Samhain

He can be omnibenevolent by intention, though. As I stated before, the god of omnipotence and omnibenevolence is problematic, but a god of omniscience and omnibenevolence (more like the Christian God which we see in the Bible), is a bit less problematic, if at all. This god would know every action to take to maximize good, but does not have the extensive power to change everything to good. This theory works fine, God would know the best way to cause good, no matter what the situation, but his powers cannot extend to more than one situation at a time, and therefore, God does what he can to make good in the world, but cannot do it all. This case, however, compromises our free will, since God knows every action we will ever take by his omniscience, making us almost pre-determined in a sense (as we discussed earlier in this thread). I see no problem with the omnibenevolence of this God, though, but it brings determinism into play.
With a god with neither omnipotence or omniscience he can still be omnibenevolent also. In this case he would do whatever action he could to maximize good (to the best of his knowledge). The fact that the act may turn out poorly is irrelevant, since it does not compromise his intentions (intentions for the best possible good, regardless of any kind of cost, but just in the name of goodness). I cannot possibly see this God as immoral in any way either if the intentions were good, but it compromises God's powers, and brings into question the point of worshipping such a fumbling god.

Exactly, but that really isn't my problem. I don't assume the being exists, but in this case there are many who do, and this being (of belief of others) can be deconstucted to reveal logical inconsistencies and impossibilities, which in turn opens new doors of questioning. If one has faith in something, one should at least make some kind of sense out of it before believing in it wholeheartedly and without question. These examples are the only logical conclusions of what the god that so many follow could possibly be, unless you have other examples of this god which I have not considered...

Elaborate, please.

After you elaborate, please define your view of "God."

These are the only gods which I see as logical possibilities, if you have others, please state them. God is inconsistent and a logical impossibility if we accept any two omni-attributes exist in the same "God." In this case, God's power is compromised, or God's morality is different from our own, and what we know of Morality, especially in the Bible is different from God's and therefore we cannot accept that morality is objective (as is stated in the Bible, making the Bible inconsistent and faulty).

Comments/Questions?

jpbrooks

So can a human.
Intention is certainly a relevant factor regarding omnibenevolence, but it alone cannot bestow omnibenevolence.

You are right that this God is more like the Christian God, but it is still problematic.

Well almost, but not quite. The fact is, evil actually exists in the world. So, the connection between "God's" actions and their evil consequences still has to be accounted for. There would still be the matter of "God" either choosing to perform actions that "He" knew would eventually result in evil consequences, or "Him" acting without knowledge of moral consequences at all. If "God" is assumed to be omniscient, of course, the latter alternative is eliminated. But this shows that "God" didn't always have benevolent intentions. And since "His" intentions were not always benevolent, "He" can't be considered "'omni'-benevolent". This is the conclusion that we are led to if we assume no distinction between indirect and direct causation.

If, however we do asume that distinction, we can argue that the evil that results from its immediate causes is not something that God Himself would cause directly, so His omnibenevolence is not compromised.

So, if "God" knew all of this, why didn't "He" simply refrain from performing any further acts at all? The fact that "He" continued to perform acts while knowing fully that more and more evil would eventually come about as a result, makes "Him" a "Devil" (on your assumptions).

Again, this problem can be seen as a result of rejecting the distinction between direct and indirect causation.
It is not possible for God to create beings that are "free" in the same sense that He is. And even if He could, the existence of evil in the world would be just as morally acceptable a state of existence as a world without evil. (If this weren't the case, then why would "God" have created such beings, when "He" clearly could have refrained from doimg so?) So because our "freedom" is restricted as compared to that of God, (on the assumption of a distinction berween direct and indirect causation), a moral system that includes both God and humans is possible.

But not all the time, as omnibenevolence requires.

But the fact that "He" knows this is relevant. It's relevant to "His" intentions.

As I said above, the situation is a lot worse than that for this "God".

But not all "people of faith" are Fideists anyway. Some do care enough to ask questions about their faith. But one has to begin with something in order to have something to ask questions about.

There are probably many different conceptions of Theism's God. I confess that I haven't had time to wade through them all.

I didn't have time to type out a full elaboration, but I did show how assuming the direct/indirect causation distinction makes a difference above.

Again, see above.

I'm not certain that the Bible states that "morality is objective". But again, since (as far as I know), this kind of relationship between deity and morality, and the problems that arise as a result of attempting to understand it, are exclusive to Biblical Theism. So, it seems irrelevant, in this regard, to drag in rival alternative "authorities" to the Bible.
It is religion that originates ideas about deities. So that is where we must begin our analysis. After we have entertained and rejected some conceptions of deity, we can either conclude that no conception of deity can be consistent, as you have apparenty done , or continue to look for consistent conceptions.

