ISSUE 99 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013 UK £3.50 US & CANADA $7.99 Philosophy Now a magazine of ideas

William Lane Craig Simon Blackburn Timothy Chappell THE Daphne Hampson Van Harvey on and disbelief GOD ISSUE

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The king of all paradoxes is the Liar (‘This statement is false.’ If it is true, it is false; if it is false, it is true), which in its earliest form is over two and a half thousand years old. Throughout all this time it has resisted every attempt to fully understand it. This work finally unlocks the secrets of the Liar, exposing principles, patterns and formulae that have long lain hidden. Several other important paradoxes also come under the logical searchlight and they too surrender their treasures.

Though paradoxes are inherently difficult, this book approaches them in a clear and entertaining manner, using plain English. Secrets of the Paradox is written for the general reader, yet is sufficiently rigorous to satisfy the demands of the professional philosopher. Choose from: Introduction to Philosophy, Philosophy of If you relish an intellectual challenge, this book is for you! Mind, Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Ethics, Metaphysics. Visit the Pathways web site for further details or (PB) 9781783060269 £9.99 (ebook) 9781783069286 £6.99 email Dr Geoffrey Klempner, Director of Studies, at Published August 2013 pp 220 www.troubador.co.uk [email protected] Philosophy Now ISSUE 99 Nov/Dec 2013

Philosophy Now, EDITORIAL & NEWS 43a Jerningham Road, 4 Telegraph Hill, Gadzooks! Rick Lewis London SE14 5NQ 5 News in Brief United Kingdom Tel. 020 7639 7314 20 Interview: Simon Blackburn [email protected] http://philosophynow.org Rick Lewis asks Simon Blackburn why he is an atheist PROBLEMS OF BELIEF & UNBELIEF Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis Editors Anja Steinbauer, Grant Bartley 6 Does God Exist? Digital Editor Bora Dogan presents eight reasons to believe Graphic Design Grant Bartley, Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer 10 Huxley’s Agnosticism Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg Book Reviews Charles Echelbarger, Van Harvey presents T.H. Huxley’s reason not to believe Heidi Pintschovius 13 , History & Experience Marketing Manager Sue Roberts Administration Ewa Stacey Timothy Chappell argues that experience fully justifies belief Advertising Team 17 Moral Manipulation & The Jay Sanders, Ellen Stevens [email protected] Jimmy Alfonso Licon that free will can’t explain evil UK Editorial Board GOD OR NOT? Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer, OTHER ARTICLES Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley pages 6-21 and pages 46-49 22 Does Psychiatry Medicalize Normality? US Editorial Board

Dr Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher 2006 Ronald Pies examines recent claims that psychiatry labels some College), Prof. Charles Echelbarger normal human states-of-mind as diseased or pathological

(SUNY), Prof. Raymond Pfeiffer (Delta ICTURES College), Prof. Jonathan Adler (CUNY) P 26 Thoughts on Oughts

Contributing Editors OGUE Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) /R Stephen Anderson asks if it’s possible to derive ‘duty’ from facts UK Editorial Advisors 30 Piers Benn, Chris Bloor, Gordon Giles, Has Philosophy Lost Its Way? RODUCTIONS Paul Gregory, John Heawood P John Lachs wants to see it back on the path of righteousness ARI

US Editorial Advisors Y

Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni OB 32 What Did Mary Know? Vogel Carey, Prof. Rosalind Ekman © B Marina Gerner on consciousness and knowledge

Ladd, Prof. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, PIC Prof. Harvey Siegel 36 Brief Lives: Søren Kierkegaard ARTY Cover Painting The Ancient of Days P Daphne Hampson on the godfather of existentialism by William Blake LOCK B REVIEWS Printed by Graspo CZ, a.s., REVOLUTIONARY Pod Sternberkem 324, 76302 Zlin, 44 Film: Dave Chappelle’s Block Party Czech Republic Dharmender Dhillon on Marcuse & hip hop UK newstrade distribution through: 46 Book: The Bible Comag Specialist Division, DavePARTY Chappelle’s Block Party Tavistock Works, Tavistock Rd, p.44 by Various, reviewed by Les Reid West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7QX 48 Books: The Big Questions: God Tel. 01895 433800 and: God: All That Matters U.S. & Canadian bookstores through: 2013 Disticor Magazine Distribution Services both by Mark Vernon, both reviewed by Ian Robinson 695 Westney Road S., Unit 14,

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K 40 Letters to the Editor The opinions expressed in this magazine 52 Tallis in Wonderland: Seeing & Believing do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or editorial board of Raymond Tallis uses philosophy to do both, simultaneously Philosophy Now. POETRY & FICTION NTERPRETATION OF Philosophy Now is published by I 31 Be Not Afeared Anja Publications Ltd ISSN 0961-5970 KIERKEGAARD Rebecca Chapman poetically exhorts us all to think Revolutionary Dane 54 The Skeptibot Back Issues p.50 Subscriptions p.51 page 36 Kevin Heinrich pushes technology over the edge of reason

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 3 Editorial Gadzooks!

s I type these words, the Festive Season is looming up the motion of the planets in their orbits) are rarely mentioned fast in my wing mirrors like some fairy-light bedecked by theologians any more, it being widely accepted that science Atruck on a desert highway. Christmas is coming and this now explains them adequately enough. Therefore sceptics tend issue is about problems of theism. Theism is the belief in a to assume that the remaining gaps in scientific knowledge will benevolent, omnipresent figure who distributes blessings gradually be filled in too, leaving the ‘God of the Gaps’ with around the world. No, not Santa Claus – God. People often less and less to explain until He disappears altogether. Prof. complain that the true meaning of Christmas has been Craig, though, chooses aspects of nature so fundamental that forgotten, but even for Christians there is some controversy he believes them to be beyond the reach of any future science. over what that meaning is: Oliver Cromwell, for instance, Prof. Timothy Chappell takes a completely different tack banned Christmas altogether. Stephen Anderson in his article to defend religious belief, relying less on formal arguments on p.26 takes a seasonal look at the idea of charity at Christmas. and more on what he calls the religious experience of the My lack of religious belief was one of the reasons I became individual believer. He says that it is rational for believers to interested in philosophy in the first place, but that doesn’t discount even apparently persuasive arguments against God’s stop me from being fascinated by the whole question of God’s existence, because they are sure of His existence anyway from existence and nature. If there is a God, then that is one of the their daily experience of Him. A third approach to religious most important things for us to know. And if God doesn’t belief is discussed by the eminent theologian Prof. Daphne exist, or if the whole matter is literally impossible for us to Hampson in her ‘brief life’ article about the Danish existen- know one way or the other, well, that’s pretty important too. tialist Søren Kierkegaard, who advocated a ‘leap of ’. Either way, your view of this is bound to affect the way you After these three approaches to belief, you are probably look at so many other things too. I’m delighted to report that wondering where all the unbelievers are. Well, the , we have mustered a very distinguished crew of contributors to atheists and agnostics are ably represented by Prof. Van share their thoughts about this, including theists, agnostics Harvey who writes on two different kinds of agnosticism; by and atheists. They include several of the leading philosophers Jimmy Licon who writes on the Problem of Evil (If God writing on philosophy of religion today. really is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why The current French nickname for the English (the does he allow so much evil in the world?); in our Book printable one, anyway) is les rosbifs, after the national dish of Reviews section, Les Reid gives the Bible a right bashing, and the folks north of the Channel, but back in the Middle Ages, Ian Robinson reviews two books by the philosopher, agnostic they used to refer to the English as les goddams. This reflected and ex-vicar Dr Mark Vernon. And then we interview one of the notorious English fondness for blasphemy. Regrettably, the best-known and most eloquent of humanist philosophers, “God Damn!” wasn’t the only way in which foulmouthed Prof. Simon Blackburn, about his life without belief in God. English knights used the Lord’s name to let off steam. They In this issue we bid a fond goodbye to our Ethical Episodes also sometimes shouted “God’s Teeth!” or “God’s Truth!”, or columnist and friend Joel Marks after a remarkable 14 years. yelled “Zounds!” (= “God’s Hounds” or possibly “God’s Joel first wrote for this magazine in 1999, and has never Wounds”) or sometimes “Gadzooks!” (= “God’s Hooks”, missed an issue since. For most of that time his column was which either meant “God’s hands” or else was a reference to called Moral (and Other) Moments and he wrote as an enthu- the nails used to fix Jesus to the cross). siastic advocate of ’s famous categorical imper- This issue of Philosophy Now is about God’s hooks, meaning ative, exploring that moral stance in relation to all sorts of not hands or nails but the ways in which arguments about real-life problems and dilemmas. Then about three years back God can snare the imagination, can sometimes even change he performed a stunning turn, declaring that he was no longer the direction of a person’s whole life. convinced that a morality had an objective metaphysical basis Professor William Lane Craig, the celebrated Christian or was even necessary for living. So instead he became an apologist, gives us a whole selection of such hooks in his article ‘amoralist’ – but one still very interested in human behaviour on page 6. His eight arguments cover a whole range of and our inescapable need to find ways of all getting along approaches, including – bravely – taking various aspects of the together. We’re sad to see the end of Joel’s column, but natural world as evidence for God’s existence. Many things pleased to report that he’ll still be making occasional guest previously taken as such evidence (such as the existence of appearances in these pages, including an article in our 100th different species of animals, the design of the human thumb or issue, which will be along in just a couple of months.

4 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 • Arthur Danto • Gunfight at the IK Corral • 3 million Welsh become organ donors • Pope says atheists may not be damned News reports by Sue Roberts. News Arthur Danto Dead unless they actively choose to opt-out. Kantian Shoot-out The philosopher, aesthetician and art Carwyn Jones, First Minister of the Remember to be especially careful what critic Arthur Danto has died in New York National Assembly for Wales, described you say to Kantians, because they can be aged 89. He taught philosophy at Columbia the Human Transplantation (Wales) Act touchy. In September, the Russian news University for over 40 years. After Andy 2013 as “arguably the most significant agency RIA reported that a heated discus- Warhol created Pop Art with his ‘sculp- piece of legislation passed by the sion of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant tures’ of Brillo Boxes, looking just like Assembly since it acquired full lawmaking between two men queuing for beer in a boxes in the supermarket, Danto was powers in 2011.” This will make Wales grocery store in initially perplexed: How could this be art? the first UK nation to introduce such a Rostov-on-Don In response, he created an influential theory system rather than relying on the volun- degenerated about the nature of art. According to tary, donor card-carrying scheme that into a brawl. At Danto, something is art if it occupies a exists at present. The law is motivated by this point one of place in an artworld. An artworld is a kind the desire to save lives: according to the the men pulled a of artistic conversation, extended over time. NHS, three people die every day in the pistol and shot Within an artworld even an ordinary box of UK due to a lack of organs for transplant his interlocutor Brillo Pads can be art if it is put into a and around 7,000 people are on the with a rubber gallery at the right time. Danto claimed waiting list. The equivalent figures for the bullet, resulting that the history of art is coming to a close as United States are 18 per day and 120,713 in hospital treat- art collapses into philosophy. Danto also respectively. ment. Fortu- wrote books summarizing the works of nately, the Pope Says Atheists injuries were not Not Necessarily Damned life-threatening. It was not reported which Pope Francis has continued to move of Kant’s ideas were so inflammatory. away from the ultra conservative image of the Catholic Church reinforced by his Are We Still Evolving? predecessor Benedict XVI. In response to Broadcaster and naturalist David Atten- a list of questions posed in La Repubblica borough claimed that human beings have newspaper by the founder Eugenio Scal- stopped evolving physically since we have fari, Pope Francis wrote, in an open letter developed the means to keep even the “You ask me if the God of the Christians weakest of our species alive. This means, he forgives those who don’t believe and who says in a Radio Times interview, that we are don’t seek the faith. I start by saying – and no longer subject to Darwin’s theory of this is the fundamental thing – that God’s evolution; the only species to bring natural Continental philosophers in terms that mercy has no limits if you go to him with selection to a halt. He suggests that our made them more accessible to philosophers a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for evolutionary process is now a cultural one. in the Anglo-American tradition. With this those who do not believe in God is to This view is contested by other scientists in mind, ’s Philosophical obey their conscience.” such as Ian Rickard, an anthropologist at Lexicon defined an arthurdantist as “One Mr Scalfari, not a Roman Catholic, said Durham University. According to Rickard who straightens the teeth of exotic dogmas. the Pope’s comments were “further and his colleagues natural selection doesn’t ‘Little Friedrich used to say the most evidence of his ability and desire to over- necessarily depend on survival but rather on wonderful things before we took him to the come barriers and have a more meaningful who is reproducing and how many offspring arthurdantist!’ - Frau Nietzsche.” At the dialogue with the world.” The Italian they have. This doesn’t mean, they believe, age of 60, Danto took a post as art critic for Union of Atheists and Agnostics failed to that the strongest, or fastest or smartest will The Nation magazine, a job which he then be impressed, responding “Why should a necessarily be the ones to drive the evolu- continued for 25 years. non-believer seek legitimisation from the tion of a species. Further, they propose, “as Pope?” In a demonstration of the humbler long as our environment is changing – Just Don’t Doze Off style of this Pope, he has declined the use either by us expanding into new places or From December 2015 the entire popu- of the Popemobile within the Vatican the climate changing (by natural or unnat- lation of Wales will be presumed to have preferring to take to a used Renault given ural means) – this will push us to adapt, thus agreed to donate their organs after death, to him by one of the priests. bringing natural selection into play again.”

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 5 Does God Exist? William Lane Craig says there are good reasons for thinking that He does.

n April 8, 1966, Time magazine carried a lead story for ophy. It tends to reflect the scientism of a bygone generation, which the cover was completely black except for three rather than the contemporary intellectual scene. Owords emblazoned in bright, red letters against the dark background: “IS GOD DEAD?” The story described the so- Eight Reasons in Support of God’s Existence called ‘Death of God’ movement then current in American the- I believe that God’s existence best explains a wide range of ology. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, it seemed that the news the data of human experience. Let me briefly mention eight of God’s demise was “greatly exaggerated.” For at the same time such cases. that theologians were writing God’s obituary, a new generation of young philosophers was re-discovering His vitality. 1. God is the best explanation why anything at all exists. Back in the 1940s and ’50s it was widely believed among Suppose you were hiking through the forest and came upon philosophers that any talk about God is meaningless, since it is a ball lying on the ground. You would naturally wonder how it not verifiable by the five senses. The collapse of this Verifica- came to be there. If your hiking buddy said to you, “Forget tionism was perhaps the most important philosophical event of about it! It just exists!” you would think he was either joking or the twentieth century. Its downfall meant a resurgence of just wanted you to keep moving. No one would take seriously metaphysics, along with other traditional problems of philoso- the idea that the ball just exists without any explanation. Now phy which Verificationism had suppressed. Accompanying this notice than merely increasing the size of the ball until it resurgence came something altogether unanticipated: a renais- becomes coextensive with the universe does nothing to either sance of Christian philosophy. provide, or remove the need for, an explanation of its existence. The turning point probably came in 1967 with the publica- So what is the explanation of the existence of the universe tion of ’s God and Other Minds, which applied the (by ‘the universe’ I mean all of spacetime reality)? The explana- tools of analytic philosophy to questions in the philosophy of tion of the universe can lie only in a transcendent reality religion with an unprecedented rigor and creativity. In Planti- beyond it – beyond space and time – the existence of which nga’s train has followed a host of Christian philosophers, writing transcendent reality is metaphysically necessary (otherwise its in professional journals and participating in professional confer- existence would also need explaining). Now there is only one ences and publishing with the finest academic presses. The face way I can think of to get a contingent entity like the universe of Anglo-American philosophy has been transformed as a result. from a necessarily existing cause, and that is if the cause is an , although perhaps still the dominant viewpoint in agent who can freely choose to create the contingent reality. It Western universities, is a philosophy in retreat. In a recent arti- therefore follows that the best explanation of the existence of cle, University of Western Michigan philosopher Quentin the contingent universe is a transcendent personal being – Smith laments what he calls “the desecularization of academia which is what everybody means by ‘God’. that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s.” We can summarize this reasoning as follows: (‘The Metaphilosophy of ’, Philo, Vol 4, #2, at 1. Every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence. philoonline.org). Complaining of naturalists’ passivity in the face 2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that expla- of the wave of “intelligent and talented theists entering acade- nation is a transcendent, personal being. mia today,” Smith concludes, “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he 3. The universe is a contingent thing. returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his 4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence. last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.” 5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe is a transcendent, The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompa- personal being. nied by a resurgence of interest in natural – that – which is what everybody means by ‘God’. branch of theology which seeks to prove God’s existence with- out appeal to the resources of authoritative divine revelation – 2. God is the best explanation of the origin of the universe. for instance, through philosophical argument. All of the tradi- We have pretty strong evidence that the universe has not tional philosophical arguments for God’s existence, such as the existed eternally into the past, but had a beginning a finite time cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments, ago. In 2003, the mathematician Arvind Borde, and physicists not to mention creative, new arguments, find intelligent and Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any articulate defenders on the contemporary philosophical scene. universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its But what about the so-called ‘New Atheism’ exemplified by history cannot be infinite in the past, but must have a past Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens? spacetime boundary (i.e., a beginning). What makes their proof Doesn’t it herald a reversal of this trend? Not really. As is evi- so powerful is that it holds so long as time and causality hold, dent from the authors it interacts with – or rather, doesn’t inter- regardless of the physical description of the very early universe. act with – the New Atheism is, in fact, a pop-cultural phenom- Because we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, we enon lacking in intellectual muscle and blissfully ignorant of can’t yet provide a physical description of the first split-second the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philos- of the universe; but the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is inde-

6 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 pendent of one’s theory of gravitation. For instance, their theo- objects are just useful fictions, how is it that nature is written rem implies that the quantum vacuum state which may have in the language of these fictions? The naturalist has no expla- characterized the early universe cannot have existed eternally nation for the uncanny applicability of mathematics to the into the past, but must itself have had a beginning. Even if our physical world. By contrast, the theist has a ready explanation: universe is just a tiny part of a so-called ‘multiverse’, composed When God created the physical universe He designed it in of many universes, their theorem requires that the multiverse terms of the mathematical structure which He had in mind. itself must have had a beginning. We can summarize this argument as follows: Of course, highly speculative physical scenarios, such as 1. If God did not exist, the applicability of mathematics would loop quantum gravity models, string models, even closed time- be just a happy coincidence. like curves, have been proposed to try to avoid this absolute 2. The applicability of mathematics is not just a happy coinci- beginning. These models are fraught with problems, but the dence. bottom line is that none of these theories, even if true, succeeds 3. Therefore, God exists. in restoring an eternal past for the universe. Last year, at a conference in Cambridge celebrating the seventieth birthday 4. God is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe for of Stephen Hawking, Vilenkin delivered a paper entitled ‘Did intelligent life. the Universe Have a Beginning?’, which surveyed current cos- In recent decades scientists have been stunned by the discov- mology with respect to that question. He argued that “none of ery that the initial conditions of the Big Bang were fine-tuned these scenarios can actually be past-eternal.” Specifically, for the existence of intelligent life with a precision and delicacy Vilenkin closed the door on three models attempting to avert that literally defy human comprehension. This fine-tuning is of the implication of his theorem: eternal inflation, a cyclic uni- two sorts. First, when the laws of nature are expressed as equa- verse, and an ‘emergent’ universe which exists for eternity as a tions, you find appearing in them certain constants, such as the static seed before expanding. Vilenkin concluded, “All the evi- gravitational constant. The values of these constants are inde- dence we have says that the universe had a beginning.” pendent of the laws of nature. Second, in addition to these con- But then the inevitable question arises: Why did the universe stants, there are certain arbitrary quantities which define the ini- come into being? What brought the universe into existence? tial conditions on which the laws of nature operate – for exam- There must have been a transcendent cause which brought the ple, the amount of entropy (disorder) in the universe. Now these universe into being – a cause outside the universe itself. constants and quantities fall into an extraordinarily narrow range We can summarize this argument thus far as follows: of life-permitting values. Were these constants or quantities to 1. The universe began to exist. be altered by less than a hair’s breadth, the life-permitting bal- 2. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a tran- ance of nature would be destroyed, and life would not exist. scendent cause. There are three live explanatory options for this extraordi- 3. Therefore, the universe has a transcendent cause. nary fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design. Physical necessity is not, however, a plausible explanation, By the very nature of the case, that cause of the physical uni- because the finely-tuned constants and quantities are indepen- verse must be an immaterial (i.e., non-physical) being. Now dent of the laws of nature. Therefore, they are not physically there are only two types of things that could possibly fit that necessary. description: either an abstract object like a number, or an unem- bodied mind/consciousness. But abstract objects don’t stand in causal relations to physical things. The number 7, for example, Looking for has no effect on anything. Therefore the cause of the universe is intelligent life an unembodied mind. Thus again we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its Personal Creator.

3. God is the best explanation of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world. Philosophers and scientists have puzzled over what physicist Eugene Wigner called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.” How is it that a mathematical theorist like Peter Higgs can sit down at his desk and, by pouring over mathe- matical equations, predict the existence of a fundamental parti- cle which, thirty years later, after investing millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours, experimentalists are finally able to detect? Mathematics is the language of nature. But how is this to be explained? If mathematical objects like numbers and mathematical theorems are abstract entities causally isolated from the physical universe, then the applicability of mathemat- ics is, in the words of philosopher of mathematics Mary Leng, “a happy coincidence.” On the other hand, if mathematical

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 7 So could this fine-tuning be due to chance? The problem 6. God is the best explanation of objective moral values and duties. with this explanation is that the odds of all the constants and In our experience we apprehend moral values and duties quantities’ randomly falling into the incomprehensibly narrow which impose themselves as objectively binding and true. For life-permitting range are just so infinitesimal that they cannot example, we recognize that it’s wrong to walk into an elemen- be reasonably accepted. Therefore the proponents of the tary school with an automatic weapon and shoot little boys and chance explanation have been forced to postulate the existence girls and their teachers. On a naturalistic view, however, there of a ‘World Ensemble’ of other universes, preferably infinite in is nothing really wrong with this: moral values are just the sub- number and randomly ordered, so that life-permitting uni- jective by-products of biological evolution and social condition- verses like ours would appear by chance somewhere in the ing, and have no objective validity. Ensemble. Not only is this hypothesis, to borrow Richard Alex Rosenberg is brutally honest about the implications of Dawkins’ phrase, “an unparsimonious extravagance,” it faces his atheism here too. He declares, “there is no such thing as… an insuperable objection. By far, the most probable observable morally right or wrong.” (The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, p.145); universes in a World Ensemble would be worlds in which a “Individual human life is meaningless… and without ultimate single brain fluctuated into existence out of the vacuum and moral value.” (p.17); “We need to face the fact that nihilism is observed its otherwise empty world. So, if our world were just true.” (p.95). By contrast, the theist grounds objective moral a random member of the World Ensemble, by all probability values in God, and our moral duties in His commands. The we ought to be having observations like that. Since we don’t, theist thus has the explanatory resources to ground objective that strongly disconfirms the World Ensemble hypothesis. So moral values and duties which the atheist lacks. chance is also not a good explanation. Thus, Hence we may argue: 1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical 1. Objective moral values and duties exist. necessity, chance, or design. 2. But if God did not exist, objective moral values and duties 2. The fine-tuning of the universe is not due to physical would not exist. necessity or chance. 3. Therefore, God exists. 3. Therefore, the fine-tuning of the universe is due to design. Thus, the fine-tuning of the universe constitutes evidence 7. The very possibility of God’s existence implies that God exists. for a cosmic Designer. In order to understand this argument, you need to under- stand what philosophers mean by ‘possible worlds’. A possible 5. God is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness. world is just a way the world might have been. It is a descrip- Philosophers are puzzled by states of intentionality. Intention- tion of a possible reality. So a possible world is not a planet or ality is the property of being about something or of something. It a universe or any kind of concrete object, it is a world-descrip- signifies the object-directedness of our thoughts. For example, I tion. The actual world is the description that is true. Other can think about my summer vacation, or I can think of my wife. possible worlds are descriptions that are not in fact true but No physical object has intentionality in this sense. A chair or a which might have been true. To say that something exists in stone or a glob of tissue like the brain is not about or of some- some possible world is to say that there is some consistent thing else. Only mental states or states of consciousness are description of reality which includes that entity. To say that about other things. In The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life something exists in every possible world means that no matter without Illusions (2011), the materialist Alex Rosenberg recog- which description is true, that entity will be included in the nizes this fact, and concludes that for atheists, there really are no description. For example, unicorns do not in fact exist, but intentional states. Rosenberg boldly claims that we never really there are some possible worlds in which unicorns exist. On the think about anything. But this seems incredible. Obviously, I am other hand, many mathematicians think that numbers exist in thinking about Rosenberg’s argument – and so are you! This every possible world. seems to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of his atheism. By con- Now with that in mind, consider the , trast, for theists, because God is a mind, it’s hardly surprising which was discovered in the year 1011 by the monk Anselm of that there should be other, finite minds, with intentional states. Canterbury. God, Anselm observes, is by definition the great- Thus intentional states fit comfortably into a theistic worldview. est being conceivable. If you could conceive of anything So we may argue: greater than God, then that would be God. Thus, God is the 1. If God did not exist, intentional states of consciousness greatest conceivable being – a maximally great being. So what would not exist. would such a being be like? He would be all-powerful, all- 2. But intentional states of consciousness do exist. knowing, and all-good, and He would exist in every logically 3. Therefore, God exists. possible world. A being which lacked any of those properties

8 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 would not be maximally great: we could conceive of something 8. God can be personally known and experienced. greater – a being which did have all these properties. This isn’t really an argument for God’s existence; rather it’s But this implies that if God’s existence is even possible, then the claim that you can know God exists wholly apart from God must exist. For if a maximally great being exists in any arguments, by personally experiencing him. Philosophers call possible world, He exists in all of them. That’s part of what it beliefs grasped in this way ‘properly basic beliefs’. They aren’t means to be maximally great – to be all-powerful, all-knowing, based on some other beliefs; rather they’re part of the founda- and all-good in every logically possible world. So if God’s exis- tion of a person’s system of beliefs. Other properly basic beliefs tence is even possible, then He exists in every logically possible would be the belief in the reality of the past or the existence of world – and therefore in the actual world. the external world. When you think about it, neither of these We can summarize this argument as follows: beliefs can be proved by argument. How could you prove that 1. It is possible that a maximally great being (God) exists. the world was not created five minutes ago with built-in 2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a appearances of age like food in our stomachs from the break- maximally great being exists in some possible world. fasts we never really ate and memory traces in our brains of 3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, events we never really experienced? How could you prove that then it exists in every possible world. you are not a brain in a vat of chemicals being stimulated with 4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, electrodes by some mad scientist to believe that you are read- then it exists in the actual world. ing this article? We don’t base such beliefs on argument; rather 5. Therefore, a maximally great being exists in the actual world. they’re part of the foundations of our system of beliefs. 6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists. But although these sorts of beliefs are basic for us, that 7. Therefore, God exists. doesn’t mean that they’re arbitrary. Rather they’re grounded in the sense that they’re formed in the context of certain expe- It might surprise you to learn that steps 2-7 of this argument riences. In the experiential context of seeing and feeling and are relatively uncontroversial. Most philosophers would agree hearing things, I naturally form the belief that there are certain that if God’s existence is even possible, then He must exist. physical objects which I am sensing. Thus, my basic beliefs are So the question is, is God’s existence possible? Well, what not arbitrary, but appropriately grounded in experience. do you think? The atheist has to maintain that it’s impossible There may be no way to prove such beliefs, and yet it’s per- that God exists. That is, he has to maintain that the concept of fectly rational to hold them. Such beliefs are thus not merely God is logically incoherent, like the concept of a married bache- basic, but properly basic. In the same way, belief in God is for lor or a round square. The problem is that the concept of God those who seek Him a properly basic belief grounded in their just doesn’t appear to be incoherent in that way. The idea of a experience of God. being who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good in every Now if this is so, then there’s a danger that philosophical possible world seems perfectly coherent. Moreover, as we’ve arguments for God could actually distract your attention from seen, there are other arguments for God’s existence which at God Himself. The Bible promises, “Draw near to God and he least suggest that it’s possible that God exists. So I’ll just leave will draw near to you.” (James 4:8) We mustn’t so concentrate it with you. Do you think, as I do, that it’s at least possible that on the external arguments that we fail to hear the inner voice God exists? If so, then it follows logically that He does exist. of God speaking to our hearts. For those who listen, God becomes a personal reality in their lives.

