Selective Obscurantism

From Scott A. Davison's "Craig on the Grounding Objection to Middle Knowledge" in the recent issue of Faith and Philosophy:

"In fact, we are probably never in a position to say with much confidence that any particular action is free (in the Libertarian sense employed by Craig and the Molinists). This is because for all we know, actions that seem to be free might very well have hidden causes."

Davison attributes this point, which he calls an old one, to Dennett among others. It simply will not do, however. I recognized the pattern of the argument at once; one comes across it in external world skepticism, and many other skeptical positions:

We cannot be confident that things that seem X are X because, for all we know, there very well might be something hidden that makes things seem X even though they are really not X.

You can plug anything into X; nothing in the form of this argument makes that impossible. Which means, if we accept this argument in one case, we have to accept it in other cases where we could say "for all we know" there might be these 'hidden causes' that are severing appearance and reality. And they are legion: other minds, external world, any scientific conclusion in any science (this is why Newton famously insisted that we should not make hypotheses - by 'hypothesis' he meant precisely this sort of 'for all we know' postulation of possible hidden causes in order to pre-empt our conclusions from the evidence), the appearance of evidentness in mathematics (because 'for all we know' there might be some hidden cause making it only seem to be the case that 2+2=4), you name it.

One finds this sort of argument, which is a lousy one, used by compatibilists quite a bit. In putting forward these arguments, they are being selectively obscurantist in ways they would be horrified to find in other places. For instance, C. A. Campbell in his Gifford Lectures On Selfhood and Godhood once claimed that we experience the fact that some of our actions are uncaused. Now, I think that this is a claim that is either false or misleading; but the actual argument I have seen compatibilists use against it is precisely a version of the above argument. This, as I said, simply will not do; it is an absurd argument (and ultimately self-defeating, because this argument form can be used against itself). The proper response to it should always be: "Prove to me that these 'hidden causes' actually exist in the relevant cases! Otherwise, you've got no more of an argument here than someone who believes evolution is false because 'for all we know' God just made things seem like evolution is true; or someone who believes that 'I have two hands' is false because 'for all we know' we might live in the Matrix."

Faith and Philosophy and the Trinity

The most recent number of Faith and Philosophy came in the mail yesterday. There are three articles on the Trinity, two on Plantinga's notion of "Augustinian science", one on Craig on middle knowledge, one about Kierkegaard and Zen Buddhism, and one on reformational aesthetics. Some comments on the Trinitarian articles:

The three articles on the Trinity each gives a different account of the doctrine. "Trinity and Polytheism" continues Edward Wierenga's defense of what has come to be called Social Trinitarianism. Its basic argument is that we should distinguish being divine from being a God. When we say

(1) There are three really distinct Persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit);
(2) Each of the Persons is God;
(3) There is only one God;

then we should interpret (2) (in the Athanasian Creed, for instance) as saying "Each of the Persons is divine" rather than "Each of the Persons is a God". The second article, "The Problem with Social Trinitarianism: A Reply to Wierenga," by Jeffrey Brower, protests that the Athanasian Creed uses 'deus' rather than 'divinus':

Ita deus Pater, deus Filius, deus Spiritus sanctus.