In any case, I thank you for such an interesting discussion, but there are other things that need my attention right now. Perhaps we can resume this discussion at a later time when I have fewer distractions and more time to devote to this issue.

[ March 28, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Kenny

Bd-from-Kg,

Sorry that I have not yet responded and for the length of this post. Planning a wedding and trying to graduate at the same time is not easy. I said I would respond to your posts so I did, but after this I must bow out. Unfortunately, even with the length, I was unable to address everything, and I have opted to save the “insanity discussion” for another day.

I think there are a couple of things going on here worth mentioning. First, I think you are confusing epistemology with ontology here. Even if we couldn’t get a group of people to agree on which qualities are essential to Smith or even if there is no way for us to decide the question, it still may be that there are essential qualities which comprise Smith, known, say, to the mind of God. It still may be that individual persons have certain qualities which make them the person they are, such that without them, “they” would no longer be the same person. It may be that these qualities reflect aspects that go deeper than language and can’t be described; perhaps qualities that are not accessible to beings such as ourselves, even though these qualities themselves result in certain descriptions that hold true of that person in all possible worlds in which he or she exists. In part, how you view this matter depends on how you view the nature of personhood and what it means to be an individual person. Are the characteristics which comprise you wholly arbitrary or do you have some sort of core identity? If you do have some core identity that makes you who you are, then it make sense to think that certain descriptions of you may hold true in all possible worlds.

Second, you may not agree with my position concerning the nature of personhoods or essences and I may not be able to prove it, but that really doesn’t matter. Since your argument is an attempt to show that the notion of just divine punishment is logically inconsistent, all I have to do is show that there is at least one logically conceivable scenario in which the concept of just divine punishment is consistent.

My contention here is that the label “Smith” in this context refers to a specific person whose individual personhood is such that in all possible worlds where “Smith” exists, “Smith” manifests the set of properties contained in E10584. Thus, when we refer to “Smith” in any possible world, we are referring to “the being which has the properties belonging to E10584.” Keeping that in mind, let’s substitute the latter phrase for Smith in your above characterizations.

You characterized my position as:

In creating Smith God assigned one of these essences, say E10584, to Smith, and also gave Smith some “accidental” or inessential properties, such as having brown eyes.

Making the appropriate substitution we arrive at:

In creating the being which has the properties belonging to E10584 God assigned one of these essences, say E10584, to the being which has the properties belonging to E10584, and also gave the being which has the properties belonging to E10584 some “accidental” or inessential properties, such as having brown eyes.

Now we can see that this way of characterizing the situation is problematic and this isn’t actually a good characteristic of my position. It doesn’t make much sense to speak of “assigning” Smith’s essence to “Smith” if Smith’s essence is what defines “Smith” in the first place. It would be the equivalent of saying that God assigned the property of roundness to circles. Let’s move on to your characterization:

I’d prefer to say that God gave Smith the properties that define E10584 and also gave him some accidental properties.

Substitution yields: I’d prefer to say that God gave the being which has the properties belonging to E10584 the properties that define E10584 and also gave him some accidental properties.

This reflects the same problem as the above. Let’s try this characterization instead:

In creating Smith, God actualized E10584 where “actualized” is defined as “give concrete existence to an entity manifesting the properties contained in_____.”[/b]

Making our substitutions, we get: [b]In creating the being which has the properties belonging to E10584, God gave concrete existence to an entity manifesting the properties contained in E105084.

This characterization does not suffer from the same problem as the first two and it is true a priori by definition. So what’s the point of the above discussion? Well, if the label “Smith” refers to a person with certain essential properties, then God had no choice over whether or not to assign this person the essential properties he has. God could not have possibly created “Smith” without them. It’s not as if we have God creating “Smith” and then giving him certain essential properties as an afterthought. God’s choice to create “Smith” with certain essential properties reduces to the choice to create “Smith” in the first place. We don’t have God choosing whether to make Smith defective or not defective. Instead, we have God choosing whether to make Smith or not make Smith.

How does this figure into the question of Smith’s moral culpability? It seems that your argument partly depends on the idea that Smith’s behavior is the result of something imposed on him from the outside by God, that it’s not Smith’s fault for acting the way he acts because if God had made him differently he wouldn’t have acted that way. However, if my characterization of the situation is accurate, this would not be the case. Smith’s actions flow directly out of Smith himself, the qualities which make Smith, Smith. God could not have made Smith and had him act differently, at least not in the same circumstances in which Smith finds himself. Perhaps there are no circumstances in which Smith freely chooses to act differently.