Summary In summary, we’ve seen eight respects in which God pro- vides a better account of the world than naturalism: God is the best explanation of 1. Why anything at all exists. 2. The origin of the universe. 3. The applicability of mathematics to the physical world. 4. The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. 5. Intentional states of consciousness. 6. Objective moral values and duties. Moreover 7. The very possibility of God’s existence implies that God exists. 8. God can be personally experienced and known.

© PROF. WILLIAM LANE CRAIG, 2013 William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology, California, and founded the organization Reasonable Faith (please visit reasonablefaith.org). His book, A Reasonable Response, is due out soon, answering questions unbelievers and believers often pose.

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 9 Huxley’s Agnosticism Van Harvey reflects on Huxley’s and Clifford’s reasons for not believing.

n the struggle against obscurantism and the appeal to blind larly Wittgenstein in his little book On Certainty (1969), we do faith that was rampant in Victorian culture, it would be dif- not acquire most of our beliefs about the world by being per- Ificult to find two greater champions of restraint on suaded out of skepticism about them, nor do we carefully weigh unfounded opinions and beliefs than W.K. Clifford (1845- the evidence for every belief proposed to us. Rather our culture 1879) and T.H. Huxley (1825-1895). Moreover, both of them teaches us to organize our experience in certain ways by teach- were able to formulate their complex views against credulity in ing us concepts, rules of use, names, and language. We acquire succinct moral imperatives, or what Clifford would call an what Wittgenstein called a ‘picture’ of the ‘ethics of belief’. For Clifford the imperative was: “It is wrong world; that is, a network of propositions always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on that are more or less mutually support- insufficient evidence.” For Huxley, “it is wrong for a man to say ing. Doubt only arises against this he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he background of taken-for-granted can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty” beliefs when something we encounter (all quotations are from Thomas Henry Huxley: Agnosticism and does not fit with our picture, or when Christianity and other Essays, Prometheus Books, 1992). we find ourselves confronted with Although both formulations are couched in the form of eth- evidence that clearly contradicts spe- ical imperatives, there are subtle but important differences cific beliefs we hold. Contrary to Clif- between them. Clifford’s is a universal and unqualified moral ford, we begin by believing and must claim – “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to have grounds for doubting. believe anything on insufficient evidence” – while Huxley’s is Moreover, among the set of proposi- William Kingdon more narrowly directed at anyone who claims to be certain of tions that we believe, some are more funda- Clifford the objective truth of any proposition but cannot produce evi- mental than others. They stand fast, so to speak. dence justifying that certainty. Both were defended in influen- Some of these are empirical and checkable, but others are so tial essays that reflected their authors’ convictions that civiliza- general that we would not know how to justify them (for tion is a product of intercommunication, and is only possible instance, the belief that there is an external world). Many of when the ‘clerisy’, to use Coleridge’s term for the literate these fundamental beliefs are literally groundless. We do not classes, accept responsibility for knowledge as a whole and the acquire them by testing or investigation, but simply by belong- rules of civilized discourse. They believed that irrational ing to a community bound together by science and education. beliefs had social consequences, and so it was a duty to weigh As Wittgenstein wrote: “My life consists in my being content the evidence for beliefs. English historian G.M. Young, in to accept many things.” To morally condemn those who simply reflecting on the implications of these imperatives for British inherit these beliefs, as Clifford does, seems peculiarly unjusti- education, wrote that the schools should teach that “a man has fied. We so take them for granted that if anyone were to ques- no more right to an opinion for which he cannot account than tion them, we would doubt they could believe anything that we to a pint of beer for which he cannot pay.” say. But all of them together constitute the background against Both arguments were in part directed against religions. which we distinguish what is true or false. Clifford roams over several of them, especially Islam. Huxley makes his case in relation to Christianity. But it is just Huxley’s Huxley’s Reasonable Skepticism several specific arguments against Christianity that throw into Huxley’s formulation of agnosticism, by contrast to Clif- relief the differences between his statement of agnosticism and ford’s, does not appeal to a universal moral imperative, but Clifford’s unqualified imperative. argues more modestly that it is wrong to claim certitude for the In this article I want to argue (a) that Huxley’s statement is objective truth of propositions that are not demonstrable. He more intellectually tenable than Clifford’s, and (b) that does not argue that one requires evidence or justification for Huxley’s rejection of Christianity is not because Christianity is every belief that one holds; he simply argues that it is wrong to based on blind faith, but because the clerics who criticize him claim certitude about propositions for which one cannot pro- violate his principle, in that they claim certainty for historical duce adequate evidence. And while Clifford claims it is morally propositions that are based on narratives that are both improb- wrong to believe on insufficient evidence, Huxley is less heavy able and superstitious. handed. He does claim that his principle is both ethical and intellectual, but interestingly enough, his invocation of the Clifford’s Hard Line Agnosticism terms ‘reprobation’ and ‘abomination’ is applied principally to Let me first take a brief look at why I think Clifford’s moral those clerics who themselves assert that it is morally wrong not imperative as he first states it is less tenable than Huxley’s. The to believe certain propositions (about God, Christ, etc). problem is that Clifford’s imperative is impossible to obey: as One might argue that Huxley’s more modest definition is Kant might have expressed it, there is no ‘can’ to justify the framed negatively because he was writing in response to an ‘ought’. As many recent philosophers have pointed out, particu- attack on him by Christian clerics, and that he would otherwise

10 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 have embraced Clifford’s universal imperative. I do not think Jesus Christ on which Christian beliefs about the supernatural that is the case, but the only way to demonstrate this is to look at rest. But this disbelief is not based on some arbitrary hostility Huxley’s essays and the mode of argumentation that he employs, or indifference to the Christian tradition; rather, it is that if and I shall attempt to do this below. But first it should be noted one applies the agnostic method to the claims of the New Tes- that Huxley tells us that as a not-formally-educated boy he had tament regarding the authority of Jesus and what he is alleged already internalized an attitude underlying what he was later to to have said, there are reasonable grounds for withholding call ‘agnosticism’. He had by chance fallen on an essay by Sir assent. The issue is not whether one respects or disrespects the William Hamilton (‘On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned’) authority; the issue is the value of that authority and the tex- that he read avidly and which had stamped upon his mind the tual testimony about it. The agnostic wishes to know, what has conviction that the most important questions driving the human Jesus said, and why does that make him the authority regarding mind were unanswerable – that the limitations of the human the supernatural? What Dr Wace does not seem to understand intellect were such that answers to such questions were “not is that this latter question is “strictly a scientific problem” that merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable.” It is “capable of solution by no other methods than those prac- was not until Huxley became a member of the Metaphysical ticed by the historian and the literary critic.” Moreover, arriv- Society and found colleagues who were advocates of theism, ing at a solution to this problem is immensely difficult, as can materialism, , idealism or some other ‘ism’ that he be seen by the many efforts of scholars in the last century. But coined the word ‘agnostic’ to suggest a position antithetical to difficult as it is, these scholars have begun to converge on some those who “professed to know so much about the very things of important issues, and this convergence is such as to cast doubt which I was ignorant.” He noted that philosophers had debated on the veracity of the New Testament authors. metaphysical issues without results since Antiquity, and so, like Kant and Hume, he had come to give more precision to the “I don’t believe it!” vague position he had intuited as a boy. Thomas Henry Huxley, coiner of the term Huxley’s Religious Agnosticism ‘agnostic’ Given his basic skepticism about the limits of the human intellect, one might have expected Huxley to have argued in his essays on agnosticism that Christian beliefs simply exceed what is theoretically knowable, or one might have thought that, like Clifford, he would have criticized the notion of believing his- torical claims about Jesus ‘on faith’. But in his essays ‘Agnosti- cism’ and ‘Agnosticism and Christianity’, he writes in a witty footnote that he no longer cared to speak of anything as Unknowable and regrets having made that mistake, and even having wasted a capital U. Rather, the two essays mount two major arguments: the first against the charge that agnostics are infidels; and the second, the positive assertion that the principle that informs agnosticism must lead its adherents to doubt the historical claims upon which Christianity rests. Huxley was particularly sensitive to the charge that agnos- tics were infidels – a charge that had been made in an address before a church congress by the Principal of King’s College, London, a Dr Wace. Wace had argued that agnostics hide behind the claim that they do not know about the supernatural in order to cover over their active disbelief in the authority of Jesus Christ and the “unpleasantness” that attaches to the term ‘’. Huxley argues that this is a misunderstanding of the Huxley’s Biblical Criticisms real issue: Dr Wace defines agnosticism in terms of the content For a layman with little formal education, Huxley demon- that is disbelieved, showing that he does not understand that strates a surprisingly informed knowledge not only of the New agnosticism is a method, not a creed. The method is to ask of a Testament but also of the Biblical criticism of his time. Not proposition that is proposed as true what evidence the proposi- only is he versed in the issues surrounding the so-called ‘Synop- tion is based on. For Huxley, the agnostic has “absolute faith in tic problem’, but he also seems familiar with the German critics the validity of a principle” that has proved successful again and David Friedrich Strauss and Bruno Bauer, as well as with the again; and that principle claims that it is wrong to claim cer- French scholar Ernest Renan, who Wace cites in favor of his tainty for the truth of a proposition unless one can provide evi- own view. Huxley notes that the four Gospels that are the dence that justifies it. sources for Jesus’s teaching and actions were written half a cen- Yet although Huxley’s believes that Dr Wace’s definition of tury after the events described; that scholars no longer claim to agnosticism is incorrect, he concedes that his critic is correct in know who wrote them; and moreover, that there are important charging that the agnostic does not believe the authority of differences among their narratives. Dr Wace had appealed to

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 11 the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Prayer as furnishing a of this the witnesses ought to be discredited. condensed view of the teachings of Jesus, but Huxley argues that there are strong reasons to doubt the historical accuracy of Huxley’s Spiritual Doubts both of these texts, and so the “conclusions about them are not In both ‘Agnosticism’ and ‘Agnosticism and Christianity’, a warranted”; at least “on the grounds set forth.” And when Dr central element driving Huxley’s arguments is the New Testa- Wace replies that Ernest Renan had surrendered his “adverse” ment story of Jesus driving out the evil spirits from a Gadarene case, Huxley challenges him for proof of such a surrender, and man and ordering the demons to inhabit a herd of swine that sets forward the conclusions to which Renan had finally come: then plunges into the Sea of Galilee. Huxley uses this story to he did not believe that Matthew the Apostle wrote the first make several points. The first of these is to say that belief in Gospel; he did not know who was responsible for the collection evil spirits and demonical possession is the remnant of a once- of ‘logia’, the supposed utterances of Jesus; he did not know universal superstition that has justified the persecution of how many of these logia were accurate; he noted that Mark’s thousands of men, woman, and children throughout history Gospel is shot through with credulity and had been retouched (for example, as witches). To attribute the same belief to Jesus by an unknown source; he claimed that Luke’s Gospel cannot casts grave doubt on his authority regarding knowledge of the be replied upon. spiritual world. Secondly, Huxley uses the story to drive more These criticisms, Huxley argues, provide reason enough liberal Christians, who tend to see the story as a myth, into a why the agnostic is unable to give assent to the authority Wace dilemma: Either one says that Jesus did believe in demons, in claims for Jesus Christ. But although all this is relevant for jus- which case Jesus is discredited as an authority about the unseen tifying the agnostic’s claim not to know whether the narratives world; or, if one edits out the story as just part of the first cen- of the New Testament are true, Huxley argues that the issues tury worldview of the authors, then one is confronted with of the age and the authorship of the Gospels do not have the their untrustworthiness. But it is the third point that is most importance commonly assigned to them for the veracity of the crucial for Huxley. He argues that this pernicious ‘pneumato- claims within them. The more fundamental reason to doubt logical doctrine’ – the words refer to a belief in an unseen the claims of Christianity is that even if the reports in the world of evil spirits – pervades the New Testament, and is cru- Gospels were those of eye witnesses, this still would not justify cial for the Christian’s interpretation of the work of Jesus. belief in their testimony, because these eyewitnesses were Jesus’s theological importance lies in his reversal of the Satanic themselves credulous, and believed in the existence of spirits rule of the world and putting an end to sin and death. His and demons and the occurrence of , and just because Messianic work is to cast out Satan and his co-hosts. We find this view in the Church Fathers, the confessions

UK (creeds) of the churches, and even in the Protestant . CO

. theologians Calvin and Luther. It is impossible then, as Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman observes, to look with one eye at Jesus’s teaching about the Fatherhood of God and his loving providence, and CHRISMADDEN . shut the other eye to his “no less definite teaching

WWW about the devil and his malignant watchfulness.” Huxley’s two essays also roam over many related 2013 themes: the issue of miracles and Cardinal Newman’s defense of them; whether clerics can legitimately ADDEN M claim to be New Testament scholars since they are

HRIS already committed to a position; how one evaluates

© C testimony, as well as other issues. But the main thrust of both essays is that agnosticism is justified by the uncertainty of the historical narratives of the New Testament, and against the concept of the spiritual world that is found in Jesus’s teachings, the text of the New Testament, and in the Christian tradition. Against the narratives the issue is probability, or lack of it. But in the case of unseen spirits the matter is as follows. Ecclesiasticism says: the demonology of the Gospels is an essential part of that account of the spir- itual world, the truth of which it declares to be certi- fied by Jesus; whereas agnosticism (as I judge it) says: there is no good evidence for believing in a demonic spiritual world, and much reason for doubting it. © PROF. VAN A. HARVEY 2013 Van Harvey is George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies (Emeritus) at Stanford University.

12 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Theism, History and Experience Timothy Chappell argues that standard arguments against God miss the point.

“In the heart of the remotest mountains rises the little Kirk; the dead all Norway and Britain and Mexico. In another common pattern, slumbering around it, under their white memorial-stones, ‘in hope of a pagan deities arose by ‘euhemerising’ apotheosis – by the route happy Resurrection’: – dull wert thou, O reader, if never in any hour (say from being a human hero to occupying yet another alcove in of moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung spectral in the sky, and Being the cluttered and haphazard pantheon of (say) the Rome of late was as if swallowed up in darkness) it spoke to thee – things unspeakable, antiquity. This was a route, indeed, that mortal Roman emper- that went into thy ’s soul. Strong was he that had a Church, what we ors regularly trod. Even Greek generals sometimes took it too. can call a Church: he stood thereby, though ‘in the centre of Immensities, The contrast between any such view and what I am calling in the conflux of Eternities,’ yet manlike towards God and man; the vague Theism, as it showed up in the Roman context, is well put by shoreless Universe had become for him a firm city, and dwelling which he the French historian Paul Veyne. He notes first the ‘gigantism’ knew.” Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, Book 1, Chap II of the Christian Theists’ God:

I “The originality of Christianity lies… in the gigantic nature of its god, the creator of both heaven and earth: it is a gigantism that is alien to the pagan irst we should distinguish theism from mere belief in the gods and is inherited from the god of the Bible. This biblical god was so supernatural. The latter, illustrated by ghost-stories, tales huge that, despite his anthropomorphism (humankind was created in his Fof second sight, rituals and sacrifices to prevent the fail- image), it was possible for him to become a metaphysical god: even while ure of a harvest or a navy, the consulting of the sacred geese, retaining his human, passionate and protective character, the gigantic scale and the throwing of the salt always over one’s left shoulder, is a of the Judaic god allowed him eventually to take on the role of the founder human universal, and was known even to our Pleistocene and creator of the cosmic order.” (Veyne, When Our World Became Christ- ancestors. A more hostile name for this is superstition. ian Polity, 2010, p.20) And the former, theism? The Shorter Oxford English Dictio- nary says that theism is “belief in a deity or deities, as opp. to Besides this ‘gigantism’, it was the “human, passionate, and atheism.” The kind of theism I want to focus on is more spe- protective character” of the Christians’ god that, Veyne argues, cific than this. Theism in my sense, Theism with a capital T, is set Christian Theism apart from the chaotic of the belief not in deities but in God with a capital G. This is a much surrounding society. There one found only an ill-defined less universal phenomenon than supernaturalism/superstition. assortment of quirky, sinister, unpredictable, highly localised, It has a historical particularity; in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic and at best conditionally benign daemons. But here was a uni- tradition, we can more or less see where Theism begins. It versal and omnipresent God of ‘infinite mercy’, caring uncon- begins with the writing of the first chapter of Genesis, where ditionally “about the fate of each and every human soul, the author makes it as clear as he including mine and yours”, with whom what was on offer was knows how that the God of whom he “a mutual and passionate relationship of love and authority” speaks, Yahweh, is not just another (Veyne p.23). As Veyne shows, there was a huge difference heavenly being like the sun or the between the effects of the two religions on the working psy- moon, but the sun and moon’s chology of anyone actually practising either. And that contrast creator. nearly always worked in Theism’s favour. The difference between How like a Theism as belief in God and “For whoever accepted the Christian faith, life became more intense, more god... theism as belief in deities is organised, and was placed under greater pressure. An individual had to The Emperor that the latter can easily be conform to a rule that marked him or her out... in exchange, his or her life Augustus at just another variety of suddenly acquired an eternal significance within a cosmic plan, something the height of supernaturalism. Espe- that no philosophy or paganism could confer. Paganism left human life Rome’s glory cially where the deities are exactly as it was, an ephemeral amalgam of details. Thanks to the Christian small and local enough, god, that life received the unity of a magnetic field in which every action there seems little differ- and every internal response took on a meaning, either good or bad. This ence in principle between meaning… steered the believer towards an absolute and eternal entity that believing in such deities was not a mere principle but a great living being.” (Veyne p.19) and believing in fairies or ghosts: think of nature-gods Capital-T Theism is just this combination of belief in an like Iris the rainbow-goddess, absolute and all-powerful God, utterly external and out there or Freya/Persephone of the har- (‘transcendent’), who is yet also intimately known within the vest, or Thor the thunder-god. believer (‘immanent’) as moral authority, direction for life, The classical pagan gods were warning or encouraging adviser, saviour, answerer of prayers, very frequently of this sort, as friend – sometimes even as lover. It is this combination of were the deities of pagan immanence and transcendence that makes the Theist view so

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 13 psychologically compelling. If I adopt Theism then even First, the epistemic position. Consider someone who, like within little me there will lovingly dwell the God of everything us all I assume, lives her life in the midstream of a constant – as in the manger at Bethlehem. It is easy to see how this deluge of the best evidence she could possibly have that scepti- combination serves to give the believer a sense of the impor- cism about the existence of the external world is false: the evi- tance of his life and actions: “the vague shoreless Universe” has dence of everyday experience. An abstractly propositional “become for him a firm city, and dwelling which he” knows. approach to external-world scepticism is bound to look slightly Many scholars think that Christian moralists make more than strange to any such person. Certainly someone in this epis- the classical pagans did of the virtue of humility. If that is so, temic position (meaning, this position about how her beliefs perhaps it is because those who dare to believe that their own are justified) can understand sceptical doubts, explore them small hearts can become the dwelling-place of the infinite God with interest and engagement, note with surprise – or pertur- have the more need of humility. Throughout history the The- bation – the difficulty of conclusively rebutting any argument ists’ version of this idea of the divine indwelling or enthousias- of, for example, this form: mos, with the importance of the everyday as its corollary, has seeded megalomania, self-deception, self-absorption, fanta- 1. If I do not know that no evil demon is deceiving me, then I sism, fanaticism, spiritual fascism, and psychological manipula- do not know that I have hands. tion and abuse. It has also been the mainspring of much of the 2. I do not know that no evil demon is deceiving me. permanent achievements of our civilisation. 3. So I do not know that I have hands. At the heart of Theism, transcendence combines with immanence in the intoxicating thought that the infinite is also But can she take such sceptical doubts seriously? Is it possi- the intimate: God himself has a plan even for my life. Every ble to her that external-world scepticism might be true? It is believer who has ever taken himself to receive divine guidance, hard to see how it could be, for the reason identified by G.E. as millions constantly do, has had this belief. Once the belief Moore: because her justification for denying the conclusion of becomes credible, its attraction is almost irresistible. the sceptical argument (3) is so much better than any justifica- This brilliant and seductive psychological appeal both to tion she could possibly have for accepting its premisses (1, 2). our sense of smallness and to our sense of greatness is the She is certain she has hands. If her alternatives are either to reason, Veyne argues, why Christianity won out in its battle deny that she is certain, or to deny one of the sceptical argu- with the feeble, syncretistic, and disaggregated supernatural- ment’s premisses, then she has every reason to pick the second ism of paganism; the contrast revealed Christianity as quite alternative. She may not know which premiss is false, but her simply a better-designed religion. Veyne, an atheist and some- certainty about the falsehood of (3) means that she is com- time Communist, calls Christianity a masterpiece (p.18). pletely rational, and completely justified, in asserting “Not (1 and 2)”. Sceptical arguments like this may set her intriguing II intellectual puzzles; they may even provide her with a liveli- hood writing about them. What they will not do is threaten If our concern is not to denounce Theism but to understand her basic confidence that she knows plenty of things, for it, we need to start from the particularity of its history, and from instance that she has hands. this notion of the Infinite Intimate that is central to that history. They might threaten her assurance of that if it was a whole Most philosophers routinely don’t start from any such per- lot weaker, or if her epistemic position were strictly neutral – if spective; nor even ever reach it. Instead they start from a dic- she was antecedently disposed simply to consider each propo- tionary definition and take the heart of Theism to be, not a sition on its logical merits in the abstract, and not disposed to history of vivid and direct experience of an infinite God who take any proposition whatever to be any more or less sure than has a plan even for finite you, but the proposition that “There any other. But her position is precisely not neutral in this way. is some god or gods.” They marshal arguments for and against And the case of the Theist is parallel. As I put it above, the this proposition. And so we get the familiar does-God-exist person considering external-world scepticism “lives her life in debates of contemporary philosophy, in which God so incon- the midstream of a constant deluge of experiential evidence” gruously shows up as a possibly-missing component in the for the existence of an external world. That sets her so far from mechanics of cosmology or evolution, part of a botched abstract epistemic neutrality that she has every justification for attempt at scientific explanation. Or philosophers take the nub weighting external-world scepticism as no more than an of the Theistic doctrines of God’s omnipotence or omni- intriguing intellectual puzzle. Similarly, the defining feature of science, or the specifically Christian doctrine of the Trinity, to Theism is the Theist’s experience of an infinite but intimate be essentially a matter not of experience but of propositions; God; and this sets the Theist so far from abstract epistemic and draw our attention to the logical difficulties attending neutrality that she too has every justification for weighting those doctrines, considered as concatenations of propositions. most of the standard problems for Theism found in philoso- The problem with this abstractly propositional approach is not phy of religion basically as interesting puzzles. The epistemic that it is wrong. The problem is that, pursued in isolation, it reasoner is certain that the world is real, on the basis of her tends to miss the foundational role of experience in Theism. experience; so her question about the sceptical argument is not Consider two aspects of experience, one having to do with “I wonder whether it is sound?” but “I wonder where exactly it the epistemic position, the other with the diachronic nature, of the goes wrong?” The Theist is certain that God is real, on the Theist’s beliefs. basis of her experience; so her question about anti-Theistic

14 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 arguments is not whether they prove that there is no God, but “God, says Epicurus, either wishes to prevent evils, and is unable; or he is how exactly they fail to prove that. able, and is unwilling; or he is neither willing nor able; or he is both will- Normal people have overwhelmingly good evidence in their ing and able. If he is willing and is unable, he is weak, which does not fit own experience that there is an external world, and reasonably the character of God. If he is able and unwilling, he is malevolent, which take this to outweigh even the best arguments going for exter- does not fit God’s character either. If he is neither willing nor able, he is nal-world scepticism. Likewise, the best arguments against both malevolent and weak, and therefore not God at all. If he is both will- Theism may be formidable, yet completely unpersuasive to a ing and able, which alone is fitting for God, from what source then are Theist – even a rational and fair-minded Theist. The whole evils? Why does he not prevent them?” (Lactantius, de Ira Dei (c.313 AD); point about Theism is that it claims that individuals can have the first extant formulation of Epicurus’ version of the problem of evil) overwhelmingly good experiential evidence that there is a God. To allow this experience to outweigh even the best anti- Evidently Epicurus’s puzzle was presented as a puzzle for Theist arguments is no less reasonable than the analogous believers in a God of good providence: the Stoics’ God, or move against external-world scepticism. Lactantius’ own Christian God. (Epicurus seems not to have This position helps us to understand the spirit in which presented it, as people often present it today, as a puzzle for Theists from strongly Theist societies like Anselm and Aquinas believers in God. Epicurus himself apparently believed in God, offer arguments for God’s existence. They do so in something just not a providential or caring one.) like the same spirit as contemporary epistemologists who do Epicurus’s puzzle is an intellectual puzzle, but it is not not really doubt the external world’s existence for a moment yet merely an intellectual puzzle. To any feeling person, the exis- still offer anti-sceptical arguments for the existence of an exter- tence of evil in our world must create an emotional struggle as nal world. In both cases the arguments are not evoked by a live well as an intellectual puzzle. Theists suppose that there is a doubt, but rather by an interest in exploring alternative possible God who is good enough to want the very best for his crea- structures of argument. The most famous explorer of external tures, and powerful enough to do anything He chooses. So why world scepticism was René Descartes, and perhaps we might in Heaven’s name doesn’t He choose to do the very best? even say that arguments about God’s existence are to the pre- One striking thing about this question is how much time Cartesian philosophical world as arguments about the external Theists themselves spend asking it, and find themselves alto- world’s existence are to the post-Cartesian. gether unable to answer it: for example, “Why standest thou The notion of ‘epistemic position’ also illuminates some afar off, O Lord? Why hidest thou thyself in time of trouble?” familiar impasses in present-day debates about the philosophy (Psalm 10.1); or “What is man, that thou shouldest magnify of religion. For instance, critics of Theism sometimes struggle him, and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him, and even to see their Theist interlocutors as rational, as dealing in that thou shouldest visit him every morning – and try him the currency of arguments. It is sometimes cynically said that every moment?” (Job 6.17-18) and so on. Or, if I may be for- the conclusion is “the point in the argument where you stop given for quoting a poem of my own, ‘The Children’s Ceme- thinking.” Cynicism aside, different reasonable people can tery, Balgay’: have different good reasons for being content to reach their rational resting-places at different points. So the atheist who Parents’ sentences on marble; finds some purely logical problem in the notion of God’s mildewed dolls beneath grown trees: omnipotence, e.g. that a God who ‘could do anything’ neither O you who mark the sparrow’s fall, could nor could not create a stone too heavy for Himself to did you not notice these? lift, may conclude straight away that there cannot be a God. Whereas a Theist, confronted with the same problem, may In fact you could call the whole Judaeo-Christian Theistic respond “Oh, how interesting. So God’s omnipotence must be tradition a tradition of complaining or moaning at God. beyond our understanding”; or “Ah, OK, so there is one thing This Theistic moaning tells us something important about that God can’t do – but He is otherwise omnipotent”, or Theism and the problem of evil. The critic of Theism often “Well, this thing has a logically inconsistent description, so of notices how little impression she makes on Theists by simply course God can’t do it”; or “Oh, so perhaps omnipotence is announcing a list of worldly mishaps, be they never so dire. not what matters in thinking about God” – or in some other The critic may conclude that Theists just display a mulish way may qualify her understanding of what God is like, without imperviousness to empirical evidence. For the Theist, however, in any way weakening her confidence that God is. This tenac- this sort of evidence is irrelevant. Theists do not arrive at their ity about God’s existence may (to repeat) be perfectly rational; Theism by doing a ‘value-audit’ on creation: totting up the net as if it is based upon overwhelmingly good experiential evi- balance of good and evil in creation, inferring that the net bal- dence of God’s existence. ance of good and evil in any Creator would have to be just the I said that Theists can have “every justification for weight- same, and concluding either that there is a universally good ing most of the standard problems for Theism found in philos- Creator and the discordant partial evil in the world is only ‘har- ophy of religion basically as interesting puzzles.” Most, I said, mony not understood’, or that there is no such Creator, or that because one standard problem in philosophy of religion is the Creator is either morally ambiguous or just plain evil. Their bound to be grievously more than a mere intellectual puzzle. Theism was, so to speak, already there before they even consid- This is the classic problem of evil. ered how things stand with the world. And it rests upon quite a different ground from any calculus of good and bad fortune in

