the arguments themselves would require more space than this review will allow. (Check out our website for detailed essays on some of them). Arguments One, Four and Five are broadly classifiable as cosmological arguments (arguably the first two depend on, though are not necessarily reducible to, the third). The Rationalist proof, the cosmological argument from the principle of sufficient reason, is probably the most powerful argument for the existence of God and raises a whole host of questions about rationality, explanation and freedom. Feser brings home the devastating cost of rejecting the argument’s core premise, the principle of sufficient reason itself, and deftly disarms a number of criticisms aimed at it, but spends little to no time on the concomitant issues of determinism and free will. The others, the Aristotelian and Thomistic proofs, are variants on Thomas Aquinas' First and Second Ways respectively. The discussion here makes a nice but not necessary supplement to Feser’s presentation of them in his Oneworld introduction to Aquinas and in his lectures e.g. An Aristotelian Proof of God’s Existence (available from his website).

The other two arguments are the book’s main selling point, so much so that it will become the main point of reference for those interested in such topics. The Augustinian proof, the claim that eternal truths and Platonic ideas require an eternal divine mind to contemplate them, is an argument often gestured to but very rarely worked out in any great depth. Feser’s discussion of it is clear and rewarding, though spends perhaps slightly too much time looking at arguments for universals in general instead of the specific accounts the argument requires. The objections he discusses are specific variants of more general problems raised by Brian Leftow and Patrick Grimm. The Neo-Platonic proof is an ingenious attempt to reason from facts about mereological and ontological composition to the existence of a completely simple being. Although such arguments were prominent in late pagan and classic Islamic theology, they are virtually unknown in modern debates.

Unfortunately, the overall discussion of the arguments is vitiated by Feser’s methodological approach to ontology. The way the book is structured means that each proof leans heavily on highly specific metaphysical premises set out in the section on the Aristotelian proof and thus are not really separate proofs in themselves. This is most noticeable in discussion of how each argument leads to a being having all the attributes we normally associate with God. This is a shame as Feser freely claims that the other four arguments have been formulated and championed by philosophers who do not share his Thomistic background. He also has an unfortunate and probably unintentional tendency for bait and switch manoeuvres such as presenting a common-sense argument for a certain conclusion (for instance the existence of irreducible dispositional properties) then conflating it with a very specific account (going with our earlier example the Thomistic Aristotelian account of pure actuality and prime matter). All in all it would be better if he did not rely so heavily on this account or at least devoted more time to deriving attributes from the reasoning central to the argument in question itself. 

Finally the last two sections are of uneven quality compared with the rest of the book. The first, an account of the Divine Attributes, is a mixed bag. There are some gems here, for instance his coverage of the privation account of evil and of the problem of the best possible world, the latter of which one of the best scholastic discussions of the subject (Feser should devote his talents to writing a full length work on such subjects).  On the other hand long term readers of Feser will be familiar with much of the material either from previous published works or copious blog entries.  Finally the section on the analogical theory of divine predication and its importance makes priority claims which, if true, has truly devastating consequences for natural theology. I make no judgements on that theory itself (modern Analytical philosophy has after all come round to the idea that one can truly predicate something of two different entities without allocating them a common property) but if the very prospect of theistic metaphysics or religious language depends on a vague and highly controversial theory of language then theism’s epistemic credibility takes a severe blow. Ironically Thomas threatens to plunge us back into bad old days of Logical Positivism and Plain Language. 

The closing section ‘Common Objections to Natural Theology’ is totally redundant. The positions refuted therein are either outdated or so bad as to be living strawmen. No minimally informed intellectually honest atheist, let alone an atheist philosopher of religion, would bother with them (at least in those forms). One wonders why Feser bothered discussing them in the first place. Had he taken on serious objections put forward by atheist philosophers he admires e.g. Graham Oppy or Richard Gale, then the section would have been of real value. As it stands response to serious atheist criticism is found only in discussion of potential objections to each purported proof and noticeably not here.

To conclude: although it presents accessible and well-worked out accounts of neglected arguments for theism, one is left with the impression that Five Proofs could have been a much better book had Feser taken more time to produce detailed original material.