I'm not sure that this really tells us anything; one can also question whether "deus Pater" should be translated "The Father is a God" rather than just "The Father is God". For example, saying "Deus Pater" is entirely consistent with saying that there is no such thing as "a God", there's just God; saying "The Father is a God" is not consistent with such a claim. Brower rightly goes on to note that Latin writers make no sharp distinction between divinus and deus, which are similar to the use of the words 'human' and 'man' in English (taking 'man' gender-neutrally). But this doesn't really show that Wierenga's difference from the Athanasian Creed is any more than verbal. However, Brower goes on to more substantive issues. Wierenga holds that properly speaking we shouldn't call any particular Person of the Trinity 'God'; we should only call them 'divine'. 'God' we should reserve for all three Persons taken together. Brower notes that this won't work with other statements in the Quicunque Vult; each of the three persons must be almighty, eternal, etc. Thus, Wierenga isn't offering a particularly natural interpretation of statements like these. Further, Wierenga's position requires us not only to say that, properly speaking, the Father isn't God, but also that, properly speaking, God isn't divine (since being divine applies to the persons), which is odd. Brower proposes as his own view the position that is sometimes called (a little misleadingly) the Material Constitution view (of which Michael Rea is the most notable defender, which argues that two things can be the same without being identical (a position that goes back to Aristotle's views on the material and formal constitution of objects - hence the name). Take a bronze statue. Are the bronze and the statue the same thing? We are usually inclined to say so. But the bronze and the statue aren't identical; they share all the same material parts, but the bronze statue's being a statue and its being bronze are essentially different (the bronze, for instance, can survive the statue's being melted down, while the statue cannot; the statue can survive the gradual replacement of its material parts, while the bronze cannot). Thus, on this view, each Person is numerically the same as God, but not identical to God. This is intended to contrast not only with Wierenga's Social Trinitarianism but also with the Relative Identity view of Geach and Van Inwagen. The Relative Identity view treats "Each Person is the same as God" as a case of identity; the Constitution view does not. According to Brower, "Unlike Social Trinitarianism, [the Constitution view] is clearly compatible witht eh view that there is exactly one divine being or deity (since it entails the existence of one and only [one] divine being); and unlike Relative-Identity Theory, it clearly has application otuside the context of the Trinity" (p. 302). I think this is a fair assessment; while the Trinity isn't a case of material or formal constitution, the Constitution view is not committed to saying it is; it just needs material and formal constitution to argue that not all kinds of sameness are identity, and then uses this latter conclusion.

In a footnote (294n23), Wierenga says, "It does seem to me that Augustine's development of teh doctrine, with its near reluctance to call the members of the Trinity 'persons' (De Trin, V, 9) and its analogy for the Trinity of mind, love, and knowledge (De Trin, IX, 4) is not social, but it is not far from modalism, either." Now, I am not convinced that there is any sense in which 'social' could legitimately be applied to the Trinity that would not be shared by the Cappadocians and Augustine; this is commonly stated, but not, I think, adequately argued. But more importantly, the reason Augustine is careful about the word 'person' in V.9 is not that he is in doubt about whether there are persons in God, but the purely historical fact that 'persona' as the Latin term had to be recruited from a meaning that didn't exactly fit the Greek word 'hypostasis'; he points out the well-known fact that "three hypostaseis in one ousia" sounds very confusing to Latin ears, because the natural way to translate this would be "three substantiae in one essentia," which is not what the Latins would say because they would tend to regard "substantia" and "essentia" as synonyms. The Latins had no easy way to make the right sort of distinction, so did the best they could and used "persona". So Augustine's "near reluctance" on this point really has no relevance to the question. And Augustine, contrary to Wierenga's point about IX.4, is quite far from modalism because he doesn't regard the analogy as anything more than an analogy, and, in fact, devotes almost the whole of Book XV to looking at ways in which the analogy fails! Virtually all the criticisms made against Augustine's account of the Trinity, including the "not far from modalism" charge, were originally considered by Augustine himself, in some version or other; this is because Augustine is explicitly not giving an account of the Trinity, but what he thinks is the best creaturely approximation to it: the mind when it is contemplatively knowing and loving God (Augustine looks at several different ways in which he thinks human beings are 'in the image of God'; this one is the image of God in the highest sense). He is very concerned, however, to make clear that this creaturely approximation falls short of the divine reality it approximates in some very important ways, and makes great efforts to prevent people from being misled on this score.

