More on “Objective” Morality

Last updated on: July 6, 2018 at 2:05 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

I recently posted a piece on objective morality in response to Jeremiah Traegar’s article here at ATP. In discussing my response elsewhere, there were the following points that I would like to deal with here in order to kill two birds with one philosopher’s stone.

My original quotes are in italic, with the commenter’s comments in blockquote.

You can argue that there is an objectively better course of action given two options, A and B. If you are looking for wellbeing or happiness (for example), as your endgame for morality, then perhaps option B empirically gets you more of those things. However, setting that as your endgame is not an objective ideal. It is a subjective, conceptual ideal. I would add that for morality to make any coherent sense, for me at any rate, it needs to be goal-oriented, and setting those goals is a subjective project.

Why can’t some endgames be objectively better than others, merely in virtue of the nature of conscious beings and their capacity to suffer and flourish, independent of our beliefs about what we ought or ought not to do to others? Anyone who sets “causing abject suffering” as their endgame is doing morality worse than someone who sets “reducing abject suffering” as their endgame, it seems to me. Also, discovering which goal one ought to pursue need not be subjective, though it is often experienced this way. I think we can coherently say that some goals are objectively better than others for some people at some times.

Some endgames can objectively be better than others in terms of empirically evidenced outcomes. It’s just a sense of what is better that needs establishing objectively, and this is difficult. For example, and here we get into some standard criticisms of prima facie consequentialism, how do we objectively define a better outcome for wellbeing, even if we do establish that wellbeing is self-evidently good and therefore some kind of objective metric.?

What I mean by this is if we say that option B over option A for wellbeing is empirically better, how do we go about calculating this? Do we mean this for the person in question, or for multiple people? Which multiple people? And for how long should we look at the consequences? And what if wellbeing is positively affected in one way and negatively affected in another? When there are pluralistic methods or units of moral evaluation, who gets to define which one wins out? Is it intention or is it outcome? And the problem is, as far as I can tell, moral realism needs to be in some sense absolute. Morally real prescriptions that exist somewhere “out there”, or wrapped up self-evidently in the world, must be self-evidently true. There can be no grey that requires people to argue the toss over one option or another, one moral value system or unit over another. This would surely lead to a kind of subjectivism or conceptual approach.

Let me try to exemplify.

Imagine I give £5 to a homeless man. My intention is to make that person’s life better, and I have a rose-tinted view of what will happen. Perhaps I am being naive and my intentions are naive. Perhaps the burden is on me to make sure that that person spends the money wisely. Let’s park that for the time being.

Now imagine the homeless man (please excuse me from stereotyping – it’s just an example) spends it on crack cocaine for the first time, or Spice, or whatever. This starts him down a trail of self-destruction that massively hurts his family. He goes into a five-year downward spiral of addiction and crisis, destroying his wider family. His wife commits suicide and his children develop mental health issues.

So my intentions were good (but I could arguably have done a better job of researching or ensuring a better outcome), yet the outcome was bad.

For five years.

It then turns out that he turns his life around and makes an awesome recovery. He becomes a role model for ex-users and ends up making a huge contribution to society in stopping other potential addicts taking that route. We could now play the destruction and pain in his family off against the life-changing events to those potential addicts. Which events have more unitary power in terms of moral calculation? Is there an objective matrix of values that feed into some sort of moral calculation that can give you an objectively true analysis of a moral action?

Now, on a twenty-year outcome-based evaluation, that fiver was well spent. However, as a result of that fiver being given and his resultant addiction, let’s say he stopped becoming an ethical vegetarian. We are now playing one outcome against another, and we are not sure over what time period we cut off our evaluation.

And we could look at that event and see the whole matrix of events that would only have come about as a result of that fiver donation. After one hundred years, that fiver event could have affected billions of people. That’s the nature of causality and time.

Where do we cut time off and how wide a net do we evaluate?

It gets even worse if we take into account the counterfactuals.

What if we didn’t give him a fiver, but someone else would have given him a tenner? What if we hadn’t given him the money and as a replacement for that something happened that was either massively beneficial or negative for him? And what if these counterfactuals (or the original action from me) had really mixed outcomes for a mixed number of people? Our non-donation or actual donation can be seen in the context of not only what did happen, but also in terms of what didn’t happen.

But, you might say, morality is not evaluated by outcome. Okay, this sounds like some conceptual, abstract philosophy. We are arguably moving away from moral realism. Somehow, written into the fabric of the universe is moral obligation or law or evaluation based on our intentions: let’s say it is about desire and intention. But should my intention require some responsible analysis or can I be just as moral by going through life with a carefree hopeful attitude that all of my actions will lead to good outcomes? If I naively go through life thinking in terms of giving people fish rather than teaching them to fish, my intentions are good, but they may very well actually be naive and damaging.

And how do we link outcome to intentions? Surely outcome should in some way inform our intentions so that we have an idea of the success of our intentions and we can adapt our intentions accordingly. In other words, I can learn that my intentions are better if I responsibly research what the outcomes of my actions are or might be. Learning from outcomes that giving homeless people money is not as useful as giving them food or buying The Big Issue from them where possible means that I can intend to do better by having a better grip on the outcomes of my actions (I am not interested in whether this is actually true for the purposes of this point).

But I’m not sure that any of this helps an absolute sense of moral realism, notwithstanding problems of the actual ontology of abstract moral laws. And there is another area for discussion: are moral laws descriptive or prescriptive?

I struggle to be able to make sense of “objective” abstracta as mind-independent “things”, since all conceptual entities must, to my mind, be mind-dependent; they are things of the mind.

This is a classic struggle for modernists and postmodernists, as you lay out here. That said, secular folks seem to have no trouble making sense of the laws of physics as our attempts to describe actual features of reality that exist out there in a mind independent kind of way. The “law of gravity” is a ghost as Pirsig would say, it exists out there, but not like a thing, instead as a description of what is. We discover that description in our own subjective way, but it precedes us. Same goes with moral claims. The truth of the claim “slavery is wrong” exists out there just as much as the speed of light, long before anyone human figured out either. I don’t even think it’s that weird, just a category reification error, which was what Plato was trying to find is way through after all.

This sort of links well to the above. We discover the real properties of the world and then immediately subjectivise them. This is along the lines of Kant and his ding an sich; we cannot know things-in-themselves as everything is interpreted through our subjective sense experiences, and this would include morality. We produce our conceptual map of the real terrain but we must not confuse the map with the terrain.

Slavery is wrong when we do moral philosophising that starts with certain axioms, it’s just establishing those axioms and the resultant frameworks. But what about slavery in the natural world? Bee drones, which are all female, work to support and serve the queen and her progeny. Bee drones don’t actually consume honey. They rely on the queen’s grubs to secrete a substance to feed on. Thus they have no choice. The Polyergus Lucidus is a slave-making ant only found in the eastern United States. It is incapable of feeding itself or looking after its offspring without assistance and must parasitize members of its own species or close relatives in order to survive. It will raid other nests and carry the pupae away to be reared and eventually grow to become workers or, in this case, slaves in their own colony.

In a sense, all parasitic relationships in nature can be viewed as slavery. One organism benefits as a result of the work of another, and the working one receives no benefit and may be harmed.

We would need to establish, in terms of ontic realism, the term “slave” and to whom it precisely applies. This gets rather close to Wittgenstein and language. On this, he did a 180 flip in his philosophical life:

Wittgenstein’s shift in thinking, between the Tractatus and the Investigations, maps the general shift in 20th century philosophy from logical positivism to behaviourism and pragmatism. It is a shift from seeing language as a fixed structure imposed upon the world to seeing it as a fluid structure that is intimately bound up with our everyday practices and forms of life. For later Wittgenstein, creating meaningful statements is not a matter of mapping the logical form of the world. It is a matter of using conventionally-defined terms within ‘language games’ that we play out in the course of everyday life. ‘In most cases, the meaning of a word is its use’, Wittgenstein claimed, in perhaps the most famous passage in the Investigations. It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it, and the context in which you say it. Words are how you use them.

So it becomes a case of working out the cut off point as to when slavery becomes wrong – it becomes an argument about personhood.

And, oh my, debates about personhood are precisely ones about realism and conceptual nominalism. I set this out in “What Is Personhood? Setting the Scene…“.

If moral realism supervenes on the idea of realism in terms of personhood, then it is doomed to failure.

Simply put, if there were no minds to conceive of morality, there would be no morality.

I might disagree, depending how you mean this. Morality tells us how we ought to treat sentient entities. As long as those sentient entities entities exist, the truths would apply to them, even if no one yet existed with a sufficiently advanced mind to cognize the those truths.

This starts to look like there might be agreement. Perhaps there is a greater need to define “objective morality” in the first place.

Again, I maintain that for these ideas to be existent in our brains the ideas are necessarily conceptual. We attach mental ideas to real properties of actions and events, and call this morality. But it is a conceptual affair. The tools and metrics we use to arrive at our conclusions will be real and empirical, though, it is just a case of establishing those frameworks themselves as ontologically objective.

[The commenter here is Aaron Rabi host of Philosophers in Space and Embrace the Void @etvpod podcasts. Check them out!]

My Views on “Objective” Morality

Last updated on: July 2, 2018 at 11:43 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

Jeremiah Traeger, here at ATP, recently posted on objective morality and referenced my beliefs in this context, especially regarding conceptual nominalism. I will look to succinctly set out my beliefs here again to stimulate some discussion.

What is a conceptual nominalist? Let me elucidate:

Abstract Objects

Abstract objects are incredibly important aspects within the context of philosophy. They include all of the labels and categories of things (tokens).These types are abstract. So, for example, a chair is both the token (actual chair) and the type (an abstract labelling as such). This can include numbers, universal ideas like redness, ideas like courage and justice, and even individual humans, such as Jonathan Pearce.

Because of their very nature, in being abstract, they can cause headaches for physicalism (and naturalism) and causality. Ever since the Greek times, there has been the famous problem known as the Problem of Universals. This briefly deals with the problem in defining what the properties of objects are, ontologically speaking (ie, what existence they have). Universals are common (universal) properties contained by more than one object. Two cars and a ball being red – what is redness? How can these different objects have an identical property and is that property real or in the mind of the conceiver, or indeed, contained within speech? Are these abstract objects and universals causally potent? Can redness take a position in a causal chain or relationship?

Platonism (realism)

Realists claim that these abstracta are real – that they exist in some tangible way. Plato, from whom the term came, believed the universals, like redness, existed separately from the particular objects (particulars) which contained said property. Platonic realism states that such entities exist independently from the particular, as opposed to Aristotelian realism states that the universals are real but dependent on the particulars.

Some arguments propose that, in order to have truth value in statements, universals must exist, such that “This apple is red” implies that the universal of redness exists for the proposition to be truthful.

The problems for such theories are where is the locus of these universals? Where can they be found and what IS their ontology?

Nominalism

Nominalism stands in stark contrast to realism in that the adherents state that only particulars exist, and not universals. Properties of particular objects can account for eventual similarity between objects (such as the green of grass and the green of a painted wall). Universals do not exist.

I am unsure as to whether the philpapers survey included conceptualism in the ‘other’ category or not, since conceptualism is sometimes called conceptual nominalism, such that universals and abstracts exist, but only in the individual minds of the conceivers (as concepts). (German) Idealism is close to this (think Kant, Hegel and Schelling) in believing universals to be in the minds of rational beings.

Nominalism can become VERY in-depth and confusing (when talking about the different types such as trope theory and resemblance theory). My opinion is that the discussions are crucial to the rest of metaphysics, it is just unfortunate that the discussion can be quite dry and dull. Here is an excerpt from the wiki entry on nominalism:

Nominalism arose in reaction to the problem of universals, specifically accounting for the fact that some things are of the same type. For example, Fluffy and Kitzler are both cats, or, the fact that certain properties are repeatable, such as: the grass, the shirt, and Kermit the Frog are green. One wants to know in virtue of what are Fluffy and Kitzler both cats, and what makes the grass, the shirt, and Kermit green.

