gadflies

Why wait until college?

2010-01-26T20:47:00.000-08:00

Check out this article from the Washington Post describing how some students at one middle school spend their lunchtime at a meeting of their Philosophy Club. I had a prospective student from the other side of the U.S. tell me a similar club at his high school was very popular. Why don't we see more of this? Do you think it'd be helpful if students were exposed to philosophy earlier in their career?

The myth of the useless philosophy major

2010-01-14T17:57:00.001-08:00

Check out this Business Week essay about why people who are seriously interested in a business career should major in philosophy.

Oh, and guess which job is ranked #11 out of 200 jobs in a recent "study"? Yes, the job is philosopher! Right below dental hygienist.

I owe both of these items to Leiter Reports.

Placing Mind in the Physical World

2008-04-15T09:17:00.001-07:00

No loopholes!

Here's a link to the Wacome paper from the Minding Place workshop: "Goodbye to the Ghost of the Ghost in the Machine"

How Should Christians Vote?

2008-03-06T14:04:00.000-08:00

Christians of various political stripes aspire to use the “levers of power,” i.e., the state’s police powers, to enforce their conceptions of divine justice, i.e., how God wants people to behave.

With this is in view, I ask: what’s the difference between these two patterns of inference?

(1) God wants people to do x.

(2) The powers of the state can be used to force people to do x.

Therefore, God wants the powers of the state used to force people to do x.

(1) God wants people to do x.

(2*) Water boarding can be used to force people to do x.

Therefore, God wants water boarding used to force people to do x.

I advocate not for water boarding--the second bit of reasoning is ridiculous and horrifying--but against the unreflective assumption that God wants us to force people to do things, even by means of the relatively 'genteel' coercive mechanisms of the democratic state.

Do 'Creationists' Believe in Creation?

2007-11-06T15:28:00.000-08:00

To believe in creation is to believe that this world, with its natural laws and boundary conditions, was created by God, that these laws and initial conditions, and what follows from them in the natural course of events, are what they are in virtue of God's creative intentions. To believe in creation is to believe that what happens in nature is God’s doing. It is to believe that God acts by means of what the theological tradition calls secondary causation. It is to believe, for example, that if the human species came into existence in the natural course of events, as a result of the operation of natural laws over billions of years, then this is how God created the human species. Many “creationists” assert, to the contrary, that if the human species came into existence in the natural course of events, as a result of the operation of natural laws over billions of years, then God did not create the human species. To accept what science tells us about human origins is, they say, to deny that God created us. They say that God can have created the human species only directly, miraculously, not by means of secondary causes. Apparently, they reject the idea that God acts in the world by way of secondary causes: either God did something directly or God did not do it at all. This is tantamount to believing that this world, even if it is an arena into which God on occasion miraculously intervenes, is not God’s creation.

2006-11-25T14:27:00.000-08:00

A plug for reading ancient philosophy from Will Smith!? (from an interview with Reader's Digest found here...)

"Smith: The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school. Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests -- not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life. Jada and I homeschool our children, because the date of the Boston Tea Party does not matter.

RD: But there are some basics in education that need to be taught.

Smith: Of course there are. Reading, writing and arithmetic, because those are the languages of our country.

RD: When you say you homeschool, do you mean you actually teach them?

Smith: No, we have hired teachers who teach what we feel is important. For example, Plato's Republic -- kids need to know that. Why is that not taught in first grade?

RD: You think kids in elementary school should read Plato's Republic?

Smith: Yeah. You cannot be an American without reading it and Aristotle's Politics. That is what the forefathers of this country read, and they used them to create what I believe is the finest system of government that has ever existed."

Of course, Smith's also rather down on formal education, including college. But what do you think?

War, Peace, and Pacifism

2006-11-07T07:13:00.000-08:00

A Panel Discussion

on Wednesday, November 8, at 7:00 pm, in VPH 215

Brief Presentations by the Panelists
followed by Open Discussion

The panelists are:

Mike Andres
Mitch Kinsinger
Don Wacome
Dan Young
Mike Yoder

Click on name for the written presentation.

More on pomo

2006-10-11T21:51:00.000-07:00

In light of Jay's recent talk and the papers now posted here, folks might find it interesting to read Keith DeRose's take on how a philosopher ought to regard postmodernism over at the epistemology blog Certain Doubts. And one of the many comments on his post is by Brian McLaren. DeRose responds to McLaren over at Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank. Lots of stuff to look at...

Van Hook Papers

2006-10-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

Gadflies is pleased to provide access to some papers by Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Jay M. Van Hook

From Phallo-philosophy to Hospitality

Seeing Jesus as a Deconstructionist

A Quest Undaunted: Excursion into African Philosophy

Philosophy and Monty Python

2006-09-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

So there's a new book out there: Monty Python and Philosophy--yet another entry in the hefty book series of [insert popular culture topic here] and Philosophy. Its existence has inspired me to post links to just a few of the many interesting and/or humorous bits of philosophical Python. Enjoy!

The Argument Clinic

Germans vs. Greeks

The infamous witch scene

The dead parrot

The Bruces' Philosophers' Drinking Song (warning: this song treats the consumption of alcohol in a lighthearted manner and includes a naughty word)

All courtesy of You Tube, of course. Do you have a favorite bit of Python? Or some other funny bit on philosophy?

does christian belief entail certain philosophical positions?

2006-08-22T21:59:00.000-07:00

Thomas Guarino thinks so.

Or, perhaps, true Christianity entails giving up on Christianity itself.

Is Morality Like Language?

2006-08-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

This brief article in the Boston Globe summarizes some interesting experiments regarding the old fat-man-on-the-trolley-track thought experiment. Quote:

In his forthcoming book, ``Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong" (Ecco), and in other recent papers, Hauser suggests we may have a moral ``faculty" in our brains that acts as a sort of in-house philosopher-parsing situations quickly, before emotion or conscious reason come into play. Hauser compares this faculty to the mental quality that allows human beings to acquire and use language naturally and effortlessly.

It's a suggestive analogy, inviting questions about just how far the similarities run. Is human morality, like language, largely universal (gratuitous killing is bad) but with plenty of room for local variation (in some cultures, killing your daughter if she loses her virginity before marriage is not considered gratuitous)? Is it easy for children to adapt to these local differences, depending on where and how they are raised, but difficult for adults-just as it's hard to learn French at 40?

(article found via 3 quarks daily)

another blog

2006-07-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

Dear all,

So, I've started another blog. Not that I've been so active here. I'll blame it on my sabbatical and my attempt to escape NWC as much as possible while remaining in Orange City. Not an easy thing to do.