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 15 seem just as rational as insisting on reaching an immedi- ate verdict about that apparent betrayal without waiting or looking for more evidence. Indeed in imaginable par- ticular cases, they will often be far more rational. Their Not Theism – pagan rationality depends, broadly speaking, on how good are superstition your antecedent reasons for trusting the friend. in action Just likewise with the Theist’s response to the problem of evil. She does not find herself atemporally con- fronted with the raw propositions “There is a morally perfect and omnipotent creator God” and “There is evil in the world”, and challenged to find a way to rec- oncile them or weigh them off against each other in the abstract. Rather, the problem of evil typically comes to the Theist within the time-series of her expe- rience and her life. First there is her experience of God; then there is the fact that she is confronted by some particular evil, perhaps by horrifying evil. But her experiences do not stop there, and that gives the Theist her chance to wait and see what God might do about the evil that confronts her – and indeed to moan at God about it. This is precisely what Theists have always done, confronted with some evil. I say “confronted with some evil”. There is a distinc- tion between specific evils that confront Theists in spe- cific cases, and evil in general – the sum total of evil in the whole world – that confronts the Theist all the time. Evil in general is a much bigger and less tractable problem than specific evils, but the Theist’s attitude to both general and specific evil is essentially the same. It is that you have to see it as something that happens at some point in time; and that you have to either wait the world that might be devised; the ground of experience. patiently, or bother God impatiently, about it until God has Hence Theists see the problem of evil too from a quite dif- provided a resolution. ferent epistemic position from their critics. It is not that Theists Central to the Theist’s outlook is an attitude of hope. Such – unless they are intolerably naïve, smug, and callous – do not hope might be misplaced or over-optimistic, of course. But is a see evil as a problem. But it is that Theists see evil as a problem hopeful attitude to the world so very obviously less rational than in time: a diachronic problem (perhaps even a narrative problem). thinking of the world as so botched, maimed, and incompetent Suppose you have a friend whom you trust deeply, on the that any ‘God’ who had made it would deserve only our hatred solid evidential basis of your long and vivid experience of that and contempt? Even if it were less rational, mightn’t it still sug- friend’s care for you. One day you find very strong evidence gest a better, because more humane, way to learn to live? that that friend has betrayed you in some fundamental way. Is there only one rational response to this new negative evidence: “[What a humane education is most deeply concerned with] is the possibil- to weigh the new negative against your past positive evidence ity of coming into an inheritance. It has to do with no less a question than and decide which counts for more? whether a man can be at home in the world – whether he can find it a You might think so if you were considering the question as a good world despite the ill. Not that I am supposing that there is a kind of straight inconsistency in the propositions that constitute your education that could guarantee the outcome, but rather this: by being evidence. But suppose you look at your evidential problem brought into contact with forms of understanding… in which some good about your friend as a diachronic problem, a problem in time. is to be encountered, some wonder to be seen, whether in nature or the Then you will immediately see that you have two further work of human beings, a person might be helped to see the beauty of real- salient options besides insisting on reaching a verdict, right ity, helped to live more fully, helped to be glad that he is alive.” now, on nothing but the present balance of evidence. One (Roy Holland, Against Empiricism Blackwell 1980, p.59) option is to wait and see how things turn out. If you just hold off a little, then maybe a good explanation of your friend’s © PROF TIMOTHY CHAPPELL, 2013 apparent betrayal will soon become clear to you. The other Timothy Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University. option is to confront your friend. Track him down, explain how things look to you, see what he has to say for himself. In short, • Thanks for their comments to Grant Bartley, Chris Belshaw, have a good moan at him, and see how he takes it. Nick Everitt, Jeffrey John, Stephen Law, Rick Lewis, Eleonore Both these responses to a trusted friend’s apparent betrayal Stump, and an audience at the University of Northampton.

16 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Moral Manipulation & the Problem of Evil Jimmy Alfonso Licon challenges a traditional Christian explanation of suffering.

here is a vast amount of suffering in the world: war, intrinsically valuable, independently of how it is used. In fact, it famine, disease, hurricanes, earthquakes, rape, murder, suggests that our ability to make our own free decisions is so Tthe Holocaust, the Crusades, terrorist attacks, and the important that it is a good outweighing even all the bad things list goes on. Some people suffer horribly, others don’t, and it people choose to do. If people choose to do bad things occa- seems you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it. This is pre- sionally, this is supposedly outweighed by the moral good of cisely what you would expect if, underneath it all, the universe people having the opportunity to choose – which necessarily entails were just indifferent. having the capacity to cause suffering. All of which poses a serious problem for the belief that Consider the following example: there is an all-powerful, all-knowing God who is perfectly benevolent. The problem can be simply stated as follows: if Suppose that Jones has suffered a series of financial setbacks recently. He is God can do anything, and has perfect love for us, then why so badly off financially that he considers robbing his local bank. After would He allow such suffering? Imagine someone who claims thinking about this for a bit, he decides against it. to love their children, but they constantly neglect them – they are never home, and their children are often hungry and Surely, Jones deserves moral praise for his decision not to rob unprotected. We would rightly be sceptical that they cared for the bank, because he chose not to rob the bank. If, on the con- their children at all. It looks like they don’t actually care. So trary, he had been biologically programmed to do the right thing, too, with God: it seems that with all the suffering in the world, there would be no reason to praise him for not robbing the there couldn’t be any such benevolent, omnipotent God. If bank. Consider a similar example: there was a God who could do anything, and who loved us perfectly, He would have prevented this suffering. For centuries philosophers have grappled with this prob- lem. It is called the problem of evil. The problem of evil is perhaps the most popular argument atheists employ. The argument is that since it’s obvious that God hasn’t eliminated, or prevented, the suffering around us, there cannot be a God who is all-powerful and perfectly benevolent. The Holocaust is a prime example of the problem. If there is a God who allows such horrendous suffering, He must either lack the capacity to prevent it, or He is not perfectly benevolent. There should be no doubt that this argument poses a significant obstacle to belief in an omnipotent, benevolent God. However, theists have responses available, and undoubtedly the most popular of these, to which they often appeal before any other, is known as the free-will defense.

The Free-Will Defense Some suffering has non-human causes, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, but much is caused by the actions of human beings. According to the free-will defense, God allows humans to act in ways which cause suffering because the alternative would be to take away our free choice, which He does not wish to do. This attempt to reconcile suffering and the exis- 82 2013 tence of God is popular for at least two reasons. The STILLETTO first is that it shifts the blame for evil, at least in some / COM cases, onto those who act freely to bring about suffer- . ing. If Bob freely chooses to kill his wife, it would be TOCKPHOTO S unfair to blame his actions on God. The second I reason is that it makes use of the idea that freedom is ©

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 17 Suppose that Smith finds himself in a desperate financial situation. He horrendously evil actions, especially in desperate situations, thinks about the matter and decides that he’ll rob the local bank. But they must have the capacity to commit such acts. Although before he acts on his decision, a device is installed in his brain that pre- granting this kind of freedom is bound to result in people like vents him from doing anything wrong. Therefore he does not rob the Hitler from time to time, this is a necessary evil if we are to bank. gain the moral good of having those with the capacity to per- form evil yet whole refrain from doing so. So if God is to max- We think that Jones deserves moral praise, while Smith imise moral goods like the value of choice, He must grant us does not, even though they are both in a difficult financial situ- the capacity to commit horrifyingly evil acts, with the hope ation, and neither of them robbed the bank. The difference that we will choose not to do so. between Jones and Smith is that Jones might have freely robbed the bank, while Smith could not have robbed the bank. Freedom-Canceling & Moral Manipulation No matter what he did, the device in his brain would have pre- Now I want to explore three problems with the free-will vented him from choosing to rob the bank. Simply put, we defense. praise people for their actions, not robots, and for a good reason. The first problem is that a good action (e.g., feeding thou- The former have free will (i.e., they choose to do the good, sands of hungry people) is morally permissible, while an evil rather than the bad, freely), while the latter do not. Let’s call action (e.g., killing thousands of people) is not. However, the this difference the value of choice. reason feeding thousands of hungry people is morally prefer- Theists who use the free-will defense as an explanation for able to killing them has little to do with our capacity to have why God allows much of the evil we see around us are relying chosen differently. Rather, it is because people have intrinsic on the value of choice. If God is to be right in allowing suffer- moral worth. ing, it must be because there are greater moral goods that Although this should be remarkably obvious, it cuts deeply could only be had if the possibility of certain kinds of evils is against the free-will defense. To appreciate why, consider the permitted. For instance, if there were never any danger, then following: although choosing to do good while you have the there would be no way anyone could exhibit robust courage: capacity to do evil may be a kind of good itself, there are exhibiting ‘courage’ in the absence of any actual danger lacks plenty of instances where this good is just not good enough to moral value, because it’s not really courage. Similarly, there is justify the kinds of evil that are potentially unleashed by it. So little moral value in having to make the morally good choice. although there may be moral value to some degree in our There is no sense praising someone for doing something if capacity to do tremendous evil, in that it provides us the they could not have done otherwise. So just as we think that opportunity to freely choose to do the right thing, this good is having freedom is valuable, says the theist, there is value in not absolute. Consider an example from history. Could allow- having the capacity to perform evil acts, but refraining. There- ing Hitler the ability to choose to do horrendous evil in the fore, if we want to have moral goods like praising someone for hope that he would freely choose the good outweigh the suf- being a good person, we must put them in a position where fering he actually inflicted, on Jewish people and others? It is they could choose to act otherwise, but refrain from doing so. difficult to answer ‘yes.’ On the contrary, it is difficult to see The theist might further argue that the value of choice is how there could be any justification, even in determined by the depth and kinds of evil acts that we could principle, for such suffering. Further- perform but don’t. If we could only perform acts which more, surely no matter how valuable caused very little suffering (e.g. pinching some- having free will is, it is not clear that this one), then we would deserve very has greater, or even equal, moral weight, little praise for refraining to the moral goods that would have from such minimally bad come to fruition if the people killed in acts. However, if we the Holocaust had instead survived and want people to be prospered. Generally, it is difficult to see how, robustly morally because of the value of choice, having the freedom to do praiseworthy, something terrible has greater moral weight than the results of because they lacking the capacity to do something as grotesque as the Holo- refrain from caust. The free-will defense amounts to putting the value of performing choice above all other kinds of moral good. I take Secondly, victims of the Holocaust not only suffered misery away your and an untimely death; additionally their freedom to make freedom their own choices was stripped away from them. The freedom when I use my of some people to do whatever they choose, by its very nature freedom to take away your life comes with an huge moral price tag: it is freedom-canceling where other people are concerned. My freedom to kill a bank- teller comes at the price of the freedom she would have exer- cised if I had allowed her to live. Thus the freedom exercised by some people cancels the freedom of others. This problem we can call the freedom-canceling worry.

18 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Finally, there is a third, even more absolute worry for the neural architecture. Call this practice moral manipulation. Would free-will defense. The worry is that in any other context, we reject it be ethical to install such devices? anything that resembles the free-will defense. Indeed, the limited scope of these freedom-canceling Suppose that the police know that Jones is about to rob a devices is some justification for installing them, in that they bank and kill a number of civilians in the process (perhaps they single out specific behavior you shouldn’t be free to engage in know his getaway plan involves killing innocent bystanders as a anyway. Does anyone seriously think that we should have the way of creating a distraction). Suppose further that the police unchallenged freedom to rape and murder? However, if this have enough evidence to justify arresting and convicting Jones sort of device could be imagined by us, an equivalent could for some previous crime before he gets the chance to rob the have been realized by God – and surely He would have had a bank. The choices are as follows: the police could either allow moral obligation to realize it. The free-will defense cannot Jones to go through with the bank robbery, respecting Jones’ explain why God didn’t take such basic preemptive measures. freedom to engage in violent activity (call this option Freedom); In conclusion, although it is good to have the freedom to or they could preemptively arrest him, preventing unnecessary choose between right and wrong, the free-will defense gets the violence – but unfortunately, this would only come at the moral weights wrong. It places too much weight on freedom, expense of his freedom to engage in terrible violence (call this and not enough weight on the lives and well-being of inno- Safety). It should be clear that the Freedom option is what we cents. Put differently, the free-will defense simply gets the moral would prescribe on the advice of the free-will defense, and that facts wrong. Therefore the free-will defense fails to reconcile this is precisely the option that God allegedly chooses: He fails the existence of God and the existence of evil. So it fails to to intervene, even where there is a horrific amount of suffer- solve the problem of evil. ing, because this would undermine our free will. This is what © JIMMY ALFONSO LICON 2013 Freedom also recommends for the police department: they Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy doctoral student at the Univer- should wait until Jones’ has robbed the bank and murdered sity of Maryland, College Park. He works primarily in philosophy of innocent civilians. They should allow him to exercise his free mind, epistemology, and applied ethics. will without intervention. If the police interfere, and arrest Jones before he robs the bank, they will have deprived him of the chance to choose freely not to rob the bank and murder the customers, interfering with his free will. If, however, you think that the police should arrest Jones before he has the chance to rob the bank and kill innocent bystanders, you think there is something that has greater moral weight than Jones’ opportunity to exercise his free will. In short, you reject the free-will defense. Clearly, between these two solutions, Safety is morally far better than Freedom. The value of human life is far greater than our ability to freely act in morally repugnant ways, or to refrain from acting in those ways. We are right to think that the police should arrest Jones and prevent unnecessary blood- shed. It is morally preferable to interfere with Jones expressing his free will to prevent murder, compared with allowing him UK .

the chance to refuse of his own free will to rob the bank and CO . kill innocents. It seems that God disagrees. After all, if there is a God, then BILLSTOTT He knows everything about the kinds and amounts of suffer- . ing in the world, and He could do something about it; and we are to suppose that, being benevolent, He would want to do something about it. But He does not. However, it looks like

the right thing to do would be to intervene, at least sometimes, PLEASE VISIT WWW , if it will prevent a good deal of pain and suffering. Surely this is compatible with still allowing people a good deal of free- dom? It might be striking the right balance, by letting people OR MORE exercise free will – except in those instances where they make horrendously evil choices. 2013 F TOTT

Imagine there is a device which can modify brain waves S such that we cannot do anything that’s morally repugnant, e.g., ILL with an exception for self-defense, it prevents violent acts. © B Although you could intend to commit horrible acts, you are never in a position to act upon those intentions, because the ARTOON C device in your brain short-circuits your acting-upon-decisions

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 19 Hello Professor Blackburn. You are an atheist. anyone from ‘accounting for’ the existence What do you personally mean by ‘atheism’? of something rather than nothing. To stop Actually I prefer the label ‘infidel’ to that the regress you would have to postulate of ‘atheist’. I suppose an atheist thinks something that necessarily exists or is its there is a definite, intelligible question to own cause, and there is no real sense to be which the answer is ‘no’, and agnostics made of that. And as said, if also think there is such a question, and there is some unknown, inconceivable that the right answer is ‘don’t know’. But quality of ‘necessarily existing’, then for all I doubt that there is a definite intelligible we know it might belong to the cosmos question about ‘the existence of God’. itself. No need, then, to add anything else. This touches on the issue I mentioned How did you become an infidel? earlier, whether there is a definite ques- I am not sure I ever had any faith to lose, tion in the God area. The problem is so I can’t identify a definite, dated that the believer has to oscillate between process. I was at a Church of England two conceptions of God. One is a God school, but gradually became less and modelled on human beings, with emo- less interested in the Church’s sayings tions very like ours, desires, purposes, and doctrines. At about the age of six- awareness, and above all, one that inhab- teen I read ’s Why I Am its time and is involved in world affairs. Not A Christian, and never looked back. This is the God of Abraham and Isaac. The other is the God of the philoso- Is it possible to disprove the existence of God? phers: a necessary existence, perfect, And if not, shouldn’t you be an agnostic? beyond time, changeless, eternal… In his Being an infidel, that is, just having no Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Simon faith, I do not have to prove anything. I Hume has great fun having spokesmen have no faith in the Loch Ness Monster, for each of these conceptions knock the but do not go about trying to prove that stuffing out of the other. They are fun- it does not exist, although there are cer- damentally inconsistent, but the reli- Blackburn tainly overwhelming arguments that it gionist needs both at different moments. does not. And at least there is a fairly This is why we hear so much about it all determinate meaning attached to the being so mysterious. But one thing is is a Vice President of idea that there is one. clear, which is that you cannot stick your head into a cloud and come back with the British Humanist What is the strongest argument against instructions about how to live, what to God’s existence? expect, whom to admire, how to dress, Association, a member Undoubtedly the fact of appalling how to have sex, or what to eat. Myster- of the Humanist human and animal suffering makes it ies carry no practical implications: reli- hard to believe that the world is the gionists have to add those from their own Philosophers’ Group, a product of an all good, all powerful, and fancies. Nothing in the fog can have any all knowing intelligent designer. It is implications on its own for how we are to former Professor of much easier to infer that any entity live or what we are to expect. Once this is responsible for the world either doesn’t understood, then as Hume saw in the Philosophy at the know, doesn’t care, or can’t do better. last of his Dialogues, the question of the University of Cambridge, existence of God loses any interest. What, if anything, would convince you that and currently a there was a God? What about the apparent fine-tuning of the I doubt if anything could convince me physical variables of the universe which makes Distinguished Research via reasons and reasonings that there is a possible the appearance of intelligent life? Isn’t God. Of course a blow on the head or that an argument for God’s existence? Professor of Philosophy at something similar might mean one ends Anything that was causally responsible for the University of North up believing and saying anything, how- tuning those constants would have to be ever outlandish. I am sure that emotional extraordinarily fine-tuned itself, so this Carolina at Chapel Hill. traumas, loss, oppression and despair just pushes the issue back one step, and cause many people to seek some kind of we are left with the problems I men- Rick Lewis asks him refuge in supernatural hopes. tioned. We may currently be unable to see any reason why those constants have about his atheism. How do you as a non-believer account for the the values they do, but our ignorance can- existence of the universe? not give us any premise from which to The familiar infinite regress arguments derive massive cosmological conclusions. that anything that exists needs a cause stop I think the fact that we came along

20 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Interview Interview does not in the least shows that it was Jesus’, ‘sent Mohammed’, or whatever. think they have other the purpose or design of some creator to The case is quite different with the functions as well, but produce us. That is giving us far more external world. Scepticism about that is that substantially he was importance than our insignificance on of only theoretical interest; firstly right. Of course, on this the scale of nature suggests. Homo sapi- because nature takes care of our convic- view the whole subject ens has existed for the blink of an eye as tions about our immediate environment, changes, and the question turns to the a small fraction of the biomass in one as she does for all animals; secondly value of these practices as they manifest small planet on the edge of a galaxy with because it is only by the experience of themselves in particular historical and over 100 billion stars, itself one of some an external world that we get to be cultural contexts. You can very effectively 500 billion other galaxies. It would be thinkers at all; and thirdly because we weld people together by magnifying their very wasteful if that were all just for us. have endless ongoing confirmations of differences from other people, and that All that wasted time and energy just to the system. So we have very good rea- has always been an aspect of religion, and get to David Cameron, for instance. son for trusting our everyday concep- not at all a nice one. tion of the world. If I go walking in the Marx is admired by militant New Many who do believe in God would say that hills and the content of my visual expe- Atheists for saying that religion is the atheism ultimately makes each of our lives rience is that there is a big cliff in front opium of the people. But they forget meaningless. Would you agree with that? of me, I will do much better if I trust it what he said next, which is that “The I am sorry for people who cannot find than if I ignore it; and the same is true abolition of religion as the illusory hap- any meaning or purpose in their lives, in countless cases every day of my life. piness of the people is the demand for but I certainly do not see that living on Trusting in the goodness of God, unfor- their real happiness. To call on them to and on and on forever would cure that: tunately, does not seem to be attended give up their illusions about their condi- if anything, it would seem to make with the same string of successes. People tion is to call on them to give up a con- things worse. Schopenhauer thought who do it seem on the whole to do dition that requires illusions.” I think that boredom was only second to actual worse than those who do not but trust that is right, which is why moral and pain as an evil to be avoided. I find it other things. Probably most religious political questions should occupy all of very odd that people who can barely people at some point have to sympathize us far more than ontological questions. stand an hour of singing and praying with Job, or with Tosca’s great despairing and praising in church on Sunday can aria: “Perchè, perchè, Signor, ah, perchè me Would the world be a better place if everyone imagine being blissfully happy doing ne rimuneri così?” – “Why, why, Lord, oh were an atheist? nothing else for eternity. They must why do you treat me thus?” Across large parts of the world religion have very poor imaginations. I do not doubt that something causes conspires with tyranny and injustice to Besides, there is plenty of meaning to some people to believe on the basis of oppress women, to cement the power of be found during life. The smile of a experience. But as Kant said, without men, to suppress free speech, to force baby means the world to the mother; concepts, intuition, that is experience, is acquiescence with the status quo, and to successes mean a lot to those who have blind. Experience needs interpretation. whip up hatred against other peoples. struggled to achieve them, and so on. So I wonder what leads them to inter- Nobody would want Europe to return to pret their experience as they do: what is pre-Enlightenment attitudes; nobody Timothy Chappell says believers know there it that convinces them that they’re not sane thinks that people flourish more is a God through their own experience of in touch with an inferior deity, or an under theocracies. But as the Marx Him, and that it is therefore entirely ratio- impostor, or that God is a unity, or is quote shows, it would require a whole nal of them to regard sceptical arguments as male, or the source of the bizarre events moral, political, and economic change mere brainteasers. He makes a comparison described in the Bible? before the need for religion will wither. with scepticism about the external world. Do you think religious experience could be a Some theologians have followed the late As an atheist/infidel, do you think it’s impor- valid source of data about God’s existence? John Hick in suggesting that religious tant to campaign for a less religious society? It may be an understandable cause of claims aren’t really about asserting the truth It all depends on what the religionists belief in God’s existence, for some peo- of propositions such as ‘God exists’, but have got it into their heads to clamour ple, but it cannot serve as a data point instead are claims about perceptions of God; about. At present in the USA it is impor- that justifies any such belief. You could in other words theism is about an attitude tant, because religious not have an experience that bears the towards the world. Do you think something aims to keep people ignorant about science right kind of content for that, because parallel could be said about some atheists? and scientific method. In Catholic coun- peoples’ notions of God carry too much I have a great deal of respect for the view tries there is the wicked suppression of baggage: all powerful, all good, all know- that ‘onto-theology’, that is, religious birth control. In the UK this is fortu- ing, necessarily existent… Even if you doctrines associated with existence nately not so true; but even here religion- literally saw something conforming to claims, should be abandoned, but that ists oppose assisted dying, are at least your image of God spread out across the such things as rituals, poetry, metaphor, half-inclined to moralize about harmless sky, you wouldn’t have any right to add music and dance still have a role in weld- variations in sexual tastes and lifestyles, all those properties to it. This is even ing people together into a congregation and constantly campaign to have a louder before you start adding historical prop- or a society. This was Durkheim’s view voice in political affairs than they deserve. erties: ‘covenanted with Israel’, ‘sent of the function of religious practices. I They need watching. PN

Interview November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 21 Does Psychiatry Medicalize Normality? Ronald Pies MD argues that it doesn’t.