Brian Leftow has an article caleld "A Latin Trinity" in which he gives yet another view. Unlike the Constitution view, Leftow's view treats "Each Person is the same as God" as an identity. However, this view, which Leftow calls Latin Trinitarianism (LT for short) takes a somewhat different tack than Relative Identity views. He proposes an analogy between the Trinity and a time-traveling Rockette. Suppose Jane, a Rockette, uses a time machine to double herself up, i.e., Jane performs on stage and goes back in time to perform with herself on stage. Now the leftmost Jane is Jane and the rightmost Jane is Jane; each Jane is Jane, but Jane is there more than once. Even so, suggests Leftow, just as Jane's life now has two distinguishable simultaneous streams, so God's life has three distinguishable atemporal events (which Leftow associates with the Trinitarian analogy of remembering, understanding, and loving found in Augustine and Aquinas), namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, each simply identical to God, but distinct inasmuch as God (as it were) is tripled up. As I said, Leftow simply calls this Latin Trinitarianism, but let's call it the Multiplied-Personal Identity view in order to distinguish it from other formulations. I find this an interesting view, but I worry about modalism. This view makes it sound as if God constituted the Persons; whereas the traditional view, I think, is that the Persons constitute what it is to be God. Leftow does consider the issue of modalism and concludes that his view is not a case of it because modalism is the position that there are three successive manners of appearance to the world rather than three Persons, and his view is that the three divine lives are not successive and are intrinsic (they are not appearance to the world). I'm not wholly convinced that this deals with the danger, since, as I noted, I think the real issue is whether it is the divine substance that constitutes the persons; and I think Leftow's position seems to bring us on the wrong side of this question. But the pastward-time-travel analogy is an interesting one that perhaps deserves further consideration. I also note with pleasure that in a footnote (332n45) Leftow explicitly recognizes that on Aquinas's view, so far from simplicity being a problem for the Trinity, God is a Trinity rather than a Triad precisely because He is simple.

A Confusion about Natural Law Jurisprudence

It is commonly claimed that natural law jurisprudence wishes, in Hart's words, "to assert mysteriously that there is some fused identity between law as it is and as it ought to be." ¹ This claim, which goes back to Bentham and Austin, is, however, simply confused. Natural law jurisprudence (such as that found in Blackstone, whom Bentham and Austin are criticizing) does not traditionally make such a distinction, because such a distinction is too crude. Neither 'law as it is' nor 'law as it ought to be' are precise phrases. In the mouth of a positivist, the sense of 'law' in the phrase 'law as it is' that has to be considered is what in the natural law tradition would be called positive law or human law. But it is clear that natural law jurisprudence does not posit a "fused identity" between positive law as it is and positive law as it ought to be; for one thing, 'positive law as it ought to be' can mean several different things. As an example: ideally, the medievals thought, positive law would outlaw prostitution; this is one sense of 'positive law as it ought to be'. However, they insisted that this was not possible; that if you did actually outlaw prostitution, you would get something worse (the destabilization of society). Despite the fact that it ought not to exist, as a matter of fact prostitution on the medieval view as a lesser evil that just happened to exclude a greater evil by (as it were) channeling violations of the marriage bond into a very narrow channel whose adverse effects could easily be limited by law; if you took away this lesser evil, violations of the marriage bond would not be channeled into this narrow set of limits where law could keep a close eye on it. In one sense, 'law as it ought to be' excludes prostitution; in another sense, 'law as it ought to be' tolerates it with approving of it. In the first sense there is no "fused identity" between positive law as it is and positive law as it ought to be; this is explicitly denied. In the second sense, however, there is no "fused identity," either, because it is never denied that positive law as it is might deviate from positive law as it ought to be.