Anyway, the new blog is designed primarily for the students in my ethics classes (PHI 110, 114, etc.), although anyone is welcome and readers of this blog are encouraged to check it out. Hopefully we'll see some rousing discussion there once the fall semester begins.

You can get there by clicking on my name above or by using the following link:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2006-06-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

New Entries to the Philosophical Lexicon
(Local Edition)

Hegland, n. A land, allegedly in the antipodes, where philosophy and theology are carried on in a spirit of absolute pessimism. Also, Heglander, as in, "Aw, God is good at least part of the time. Don't be such a heglander!"

Berntsonic, adj. A heretical argument presented with clarity and posed innocence. "His berntsonic argument for the non-existence of Hell was strangely compelling."

Gunn, n. A philosopher predetermined to fire an entirely absurd presupposition at a perfectly sensible argument. "Everyone agreed on my position except the one gunn who insisted determinism is equivalent to fatalism."

Honors Forum

2006-04-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

Honors Program Panel Discussion

Evolution and Faith

Tuesday, April 18 at 8:00 p.m. in 215 Van Peursem Hall

Panelists: Dr. Laurie Furlong, Dr. Michael Andres, Rev. Harlan Van Ort, and Dr. Donald Wacome

Lem Lost

2006-03-28T07:59:00.000-08:00

Alas, the great Stanislaw Lem is dead.

2006-03-03T14:15:00.000-08:00

Would a liberal arts education be better if professors focused more on research and less on teaching? Read this article by Paula Krebs in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

An Exchange on Pacifism

2005-11-18T15:10:00.000-08:00

Yoder: I would like to think that I am a “pure pacifist”, in that I do not feel that I personally could or should myself use violence against anyone, friend or “foe”. (That’s not an absolute guarantee that I would not, of course, since I am obviously a fallen being myself who cannot predict exactly how I would react in all circumstances) I take the NT literally when Jesus asks his disciples to love their enemies, turn the other cheek, etc. My reading of scripture is that we are called to adopt that standard now, even though the Kingdom is not yet present in its fullness, rather than waiting to the latter to happen before we feel called to the former, as the dispensationalists might argue.

Wacome: Mike, thanks for your thoughtful response and the opportunity to try further to articulate and defend my views.

I agree that this is the standard we are called to adopt now. But why think Jesus intends these words to constrain the activities of governments? Aren’t there lots of things Jesus commands his disciples that aren’t plausibly taken as prescriptions directed to secular nation states? Jesus’ words about giving your coat to one who takes your shirt don’t imply that governments should refrain from interfering with, and in fact aid, thieves and robbers. So why think the “turn the other cheek” admonition applies in this political context?

The implicit assumption that the United States is called to “turn the other cheek,” i.e. to eschew the use of military force, seems to me to endorse the civil religion you rightly reject, for it is to suppose that a nation might act upon “Christian principles.” We should insist that every nation state be constrained by moral principles. Possibly, there’s a general moral case to be made against the use of lethal force, and common sense morality is mistaken on this matter, but I have yet to see it.

Jesus tells Mike Yoder and Don Wacome to turn the other cheek, not to resist evil with evil; he doesn’t tell the USA to do so. The interesting question is what’s he telling us now, given our opportunity to advocate, and to vote for, public policies, e.g., for the USA to scrap its military, or for it to repeal its laws against mugging. In general, I want to say, “You can’t get there from here.” Jesus commands, “Do x!” and that means you and I should do x, but it doesn’t mean we should vote for the USA to do x, to make doing x legally required, etc. Indeed, voting for the USA to do x, or to make people do x, might be something we ought to refrain from, in light of the Gospel.

Yoder: However, I respectfully take issue with your characterization of pure pacifism as being inherently anarchistic. No Anabaptist pacifist I know denies the legitimate police function of the state within the nation-state itself. To do so would be to deny Romans 13. The way that Anabaptism has historically dealt with what to outsiders may seem like an inconsistency and/or a double standard is to recognize that “the world” (including government) is not called to the same level of ethical standards as are the true disciples of Christ in a “pure” church (“pure” not because of any inherent goodness on the part of members, but rather only pure to the extent that we are transformed from our inherently sinful human tendencies—including the tendency to strike back at those that strike us—by the sanctifying grace and redemption of Christ). So I see a legitimate (limited) use of force to maintain order and restrain evil in society. I would prefer that the use of that force be kept as minimal as possible, for example, by police refraining from lethal violence and capital punishment against criminals and suspected criminals, opting perhaps for darting fleeing criminal suspects with tranquilizers, much as animals are darted before being moved for their own good by environmentalists. In extreme cases, I could see police shooting persons in the legs or arms to prevent them from firing shots at others, but I could never approve of police shooting to kill. Does that make me an anarchist? I don’t think so. And I would not be so realistic to argue that we could get along without prisons, although I do argue that we use imprisonment far too often in our own society and often in an arbitrary manner biased by race, social class, etc.

Wacome: I don’t see how the claim that Christians are called to a “higher ethical standard” removes the inconsistency. The Anabaptist could consistently claim that this standard applies to him, and that he is required to refrain from violence against both foreign Hitlers and domestic muggers, while denying that it applies to government policies. Or he could claim it applies to government polices too, and accept the anarchist implications. But when he says that the alleged higher standard applies to a government’s foreign policy, but not to its domestic policies, therein lies the prima facie incoherence.

But I don’t share your underlying view that a Christian is, or ought to be, morally superior to other persons: that we are called to a higher ethical standard. Morality’s basic demands are universal. Christian faith has practical implications—what it makes sense to do in light of the Gospel—and these might, on occasion, involve morally supererogatory actions—maybe turning the other cheek is an example—but aren’t they generally either morally obligatory for everyone, Christian or not, or (when unique to Christian practice) morally indifferent?

Does Jesus admonish us not to resort to violent force even when doing so is necessary to save an innocent third party from grievous harm? I see no reason to think so. It’s one thing to turn your other cheek, quite another to stand by when someone is slapping a child around. If this is what Jesus’ commands, then he’s plainly telling us to do what’s morally wrong, not calling us to a higher moral standard. I have no a priori objection to the possibility of the Christian being called to do what’s morally wrong, but I do object to calling it morally right, let alone better. And I think the burden of proof falls to anyone who claims that morally wrong conduct actually accords with the Gospel.