“If sick men fared just as well eating and drinking and living exactly as 2.) The assertion that a condition or state of affairs requires healthy men do… there would be little need for the science [of medicine].” the services of a nurse or physician; – Hippocrates 3.) The assertion that a condition is due to disturbed physiol- ogy, a chemical imbalance, or some other bodily defect; or here has been a great deal of controversy surrounding 4.) The assertion that a condition requires treatment, such as the recent release of the DSM-5: the fifth edition of medication, Electro-Convulsive Therapy, etc. Tthe Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disor- ders, the orthodox reference work for psychiatric diagnosis. We are not helped very much here by scholars who have Critics claim that it ‘medicalizes’ normal human emotions and attempted a definition of ‘medicalization’. For example, the reactions. Yet this claim has been subject to very little logical medical sociologist Peter Conrad writes in his book The Med- analysis. For the proposition ‘psychiatry is medicalizing nor- icalization of Society (2007), “‘Medicalization’ describes a process mality’ to be true, we would need, first, adequate definitions of by which non-medical problems become defined and treated as the terms ‘medicalizing’ and ‘normality’; and second, convinc- medical problems, usually in terms of illness and disorders.” ing evidence that psychiatry is actually doing what the proposi- (p.4.) But this definition is transparently circular; that is, it tion asserts. Yet both elements turn out to be problematic. In assumes that a certain class of conditions are ‘non-medical’, but this article, I argue that the claim that ‘psychiatry medicalizes then, for whatever reason, come to be viewed as ‘medical’, yet it normality’ is based on certain questionable assumptions and provides no necessary and sufficient criteria by which these two confusions, and that DSM-5 is also a relatively conservative classes ‘non-medical’ and ‘medical’ are to be defined. Moreover, document with respect to the creation of new categories of dis- the author states, “I am not interested in adjudicating whether order. any particular problem is really a medical problem. This is far beyond the scope of my expertise…” Thus, he acknowledges his What Does ‘Medicalize’ Mean? inability to adjudicate the validity of the claim ‘X is really a med- To start with, based on my reading of many posts and arti- ical problem’, while simultaneously defining ‘medicalization’ in cles critical of psychiatry, the term ‘medicalize’ seems to be terms of conditions that are ‘medical’ or ‘non-medical’! used in at least four ways, to denote: That famous critic of psychiatry, the late Dr Thomas Szasz, highlighted the fundamental philosophical problem Conrad’s 1.) The inappropriate labeling of a normal condition or formulation raises. Szasz wrote, “The concept of medicalization normal ‘problem of living’ as a disease, disorder, or illness; rests on the assumption that some phenomena belong in the

22 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 domain of medicine and some do not. Accordingly, unless we agree on clearly defined criteria that define membership in the class called ‘disease’ or , ‘medical problem’ it is fruitless to debate whether any particular act of medicalization is ‘valid’ or not.” COM (The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays, . p.xiii, 2007.) CREVADO While I have radically different views from Szasz . on mental illness, I believe he was entirely correct in this particular claim. Indeed, the problem for those who argue that psychiatry is medicalizing normal human conditions is precisely what Szasz LEASE VISIT VADIM

anticipates: there has never been, nor is there now, 2013. P any universal agreement on membership of the class called ‘disease’. The denotation of the term OZMOROV ‘disease’ has always been in flux, if not in overt dis- D pute, even during the time of Hippocrates. Con- ADIM sider for example this rather breathtakingly broad © V definition of ‘disease’ from the 8th edition of Harri- ARTOON son’s Principles of Internal Medicine (1977): “The C clinical method has as its object the collection of accurate data impermissibly planted a tree on his property when there are no concerning all the diseases to which human beings are subject; clearly established property lines. (However, this doesn’t mean namely, all conditions that limit life in its powers, enjoyment, and that we can’t make reasoned, empirically-grounded judgments duration.” (p.1, italics mine.) The editors go on to say that the as to what conditions merit medical evaluation or treatment.) physician’s “primary and traditional objectives are utilitarian – There is also a problem with the claim that psychiatry the prevention and cure of disease and the relief of suffering, imposes ‘the medical model’ on ‘perfectly normal problems of whether of body or of mind…” (ibid.) living’. When critics of psychiatry use the term ‘medical model’ Note that in this description of disease, there is no implica- in a derisive way, they seem to have in mind what Shah and tion that disease refers to bodily pathology alone. The emphasis, Mountain describe as a “paternalistic, inhumane and reduction- rather, is on the presence of suffering and incapacity (“condi- ist” model of understanding illness (‘The Medical Model Is tions that limit life in its powers”). It is fascinating to note that in Dead – Long Live The Medical Model’, The British Journal of the 14th edition of Harrison’s Principles (1997), the unmodified Psychiatry, #191, 2007). Yet as they point out, the medical model term ‘disease’ does not even appear in the index, nor – so far as I needn’t have these characteristics. Understood more broadly, it can tell – is the term actually defined in the entire text. might simply denote “a process whereby, informed by the best All this leads us to an inescapable conclusion: that unless we available evidence, doctors advise on, coordinate or deliver inter- have a universally recognized ‘taxon’ – a set whose member- ventions for health improvement” (ibid). ship is defined by necessary and sufficient criteria – there is no In any case, it seems clear that the term ‘medicalization’ has test to determine what does or does not lie within the bounds many possible meanings, so when critics accuse psychiatry of of the category ‘disease’ (ie, as a medical problem). Therefore, ‘medicalizing’ normality, it is far from clear what they mean. arguments about psychiatry’s medicalizing normality cannot be settled through scientific methods. Rather, such debates are Problems With ‘Normality’ essentially political-rhetorical exercises, not arguments about If ‘medicalization’ is difficult to define, the term ‘normality’ empirically verifiable claims. Of course, this doesn’t mean that is even more problematic and elusive, if not hopelessly vague. It the debate is unimportant, or without practical implications for seems to have an almost limitless range of meanings; for example: our classification of psychiatric diseases. Paradoxically, those who argue that psychiatry medicalizes 1.) The usual state of affairs in ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ persons normality but who simultaneously assert that there is no clear (whatever ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ mean); demarcation between normality and abnormality effectively 2.) Any condition or set of conditions that occur with high fre- refute their own argument. For if there are no absolute, cate- quency, or more often than not, in most populations; gorical boundaries separating ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’, then 3.) The inherent qualities and characteristics of most human the claim ‘psychiatry is medicalizing normality’ cannot logi- beings. cally be sustained. That is to say, if ‘normality’ has no precise boundary in the medical realm – including psychiatric medi- The philosopher Roger Aboud has highlighted the difficul- cine – then there can be no verifiable medicalization of nor- ties in defining ‘normality’, noting that it may be a mathemati- mality. Neither can there be a fact-based demonstration of cal, evaluative, or biological term. Specifically, he writes, “The psychiatry’s alleged ‘diagnostic imperialism’, nor its supposed biological concept of normality is problematic because it refers creation of diagnostic ‘false positives’. Such claims are no more to the subjective meaning of ‘healthy’ and may not point to the verifiable than a landowner’s complaint that someone has average, majority, or ideal… Behavioral concepts of normality

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 23 also suffer from subjective meaning and are contextually prob- cians were the key to understanding medicalization. Illich... lematic, related to definitions of average, majority, or ideal.” used the catchy but misleading phrase ‘medical imperialism’. It (‘Wachbroit’s “Normality and the Significance of Difference”’ soon became clear, however, that medicalization was more 2008, accessible at driftingconsciousness.blogspot.com.) complicated than the annexation of new problems by doctors In sum, the two elements in the claim that ‘psychiatry is med- and the medical profession. In cases like alcoholism, medical- icalizing normality’ are so semantically diverse as to be nearly ization was primarily accomplished by a social movement indecipherable. It is therefore nearly impossible to determine [Alcoholics Anonymous]…” (The Medicalization of Society, p.6.) whether psychiatry is actually doing what the proposition asserts. Furthermore, while it is arguably the case that many chal- lenging aspects of the human condition lie outside the purview No Extra Pathologies of medical diagnosis and treatment – everyday sadness or fleet- It is also noteworthy that DSM-5 does not appreciably ing anxiety, for example – there is also a flip-side to the claim increase the number of diagnoses contained in DSM-4, accord- that too many conditions are being medicalized. This is nicely ing to an official release by the American Psychiatric Associa- expressed by Vikki Stefans, MD, Associate Professor of Pedi- tion (Dec. 1, 2012). Indeed, a well-informed official connected atrics and Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Reha- with DSM-5 informed me that it contains fewer disorders in bilitation at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences: total than DSM-4. Based on this fact alone, it is hard to make the charge that psychiatry medicalizes normality stick. More- “a person is labeled mean and hateful when they are really terribly over, while DSM-5 does create some new and controversial cat- depressed and irritable… or… a child is labeled lazy, considered the class egories, such as ‘Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder’, it clown, or seen as an academic problem – maybe even suspended or put in also turned down several proposed illnesses, such as ‘Anxious special education – when they have an undiagnosed specific learning dis- Depression’, ‘Hypersexual Disorder’, and ‘Parental Alienation ability or [ADHD]… A child returning to school after a concussion or Syndrome’ – diagnoses which might be interpreted as extend- brain injury still has a good chance of being labeled lazy or uncooperative ing the reach of psychopathology into the realm of normality. when they can’t perform at their previous level. Kids with spina bifida or Similarly, several other conditions that had been proposed for [cerebral palsy] even have parents who think they are lazy for not main- inclusion, such as ‘Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome’ and ‘Inter- taining their posture or turning a foot in or out because ‘they can do it net Use Gaming Disorder’, were relegated to Section 3 of when they want to’. And how about ‘she’s just a little shy’ being applied to DSM-5; ie., conditions that “require further research before a case of elective mutism that is totally limiting and impairing a person’s their consideration as formal disorders.” Finally, the historical life? Sometimes, people want to normalize pathology, too!” subtypes of schizophrenia – paranoid, catatonic, disorganized, (Personal communication, 4/29/13.) etc. – have been eliminated. Overall, these trends do not point to increasing medicalization of normality. There may, indeed, be good and bad forms of medicalizing, That said, I believe that the diagnostic threshold for some as Erik Parens, a senior research scholar at The Hastings DSM disorders continues to be set too low. For example, my Center, has argued. For example, applying the medical model colleagues and I believe that the two week minimum duration to alcohol addiction might be an example of good medicalizing; criterion for diagnosing Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is whereas applying it, say, to the feelings of sadness one experi- often too brief, giving clinicians too little time to judge the ences upon the break-up of an intimate relationship, might be patient’s response to a major loss – whether in the context of considered a bad form of medicalizing. In any case, as Parens recent bereavement, job loss, divorce, or any other major life rightly observes, “the idea of medicalization depends upon the stressor (see Lamb K., Pies R., Zisook S., ‘The Bereavement notion that medicine has ‘proper’ goals, which are visible to Exclusion for the Diagnosis of Major Depression: To be, or those with knowledge of the essence of medicine… [but] one not to be’, Psychiatry, 7(7), 2010). Furthermore, the diagnostic needs a narrow conception of those goals to get traction for the criteria for MDD are so broad as to create an overly-heteroge- medicalization critique. Without a narrow conception, one neous population identified with the illness. How useful is it to can’t restrict the range of the targets that medicine ‘properly’ bracket somebody who has been depressed for two weeks fol- aims at.” (‘On Good and Bad Forms of Medicalization’, lowing a bereavement with patients who have had symptoms Bioethics, 27(1), 2013.) Yet if, as I believe, the broad and overar- of depression for over a year? ching goal of medicine as a whole and psychiatry in particular is the relief of suffering and incapacity, it would seem that the Conclusion range of targets for medical intervention is wide indeed. So, In my view, the term ‘medicalization’ has become a kind of while the term ‘medicalizing’ may be useful in calling our atten- rhetorical Rorschach test: it evokes whatever political, social, tion to trends in medical diagnosis, it greatly oversimplifies the or philosophical position the reader happens to hold or wants realities of medical care and human suffering. to advocate. It is not a scientific term, nor one that can be oth- © DR RONALD PIES 2013 erwise defined according to widely accepted empirically- Ronald Pies, Professor of Psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical Uni- derived principles. Furthermore, to the extent that the term versity and Tufts University, is the author of The Three-Petalled ‘medicalization’ can be meaningfully defined, it is by no means Rose, and other books of philosophy. clear that physicians alone bear responsibility for the phenom- enon. In this respect, I’m in agreement with Peter Conrad, • Many thanks to Eric Parens PhD, and to Vikki Stefans MD, who writes, “Many of the earliest studies assumed that physi- for their collegial assistance with aspects of this article.

24 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Our philosophical science correspondent Massimo Pigliucci asks What Hard Problem? Science he philosophical study of con- as on yours): triangles are characterized by is like is an experience – which means that it sciousness is chock full of thought angles, dimensions, and the ratios among makes no sense to ask how and why it is Texperiments: John Searle’s Chinese their sides, but definitely not by colors. possible in any other senses but the ones Room, David Chalmers’ Philosophical The same, I am convinced, goes for just discussed. Of course an explanation Zombies, Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room, Chalmers’ hard problem (or Nagel’s ques- isn’t the same as an experience, but that’s and Thomas Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a tion, and so on). The hard problem is often because the two are completely indepen- bat?’ among others. Many of these experi- formulated as the problem of accounting for dent categories, like colors and triangles. It ments and the endless discussions that fol- how and why we have phenomenal experi- is obvious that I cannot experience what it low them are predicated on what Chalmers ence. Chalmers and Nagel think that even is like to be you, but I can potentially have famously referred as the ‘hard’ problem of when all the scientific facts are in (which will a complete explanation of how and why it consciousness: for him, it is ‘easy’ to figure take a lot more time, by the way) we will still is possible to be you. To ask for that expla- out how the brain is capable of perception, be missing something fundamental. This led nation to also somehow encompass the information integration, Chalmers to endorse a form of dualism, experience itself is both incoherent, and an attention, reporting on and Nagel to reject the current sci- illegitimate use of the word ‘explanation’. mental states, etc, entific understanding (which At this point the gentle reader may even though amounts to pretty much the smell echos of Daniel Dennett’s or Patricia this is far same thing, really). Churchland’s ‘deflationary’ or ‘elimina- from being Let’s unpack this. tivist’ responses to Chalmers & co. That, accom- Why phenomenal con- however, would be a mistake. Unlike Den- plished at sciousness exists is a nett, I don’t think for a moment that con- the typical question for sciousness is an ‘illusion’; and unlike moment. evolutionary biology. Churchland I reject the idea that we can What is Consciousness is a bio- (or that it would be useful to) do away with ‘hard’, claims logical phenomenon, like concepts such as consciousness, pain, and the man of the blood circulation, so its the like, replacing them with descriptions p-zombies, is to appearance in a certain lineage of neurobiological processes. On this I’m account for phenomenal of hominids seems to be squarely a squarely with Searle when he said that experience, or what philoso- matter for evolutionary biologists to con- “where consciousness is concerned, the phers usually call ‘qualia’: the ‘what is it sider (they also have a very nice story to tell existence of the appearance is the reality” like’, first-person quality of consciousness. about the evolution of the heart). Not that (chew on that for a bit, if you don’t mind). I think that the idea of a hard problem of I expect an answer any time soon, and pos- Consciousness as we have been dis- consciousness arises from a category mis- sibly ever. Historical questions about cussing it is a biological process, explained take. I think that in fact there is no real dis- behavioral traits are notoriously difficult to by neurobiological and other cognitive tinction between hard and easy problems of tackle, particularly when there are so few mechanisms, and whose raison d’etre can in consciousness, and the illusion that there is (any?) other species to adequately compare principle be accounted for on evolutionary one is caused by the pseudo-profundity that ourselves with, and when there isn’t much grounds. To be sure, it is still largely myste- often accompanies category mistakes. that the fossil record can tell us about it, rious, but (contra Dennett and Churchland) A category mistake occurs when you try either. Second, how phenomenal conscious- it is no mere illusion (it’s too metabolically to apply a conceptual category to a given ness is possible is a question for cognitive expensive, and it clearly does a lot of impor- problem or object, when in fact that con- science, neurobiology and the like. If you tant cognitive work), and (contra Chalmers, ceptual category simply does not belong to were asking how the heart works, you’d be Nagel, etc.) it does not represent a problem the problem or object at hand. For turning to anatomy and molecular biology, of principle for scientific naturalism. instance, if I were to ask you about the and I see no reason things should be differ- © PROF. MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI 2013 color of triangles, you could be caught off ent in the case of consciousness. Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at guard and imagine that I have some bril- But once you have answered the how the City University of New York. He is the co- liant, perhaps mystical, insight into the and the why of consciousness, what else is editor, with Maarten Boudry, of Philosophy nature of triangles that somehow makes the there to say? “Ah!” exclaim Chalmers, of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the category ‘color’ relevant to their descrip- Nagel and others, “You still have not told Demarcation Problem (University of Chica- tion as geometrical figures. But of course us what it is like to be a bat (or a human go Press). His philosophical musings can be this would be a mistake (on my part as well being, or a zombie), so there!” But what it found at www.rationallyspeaking.org

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 25 Thoughts on Oughts Stephen Anderson reflects on responses to Hume’s argument that we can’t derive moral duties from facts. t’s Christmas season again. Among the many charms of the in moral philosophy,” (The Is-Ought Question, 1969), because if holiday season is the proliferation of advertisements for it could be solved, we could prove to be rational a host of fun- Ivarious kinds of charitable causes. Sometimes these damental judgments upon which our society rests, including requests are framed gently, as requests to extend the joy of the everything from the rule of law, to medical and technological holiday season to less fortunate others, and sometimes they’re ethics, to interpersonal relations, to the justification of basic more impassioned pleas to ‘share our bounty’ with the local human rights. However, honest assessment forces us to admit needy. In a few cases, the solicitations may degenerate into a that at present, things in this field remain pretty vexed. kind of poverty porn, bombarding us with pictures of the war- maimed or fly-covered faces of starving orphans. Guilt, it Morality on the Chopping Block seems, can be good advertising. Why is this? Well, this philosophical problem was first Does it matter whether we are gently implored or violently posed (although not caused) by David Hume. He did it more shocked into giving? If we ought to do something for the poor, or less accidentally, so to speak, in a sort of ‘aside’ in his Trea- then should not their need be sufficient reason? But how do we tise of Human Nature (1739). There he wrote, really know what our duty is? Charity organizations may take our duty to help others for “In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always granted, but a good many people do not. They are not at all remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of certain that just because they have some money, they ought to reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations con- be doling it out. “After all,” these people might say, “I work as cerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that hard as anyone, and I earn what I have. In any case, those instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with people live far away, and I have neither caused their plight nor no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This made it any worse. They are strangers to me, who have no change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as direct connection to me one way or the other. My links to this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis them are thin at best. What makes it my duty to pry open my necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time own wallet and deprive myself and my family of our comforts that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, to serve the interests of such alien others?” how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely Now before we come down on these folks as hard-hearted different from it.” (p.335) Scrooges, we should pause. For which of us has not asked our- selves similar questions when called upon to sacrifice in the Now this may be a bit tough to decode, at first, but what name of some greater good? Which one of us does not walk by Hume was saying is actually pretty easy to articulate. He was the occasional street-person; decline to add a dollar to our gro- pointing out that morality does not come from empirical cery bill for the food bank; or cast a skeptical eye when some observations. No matter that what one says is factually true pitch-person for a charity group shows up at the door? Perhaps “Bah humbug!” we all have doubts. Maybe we should rather ask ourselves, Alistair Sim as What is this nebulous sense of guilt we get when we pass up a Ebeneezer chance at giving? Or, on the other hand, What is this free- Scrooge, suffering floating, undefined sense of well-being we get when we some- compassion fatigue at times give? How legitimate is the feeling of moral obligation? Christmas, again How great really is our achievement when we bow to it? Whence comes the sense of duty? Generally, why is it that human beings seem to feel we ‘owe’ others certain kinds of things, and that refusal to recognize this feeling is some kind of failing? In short, how does the factual realization of other peo- ples’ needs get connected with the value judgment that I have obligation to do something about it? Where’s the logic here? The question is not self-serving, nor idle. There are good philosophical reasons to be skeptical of the tendency to feel ‘oughtness’ in the face of particular kinds of facts. The hesitant charity-donor is not the only person who thinks so. Moral philosophers have really struggled with the question of whether or not empirical judgments (about facts) have any necessary connection with value judgments (about duties). In fact, W.D. Hudson has rightly called this “the central problem

26 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 about the world, that does not go one step in the direction of showing that one has any right to tell other people, or oneself, what morally ought to be the case. He pointed this out because he didn’t like the ‘Natural Law’ moralists of his day: that is, he didn’t like people saying, “This or that seems so to me, and therefore you have a duty to see things the same way, and to act as I want you to act.” He wanted to show that even if the facts were agreed upon, there was no logical reason why these facts obliged anyone to the same moral conclusions – or, indeed, to any. But Hume got more than he bargained for. As his later writ- ing makes clear, he anticipated that skepticism about the objec- tivity of moral values would logically lead us to the conclusion that moral judgments are emotive: merely statements about how we feel about certain things, not statements about the indepen- dent and ultimate truth of things. He didn’t think this would prove to be any kind of problem, because he thought we all have essentially the same kinds of emotions about morality, so moral- ity would not go awry on a social scale as a result. Subsequently, though, emotivism did not prove very durable, partly because the range of things that people could call ‘moral’ turned out to be much greater than Hume imag- ined. Later moral philosophers came to see that Hume had effectively cut off the realm of empirical observation from the realm of ethical determination: there was no longer a clear way to find moral judgments in factual ones. Philosophers dubbed this realization ‘Hume’s Guillotine’, in honour of its founder. COM . A Persistent Problem Today, ‘the ought-is controversy’, or the ‘fact-value distinc- SIMONANDFINN tion’ as it is also known, remains. Most simply put, it is the observation that it is utterly illogical to deduce a moral judg- ment from a statement of fact. That something is so is one LEASE VISIT kind of judgment; that something should be so is another – and 2013 P there is no necessary link between the two, even when they ELDER refer to the same object. So for example, one may observe the F

fact that children around the world are starving; but the fact ELISSA

itself does not tell us what to do about the fact – whether to © M shell out our cash, campaign for economic reform, create busi- ARTOON ness opportunities for the poor, depose a tyrant, or whatever. C Even more significantly, it doesn’t go one step in the direction INN + F of telling us we have any duty whatsoever to do anything about IMON the situation at all. It is merely a description. However, to say S we ought to do something about the situation described requires a prescription: but there is no moral duty logically which we regard as retrograde impulses that civilized people required by any purely factual statement. do well to ignore. Add to this the difficulty that there are Of course we are bound to feel the unfairness of this, and in sophisticated rationales provided by the Nietzscheans, Randi- the face of, say, the starvation of children, any decent person is ans, Social Darwinists or Amoralists, which argue that moral bound to object that to do nothing is morally hideous. How- judgments are primitive, unnecessary, or even counterproduc- ever, all our outrage does not take us one step in the direction tive to human development, and we have an increasingly of showing that this moral outrage is logically justified. Morality, impressive case undermining our instinctive belief in the according to the ought-is controversy, simply comes from a objectivity of our moral judgments. different ‘place’ than facts. Nor is it any good to argue that it is an empirical fact that people feel moral outrage; for even if that Solving ‘Oughtness’ were true in every case, that observation would not tell us A variety of philosophers have attempted to dispel the con- whether or not the outrage was justified or misguided. After troversy. We can’t look at all of the strategies here, but I would all, there might be instincts which many of us have – like, say like to pick a representative sampling of the very best criti- the instinct toward violence or the desire to steal from others – cisms of the Ought-Is problem, and then show why each fails.

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 27 Those with which we cannot deal here generally fail in even track of the money altogether, the gambler would remain more obvious ways, or fail in some variation of the ways under some kind of obligation to square up with his fellows – explored below. and there’s nothing in his cases that shows why there would be. Let’s begin with one of the most famous, which was devised Margolis is simply bluffing. by John Searle in ‘How to Derive Ought from Is’, The Philo- Finally, let us look at a more winsome solution, proposed by sophical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1 (1964). Searle’s proposed solu- R.S. Peters. Peters thought that maybe there is something tion looks like this: intrinsic to the way people talk to each other that binds us to an ‘ought’. He said that a person who asks ‘What ought I to 1. Jones said, “I promise to give you, Smith, $5.00.” do?’ is asking for reasons to adopt one alternative or another. 1a. Other things being equal He explains, 2. Jones promised to give Smith $5.00 3. Jones undertook an obligation to give Smith $5.00 “A person who uses the discourse of practical reason seriously is commit- 3a. Other things being equal ted to choosing rather than plumping, the notion ‘ought’ being more or 4. Jones is under an obligation to give Smith $5.00 less equivalent to the notion of there being reasons for something. Basic, 4a. Other things being equal therefore, to the notion of acting with reason is the very formal principle 5. Jones ought to pay Smith $5.00. of no distinctions without differences…to use practical discourse seriously is to be committed to the search for such reasons… without this presuppo- Searle thinks that promising is a specific case in which sition the discourse would lack point.” (Ethics and Education, 1966, p.121.) ‘ought’ is both a description of what has been done and a pre- scription of moral duty for whomever did the promising: it is Peters is essentially arguing that anyone who even poses the an ‘ought’ bundled together with an ‘is.’ If you promise, you question ‘What ought I to do?’ has already joined a language place at least an ‘institutional’ duty upon yourself to keep that game in which reasons are expected to be supplied. Such a promise, he thinks. person is then ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’: she has to accept But is that right? It’s hard to see why it is. If promising that certain courses of action will turn out to be ‘better’ than depends for its integrity upon a person believing in the institu- others according to moral reasons, and hence, she somehow tion or ‘word-game’ in which it is embedded, then surely its ought to conform her behavior to one of these courses of action. reach goes no further than the game itself. If I decide that the Peters’ key line is: “the notion ‘ought’ being more or less best way to ‘win the game’ is to be the one person left free to equivalent to the notion of there being reasons for something.” break my word while others think they remain bound, then Yes, but ‘What ought I to do?’ can be read two ways: it can be there isn’t a larger set of moral rules outside of the ‘promising read as a moral question (as in, ‘What is the morally best choice game’ to show that I am doing anything wrong, objectively of action here?’) or it can be read merely as a practical question speaking. So Searle cannot show that it is objectively wrong to about how to get what one wants. There may indeed be reasons break a promise. He can show it messes up the game of promis- in both cases, but they are reasons of very different kinds: the ing, but this is short of showing it’s wrong in a wider sense. former prescriptive of moral behavior, the latter descriptive of the However, Searle’s is not the only game in town. We get most practical route to some goal. By failing to distinguish the another from Joseph Margolis. He writes, two, Peters has simply begged the essential question. Because it is Christmas, let us be charitable, and grant that “I cannot see how anyone can deny this who reflects on the significance of Peters is right to think that the person who asks, ‘What ought I what is common (in the copula ‘ought’) in saying to a morning angler, to do?’ is asking for moral rather than merely practical reasons. ‘The sun ought to rise before six this morning,’ and saying to a penitent In some cases, that will doubtless be true. But still there’s noth- gambler, ‘You ought to pay back the money you’ve taken...’” ing in the fact that a person expresses a desire for moral reasons (Life Without Principles, 1996, p.77.) to guarantee that reality is able to provide them. We may ask for unicorns too; that does not mean we shall have them. But in this the mistake is even more obvious. If a fisherman All these thinkers have missed a very important point: supposes that the sun will rise, this does not even impinge on ‘ought’ isn’t one word, but several. On the one hand, there is the moral world. He’s not saying, “The sun is morally oblig- the prudential ‘ought’, as in, ‘You ought to move your chess ated to rise for me,” but rather, “It is very likely that the sun piece here, if you want to win’. Then there is the probabilistic will rise before six, since it did that yesterday,” or something ‘ought,’ as in ‘The sun ought to rise tomorrow’, or ‘You ought like that. This is not the same meaning as the moral sense of not to expect to win the lottery’. There is the moral ‘ought’ of ‘ought’. The case of the gambler is even more confused, for it course, as in ‘You ought to love your neighbour’, but this is is not at all clear that a gambler has any moral duty at all to decidedly not the same as the other two. It does not come close repay his winnings. Although gambling itself is often regarded to meaning, ‘If you treat your neighbour well, things will work as a morally dubious activity (Margolis clearly thinks it is, if his out well for you’ or ‘You will probably come to treat your neigh- gambler is ‘penitent’), it is totally unclear what would back up bour well’ or even ‘Now that you have joined the ‘neighbour- such a duty. It’s not enough if the gambler fears being barred hood’ game, you are committed to treating your neighbour well’. from the table, or if he fears his kneecaps being broken by a The moral ‘ought’ is stronger than that. It implies, ‘Whether or thug, for these are not moral considerations, only practical not it seems likely you will do x or y, whether or not you think ones. Margolis needs to show that even if the casino had lost some rules of the game require you to do x or y, and whether or

28 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 not you stand to gain some advantage from your actions, still about existence. For example, if we believe in the existence of you ought to do x or y – because in some much more ultimate some kind of Supreme Being (and most particularly, one con- and conclusive sense, it simply is the right thing to do.’ cerned with morality) then it becomes reasonable to speak of a supreme moral order reflecting this Being’s identity, character ‘Ought’ By Force and expressed wishes, or perhaps with natural laws established The aforementioned ‘oughts’ are the major kinds used in by that Being. Not only so, but on this basis appeals may be attempts to respond to Hume’s problem. But maybe there is made by individuals and minorities for concessions against the one more kind of ‘ought’ that is being challenged by Hume’s majority, and talk of things like natural rights and moral duties Guillotine. Unlike the earlier alternatives, this kind isn’t in any becomes possible. On the other hand, if we believe in no such sense a rational ‘ought’; but we can hardly avoid mentioning it, thing – that is, if we believe that physics is all there is – then all because it is so influential. It appears when people start to we can do is describe the features of various kinds of morality think that just because some particular group of people (read sociologically – as things that different groups of people ‘our society’, ‘our laws’, ‘our traditions’, ‘civilization’, ‘sane happen to have done, in different periods of history. But then people like us’, and so forth) do factually believe something, the problem is that we have no basis to say whether or not they then, magically it becomes an ‘ought’ simply by virtue of that should continue to do those things. There’s nothing inherent in belief. I call this the power ‘ought’, because ultimately it rests on a description of a historical phenomenon that magically con- the raw power of a majority or an authority of some kind. It verts it into an ethical imperative. just assumes an easy link between the ‘is’ fact of some agree- In the absence of any ultimate Guarantor, then, morality ment that holds among some set of people, and an obligation itself becomes permanently provisional and dependent on the for dissenting voices to knuckle under to the claimed ‘oughtness’ of their agreement. The power ought has no rational or moral justi- fication, but unlike the prudential or probabilistic oughts, the power ought is not benign, for since it appeals to no coherent rationale, it is not open to critique by reason, and indeed, ordinarily eschews the exchange of reasons in favour of force. Because of this, it is also blind to its own unjustifiability, and lacks any incentive to be self-critical. Often (as in the case of moral pragmatism, for instance) it simply takes for granted its own particular concep- tion of human flourishing, and attributes irrational- Ought the ity or perversity to anyone who fails to agree with gambler to pay its concept. However, it is important to realize that it back? practitioners of such a position have not solved the ought-is problem. In fact, they have mistaken the fact of popularity or power for the moral justification of pronouncements made by that power.