The realist answer is that all the green things are green in virtue of the existence of a universal; a single abstract thing that, in this case, is a part of all the green things. With respect to the color of the grass, the shirt and Kermit, one of their parts is identical. In this respect, the three parts are literally one. Greenness is repeatable because there is one thing that manifests itself wherever there are green things.

Nominalism denies the existence of universals. The motivation for this flows from several concerns, the first one being where they might exist. Plato famously held, on one interpretation, that there is a realm of abstract forms or universals apart from the physical world (see theory of the forms). Particular physical objects merely exemplify or instantiate the universal. But this raises the question: Where is this universal realm? One possibility is that it is outside of space and time. A view sympathetic with this possibility holds that, precisely because some form is immanent in several physical objects, it must also transcend each of those physical objects; in this way, the forms are “transcendant” only insofar as they are “immanent” in many physical objects. In other words, immanence implies transcendence; they are not opposed to one another. (Nor, on this view, would there be a separate “world” or “realm” of forms that is distinct from the physical world, thus shirking much of the worry about where to locate a “universal realm”.) However, naturalists assert that nothing is outside of space and time. Some Neoplatonists, such as the pagan philosopher Plotinus and the philosopher Augustine, imply (anticipating conceptualism) that universals are contained within the mind of God. To complicate things, what is the nature of the instantiation or exemplification relation?

Conceptualists hold a position intermediate between nominalism and realism, saying that universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality.

Moderate realists hold that there is no realm in which universals exist, but rather universals are located in space and time wherever they are manifest. Now, recall that a universal, like greenness, is supposed to be a single thing. Nominalists consider it unusual that there could be a single thing that exists in multiple places simultaneously. The realist maintains that all the instances of greenness are held together by the exemplification relation, but this relation cannot be explained.

Finally, many philosophers prefer simpler ontologies populated with only the bare minimum of types of entities, or as W. V. Quine said “They have a taste for ‘desert landscapes.’” They attempt to express everything that they want to explain without using universals such as “catness” or “chairness.”

As ever, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on nominalism is great – here.

As is the SEP entry on abstract objects – here.

As is the superb SEP entry on properties found here.

Other useful SEP entries are Challenges to Metaphysical Realism, Platonism in Metaphysics, and the wiki entry on the Third Man Argument (an argument from Plato that shows an incoherent infinite regress in relational universals, which can be found in the SEP here).

Morality

How does this all chime with morality? Well, morality is almost the most famous of abstract objects. We apply the abstract labels of moral evaluation to actions and intentions of humans. Actions are themselves events with real, physical properties. Intentions are different to actions in that they are states of minds. Of course, with the position that the mental supervenes on the physical (as I claim), then there is a sense that such mental states of intentions are themselves reducible to physical properties.

When we talk about “morality” as a whole, we talk about the moral laws and prescriptions, and the truth values of a moral proposition. For me, there is no ether or locus for morality outside of our brains where such ideas can exist in an ontic sense. In this way, morality is a conceptual enterprise that is constructed by our brains to create a moral map of the world that we can use to navigate the social landscape.

We can use science to help us, as Sam Harris does, arrive at the best course of action, given a particular goal. But, I think, setting out that goal is a philosophical project and that requires some abstract thought, perhaps setting out axioms in one’s framework. You can argue that there is an objectively better course of action given two options, A and B. If you are looking for wellbeing or happiness (for example), as your endgame for morality, then perhaps option B empirically gets you more of those things. However, setting that as your endgame is not an objective ideal. It is a subjective, conceptual ideal. I would add that for morality to make any coherent sense, for me at any rate, it needs to be goal-oriented, and setting those goals is a subjective project.

I struggle to be able to make sense of “objective” abstracta as mind-independent “things”, since all conceptual entities must, to my mind, be mind-dependent; they are things of the mind.

Simply put, if there were no minds to conceive of morality, there would be no morality.

Of course, perhaps you could argue for some other ontology of morality other than this ontic sense of objective morality that I am putting forward here. Perhaps there is something objective about axioms: self-evident truths. But, to me, a self-evident truth is evident to a conceiver and is thus itself an abstract object.

Over to you, Traegar!

Beauty: Can You Only Really Get It with God? (No)

Last updated on: April 22, 2018 at 9:51 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

A Christian commenter recently claimed this humdinger:

If God exists, beauty and ugliness are not subjective but objective properties. that is the point. you used the term ‘ugly’, while you claim to be an atheist.

Yes, everything people say says a lot about them. The fact that you would be a deistic god, if you were god, says a lot about you, as well.

For me, a caring God is the kind that created us with feel will and with a plan to save us from ourselves.

and:

This is not a random assertion. For beauty to be objective, there must be a standard outside of the things themselves. While it is true that beauty is subjective, if there is no God, this is not so, if there is a God.

The view may be tragic but it is the truth. We are sinful and need to be saved from ourselves. If God exists, then a standard of righteousness exists, which flows from God’s nature.

I claimed that this view really was naive. He answered how ti could be naive, so here you go.

My belief is that:

Beauty is a word which all too often means “I like that”. In other words, it is shorthand for desirability, attraction etc. Stripping many of those meanings away leaves you with somewhat anaemic definition.
Beauty is a personal value statement ascribed to an object by the subject. It might be described as relational.
If there were no humans or rational agents in existence, then nothing would be beautiful, though they would still have the properties which were ascribed beauty.
In other words, it is dependent on perception.
I would think, in the ways that humans understand beauty, only humans presently have that conception, though other animals might have the same emotional reaction to some things which we might describe as beautiful.
The argument boils down to nominalism vs realism and it is arguably foundational to the debate. That said, real emotional/physiological reactions are also at play.
There are many good theories and a whole host of research concerning the evolutionary basis of things pertaining to beauty. For example, see Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works.
If you think an object actually has the real properties of beauty, then these properties must exist somewhere. Either this means a platonic realm DOES exist, or that an object holds beauty like it does mass and so on. Either claim is victim to an array of problems.

Let’s say that we claim a volcano is beautiful. These questions should evoke the issues with objective beauty:

What about looking at the inside of the volcano? The outside?
Is half of the volcano half as beautiful?
What about where the volcano ends? If I included 2, 4, 9 miles outside the volcano?
Would different angles viewing the same object ACTUALLY hold different beauty values?
What about that same volcano but magnified to standing right in front of it? What about magnified under a microscope? What about at electron level? This same object, would it now have different objective beauty?
What about the volcano to an alien, monkey, bird?
What if it was erupting, smoking?
What if it was now causing widespread death and destruction? Global warming?
What if I kept chipping away at it, rock by rock? When would it go from being beautiful to not? Or is it gradual? If you were looking from afar, you wouldn’t see most of that gradual chipping, yet you would still claim that now different object had the same beauty value. At some point, though, there would be a tipping point.

So on and so forth.

The point is, it is easy to claim that something is objectively beautiful; far more difficult to give a coherent account of how it works.

However, from a subjective stance, all the above questions pose absolutely no problems at all.

Of course, with different definitions and ideas (a grandmother being beautiful to grandmothers as a generic concept being beautiful – visual vs abstract ideas of beauty), we have different ideas concerning beauty, and objectivity becomes even harder.

In other words, it is difficult enough to establish abstract ideas as real in philosophy (nominalism vs realism) but to then assign a supposedly objective abstract concept (beauty) to an abstract idea (grandmotherness) is even more difficult. And then to claim this is only coherent when underwritten by another abstract concept (God), well…

The case here is that if God exists, beauty must be objective. But hopefully you can see that the idea of objective beauty is problematic and those problems, highlighted above, are simply not solved by throwing God into the equation.

The final issue pertains to the meaning and purpose debate. Theists, such as the commenter above (TJT), claim similarly:

There can be no real purpose and meaning, if there is no God.

The problem is, as Kant would argue, you can’t know things-in-themselves, and this includes ideas of meaning. If God has a meaning for us, then:

Why should that mean I have to adopt that meaning for myself?
Meaning is by definition what things mean to me. This is the case for language. We try to codify and make it objective in creating dictionaries, but meaning is the act of a mind applying meaning and representation to a thing or a concept. This is necessarily subjective.
All that saying God gives meaning does is to say another mind applies it’s own meaning to s given thing. You may or may not accord with that third party in your own representations and meaning-making.

Imagine if I cam up to you and pointed at a painting that you hated and thought was ugly and said, “That is truly beautiful!” We would argue and give reasons for our probably intuitive reactions. But that visceral reaction is neither wrong or right, and each of us is neither wrong or right.

Now imagine I am God. This does not really change the situation. I can give you all the reasons in the world, but if you don’t feel that the painting is beautiful, then you don’t think it is beautiful.

Theists love to argue that everything that has value (here, aesthetic value) must be underwritten by God. But they fail to adequately grapple with the idea that values – or the acts of evaluation – are necessarily subjective. Just because something has a price tag does not mean it objectively has that value, or that God has a price tag machine.

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Aquinas, Distinction, Composition and Divine Simplicity

Last updated on: April 12, 2018 at 10:37 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

In continuing to comment on the idea of divine simplicity, as it pertains to the Trinitarian God of Christianity, I am going to move on to speak about Aquinas.

Setting the Scene

Commenter (and contributor) here at ATP Ficino asked:

Jonathan, I would very much appreciate it if you can comment on the thesis that there is no composition in God but there is *real* distinction in God, not *only* notional distinction or distinction “in ratione sed non in re” or distinction as described by us.

From a commentator on Feser’s blog:

“Divine simplicity is not lack of distinction, but lack of composition. Aquinas is extremely clear about this; he repeatedly states it, so there is no excuse for ignoring it here. It only rules out distinctions that require composition … Rational distinctions are not ruled out by strictures against real distinctions that imply composition. (For that matter, real distinctions that don’t imply composition wouldn’t be ruled out, either.)”

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/five-books-on-arguments-for-gods_4.html

Adding: I see from a quick perusal that Aquinas holds that there is a real distinction, not only a rational distinction (i.e. only in the mind), of the Persons of the Trinity. It’s grounded in relations of origin, i.e. Son and HS proceed from Father. Aquinas says it’s the smallest distinction in quantity but the greatest in dignity. So Aquinas says the Trinity does not violate divine simplicity, since real distinction is not an instance of composition.

My initial reaction to this is “word salad” and not in what Ficino is saying, but in the source content. I suppose, some might say, this is the nature of theology. We shall see. As I write this, part of me wonders whether nominalism and realism will come into play. His (Brandon, the commenter on Feser’s blog) full comment is:

(1) Divine simplicity is not lack of distinction, but lack of composition. Aquinas is extremely clear about this; he repeatedly states it, so there is no excuse for ignoring it here. It only rules out distinctions that require composition. Your argument is based on an incorrect understanding of what Aquinas means by simplicity.

(2) Rational distinctions are not ruled out by strictures against real distinctions that imply composition. (For that matter, real distinctions that don’t imply composition wouldn’t be ruled out, either.) As I pointed out, this shows that you have misunderstood Feser, as well.

(3) ‘The will to create X’ literally and on the face of the expression refers not only to the divine will but also to X, which is not a divine attribute at all. Therefore ‘the will to create X’ and ‘the divine will’ are not interchangeable salva veritate, as your argument illogically assumes.

Likewise, ‘the will to create X’ and ‘the will to create Y’ both indicate the divine will, but do so with respect to a different source of extrinsic denomination; a distinction in the source of extrinsic denomination is not a distinction in the divine nature.

Brandon later quoted Feser himself:

As to divine simplicity, allow me to present a quote from Professor Feser himself: “There is also no distinction within God between any of the divine attributes: God’s eternity is His power, which is His goodness, which is His intellect, which is His will, and so on. Indeed, God Himself just is His power, His goodness, etc., just as He just is His existence, and just is His essence. Talking or conceiving of God, God’s essence, God’s existence, God’s power, God’s goodness, and so forth are really all just different ways of talking or conceiving of one and the very same thing. Though we distinguish between them in thought, there is no distinction at all between them in reality.” http://edwardfeser.blogspot.be/2009/11/william-lane-craig-on-divine-simplicity.html

This is referred to in the introduction to Aquinas on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Aquinas and his metaphysics. It states:

Primarily, for Aquinas, a thing cannot be unless it possesses an act of being, and the thing that possesses an act of being is thereby rendered an essence/existence composite. If an essence has an act of being, the act of being is limited by that essence whose act it is. The essence in itself is the definition of a thing; and the paradigm instances of essence/existence composites are material substances (though not all substances are material for Aquinas; for example, God is not). A material substance (say, a cat or a tree) is a composite of matter and form, and it is this composite of matter and form that is primarily said to exist. In other words, the matter/form composite is predicated neither of, nor in, anything else and is the primary referent of being;

Let me unpack this for you. As I understand it, Aquinas is again dealing in terms of essences and matter. A tree has the essence (form) of a tree and the matter in instantiating that essence. This is a composition of essence and matter, as well as existence.