Yoder: I would point out that I see no scriptural mandate for one earthly nation or kingdom, whether the Roman one of Christ’s time or the American empire currently trying to dominate the world, to “police” the entire globe or even a major region or continent. (Even though I grant that historically the “Pax Romana” may have been an improvement over what preceded it and succeeded it in the Roman world) It is up to whatever nation(s) rule in those parts of the world to police their own peoples, hopefully in a just way. I see no scriptural mandate for armed revolution, even against a tyrannical government. Thus I hope, had I been alive at the time of the American revolution, that I would not have joined or supported it. As a modern American, I am rather enamored of representative democracy, but I see no scriptural promise of that system of government. I find it both amusing and tragic that so many American “conservatives” fall into the trap of American civil religion, believing that somehow the U.S. as a “Christian” nation (the “new Israel”) is commissioned to work God’s will in the world. That’s why I find the support of the Christian right for the war in Iraq, among others, so scary and unbiblical. And in an attempt to be consistent, I also am unable to support the “revolutionary violence” of liberation theology on the extreme left.

Wacome: It’s morally required that we employ the minimum degree of violence necessary to interdict violent evildoers, and thus that whenever possible we should use means that are not potentially lethal. (Capital punishment for this reason is morally wrong, since we can only execute someone we have already rendered harmless.) But no government can exist without the at least implicit appeal to the threat of decisive force, and with current technology, that means force that is potentially lethal. This is obvious if for no other reason than that criminals are themselves sometimes equipped with the means to inflict death and will do so, unless they are stopped. Ultimately, if the government doesn’t have the means to kill and threaten to use it, those who do will become the de facto government. A morally decent civilization depends upon the willingness of good persons to use violence, because there are evil persons who will if they don’t.

If a gang of sociopaths takes over a house on Central Avenue, and begins to torture and murder the people in it, and the only way we can put a stop to the atrocities is by going in with guns blazing, that’s what morality requires. Were that house enlarged to the size of a country, removed to another continent, and proclaimed a nation state by its rulers, this would make no essential moral difference.

The idea of a “Christian nation” is, I agree, absurd. However, no conclusion about moral equivalence follows from this. Some schemes of social organization (e.g. capitalism, and when it’s properly constitutionally constrained, representative democracy) clearly are morally superior to others. Historically, all nation states, including the United States, are morally bad actors and deserve to be criticized as such. However, this does not imply that some states might not be so bad that it is morally permissible, or even obligatory, for other states militarily to intervene.

However, I find it hard to resist the conclusion that, even though the Scriptures endorse no particular form of government or social organization, some cohere better with the Christian faith than others. For some respect and care for the human individual better than others and are for that reason more consonant with what God cares about than others. Here it seems to me that to a first approximation what’s to be preferred morally is also to be preferred from the perspective of Christian faith. Whether any Christian might be called to act on that preference in a particular way is, of course, a further issue.

I admit to being appalled at the idea that, e.g. North Korea, must be allowed to do as it pleases with its citizenry and that we are obligated merely to hope for the best. Persons, not nations, have rights, and no nation’s rulers have the right to terrorize, torture and enslave human beings. If we could use a “bunker buster” to change regimes there, it might be morally obligatory to do so, though there might be compelling practical reasons not to do so. To regard the state as entitled to do evil to human individuals without decisive interference is to regard it as sacred; it’s the essence of idolatry to treat something other than a human being as of more ultimate importance than human beings. To me, this is at bottom the same idolatry we see in the Christian Right’s nonsense about “one nation under God.”

I take the Christian Right’s reasons for supporting the war in Iraq to be as ill-conceived as the Left’s—and the Christian Left’s—reasons for opposing it, and that the unsavory spectacle of the former does nothing to justify the latter.

Symposium Papers

2005-11-17T20:02:00.000-08:00

Hell and Its Discontents

A Symposium Sponsored by the NWC Philosophy Department

Monday, November 21 3:30 – 5:00 VPH 215

Joonna Trapp

Hell in a Handbasket: The Absence of Hell in American Literature

Daniel Berntson

Eluding the Hound of Heaven: Will anyone escape the love of God?

Mike Kugler

One Hell of a Story? A Brief Account of Matthew’s Portrait of Hell and the End

Ryan Pendell

Love is a Burning Thing: Rethinking the Justice of God

With responses by John Brogan, Randy Jensen, and Don Wacome

Pacifism: Good, Bad and Bogus

2005-10-30T20:58:00.000-08:00

A few provocations for my pacifist friends:

1. Call pure pacifism the view that no one ought ever to engage in violence. (This includes the threat of violence.) Pure pacifism is a kind of anarchism, since in asserting that violence is always morally impermissible it denies legitimacy to all possible governments, on the supposition that a government is an institution that has a monopoly on the use of violence in some region. It proscribes the use of military force in war for any purpose, and the use of domestic police forces to keep the peace, to prevent evildoing, or to marshal a society’s resources to some putative good end, such as collecting tax revenues to fund a welfare system. It has the advantage of being honest and coherent, but the disadvantage of being morally bad. It is morally bad because it counsels that we refrain from counteracting evil by means that are, on occasion, both morally permissible and necessary.

Whether this form of pacifism is, despite its moral badness, a reasonable—or even a necessary—Christian practice is a further issue. There’s no a priori guarantee that our free vocation as persons of faith will coincide with what morality requires in a particular context, though the burden of proof falls to anyone who proposes something immoral as what the gospel calls us to do. Moral principle, insofar as it demands minimally decent treatment of human beings, is congruent with the aim of the God who loves, and wills good for, all human beings. Pure pacifism is morally bad, though the possibility remains open that all things considered, it’s what we ought to embrace.

2. What can also be regarded as a form of pacifism, though it usually is not described this way, is classical liberalism (nowadays often known as libertarianism), insofar as it contends that it is morally wrong to initiate violence (or the threat thereof) while also contending that it is morally permissible, and in some instances obligatory, to respond with violence to those who initiate the use of violence. This does not call for anarchism, though it imposes stringent moral constraints on the scope of governments’ use of their military and police powers. While allowing for the state, this view denies it the prerogative of regimenting human individuals in pursuit of the good. Instead, it conceives legitimate government as helping to sustain a neutral framework within which individuals pursue the good as they conceive it.

Insofar as this conception has a claim upon Christians, it is presumably principally because it insists on minimal respect for individuals as capable of peacefully pursuing their own ends, i.e. because it is prima facie morally mandatory. If there is a good pacifism this is it.

