Photocrat

Yes, but the real question in terms of the last verse is *how*? I mean, there are other verses I can remember which say that God does *not* hold children accountable for the sins of their parents (in fact, a fairly large section on it... somewhere in the 'Minor Prophets', IIRC). My understanding of it is that they suffer from such things as the infamy thereof (you're dad was a crooked, evil, so-and-so; etc.) but are not actually held guilty of their parents' sins. Compare with the blind man in John 5.

Of course, I'm sure that you'll probably just say that the Hebrews changed their minds later on & it's just YABC [Yet Another Biblical Contradiction]. *shrug*

jpbrooks

I understand the issue.
My contention is that moral responsibility for one's choices depends only on the fact that one is capable of making choices informed by moral knowledge; not on whether one's choices were actually predetermined by an "Omnimax" being. One is culpable for bad moral choices simply because one can make decisions based on how one values morality. Once one's nature is (pre)determined to be capable of (the "act" of) deciding whether to value moral cosiderations in choice making, it doesn't matter what specific choices one was predetermined to make. One would still be culpable for making bad moral choices.
If this were not the case, then any criminal that is brought to trial could, with enough experts on his side, establish that he is not guilty of the crime that he is on trial for, simply because of the way his personality has been determined by his life experiences.

So, if we are not making our own decisions to act, who is making them for us?

Ok. Let assume that God does decide on a general policy of intervening in the process of humans acting on their choices so that the result is that no human ever does anything that is contrary to God's law. This would necessarily include decisions to think in certain ways (e.g., Exodus 20:!7), because thoughts lead to actions. But if it is generally "right" for God to intervene in our thought processes to bend our wills toward His, then it would be "wrong" for Him to allow us to have any freedom of thought at all because our thinking is necessarily inferior to His thinking. But if God is not to be held "culpable" for not having created this "morally superior" world that has no beings that can think independently from God, how could He be at fault for predetermining our natures in this world?

Oh, I most certainly agree that, due to His omniscience, nothing is truly "random" or "unaccounted for" to God Himself. That is precisely why it would be unjust for Him not to render a judgment on every act or choice to act that every morally responsible being makes.

[ March 17, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Samhain

Of course, we make the action ourselves, but we do not have choice in the matter at all. God, being the omnimax creator of the world and ourselves, is ultimately responsible for any action we take in life because God created us, and therefore, knowing everything, as God does (in this case), God would not only know what our actions would be prior to these actions being taken, but would also, by bringing us in to existence, or creating us, would be ultimately responsible for any action that we took.

It's fairly simple, we'll try an analogy. A man creates a watch, but this watch, unlike others, was created by the man to go counter-clockwise. The man has several insights on the creation of this watch. (1) The man either KNOWS with all certainty that the watch will go counter-clockwise because that was the way the man created it, and therefore created it to do specifically that as long as he keeps it wound or (2) the man creates the nature of the clock, which he knows will in turn lead to the clock spinning counter-clockwise.

Now the man cannot tell time on his watch, should the man get angry with his watch and break it because he cannot tell time on it because he made the watch knowing it would not be able to tell time correctly?

jpbrooks

So, if the choice to perform the action was not ours, how could we have caused ourselves to go from a state of having not performed the action to one of having performed it?

So what?
"ultimate" responsibility does not establish guilt on the part of the person or party that is the "ultimate" cause of an act that was done by the person or party that was "immediately" responsible for the act.
For example, it would not be just to blame the Ford manufacturing company for creating vehicles knowing that some of the vehicles might be used as murder weapons.

This analogy is not precise because the watch was not created to make a decision as to whether to tell time correctly based on a value system that takes morality into account.

Samhain

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here? The choice is not ours, as in, yes, we preform the action, and it appears as if we had a choice in the matter, but the only reason it appears as if we had a choice was the fact that there is always more than one path that we "could" have taken, but in reality, we are only fooling ourselves because God has already pre-determined the path which we will take.

Of course, this is true in reality as we know it. But your analogy is a bad one, because it fails to take into consideration the ability to know whether or not the vehicle will be used as a murderous weapon.
A better example would be that the Ford company decides to manufacture a car with an airbag that produces such force that it would kill the driver on impact. Who should be held responsible in the matter? The airbag or Ford company? (for sake of argument let's say that we could put the airbag on trial for the crime) Everyone would say that Ford would have to be the only ones held responsible for the action taken by the airbag, because the Ford company KNEW that the airbag would kill the driver on impact, and even more they designed it specifically for that purpose. This would present a better analogy, because the airbag had no other choice in the matter just as humans have no other choice in the matter, since God (in theory) specifically designed us for the purpose of every action that we will take in life because of the simple fact that God knows all things.