The problem here is that I already fundamentally disagree with Aquinas’ position because I do not adhere to essentialism. Things don’t have essences or prescriptive ideas of form. Things are and we ascribe labels and categories and talk of “essences” as a way to describe these things, especially when they are similar. But these universals do not exist outside of our conceiving minds.

I will park this in a hope to better understand this Thomistic view of existence but it is fundamentally flawed in its foundation.

Composition

Let us look at what Aquinas variously means by composition:

On the basis of these considerations, we have to say that material substances are composite in several ways, depending on how we consider and identify their various integral parts.

They are composed of matter and (substantial) form, as is obvious

Their essence itself is also composed of matter and form considered in general

They are also composed of their essence (which comprises their matter and form in general) and their individual, designated matter, which is the principle of their individuation, i.e., that on account of which one individual of the same species is numerically distinct from another individual of the same species.

These three types of composition are peculiar to material substances, since all of these are the result of their having matter, informed by their substantial form.

But they also exhibit two further sorts of composition, which they share even with immaterial substances, except for God. These are

The composition from subject and accident

The composition of essence and existence (potentiality and actuality)

The former type of composition is present even in angels (“intelligences”, as Aquinas also refers to them), given the fact that even angels are changeable in respect of their spiritual activity, say, changing the objects of their thought or their will. It is only God, who is eternally immutable, self-thinking thought, who knows of all changeable things by understanding His own nature, which is only fragmentarily and imperfectly represented by the finite natures of His creatures, just as the light of the sun can be reflected by several, brighter and dimmer, variously tinted mirrors.

The second type of composition also has to be present in all creatures given that their essence is really distinct from their existence (this fundamental Thomistic thesis is often referred to as “the thesis of real distinction” [between essence and existence in creatures]). It is only God whose essence is nothing but His existence, which is precisely the reason why His essence, not being distinct from His existence, does not put any limitation on the infinite actuality of His existence. By contrast, the essences of creatures, even of the highest-ranking angels, are some determination of the act of existence which actualizes this essence. Indeed, given that angels cannot be numerically different on account of their designated matter (since they are immaterial), they differ from one another in their essence, that is, in virtue of the differences between how much limitation their essence imposes upon their existence: thus they differ in their essential perfection, and so they have to differ not only numerically but also specifically; according to Thomas, therefore, there cannot be two angels of the same species.

God Is His Nature

Aquinas’ next step follows, in showing that God is not a composition of essence and existence, but that they are one and the same:

Thomas begins stage three with the premise that whatever belongs to a thing belongs to it either through its intrinsic principles, its essence, or from some extrinsic principle. A thing cannot be the cause of its own existence, for then it would have to precede itself in existence, which is absurd. Everything then whose essence is distinct from its existence must be caused to be by another. Now, what is caused to be by another is led back to what exists in itself (per se). There must be a cause then for the existence of things, and this because it is pure existence (esse tantum); otherwise an infinite regress of causes would ensue.

There is a distinction between existence and essence in, say, a tree. But with God, then, his existence and essence are one. And here is the key to the simplicity. There is no distinction between the two, and there is no matter to boot. God is an immaterial substance, like angels, but not composite where they are. We can park any problems entailed with being able to see and experience angels and God moving in the material world for a while.

God is omniscience. God is his nature.

This quote is key: “Indeed, God Himself just is His power, His goodness, etc., just as He just is His existence, and just is His essence.”

This is, it appears, a wild metaphysical assertion. Defining things like power and goodness are meaningless, in my opinion, without context. God, one presumes, existed causally prior (if that even makes sense) to the beginning of the universe. If this is so, then there was no time at the point of GodWorld, as we might call it. There was nothing else other than the pure existence in essence of God.

As Aquinas says in Summa Theologiae, “All perfections existing in creatures divided and multiplied, pre-exist in God unitedly.”

There is a problem with asserting that God has all of these properties in essential nature, but that they are not distinct properties.

All that appears to exist of God is potential. There is potential to be good, potential for power and so on. If God knows everything, where is all this knowledge stored? I don’t want to sidetrack here, but we know only of knowledge in material contexts: computers, books and brains and their storage. The meaning of knowledge is derived from thought, which appears to need a brain or other material machine in order to compute and understand. God, evidently, just does magic to allow for these abilities immaterially. Perhaps this is analogous to a brand new state ruler being a good person because they have the potential to do good – it is in their nature, or DNA even, to make benign decisions even if they have not yet done so. They also have power, even if they have not yet wielded it.

At least with humans, though, we understand potential and nature in what is materially defined by our bodies and temporally defined by our learning and past. But, with God, this is not the case. I struggle to understand nature as applied immaterially to God.

In this way, God is (prior to creation) all these good things in potentiality, rather than actuality.

Actus Purus

What we need to do, then, is describe these terms in the context of Thomistic philosophy. Potentiality and actuality are perhaps different notions than otherwise conceived.

In scholastic philosophy, actus purus ( literally “pure act”) is the absolute perfection of God.

Created beings have potentiality that is not actuality, imperfections as well as perfection. Only God is simultaneously all that He can be, infinitely real and infinitely perfect: ‘I am who I am’ (Exodus3:14). His attributes or His operations, are really identical with His essence, and His essence necessitates His existence. (Contrast this understanding with the Essence–Energies distinction in Eastern Christian, particularly Palamite, theology).

In created beings, the state of potentiality precedes that of actuality; before being realized, a perfection must be capable of realization. But, absolutely speaking, actuality precedes potentiality. For in order to change, a thing must be acted upon, or actualized; change and potentiality presuppose, therefore, a being which is in actu. This actuality, if mixed with potentiality, presupposes another actuality, and so on, until we reach the actus purus.

According to Thomas Aquinas a thing which requires completion by another is said to be in potency to that other: realization of potency is called actuality. The universe is conceived of as a series of things arranged in an ascending order, or potency and act at once crowned and created by God, who alone is pure act. God is changeless because change means passage from potency to act, and so he is without beginning and end, since these demand change. Matter and form are necessary to the understanding of change, for change requires the union of that which becomes and that which it becomes. Matter is the first, and form the second. All physical things are composed of matter and form. The difference between a thing as form or character and the actual existence of it is denoted by the terms essence and being (or existence). It is only in God that there is no distinction between the two. Both pairs – matter & form and essence & being – are special cases of potency and act. They are also modes: modes do not add anything to the idea of being, but are ways of making explicit what is implicit in it. [source]

God is pure actuality. I get a sense here of playing with terms and making definitional assertions so as to suit the purpose. God is pure act, and is not potential by virtue of that simply being how Aquinas defines him. “Act” here seems to have the sense of being rather than doing so that God is all that he can be, which leads to immutability. There is a prime mover style of argument here so that the only pure axiomatic act can be God, with all other things contingently containing potency with regard to some other act.

God and Time

But without time, you have no thought, no deliberation, no intention, no decision. Without time, there is arguably no personhood. I am struggling to make sense of a Thomistic view of God in a timeless vacuum. Ah, but the Thomist will reply that this is because God has no personhood. God is the qualities that we may ascribe to persons. More on this later.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states (on Divine Simplicity), though:

Besides perfection and necessity, immateriality, eternity, and immutability also seem to point to simplicity as their ground. Because God is simple, he cannot have parts and so cannot have material or temporal parts. And because God is simple, he cannot harbor any unrealized potentialities, and so must be immutable.

But how can he not harbour unrealised potentialities as a pure form in GodWorld without time? He is merely potential!

As mentioned, I actually refute personhood making sense without time; the problem being that God just becomes a potential to be all of these things without actually being them. But then one needs to define being. To return to the IEP’s quote. It looks rather tautologous in saying:

Primarily, for Aquinas, a thing cannot be unless it possesses an act of being, and the thing that possesses an act of being is thereby rendered an essence/existence composite. If an essence has an act of being, the act of being is limited by that essence whose act it is. The essence in itself is the definition of a thing…

What is God? He is his essence. What is his essence? These attributes A, B and C, but not as separate composites, as one essence in existence. What is being? The act of having those essences.

It’s a very murky and circular world of assertions as claims. God is these attributes as his nature, and they exist immaterially as a single abstract entity.

Plantinga

Alvin Plantinga, a Christian philosopher held in high regard, disagrees with this approach to divine simplicity (as does William Lane Craig):

A central threat to coherence is the question of how a thing could be identical to its properties. Alvin Plantinga (1980, p. 47) maintains that if God is identical to his properties, then he is a property, and they are a single property, in which case God is a single property. Given that properties are abstract entities, and abstracta are causally inert, then God is abstract and causally inert — which is of course inconsistent with the core tenet of classical theism according to which God is the personal creator and sustainer of every contingent being. No abstract object is a person or a causal agent. No abstract object can be omniscient, or indeed know anything at all. More fundamentally, no abstract object can be identical to any concrete object. Abstracta and concreta are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Objections similar to Plantinga’s have been raised by Richard Gale (1991, p. 23 ff.) and others….

It is easy to see that Plantinga-style objections will not appear decisive to those who reject his ontological framework. Plantinga, along with many other philosophers, thinks of individuals and (first-level) properties as belonging to radically disjoint realms despite the fact that individuals exemplify properties. Individuals are causally efficacious concreta whereas properties are casually impotent abstracta. Such an approach to ontology renders the divine simplicity inconceivable from the outset. For if God is a concrete individual and his nature (conceived perhaps as the conjunction of his omni-attributes) is an abstract property, then the general ontology rules out an identity of God with his nature. Any such identity would violate the separateness of the two realms. To identify an unexemplifiable concretum with an exemplifiable abstractum would amount to an ontological category mistake. At most, a Plantinga-style approach allows for God’s exemplification of his nature where the (first-level) exemplification relation, unlike the identity relation, is asymmetrical and irreflexive and so enforces the non-identity of its relata. In short, if God exemplifies his nature, then God is distinct from his nature. His nature is something he has, not, pace Augustine, something he is.

I would agree to be something more than an abstract concept, then I think the Christian has to adhere to this line of thinking. I think the Thomistic approach renders God an abstract idea in an incoherent network built upon faulty foundations of ontology.

The Thomistic Reply

The problem is for Plantinga and people who might agree with him (myself included) is that the Thomist won’t buy this. God has no personhood as he is not a person. For them, God is not in time, but is timeless:

For Aquinas, God’s timeless eternity is unending, lacking both beginning and end, and an instantaneous whole lacking succession. It is a correlate of divine simplicity (see the SEP entry on divine simplicity), and it is incapable of being defined or fully grasped by a creature. For Aquinas too, timeless eternity constitutes part of the “grammar” of talking about God. Since God is timelessly eternal it does not make any sense to ask how many years God has existed, or whether he is growing old, or what will he be doing later on in the year. [SEP entry on eternity in Christian thought]

So God cannot be in time, only his effects can be, rather conveniently. I am somewhat dubious about how this can possibly work, and how it works in terms of interactionism and the God of the Bible working in unison with mankind. The end result for the Thomist is that it doesn’t matter whether time is a necessary condition for personhood, since God is not a person (though might be personal in that he has intellect and will, but in a sense that he is those things rather than having them as properties). God does not instantiate personhood because he simply is those qualities.

I have argued in my book on free will that a timeless god acting within time simply makes no sense. It also renders God very strictly immutable such that any changing of his mind as found variously in the Bible needs to be denied in some fashion. Of course, this all plays merry havoc with the idea that God supposedly has free will. He simply cannot.