3. A third pacifism is by far the most widely subscribed. This is the idea that the use of governments’ military forces in war is always morally wrong, but that it is morally permissible, indeed obligatory in some instances, not only for governments to pursue their domestic ends by means of violence and the threat of violence, but actually to initiate the use of violence to achieve those ends. This species of pacifism condemns as morally wrong the use of military power to extirpate a murderous foreign tyrant, but commends the use of police powers to compel certain forms of behavior from individual citizens, even when they are pursuing their ends peacefully. Conceivably, proponents of this hybrid pacifism can show that it is not incoherent, and that there is a principled moral distinction between violence perpetrated by the military and the police, and that it is morally permissible to initiate the use of force against human persons. A plausible defense of these claims has yet to be made. Nor is there a plausible case that this pacifism, irrespective of its moral dubiousness, is consonant with the Christian gospel. Absent either the moral or the theological case, we are entitled to regard this an unprincipled, bogus form of pacifism, not to be taken seriously.

We Can Do Better

2005-10-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

Reposted here is a letter from Don Lindskoog, a long standing friend of the NWC Philosophy Department, to the Church Herald, a publication of the Reformed Church in America, the denomination with which Northwestern College is affiliated.

(Lest it’s not obvious, the views expressed by the various contributors to Gadflies are not necessarily, and sometimes not even contingently, the views of the RCA.)

July/August 2005

“We Can Do Better”

I was astonished at how harsh the Reformed Church family could be to one of our own, Norman Kansfield (“Guilty as Charged”). Weakness and fear is revealed whenever the culture war erupts in personally destructive skirmishes, even within the church of Jesus Christ. I truly believe we will look back on this as a dark hour in our family history and repent of what we have done.

There is an urgent need for discussion in the RCA, but it should not focus on any particular ethical issue. Instead, the discussion, especially in our seminaries and colleges, should develop a historical/critical biblical hermeneutic that will allow the written Word of God to speak to moral questions in every generation within the context of God’s good news of the kingdom. We have too long allowed Christian pop culture figures to instruct us in their overly simplistic way of interpreting Scripture. We have the talent within our own family to do better than this.

Don Lindskoog

Leesburg, Florida

The Unforgiven

2005-10-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

Several members of the Philosophy Department recently attended a conference on heaven and hell at a famous evangelical college.

Here, for discussion, are some thoughts and speculations on the subject of hell and the fate of the damned. (With apologies to Clint Eastwood.)

1. What happens to people who die unaware of, or having consciously rejected, the forgiveness God offers in Jesus Christ? Persons of Christian faith acknowledge the need for forgiveness, the imperative to receive it from God, and to give it to, and receive it from, others. But what of the unforgiven?

Some say that those who die unforgiven go to a place of punishment, that this punishment is extreme, inescapable, and everlasting. Thus hell, as traditionally conceived. Jesus dies to save people from God, who executes implacable divine justice, but this deliverance is conditional upon their choosing to accept God’s forgiveness. To accept God’s forgiveness is to accept Jesus’ sacrificial historical death as substituting for one’s own everlasting punishment. Unless this alternate arrangement is accepted, one receives everlasting retribution.

2. This account is problematic in various ways; most of all because it implies that Jesus’ attempt to save the world God so loved is only a partial success. God wants everyone to be saved, but not everyone is saved. The God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself is in part a failure, his aims thwarted by humans’ failure to believe the good news. A second consideration is that it proposes a separation of God’s love from his justice, so that while God’s love leads to mercy and forgiveness, justice demands punishment. This contrasts with what is to all appearances the Biblical view, which is that God is love, and that God’s justice is properly understood not as an abstract ethical principle about people getting what they deserve, and thus as the source of a demand that can conflict with love, but as God’s relentless commitment to his creatures and the covenant he makes with them. God’s justice (righteousness) is conceived in terms of God’s love, not as an independent, competing principle within God. This account is also problematic insofar as it makes a necessary condition of avoiding punishment something that is not in our control, viz. our having certain beliefs. Further, if, as is traditionally assumed, the punishment is everlasting, and an everlasting punishment is an infinite punishment, then a finite creature is capable of acting is a way that merits an infinite punishment. The tradition has held that we wrong God when we disobey him and that to wrong an infinite being is to merit an infinite punishment. But this is not exactly obvious. At the very least it is hard to see how someone can be guilty of wronging a deity one those not believe exists.

3. For the past generation or so even quite conservative Christians have been abandoning the penal idea of hell in favor of alternative conceptions of the post-mortem existence of the unforgiven. One, which appears to have been legitimized almost single handedly by C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce and other places, is that those who die without faith in Christ are “punished,” not by God, but by themselves. “The door to hell is locked on the inside.” No one is denied the joy of God’s presence by anything other than her own choice, a choice that must be continuing if separation from God is to continue. Anyone can leave hell at any time; she merely needs to choose to do so. Anyone who stubbornly refuses to so choose will remain forever in hell. Or, she will remain there so long as she exists. It might be that her sustained choice against God, i.e. against goodness and being itself, will eventually result in her ontological diminution and finally her demise, i.e. a kind of self-annihilation.

4. This, which we might as well call the Lewis view, generally involves a very high conception of human freedom, both in the sense of what it is and how God regards it. It is libertarian free will, i.e. when we make free choices nothing, not even our own considered beliefs and desires, causes them. (Or: they are caused by us, but not by anything that happens in us. This is the doctrine of agent causation.) The metaphysical quandaries that arise from belief in libertarian free will are daunting and, in my view, intractable. (However, the assumption that we possess this kind of freedom, though false, makes little difference to what I want to say about hell.) The Lewis view supposes not only that we have this mysterious freedom, but also that God values it very highly. Indeed, it’s fair to say that God values it absolutely; nothing about a human creature matters more to God than her possession of this capacity for radically free choice. Its value is explained by its being a necessary condition for our responding with love and trust to God.

God’s ultimate aim for his human creatures is for us freely to respond to him with genuine love and trust, and this implies that we do so freely. Yet, in the nature of the case, this aim is precarious and, it seems, cannot be guaranteed, even by an omnipotent God. For if God were to force a human being to choose to respond favorably to him, to accept his love and forgiveness, then her choice would not be free. Even an omnipotent God cannot force someone freely to choose something. The attempt to do so would be self-defeating. Because of this, for all we know hell might be everlasting for some individuals, for it would be everlasting—leaving aside the possibility of self-anihilation—for anyone who freely persisted in the choice to remain there. Libertarian free will, if real, is a dangerous gift, for because of it we might find ourselves in the outer darkness, beyond even God’s help.