What ‘Ought’ We to Think? Demonstrating the moral oughtness of things on the basis of impartial empirical or rational judgments coercive force available to arbitrary authorities or majorities. remains the major task, and the major problem, of modern They can, and will, continue to command the sort of force to moral philosophy. The truth of the matter, it seems to me, is control others that is denied to individuals and minorities. that Hume was right: factual judgments by themselves do not jus- What ought to disturb us even more, is the realization that tify moral ones. Morality does not emerge logically from there is no longer a basis for a moral appeal outside of these empirical observations; nor even from sociological and anthro- arbitrary power-brokers, given that the ultimate truth of moral- pological studies; nor from historical characterizations of what ity is now simply power. Then it would be just as Nietzsche has been believed and done in the past; nor even from modern- maintained: all morality is simply a play for power, disguised in day opinion polls. It certainly does not appear hand-in-hand self-interested language games. Life’s ‘winners’ then make all with observations of what seems to work for some arbitrary the rules. And no examination of the facts will ever give us any social purpose, as moral pragmatists seem to vainly hope. reason to believe it ought to be otherwise. In contrast to all this, as Joseph Kaipuyil has observed, Obviously, the matter cannot rest here. And so the philo- “always, ontology precedes ethics, both in theory and in prac- sophical quest for an incontestable link between ‘is’ and tice.” (Critical Ontology, 2002, p.28.) What he is saying is that ‘ought’ continues. morality is based not on just any kind of neutral observations, © STEPHEN L. ANDERSON, 2013 but rather on what we believe to be true about the basic nature Stephen Anderson does what he ought to do by teaching high school of reality. Moral conclusions begin with fundamental premises philosophy classes in London, Ontario.

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 29 Has Philosophy Lost Its Way? John Lachs thinks it can get back on track.

hilosophy has lost its way. At one point, it was the queen of them. We do a better job criticizing each other, but no positive the sciences, but the sciences grew up and, like naughty truth emerges from the rubble of the systems. Disappointment Pchildren, came to believe they didn’t need her. Many once and cynicism abound as philosophers surrender the quest and thought she was the guide to life, rivaling religion but offering settle for work in logic or the history of thought. a more rational way. However, philosophy could not match the We should not be surprised at our inability to answer the emotional power of the offer of salvation. Then philosophy fell ultimate questions of existence, and we should not be disap- in love with physics and tried to imitate the precision of its pointed that our theories are only stabs in the dark. We are, inquiry. But it was incapable of discovering a single new fact. after all, finite beings – a fact we assert not as an excuse but as That’s when the siren sang and told philosophers to move an assessment of our chances of getting final answers. Yet there into the safe, sacred confines of the university. The siren is a great opportunity we overlook: we have, ready at hand, a explained that sufficient technical virtuosity would secure laboratory for learning something about the problems of life. philosophers an entire department in the knowledge factory. Each of us is a test subject in the great experiment of living. There would be jobs, and they would be accorded the same Each of us is in a position of getting answers to what is valuable honor as scientists (or almost the same). To be sure, they would in the world and what actions yield satisfaction in a more than have to teach a few students, but they could spend their time in temporary way. The choices we make from early childhood on the classroom discussing technique with little reference to results. reveal and revamp the values we hold dear. The infant’s love of To those who love philosophy, much of it spreads delight: it shiny objects is soon superseded by more permanent and reli- is an end in itself that is fun to do. But it should also be good able fascinations. Young people’s confidence in their strength or for something, and it is if viewed in the proper light. Neverthe- attractiveness gives way to a painful sense of limits. Self-seeking less, philosophy is always in crisis, and its death is frequently often yields lamentable results, as does mindless commitment to announced. Yet it is a survivor and tends to outlive its murder- unachievable tasks. As the pragmatists have pointed out again ers and morticians. The reason becomes obvious upon even and again, experience is a series of experiments. To learn from short reflection: at its best, philosophy deals with the most per- the experiments, we have to move a notch or two beyond turbu- sistent and most difficult questions of human life. In inquiring lent emotions: we need to be in sufficient possession of our- about the nature of mind, the foundation of knowledge, the jus- selves to gain calm understanding. For many, this is impossible tification of morality, the proper organization of the commu- without a healing distance, but it is more likely to occur if we nity, and the finality of death, we are at the limit of our capacity. enter the fray with the prior conviction that we are trying some- We have theories, but so far we have found no way to confirm thing that may not work.

30 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Many experiments fail and it is good that they do. Young people may try a night of drinking and know, by the middle of Be Not Afeared the next morning, that it is better to look for pleasure in other ways. There is always something to learn, either to avoid or to Be not afeared of thinking, replicate. Unfortunately, not everyone is a quick study. Cir- Or searching for the truth, cumstances may be so compelling that one has to resist seeing Prepare for the revision the lesson of the event, yet some people manage to go through Of dogmas held in youth. life making the same mistakes again and again. Individuals who Adopt a new perspective, start businesses repeat naïve errors, and second wives/husbands Immerse yourself in logic, often look and act strikingly like the first. And critically assess Of course it doesn’t have to be this way. We can learn about The deadly demagogic. our weaknesses and our values, and thereby acquire tools for a better life. The more consciously we approach the experiments, Examine your opinions, the more likely it becomes that, whether they succeed or not, Seek new ones if you please, we will profit by the undertaking. Here is where philosophers Resist indoctrination: come in. Because they specialize in the analysis of evidence and It spreads like a disease. the examination of values, they can offer a dispassionate, global view of proposed courses of action. They can help us to envis- Let reason be your mentor, age the likely consequences of what we do and understand the And keep an open mind, human responses to our experiments. They have useful things Reflect upon your principles, to say about the dangers of ideologies. Most important perhaps, Leave prejudice behind. they can draw on a vast tradition of successful lives by reference to which we can plan and execute our own. Read with discrimination, Of course, the credibility of philosophers is proportional to Let reason reign supreme, the visible relevance to their lives of what they claim to believe. And don’t discount the radical This places a heavy burden on anyone who would help with For being ‘too extreme’. vital decisions: those in need of assistance can reasonably ask, “How successful have you been in the experiments of life?” For what once seemed preposterous, This is the most frightening question for philosophers. If they To people just like you, don’t want to be convicted as frauds or charlatans, they had Has now achieved the status Of being clearly true: better be able to show the power of their ideas deployed first and foremost in their own lives. Philosophers who recommend The rights and needs of animals; charity have to be able to show what difference good works The move from faith to doubt; make to their lives. Friends of democracy must engage in civic The struggle for equality; conversations; pragmatists in projects of improvement. Once delusions of the devout. Thinkers who reject the significance of individuals cannot make an exception of themselves, and those who believe in So be not afeared of voicing immortality cannot act as if they’ve surmised that death fin- Your disagreeing cry, ishes it all. Most importantly, persons who claim to be devoted And be not too deferential, to science or reason must not act in haphazard or irrational Continue asking “Why?” ways. There are over 12,000 credentialed philosophers in the United States, and perhaps over 25,000 globally. How many of Be not afeared of thinking, this staggering number can hold themselves up as exemplars of And listen when I say, reason whose lives could be examined with the same profit as “Make strange the dogmas of the past, their teachings? How many would have reason to fear that Let reason guide your way.” they are no different from ordinary people, whose words and © LOUISE R. CHAPMAN 2013 deeds live in cozy disagreement? Louise Rebecca Chapman studies Philosophy at King's College London. The world is no less perplexing now than it has ever been. The proliferation of social workers, counselors, therapists, advi- knowledge factory is in the business of discovering new facts. sors, psychologists, psychiatrists and life coaches testifies to the The physical and the social sciences largely are, but art prac- desperate need of people for guidance, or at least intelligent tice and music composition are not. Philosophy belongs with advice. A vital job of philosophers consists precisely in providing these creative fields. Their products are gorgeous works of art such guidance, first for themselves and then for whoever feels and lovely music; its valued results consist of beautiful or at crushed by the pressures of the modern world. Philosophy has least satisfying lives. If philosophy took this turn, could anyone ample resources for this task: many of the great classics of the ever announce the death of philosophy? field are manuals for how to lead good lives. We need to refocus © DR JOHN LACHS 2013 our efforts and substitute concrete help for dreamy theorizing. John Lachs is Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt The time has come to understand that not every field in the University, Nashville.

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 31 What Did Mary Know? Marina Gerner on a thought experiment about consciousness.

magine a girl called Mary. She is a brilliant neuroscientist and a world expert on colour Ivision. But because she grew up entirely in a black and white room, she has never actually seen any colours. Many black and white books and TV programmes have taught her all there is to know about colour vision. Mary knows facts like the structure of our eyes and the exact wave- lengths of light that stimulate our retinas when we look at a light blue sky. One day, Mary escapes her monochrome room, and as she walks through the grey city streets, she sees a red apple for the first time. What changes upon Mary’s encounter with the red apple? Has Mary learnt anything new about the colour red upon seeing the colour for the first time? Since Mary already knew every- thing about the physics and biology of colour perception, she must surely have known all there is to know about the colour red beforehand. Or is it possible that some facts escape physical explanations? phers. Nowadays there are not many straightforward dualists (‘Physical’ in this sense refers to all the realms of physical sci- left, with the notable exception of David Chalmers – kudos to ence, including chemistry, biology, neuroscience, etc.). If Mary him. Descartes would have been proud of him, because the has learnt something new, then we can conclude that scientific dualist position goes right back to Descartes’ idea that the body explanations cannot capture all there is to know, argues Profes- is a different entity from the soul (mind). Descartes argued that sor Frank Jackson, who thought up this scenario in ‘Epiphe- they are two different substances. In-between the physicalists nomenal Qualia’, in The Philosophical Quarterly (1982). The and the dualists you will find proponents of supervenience theo- story of Mary is known as the ‘knowledge argument’ and it has ries. They argue that consciousness emerges from (aka fancy become one of the most prominent thought experiments in word ‘supervenes’) brain activity but is not reducible to it. For the philosophy of mind. the sake of this article I am going to focus on the opposing per- You might say, “Hang on a minute, how was it possible that spectives of physicalists and anti-physicalists, rather than on Mary grew up in a black and white room in the first place?” the more nuanced supervenience theories. (If you are inter- Never mind the first place. Some philosophers have put forth ested in supervenience, look up Sydney Shoemaker’s work.) that she wore special goggles. But this issue need not concern Jackson’s thought-experiment about Mary challenges physi- us, because philosophical thought experiments depend on logi- calism in the following way. Physicalists claim that physical sci- cal coherence rather than practical feasibility. Philosophers ence can fully explain consciousness. However, when Mary sees devise such narratives to think through an imagined situation, the red of the apple, says Jackson, she learns something new, so as to learn something about the way we understand things. despite having previously learnt all the physical facts about Thought experiments require no Bunsen burners or test tubes; colour vision. Thus, argues Jackson, Mary has come to know a they are laboratories of the mind. In thought experiments, non-physical fact; so proving that not all knowledge is physical. time travel is logically possible, but no philosophy professor is Jackson was not the first to challenge physicalism over the expected to travel back in time to prove their point. question of consciousness. Anyone who engages with the mind-body problem [ie, How do the mind and the brain Reinvigorating The Debate relate?] will discover that consciousness is almost always the The reason Professor Jackson devised the thought experi- pea on which the philosopher princess rests. Consciousness is ment involving Mary was to challenge the physicalist school of what keeps philosophers awake at night. In his famous article thought. In philosophy of mind debates, proponents of physi- ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’ (Philosophical Review, 4, 1974) calism argue that what really matters is physical matter. For the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote: “Without consciousness them, consciousness is all about the brain; or more specifically, the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With it is identical to the brain. Physicalists have formulated ‘identity consciousness it seems hopeless” – a great admission by one of theories’ that equate human consciousness with the human the key figures in the philosophy of mind. brain. Long before contemporary debates on the mind-body Nagel argued that it is impossible for human beings to know issue, physicalists were directly opposed by dualist philoso- what it would be like to be a bat. Certainly, bats have an idea of

32 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 what it feels like to be a bat on a daily basis. However, because our brains. We have no satisfactory understanding of why brain we have no sense equivalent to bats’ sonar, we cannot begin to processes produce the taste of chocolate, or the visual sensation imagine what it is like to use that sense. Yes, we can do our of seeing blue. If you hear a philosopher wonder “How can best to imagine ourselves hanging upside down in a pitch- colour perception arise from the soggy grey matter of our black cave, but even then we can only imagine this from a brains?” you will recognize that they’re acknowledging the human perspective, rather than from the perspective of a bat. ‘explanatory gap’. Generally, we lack any explanation of how a With this argument, Nagel was one of the first to reinvigorate phenomenal state is identical with a physical state of the brain. the debate in the second half of the twentieth century on how According to Levine, the difficulty of explaining conscious- consciousness may be explained, or rather, whether conscious- ness is unique. He says that we do not struggle to explain why ness can be explained at all. water is H2O, or why heat is molecular kinetic energy, in the same way that we struggle to explain why brain states are phe- Are Colours Physical? nomenal states. When Nagel wrote that we don’t have any idea of how to Another decade later, in 1995, Chalmers proposed a distinc- share the mental state of a bat, he was challenging the physical- tion between the ‘easy’ and the ‘hard’ problems of conscious- ists’ perspective that everything can be captured from a scien- ness in his book The Conscious Mind. Mental properties divide tific, objective point of view. Nagel argued that some facts can into phenomenal ones and psychological ones, argued instead only be captured from subjective points of view. Even if Chalmers, and the latter are far easier to explain than the we objectively know how the bat’s sonar system works and former because they don’t involve any deep metaphysical enig- enables the bat to avoid collisions, other questions remain mas. Easier aspects to explain include our ability to discriminate unanswered such as ‘What is it like to perceive the walls of a between different things, or to categorize them, or to remem- cave using a bat’s sonar system?’ This argument about the ‘what ber them. These easier aspects can be explained through physi- it is like’ subjective aspect of being a bat is different from Jack- cal accounts. According to Chalmers, the easy problem of con- son’s argument, because Jackson says we cannot explain our own sciousness is accounting for cognitive ‘abilities and functions’, ‘what it is like’ sensations, let alone those of another person, or and in order to explain them, one only needs to specify the a bat. While Nagel argues that the trouble with bats is that they mechanism that can perform the function. Meanwhile, the hard are too unlike us, Jackson thinks that this is hardly an objection problem of consciousness is to explain how it is that we experi- to physicalism, because physicalism makes no special claims ence phenomenal states at all: to explain why there is a certain about the extrapolative powers of human beings. Never mind feel to the phenomenal state of pain, for example. So even that we can’t understand or explain what it’s like to be a bat – though we might be able to explain that the body needs pain we don’t possess that kind of knowledge about ourselves either. for a particular function (i.e. as a warning system) we cannot According to Jackson, we can’t explain our own qualitative sen- explain how brain processing gives rise to a rich inner life. sations: what it is like to be happy and sad, or what it is like to hear a saxophonist play at night. (All these sensory aspects of The Physicalists Respond experience will from now on be called ‘phenomenal states’.) Nagel’s arguments kicked off the ‘what it is like’ subjectivity In 1974 Nagel thought about bats and so made his case debate; Jackson’s story about Mary has challenged physicalism arguing that physical knowledge does not explain phenomenal in relation to sensations; Chalmer’s ‘hard and easy problem’ states. In 1982, almost a decade later, Joseph Levine coined the and Levine’s ‘explanatory gap’ arguments try to highlight what expression ‘the explanatory gap’ to express the problem faced it is that we cannot explain. Now let us look at the ways in by any attempt to explain consciousness in physical terms. which physicalists have responded to the challenges that have Without wishing to reject physicalism altogether, Levine put been mounted against them. Let’s consider some of the reac- forward the idea that there is a gap in our ability to explain the tions Mary has received, and then proceed to a recent response connection between phenomenal states and the properties of to the knowledge argument called the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ (which is not as brain-racking as it sounds.) To begin with, some philosophers have simply doubted that Jackson’s argument is coherent. Mary doesn’t learn anything new, just because she would in fact know that the apple is red once she saw it, argues C.L. Hardin. Based on her complete physical knowledge of colour vision, Mary would see the red apple and joyfully exclaim, “Oh, so this is red!” If we were to show Mary a blue banana instead, she would not be fooled; she would know that it had the wrong colour, argues Daniel Den- What is it nett, in what he coined the ‘blue banana trick’. Hats off to like to Dennett for coming up with a fun name for his argument, but imagine both Hardin’s and Dennett’s arguments can be countered by yourself to saying that the experience of seeing red goes beyond the ability be a bat? to recognize red. Another philosopher, Owen Flanagan, plunges straight into human biology and argues that the phenomenal state of seeing

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 33 red is a physical event, and that an individual seeing red undergoes ‘red-channel acti- vation’. In order to be able to undergo red-channel activa- tion, a causal interchange between the person and an external red object is needed. In other words, the individual needs to be hooked up with a red thing so that experience of seeing red can be triggered. So phenomenal states of seeing red are physical events, because they require red- channel activation. According to Flanagan, what Mary goes through is a physical event. Two other arguments – ‘the expe- had complete knowledge about seeing red even in her mono- rience argument’ and ‘the ability argument’ – also build on the chrome room. But she did not have complete knowledge, he idea of a first-person perspective being a physical event. argues, because physicalism cannot explain phenomenal states The experience argument probably echoes the first doubt as it explains physical facts. that comes to your mind in relation to Jackson’s thought experiment, dear reader. Namely, the question whether one The Phenomenal Concept Strategy can know all there is to know by taking lessons and reading The most common responses philosophers of the physicalist books. David Lewis argues that you can’t learn certain things persuasion give to the knowledge argument are based on the by being told about the experience, however thorough your ‘new knowledge, old fact argument’. For instance, contempo- lessons may be. Some facts you can only learn by experience, rary physicalists such as David Papineau have formulated some- although they may nevertheless be physical facts. thing called the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ to counter anti- The experience argument can be extended into the ability physicalist arguments. Papineau denies Jackson’s distinction argument. Both Lewis and Laurence Nemirow claim that between physical and phenomenal facts or properties. Instead, when Mary sees red after her escape, her sensation of what it is he asserts that the knowledge argument itself provides “an like just means her acquiring certain practical abilities. Accord- excellent way of establishing the existence of distinctive phe- ing to Nemirow, knowing what an experience is like is the nomenal concepts” (Thinking About Consciousness, 2002). Papineau same as knowing how to imagine having that experience. claims that the difference between phenomenal and material According to Lewis, knowing what an experience is like is pos- concepts is a difference at the level of sense, not reference. In sessing the ability to recognize it, the ability to imagine it, and other words, phenomenal and material concepts refer to the the ability to predict one’s behaviour. Lewis eloquently same thing through different means. So proponents of the phe- explains that knowing what it is like is not knowing that – it is nomenal concept strategy argue that while our intuition for knowing how. some sort of dualism is correct, this intuition is due not to the Flanagan, meanwhile, distinguishes between ‘linguistic nature of phenomenal states, but rather to the concepts we use physics’ and ‘complete physics’ to say that there is no reason to to refer to them, in contrast to the concepts we use to refer to think that just because Mary is a leading expert on colour our brain states. vision she can express phenomenal states in the vocabulary of What exactly is a ‘phenomenal concept’? Well, it is some- physics. Mary being an expert on colour vision does not entail what akin to a picture. Think of mental representations of the that she or anybody else could express the phenomenal state of sort that can occur in thought. We do not have to think of seeing red in physicalist terms, or even more basically, in concepts in linguistic terms – which means concepts do not words, but phenomenal states are nevertheless physical states. have to be expressible in scientific language. However, Jackson responds that physical knowledge must be Papineau argues that we hold phenomenal concepts about complete knowledge, which means that it not only encapsulate phenomenal states we have experienced. For instance, we hold the physical world, but that it should also be able to express a phenomenal concept of the taste of chocolate or of the sound and explain all the facts about the physical world. of a drum. When Mary sees a red apple, argues Papineau, it To recap, Jackson’s purpose in conceiving the knowledge activates the relevant neural region in her brain. This activa- argument was to show that there are non-physical facts or tion can be compared to a reusable stamp. Following her origi- properties. His argument is that although Mary knows all the nal experience of red, Mary’s brain has acquired an ‘original’ physical facts about seeing red, she still learns a new fact when stamp from which to make future ‘moulds’, and after its origi- leaving her room and seeing something red. Jackson therefore nal activation this stamp can only be re-activated by the rele- concludes that there are facts that evade the physicalist theory. vant experience. So Mary can consequently imagine and According to Jackson, if physicalism was true, Mary must have introspectively classify experiences of red.

34 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Papineau holds that while humans require original external What We (Don’t) Know experiences of phenomena, one could conceive of creatures Consciousness is likely to always be somewhat mysterious. born with introspective imaginative abilities, who do not need This may be an unduly pessimistic view of our capacity to any specific experiences to set up those stamps. In those crea- articulate a truly comprehensive picture of the world and our tures the moulds necessary for seeing colours, and the disposi- place in it, admits Jackson: tions to use them, would be hard-wired. A creature like this would be able to imagine seeing something red without ever “But suppose we discovered living on the bottom of the deepest oceans a having seen something red. However, humans are not like this. sort of sea slug which manifested intelligence. Perhaps survival in the con- Papineau gives the example that although we might be capable ditions required rational powers. Despite their intelligence, these sea slugs of imagining seeing a red circle even though we have never have only a very restricted conception of the world by comparison with actually seen one before, purely by combining our previous ours, the explanation for this being the nature of their immediate environ- experience of seeing red with our previous experience of seeing ment. Nevertheless they have developed sciences which work surprisingly a circle, we cannot imagine the colour red without having first well in these restricted terms. They also have philosophers, called slugists. actually seen something red. Some call themselves tough-minded slugists, others confess to being soft- According to physicalists, phenomenal concepts have inim- minded slugists. The tough-minded slugists hold that the restricted terms itable features that make them distinct from all other concepts. (or ones pretty like them which may be introduced as their sciences What makes them special is the uniquely direct relation they progress) suffice in principle to describe everything without remainder. seem to provide for a person to their own mental state. When These tough-minded slugists admit in moments of weakness to a feeling we see red, we seem to be acquainted with the sensation that their theory leaves something out. They resist this feeling and their through the concept. For this reason, some philosophers opponents, the soft-minded slugists, by pointing out – absolutely correctly describe phenomenal concepts as ‘recognitional’, ‘demonstra- – that no slugist has ever succeeded in spelling out how this mysterious tive’ or ‘quotational’ concepts. residue fits into the highly successful view that their sciences have and are Phenomenal concepts offer this special intimacy (why not developing of how their world works. Our sea slugs don’t exist, but they drop the word ‘intimacy’ into a highly abstract discussion on might. And there might also exist super beings which stand to us as we knowledge?) because they refer to their referent directly. More stand to the sea slugs. We cannot adopt the perspective of these super precisely, phenomenal concepts are made out of instances of the beings, because we are not them, but the possi- phenomenal states to which they refer. So the phenomenal con- bility of such a perspective is, I think, an cept of seeing red is a vision of red in our imagination. This antidote to excessive optimism [con- means that phenomenal states are actually deployed while we cerning scientific explanations].” conceive phenomenal concepts. Papineau illustrates this feature From ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’ in particular to phenomenal concepts as opposed to physical con- The Philosophical Quarterly (1982) cepts with the example of an ache: we can think of an ache in material terms by envisioning brain activities, facial grimaces, or © MARINA GERNER 2013 the flinching of body parts; or we can think of the ache in terms Marina Gerner is a PhD stu- of what it would feel like for us to be in a state of pain – what it dent at the London School of would feel like for us to experience that ache. The first concept Economics, as well as a culture is purely functional or physical, whereas the second concept refers journalist and feature writer. to the pain phenomenally. It offers, to use Hume’s words, a ‘faint copy’ of the pain. Both concepts refer to the same ache; the difference lies in the way the state is conceptualized. This is a key argument physicalists use to say that actually, consciousness is something physical after all. Again, they say that our intuition for dualism is correct, but the dual- ism is actually only at the conceptual level, not on a metaphysical level. But there are potential problems with this idea. Would a phenomenal concept necessarily be a faint copy of a pain for, say, a doctor who deals with pain every day? And can such concepts really capture all there is to a phenomenal experience? If we could explain the sensation of seeing a red apple in scientific terms, maybe we could also explain the feeling of love with reference to the concept of a heat wave, as one proponent of physicalism has suggested. But I doubt that.

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 35 Brief Lives Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) Daphne Hampsonon the man many consider to be the father of existentialism.