Thomists will maintain that God cannot be a potentiality but is an actuality. This looks to be a tough thing to do when considering that God is timeless.

I also find it hard to consider entering into a loving relationship with something that is so abstract in ontology, with no personhood as commonly understood. I think this is where abstracting God philosophically and working so hard to find a coherent idea for God works against the Christian who is also trying to convince others to enter into a loving relationship with such a god.

And Finally

Finally, let’s dwell on this point, but not for long:

Likewise, ‘the will to create X’ and ‘the will to create Y’ both indicate the divine will, but do so with respect to a different source of extrinsic denomination; a distinction in the source of extrinsic denomination is not a distinction in the divine nature.

Divine will is problematic, especially in God prior to the creation of the universe. I have argued before in This World as Philosophically Necessary. I adhere to the idea that, again, without time, intention and desire is meaningless.

There we have it. A whistlestop tour around some ideas concerning Thomistic views on divine existence. Personally, I don’t essentialism is coherent (given my conceptual nominalist position), and, as such, the whole project fails. I also fail to see how God can coherently have all these properties timelessly, and yet not be a complex entity with a whole host of properties. To me, every entity is an instantiation of properties, God included. I see love, power and mercy all around me, and it doesn’t depend on or dip into God’s nature. Don’t just assert God is love and mercy, and then tout the Bible as evidence of this. The book is a far cry from all those properties God’s nature is supposed to imbue.

I will, in a next post, look more closely at how this works in the context of the Trinitarian understanding of God.

[NOTA BENE – this article might well be edited for clarity if necessary, and given discussion below]

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Evolution, Transitional Fossils and Theodore Turner (and his TERRIBLE Comments)

Last updated on: March 24, 2018 at 2:53 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

Theodore Turner is doing what See Noevo used to do: providing stimulus for posts after placing ridiculous comments on the threads. I know many will think why bother replying but it is hopefully useful for lurkers and ammunition for others in similar arguments.

Anyway, the comments in question were:

I know that you were taught that evolution is a fact. However, it fails , when we actually look at the evidence. There is zero evidence that things evolve between kinds. Every piece of evidence that has ever been discovered is now known to be fake. The latest fatality was the evidence for whale evolution.

And:

Why do we find no links between kinds in the fossil record? Why is there no transitory fossils? As Darwin said, “”If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

This has been demonstrated. Even the once mighty warrior of atheistic evolution, Anthony Flew, had to summit to the evidence. Was he also a crank?

Part of me is deeply depressed that someone who purports to be really well read, but doesn’t know his evolutionary arse from his elbow:

Really? What is this based on? I am sure I have studied and read more on evolution than you have. I have 45 years of reading on the subject.

You know Geoff Benson, to whom you were replying, do you? Are you sure of this? You may well have read more on evolution than him. But what you have read must have been demonstrably stupid. Because you in no way show an even rudimentary understanding of evolution. I mean, just the basic claim that there is no evidence of a transitional fossil b when we know that all fossils are by definition transitional. So we literally have a 100% proportion of fossils found as being transitional.

D’oh.

His problems are first and foremost philosophical before they are scientific.

So I will dig up some old stuff for TJT to see if he understands the problems with his comments and his reliance on some kind of philosophical essentialism about which even Darwin at the time was well aware. This image sums up his problems:

I am going to explain to you why species do not exist and in some sense there is no such thing as speciation in evolutionary biology. This will involve philosophy, sand dunes, voting, colours and fossils. Amongst other things.

The Sorites Paradox

My favourite philosophical thought experiment, if you can call it that, and as many of my readers might know of me, is the Sorites Paradox. It can be defined as follows:

The sorites paradox^[1] (sometimes known as the paradox of the heap) is a paradox that arises from vague predicates.^[2] A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?^[3]

The paradox arises in this way:

The word “sorites” derives from the Greek word for heap.^[4] The paradox is so named because of its original characterization, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus.^[5] The paradox goes as follows: consider a heap of sand from which grains are individually removed. One might construct the argument, using premises, as follows:^[3]

1000000 grains of sand is a heap of sand (Premise 1)

A heap of sand minus one grain is still a heap. (Premise 2)

Repeated applications of Premise 2 (each time starting with one fewer grain) eventually forces one to accept the conclusion that a heap may be composed of just one grain of sand.^[6]). Read (1995) observes that “the argument is itself a heap, or sorites, of steps of modus ponens“:^[7]

1000000 grains is a heap.

If 1000000 grains is a heap then 999999 grains is a heap.

So 999999 grains is a heap.

If 999999 grains is a heap then 999998 grains is a heap.

So 999998 grains is a heap.

If …

… So 1 grain is a heap.

This is crucial for my larger point.

What creationists claim

Creationists very often demand silly things like evidence that dogs give birth to non-dogs. Indeed, in a recent thread, a creationist stated these indicative remarks:

Lots of redheads coming out of Ireland isn’t evolution. Redheads coming (eventually) out of “Rhubarb”, now THAT’s evolution.

and

You’re the one who’s confused. Evolutionists claim “evolution” happens right before our eyes when bacteria “evolve” *RESISTANCE* to antibiotics. (I say NO evolution. The antibiotic-susceptible bacteria and the antibiotic- resistant bacteria are …
BOTH BACTERIA, one is no less a bacteria than the other.)

But the same scientists demur, I guess for political correctness, that the mutation that causes some human beings to have *RESISTANCE* to malaria (via the sickle cell mutation) is NOT evolution. You know, because they do NOT want to say those blacks with sickle-cell are NOT humans anymore. (And they’re right to not say that, but they’re right for the wrong reason.)

and

Well, if scientists think that evolution does *not* mean new species AND evolution does *not* mean common ancestry, then I guess I believe in evolution.

What you should be able to see here is that such a position demands of evolution clear speciation and particular points. A dog must give birth to a non-dog.

The problem is, this doesn’t happen and evolutionary scientists will be the first people to tell you this. If you are demanding this of evolution, and never get it, it is no wonder you deny evolution because it is nothing but a shoddy straw man of properly defined evolution.

Categorising stuff

We love to use categories. That’s a blue flower, that’s a red car, that’s an adult, that’s a child. It’s how we navigate reality in a practical sense – it provides our conceptual map. However, you shouldn’t confse the map with the terrain. Essentially (good word choice), we make up labels to represent a number of different properties. A cat has these properties, a dog these. Red has these properties, blue these. Often we agree on this labelling, but sometimes we don’t. What constitutes a hero? A chair? Is a tree stump a chair?

The problem occurs when we move between categories. It is at these times that we realise the simplicity of the categories shows weakness in the system.

You reach eighteen years of age. You are able to vote. You are now classed as an adult. You are allowed to buy alcoholic drinks (in the UK). But there is barely any discernible difference in you, as a person, physically and mentally, from 17 years, 364 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds, and you 1 second later.

However, we decide to define that second change at midnight as differentiating the two yous and seeing you move from child (adolescent) to adult. These categories are arbitrary in where we exactly draw the line. Some countries choose sixteen, some younger, some older. These are conceptual constructs that allow us to navigate about a continuum of time. You can look at a five-year-old and the same person at twenty-eight and clearly see a difference. But that five-year-old and the same person one second later? There is no discernible difference.

And yet it is pragmatically useful for us to categorise, otherwise things like underage sex and drinking would take place with wild abandon, perhaps. Sixteen for the age of consent is, though, rather arbitrary. Why not five seconds later? Four days? Three and a half years?

Speciation is exactly the same. There is no real time where a population of organisms actually transforms into a new species. Because species is a human conceptual construct that does not exist objectively. We name things homo sapiens sapiens but cannot define exactly where speciation occurred. In one sense, it does not occur. In another, if you look at vastly different places on the continuum, it does (at least in our minds).

This is a version of the Sorites Paradox.

As I have shared several times, this image above sums it up with aplomb.

Examples with recent human ancestry

We know this happens very clearly because there have been skulls found that have aspects and properties of what we think one (sub)species has, and other properties of another species. It is not different enough from either to be a new species, and thus it really is truly transitional. As all fossils are. The whole continuum of any branch is transitional right the way along. There are no category markers. As Dawkins states in The Greatest Show on Earth (but without images – it’s a long quote, but nails it):

Now for my next important point about allegedly missing links and the arbitrariness of names. Obviously, when Mrs Ples’s name was changed from Plesianthropus to Australopithecus, nothing changed in the real world at all. Presumably nobody would be tempted to think anything else. But consider a similar case where a fossil is re-examined and moved, for anatomical reasons, from one genus to another. Or where its generic status is disputed – and this very frequently happens – by rival anthropologists. It is, after all, essential to the logic of evolution that there must have existed individuals sitting exactly on the borderline between two genera, say Australopithecus and Homo. It is easy to look at Mrs Ples and a modern Homo sapiens skull and say, yes, there is no doubt these two skulls belong in different genera. If we assume, as almost every anthropologist today accepts, that all members of the genus Homo are descended from ancestors belonging to the genus we call Australopithecus, it necessarily follows that, somewhere along the chain of descent from one species to the other, there must have been at least one individual who sat exactly on the borderline. This is an important point, so let me stay with it a little longer.

Bearing in mind the shape of Mrs Ples’s skull as a representative of Australopithecus africanus 2.6 million years ago, have a look at the top skull opposite, called KNM ER 1813. Then look at the one underneath it, called KNM ER 1470. Both are dated at approximately 1.9 million years ago, and both are placed by most authorities in the genus Homo. Today, 1813 is classified as Homo habilis, but it wasn’t always. Until recently, 1470 was too, but there is now a move afoot to reclassify it as Homo rudolfensis. Once again, see how fickle and transitory our names are. But no matter: both have an apparently agreed foothold in the genus Homo. The obvious difference from Mrs Ples and her kind is that she had a more forward-protruding face and a smaller brain-case. In both respects, 1813 and 1470 seem more human, Mrs Ples more ‘ape-like’.

Now look at the skull below, called ‘Twiggy’. Twiggy is also normally classified nowadays as Homo habilis. But her forward-pointing muzzle has more of a suggestion of Mrs Ples about it than of 1470 or 1813. You will perhaps not be surprised to be told that Twiggy has been placed by some anthropologists in the genus Australopithecus and by other anthropologists in Homo. In fact, each of these three fossils has been, at various times, classified as Homo habilis and as Australopithecus habilis. As I have already noted, some authorities at some times have given 1470 a different specific name, changing habilis to rudolfensis. And, to cap it all, the specific name rudolfensis has been fastened to both generic names, Australopithecus and Homo. In summary, these three fossils have been variously called, by different authorities at different times, the following range of names:

KNM ER 1813: Australopithecus habilis, Homo habilis

KNM ER 1470: Australopithecus habilis, Homo habilis, Australopithecus rudolfensis, Homo rudolfensis

OH 24 (‘Twiggy’): Australopithecus habilis, Homo habilis

Should such a confusion of names shake our confidence in evolutionary science? Quite the contrary. It is exactly what we should expect, given that these creatures are all evolutionary intermediates, links that were formerly missing but are missing no longer. We should be positively worried if there were no intermediates so close to borderlines as to be difficult to classify. Indeed, on the evolutionary view, the conferring of discrete names should actually become impossible if only the fossil record were more complete. In one way, it is fortunate that fossils are so rare. If we had a continuous and unbroken fossil record, the granting of distinct names to species and genera would become impossible, or at least very problematical. It is a fair conclusion that the predominant source of discord among palaeoanthropologists – whether such and such a fossil belongs in this species/genus or that – is deeply and interestingly futile.