The point is simply that possible persons may not be reducible to isolated sets of properties such that God could have made a particular possible person, say Smith, and have it be the case that he make more virtuous choices.

If there is a certain logically compatible ensemble of properties which is part of the essence of the being which we have labeled “Smith,” then God’s responsibility for endowing Smith with certain properties reduces to God’s responsibility for His choice to create Smith. In other words, as I have said, in this scenario, God did not start out with some empty set designated “Smith” and arbitrarily fill that set with certain properties. God started out with a set of interrelated properties which had to be actualized in order for the being which we have designated “Smith” to exist, and those properties flow out of the very essence of Smith, the very thing which makes him who he is.

The point being that saying God is responsible for creating a being with the nature of Smith reduces, quite simply, to saying that God is responsible for creating Smith. Of course, that’s no big shock to Christian theology since we hold that God is ultimately responsible for creating everything.

God created a defective Smith because Smith IS defective. In other words, in terms of the way the word “defective” is being used here, it is not as if God could have made a “non-defective” Smith; to say so is actually quite meaningless, on the order of talking about God creating a square circle. Being “defective,” in this context, is part of what defines Smith’s individual personhood.

I think the wording here is misleading. Saying that Smith has an “irresistible tendency” to reject God makes it sound as if Smith would really like to not reject God but just can’t help himself, the way someone addicted to cigarettes just can’t help take a smoke even though they’d really like to quite. That’s not the scenario I have in mind. Smith rejects God, in the view I am proposing, not out of some external “tendency” but out of the very core of his own being, acting in a completely voluntary manner out of his very self.

If we understand that Smith’s nature is simply an abstract description of who Smith is, then saying that Smith’s nature “makes it inevitable that he will reject God,” though technically accurate, is a bit misleading. It is not as if there’s poor Smith there trying to be good, but that mean ol’ nature of his is forcing him to act bad. Smith is simply acting out of himself, out of who he is.

&lt;skip to middle of next post&gt;

But, when I say that an action originates from a creature’s nature, in my mind that is equivalent to saying that action originates from with the agent. I think part of our problem in communicating may be that we are using two different definitions of “nature.” I am using the term in a very broad sense to refer to all the properties that make a particular person who they are, including the choices that such a person would make in given sets of circumstances.

I would say that Baker’s actions on that day did flow from his nature, even though they may not be characteristic and may not have originated under other sets of circumstances. Even if, had the circumstances been different, the occasion would not have arisen for Baker to make the decision he did on that day, the choices he made in those circumstances, insofar as the represent choices which Baker is morally culpable for, reflect moral traits which can eventually be traced back to Baker’s essential nature. And, I would argue that in all possible worlds where the external (with respect to Baker’s personhood) circumstances are the same (including the same history, etc.), Baker makes the exact same choice, not because the external factors compel him to do so, but because it is part of his own personhood to do so. Otherwise, I don’t see how we could hold Baker responsible for his actions; he would simply be a victim of his environment. Baker is responsible for actions precisely because they originate from within himself, precisely because they flow out of the type of person he is.

Even though many ethicists and many of my fellow Christians may disagree, I consider Baker’s actions under these circumstances to be justified (though such ethical dilemmas can be extremely difficult and sticky to resolve). I also think that, as in the previous example, Baker acted from his nature. I would say that every action which Baker, acting as a personal agent, is causally responsible for is traceable to his nature in some way. The reason that Baker is not morally culpable in this situation has nothing to do with the fact that his actions flowed from his nature and everything to do with the “mitigating circumstances” under which Baker acted.

I think that nearly everyone agrees that people are not responsible for actions which are the result of other causal forces besides themselves in such a way that a said person’s choices are not the deciding factor which results in their actions. That when a person “couldn’t help it because they really had no choice,” they are not responsible. Hence, a person who has been brainwashed, or a person suffering from some sort of mental disorder that impairs her ability to freely choose a particular course of action, or someone with an overpowering addiction which they have no control over, cannot be held responsible for the actions which result.

However, I also think that nearly everyone would agree that people are morally accountable for actions which they, acting as a volitional agent, are causally responsible for. I hold that we are morally accountable for the choices we make because we are genuine causal agents, not just at the whims of circumstance or chance. And, I do not see how that notion of causality is meaningful unless identical causes in identical circumstances result in identical effects, meaning that, there are no possible worlds in which we choose differently under the exact same circumstances in any given situation. It may also be that there are some choices which hold constant under all possible circumstances, that we would not freely chose to act differently in any possible environment.