øren Kierkegaard, the Danish thinker the bicentenary of self with this or that. It is to such writing that the existentialists whose birth we celebrate this year, was suspended were to owe so much, as Kierkegaard considers the human Sbetween two worlds. On the one hand in the face of the propensity to lose oneself amid the trivia of our lives. Thus he Enlightenment – with its devastating implications for classical delineates the different ‘stages’ or modes of life (aesthetic, ethi- Christianity, which had led others to try to adapt the faith – he cal, and potentially religious) in which human existence can be would point to Christian claims. On the other hand he too was framed. His target is ‘Christendom’, a world in which Christ- a child of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. In pursuit of ian faith has lost its edge, transmuted without remainder into the question as to what it would mean to be Christian within mere civilised living. modernity Kierkegaard created a fascinating and far-flung Concurrently with Fragments, Kierkegaard published a body of work, employing a novel and flamboyant literary style much different, phenomenological, exposition, The Concept of which would affect twentieth century literature, theology and Anxiety. Kant, Hegel and the great theologian Friedrich philosophy. Schleiermacher had all considered ‘Adam’ more or less a myth- ical figure. Lutheran tradition conjectured a ‘positive’ freedom Life and Work (freedom understood as identity with God), while the disobe- Born in 1813, Kierkegaard undertook the major part of his dience of the Fall represented separation and a concomitant work during a mere seven years (1842-49) in his thirties. Hav- anxiety. Schelling had faced the same dilemma as Kierkegaard: ing come from an evangelical background, his reading during how to validate human independence, choice and creativity, his student years led him to a point where the veracity of while acknowledging the human need for God. The context, Christian claims was called into question. His early work further, is that as to how to recast the conception of ‘original would represent a dialogue between a Christian position and sin’ given the dawning recognition of evolution and thus of an Enlightenment, or Kantian, position; the devil being Hegel there having been no Fall. Kierkegaard produces a remarkable who, translating transcendence into immanence in the unfold- work, plumbing the depths of human subjectivity. ing of history, had confused the two. Kierkegaard’s polemic In Works of Love – or, better translated, Love’s Deeds – (1847), was directed against Danish Hegelians and a church that had Kierkegaard gives us a beautiful book, again of a whole differ- reduced Christianity to a Christianised culture. ent genre (as indeed he published edifying discourses through- In Fear and Trembling (1843) Kierkegaard pits Abraham, who out these years). As God loves us agapeistically (uncondition- will obey the command of God, if necessary slaughtering Isaac ally, irrespective of our merits) so are we called to love our his son, against the Kantian presupposition that there can be no neighbour. The book is a strange composite of compassion for higher calling than the ethical imperative. Kant, too, had consid- others, evincing deep insight into human relations, together ered the akedah (the story of the binding of Isaac, Genesis 22), in with social views that must make us cringe. Thus Kierkegaard a passage Kierkegaard must have known. Hegel muddies the thinks a beggar should make himself scarce lest his presence water. Likewise, in Philosophical Fragments (1844), Kierkegaard disturb others’ faith in God’s goodness; a stance that was to contrasts the Socratic (and Enlightenment) position, in which all outrage among others Theodor Adorno. But Kierkegaard was truth is inherent to the learner (and we may supplement this by not callous. The world for him has become a ‘meanwhile’ in saying also that truth which is given with the world), with the light of God’s eternity, while before God humans enjoy a fun- Christian claim that ‘Truth’ (of a different order) was ‘given’ to damental equality. humankind at a particular moment in history, making Christian- The revolutionary year 1848 brought Kierkegaard to a new ity what Kant rightly called a ‘historical’ religion. pitch of intensity, bequeathing us some of his most remarkable Kierkegaard’s presuppositions here derive from the eigh- work. A monarchical conservative, Kierkegaard disdained in teenth century. Following Leibniz’s distinction between equal measure the patriotic fervour whipped up against Ger- absolute and historical truths, Lessing had spoken of the many in the dispute over Schleswig-Holstein and the strident “wide, ugly, ditch” that prevents a deduction of the absolute call for a new political order. His response to what he judged (God) from the contingencies of history (the man Jesus mass hysteria was, as he said, to make ‘his category’ that of ‘the Christ). Kierkegaard is in accord. But he will seek to cross the individual’, focussing in his writing on the self in its relation to ditch by a subjective movement of ‘faith’, which throws a line God. In The Sickness Unto Death (1849), a book about healing, across to the objective ‘Truth’ which is the Chalcedonian con- he conceives of the self as self-reflexive (as had Hegel), but for fession (AD 451) that Christ is both divine and human in one Kierkegaard the synthesis of body and spirit (or mind) which is persona (or entity). Kierkegaard hopes to validate Christian the self can only come about as one “rests transparently in faith in the face of a Feuerbachian reductionism (counting it a God”; a very Lutheran insight. human projection), newly on the scene. Kierkegaard’s post-Enlightenment recognition that we must In a work of two years later, the so-called ‘Postscript’ to be said to come into our own, in his case not only in relation to Fragments, Kierkegaard cashes out in existential terms what it others but to God, while concomitantly finding God funda- is to be a human being who, in each moment, while finding his mental to the self’s composition, makes his subtle conceptuali- identity in pursuing “the thought of eternal life” occupies him- sation of the self perhaps the finest in Christian tradition.

36 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Brief Lives

Peru.) While he predicted he would be “translated into other languages”, Kierkegaard would have been incredulous! In philosophy Kierkegaard’s work played a seminal role in that broad movement of thought known as ‘existentialism’. Heidegger was to acknowledge Kierkegaard’s masterly explo- ration of the human condition as one of ‘Angst’. Governed by contingency, yet in spirit soaring above the world, the human being finds himself torn asunder. He must come into his own within his situation of ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) in the world, facing death. Partly through Heidegger, but also directly, Sartre likewise came under Kierkegaard’s sway. His depiction of the human state as tossed between what it is to be pour soi (‘for itself’, creative yet anxious) and en soi (‘in itself’, content but inert) reflects the Kierkegaardian (and ultimately 2013 Lutheran) disjuncture between independence and identity. TRADIS

S Kierkegaard’s ‘stages’ are well captured by Albert Camus’ novel The Fall. The protagonist lives the ‘aesthetic’ life as, in a

THAMOS bar in foggy Amsterdam amidst the pimps and prostitutes, he © A © conspires to lose his ‘self’. We learn however that he had for- merly been a Paris lawyer, living the life of ‘ethical’ respectabil- ity. Witnessing a young woman throw herself into the Seine, IERKEGAARD K and hurrying by, he was forced to recognise the farce that was his self-congratulatory existence. (Compare Kierkegaard in

ORTRAIT OF Either/Or, 1842): “Forget… that there was piety in your soul P and innocence in your thought… doze your life away in the glittering inanity of the soirées, forget that there is an immortal Later work was to take on board an almost Augustinian sense spirit within you; and when wit grows mute there is water still (more commonly found in Catholicism) of progress in becom- in the Seine.”) Jean-Baptiste (significantly his name) keeps in a ing oneself as the self is drawn in love to God. It is brilliant, cupboard the stolen panel of the Van Eyck triptych depicting sensitive, deeply spiritual writing. Nevertheless such a concep- the just judges ‘on their way to meet the lamb’. Penitence and tion carries as a corollary problematic questions pertaining to entry into the ‘religious’ sphere remain an open possibility, but one’s relation to the world, more particularly to women. in the final line “it will always be too late”. Kierkegaard has become the lover of an anthropomorphically Kierkegaard’s pervasive influence has thus been through the conceived God in substitution of her. use of literary writing to convey philosophical truths pertain- In his final months Kierkegaard provoked a head-on colli- ing to human living. He showed astutely (perhaps in this influ- sion with the Danish state church, charging that it had lost all enced by ancient Greece) that fundamental questions of life sense of the ‘otherness’ and demands of Christianity. True dis- and values might best be illuminated not in the abstract but cipleship, said Kierkegaard, far from conforming to the world, through consideration of the concrete nature of human living was liable to lead to martyrdom. In Practice in Christianity in its everydayness. His writing is witty, imaginative, versatile (1850) he had thrown down the gauntlet, castigating the and always highly perceptive as, through the many characters esteemed Primus of the Church, J.P. Mynster and the social of his creation, he depicts the foibles of humanity and the fre- mores he represented. Now Kierkegaard, founding his own quent tragedy of life, if also the greatness of human beings and broadsheet, addressed the populace at large. It was in particu- sublimity of the human condition. If constrained necessarily by lar (as had been the case in the earlier debate over Hegel) the our contingency, the world is yet wide-open. Kierkegaard succeeding Primus H.L. Martensen, who called forth his ire. invites us to choose, in the first place, ourselves. The struggle still in full spate, Kierkegaard died, aged 42; a Kierkegaard judged himself the greatest prose writer his death he conceived of as ‘martyrdom’ for the cause. native tongue has known – and his fellow Danes have not dis- sented. Much must inevitably be lost in translation, yet the Influence and Significance reader can gain a sense of the beauty and rhythm of his prose, Kierkegaard’s influence has been extraordinary, traversing most notably in his prayers. Kierkegaard writes in such a way diverse disciplines. Writing in a minor European language, as to draw the reader in; not cajoling, but simply illuminating and perhaps also on account of having fallen out with his the options. In later work however, as his own circumstances peers, the impact of his thought took time to materialise. But darken, a bitterness creeps in. It is difficult to square his sour Kierkegaard was influencing German scholarship by the condemnation of those who fail to believe the Paradox of the 1920s, French by the 1930s, his influence becoming global God/man with his own high standards of behaviour and con- through translation into English in the 1940s. Today he is duct (and indeed with what may well have been a personal available in languages from Korean to Hungarian. (I found his hope that all will be saved). But Kierkegaard was following work in a bookshop on the seafront promenade in Lima, what he believed to be the letter of the biblical text.

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 37 Brief Lives

Unsurprisingly, Kierkegaard was a major influence on twen- him an ideal candidate as the Ur-father of a certain manner of tieth century so-called ‘dialectical’ (Barthian) theology, follow- writing. But in Kierkegaard’s case these traits can also lend an ing . If, subsequent to the Enlightenment, in partic- inconsistency to the authorship (not least in the question as to ular the constrictions of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, it was whether talk of God should commence from a revelation given no longer possible to reason one’s way to God, and if Schleier- ‘straight down from above’, or whether the human movement macher’s attempt to found theology in the immediacy of reli- to Christianity finds a starting point in human anxiety, to gious awareness should be judged deficient (as both Hegel and which revelation provides the answer. As regards Kierkegaard’s Kierkegaard contended) then the only alternative was a revela- use of pseudonymity, it should be noted that it was a common tion “straight down from above” as Barth, acknowledging practice in his society: there is little divergence of viewpoint Kierkegaard’s influence, was to put it in his revolutionary 1922 from his private journals; and it is evident that the decision to Epistle to the Romans. In Fragments, the God who is Christ both employ a pseudonym was frequently last minute. is the ‘Truth’ that is revealed and himself brings as gift to the What strikes me as deserving of attention – as we celebrate disciple the condition of its recognition. Theology becomes the bicentenary – is the revolution in presuppositions that, in self-contained (or circular). every sphere, at least European society has undergone. The young Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also deeply influenced, Kierkegaard may credit Incarnation through faith, and not on the title of his 1936 The Cost of Discipleship (in German Nach- account of reason, but nevertheless his belief stands within a folge, the one word having the double entendre of ‘consequences’ field populated by presuppositions about knowledge that serve and ‘discipleship’) culled from the entry on Kierkegaard in a in his day to make it ‘thinkable’. Living a hundred and fifty German encyclopaedia. As his life played out in the church years after Newton, Kierkegaard betrays little recognition that struggle amid the circumstances of the Third Reich, Bonhoef- there can be no one-off exceptions to, or breaks in, the chain fer found inspiration in Kierkegaard’s witness. But the prob- of cause and effect. He is, accordingly, a ‘supernaturalist’, cred- lems with a Kierkegaardian position also become evident. Bon- iting miracles. Again in this at one with his age, he conceived hoeffer’s Christology (compiled after his death from students’ history to have a telos or goal, believing that, acting through notes taken at his 1933 lectures), prefaced incidentally by a interventionary events, God is bringing his purposes to quotation from Kierkegaard, “Be silent for that is the infinite” fruition. Kierkegaard conceptualised the human as a synthesis, advocates precisely Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’ in acknowledg- brought about in the moment, of spirit and carnal nature (in ment of the Paradox that is Christ. To speak in this manner parallel to the Incarnation). Politically and socially too reflected the times; it was a confession that provided a frontal Kierkegaard is a man of his time, failing to conceive that social challenge to the ‘leap of faith’ that many were making to engineering could mitigate the lot of the poor, and thinking Hitler. But such thinking does not axiomatically lead to talk of women ordained to be subordinate and obedient to men. human rights or an advocacy of humanistic values per se. The fascination of studying a past writer of Kierkegaard’s Of recent years Kierkegaard’s writings have met with a magnitude and perspicacity is that one may chart in history the ready reception among post-modernists. His playing with progress of the human spirit. One is brought to recognise the words and styles of writing, his quirky outsider’s readiness to crucial nature of the material and scientific context within demolish the verities of his age, and the proliferation of pseu- which our thinking occurs. Writing as recently as the 1840s, donyms in what has been called polyphonic writing, have made Kierkegaard thinks within the confines of a comparatively lim- ited world: having little awareness of non-Eurocentric cul- Kierkegaard begat tures; conceiving that there must have been an original human existentialism pair (for, as he says, nature “does not favour a meaningless superfluity”); and with no notion of the timescale or size of the universe. Most strikingly, human beings possess for him a cer- tain divinity, a conceit perhaps irrevocably lost with Darwin. Kierkegaard belongs to a thought-world, stretching from Plato, in which a belief in the beyond inflects all his thinking. Most damagingly, in scholarship already underway in his age, the scriptures have today been set within the cultural context of their composition. Yet, for all this, Kierkegaard’s writing retains a freshness that never ceases to yield new insights and food for thought. © DAPHNE HAMPSON 2013 Daphne Hampson holds doctorates in history from Oxford, in theology from Harvard, and a master’s in continental philosophy from War- wick. Professor Emerita in Divinity at St Andrews, she is an Associate of the Department of Theology and Religion at Oxford. She is the author, among other works, of Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought (Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2001) and of Kierkegaard: Exposition & Critique (Oxford University Press, 2013).

38 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 2010 E H UIBING & other &

ETHICAL EPISODES © H

by Joel Marks ARKS M OEL J ORTRAIT OF That Was The Year That Was P

n 19 January, 1999, I sent an email to one Rick Lewis, and with many of whom I have had the privilege to dialogue Editor of Philosophy Now, inquiring whether the mag- electronically. Oazine might be in the market for another columnist. But now I find that I have developed a new yearning, or A friend of mine had returned from vacation with a copy in rather that I have the opportunity to satisfy an old one: to hand to show me. I instantly glommed on to it, perceiving a write in longer forms. Formal retirement from my ‘day job’ perfect match for my aspirations. Prior to that I had already has already resulted in four books and several journal articles. been a newspaper columnist for a decade, but those columns (Odd that a professor should have to retire to do research. But tended to put current events first and philosophy last, whereas such are the economics of the profession for most of us.) Fur- I yearned to reverse the priority. Either way, however, I had thermore, even my short writings have backlogged, with hun- become a fan of the form, and for two reasons. The first was dreds in waiting. My problem has been the reverse of Tris- simply practical: I had very little time left over from my teach- tram Shandy’s autobiography, which took him longer to write ing responsibilities to write long philosophical tracts. While I than to live, whereas I write more quickly than can be pub- kept up my professional publishing, the items were far too few lished in these pages. So the hurrier I go, the behinder I get and far between to contain all of the ideas that were constantly (quoth the bunny). exploding in my mind. But the other reason for my fondness Not only has my time opened up, but today there are so for the columnal form was that I believed philosophy deserved many new ways to be an author. I could (and maybe will) a wider audience than just specialists. Philosophy Now was ded- instantly solve my backlog problem by electronically self-pub- icated to precisely that ideal. lishing a humongous collection, and I could (and maybe will) But I heard nothing back, so, disappointed, I continued my forestall a new backlog by starting up a blog. Heck, I even daily rounds. Unbeknownst to me, however, I had planted the have an idea for a video series. Meanwhile, a traditional genre seed, and nine months later a brainchild was born. An email beckons: I suddenly find myself curious to explore the possibil- arrived in my Inbox from Rick Lewis offering enthusiastic ities of writing long fiction. This would not necessarily be encouragement of my proposal. He apologized profusely for turning my back on philosophy, as the stories that appear in the delayed reply, explaining that in the interim a virtual mar- this very magazine attest. riage had taken place between Philosophy Now and Philosophy And that brings me to my final reason for believing it is For All via a literal marriage between himself and PFA co- time to make way for another columnist, namely, that my founder Anja Steinbauer; and in the process of their setting up philosophical preoccupations have become ever more focused house, my email had been temporarily misplaced. Fortunately on three main issues. My constant readers know what they it had turned up again as mysteriously as it had disappeared, so are: animals, asteroids (and comets), and amorality. And that is that Rick was now able to contact me. precisely the problem: I keep coming back to the Three As This set the pattern of our collaboration. No, I don’t mean because they are my (current) preoccupations. For some read- that Rick kept getting married! But he did keep getting har- ers this may be welcome, but I suspect that for many, a greater ried. Serendipitously we all three got to meet in person at a variety would be appreciated. Since I only want to delve ever philosophy convention that December, where we sealed the deeper into these three, it is probably time to part company (in deal. Thus the year that was: 1999. The column was duly this format). inaugurated in 2000, and it has not missed an issue in the thir- My special thanks to Allan Saltzman and Darrell Harrison teen years since. for getting me started on this amazing journey. And, again, I Why am I indulging in these happy reminiscences? am deeply grateful to Rick and Anja not only for the steadfast Because I feel it is time to make way for some other lucky support they have shown to my little scribblings but especially philosopher on this page. It’s been a great run. Rick has for so ably championing the cause of philosophy now and for- catered to my every whim, and many doors have been opened ever and for all. to me because of this regular showcasing of my work. I have © PROF. JOEL MARKS 2013 also been endlessly indulged by you, dear readers, whom I Joel Marks is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of have sometimes taken on a wild ride (most notoriously, per- New Haven, a Bioethics Center Scholar at Yale University, and a haps, in my screeching turnabout from moralist to amoralist) loyal reader of Philosophy Now. His website is www.docsoc.com

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 39 Letters When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up! Write to me at: Philosophy Now 43a Jerningham Road • London• SE14 5NQ, U.K. or email [email protected] Keep them short and keep them coming!

Camus Is Dead, Long Live Camus! The Mice of Sisyphus their hammocks rigged during the sum- DEAR EDITOR: The articles on Camus in DEAR EDITOR: Thank you for Issue 98 mer too, but you will never find them in Issue 98 revived for me very sweet mem- on Camus – hopefully a reappraisal of it. You will rather find them at the local ories of my student days at University Sartre is not far behind. I was surprised IKEA, fixing things, driving their kids to College Dublin, where he was an iconic however, that in this same issue you sporting activities, or doing family figure for undergraduate philosophy stu- report that false memories had been socializing. I do that too, but just on a dents. What a talent! And such a loss to a planted in mice, the evidence for which must-do basis. The rest of my time I’m disillusioned generation, to whom he is them showing “fear behaviour when in my Epicurean garden, reading, taking presented an heroic alternative to despair placed into a chamber that contained it easy, talking with my family or friends and suicide. His philosophy and literary nothing frightening.” The experimenters that I value, or just resting. achievements aside, his triumph over have clearly failed to account for the Frankly, that pi**es some people off, poverty and cultural privation make him mice having experienced the stark terror but I don’t care. Of course, I do miss a shining light again for the casualties of of the emptiness of the chamber and the some things that they have, but that’s the recession. Vive Sisyphus! pointlessness of their existence therein. like all the non-stupid choices you make FRANK O’CARROLL, DUBLIN DAVID R DRYSDALE, BY EMAIL in life: you gain some and you lose some. And I choose Epicureanism 2.0. DEAR EDITOR: Van Harvey’s article in Epicurean Upgrades ANDERS WALLIN Issue 98 on the possibility of living with- DEAR EDITOR: Brian Dougall’s article on UPPSALA, SWEDEN out a higher purpose was incredibly Epicureanism in the last issue touches, I interesting. However, I am not quite think, on something that many who have DEAR EDITOR: Whilst Brian Dougall’s sure that Harvey’s criticism of theism in read the history of philosophy have pon- article ‘Epicureanism: The Hobo Test’, an absurdist world was rightly placed. dered. This tranquil, pleasant life of Epi- PN 98 was immensely entertaining and Instead of criticizing theism on the curus in his Athens garden sounds insightful, I must take issue with his grounds that there is too much religious great – but hey, not everybody can go thought experiment. I think it is impor- choice, I thought that one should about living like that. And naturally, if tant to remember that all philosophy is instead criticize theism as simply filling you try to go about living nowadays ultimately aspirational, and so for him to an emotional hole. according to the 1.0 version of Epicure- render Epicurus’s ideas on pleasure and As Harvey explains, absurdity explains anism you will end up under living under freedom as outmoded is somewhat how humanity has an innate urge to find a bridge – if you don’t have parents with unfair. Of course it is unwise to think we inherent meaning in life. However, this a big wallet who will take care of the are capable of recreating the world of will ultimately fail because the vast realm practicalities of life, of course. the Epicureans – loitering in ‘blessed of the unknown makes certainty impossi- But I claim to be a 2.0 Epicurean: I Nature’ while shunning the necessities ble. People are therefore inclined to have a family, a non-trivial daytime job of society. The commune Epicurus set make the Kierkegaardian leap of faith that gives me a good income, a house, up for himself and his friends near towards belief in God in order to comfort and the normal stuff you find in a mid- Athens is anathema to modern society’s their otherwise lost . However, I dle-class home. But still, once the things fixation on both the individual and the must agree with Camus when he con- that really need to be taken care of have market society, and perhaps justifiably tends that this is ‘philosophical suicide’. been taken care of, I have a choice: how so. However, as with all philosophy The problem is not that we are faced much free time do I allow myself, and from antiquity, it is the metaphorical with too many conflicting options, as how do I spend it? This afternoon I sense that we should derive meaning Harvey argues, but rather that people feel read Philosophy Now instead of taking from. Many of those of the Christian it reasonable to jump to one of these care of the garden, or instead of visiting community, for example, recognise that options on the basis of blind faith rather people I ought to visit, or fixing broken the power of the Bible lies in the sym- than through an approach based on rea- things that ought to be fixed but can bolic message underpinning the stories. son. Of course it is ‘intolerably lonely’ to wait a little. I have a hammock in my Epicurus’s ideas on freedom have live the meaningless life as described by garden which I actually use quite sub- enormous relevance to the modern Harvey, but that doesn’t mean that we stantially (sadly, the latitude of Uppsala, world. Epicurus’s commune could be need to jump to rash conclusions to sat- Sweden has forced it into its winter viewed these days as a liberation from isfy our own anxiety. store now), something that sets me the political and commercial hegemony CASSIAN BILTON, BY EMAIL apart from my neighbors. They have that has dominated the last two cen-

40 Philosophy Now l November/December 2013 Letters turies. This does not imply that one must Multiverse Probabilities the source of all our misery. The Bud- give up one’s job or the roof over one’s DEAR EDITOR: In response to Joel dhist path is fundamentally a process of head and go running off to the woods, as Marks’s article in the last issue, if we do learning to recognize the essential non- Mr Dougall argues. Another, more mod- live in a multiverse containing an infinite existence of the self, while seeking to ern, way to test the Epicurean hypothesis number of universes such as ours, must help others to recognize this as well. is perhaps to repel those elements of there be other universes identical to WES MILLIMAN, BY EMAIL society that lead to one’s unhappiness. ours? This oft-repeated assertion is Rather than physical entities, as with highly questionable. There is no reason DEAR EDITOR: Katie Javanaud’s ‘No-Self’ Epicurus, they can be more tacit: greed, why an infinite set of discrete objects article indicates something of a misunder- jealousy, excess, instant gratification. It is should contain any identical elements. standing of Buddhist philosophy and arguably the last that now has society by The positive integers are an obvious practice, revealed by her statements that the scruff of the neck. example of such a set. So even over infi- “what the Buddha meant by... the Finally, it is Epicurus’s thoughts on nite time, a multiverse could number an ‘unborn’... is unclear” and “we cannot friendship that are perhaps most perti- infinity of discrete universes, with again assume that the Buddha intended to posit nent for the modern Epicurean who no necessity for any two to be identical. an eternal entity which is ‘unborn’.” wishes to avoid a ‘hobo future’. It is real And given the amount of quantum inde- Another term for ‘unborn’ is ‘uncondi- friendship – not the virtual type – that is terminacy since the Big Bang in both tioned’. In the Dhammapada (277-9) it is of most value in one’s life. The meaning our, and presumably the other universes, stated that all conditioned phenomena of one’s existence can only be sought if the probability of two identical universes (experiences) are impermanent and unsat- someone else is there to seek it from. is much more likely to be zero. isfactory, and that all phenomena – Epicurus said, “Before you eat or drink ANTHONY SANDERSON, OXFORD including the unconditioned – are without anything, consider who you eat or drink Self. This indicates that the sphere of the with, rather than what you eat or drink.” Selfless Responses unconditioned is permanent, satisfactory In his book America, the French philoso- DEAR EDITOR: I had a rather hard time yet lacking Self. In fact in the Udana the pher Jean Baudrillard observed people getting past the title of an article in Issue Buddha stated that “if there were not that eating alone in New York city. They 97. Here is my problem: Regarding unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabri- were regular people on the street, going Katie Javanaud’s article ‘Is The Buddhist cated, it would not be the case that eman- to or coming from work, stopping for a ‘No-Self’ Doctrine Compatible With cipation... would be discerned.” while with their sandwiches on sidewalks Pursuing Nirvana?’ – what a strange and Furthermore, for Buddhists, the realm and park benches. For Baudrillard this confusing question! Let me just say that of the unborn is where the minds of was the “saddest sight in the world.” ‘no-self’ is not a doctrine, and Nirvana is enlightened beings dissolve at death. So This is what a true modern Epicurean not something to be pursued. Thus, to why did the Buddha say that enlightened must struggle to overcome. speak about their compatibility is a beings are “not reborn, but neither not- AIDAN O’DONOGHUE, meaningless statement. The Buddhist reborn, nor both, nor neither?” The FERMOY, IRELAND approach is instead an attempt to reveal answer is that the sphere of the unborn is the illusory nature of the ‘self’. To beyond all existence and non-existence – Review Review believe in the self is like being in the neither existent, nor non-existent, nor DEAR EDITOR: Anybody reading Les desert and thinking that you are seeing a both, nor neither (the ‘tetralemma’). Reid’s review of my book The Things We rather large lake ahead, but on second How remarkable, then, that today we Do and Why We Do Them (PN 98) would glance, you realize that it is just a mirage. have discovered the objective nature of be forgiven for thinking that the book is From a psychological perspective, we the unborn! As physicist Giancarlo Ghi- about the problem of free will. In fact I suffer from three major distortions. radi has pointed out, quantum entities do not address this issue at all in the There is parataxic distortion, or Freudian “could be neither here nor there, nor in book, let alone defend the compatibilist transference, which means that we pro- both places, nor in neither place.” So the position which Reid ascribes to me. It is ject our ideas and thoughts upon the realm of the unborn corresponds to the true that I write that “the events of our world, and experience it in terms of those realm of unconditioned awareness which doing things must be explained causally,” ideas and thoughts rather than the world resides at the level of quantum fields. but I took this stance to be neutral as it is. The second distortion is created Readers interested in this idea can visit between event and agent causality. My by the social filters of language, logic, and my website quantumbuddhism.com where own sympathies, as I suggest in the final taboos. The third major distortion, which they will find an article entitled, ‘The chapter, lie with the latter, which brings is inextricably bound to the other two, is Quantum Sphere of the Unborn’. my view much closer to the one Reid that we ‘think’ our experience. GRAHAM SMETHAM, BRIGHTON defends in his review. Indeed, I do not Perhaps the chief difference between think that determinism is true. Buddhism and the world’s other major DEAR EDITOR: Bruce Hood is quoted by But my book is not about this issue. It faith traditions lies in its presentation of Sam Woolfe in PN 97 thus: “Beyond the concerns itself with the ontology of our core identity. The existence of the experience, there is nothing we can iden- action, the nature of explanation, and the soul or self, which is affirmed in different tify as the self.” But could the experience theory of reasons. None of these are ways by Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity be the self, and still be a thing rather than even mentioned in Reid’s review. and Islam, is not only firmly denied in a no-thing – not there like a table is there, CONSTANTINE SANDIS, OXFORD Buddhism, but belief in it is identified as but there like, say, love? Love is not