Hold in your head the hypothetical notion that we might, by some fluke, have been blessed with a continuous fossil record of all evolutionary change, with no links missing at all. Now look at the four Latin names that have been applied to 1470. On the face of it, the change from habilis to rudolfensis would seem to be a smaller change than the one from Australopithecus to Homo. Two species within a genus are more like each other than two genera. Aren’t they? Isn’t that the whole basis for the distinction between the genus level (say Homo or Pan as alternative genera of African apes) and the species level (say troglodytes or paniscus within the chimpanzees) in the hierarchy of classification? Well, yes, that is right when we are classifying modern animals, which can be thought of as the tips of the twigs on the evolutionary tree, with their antecedents on the inside of the tree’s crown all comfortably dead and out of the way. Naturally, those twigs that join each other further back (further into the interior of the tree’s crown) will tend to be less alike than those whose junction (more recent common ancestor) is nearer the tips. The system works, as long as we don’t try to classify the dead antecedents. But as soon as we include our hypothetically complete fossil record, all the neat separations break down. Discrete names become, as a general rule, impossible to apply. [Chapter 7]

In philosophy, there is a position called (conceptual) nominalism, which is set against (Platonic) realism. This conceptual nominalism, as I adhere to, denies in some (or all) cases the existence of abstracts. These categories we invent don’t exist (a word that itself needs clear defining), at least not outside of our heads. Thus species do not exist as objective categories. We invent them, but if all people who knew about species suddenly died and information about them was lost, then so too would be lost the concept and categorisation.

When we look at two very different parts of a continuum we find it easy to say those things are different and are of different categories, but when we look in finer detail, this falls apart. There is a fuzzy logic at play.

Species do not exist. Well, they do in our heads. When we agree about them. And only then so we can nicely label pictures in books, or in our heads.

Some quotes

Wikipedia has some nice quotes on the subject. Follow the links for sources and references:

“No term is more difficult to define than “species,” and on no point are zoologists more divided than as to what should be understood by this word.” Nicholson (1872, p. 20).^[54]

“Of late, the futility of attempts to find a universally valid criterion for distinguishing species has come to be fairly generally, if reluctantly, recognized” Dobzhansky (1937, p. 310).^[13]

“The concept of a species is a concession to our linguistic habits and neurological mechanisms” Haldane (1956).^[46]

“The species problem is the long-standing failure of biologists to agree on how we should identify species and how we should define the word ‘species’.” Hey (2001).^[49]

“First, the species problem is not primarily an empirical one, but it is rather fraught with philosophical questions that require — but cannot be settled by — empirical evidence.” Pigliucci (2003).^[17]

“An important aspect of any species definition whether in neontology or palaeontology is that any statement that particular individuals (or fragmentary specimens) belong to a certain species is an hypothesis (not a fact)” Bonde (1977).^[55]

And Now:

Given a categorisation framework that can be used for pragmatic valule, let me now point TJT in the direction of a few pieces:

Just for starters.

Atheists and Morality: Defining Our Terms

Last updated on: January 30, 2018 at 12:47 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

Let’s set the record straight. I’m tired of hearing stuff like this:

“Then the Catholic Church is wrong.”

Wrong answer.

For a genuine atheist, there is no wrong. All you should say is that your opinion is different.

Let me give you some of the chapter I wrote for John Loftus’ book Christianity Is Not Great:

Chapter 22: “Tu Quoque, Atheism!” – Our Right To Judge

By Jonathan MS Pearce

Throughout the chapters in this book you have seen how the authors have woven the threads of argument that have made a patchwork quilt, a tapestry of accusations, to be hung around the body of Christianity, that serves to highlight the harm done under its auspices and in its name.

Christians throw the accusation at atheists that we have no epistemic right to judge the moral dimension of the Christian faith. Take Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (who concerned himself with the problem of evil) for example. One of the foremost modern apologists, William Lane Craig, stated in his book Reasonable Faith about Dostoyevsky:

Actually, he sought to carry through a two-pronged defense of theism in the face of the problem of evil. Positively, he argued that innocent suffering may perfect character and bring one into a closer relation with God. Negatively, he tried to show that if the existence of God is denied, then one is landed in complete moral relativism, so that no act, regardless how dreadful or heinous, can be condemned by the atheist. To live consistently with such a view of life is unthinkable and impossible. Hence, atheism is destructive of life and ends logically in suicide.[i]

Oh dear, we atheists are apparently a miserable and evil bunch! And what of Craig himself?

In a world without God, who is to say which actions are right and which are wrong? Who is to judge that the values of Adolf Hitler are inferior to those of a saint? The concept of morality loses all meaning in a universe without God…

In a world without a divine lawgiver, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong.[ii]

You can’t get any clearer than that. This, I would argue, is representative of the Christian approach to atheistic morality and to whether atheists have a right to judge others. And it is this view that I will challenge.

Do we non-theists have an epistemic right to judge Christians, to assign moral value to their actions? Are we throwing around accusations of harm without having our own foundation upon which to base them, as many Christians claim?

There are three things to say in direct answer to this question. First, it doesn’t matter. By this, I mean if all the atheists and non-religious people of this world did not so much as exist, these concepts and ideas and accusations leveled at Christians and Christianity would still have merit. In fact, there are Christians around the world who are critical enough of their own religion and, moreover, of all the other thousands of denominations other than their own, as to make these accusations valid, irrespective of whether or not they come from atheists. If every author in this book happened, in some bizarre twist, to be a committed (yet critical!) Christian, would these points not still hold? Of course they would.

Consider Thom Stark, a liberal Christian, who took Paul Copan and his book Is God a Moral Monster? to task in Is God a Moral Compromiser? Stark prefaced his work with these comments:

In critiquing Paul Copan’s apologetic defenses of our frequently morally problematic Bible, my aim is not to turn anybody away from the Christian faith. In fact, I am critical of apologetic attempts to sweep the Bible’s horror texts under the rug precisely because I believe such efforts are damaging to the church and to Christian theology, not to mention to our moral sensibilities…

But despite [contemporary popular apologists’] very good intentions, they seem oblivious to the real harm they’re doing. Not only are they giving permission for Christians to be dishonest with the material, they’re reinforcing delusions that disconnect well-meaning Christians from reality, blinding them to the destructive effects many of these horror texts continue to have upon Christian communities and in broader society.[iii] [my emphasis]

So you can see that Christians themselves (the ones who are critical enough) hold similar views to mine. They see the harm that their own apologists perpetuate through the use of contrived theology whose only purpose serves as self-authenticating validation.

As Bishop John Shelby Spong stated in The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love:

This book [the Bible] has been relentlessly employed by those who say they believe it to be God’s Word, to oppress others who have been, according to the believers, defined in the “hallowed” pages of this text as somehow subhuman. Quotations from the Bible have been cited to bless the bloodiest of wars. People committed to the Bible have not refrained from using the cruelest forms of torture on those whom they believe to have been revealed as the enemies of God in these “sacred” scriptures. A museum display that premiered in Florence in 1983, and later traveled to the San Diego Museum of Man in 2003, featured the instruments used on heretics by Christians during the Inquisition. They included stretching machines designed literally to pull a person apart, iron collars with spikes to penetrate the throat, and instruments that were used to impale the victims. The Bible has been quoted throughout Western history to justify the violence done to racial minorities, women, Jews and homosexuals. It might be difficult for some Christians to understand, but it is not difficult to document the terror enacted by believers in the name of the Bible.[iv]

These are just two examples of many. Christians are critical enough of themselves to point out the harm their holy book and its adherents have caused. If their points are correct, then so, surely, are ours.

The second thing to say in response is that we are merely testing the hypothesis that God is love. One highly contentious view that almost everyone hears about God is that he is love. God is love. This view is somewhat controversial in the context of much of what you have read in this book. What the authors have established is an evidential problem of evil argument against God. Christianity and Christians have contributed harm to this world; how is this fact coherent with the existence of an all-loving, morally perfect God?

If we can establish, and I think we have quite forcefully, that Christianity has created a great deal of harm, then Christians are under even more pressure to answer the ubiquitous problem of evil. Seeing Christianity as the problem of evil has a certain ironic ring to it.

God is love is a truth claim. It is a hypothesis that is being put to the test. We can actually use the dirty linen of the Bible and of Christianity since biblical times to make the bed; and we can see if the Bible lies comfortably in it. We can use the morality of the Bible to be its own judge, jury, and executioner. And let’s face it, the Bible won’t be averse to meting out the most final of punishments: there is rather a lot of execution therein.

Accordingly, the claim that God is love is problematic on many levels.

The third response is that atheists do have the right to judge. We have an epistemic right to judge that Christianity and Christians have caused this world harm. We do so because morality is a coherent concept in a worldview absent of a god.

To show this, I will start by defining the relevant terms then briefly critiquing the main concepts of Christian ethical systems, with particular reference to the idea that (the Judeo-Christian) God himself appears to be a moral consequentialist. This refutes the claim of his acolytes that he is needed to ground morality. I will show that most philosophers are non-theistic and hold to a variety of non-theistic moral value systems that do not necessitate a god and invariably undermine Christian morality. I will go further to argue that morality indeed presupposes atheism in order to make sense.

Defining our terms

Before we investigate morality, it is useful to establish what we mean by it. First, and obviously, we must look to find a useable definition as to what morality is.

Generally, the study of morality is split into three components: descriptive morality, meta-ethics and normative morality. Normally philosophers replace the term ‘morality’ with ‘ethics’. Descriptive ethics is concerned with what people empirically believe, morally speaking. Normative ethics (which can be called prescriptive ethics) investigates questions of what people should believe. Meta-ethics is more philosophical still in attempting to define what moral theories and ethical terms actually refer to. Or,

What do different cultures actually think is right? (descriptive)

How should people act, morally speaking? (normative)

What do right and ought actually mean? (meta-ethics)

Morality, as the term will be used here, will generally be understood as: “normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.”[v]

The second important term to attempt to unravel is objective. This is a more difficult term to define than one may think. Usually it means something that is independent of an agent’s mind, or mind independent. This is the understanding I will use here for the sake of argument. Thus objective morality refers to facts about what constitutes moral behavior, and these facts lie in the nature of the agent’s action, regardless of cultural and individual opinion.

One hugely important question at this point concerns the existence of properties such as “is an abstract idea.” This is important because theists end up arguing at only skin depth, at the veneer of philosophy. Whether an atheist has the right to make moral judgments is a question that has as its basis much more fundamental meta-ethical and metaphysical philosophy. What theism and theists rely on is some form of (Platonic) realism such that there is a realm where abstract ideas and forms exist. This is not immediately, or even after some critical analysis, apparent. What are rights, moral laws or morality actually made of? What is their ontology? What are the properties of these abstract ideas? The conceptualist (a form of nominalism, the position that denies the existence of universal abstract ideas in some way) claims, for example, that abstract ideas like morality are concepts in each individual conceiver’s head. Thus objective morality is potentially a non-starter or requires a more befitting definition. Now the philosophy gets very in-depth here, but is actually critically important. It is easy to say atheists have no ground for objective morality and that theists do. It is a lot harder to show how objective morality exists in some kind of mind-independent reality. Even God can be argued to be an abstraction (since he apparently has infinite qualities, a concept that has no actual reality).

This terminology of “objective morality” is ubiquitous in debates with Christian apologists, as we can see with William Lane Craig’s Moral Argument, which he uses in every debate:

(Premise 1) If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.

(Premise 2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.

(Conclusion) Therefore, God does exist.[vi]

There is a philosophical problem here because this might well imply that there must exist some kind of Platonic realm, as mentioned, where these ideas actually exist. Without humans in the world, and the actions that carry such moral values, can we actually say that these ideas exist mind-independently? For example, if one were to posit a moral theory that was universally subjective, such that each rational and knowledgeable person with a sound mind would arrive at the same conclusion in valuing a moral action, would this qualify as “objective”? For example, if we agreed that which would be a self-evidently good state of affairs (human flourishing, lack of pain, increase of pleasure, etc.), then this goal could be achieved or known by a thorough empirical analysis (qua science)—would this qualify as objective?[vii] If ideas and concepts exist only conceptually, rather than out there in the ether, does the concept of “objectivity” even make sense?

This idea of universal subjectivity would explain commonality between people, as well as the differences (taking into account societal influences) much better than morality existing as some Platonic form. Or is it just a fanciful way of smuggling in God? If the idea of objective morality is incoherent, are we left with any grounding for moral judgments sans God, and perhaps, even with God?

I have had many conversations with theists who make claims about objective morality without properly defining it and then, upon being pressured, reveal it to mean something like “valid and binding.” But this ends up being a circular claim. You cannot have an objective morality without a god since objective morality means a value system validated by some entity. In other words, you can’t have “God-derived morality” without God! Well, indeed.