The analogy of the watch is precise because with an omnimax god, we have no other choice in any action that we take because we are pre-determined by God, so morality would only be a figment of our imagination, something which would seem important to us, but the cold and honest truth is that since we have no choice in the matter, morality is just something that we would have to imagine in order to display some kind of social order so people will not despair.

jpbrooks

What I am saying, or rather, asking, is if the choice to perform the action is not ours, then who is it that makes the decision to perform the act at the time that the decision is made? Your assessment of these analogies and examples seems to relegate the subject that is immediately responsible for making the choice to perform actions to nonexistence.

We are not "fooling ourselves". The "appearance" that we are making choices is our reality because it is inescapable for us. We do not have the option of viewing the whole sequence of "cause and effect" relationships from eternity past to eternity future from the standpoint of omniscience. So, from our standpoint, the only time that we could ever "confirm" that a certain choice has been "preordained" is after the choice has been made. But this situation is no different than that where no choices are "preordained".


Granted.
This is what I meant in my post above about the limitation of such analogies.

This modification to my analogy is also faulty for the same reason I alluded to above, viz., that it leaves out a subject that is capable of making choices that take moral judgments into account to serve as the immediate cause of the action in question.

Not at all. Even on the assumption that all of our choices are "preordained", those choices, along with all of their consequences are simply part of the sequence of events that was "preordained" to occur.

And if we are not the subjects that make our choices, how is it possible for morality to serve as something we "have to imagine in order to display some kind of social order so people will not despair"?

[ March 17, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Samhain

Considering all works in accordance to God's "plans" (whether or not these plans are for any purpose that we can comprehend is another discussion, I use "plans" for lack of a better term) then since God is our omnimax creator he would therefore be the being responsible for the acts we would make. We are only the tool through which his will is achieved (his will of what he wishes us to be or wants to create us as).

If you have an example of any true moral choice that is not subject to cause and effect, I'd like to hear it. Don't get me wrong, I am an advocate for free-will, I truly do hope that we make actions according to how we wish to make those actions. But the point I am trying to make is that if someone, such as an omnimax creator, knows (with certainty), of any action which we will take before we even take it, then how is it possible to say that we have free-will? There is no room for both to co-exist. God, in theory, makes us and even prior to that he knows every action we will make throughout our lives before we even take it, or before we even exist (that is the benefit of omniscience, yes?), so therefore, God creates us willingly, all the while, knowing whether or not we will believe in him and whether or not we will be evil in our lives. So how can the responsibility of our actions lie on us if we are already predetermined, not only to exist, but to exist in a specific fashion?

I think we both are confused on this point perhaps. The whole point of this thread is to, in effect, prove that we do not have any true choices because of the nature of God, and because we have been created a specific way by that God. Therefore how can moral judgements by any God be justified if that same God has created us to do that which we are to be punished for?

Maybe I'm missing something...As I'm saying, yes everything is determined by a god whose most prominent qualities are omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Therefore, it begins to seem that God has created a grand play, with us as the characters, and then has watched it for his own amusement, changing things as he wishes, leaving things the same as he wishes. We the characters are directed by God, and we cannot deviate from the script God has given us unless he directs us to do so.

Assuming that God exists in the universe and that we are predetermined by God in any action which we take, then morality would be given to the masses to fool them into believeing we have a choice in the matter, it gives a reason for why some people do evil and why some people do good. People who do good are doing "God's work" while people who are doing evil follow "Satan." This is to show that God is not a heartless diety with a very sick sense of humor. Morality in the presence of a God would be meant to fool people into thinking we have a choice to be good or to be evil, therefore trying to eliminate the same argument which I am making now, and which you are debating so vehemently against.

jpbrooks

I'm sorry for the late reply, Samhain. But it is, once again,
the beginning of the week, and my time online is limited. So, I'm apologizing, in advance, for any further late replies.

Alright. Let's view this problem from the standpoint that you seem to be emphasizing. If our choices cannot, under any circumstances, be considered as being initiated by us, then there is no reason to assume that any other aspect of our consciousness really belongs to us either. When we make choices to act in a certain way, we seem to be initiating the choices ourselves. But if this is not the case and we are, in reality, being "fooled" into thinking that the choices are ours, when, in truth, they are not, then God is manipulating our thought processes as well as our actions. But this means that "we" as real personalities with mental processes that are distinct from God, don't really exist. Assuming that this assessment is correct does indeed mean that morality is fictional, but the "price" that is paid for that move is that nothing that God does within the universe can be affirmed to have any moral significance. So following that line of argument undoes what the argument is trying to accomplish. In other words, the argument, along those lines, is "self-effacing".
Either there are subjective "centers of "consciousness" that can think and act independently from God, in which case, moral responsibility can be a reality, or else no such entities can exist, morality, as it applies to actions, is "meaningless", and moral evaluations therefore cannot be ascribed to any of God's acts. You can't have it both ways. These two alternatives are mutually exclusive.