I want to challenge the assumption, one that appears to be common among proponents of the Lewis view, that everlasting damnation is for this reason likely for some. It seems to me that it is at best a rather remote possibility, and not at all probable.

5. First, it seems obvious to some, though by no means to everyone, that there are true subjunctive conditional propositions about human freedom. Consider the statement, If a student were to offer Randy $1000 for an A in Logic 202, then Randy would give him the A. Suppose this statement is counterfactual, i.e. Randy never was offered, is not being offered, and never will be offered such a bribe. Assume too, that it is possible for a student to offer Randy this bribe, and for him to accept it. Does omniscience include more than knowledge of what’s actual and what’s possible? That is, does God possess middle knowledge of free human choices? If God has this sort of knowledge, then it seems fairly clear that, contrary to the assumption made above, it is possible for God to ensure that he gets what he wants. He can guarantee that all his human creatures ultimately freely choose to accept him. Prior to creating anyone, God can survey all possible persons and know what each would ultimately freely do were he to create them and give them the choice between accepting and rejecting God. Knowing that, God, wanting creatures to choose him freely, and not wanting anyone to be everlastingly damned, would choose to create only the human creatures that would, if created, freely choose for God and against final damnation or self-destruction. God would not create persons knowing that they will be eternally damned or annihilated. Contrary to first impressions, God can guarantee the outcome he wants: universal salvation freely chosen. (Note, by the way, the damage this sort of consideration does to free will theodices more broadly. Why didn’t God create only the free creatures he knew would freely choose only good rather than evil?)

Proponents of the Lewis view who accept that God has middle knowledge of free human choices face what might be an insurmountable obstacle. However, not everyone believes that God has knowledge of this sort. If they’re right, when God creates a creature with libertarian free will, then it might be impossible for God to know what she will actually do in the future. For if her free choices are not caused by her desires or beliefs (or any other antecedent states or events), then they cannot be inferred from knowledge of them. Assuming (as we should) that God is himself everlasting in time, not timelessly eternal, and thus has no immediate epistemic access to the future, it appears that when, e.g., he chose to create Adam, he could not have known what Adam was going to freely choose to do. Under these assumptions, the defender of the Lewis view is, perhaps, justified in holding that for all we know many will endlessly freely choose against God, and those endure forever in hell or finally self-destruct there.

6. However, this is a less than compelling conclusion. Discussion of these matters very often implicitly supposes that God faces an either-or choice: Either the self-defeating strategy of stepping in to force the wayward creature to accept him, thereby violating her freedom, or stepping back and letting her do as she pleases, even when this results in her everlasting damnation or self-annihilation. This is a false dichotomy. God has options that lie between these extremes.

7. God has powers of persuasion. When we want someone freely to choose a particular course of action, we sometimes can figure out how to motivate her freely to make the choice we want her to make. Human beings sometimes persuade other human beings to make certain choices, and do so without violating or infringing on their freedom. If Randy convinces you to sign up for Medieval Philosophy by providing you with what you on reflection recognize as excellent reasons, and because of this you choose to take it, your choice is free. Indeed, given this course’s obvious contribution to overall cognitive excellence, this persuasion will in all probability enhance your status as a free, rational agent, not diminish it. Further, the more one knows about the workings of another’s mind, and the greater the disparity of intellect, experience, and resources between the prospective persuader and persuaded, the greater the opportunity to persuade. Wise and loving parents sometimes find that they can persuade a stubborn child to choose what’s good for him even when doing so is contrary to his initial inclination. No doubt, persuasion gradually trails off into manipulation, which is, I take it, persuasion that proceeds without due regard for the personal integrity of its target as an informed, rational agent. Yet even manipulation only infringes, and does not completely remove, freedom. Manipulation in turn approaches coercion in the form of threats and this in turn at last takes the form of simply forcing someone to do something. Since what’s at issue here is an individual making a particular choice in favor of God, this final stage is not at issue. The ultimate insult to freedom in this context presumably would not be God forcing people to love and trust him despite their choices to the contrary, but God causing them to choose to love and trust him, i.e. not overriding their choice, but producing it by directly intervening in their minds. (While in this context, we should pause to note the oddity of the claim that God wants us to make a free, uncoerced choice for him, but also that God threatens us with endless torture if we choose against him. If that’s not a coerced choice, it’s hard to imagine what is.)

I submit that, in light of God’s superior knowledge and wisdom, including his profound understanding of the individual’s habits of thought, and of his reasons (or rationalizations) for rejecting God, it is plausible that God can persuade even the most recalcitrant of the damned to repent and freely choose God and salvation. If, as I am supposing here for argument’s sake, humans possess libertarian free will while God lacks middle knowledge of human freedom, there is no guarantee that whatever means God chooses to try to persuade someone will suffice. We cannot, perhaps, eliminate the sheer possibility of God’s will being finally thwarted. Yet given the prima facie disparity between God’s powers of persuasion, and human powers of resistance, it seems that we can be confident that that horrible possibility will, at the end of the day, be no more than a possibility, and that God will win in the end. To suppose otherwise is drastically to discount the difference between Creator and creature.

8. Someone might fear that this is too sanguine a view of God’s ability to persuade, given his lack of knowledge of what a human creature will freely choose in a given situation. For on the libertarian assumption, a free choice cannot be subsumed under natural law, and thus cannot be foreknown by an inference from those laws together with the current state of the individual’s mind. However, human minds need not be governed by casual laws for us to be able reliably to acquire beliefs about how they will freely choose. Inductive inference from knowledge of a person’s preferences as manifest in past free choices often is a trustworthy guide to their future free choices. If, e.g., Brian offers Randy the $1000 bribe for an A, we can be highly confident that he will turn it down; we can reasonably discount the possibility that he will accept it, not because there is no such possibility, but because given what we have seen of him so far, it is too improbable to take seriously. The possible world in which he accepts the bribe is exceedingly remote from this actual world. This belief about what he will freely choose is warranted because of what we have already observed of his good character. When this warranted belief turns out to be true, as it usually does, it is revealed as an instance of knowledge of future free choice. We must assume that whatever observational and inferential capacities we have along these lines are far outstripped by those of God, and that God’s knowledge of what even radically free creatures will do far surpasses our own.