Nevertheless, let us take this mind-independent concept of objective and apply it to morality and see whether it holds up. Interestingly, unless theists also hold to some kind of Platonic form, or actual ontological existence of morality in God (whatever that could possibly mean), then they face the same questions.

[i] William Lane Craig, A Reasonable Faith, (3^rd Ed., Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), p. 69.

[ii] Ibid, p.75

[iii] Thom Stark, Is God a Moral Compromiser? A Critical Review of Paul Copan’s “Is God a Moral Monster?”, 2^nd Ed., http://thomstark.net/copan/stark_copan-review.pdf (accessed July 20, 2013), p. 1. (accessed July 20, 2013)

[iv] John Shelby Spong, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 4-5

[v] Bernard Gert. “The Definition of Morality,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/ (accessed July 20, 2013)

[vi] E.g., William Lane Craig, “Morality and Does God Exist?”, Reasonable Faith with William Lane Craig, http://www.reasonablefaith.org/morality-and-does-god-exist (accessed July 20, 2013)

[vii] Here we could use a goal-oriented approach such that if we wanted a (e.g. human flourishing), then would need to do x (some action to achieve a). This conditional has an apodosis (then…) which follows factually from the protasis (if…), something which could be established using an empirical method. The matter of fact aspect of this conditional statement can make such a hypothetical moral approach objective or factual, though it then becomes important to establish the goal as being self-evident ofrfactual in some such way.

In the next section, I will look at Christian systems of morality.

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What Is Personhood? Setting the Scene.

Last updated on: November 10, 2017 at 9:40 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

I recently gave a talk on personhood to the University of the Third Age at one of my local schools. My talk was the first one of a day that was designed to look at what it means to be a human. After my piece, an evolutionary behavioural scientist gave a talk on animal behaviour in comparison to human behaviour to look at what it means to be human from a behavioural point of view. After that, there was a breakout session with the children from the school that was hosting the event and this was really interesting because those children, probably about thirteen and fourteen, had so much to add to the conversation. They were really engaged with what we were talking about and how it might affect moral decisions in the future with robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as looking at ideas of abortion, evolution, species and whatnot; and it was a pleasure to see the engagement of people at both ends of the developmental spectrum. It’s interesting to have them interacting so much with thought experiments involving burning abortion clinics and blastocysts and janitors. Nothing like challenging minds early!

Which one of these entities has personhood? — Which one of these entities have personhood?

Conceptual nominalism

The way I’m going to start this piece is by talking about one of my favourite subjects, the area of abstract ideas and nominalism. As I’ve mentioned many times before, I am a conceptual nominalist and this means that I deny the ontic reality of abstract ideas. Abstract ideas, such as morality, personhood, heroes, chairs (as ideas), redness and so on, only exist in the minds of the agents who conceive them. There is no realm “out there” where these abstract ideas exist.

My idea of what a hero is will be different from yours and any other person’s. When I look at the chair, I get a sense of chairness from it and have an understanding of the idea of a chair. However, a chair might feel like a bed to a cat, or to an alien it could be something entirely different, or to someone from the Amazon Rainforest, yet again something different. this is because there is no objective idea of what a chair is that our minds tpa into. It is not top down epistemology but bottom up mental construction. Definitions are usually functional so that a chair fulfills the idea of being a chair by fulfilling the function it provides to the people who are perceiving it.

What this means is that every single abstract idea is constructed by the conceiver. And, obviously, this includes personhood.

Evolution

Let’s have a look at evolution and what is known as the species problem. Even Charles Darwin understood the nature of nominalism and how it affects how we categorise species and label them in the arena of evolutionary theory. The nature of evolution means that every single organism is part of a transitional journey from one point in time to another in terms of the properties of those organisms. What we do is we attach labels to categories along that continuum of time in an arbitrary fashion. It is like applying a digital idea to a spectrum. Let me remind you of my favourite picture:

Arguably, at no single point along that journey of text from red to blue does the text stop being red and become blue. It’s fuzzy. We kind of intuit it. In a sense, there is no such thing as red and blue (outside of our minds, objectively). We invent these labels and attach them to a range of colours as we see fit. However, there will be disagreement as to what constitutes red and what constitutes blue. In Photoshop, for example, there are individual codes for every instantiation of colour. The same could be applied to evolution. If we look at the evolution of man, we could apply an individual label for every single generation of organism throughout the whole continuum. Even that has problems because there will be numerous differentiated organisms that coexist contemporaneously.

What we do is arbitrarily draw lines in time and say everything to the left of that line is this species and everything to the right of that line is that species. For example, we might draw a line in time and say that everything to left of that line is homo antecessor and everything to the right of that line is homo heidelbergensis. However, this does not mean that a homo antecessor male and female gave birth to a homo heidelbergensis at a particular point in time. Remember, everything is transitional. Evolution moves in very slow incremental changes.

Because we create these arbitrary categories, we think that these categories really do exist outside of our minds. The layman will think that at some point in time, precisely, one species turns into another. However, this is a mischaracterisation of evolution based on the simplistic way that we categorise and chop up the continuous spectrum of change.

Human development

You can see that these categories and labels don’t really exist outside of our minds but we create them in order to simplify something that is otherwise complex and too unwieldy to use. This allows us to understand the field and manipulate the ideas to our own pragmatic ends. What you have seen above with evolution, can also be applied to human development.

Imagine the spectrum of human development from zygote to blastocyst, through foetus and baby, to child, adolescent, adult geriatric.

As you can see from the slide above, we have these labels, these arbitrary cut-offs, that segment and categorise human development, dividing it into nice, simple chunks.

They don’t exist objectively. We have constructed them to navigate our social and moral world. We apply digital cut-off points to a spectrum of continued development. In Britain, you reach (a form of) adulthood when you reach eighteen. But what happens at seventeen years, three hundred and sixty-four days, twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds? What does that one second do to that child? That adolescent even, on their eighteenth birthday? What properties do they now possess that allows them to qualify to vote that they did not possess the second before? Well, there is no discernible difference. We arbitrarily draw the line at eighteen years. Other countries do it as twelve, sixteen or twenty-one, depending on what adulthood might be defined as. In voting terms, we changed that in the UK, in Scotland, for the independence referendum.

These things are not set in stone.

And that’s just adulthood. You might ask, like personhood, what adulthood is and how it can be defined. Is it consensual sex? Ability to vote? Drive? Commit a crime?

Of course, different people will have different ideas.

Indeed, I know some seventeen-year-olds who are more adult and prepared and cognitively able to vote than many nineteen-year-olds. But we cannot treat adulthood on a case by case basis for pragmatic reasons (though you might imagine a test of sorts). We draw lines (in the UK at eighteen for voting) and declare that people must adhere to that for their definitions.

It hasn’t always been like that across time and geography.

What these labels require are properties to be attached to. Because there is no objective fact that a given label applies to a particular set of properties, we need to agree on what ones attach to which properties, and agree by consensus. When we agree, we write dictionaries and encyclopedias codifying that agreement. But these things change. The Second Law of Thermodynamics has adapted to the needs of scientists, and the word “literally” is now a contranym whose meanings also include metaphorically, the opposite to what it traditionally means. “He was literally on fire on the football pitch” has become such a common use of the word such that it can now, according to some dictionaries, be used to mean the opposite of itself.

Personhood is the same. It means whatever we agree it to mean. The problem is that so many philosophers, politicians and laypeople thoroughly disagree on what constitutes personhood. And that disagreement, as with any other term (including morality), reflects the lack of objective facticity.

Can we find agreement? Undoubtedly not, because it is wrapped up with so many other things such as abortion, euthanasia, the afterlife and other ideas that have such strong cultural, religious and contextual draw that means you cannot separate it from these other frameworks in which it is set. Thus to objectively (as in neutrally) assess its meaning is almost impossible for many people.

So now that we have established the problem with labelling things, considering the fact that there is arguably no right or wrong answer as to what personhood actually is, we will need to look at what the most reasonable definition for the word might be. What properties can most reasonably be assigned to personhood?

We’ll look at that in the next post.

Hopefully, you can see the value in setting out these arguments and points first before getting into the nitty gritty of personhood.

Aristotelian Realism and Saving Theology

Last updated on: October 25, 2017 at 6:54 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

I recently posted about abstract objects and things that are called universals, writing about how I think the whole area is thoroughly problematic for metaphysics and thus theology. I won’t go through it all again – you can read more here – but I will redefine universals. There is a danger this post could be huge, so I have been necessarily succinct or frugal in wht I talk about. The reason for this post is that one commenter claimed I didn’t really deal much with Aristotelian realism, and that I concentrated on Platonic realism (true, but for good reason, as will hopefully become apparent).

Abstract objects are incredibly important aspects within the context of philosophy. They include all of the labels and categories of things (tokens). These types are abstract. So, for example, a chair is both the token (actual chair) and the type (an abstract labelling as such). This can include numbers, universal ideas like redness, ideas like courage and justice, and even individual humans, such as Jonathan Pearce.

Because of their very nature, in being abstract, they can cause headaches for physicalism (and naturalism) and causality. Ever since the Greek times, there has been the famous problem known as the Problem of Universals. This deals with the problem in defining what the properties of objects are, ontologically speaking (i.e., what existence they have). Universals are common (universal) properties contained by more than one object. Two cars and a ball being red – what is redness? How can these different objects have an identical property and is that property real or in the mind of the conceiver, or indeed, contained within speech? Are these abstract objects and universals causally potent? Can redness take a position in a causal chain or relationship?

Let’s look to see how Aristotelian Realism differs from Platonic realism.

Platonism Realism

Realists claim that these abstracta are real – that they exist in some tangible way. Plato, from whom the term came, believed that universals, like redness, existed separately from the particular objects (particulars) which contained said property. Platonic realism states that such entities exist independently from the particular, as opposed to Aristotelian realism states that the universals are real but dependent on the particulars.

Some arguments propose that, in order to have truth value in statements, universals must exist, such that “This apple is red” implies that the universal of redness exists in another realm for the proposition to be truthful.

One fundamental issue for such theories is: where is the locus of these universals? Where can they be found and what is their ontology?

Aristotelian Realism

The problem of universals existing in some other realm is seemingly solved by an Aristotelian approach whereby universals exist when they are instantiated in individual particulars. Universals exist in things, or in re. Each green thing has a copy of the property of greenness.

There is a kind of prototypical empiricism in Aristotle’s viewpoint in that it is investigating things that we discern knowledge of the world – we acquire knowledge through sensation, and by tapping into, say, the treeness of a tree to find out about trees and treeness. Unless there is instantation, there is no universal (form).

As Martin Tweedale says in “Aristotle’s Realism” of Aristotle:

He was, rather, a realist, but of a very tenuous sort…. he viewed universals as real entities but lacking numerical oneness; each is numerically many, and yet each is also one in some sense. The specific identity of numerically distinct particulars creates something like a class, and this is the universal.

“In some sense” is key here. Personally, I see Aristotelian realism (AR) as a fudge. To me, this is just an attempt to make certain properties ontologically real. That manness is instantiated in a man and thus manness is a “real” concept does little for me. In my opinion, this is just saying that person X has A, B and C qualities and that we have agreed that A, B and C are properties that, when seen together, constitute a “man” and thus “manness”.

However, we know that gender is being called into question and, as such, we can see this concept is a human conceptual construction. After all, we see male seahorses giving birth, and gender and sex being two differing concepts, and so on. When we agree on such terms, we codify this in dictionaries (very roughly) and encyclopedias (more deeply) as to what properties together constitute a given label.

But these are open to change. We have hangovers from history and society in receiving certain labels-to-properties relations, but these are not magicked into some reality when we commit them to thought or paper. They can be argued and changed. The properties themselves don’t change (though our scientific methods give us more details on them, and our understanding of them changes with new knowledge). The fundamental properties remain what they are, and we use language to essentially invent descriptions thereof.