The trap into which legal positivists continually fall is, from the natural law point of view, thinking that 'law' means exactly the same thing whenever it is used. Natural law jurisprudence denies that; it insists (1) that 'law' means several related but different things; (2) that the difference among these senses is in some cases so great as to result in equivocation; and (3) that these different senses can be ranked in the sense that some things are more properly called 'law' than other things [added later: A fourth needs to be added here, since on some views it is what is really at issue: (4) the primary criterion for this ranking is moral, i.e., moral laws are more properly laws than immoral ones; although most positivist arguments don't really do much against this principle, it is often in the background as the primary disagreement. But here I'm merely considering the "fused identity" claim, which is false because of (3).]. Thus when we are talking about positive law, 'law' may be used for just and unjust laws. If we have an unjust law, natural law jurisprudence denies that there is a "fused identity" between law as it is and law as it ought to be, just as much as any positivist. The difference is that natural law theorists hold that in this sort of case the distinction between law as it is and law as it ought is a sharper distinction than the legal positivist thinks it is. On legal positivism, the word 'law' in 'law as it is' and 'law as it ought to be' always has exactly the same sense; on natural law theory, in all cases where positive law as it is and natural law (one of several possible senses of the phrase 'law as it ought to be') conflict, the word 'law' is used equivocally in the phrases 'law as it is' and 'law as it ought to be' - there is a slightly different sense. Both senses are legitimate senses of the word 'law', but in one case we are using 'law' in a more extended sense than in the other. Another medieval analogy: How many human beings are in a morgue? In one way one can easily count human corpses as human being. It is also clear that in another way we could deny that the human corpses are human beings and restrict 'human being' to the living. The word 'human being' is used equivocally when applied to corpses or to the living; sometimes not recognizing this distinction doesn't make any difference, but sometimes it does. Roughly, one may say that in natural law jurisprudence, unjust laws are the corpses of law. In one sense they are laws, but in another, more fundamental, sense they are not. Sometimes not making this distinction doesn't matter; but sometimes it genuinely does. From the natural law perspective, legal positivism is guilty of failing to recognize this distinction in senses; it tries to act as if there were only one sense of 'law', as if things weren't able to be called 'law' in stricter and looser senses. What bothers the natural law theorist is not that legal positivists make a distinction between law and morality; it is that they make the distinction in an overly simplistic way.

Hart treats the attempt to reject this over-simplistic distinction as "an invitation to revise our conception of what a legal rule is." ² This, however, is exactly wrong. Natural law jurisprudence precedes positivism in time; it became far more pervasive in society than positivism ever has; its residual traces are still found throughout our legal system; legal positivism grew out of a criticism of this. It was Bentham and Austin who attacked Blackstone, not vice versa; it is the legal positivist who is inviting the revision of our conception of law, a revision that has not completely been effected. The natural law theorist is not offering an invitation to revise our conception of law; the natural law theorist is refusing the legal positivist's invitation to revise our conception of law, on the basis that there are perfectly good reasons not to oversimplify it in the way legal positivists generally seem to do. [One can argue that not all do, i.e., that it is not essential to legal positivism; but this is a different issue. What I am pointing out here is that from the perspective of natural law jurisprudence most positivist arguments against natural law jurisprudence appear to commit them to some such oversimiplification.] 'Law' and 'legal rule' are words that indicate complicated interrelations of different senses, and, from the natural law perspective, the legal positivist is committed to severing these interrelations and saying that one, and only one, of these senses is law (and, what is more, from the natural law perspective the legal positivist chooses the sense least capable of standing alone as their stand-alone sense).

Notes

[1] H. L. A. Hart, "Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals," in Law and Morality, ed. by David Dyzenhaus and Arthur Ripstein, University of Toronto Press (Toronto: 1996) p. 41.

[2] Ibid.

Skeptics' Circle

The second Skeptics' Circle at "Respectful Insolence" is well worth reading.

Positive Arguments for Natural Law

These are of two sorts, which I will call top-down and bottom-up. I'll do the latter first.

Bottom-up argument

The fundamental and basic point of natural law jurisprudence is that law is the authoritative promulgation of dictates of practical reason (this isn't a complete definition of law, but the primary element to which natural law jurisprudence appeals). Every act of reasoning is based on principles. This is true of practical reasoning as well; our practical reasoning gets its force through conformity with certain principles that are fundamental and naturally known. For instance, if a line of reasoning forces us to the conclusion that something evil should be done, we know that we have gone wrong somewhere and that our reasoning violates a fundamental principle (evil should not be done). Such reasoning is not according to reason, in that it is not according to the fundamental principles to which reasoning must be conformed in order to be genuinely rational. Thus there are natural principles of reason to which practical reasoning must conform in order to be rationally authoritative. Natural law consists of those principles to which practical reasoning (particularly about things to which we are naturally inclined, like living in society) must conform in order to be according to reason.