Even if for some reason God lacks these powers of prediction, it might not much matter. If a human being is free with respect to a particular choice, then it is possible for her to make that choice. If it is possible for her to make a choice, say the choice to accept God’s forgiveness and be delivered from hell, then there is at least one possible situation, call it C, such that, if it were to occur, she would freely choose to accept God’s forgiveness. Were C to occur, she would find herself with persuasive reasons to choose God. If God could not know exactly which possible state of affairs C is, he would still know that there is some state of affairs such that, if it were to occur, the person in question would freely choose to accept God’s forgiveness. Given unlimited stretches of time, God could bring about various states of affairs in the hope of hitting upon the one in which the person freely chooses to be saved. Presumably, reasonable assumptions about the kind of things relevant to human choices in general, and to this agent’s choices in particular, would significantly reduce the number of possibilities that would have to be explored before the damned human is persuaded to choose for God and against hell.

9. However, the apparent possibility of self-annihilation forces us to worry that God does not have unlimited time in which to persuade the sinner to repent. If self-destruction is a genuine possibility for damned human creatures, then God is in a race against time, trying to persuade the human to repent before her free choices so psychically damage her that she is no longer capable of making that choice, or simply ceases to exist. Perhaps self-annihilation is a possibility for human creatures, but so far as I can see we have no reason to assume it is. Quick acceptance or rejection of this possibility requires a confidence in speculative eschatological psychology to which, I suspect, we are not entitled. The imagined conditions of post-mortem existence are so remote from ordinary experience that we have little basis for making any strong claims about how human minds would function there. Suppose faithless Marvin expires and goes to hell where, after a month, or 900 billion years, or whatever, he will self-destruct. Probably, the arrival of his end will be hastened or delayed, depending on the free choices he makes, so not even God will know precisely how long he’s got, but we may plausibly assume that God would have some idea of how long this individual is likely to last. But it might be that God—and his creature—runs out of time and this lost soul is extinguished before he can be reclaimed, even by God’s best efforts.

However, I suspect that most of whatever attraction the idea of self-annihilation has comes from the assumption that sin, the failure to trust God, is properly understood as a matter of morally wicked behavior. It is, perhaps, plausible that a life devoted to moral wickedness does deracinate the human personality, so if entrenched rejection of God were a moral matter, self-annihilation might be likely. However, it is much more likely that intractable rejection of God takes the form not of moral misbehavior, but of an ingrained self-righteousness manifest in a keen concern for moral propriety that seeks to justify itself with no need of a gracious and merciful God. This should be totally obvious but is not, thanks to many centuries of Christian moralism subverting the gospel. As we know from the Gospels, it is the well-behaved Pharisees, not the tax collectors and whores, who are at greatest risk of finally rejecting God.

10. Now I want to challenge a fundamental component of the Lewis view, the claim that God values human freedom so much he prefers either the human individual’s everlasting damnation, or her annihilation, to violating it. At face value, this is extremely implausible. If you love another human being, you place a great value upon her freedom. You respect her right to choose even when you disapprove of what she chooses. But you do not love her freedom more than you love her. That’s why, if you see her making a self-destructive choice that will have disastrous consequences, you will—and ought to—intervene, even when this means violating her freedom.

God cares about freedom for the sake of persons, not persons for the sake of freedom. If God knows that if he violates a creature’s freedom now, later, when she is in the new situation this interference brings about, she will see things differently, and she will then freely choose to love and trust God, and to continue in that state, or merely that his doing so is necessary for this, then it is hard not to think that is what he would do. If God does so, she will be grateful to him for loving her enough temporarily to undermine her freedom. If the alternative is to permit her to continue on in endless misery, to proceed toward an existence in which genuine freedom diminishes and disappears, or to self-destruction, it seems an absurd misevaluation of freedom to regard it as too important to subvert. One simply does not allow those one loves to throw themselves off into the abyss.

Taking the Biblical narrative as a guide, it appears that while God cares about our freedom, and desires us freely to choose him, he is perfectly capable of forcing himself upon us when it suits his purposes. For instance, it seems that when Saul, on his way to Damascus in pursuit of Christians, encountered the resurrected Christ, he was not being given an opportunity freely to choose for or against Jesus. He simply saw Jesus for who he was and was thereby compelled to believe and obey. (“Every knee shall bow.”) Yet Paul later freely chose to love and trust God, if anyone did.

11. There is also the possibility that an individual’s continued free choice to reject God eventually results in a self so constituted that any intervention that changes this is tantamount to a destruction of this person. If there were such persons, God’s acting so as to subvert their freedom would be self-defeating. Such a person, like the proverbial Vietnamese village, could be saved only by being destroyed. How serious to take this worry? Even if (as seems unlikely to me) a person could not survive the abrupt radical change of being forced to see God for who he is and to choose and act accordingly, there is no apparent reason to think he could not survive a gradual process of relatively minor interventions that incrementally push him in this direction. In any event, this sort of concern relies on untenable essentialist notions of personal identity through time. At least it seems to me that if x is a person at an earlier time and y is person at a later time, and the right sort of spatio-temporal and psychological continuities exist from x to y, then x is the same person as y, no matter how radical the ways in which they differ psychologically. There actually is such a thing as Christian conversion and it is survivable. The born-again person is a “new creation,” but numerically identical to the original.

12. While contending against some components of the Lewis view, I share its assumption that hell is not a place of punishment. On the contrary, Jesus died for the sins of the world, and he took upon himself all our punishment. Not everyone will be happy with the idea that no one gets punished. The same concern will arise in regard to the prospect of a final emptying of a non-punitive hell. One may wonder whether, for example, Hitler simply gets off the hook, reaping neither punishment, nor obliteration, nor even endlessly self-inflicted separation from God. Lest anyone think that to reject the notion that the free choices of the damned might lock them forever away from the God who pursues them, or, for that matter, to reject from the start the idea of hell as punishment, lacks the ultimate seriousness appropriate to these matters, I propose a fate that is, in important ways, worse than punishment or annihilation.

We are sinners. Sinners need forgiveness. Judgment is the revealing of the need for forgiveness. God in Christ forgives. To refuse forgiveness, either the need to receive it or to give it, is to be damned to live into a closed, Godless future rather than one in which there is a place for oneself, in communion with those one wronged, first God but all the rest too, and with those who have wronged you. (Such refusals are the small damnations of daily life, even for those of us who confess the forgiveness God gives us in Christ. For now, the border between heaven and hell lies within each of us, not between us and them.) It may well be that those who leave this life rejecting God, with characters pervasively formed in the denial of the need to be forgiven and to forgive, will, to say the least, not have an easy time when facing the prospect of forgiveness. To draw such to forgiveness, is, perhaps, a task too great for any but the crucified God who descends to the dead. This is the work of reconciliation that remains after we have done our best.