Edward Feser states, in The Last Superstition. A Refutation of the New Atheism:

Like Plato, Aristotle is a realist in the sense we’ve been discussing. But he thinks Plato needs to be brought down to earth a bit. For Aristotle, universals or forms are real, and they are not reducible to anything either material or mental. Still, he thinks it is an error to regard them as objects existing in a “third realm” of their own. Rather, considered as they are in themselves they exist only “in” the things of which they are the forms; and considered as abstractions from these things, they exist only in the intellect. [p.30]

And later:

Consider first that when we grasp the nature, essence, or form of a thing, it is necessarily one and the same form, nature, or essence that exists both in the thing and in the intellect. The form of triangularity that exists in our mind when we think about triangles is the same form that exists in actual triangles themselves; the form of “dogness” that exists in our mind when we think about dogs is the same form that exists in actual dogs; and so forth. If this weren’t the case, then we just wouldn’t really be thinking about triangles, dogs, and the like, since to think about these things requires grasping what they are, and what they are is determined by their essence or form. [p.124]

I think Feser is trying to have his cake and eat it. Damned cake-eater!

Problems

The problems with AR, as I see them, and I have hinted at some above, are as follows.

1) These instantiations are only accessible through human sensation and are subjectively interpreted. In Aristotle’s time, the universal of a solar system would have been described really very differently to today’s description of one. I struggle to see how such a theory can escape subjectivism.

2) Given the massive range of, say, colour (or anything that sits on a spectrum), the only sensible way of interpreting all the instantiation is that there isn’t blueness, but only individual instantiations of any given colour. Let me remind you of this:

What humans do is arbitrarily assign a label to things. Above, there is blue or red. Or blue, purple and red. Or blue, purple, lilac, pink, puce, scarlet and red. And so on until we get to the level of labelling for any given instantiation. This is essentially what Photoshop does – it gives a code for every single colour. Now, you could perhaps argue for an AR account of each of them (assuming that you can’t go further down, to a more granular level) but what does this then say of the simple labels of blue and red? Do they disappear when they are found to be sub-optimal? When there appear to be no real demarcations? What of the “edgeness of redness”?

Aristotle did make a distinction between colour and, say, the label of “Socrates”. Socrates is a substance that exists in and of itself, whereas he saw colour as being an accident, a sort of modification to the substance (this could include weight or motion, for example). Substances always have accidents, but they are not essential to the substance. To me, however, this distinction still reflects the concept of labelling. Accidents are labels of properties which are assigned collectively to substances by labelling. Wetness emerges as a label to reflect the properties of multiple H2O molecules. This, in modern philosophical speak, is seen in terms of essence, property and contingency. Arguments abound as to whether there are, indeed, any essential properties (Anti-Essentialism) or whether all properties are necessary (Modal Necessitarianism).

I don’t think that this distinction particularly helps the Aristotelian get around the issues of the realism of these labels. The accidental properties of substances are still universals that are, at base, abstract.

And yes, humans understand these labels, but they are terribly fuzzy.

We understand what “adult” means, but this differs widely from culture to culture, and can be assigned from twelve to twenty-one, for example.

Fuzzy logic of boundaries play merry havoc with a clear understanding of AR.

3) What Feser above seems to hint at is the similarity between the instantiation and the sensation in the mind of the conceiver of the instantiation. But these are not identical. These are mental interpretations of properties. And we get these wrong, or disagree on them. In the species problem, you have palaeontologists disagreeing about which species a hominid fossil should belong to because it has properties of two hominids. The fossil, being transitional (as they all are) happens to sit right “between” the two species (itself a problematic ideal). As such, it is both. Or neither. And so humans actually disagree on the form or instantiation of the fossil. As Richard Dawkins said of this in The Greatest Show on Earth: “Once again we see how fickle and transitory our names are…. these three fossils have been variously called, by different authorities at different times”. Indeed, as archaeologyinfo.com states:

Homo habilis is a very complicated species to describe. No two researchers attribute all the same specimens as habilis, and few can agree on what traits define habilis, if it is a valid species at all, and even whether or not it belongs in the genus Homo or Australopithecus. Hopefully, future discoveries and future cladistic analyses of the specimens involved may clear up these issues, or at least better define what belongs in the species.

The reason this is, is because both species (in my first example) don’t exist in an ontic sense. There is a constant transition to which we apply two labels somewhat arbitrarily. As with the colours, we could have applied fifty, a hundred, or, indeed, none.

And the same can go for “dog”. So “dogness” doesn’t have ontic existence because the very label of dog is conceptually constructed to apply to certain animals on a biological and evolutionary spectrum. But not wolves. Perhaps.

Answering Criticisms

When I last posted about this and said:

Properties of particular objects can account for eventual similarity between objects (such as the green of grass and the green of a painted wall). Universals do not exist.

…Jayman (a Christian commenter) said:

This sounds incoherent. You want to say the greenness of the grass and the greenness of the painted wall are particulars but experience shows that greenness transcends either item. How can greenness be both particular and transcendent?

What appears to be happening is that AR proponents are looking at the correspondence of our thoughts to properties and seeing that as evidence of a realist sort of form rather than qualia, or sensations, of given properties. When our human sensations are similar to others’ (as they should be, with similar language, brains and social contexts), we see sameness, and apply labels. But if some of these differ (say, social context), then the labels and interpretations of the properties can differ. I might think a twelve-year-old is a child who should be treated morally appropriately and with whom adults should not be allowed to have sex. Someone else may have a completely different experience, thinking they qualify as an adult and sexual partner.

These are difference experiences of the same properties, both giving out different “forms” or “types”. For one person, there is an “adultness” of the twelve-year-old and their forty-year-old self, and for the other person there is not an adultness instantiated in both, but separate forms of human developmentalness: childness and adultness. And yet the properties in both cases are the same (indeed, the instantiation is one individual).

Who is right?

In some sense, under conceptualism, neither. Because these are subjective experiential labels. We have to try to agree on as much as we can, using logic and reasoning, and come by some moral rules that lead to legal codification.

This appears clearly what actually happens in the world. AR doesn’t seem to account for this, for what actually happens, whereas conceptualism does.

Jayman went on to say:

The realist maintains that all the instances of greenness are held together by the exemplification relation, but this relation cannot be explained.

The relation is itself a conceptual construction. Relations, seen as ontologically real things (as they would be under both types of realisms here) suffer from something called Bradley’s Regress:

Suppose that the individual a has the property F. For a to instantiate F it must be linked to F by a (dyadic) relation of instantiation, I₁. But this requires a further (triadic) relation of instantiation, I₂, that connects I₁, F and a, and so on without end. At each stage a further connecting relation is required, and thus it seems that nothing ever gets connected to anything else.

Conceptualism is a form of eliminativism here, with regard to this problem. There is only a relation when we think of one.

Jayman continues (with my comments in italics):

We may think that things like tables, chairs, humans, rocks, lemmings and so on exist. Well, they do in one sense (an arrangement of matter/energy), but in the sense of the abstract labels of “rock” or “chair”, they are exactly that, abstract labels. Their existence, in Platonic terms, as some kind of objective entity, requires the philosophical position of (Platonic) realism.

Platonic realism is not the only kind of realism. Furthermore, an arrangement of matter-energy just is a part of a chair’s formal cause. Even when trying to deny realism you aren’t able to do it coherently.

What this means is that what makes the chair, the molecules and atoms, already existed in some form or other before the “chair” came to be. So the matter or energy did not “begin to exist”. This merely leaves the label of “chair”.

You are correct that the material cause of the chair pre-exists the chair. But you are incorrect in concluding that we are merely left with the label of the chair because you ignore the formal cause of the chair. You also admit that the molecules and atoms already existed in some form before taking on the form of a chair.

I could list some more quotes, but the point is the same. Jayman, and other Christian thinkers, really do favour Aristotelian accounts of causality (material, formal, efficient and final causes). Causality is a difficult concept over which people disagree. Aha! Look, you see, this is another concept over which there are fuzzy boundaries. It’s another case of conceptualism, in my mind. Just because Aristotle thought up four types of causes, it doesn’t mean these hold as objectively codifying causality!

I don’t want to get into critiquing the four causes here, but since the final cause is essentially “purpose”, you could imagine where I would start. That’s not to say purpose isn’t a valid idea, but I would not call it a cause. A tree stump doesn’t have an intrinsic purpose, but I could use it functionally as a table or a chair, and a cat could purpose it as a bed. That doesn’t mean it is objectively all these things now. It simply means that some entities have used it as those things and says little about its cause in the manner I would entertain “cause”.

So, on your view, science is just as unreal as God and objective morality?

Science is about investigating and understanding the world using language that describes reality functionally for us. We attempt to understand phenomena in the most accurate way possible (approaching corresponding to or reflecting their actual properties), and the scientific method self-corrects, often utilising forms of pragmatism to do so.

Our minds are about constructing maps of reality.

What Jayman and others do is confuse the map with the terrain. As Kant knew, we can never access the terrain-in-itself. The best we can do is approximate it as accurately as we can so that it is as pragmatically useful to us in flourishing as possible.

Conclusion

I don’t really see how AR gets you to realist accounts of morality and other theological labels. These still all appear to be conceptual constructions and we will continue to argue over them for many years to come.

NOTES

Edward Feser, The Last Superstition. A Refutation of the New Atheism (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2008)

Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #10: Knowledge: Empiricism or Rationalism

Last updated on: March 31, 2017 at 1:12 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

Having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions meant. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.

This is the ninth post, after

#1 – a priori

#2 – Abstract objects – Platonism or nominalism?

#3 – Aesthetic value: objective or subjective

#4 – Analytic-Synthetic Distinction

#5 – Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

#6 – External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

#7 – Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

#8 – Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #8: Belief in God: theism or atheism?

#9 – Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #9: Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

The question for this post is: Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? Here are the results:

Other	346 / 931 (37.2%)
Accept or lean toward: empiricism	326 / 931 (35.0%)
Accept or lean toward: rationalism	259 / 931 (27.8%)

First thing to note is a fairly even split, with “Other” featuring prominently, though with empiricism having the edge over rationalism by some 10%.

The other thing to notice is that the last question featured the term “knowledge claims” whereas this one just talks about “knowledge”.

I see this as talking about systems we use to gain further knowledge, as well as propositional knowledge, and we are not a million miles away from a previous topic of “a priori” – can we have knowledge a priori, or before the fact (from the earlier) – in other words, before we use our senses to check out empirically what is going on?

In some sense, this is a simple rephrasing of that debate.

Rationalism

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that rationalists adopt at least one of three statements:

The Intuition/Deduction Thesis: Some propositions in a particular subject area, S, are knowable by us by intuition alone; still others are knowable by being deduced from intuited propositions.

The Innate Knowledge Thesis: We have knowledge of some truths in a particular subject area, S, as part of our rational nature.

The Innate Concept Thesis: We have some of the concepts we employ in a particular subject area, S, as part of our rational nature.

We either know things to be true intuitively, or as part of being rational agents, or the empirical may trigger concepts already embedded within our nature. Of course, one weakness here is in establishing what intuition actually is.

Whilst other ideas and theses are closely connected to rationalism, or are often associated with it, I will keep it simple by only involving the above three.

One question that is often touted about such rationalism is the epistemic warrant: if someone uses intuition about a certain proposition, then it can be seen as lacking reason, and is thus potentially less justifiable, lacking in being warranted. How does an intuitive claim become a warranted claim?

Empiricism

For the empiricist, the following must be true in some way:

The Empiricism Thesis: We have no source of knowledge in S or for the concepts we use in S other than sense experience.

The source of knowledge for us is claimed to be a posteriori (from the latter) in its entirety, at source. Things may become intuitive, and even lacking reason, but they are as a result of us using our senses over time to formulate our propositional knowledge, and our systems that we use to navigate through the world. As the SEP continues:

Empiricism about a particular subject rejects the corresponding version of the Intuition/Deduction thesis and Innate Knowledge thesis. Insofar as we have knowledge in the subject, our knowledge is a posteriori, dependent upon sense experience. Empiricists also deny the implication of the corresponding Innate Concept thesis that we have innate ideas in the subject area. Sense experience is our only source of ideas. They reject the corresponding version of the Superiority of Reason thesis. Since reason alone does not give us any knowledge, it certainly does not give us superior knowledge. Empiricists generally reject the Indispensability of Reason thesis, though they need not. The Empiricism thesis does not entail that we have empirical knowledge. It entails that knowledge can only be gained, if at all, by experience. Empiricists may assert, as some do for some subjects, that the rationalists are correct to claim that experience cannot give us knowledge. The conclusion they draw from this rationalist lesson is that we do not know at all.