It is natural law, therefore, that makes possible obedience to positive law in the first place, since it is natural law that makes possible all practical reasoning (which obedience to positive law presupposes). It is natural law, then, that justifies the creation and preservation of the legal mechanisms of civil society through which positive law is possible, since it contains the principles that govern practical reasoning about what would be conducive to the common good of each us insofar as we are interacting with each other in society. It is natural law that gives us the reason why law is binding in the first place. It is natural law that begins to establish a commonality of law among nations. This commonality need not be perfect; since positive law presupposes reasoning, and often a lot of reasoning, some nations may have reasoned more carefully or more extensively along a particular line than others. But the commonality does exist, and is in the ordinary work of society generally recognized to exist. This is what is called ius gentium, the collection of principles recognized by societies generally; the more civilized the society is, the more they are recognized.

It is also natural law that makes possible a real international law, since the first basics of a law of nations derive from the need for interactions between peoples or nations to be in conformity with the basic principles of practical reason. It is possible, therefore, to have a real law of nations independent of the particular legal mechanisms that are responsible for civil law, a basic framework that allows nations to interact practically for common good. This framework is also generally recognized to exist in the ordinary interactions of various peoples and nations. It is this framework that is already in place to justify the extension of legal mechanisms analogous to those in civil cases (treaties, for instance) to international cases, in a way that allows those mechanisms to be binding at all. International law, therefore, in both its customary and treaty-mechanism forms, is itself an evidence of natural law.

This allows an additional consideration. Through natural law we are able to hold governments accountable by determining whether they are acting in accordance with the principles and conclusions of practical reasoning that make them possible in the first place. An example of this is appeal to natural rights against the tyrannies of government. Natural rights are more fundamental than any positive law precisely because they are upstream (as it were) from positive in practical reasoning. In virtue of these elements of our practical reasoning, people can demand of the sovereign, demand of the legislative powers that constitute government, that they not act in certain ways; people can insist that civil rights should be distributed in certain ways. This is because natural rights are elements of something more fundamental than positive law itself, something that grounds the very possibility of government and civil society: natural law, constituted by the fundamental principles of practical, moral, and legal reasoning itself. Natural law is capable of being a bulwark against tyranny and oppression because it transcends, rationally and morally, all mechanisms of society.

Top-down argument

Granted that the world is ruled by divine providence, it is ordered according to promulgated dictates of divine reason; the whole community of the universe, as Aquinas says, is governed by divine reason. Thus there is an eternal law according to which the world is governed. Since all things are governed in some way by this law, everything in its own fashion participates in this eternal law. Rational creatures are also subject to the eternal law involved in divine providence; they participate in this law rationally. Since they participate in the rule of divine reason according to their own reason, they participate in providence itself through principles of reason that govern how they guide their own practice and the practices of others. This participation, these principles of reason, is what we call natural law.

Anscombe and Just War Theory

"Verbum Ipsum" gives some quotations by G. E. M. Anscombe on the philosophy of war.

The Foreign-born and the President

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

There's a minority (but growing movement to amend the above portion of the U.S. Constitution; see, for example, Amendus.org with its slogan of 'Amend for Arnold and Jen' (Arnold you know; 'Jen' is Jennifer Granholm, the Canadian-born Democratic Governor of Michigan). Congress is considering several possible amendments.

Since I'm fairly conservative about Constitutional matters, I oppose any such amendment. What strikes me, though, is that supporters of such amendments often treat the matter as if the Constitution were specifically singling out foreign-born citizens; but, of course, as you can see, natural-born citizens who have not been U.S. residents for fourteen years are also prohibited from running for the Office of the President. This is entirely reasonable; the conditions for the Office of the President must be determined entirely by the peculiarities of the Office itself. Part of the reason for the above clause (it is also a reason for the Electoral College) is to weaken the chances of putting the power of the most powerful magistracy in the United States under foreign influence, and to reduce the chances that the interests of the President will become too identified with the interests of those who are not American citizens. This the clause does reasonably well. No, nor are any rights violated by this clause, nor is it, in Orrin Hatch's absurd phrase, 'un-American' (I've never understood how people can call something in the Constitution, which has been the American norm for more than two centuries, 'un-American). My own stance on these matters is that the Constitution is best left well alone until and unless it can be shown that a provision is leading to clear abuse.