Christian doctrine asserts that when he died, Jesus descended into hell, and Christian tradition has it that in doing so he harrows hell. One way we might take this is that the damned, the cursed of God, those who have found only a God who judges, condemns, and abandons, will at last come face to face with God himself, cursed, judged, condemned, abandoned—and forgiving: Jesus in hell. Therein, we trust, reside powers of persuasion far beyond the feeble ones we in this interim time have been privileged to exercise to the glory of God and for the benefit of our fellow human beings. And thus some who are saved will be saved, “though as by fire.” For imagine that Hitler, freshly resurrected from the ashes of the Berlin Fuhrerbunker, defeated and broken but still replete with rage and pride, confronts head on the divine insistence that he plea for forgiveness from and—surely worse, receive forgiveness from—each and every Jew he insulted, harassed, tortured and murdered: I have no difficulty thinking he’d readily prefer everlasting punishment or simply ceasing to exist to this, of all things. It is in significant respects worse than any penal retribution we might devise. The ‘coals of fire’ thus heaped upon his head are drastically worse than any imagined flames of punitive retribution. We know he chose the real flames merely to avoid being captured by the Red Army. I take it for granted that he already always has the forgiveness of the crucified God, that Jesus’ words from the cross are efficacious, unqualified, and unconditional: “Father, forgive them!” There is forgiveness even for rejecting Jesus. Hitler languishes in hell not because God does not forgive him, but because he hates the idea of being forgiven. This his entrenched pride cannot endure. In relation to the crucified God, the unforgiven are not unforgiven in reality, but only in their defiant and despairing hearts. Only accepting the reality of that need releases him, enables him to choose to leave and be with the all-forgiving God who gave himself for him. So let us say that being in hell simply is being in the state of finally confronting the implacable divine imperative of forgiveness received and given, not as something one freely and joyfully embraces, but as an alien demand. My view is that we can reasonably hope that this demand at last overwhelms everyone’s defenses, even the strongest. “Defeated in our last refusal” (John Crowley, Little, Big).

This is, of course, a terrific affront to justice in anything like human terms, but such is the justice of God, which has everything to do with God getting what he wants and nothing to do with any of us getting what we deserve.

The Gospel is Good News, Not a Worldview!

2005-10-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

Mike Kugler's Letter to the NWC Beacon, 7 October 2005

To the Editor:

Lately we’ve had chapels and Beacon articles about self-control in the Christian moral life and the Christian political stand, both the consequence of disciplined obedience to the Christian religion. These combine in different forms the commitments of patriotic politics, moralism and religion. This combination of ideas and convictions seems attractive to Christians across America. For the sake of time I’ll call it “the Christian world view”, or CWV. Those holding the CWV claim that the Gospel of Jesus Christ does and should encourage a consistent political, moral and religious way of living in the world. The political, moral and religious convictions expressed in this CWV reinforce one another in their distinct tasks. More specifically, religiously zealous and morally pure Christians would be “salt and light” in a back sliding, godless American society. If they prayed and worked hard enough, Christians with this proper CWV could take back America for God.

When I hear this I ask: how did the Good News get confused with this CWV? I’m not talking about a specific political party; a particular social or moral issue; or singling out one denomination over another. I’m wondering how anyone can argue that any combination of political, moral and religious convictions is the consistent consequence of thinking about the Good News. What in the Gospel implies a particular patriotic political ideology over against another? What in the Gospel tells us about sharply drawn moral behavior? Where in the Gospel can a religious life be found?

By the Good News I understand the story of the loving, merciful God who took human form in order to share our lives and suffering. When this man, Jesus Christ, preached the Good News that God had come to reconcile all humanity to Himself, He challenged the political, moral and religious authorities of His day. He did not challenge them because they had the wrong politics, morals and religion for His Kingdom. Jesus challenged them because they claimed that by our political, moral and religious righteousness we give God what He expects of us. When Jesus challenged their authority those powers murdered Him. God brought Jesus back to life again, not in order to lead a heavenly army to punish His murderers, but to confirm His confidence in the loving authority of His Son. The Son’s life and resurrection remain today a promise of the reconciliation awaiting the creation by God’s mercy.

I wonder just what in that story—where God unfairly gives abundant life to all of us, the undeserving—suggests a particular political, moral or religious life. Politics, morality and religion thrive on rule making and behavior management. It seems to me that the Scriptures teach that the only rule Christians must obey is to love God and their neighbors. If so, it’s hard to move from that to a Christian world view rich in political, moral and religious demands.

Don’t get me wrong. Like everyone else followers of Jesus Christ have to figure out what the best political, moral and religious life might look like. We will inevitably argue among ourselves and others, because all serious issues are the subject of dispute. But our job to think carefully about those responsibilities should never be confused with the Gospel. The Good News of God’s undeserved grace to humanity is frail; for all its power to redeem creation and transform humanity, we apparently have the power to twist it into a false Gospel, a program for making us and the world turn out right. Thinking Christianly about the world, then, seems different to me than having “a Christian world view.” Realizing that we and our political, moral and religious powers have hijacked Jesus’ Good News, are we forced to choose between a frail Gospel, and the power of the Christian world view?

Sincerely,

Mike Kugler

College prep?!

2005-09-30T22:37:00.000-07:00

Look at this.

thought experiments: not intended for public use

2005-09-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

Daniel sent this story to me this morning with the subject line "Why philosophers could never be politicians..." This is so very hilarious to me. I keep thinking the politician's responses make them sound like total idiots--the further you read the more absurd it gets.

scaling up: the government on behalf of society

2005-09-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

1. The unspoken assumption that Daniel tries to bring to light and confront in his opinion piece is that governments are a morally justifiable way to get people to do good things and to keep them from doing bad things. He frames the government as a political entity of force and coercion. To make his point Daniel scales down the concept of taxation for the poor to a single interpersonal relationship.

Someone might argue that to scale moral issues up or down changes the content of the dilemma (e.g., two people fighting is a different moral issue than the justification of two armies going to war). Wacome wonders if this belief is simply arbitrary.

But consider murder, the unjustified taking of someone's life. If one woman kills another woman, it's murder. But if the murderer is put onto trial and is sentenced to death, we consider this a different sort of act than murder. Hopefully even someone who thinks that governments unjustly kill when they enforce a death penalty, sees this act as somehow having more reasons and more legitimacy within society--at least in general people do seem to give the government more legitimacy in these matters, in a way that cannot be scaled up or down.