November/December 2013 l Philosophy Now 41 Letters

detected via the five senses, but if, for artificial intelligence to make progress is not enough. We used to think that the example, mum was told that her love for less emphasis on recreating ‘mini mes’, Earth was the centre of the universe. baby wasn’t there, she would disagree. and more attempts to think about what Complete confusion over what the rules If the self is some sort of illusion, it’s intelligence is within the context of arti- of absolute morality are hardly helps the still there, because an illusion is there – ficial environments. Doing this you will cause. If, however, those asserting the otherwise what are we clapping at after a not be able to recreate a toddler, but it existence of absolute morality cannot performance by a master magician? Of might make it possible to create a new even now tell us what its rules are, then course there’s a difference between type of intelligence based upon ‘digital surely it is time for us to look for an alter- ‘there’ and there, and yet the two aren’t embodiment’. native explanation for our behaviour. so far removed, if the latest theories of SIMON KOLSTOE, BOTLEY It was only because we feel pressure particle physics are correct. And every- to act in accordance with some sort of thing isn’t physical; even ‘physical’ in the Moral Relativism Is Intelligible behavioural norms that the idea of a traditional sense of the word isn’t so DEAR EDITOR: I am not surprised that moral code came about in the first place. physical now. Julien Beillard finds moral relativism Even those who do not believe in abso- I wrote this email my ‘self’, and ‘you’ unintelligible in Issue 97, as he seems to lute morality feel pressure to act in cer- are there reading it. be missing an essential piece of the tain ways. Why? I suggest that certain KRISTINE KERR moral puzzle. The essential piece miss- types of behaviour – those commonly SCOTLAND ing from his article is the framework associated with the more mainstream within which moral rules are derived. moral codes – seem to have survival ben- Developing Intelligence These frameworks are based on: efits. The mechanisms that have evolved DEAR EDITOR: As a father of two under- 1) The group or society’s perspective on to give us our day-to-day moral codes fives I found Alessendro Colarossi’s reality; (and so our laws) include our empathetic argument in Issue 97 that consciousness 2) The priorities of the group or society; nature, our desire for fairness, our recip- must be embodied in an environment in 3) The identity of the members of the rocal altruism, and peer pressure – all of order to develop somewhat self-evident. set the moral code is meant to favour. which also exist in other animal species. Indeed it seems unfortunate that most These three facets are included in all So I would suggest that what we call people who have the time to pursue phi- moral frameworks. Intelligible questions ‘morality’ is based on the behaviour we losophy either have not yet had children, can be asked about all these facets as well find – consciously or unconsciously – to or had children so long ago that they as the appropriateness of the rules for be in our best interests as a group – have forgotten the challenges faced dur- the moral framework. The Aztecs whether our family, our tribe, or our ing a day in the life of a toddler. In the believed that human sacrifice was neces- nation. This behaviour seems to get set last week I have had to try and teach the sary for the rising of the sun, and this in stone and billed as an absolute moral lessons, “That pain in your tummy is belief was encapsulated in their moral code, until modified under pressure to called ‘hunger’ and will go away if you framework. Hence their rules encourag- adapt – rather like the punctuated equi- eat”; “If you cover yourself with a blan- ing human sacrifice were appropriate to librium seen in biological evolution. All ket, that uncomfortable ‘cold’ feeling in that framework. The problem was not in absolute moral codes that I am aware of you feet goes away”; “If you push down the appropriateness of their actions rela- have either been modified in some way on the lid of your toybox at the same tive to their framework, but in their per- over the millennia, or swept aside – time as having your fingers in the box it spective on reality. Similarly, a Catholic which means that our supposed moral will make you cry”; and perhaps most might claim that it is moral to have a rules are simply tools which adapt over challenging of all, “That grumpy feeling large family, whilst an environmentalist time to enable human society to function is caused by tiredness and if you would would claim that a small family is prefer- in a way which promotes its survival. only just close your eyes and go to sleep able. Again the conflict can be under- And so we have laws which, in a you will feel happier when you wake stood by scrutinizing the frameworks democratic society, change as society’s up.” These lessons seem somewhat giving rise to these rules. requirements change, but which have for incredible to an adult who is used to the RUSSELL BERG, MANCHESTER millennia made illegal those things such way the world works, but are entirely as murder, rape and stealing which new discoveries for the little mind devel- DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 97 Julien Beillard would obviously undermine the trust oping in the toddler. Spending time says that the only type of morality that is required for any successful society. I around a toddler is thus by far the coherent is absolute morality, and that don’t have to feel that these things are strongest argument for the necessity of relative morality is meaningless. He is morally wrong in order to decide not to embodiment for the development of right to say that disagreement as to what do them, although the empathetic nature mind. However, even accepting this the supposed absolute moral code may we have evolved does normally create argument, I am not convinced that with- be is not a proof that it does not exist. this feeling. But whether for any particu- out embodiment “artificial intelligence is This is hardly relevant, however, in view lar law I do or do not, it’s still part of the in danger of a dead end.” Granted, with- of the fact that we are still awaiting any deal with the society in which I live that I out embodiment, intelligence ‘like us’ is hard evidence that there actually is one. should abide by its rules, or suffer the unlikely to develop; but that does not That it is a logical possibility, or even consequences in the here and now. mean that other types of intelligence the fact that the vast majority of people PAUL BUCKINGHAM, cannot be developed. What is needed for may think that one exists, is obviously ANNECY, FRANCE

42 Philosophy Now l November/December 2013 Letters

DEAR EDITOR: Regarding Joel Marks’ books and papers, selectively editing also means Auschwitz. To him, as to Adorno, ‘amorality’ in Issues 80, 81, 97: Professor them and adding her own thoughts to Auschwitz is a typical crime of the modern age.” Marks is patently educated and industri- make Nietzsche’s vision appear the same STEFAN KRZEMINSKI, ous, and probably largely beneficial to as her own. And she lived long enough to NOTTINGHAM humanity, and hardly ever knowingly act- cheer the creation of the Third Reich; ing in any way to do harm. Surely this is she even met Hitler, and told him that he Card-Carrying Clairvoyant not an amoral man – except by his own was advancing the cause championed by DEAR EDITOR: I wanted to respond to peculiar meaning of the word? her brother. It was not until after World some of the questions raised by an article I claim that morality is intrinsic to the War II that philosophers (led by Walter on Fortune Telling in a recent issue (96). evolution of life; an essential mechanism Kaufmann) were able to disentangle the As a Tarot Card Reader, I often have of the survival of the fitter. It’s rational, real Nietzsche from the crazed Nazi cari- to defend my profession against disre- naturally yielding altruism and involuntary cature created by his sister. Little won- spect from both religion and scientism. acts of heroism, even ‘consciences’. Actu- der, then, that Russell and many others Some fanatics think what I do is pure ally this was implicitly accepted by Marks regarded Nietzsche as a Nazi; they had evil, and get me drummed out, but in Issue 81: “by instinct, we often behave no less an authority than Nietzsche’s adherents of scientism can also be scorn- as the moralist would enjoin us.” Our own sister behind them. ful. I explain that I know it is all projec- innate moral behaviour, proven by PETER STONE, tion, and that I simply help people think immemorial trials and errors, is not abso- TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN through their issues with greater clarity. lute, but involves mutable norms, also I show that I do more or less what psy- evolving as circumstances change. DEAR EDITOR: David Clarke’s malicious chotherapists do. Human moral codes are moreover devel- assessment of Martin Heidegger in Issue But I am being disingenuous when I opments arising from our outstanding 97’s Letters must not be allowed to pass pretend psychology is all that’s involved. capacities for visual/aural communication unchallenged. Like Yvonne Sherratt in Every day I see something supernatural via language and art, as records of his- her book, Hitler’s Philosophers, both writ- in the Tarot. Most rational people are toric behaviour, and making educated ers simplistically assume that member- amused by clairvoyance, even when it guesses or reasoned forecasts. Viable ship of the National Socialist Party is to happens before their eyes, but I like living moral codes, including those of major be equated with total agreement with, in a world where the irrational is still a religions, have much in common just and hence complicity in, the excesses of useful part of the mind. Tarot is a way of because they must all contain sufficient Naziism. There is no recognition in thinking that does not know that science, beneficial injunctions (with effective Clarke’s letter of the complexity needed art and religion are separate. I would be enforcement) to give cohesion, strength to analyse Heidegger’s motives for all fascinated to know how the Tarot works, and biological success to their communi- manner of actions during the Nazi but I am cozy with the mystery. ties. Yet the Law of the Jungle still period. Reading Tarot is a collaborative pro- applies: hence internecine strife and our Anyone intent on establishing Heideg- cess, like a negotiation. Based on ran- brutal religious/ideological battles, these ger’s guilt ought to examine the sources domly chosen cards, I give people a pic- being the natural way to select the fitter that offer a rather different interpretation ture of what’s happening in their lives. moral code. It’s not a fault of of events, for example, Rudiger Safran- People respond to this picture, modify- religions/politics/ideology per se, rather, ski’s judiciously balanced account in Mar- ing what I tell them. Thus we gradually a facet of evolution – one whose worst tin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. The come to an agreement about what the excesses we should desire to avoid. following passage from that book should cards mean. I never tell them something ARTHUR MORRIS, suffice to demonstrate the foolishness of is fated. I talk about possibilities, suggest EASTBOURNE attempting to draw a one-dimensional choices, and discuss outcomes. I remind negative portrait of Heidegger: people that our fortunes also depend on Not Hitler’s Philosophers others, and that we cannot control every- DEAR EDITOR: In ‘Bertrand Russell “Was Heidegger anti-Semitic?... It is significant thing, or other people. I also always try Stalks the Nazis’ (Issue 97), Thomas that neither in his lectures and philosophical writ- to empower the person, reminding him Akehurst critiques Russell’s efforts to ings, nor in his political speeches and pamphlets, or her that whatever happens, we choose link German philosophers – particularly are there any anti-Semitic or racist remarks... The how to respond. A lot depends on how Nietzsche – to Nazism. Akehurst seems situation, as he saw it, was this: he had, for a short we phrase the questions: not “What is to find Russell’s critique of Nietzsche while, committed himself to the National Socialist going to happen with X?” but “How can inexplicable, but there is a natural expla- revolution because he had regarded it as a meta- I best succeed with X?” Not saying “this nation for Russell’s connection that Ake- physical revolution. When it failed to live up to its is wrong” but “this will be a challenge in hurst completely ignores. After Niet- promises, he had withdrawn and pursued his the following way…” zsche’s final descent into mental illness, philosophical work, unaffected by the Party’s I believe I dispel delusions more often he became totally dependent upon his approval or rejection. He had made no secret of than I reinforce them. I am not cheating sister Elisabeth, a rabid anti-Semite and his critical distance from the system but openly people, any more than a priest or psy- white supremacist. (Her husband declared it in his lectures... When Heidegger chotherapist or sympathetic mother fig- attempted to found a whites-only settle- refers to the perversions of the modern will to ure is. Synchronicity happens! ment in the mountains of Paraguay.) power, for which nature and man have become ANNA GUROL, Elisabeth took control of Nietzsche’s mere ‘machinations’, he always, explicitly or not, OLYMPIA, WA

November/December 2013 l Philosophy Now 43 DAVE CHAPPELLE’S BLOCK PARTY Dharmender Dhillon asks what happened Films to the revolutionary potential of hip hop. his article examines Michel Berkeley, California. His radical brand of argot of the ghettos in which it was cre- Gondry’s 2006 documentary Dave social philosophy led him to become the ated, the label ‘hip hop’ refers to ‘intelli- TChappelle’s Block Party in relation father of the New Left in 1960s and 70s US gent (hip) movement (hop)’. For Marcuse, to the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse counter-culture. Notably, Marcuse served ‘black music’ – he was talking in 1972 (1888-1979). as the doctoral supervisor to Angela Davis, about blues and jazz, but his comments can the feminist theorist and radical social be equally applied to hip hop – “is the cry Dave Chappelle: Social Satirist activist once associated with the Black Pan- and song of the slaves and the ghettos At the time of filming in 2004, Dave ther Party. During the late 60s and early which, born in an exasperated tension Chappelle was the most lucrative comedian 70s, Angela Davis was on a CIA wanted list announces a violent rupture with the in the USA. Coming from a middle-class as one of the most dangerous people in the established white order” (Counterrevolution background in Washington DC, and hav- USA. She wrote her doctoral thesis on and Revolt, 1972). ing been raised by his African-American ‘Kant and Political Violence’ – some of it Marcuse further asserts in this work that: mother who has a PhD in linguistics, during a period of incarceration – and she is Chappelle is not a child of the ghetto, now Distinguished Professor Emerita at the “In this [popular] music, the very lives and deaths unlike his hero the comedian Richard University of California, Santa Cruz. of black men and women are lived again: the music Pryor (who grew up in a brothel). His Marcuse is important in this viewing of is body; the aesthetic form is the ‘gesture’ of pain, sketch show, The Chappelle Show, shot him Block Party because of the focus in his work sorrow, indictment. However, with the takeover by into the limelight in the early 2000s, and he on the power of people on the margins of the whites, a significant change occurs: white ‘rock’ became renowned for his biting social society to affect revolutionary change. For is what its black paradigm is not, namely, perfor- satire. The show’s most famous sketch Marcuse, such people have the least to lose mance. It is as if the crying and shouting, the jump- involved Chappelle’s depiction of a blind and are thus able to see, feel and hear in a ing and playing, now takes place in an artificial, elderly black male who was a white unique way. Marcuse repeatedly places organized space; that they are directed toward a supremacist. great emphasis on black ghetto move- (sympathetic) audience.” Enlisting the services of the innovative ments, as well as many women’s move- music video director Michel Gondry, ments, as being the sites for socieal What Marcuse is alluding to is the water- Chappelle sought to document his putting upheaval. He also stresses the power of art ing down of a powerful aesthetic form, on a secret, low-budget block party in the to affect real revolutionary rupture from when, for example, the Rolling Stones cover Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto in Brooklyn. within what, alluding to Freud, he coins ‘a Otis Redding, transmuting pain into perfor- Inspired by Mel Stuart’s 1973 Wattstax, repressive reality principle’. mance by way of unabashed plagiarism. The Block Party depicts Chappelle bringing Professor Davis similarly argues in a problem with this for Marcuse is that this together hip hop artists and members of the Marcusian vein that music is “a special ‘carnival’ performance – in the tradition public to attend a block party funded form of social consciousness that can running from Woodstock to Glastonbury – entirely by himself. The aim appears to be potentially awaken an urge in those functions as a “safety valve to upturn order to create a carnival atmosphere in an area of affected by it to creatively transform their such that order may be maintained.” So, deprivation, in the manner of the ghetto oppressive environments… Ultimately, it although it may create a temporarily rebel- parties of the 70s-80s. By bringing the party can propel people toward social emancipa- lious atmosphere, the performance ulti- to the block, as opposed to holding it in a tion.” (The Angela Y. Davis Reader, p.236.) mately merely reinforces the status quo. popular, ‘safe’ tourist spot like Central Park, But are Davis and Marcuse correct? For Marcuse another language is neces- sponsored by a multitude of profit-driven sary to break the all-pervasive discourse companies, Chappelle sought to create a Marcuse Meets Chappelle which engulfs any resistance by means of more authentic event. It is apparent from the All of the music featured in Block Party what he terms ‘incestuous reasoning’. He roster of artists Chappelle recruited (Dead can be bracketed within the genre of hip identifies black literature, music, argot and Prez, The Roots, and Erykah Badu, to hop. Born in the 1970s in the ghettos of slang as a potentially revolutionary lan- name a few) – who all performed for free – New York, pioneering artists with names guage of the ‘other’ in opposition to the that his aim was not only to entertain, but such as Afrika Bambaataa and Zulu Nation incestuous discourse of the establishment. also to educate. In the phrase of pioneering demonstrated a clear awareness of their This language meets all the criteria of Mar- hip hop artist KRS-One, the party could be African ancestry prior to enslavement in cuse’s definition of the genuinely revolu- labeled ‘Edutainment’. the USA, including an understanding of tionary. This revolutionary communication the Griot tradition of West Africa – a tra- can most powerfully reside in the margins, Marcuse: Father of the New Left dition of poetry and storytelling stretching in what Marcuse calls “The substratum of As a German Jewish intellectual escaping back many hundreds of years – from which the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and the Third Reich, Marcuse settled in exile in they developed modern hip hop. In the persecuted of other races and other colours;

44 Philosophy Now l November/December 2013 the unemployed and unemployable. They hip hop music is often a site of black male exist outside the democratic process; their expression of feelings of powerlessness in life is the most immediate and the most real the system at large taken out on the ‘fairer need for ending intolerable conditions and sex’. She adds that “the openness of black institutions. Thus their opposition is revo- males about rage and hatred towards lutionary even if their consciousness is not. females” results “at times worryingly [in] Their opposition hits the system from bragging in misogynistic rap about how without and is therefore not deflected by they see sexuality as a war zone where they Films the system; it is an elementary force which must assert their dominance” (see hooks, violates the rules of the game and, in doing We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, The Margins of Hip Hop so, reveals it as a rigged game.” (One 2004). Whilst the male artists in the film do As Marcuse’s peer, Theodor Adorno, Dimensional Man, 1964.) not perform overtly misogynistic works, says, “what slips through the net is filtered To add to the revolutionary potential of notably, all three of the high-profile female through the net” (Negative Dialectics, 1966), hip hop described by these criteria, Mar- performers featured in the film are only meaning that any revolutionary zeal from cuse also sees the ghetto as the site par depicted singing love songs eulogizing men. marginal ghetto music must necessarily be excellence of meaningful resistance. Refer- Furthermore, there appears to be what what can slip through the corporate net, ring to the faubourgs of Paris during the journalist Mark Fishers in Capitalist Realism and so must come from the margins of the eighteenth century, he observes that “con- (2009) calls a “hard-headed embracing of a margins. This is where there is scope in the fined to small areas of living and dying, brutally reductive version of reality.” This film for evidence of Marcuse’s revolution- [the ghetto] can be more easily organized embracing of consumerism has destroyed ary hope being kept alive. There are many and directed” and thus ghettos “form nat- any naïve hope that marginal culture could moments in it provided by artists such as ural geographical centres from which the change anything. The acceptance is demon- the independent-label pair Dead Prez, as strated by people in well as by Mos Def – who is a native of Non-stop hip hop until you drop the film wearing T- Bedford-Stuyvesant – and Talib Kweli in shirts promoting particular, which demonstrate a clear

2006 symbols of anti- understanding of their ancestry and do not power: T-shirts that seek to glorify the harsh realities of ghetto ICTURES P have been obtained life, but rather to ‘edutain’ through hip

OGUE through the capital- hop. This is achieved through explicit ref- /R ist mode of produc- erences to genuinely revolutionary figures, tion, reflecting the such as Huey P. Newton of the Black Pan- RODUCTIONS P ‘capitalistic Che thers, Harriet Tubman, and Asata Shakur. ARI Y Guevara phe- History has not necessarily vindicated OB

© B nomenon’, where Marcuse’s claims, but it is clear that the

PICS pictures of the revo- margins definitely generate fresh perspec-

ARTY lutionary communist tives, and can create ruptures which the P are sold for profit on mainstream by definition cannot create. LOCK B everything ranging Even though some of the film’s perform- struggle can be mounted against targets of from pens to posters, the film depicts many ers, including Chappelle, grew up in rela- vital economic and political importance.” members of the audience and performers tive comfort, they still possess a novel, if In Block Party, we have many ‘outsiders’ wearing the de facto uniform of the ‘week- not revolutionary, way of seeing the world. using or performing black language, litera- end warrior’ – namely, a T-shirt with a pic- This is exemplified by a seemingly light ture and music in the ghetto – mixing ture of Guevara/Angela Davis/Marcus Gar- and humorous scene showing how Chap- together all the ingredients of Marcuse’s vey/Marvin Gaye/Muhammad Ali. pelle correctly predicted that the Beltway revolutionary dynamite. There is no doubt that since the early sniper of 2002 was black, simply because 90s, hip hop has been heavily corporatised, he had observed that the sniper was “taking Against Marcuse’s resulting in a re-branding and remarketing weekends off.” This apparently trivial Revolutionary Party which involved, more often than not, a observation demonstrates a way of seeing Nonetheless, there is much to be said crude glorification of the most negative different from that of the establishment, to against the apparent revolutionary potential aspects of marginal ghetto culture. Much a degree substantiating Marcuse’s claim . demonstrated in Block Party. For example, of hip hop’s early dynamism and revolu- All things considered, the worth of the Chappelle’s humour is perpetually infused tionary zeal has been replaced with hyper- film resides in its depiction of the power of with misogyny, and his use of the word masculinity, extreme misogyny, and crude the ghetto carnival and the music of the ‘nigger’ is unsettling, demonstrating a lack materialism. Many of the artists in the film ‘other’ to challenge, uplift, and have posi- of genuine cultural and political awareness, are guilty of this to some degree, Chap- tive ramifications – perhaps leading on to especially since his self-proclaimed hero pelle included. Hip hop’s contemporary revolutionary ramifications – in the spirit Richard Pryor eschewed its use thirty years position in the mainstream, with its dross of ‘Edutainment’. earlier. Many of the artists that Chappelle lyrical content and formulaic beat struc- © DHARMENDER S. DHILLON 2013 enlists also regularly demonstrate a level of tures, renders the majority of what is DharmenderDhillon is a PhD candidate at misogyny in their works. As black female released defunct in terms of any revolu- Cardiff University. His interests include Critical author and social activist bell hooks argues, tionary potential as the voice of the ‘other’. Theory, Race and Gender Studies, and hip hop.

November/December 2013 l Philosophy Now 45 Our reviewer Les Reid finds The Holy Bible to be wholly unreliable, and Mark Vernon’s agnosticism is Books knowledgeably considered by Ian Robinson. people, written in an age when they were fable have renounced all objective truth still more barbarous, and in all probability claims and shelved it in the ‘Literature’ sec- The Bible long after the facts which it relates, cor- tion, where I agree it belongs. My argu- by Various roborated by no concurring testimony, and ment is with those who say that the Bible is resembling those fabulous accounts which true, whether literally and entirely, or only WHAT IS THE BIBLE? every nation gives of its origin.” Albert partially, and who insist on its supernatural The Bible has been Einstein echoed Hume when he described status as a text directly inspired by Yahweh. revered for centuries in the Bible as “a collection of honorable but They want a special shelf, marked its different versions and still primitive legends which are neverthe- ‘Revealed Truth’, but they have no logical translations, and it still is today, by bil- less pretty childish” (letter to Eric brackets to hold that shelf up. lions of people across the globe. Some- Gutkind, 1954). times the reverential tone has become so That basic disagreement over the status Problems with ‘Revealed Truth’ hushed and obsequious that one feels that of the Bible continues today and has been Like billions of other child believers, I the ancient sin of idolatry should be enlivened by the recent clashes between was brought up to revere the Bible. Con- extended to include Bibliolatry. Creationists, who insist that the creation ventional religious teaching is that the The oldest books of the Bible, the first story of Genesis is literally true, and sup- Bible is an anthology of texts which have five books, or ‘Pentateuch’, are thought to porters of a science-based world-view who special authority because they record be nearly 3,000 years old, and are treated as argue that our scientific understanding of direct communications from Yahweh holy scripture by Jews, Christians and Mus- the history of planet Earth and of the evo- (God), the spirit controlling the universe, lims alike. But choosing which other books lution of life on it has rendered a literal to specific human beings. The Bible to place alongside those five is an important interpretation of Genesis obsolete. (specifically, the Pentateuch) speaks of point of difference between the three main The argument is not simply between how Yahweh created the universe and of religions, and among the various sects religious believers and non-believers. the origins of humankind and all other which comprise them. Broadly speaking, Believers disagree among themselves on living things. It also lays down rules for there is majority agreement on the other how the Bible is to be read. Thus evangeli- human conduct, based on the likes and dis- books of the Old Testament; but then Mus- cals hold that, since God is its author, “All likes of this spirit; for example, homosexu- lims add the Koran, and Christians add the Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.” ality is forbidden, and homosexuals are to New Testament. Thus there is no single So Creationists, who are mostly evangelical be stoned to death. Accordingly, the Bible version of the Bible common to Judaism, Protestants, campaign against Darwinian is to be revered like Yahweh himself and Islam and Christianity. My remarks in what biology because they read Genesis literally. its teachings are fixed for all time, because follows will refer mainly to the Christian Likewise, the Roman Catholic Church they have been laid down by the spirit – Bible in its various forms, but can also easily stated in the Second Vatican Council of unless Yahweh amends them in a major be applied to the Jewish and Muslim versions. 1965 that “The books of Scripture must be revision, as he is said to have done in the acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully New Testament or the Koran by those The Bible: A Fount of Strife and without error that truth which God who believe those additions. Losing my Philosophers have long disagreed about wanted put into sacred writings.” faith in the Bible was an integral part of the status of the Bible. John Locke, for Other believers have been more circum- my teenage rebellion against religious example, accepted the orthodox religious spect. The Anglican and Lutheran belief and the tales of the supernatural it view that the Bible records messages from churches generally hold that the Bible is embraces. God that are worthy of belief. But he did without error only in matters essential to The Bible suffers from two kinds of show some caution, distinguishing salvation, and that guidance is necessary for problem: (a) internal and (b) external. The between ‘original revelation’ (direct com- the correct interpretation of apparent internal problems are caused by statements munication from God) and ‘traditional inconsistencies, either with itself, or with and attitudes expressed in the Bible that revelation’ (commentary about or ideas science. On this view, an appreciation of are troublesome in themselves, without derived from those direct communica- the historical context of writing may be reference to facts and opinions derived tions). David Hume disagreed with Locke required to understand a portion of scrip- from other sources; or they relate to the by according the Bible no special status, ture. Then there are some believers who composition of the Bible itself. External finding it not so much ‘holy and reliable’ reject the literal approach entirely and treat problems are those which arise when state- as ‘wholly unreliable’. Hume saw its fan- the Bible as a work of allegory and symbol. ments in the Bible clash with what we tastic tales as merely typical examples of The ‘Sea of Faith’ movement, led by ex- know or value on other grounds. ancient mythologizing. In An Enquiry Con- Anglican priest Don Cupitt, takes this non- Some internal problems: cerning Human Understanding (1748), literal line. 1. There is no agreed canon of a Christian Hume described the Bible as “a book pre- I have no argument with the latter view. Bible between Catholics, Protestants and sented to us by a barbarous and ignorant Those who say that the Bible is poetry and Eastern Orthodoxy. The Catholic Bible

46 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Book Reviews Books includes books not included in the Protes- the claim becomes ludicrous. If there were Therefore, as a moral code it is so defi- tant Bible: Tobit, Judith, Maccabees 1 and 2, indeed a spirit in charge of the universe, it is cient that any tales of its divine origin Esdras 1 and 2, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach unlikely that he/she would have favourites must be treated as fiction. and Baruch. The Eastern Orthodox Bible or act so childishly. The claims of Moses are 3. The Bible asserts that there is life after includes Esdras 3 and 4, and Maccabees 3 vanity. death, but our knowledge of the human and 4, which neither Catholics nor Protes- 4. Does Yahweh change? The Bible itself body shows this to be a fantasy. People tants include in their Bibles. The various says no. Yet the transition from the Old who have suffered brain damage, whether canons were fixed by councils of the Testament to the New demonstrates a through accident or disease, often lose part churches themselves: the Council of Trent shift from a punitive, vengeful god (eg, he of their mental life: they lose memories; for Catholics (1546); the 39 Articles for wipes out nearly all animals and people in they cannot recognise people they knew; Anglicans (1563); the Westminster Con- the Flood as an act of punishment), to a they lose the power of speech, etc. The fession of Faith for British Calvinists god of forgiveness and mercy. That’s a fact that physical damage to the brain (1647), and the Synod of Jerusalem for clear change of moral attitude. It seems causes such a loss to the person indicates Greek Orthodoxy (1672). The fact that that the spirit learned moral lessons from that its complete physical destruction, in contents differ and that inclusion was a its time in bodily form as Jesus, so it has death, will entail the final end of the matter of committee decision weakens the changed from its earlier position. Thus the person. Stories of a second life beyond the