The Debate

The simple fact is that, and I assume this is why there is a large “Other”, many philosophers actually advocate for both, and others are skeptics, such that knowledge is not possible, or do not claim that it is possible. For example, on the former point, you could be rationalist about maths and mathematical claims, but empiricist about physical sciences. When, however, the domain being analysed has a crossover of empiricism and rationalism, we might have more of a problem. This can present problems when defining historical philosophers as entirely rationalist or empiricist, where a more nuanced approach is advised.

Nonetheless, an important debate properly described as ‘Rationalism vs. Empiricism’ is joined whenever the claims for each view are formulated to cover the same subject. What is perhaps the most interesting form of the debate occurs when we take the relevant subject to be truths about the external world, the world beyond our own minds. A full-fledged rationalist with regard to our knowledge of the external world holds that some external world truths can and must be known a priori, that some of the ideas required for that knowledge are and must be innate, and that this knowledge is superior to any that experience could ever provide. The full-fledged empiricist about our knowledge of the external world replies that, when it comes to the nature of the world beyond our own minds, experience is our sole source of information. Reason might inform us of the relations among our ideas, but those ideas themselves can only be gained, and any truths about the external reality they represent can only be known, on the basis of sense experience. This debate concerning our knowledge of the external world will generally be our main focus in what follows.

A thought experiment that I always find useful is imagining a disembodied mind at birth, if you will. Can you see that mind ever taking in more knowledge without any sensory input whatsoever? Can it access rational or non-empirical knowledge without recourse to any senses at all? And are rational sources of knowledge actually found within neural networks?

As a naturalist, and this is a pretty important point, I believe that the mind is supervenient on the physical matter of my brain and body. So at this source level, with the mind being at worst reflective of the physical brain, but certainly dependent on it, we have an issue for rationalism. Intuitive feelings or claims are still resultant from neurons firing and physical substrates and interactions within the body and brain. How does this affect the debate? If rationalism is the result of biological evolution and neural networks, what does this say about rationalism? Does it, in some manner, now become a sort of empiricism, or just because the innateness is sourced in biological systems, can we not still define something as rationalist?

AJ Ayers said of rationalism:

There can be no a priori knowledge of reality. For … the truths of pure reason, the propositions which we know to be valid independently of all experience, are so only in virtue of their lack of factual content … [By contrast] empirical propositions are one and all hypotheses which may be confirmed or discredited in actual sense experience. [Ayer 1952, pp. 86; 93–94]

As mentioned earlier, what is intuition? How can it support a warranted belief? “Grasping” or “seeing” things is simply not good enough, arguably, in establishing epistemic warrant, and some will also claim (see David Eagleman’s Incognito for some interesting examples of intuition) that these intuitions are often actually previously embedded, nonconsciously experienced, phenomena. Knowledge, according to pragmatists, is only knowledge when it is reliable, and how can you test intuition without recourse to the external world in validating its reliability? As the SEP continues:

What accounts for the reliability of our intuitions regarding the external world? Is our intuition of a particular true proposition the outcome of some causal interaction between ourselves and some aspect of the world? What aspect? What is the nature of this causal interaction? That the number three is prime does not appear to cause anything, let alone our intuition that it is prime.

It is true that we can never be certain about the external world. We could be living in The Matrix – there is always some non-zero element of doubt in any proposition. In a sense, that is the nature of empiricism: probabilities. But all reasoning is grounded using the Munchausen Trilemma, either in:

infinite regress
circular reasoning
an axiom

And, some might say, the soundest of the three is the axiom, as self-evident truth (though some don’t have a problem with circularity in principle). If you can’t give derivative reasons as to why something is true (i.e., that I am not in The Matrix), and can’t rely on empirical data, then where does this leave us? Perhaps we have to admit that there is no justifiable reason as to why we are not in The Matrix. However, this might be a neutral claim, since you could say that there is no justifiable reason as to why we are.

Certainly, self-evident truths are something that okay into rationalist hands. Merely just understanding what such a claim says is enough for us to think it is true.

The idea that we have innate knowledge is, to me, problematic, given the disembodied mind hypothesis above. Knowledge flows out incrementally from brain development that goes hand in hand with knowledge acquisition. We learn. We are always learning, and this learning is done through taking things in from the outside world into our senses.

Language us interesting as it appears to rest in some sense on grammar and syntax, which can be seen as a sort of logic. Is logic innate? Is the Law of Non-Contradiction something that is rationally in-built? Or does it come from making sense of data? If I see something is blue, then it is blue and not red. My senses lead me to understand that it cannot be both. But is that understanding innate? But we surely need to be able to test the law against real, observed examples. So at best for the rationalist, the law is empirically warranted.

The SEP says of Noam Chomsky, famous scholar of language (and many other things):

It is important to note that Chomsky’s language learners do not know particular propositions describing a universal grammar. They have a set of innate capacities or dispositions which enable and determine their language development. Chomsky gives us a theory of innate learning capacities or structures rather than a theory of innate knowledge. His view does not support the Innate Knowledge thesis as rationalists have traditionally understood it. As one commentator puts it, “Chomsky’s principles … are innate neither in the sense that we are explicitly aware of them, nor in the sense that we have a disposition to recognize their truth as obvious under appropriate circumstances. And hence it is by no means clear that Chomsky is correct in seeing his theory as following the traditional rationalist account of the acquisition of knowledge” (Cottingham 1984, p. 124).

Establishing warrant for any kind of innate knowledge is very difficult, and usually defers, again, to some sort of reliabilism, which is very difficult to establish without recourse to taking in empirical data. So even if you have a piece of innate knowledge, to make it warranted and to test its reliability, you need empiricism.

Of course, metaphysics is arguably the bedrock of rationalist thought.

But taking something like morality, would I have a coherent idea of morality if I had never seen other agents be kind or unkind? If I had never experienced morality, and empathised with others, would I ever have had access to moral knowledge? I think not.

When we see causation at play, we are using inference from all the other instances of causation that have taken place and experienced in our lives. We then apply these experiences to the new event. We might appear to be being intuitive, but our senses have been sifting through billions of pieces of data since our births.

Does a blind person have a concept of redness? Of chairness? imagine a blind person had no sense of feeling, would they have innate knowledge of the things around them? We get back to a version of the disembodied mind.

Maths can create much debate, too. 2 + 2 = 4 is arguably innate. But, the empiricist might say, you first learnt this from seeing multiple objects and counting them. True, but this is the source of learning the maths, not the source of the truth. And this can be applied to many of the previous claims concerning the brain.

We could derail here to get on to abstract objects and mathematical Platonism. Maths is, to me anyway, a descriptive language of reality, not reality. There is no ontic reality to the abstract maths we do, which we do to better understand the world out there.

How this might pertain to God

Rationalists like Descartes have used pure reason and rationalist approaches to argue for the existence of God. Descartes started by stripping back knowledge to the indubitable – knowing that the thinking entity exists. But is even that a result of sensation, in some manner? If the mind supervenes, depends upon, the physical, what does it say about that kind of Cartesian conclusion? Descartes had a fundamentally faulty understanding of physiology and the brain, let alone what the mind might be.

Descartes believed that we had an innate concept of God, as the SEP elucidates:

Consider Descartes’s argument that our concept of God, as an infinitely perfect being, is innate. Our concept of God is not directly gained in experience, as particular tastes, sensations and mental images might be. Its content is beyond what we could ever construct by applying available mental operations to what experience directly provides. From experience, we can gain the concept of a being with finite amounts of various perfections, one, for example, that is finitely knowledgeable, powerful and good. We cannot however move from these empirical concepts to the concept of a being of infinite perfection. (“I must not think that, just as my conceptions of rest and darkness are arrived at by negating movement and light, so my perception of the infinite is arrived at not by means of a true idea but by merely negating the finite,” Third Meditation, p. 94.) Descartes supplements this argument by another. Not only is the content of our concept of God beyond what experience can provide, the concept is a prerequisite for our employment of the concept of finite perfection gained from experience. (“My perception of the infinite, that is God, is in some way prior to my perception of the finite, that is myself. For how could I understand that I doubted or desired—that is lacked something—and that I was not wholly perfect, unless there were in me some idea of a more perfect being which enabled me to recognize my own defects by comparison,” Third Meditation, p. 94).

The problem here being that our concept of God can be seen in terms of human psychology, and is built up out of other concepts. In more pagan and polytheistic religions, they are human or animalistic, and have flawed personal attributes. In Judeo-Christian monotheism, God still looked like just a very powerful man. Patternicity, our desire to live forever and cope with death, the justification for our moral proclamations: all of these sorts of things are why God was invented. I do not think God as an innate concept is remotely defensible given that it seems derived from aspects of the world around us.

Here’s another thing. My twin six-year-old boys have no concept of God. I have not taught it to them. I have, on occasion due to mention in a film, sort of explained deities, but they appear to have no innate concept of God. Empirically from my own experience of my boys, this claim of innateness does not hold. Now, society is geared up towards thoughts and concepts of deities, and they will no doubt interact with these in due course. The prevalence of belief and religion is more about the psychological function that such beliefs provide.

Conclusion

Well, tough one. I think, for me at any rate, it doesn’t really matter. Yes, rationalism might hold for certain interpretations of maths, and perhaps for logic. But without empiricism, it’s all useless. I prefer a pragmatic and reliabilist approach in that justification needs sensory data and empiricism; and to show something as reliably and usefully true, you need to test it on the outside world. I think, therefore I am. This may be the bedrock of epistemological claims, but it doesn’t really get you anywhere else useful.

Abortion and “Innocent” “Human life”

Last updated on: January 26, 2017 at 12:17 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

You hear this often, indeed on a recent thread, that abortion is the murder or death of innocent human life.

However, I *am* aware of laws against destroying innocent human life.

This prompts obvious questions about what human life entails and what innocent can mean. Let’s tackle innocent really rather succinctly. As one commenter stated:

Is it capable of being guilty?

At the pertinent time, it is neither innocent, nor guilty. It might have some potential to be both, by considering future hypotheticals, but at the time in question it cannot be innocent and it cannot be guilty. Just like it cannot be a Democrat or a Christian or good-looking or sensible.

That was easy.

As for it being human life, here are those sticky semantic arguments, that, as commenter Geoff Benson will know, will get me invoking the Sorties Paradox and conceptual nominalism again (the notion that abstract ideas don’t “exist” other than inside our minds).

Human and human life are terms whose definitions are whatever we agree them to be. They have no ontic reality, and exist as labels applied to properties, all of which is done in our minds.

I don’t look at an egg in my fridge and say “Oh look, that’s a chicken.” I say it is a chicken egg (or indeed, “chicken’s egg”). In this way, and embryo is not a human (being or life), it is a human embryo or blastocyst. Or, the embryo of a homo sapiens sapiens, as agreed by consensus. ven then, there is no ontic reality to species labels, as I have expressed elsewhere.

This is the problem with language. We forget it is a conceptual construction to describe the world. It is the pen that draws our map of reality, but it is not the terrain of reality itself. And sometimes, it fails to do or be what we want it to do or be.

The labels “human being” and “personhood” are hotly contested as to what properties of existence can be applied to them. At some unspecified and potentially unspecifiable point (such that we may perpetually disagree) an embryo turns into a baby and a baby takes on properties of being a human being, and of being a person. Because there is no clearly definable point at which this happens, we humans have conceptual meltdowns. We don’t like fuzzy logic and murky boundaries. They cause arguments. The abortion debate is a result of this. We look at a fully grown and functioning human, and project those properties and rights 9themseves conceptual edifices built on top of conceptual and shifting sands) onto every single developmental stage of that person/human/organism.

So “murdering unborn, innocent human lives violates the rights of the unborn” is a cluster grenade of exploding, and eventually disintegrating, conceptual ideas.