That is because, at least in a republic, we see the government not only as a political entity (dealing with the military, borders, diplomacy) but also as a speaker for society. We must give reasons to society for our behavior and we all work together to decide what it is our society stands for. The government works as a service to society. So to give one's money over to the government is not the same as giving one's money to any stranger on the street, it is to give it to the greater good of society. And, seeing that all the property we do have comes from society, it is really giving back a little to society via the government for its betterment.

Exactly how this is done is a different question and there perhaps are better ways to work toward an equal and fair society. Tax exemption is a good way of letting people choose where they put their money instead of just letting it go to some general fund; in this way society promotes charity and philanthropy, especially among the very wealthy.

2. Nevertheless, I do agree that society cannot make people do the right things for the right reasons, especially live according to the gospel. There is a force behind society that makes sure people act certain ways but there are many 'forces' around us that shape us and direct us.

In one way of looking at things, I was forced to learn English as a child, I was forced to live in a family, I was forced to walk on two legs, I was forced to live as an American citizen. Well, yes, forces do impose themselves on us continually but we do not think that all force is inherently bad, right? The forces of nature have shaped our entire species but we don't think that it would've been better if we had been radically free immaterial souls. So why then, as members of a society, do we think that society is bad for forcing us to abide by rules that lead to the betterment of all its members? We should not be upset that we might have to give reasons for breaking the rules of society and that, while in our own minds giving our money to support a war may be morally wrong, we can still say that if society throws us into jail for tax evasion society is still acting fairly and properly.

[I'd like to make a note that these comments are for the sake of argument, worthy to be considered, but not my own position.]

Opinion Piece: The government is not the kingdom of God

2005-09-29T22:16:00.000-07:00

Here is my opinion piece for those who may not have read it in the Beacon.

The goverment is not the kingdom of God

Think about the following situation: Suppose I tell my wealthy neighbor that I’ve been reading Hosea, and I think he should give more money to the poor. Then, I get together a bunch of neighbors, and we go over to the rich man’s house with rifles and shotguns. We demand that he give us a third of his income to give to a poor family down the street—and he does.

Should either the posse of neighbors or the rich man be credited with Christian charity? Hardly. The group of neighbors took the money using the threat of violence, and the rich man gave his money only because he was threatened . The neighbors may have fed and clothed the poor, but they have done so by using violence—a means contrary to the Gospel.

This situation is no different from the liberal tax policy alluded to by last Friday’s chapel speaker Dr. George DeVries. He thinks Christians should be outraged that “our government cuts taxes on the very rich and pays for it with smaller appropriations for the very needy,” implying that Christians should expect the goverment to take money from the rich to give to the poor.

He fails to realize, however, that such a “progressive” tax system relies on physical violence. If you have any doubts about this, try not paying taxes for a year. Within weeks, the government will arrest you, confiscate your house and sell enough of your possessions to pay the tax. This despite the fact that you may object to the government using your money to fund an unjust war or stem cell research.

While Jesus severely criticized the rich, he never used violent coercion to care for the needy. He called the rich young ruler to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor. But when the man refused, Jesus didn’t tell his disciples to use weapons to take the man’s belongings.

Think about another example: Suppose I find out that my neighbor is not only rich, but also a glutton. Appalled that he is committing such a blatant sin, I go over to his house with my posse of neighbors and we confiscate his Snickers bars, ice cream and Little Debbies, and tell him that we’ll regularly check in to make sure he eats right.

Like the neighbors in this second story, many conservative Christians want to use coercion to serve the Gospel by discouraging people from doing bad things, even if those “sins” aren’t directly hurting anyone else. Conservatives are intent, for example, on using the federal government to stop gay marriage, even though gay couples aren’t directly harming anyone else by living together. Such actions are supposedly justified because they make society more moral.
Jesus, however, never using the coercion of laws to stop sin. When Jesus met the women caught in adultery, he didn’t try to pass a law against unfaithfulness (in fact, he stopped her from legally being stoned). Instead, he told her sins were forgiven and asked her to voluntarily leave her life of sin.

Jesus refused to become a political leader or use force to advance his Kingdom. Almost everyone expected Him to use His power to fix the political problems in Israel, to remove the oppression and injustice of the Romans or to clean up the corruption of the Jewish Sanhedrin. Instead, Jesus cared for individual people, told parables and died a humiliating, powerless death. Jesus showed that the Kingdom of God isn’t about forcing other people to do the right thing, it’s about repenting of your own sin, believing in the grace of God, and convincing others to do so as well—but not through the use of political force.

Scaling Up?

2005-09-28T12:05:00.000-07:00

Berntson’s editorial (NWC Beacon, 9-16-05) points out that social programs advocated on both the political left and right, and endorsed by many Christians as means to realizing the kingdom of God, violate principles of common sense morality. E.g., it would be morally wrong if, upon reading the prophet Hosea, I gathered an armed group to expropriate my neighbor’s wealth for the worthy purpose of aiding the poor, and tax-funded welfare programs are morally equivalent to this. But if an act is morally wrong, that’s at least prima facie reason to think it’s not in accord with the Christian gospel. It’s worth noting that this type of intuition need not emanate from an anarchist or libertarian perspective; it underlies Peter Singer’s well-known assertion that we are morally wrong to refrain from transferring a significant portion of our wealth to rescue desperate persons in the underdeveloped world.

The moral critiques grounded in these moral intuitions are generally resisted by those who at least implicitly hold that moral principles applicable to small scale, interpersonal interactions do not necessarily apply to matters of public policy. On this view, taxing to fund welfare programs is not relevantly similar to robbing one neighbor to help another, and failing to contribute to Oxfam in ways that significantly alter one’s affluent lifestyle is not relevantly similar to letting a child drown rather than getting my Armani suit wet.

My question is whether the resistance to scaling up one’s moral principles is arbitrary, or is there a principled difference between right and wrong depending on scale of application.

A few things you might want to look at...

2005-09-27T20:28:00.000-07:00

Jim Holt's review essay of Frankfurt et al on truth and b.s.

A piece from the Chronicle on why professors are the way they are

Action Philosophers!

The Socratic vocare?

2005-09-27T12:50:00.000-07:00

I was attached to this city by the god -- though it seems a ridiculous thing to say -- as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly. It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade and reproach you all day long and everywhere I find myself in your company (Socrates, in Plato's Apology 30a-31a).

Beginnings

2005-09-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

A good philosophy program is one where philosophical discussion spills out of the classroom and into the hallways, dorms, cafeteria, etc. We hope this blog can be a place for that sort of conversational overflow, too. Our philosophy majors are invited to be members; anyone at all is invited to comment!