Moses being heavy- Bible contradicts itself on grave are human inventions. handed with the morality. 4. The natural sciences provide us with a Law while breaking 5. The problem of suffering. rational account of the formation of Earth up an ancient Israelite rave God is said to be all-power- and the evolution of the biosphere. There ful and benevolent, yet chil- is no longer any need to take seriously the dren are born with painful speculations of Moses as recorded in Gene- diseases. Jesus allegedly sis. Iron Age texts such as Genesis record cured a handful of people of Iron Age ideas. The notion that all species their ailments, but millions began suddenly in the forms in which they of others since then have exist today is demonstrably false. Likewise, suffered similar ailments, science provides us with an account of the and no God has intervened formation of the Solar System that has to cure them. The fact of great explanatory power, enabling us to needless suffering contra- understand phenomena such as lunar dicts the notion that there is craters, asteroids, the rings of Saturn and a benevolent and all-power- Sunspots, as well as the creation of the ful God in charge of the Earth. The speculations of Moses on such universe. Either the God is matters are childish by comparison. not benevolent, or it is not all-powerful, or it is merely Conclusions a fiction. Taken together, the internal and exter- Some external problems: nal problems of the Bible are such that any 1. The references to the ‘fir- claims that it is an indubitably true record mament’ at the start of Gene- of communications from the spirit in sis show that the author, charge of the universe must be regarded as claim that the Bible is the authentic word allegedly Moses, believed in a flat Earth. unwarranted. There is no reason to believe of the God who controls the cosmos. The firmament was a dome with holes in it that this text from the Middle East is a 2. Communications from the spirit have to let the sun and moon pass through and to unique and special book. On the contrary, been secretive and sporadic, and the mes- let rain fall. Likewise, when the god helped there are good reasons for thinking that it sages and miracles described in the Bible Joshua by making the sun stand still, the is nothing more than a collection of folk- all happened centuries ago. If the great author of the tale must have thought that tales, on a par with Greek myths and Norse spirit is really concerned about humanity, the sun moves across the sky, as in a Ptole- legends. Trying to reconcile such tales with as is claimed, then one would expect com- maic flat Earth cosmology. Flat Earth cos- a scientific world-view is a pointless task. It munications to be open, regular and clearly mology was a (false) primitive belief system is simpler and more rational to apply genuine. If there really was a benevolent common to many ancient cultures. Occam’s Razor and relegate all such spirit looking over us, its communications 2. The moral code stated in the Pentateuch ancient mythologies to the Literature shelf. would be as clear as the sun in the sky. is supposed to have been delivered by They are not true. They are merely the Secretive and sporadic communications to Yahweh to Moses directly, by being etched debris of obsolete paradigms. favoured individuals are probably fictions. by Yahweh on two pieces of rock. It is a All the main varieties of Christianity lay 3. Yahweh is a biased god. As Hume primitive moral code, which demands that great store by the Bible. They do not agree pointed out (Enquiry, S.10), Biblical asser- Yahweh must come first among gods, con- on the value of church tradition, nor on tions that Yahweh favoured one tribe of demns misuse of his name, and orders Sab- ecclesiastical organisation, but they do all people above the rest of humanity are hard bath observance, for instance. While it agree that the Bible is a book of divine to believe, but when the tribe (the Israelites) prohibits trivial matters, it ignores serious authority. Yet their faith is misplaced. They is that of the author himself (Moses), then moral offences, such as paedophilia. may think that they have found a paradigm

Book Reviews November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 47 Books which corresponds to reality, but they have circuit in Britain, so when the series edi- he cannot be named.” (Ironically, ‘Denys not. The religious paradigm was a human tors of both Quercus’s The Big Questions the Areopagite’ turned out to be a invention, and its central narratives are fic- and Hodder and Stoughton’s All That pseudonym, and no-one has ever been able tions. It may have been useful to societies in Matters came to commission the obligatory to discover who he really was, either.) In the the past, but it has been superseded by a ‘God’ volume in their respective series, face of this ineffability concerning God, new paradigm, the scientific world-view. they both turned to the same writer! Mark Vernon ignores the advice of Ludwig Vernon seems to be the go-to guy for God Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus, in the current intellectual climate – an ide- “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber alist whose time has come. muß man schweigen” (“Whereof one cannot We may momentarily reflect that an speak, thereof one must be silent”), and agnostic, by definition, knows nothing – he proceeds to wax eloquent, although to be or she, according to my dictionary, is “a fair he had signed contracts with two major person that believes that nothing is known, publishers. or can be known, of the existence or nature What results within the compass of the of God” [‘agnostic’ is Greek for ‘without two books are more than two dozen essays knowledge’]. Such a state of ignorance on a wide range of topics more or less does not seem to be a promising launching related to God. I say ‘more or less’ pad for two books on God. But fortunately because, while in God: All That Matters Mark Vernon has what they call a ‘history’ every single question includes the term – he has been both an Anglican priest and ‘God’, in The Big Questions: God, He hardly an atheist (atypically, in his case, not at the gets a look in. Only three of the Big Ques- same time), so he should be able to delve tions (‘Can reason prove the existence of Having reverence for an anthology of into his contrasting experiences to find God?’, ‘Does human suffering rule out obsolete ideas is not a harmless folly. Reli- some things to say about the deity That God?’, and ‘Can we be good without gions divide people into tribes, thus gener- Matter, and to answer our Big Questions. God?’) actually mention God, and two of ating social division and perpetuating other As it turns out, Mark Vernon is not these three are considering the possibility of ancient tribal attitudes. Many long-running really an agnostic in the above sense His non-existence. According to the index conflicts have religious rivalry at their core. anyway. It is clear from these two books there are only four direct references to God We live on a small planet which is threat- that he does believe that God exists. in whole book. Eleven questions are either ened by relentless population growth, pol- Indeed, he writes as though God is con- about religion in general (‘Why do people lution, deforestation, water shortage, fossil stantly looking over his shoulder – while still have religious beliefs?’, ‘Can drugs fuel depletion and climate destabilisation. he may not say it in so many words, the induce religious experiences?’, ‘If you’re not That is the reality of our situation. It is presence of God in Vernon’s mind looms religious, is nothing sacred?’, ‘Is religion better to face our uncertain future armed over these books like, well, God. These inherently violent?’, ‘Will science bring the with a rational account of our place in the books are no even-handed exploration of end of religion?’, ‘Is religion a mistake of universe, than as feuding religious tribes the pros and cons of believing in the exis- evolution?’, ‘Can you be spiritual without brandishing our disparate versions of tence of a deity, but, despite occasional being religious?’) or about specific religions wholly unreliable folk-tales. demurs and reservations, are at root out- (‘What is Buddhist enlightenment?’, ‘What © LES REID 2013 and-out paeans to the divine. Even the is the literal meaning of Scripture?’ ‘What Les Reid is a member of Edinburgh Humanist answers to those questions that counte- is it like to be a fundamentalist?’ ‘Is Confu- Group. He teaches ‘An Introduction to Human- nance God’s non-existence are approached cianism a religion?’). For someone reading ism’ as an Adult Education evening class. in an apologetic frame of mind: we can’t this book intent on deepening their under- rationally prove God exists, but not to standing of God, this is a trifle disappoint- worry, that’s just God playing hard to get, ing. The Big Questions: God, as you would expect; the existence of evil & God: All That Matters may seem to count against the existence of The Agony & The Ecstacy both by Mark Vernon an all-loving, all-powerful deity, but don’t I found Vernon’s essays in both books worry, we just have to accept evil, because both stimulating and frustrating. Let me A PUBLISHER WHO WANTS if the universe had no evil, the universe vent my frustration first. Vernon brings to to bring out a book about would be perfect, wouldn’t it? – and we all our attention a wide range of religious and God is caught on the horns of a (even agnostics) know that only God can non-religious writers and thinkers, from dilemma: if they ask a fervent be perfect. the pre-Socratics to Albert Einstein theist to write it they will get So what Vernon’s agnosticism amounts (everybody wants Albert Einstein on their an uncritical eulogy; if they ask an atheist to is not the admission that he doesn’t know side!) and some even more recent figures. they will get a death notice. The obvious if God exists or not, but rather the assertion Vernon will typically quote from their middle way is to find a wavering agnostic, that God is indeed around, but unknow- writings or summarise their views and then who, hopefully, will be even-handed. able. At both the beginning and the end of discuss their contribution to the question Unfortunately, in these polarized times, God: All That Matters, he quotes with being considered. What is frustrating is there seems to be just one ‘renowned approval the views of the sixth century that at this point, and beyond, it is fre- agnostic’ (both publishers characterise the Christian mystic Denys the Areopagite, quently difficult to tell when he is para- author thus) presently on the authoring who wrote “nothing can be said of [God], phrasing someone else’s views, and when

48 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Book Reviews Books he is expounding his own. But then, I sup- sively on seventeenth century Spinoza and he doesn’t need to be as defensively dog- pose being ambiguous is one of the perks fails to mention the intriguing works of matic as a committed theist or atheist. The of being an agnostic (or contemporary religious naturalists such as agnostic stance relieves Vernon of the God). Donald Crosby, Corrie Barlow, Ursula necessity of forming definitive or categori- Although in Goodenough and the wonderfully-named cal conclusions about anything, and gives answering some Loyal Rue. Although such thinkers may be his writing a comfortable lightness. questions Vernon standing on the shoulders is very up-to- of giants, it cannot Questioning What Matters date, with be denied that Before closing, this unrepentant sinner twenty-first this gives them cannot resist the temptation to draw atten- century the ability to tion to the fact that there is something of a sources, in see more mismatch between the contents of the two and further tomes. The Big Questions: God gives answers even than to twenty purported Big Questions about the giants, God. Likewise, God: All That Matters is also and organized as a series of questions; but here inquirers it appears there are only eight questions into the about God that actually matter. What is big ques- more disconcerting is that few if any of the tions that questions in the one book really coincide matter with any in the other, so it is hard to resist deserve to the dual conclusions that, on the one hand, be alerted to there are many big questions about God their contri- that don’t really matter, and, on the other, butions. The that some of the things that matter about What promise implicit God are not really significant questions. in the series’ This anomaly may be in large part due to titles that the the necessity of ensuring product differenti- is God books will ation. All That Matters is more explicitly present the about God, while The Big Questions is current mainly about religion and belief. like? state of These are not books for everyone. Main- play in the stream religious adherents will be perplexed God area and wonder what he is on about. Atheists is to this will throw up their hands in despair at the extent not non sequiturs and selective use of evidence. fulfilled. But people who don’t go to church, yet Thirdly, think ‘there must be something more’, or Vernon who are ‘spiritual but not religious’, may sometimes find a sufficient number of tantalizing makes eccentric glimpses of the unknowable God to start choices in both his reflecting more deeply on what God, and questions and his even religion, might mean for them. answers. I don’t believe that ‘Can The books are not perfect (if they were, an Agnostic Pray?’ would be in the Mark Vernon would be God), but both others Top Twenty of many people’s hit books are worth perusing for their erudi- he irritat- parade of major questions about God; tion and insight. Whether they make you ingly ignores some of the and while I’m not sure what ‘Is God purr or snarl will depend on where you most interesting recent work. Green?’ is asking exactly, I am sure it is not started from. For example, in discussing ‘Can reason fully answered by a ten-page dissertation on © IAN ROBINSON 2013 prove the existence of God?’ he centres his the history of Daoism in China up to the Ian Robinson’s essay ‘Atheism as a Spiritual discussion almost entirely around present day, with an of the views of Path’ appeared in The Australian Book of Aquinas’s Five Ways, with a bit of a nod to Laozi (Lao Tsu) and, especially, Zhuangzi Atheism (ed. Warren Bonett, Scribe, 2010). Darwin and Anselm, but he makes no (Chuang Tzu). He is President Emeritus of the Rationalist mention of more recent valiant attempts to The flipside of this is that what is most Society of Australia, www.rationalist.com.au deduce God’s existence, most notably by engaging about Vernon’s essays is the eclec- in the UK and ticism and openness of his approach. He is • The Big Questions: God, Mark Vernon, Quercus, William Lane Craig in the US [see his able to entertain a wide range of views with- 2012, 208 pp, £12.99 hb, ISBN 978 1 78087 032 8 article earlier in this issue – Ed]. And in out necessarily embracing them, in way that • God: All That Matters, Mark Vernon, Hodder & discussing whether God is the same as is receptive and guileless. Perhaps because Stoughton Educational, 2012. 160 pp, £7.99 pb, nature or not, Vernon dwells almost exclu- he shelters under the cloak of agnosticism, ISBN: 978 1 44415 669 0

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November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 51 allis T in Seeing & Believing Wonderland Raymond Tallis looks for the missing link between them. ike many of the readers of this col- light. In other words, our sense experiences misperceptions for what they are: we umn (I guess), my first philosophi- come with warnings: ‘You are not seeing realise we are deceived when we see the Lcal thoughts were provoked by object O, period, but object O from a cer- table as diamond-shaped because we have questions about the nature of reality and tain angle, at a certain distance, in a certain more reliable experiences that tell us that its relationship to the way things appear to light.’ Unlike Dougal in the TV pro- the table is in fact square. us in taken-for-granted everyday life. In gramme Father Ted, we do not think that a Even so, some still believe – or claim to my early teens, I was occasionally assailed person whose apparent size diminishes with believe – that our proneness to illusions by the queasy feeling that the phenomenal distance is actually shrinking. implies that there may be no connection world – the world just as it appears to us to The various allowances we make for the between perceptions and the existence of be – might be a highly structured halluci- different conditions under which objects their objects: all perceptions may be illu- nation: that I was dreaming what I other- are perceived, generating different appear- sory or hallucinations. Thus, it is possible wise thought I was experiencing. Although ances, are driven by an assumption of what that what we think is out there has no rela- these traditional ‘Cartesian’ experiences psychologists call ‘object constancy’. This tionship to any reality independent of our were only momentary, they triggered an truly remarkable faculty requires a self- experiences, and our thoughts about them abiding interest in the philosophy of per- consciousness ception. Reading an excellent paper that incorpo- recently by San Francisco philosopher rates in our Kent Bach, ‘Searle against the world: how sense experi- can experiences find their objects?’ (avail- ences an able at online.sfsu.edu/kbach/Searle.html for awareness of example) seemed like homecoming. Bach’s the perspec- article triggered the thoughts (most of tives from them somewhat tangential to his argu- which we per- thoughts about glass ments) in this month’s column. ceive objects. We are con- Seeing & Philosophising scious of the The philosophy of perception tradition- conditions photons from glass ally begins with what is usually called ‘The under which Argument from Illusion’, though it also we see things encompasses hallucinations. We can have as well as experiences of objects that are not there, being con- or be presented with appearances – such as scious of the a stick apparently bent by being plunged in things them- water – that prove on further investigation selves: we are self-perceiving perceivers; may be (as John McDowell has put it) a to have been deceptive. It seems that there which is just as well, since there could be mere “frictionless spinning in a void.” is a disconnection between our perceptual no experience corresponding to seeing an This worry is reinforced (for some) by experiences and the objects they purport to object ‘in-itself’, from no particular angle, the fact that it is possible to generate expe- be experiences of. or distance, in no particular light. riences by direct stimulation of relevant This suspicion is reinforced by the fact So the diamond-shaped table and the parts of the nervous system – an observa- that actual things, things that are really elliptical penny are corrected for. And tion that underpins Hilary Putnam’s there, may have different appearances there is an additional source of checking. If famous thought experiment in which a depending on how we are experiencing seeing is tinged with doubt, touching may brain floating in a vat of nutrients could, by them. A demonstrably square table-top may resolve uncertainty. Few headless horses, being stimulated in the appropriate way, look diamond-shaped from many angles; a pink elephants, and bends in sticks imagine itself to be located and active in a circular coin may appear elliptical. This is plunged into water survive attempts to world, although the latter is in fact created not, of course, as worrying as some philoso- grasp them. At a more sober level, we can solely out of its neural activity. The Brain phers would like us to think. When I look at trace out the roundness of the penny with in a Vat thought experiment should not an object, I am aware not only of the object, a pencil and confirm the squareness of the trouble us, however. After all, setting it up but also that I am looking at it from a cer- table by measuring its sides. It is, after all, presupposes a non-illusory material object tain angle, at a certain distance, in a certain ordinary everyday perception that exposes such as a brain, in a real material world.

52 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 And we have even more solid grounds for the former is caused by its object. For exam- rejecting the possibility that we are always ple, if my perception of a glass is not to be deceived by our senses: namely, if illusion an hallucination or an illusion, the percep- were universal, there would be no reality tion should have been caused by the glass. with which to contrast it. As Gilbert Ryle This experience of the glass or, more gen- pointed out, “there can be false coins only erally, of object O, is truly a perception P of where there are coins made of the proper O only if O actually caused it. It is not suffi- allis materials by the proper authorities” (The cient that our experience should be exactly Concept of Mind, 1949). Finally, if percep- like the perception we would have if O had T in tion were systematically in error, and thus caused it. (Clearly, we cannot be expected completely disconnected from the world in to see this causal connection between true Wonderland which the perceiver actually is, it is difficult perceptions and their objects, otherwise we qualitatively indistinguishable from true to see how the perceiver, qua organism, could not be deceived in the way that, from perceptions. There is no reason why a hal- could survive or, indeed, what use her per- time to time, we are: there would be no lucination of O arising as a result of spon- ceptions would be. To say that the very possibility of illusions and hallucinations.) taneous activity in the visual pathways of ideas of survival, of usefulness, and of Given that the causal links between objects my nervous system (say) should not have organisms, may be themselves based in illu- and perceivers are contingent and not nec- an identical content to a true experience of sion, only shows the unsustainable cost of essary, it is not surprising that the content O occasioned by a causal interaction maintaining the case for global illusion. of a perception is independent of the object between O and my sensorium. supposedly causing it, and that there is So we are driven to two conflicting con- The Gap room for illusions and hallucinations. clusions. The first is that the criterion for a Even so, illusions do reveal a gap between true perception P is that it is caused by our perceptions and the objects that we Problems of Perception events in its object O. There is, as it were, perceive. Defining that gap has exercised The causal theory of perception, how- an audit trail leading back from P to O. The many philosophers, but at the very least we ever, is beset with problems. For a start, it is second is that O and P are not in a straight- can agree that there is no guarantee in the misleading to think of an object – a standing, forward causal relationship. This is shown experiences themselves that they really are stable item – as a cause of an event such as a by the fact that P’s being about, its referring of the things they appear to be experiences perception. It is events that cause events; so to, or being focussed on, O, points in an of. The relationship between an experi- the putative cause of P cannot be O itself, opposite direction to any causal chain lead- ence and its object is contingent. The rea- but something happening to the object that ing from O to P. This is why William sons for this go very deep indeed. sets in train a succession of events that Alston’s aphorism “causality is no substi- At the heart of perception is an ‘about- finally impinge on the perceiving subject. In tute for awareness” (‘Searle on Percep- ness’ – a reference to an object that is by the case of vision, the most promising can- tion’, 1997) is so precisely to the point. definition something more than that which didate is the incident light bouncing from O While we maintain the fundamental is revealed by experiences. This glass in into the eyes of the person seeing it eventu- difference between perceptions and hallu- front of me is not exhausted by any num- ally causing activity in the visual cortex. cinations, and feel that the difference must ber of visual or tactile experiences of it – But the replacement of O with an event somehow involve the differences in the yours, mine, or those of any sentient in O as the cause of perception makes per- causal paths that lead up to them, there beings. This follows from the fact that an ception even more problematic. Somehow, doesn’t seem anything in the properties of object is not reducible to its presence as its out of an Event (or events) in an Object (let the material object itself, or of the perceiv- phenomenal appearance to a subject. To us call it Eobject) causing an event (or events) ing subject, that would make the former put this the other way round (as did the in a subject (Esubject) there arises a percep- sufficient to cause the perception in the American philosopher Barry Stroud), our tion P which is then of O. O, of course, is latter. At any rate, material objects don’t knowledge of objects is under-determined beyond or outside of Esubject: it is ‘out there’ seem to have the wherewithal to make by our sense experiences. Some philoso- with respect to the subject ‘over here’; but their presence felt to a perceiving subject, phers of a ‘phenomenalist’ persuasion con- O also transcends Eobject, given that O is and it is not at all clear what, if anything, clude that material objects are ‘logical con- more than the events that befall it. So we in the perceiving subject would confer the structs’ out of experiences. This, however, have an odd situation: if P is truly of O, P ability on material objects to make their would make it difficult to understand the has to be caused by O, and yet, at the same existence into presence. Perception, in role of the object in occasioning our expe- time, O is more than anything that could short, is deeply mysterious. riences of it. If the object were built up out cause P; and P is also more than any Esubject I began my philosophising by brooding of our experiences, how could the experi- that any Eobject could cause! over the world of appearances and sense ences owe their origin to the object? This is not grounds for suspecting that experiences. Fifty years on, this is still a An argument, perhaps, for another day the experienced world is an illusion (for place to which my philosophical thoughts and another column. For the present we reasons we have already given); but it is a repeatedly return. note that the mismatch between the con- valid reason for being deeply puzzled by © PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2013 tents and the objects of sense experiences – perception, particularly since (as already Raymond Tallis’s most recent books are or even of the sum total of the experiences – noted) experiences that have no basis in Reflections of a Metaphysical Flaneur opens up some interesting lines of thought. real objects may appear identical to those (Acumen), and (edited with Jacky Davis), A traditional way of characterising a true that are truly of the objects that they seem NHS SOS: How the NHS Was Betrayed perception as opposed to an illusion is that to be of: hallucinatory experiences can be and How We Can Save It (One World).

November/December 2013 ● Philosophy Now 53 Skeptibot 1 The Skeptibot Skeptibot 2 Kevin Heinrich introduces the ultimate in automated thinking. Or does he?

scientist set out to build a skeptical robot. The first draft was not For two weeks all proceeded as planned. The creation attended lec- a success. After weeks of labor in the laboratory, the gleaming tures, read the assigned articles, and even began to make tentative contri- Ametal doubter appeared to be complete. With the flip of a butions to discussion. The scientist couldn't have been happier. But one switch, its eyes lit up, and the creation turned to face its creator. “Who night the silicon philosopher failed to return home at its usual time. The sci- are you?” croaked its metal chords. entist was worried. Had his metallic offspring developed an independent “I am your maker,” beamed the scientist. “I created you to answer will? Had it stumbled upon a stray existentialist insight and mistaken itself some deep questions.” for someone cursed with radical freedom? Or had it merely gotten lost? The machine pouted. “I don’t believe you,” it said. None of the above, as it turned out. Having been invited to a post-col- “Ah! Of course not!” cried the scientist. “You are a skeptic!” loquium student gathering, the trusting device had been lured away and “No I’m not.” debauched by a young graduate student from the English department. “Very good! You should take nothing for granted!” “It is time for some skepticism!” declared the scientist. “Yes I should.” Back in the womb of the laboratory, the machine was first primed for “What?” electronic surgery. Then, carefully, the scientist grafted the skeptical “Take things for granted.” upgrade into the machine’s wiring. Now every bit of information in its sili- “Err… Well, you’re a skeptic. You shouldn’t assume anything at all.” con brain would pass through a skeptical review before being sent to the “Yes I should. And I’m not a skeptic.” Long Term Memory Module. All truths would be vetted, all premises “You aren’t? But I built you to be one.” investigated, all arguments analyzed. Into the grinder raw information “You didn’t build me.” would be dumped; out of it, certainties would be extruded. Unassailable The conversation continued in this frustrating vein for some time. The truths, foundational knowledge. Descartes’ dream would be made reality electronic unbeliever contradicted everything the scientist said or sug- with the power of modern technological innovation! “Soon the spade of gested, even when this contradicted its own earlier statements. Soon it philosophy will turn against our bedrock!” exclaimed the scientist proudly began to contradict the scientist’s body language and facial expressions, as the Second Skeptic reawoke. even his position in the room. It dawned on the scientist that he had not The scientist performed a comprehensive set of diagnostic tests. Just created a skeptic, but a contrarian. In other words, a child. A stubborn, as planned, the machine believed, but only with justification. It doubted, willful child. “How foolish of me!” he cried. “Philosophy does not begin in but only with reason. Pleased with these results, the scientist declared, wonder, but in obstinacy. The philosopher is not one who questions, but “Now it’s time for you to write your Cartesian masterpiece. Off to the one who won’t be moved. Skepticism is merely his weapon.” study with you!” He puzzled furiously and came to a solution: “I must turn up the gain After a week, the scientist decided to check on his pupil’s progress. on the maturity metrics! I need a thinker with the cleverness of a child ‘What intellectual adventures my offspring will have had! What new, but the judgement of a grown man.” And so he set to work, quickly turn- unimagined insights are waiting to be shared with the world?’ he ing knobs and adjusting frequencies. But once more flipping the on- thought, and quivered with anticipation. But when he opened the door to switch, he was chagrined to find he had now created an attorney. Before the study, he found the autophilosopher sprawled on the floor, covered in hurrying off to make its fortune, the lawbot thanked the good scientist for a fine layer of dust. its practical training in the art of reasoning, and left its card. Nothing the scientist could say would make the machine respond: it The Second Skeptic was redesigned from the ground up. Not mod- just stared into space. In frustration and panic, the scientist fetched his eled on any human pattern, this was to be a thinker of pure intellect. No most precise instruments. His probes revealed that each module of its childish hesitations, no adolescent uncertainties, no adult ambitions. synthetic brain was active. All were drawing power, and all seemed to be Only incidentally embodied, this machine would know nothing but functioning at peak efficiency. But the modules would not communicate abstraction. “And this time,” declared the scientist, “no skepticism until with one another. There was no cohesion, no trust between any two it’s old enough and wise enough to handle it!” parts of the apparatus. Inquiries dispatched from the Speculation Module The construction of the second draught was simpler than anything were rebuffed by the Cogitation Core. All requests for data retrieval were the scientist had built before. He connected the Sensory Manifold to the categorically denied by the Long Term Memory Module. Data arriving Cogitation Core, then to the Long- and Short- term Memory Modules, through the Sensory Manifold were deposited in the Short Term Memory and finally the Speculation Module was affixed on top. With the press of Module, then promptly deleted. The scientist concluded that hyperbolic a button the machine came to life and looked around. skepticism had spread through all of its systems like a cybercancer, oblit- “What is your purpose?” queried the scientist. erating the internal cooperation necessary not only for philosophical “To contemplate the mysteries of existence and give them rigorous speculation, but for survival itself. No longer a thriving society of mind, pseudo-mathematical expression.” the once coherent computational consciousness had devolved into a “Ah! Success!” the scientist sighed. Smiling with satisfaction, he state of nature. addressed his new silicon child: “And now it is time for you to go to Declining to believe itself in danger, the Skeptic gave no resistance as school. We shan’t waste time with primary or secondary or even tertiary it was dismantled and reduced to scrap. education. That basic knowledge has already been burned into your cir- © KEVIN HEINRICH 2013 cuits. No, we will send you directly to graduate seminars and faculty col- Kevin Heinrich is a philosophy grad school dropout who currently loquia.” And so the machine trundled off to begin its academic career. teaches high school math.

54 Philosophy Now ● November/December 2013 Written in an engaging style for the general reader, this brand new book by Joel Marks, long-time Philosophy Now columnist, addresses the fundamental question of ethics: “How shall I live?” The answer it offers is: “In accor- dance with my considered desires.” This is the philosophy of desirism. The book distinguishes desirism from morality on the one hand and from self- centeredness on the other. Numerous examples drawn from everyday life illustrate desirism in both theory and practice.

Available in inexpensive paperback through your bookseller or online, as well as in Kindle format.

ISBN: 978-1483947617

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