Fine, but I would not regard such an impulse to flow out of such an individual’s personhood. In other words, it is not part of their nature as a person in the sense that it reflects who they are in all possible worlds. I would regard the factors which result in this impulse to be external with respect to that individual’s personhood, such that his actions do not truly result from volitional choices made by him.

At any rate, I realize that there is probably a great deal more that could be said. Feel free to add whatever comments you like, but I must conclude this discussion for the time being.

God Bless,
Kenny

[ April 10, 2002: Message edited by: Kenny ]</p>

Kenny

Well, I’m not quite married yet, just engaged, and as a conservative Christian couple, there is quite a difference between those two states The wedding date is June 22. Thanks for the congrats.

God Bless,
Kenny

[ April 08, 2002: Message edited by: Kenny ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Kenny:

I do intend to reply to your last post when I can find some time, but other threads have kept me much busier than I expected. Stay tuned.

bd-from-kg

Kenny:

I finally found time to reply to your last post. I’m going to ignore or give short shrift to what I think are really extraneous issues and zero in on the key question.

Your position, as I understand it, is that if someone makes a choice that is determined by his innate nature, so that it was not possible in any sense for him to done anything but what he did, he is morally responsible for his action and it is just to punish it for him. In fact, the logic of your position is that such a person is more clearly and perfectly culpable than he would be in any other situation.

To support this position, you appeal to the notion of “eternal essences”, which you often refer to as a person’s “nature”. Thus:

This is the basic argument; nothing in later posts seems to have added anything to it. But frankly, it continues to leave me completely baffled. It seems to me to be saying that if it is part of Smith’s nature to reject God, it is part of his nature to reject God, and that God could not have created Smith without creating Smith. All of your attempts to “clarify” this argument have been as clear as mud.

I don’t think there’s any point in pursuing this. To me, Platonism seems to consist of meaningless assertions about the “reality” of various nonexistent entities. As far as I’m concerned, when you talk about Smith’s “essence” as a “real” thing, you’re talking nonsense. When you say that Smith (or his “essence”) has “always” existed you’re talking nonsense piled on nonsense. When you suggest that the supposed “reality” of this imaginary “essence” somehow makes the actual Smith who exists in the real world culpable or responsible for his actions in ways that he wouldn’t be otherwise, I just don’t know what to say. I find this just about as meaningful and convincing as an explanation that the person sacrificed to the volcano god each year must be a virgin because virgins have a “spiritual aura” that only the volcano god can sense.

Indeed, even if Smith himself (not just his “essence”) had existed, in the same sense that you and I exist, from before the beginning of time, I still don’t see how this would be relevant to the moral question. Either it’s just to punish him for being who he is (or for actions that he must necessarily take because he’s who he is, which comes to the same thing) or it isn’t.

You say:

But what you mean by this is that one is not morally responsible for an action if one is compelled to do it by something “external” to oneself. Thus:

If the compulsion comes from within oneself, that’s another matter:

And even more clearly:

This speaks to the general case in which the agent might have chosen differently under different circumstances, which we’re not concerned with at the moment. But if the principle here is applicable in general, it is applicable to the case we are concerned with, where the agent would have made the same choice under any circumstances. In that case we would certainly say that the agent must be the cause of the action, and that he or she would not choose differently, and thus (as you consistently conclude) that he is responsible for his action.

Now there’s no way to objectively prove that an action is just or unjust. If you were to insist that it would be just for someone to perjure himself in order to send someone else to the gallows for a murder that he himself committed, I couldn’t prove you wrong. All that I can do is to appeal to your sense of justice. And if, upon due reflection, your sense of justice is radically different from mine, there’s nothing more to say. But I can offer examples (as I’ve done in previous posts) to illustrate why I think this position is not only wrong, but perverse.

Unfortunately, it appears that you’re prepared to play games to invalidate such examples when it suits you. For example, when I offered the example of a man (call him Raymond) whose genetic makeup is such that he has an irresistible impulse to rape women, you replied:

Ironically, the reason that you can deflect this example (and any other possible example) in this way is that, as I pointed out some time ago, the notion of an “essence” or “essential property” is meaningless. Being “essential” is not an objective attribute of properties; any given property can be called “essential” or “accidental” according to the whim of the moment. Thus, even if a property is embedded in Raymond’s genetic makeup, you are free to deny that it’s an “essential” property. And of course, if you say it isn’t an essential property, it isn’t, because the attribute of being “essential” exists only in your mind, not in the property itself. In my mind, this property may be self-evidently “essential”, but that shows only that his “essence” is different for you than it is for me.

But if you’re prepared to counter every possible example of someone who will necessarily commit a wrong or evil act regardless of external circumstances by claiming that, no matter how thing might appear, the property or properties that are responsible for his being certain to make this choice aren’t “really” innate or essential, then we have wasted a lot of time talking about a case that does not exist. If not, what’s the point of rejecting this or that particular example? The principle is what we’re discussing.

To get things rolling, here’s the purest example I can think of. In the spirit of my earlier “Smithy” example, let’s suppose that I design someone whose actions are predetermined – who will act in a certain way (if physically possible) no matter what. One of the things he will do is to kill Jones. Is he responsible for this act? Well, let’s see. He is certainly “acting out of [his] own nature”. His action “originates from within the agent [i]himself] without being coerced by factors external to [him]”; it “flows out of the type of person he is”. He meets all of your requirements for being morally responsible, and is therefore culpable.

But I say that he is obviously not culpable; it would be absurd to suggest that he should be punished for his actions. That’s because his choice was plainly not “free”: he could not have acted otherwise, and thus was not a moral agent. But you have rejected this point of view, saying that the relevant sense of “could not” is that there must be something external to the agent preventing him from acting in that way, and that is not the case here. So you would seem to have no alternative but to say that he voluntarily chose (in your sense) to do as he did, that he was a free moral agent, and that he was therefore culpable.

So far as I’m concerned, this is a reductio ad absurdum of your position. It is a widely accepted principle that an agent is not responsible for an act (or is not really acting as a moral agent) if he “could not” have acted otherwise. Although, as I commented earlier, the appropriate meaning of “could not” in this context has been debated for millennia, it cannot be the meaning that you have defined.

As a second example, consider the “Conkers”. Conkers are born in pairs (with minds that already understand what they’re doing and know what God has commanded), and their nature is such that they invariably hit the first Conker that they come across on the head immediately. But God has decreed that any Conker that hits a fellow Conker on the head shall be punished with infinite torment forever. As a result, every one of the trillions of Conkers who has ever been born is suffering unimaginably for all eternity.

Now at the moment I’m not interested in whether God would be acting wrongly in creating such creatures. If it is right for God to create a world in which innocents experience enormous suffering for reasons we cannot comprehend, it might also be right for Him to create the Conkers: their suffering may be a necessary condition for some greater good. So let’s forget about whether creating such creatures would be right or wrong; there’s no way for us to know.

The question before us is whether the Conkers are being treated justly. And surely the answer to this is obvious: they are not. Yet according to your criterion the Conkers are responsible for their actions: they are acting out of their own natures; their acts originate from within themselves and are not coerced by external factors, etc. Thus they must be deemed to have chosen voluntarily to do as they did, and therefore to be free moral agents responsible for their actions, and therefore culpable. Once again, the absurdity of this conclusion seems to me to be self-evident.

Now for a third example: the Exterminators. This is a race designed to have one and only one purpose: to kill as many human beings as possible. They have no other motive, no other desire, no other end. Nothing can deflect them from their deadly function. Are they responsible for their actions? Of course not. How could they be? They are what they are; it’s impossible for them to be anything else. They are no more responsible for their actions than a shark is. But according to your criterion they are responsible.

For a final example, let’s consider again the Mule (from Asimov’s Foundation series). The Mule had the ability to “twist” the mind of anyone around him so that he becomes a willing slave or follower. Our interest here is not in the Mule himself, but in those whose minds he “twisted”. were they culpable for their actions. As I pointed out earlier:

Perhaps you will want to say that all of the mental qualities that they have now that cause them to follow the Mule are “accidental”, whereas the ones they used to have but no longer do are “essential”. If so, you will merely be confirming the meaninglessness of the distinction between “essential” and “accidental” properties. And if qualities that would ordinarily be considered “essential” are to be considered “accidental” if someone else endowed you with them, how can any of us be said to have any “essential” properties at all? Isn’t that how we came to have all of our properties? From your point of view, the only consistent way of looking at this situation is that the Mule replaced the original “essence” of his victims with a different “essence”, and that the resulting new individuals are guilty as hell.

This seems to me to be the clearest example of all of the absurdity of your criterion. If your God considers these people to be culpable – if he is prepared to torture them for all eternity for their “crimes” – He is a moral monster, and I want no part of Him. Anything – even Hell – would be preferable to spending eternity with such a fiend.