I wasn't claiming that moral actions occur outside the scope of any cause and effect relationship. Actually, to get to the point, I'm suggesting that morality involves "self-determinism", in which individual "selves" can be viewed as "causes", rather than "indeterminism", which, like "strict" or "hard" determinism, holds that "selves" (if they are posited, which as I argued above, raises problems) can only be "effects".
But since moral knowledge is a fact in reality, reality cannot be as simplistic as "hard determinism" or "indeterminism" seems to suggest it is. God has created a "cause and effect" system in which morally responsible creatures can exist.

I agree. And as I pointed out above, this raises problems for the original argument.

See my comments above.

It is not possible for God to direct anyone to "deviate from the script" from the perspective that you are alluding to because God's direction is itself what determines the "script".
But it is not clear why God would be amused by people ending up in hell. God simply desires eventually to obtain a certain specific type of world. So, it is not clear that He has infinite freedom to toy around with it in a whimsical or capricious manner.

Again, in acknowledging that we exist within a realm in which morality can and does exist, we are not being "fooled" or "duped" into believing something that is not real for us. Either our experiences of making choices are real, or else they are illusory, in which case "we" don't really exist as independent conscious entities, and the original argument fails.

[ March 18, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Kenny:

1. On the notion of “essences” or “essential properties”

You defined “essential properties” as follows:

I agree with HRG that this notion is essentially meaningless. The problem is that there is no non-arbitrary way to determine whether you are talking about the same “possible person named Smith” as you were before. To clarify this, let’s agree (for the moment) to use the word “entity” in such a way that two X’s that are not absolutely identical are different entities. Now imagine a large set of possible entities that resemble (in the sense of sharing some properties with) Smith to a greater or lesser degree. Now ask a hundred people (whom we will assume will be miraculously given as much time as they need) to identify the subset consisting of different versions or instances of the same person. I submit that you would get a hundred different results, and that there would be no objective way to decide who’s “right”, or even to decide, for any entity from the original set, whether it “really” belongs in this subset. In other words, which properties of Smith are “essential” is not an objective question, but a matter of how one conceptualizes the world (and any other “possible worlds” that one imagines). Or to put it yet another way, being “essential” is not an objective attribute of a property, but is merely an aspect of how we think about the property.

As HRG pointed out, this implies that there is no non-arbitrary way in general to define a mapping from the entities in one “possible world” to the “same” entities in another. You argued that this was implausible:

This objection does not seem to be too serious. For example, if I want to talk about what might have happened to me, there is an obvious one-to-one correspondence between the “alternate world” that I am imagining and the actual world; in fact, it is an isomorphism right up to the moment where the two are imagined to diverge. After this, there is a person who can be identified in the alternate world as “me” in the same way that I identify the one-year-old “me” with the current “me”, namely physical continuity in time.

Similarly, when I imagine an alternate world, I normally think of it as a somewhat modified “version” of the actual world, and I have a specific correspondence in mind as part of the overall conception. This correspondence allows me to locate “myself” in the alternate world. Of course, some imagined worlds may not include any such correspondence, or it may be only partial and does not include a “mapping” of “me” to any particular individual. In that case it is indeed impossible to “locate myself” in a non-arbitrary way in this imagined world.

2. Essences and divine creation

You expressed your conception of Divine creation as follows:

My immediate reaction to this was that these two sentences are not descriptions of two different possible acts, but alternative descriptions of the same act; i.e., they are different ways of conceptualizing a Divine creative act. As I put it:

You replied:

This certainly didn’t clarify anything in my mind. It seems to me that you have simply once again described the exact same act in two different ways and declared that one of these descriptions is “right” and the other “wrong”. I don’t even understand what you might mean by saying that the one description is right and the other wrong. How might one distinguish between God’s “giving one of His creatures a certain nature” and His “selecting that creature’s nature from the set of possible natures and giving it actuality”?

In an attempt to clarify this, I said:

You replied:

OK, if I understand you correctly, the situation as you conceptualize it is this: There are a number of “possible natures” or “essences” (say E1, E2, E3, ...) that have some kind of “reality” independently of their being the nature or essence of anything that exists. 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. I’d prefer to say that God gave Smith the properties that define E10584 and also gave him some accidental properties. But are we disagreeing about what God actually did, or are we just describing (or conceptualizing) the same act in different ways? I say the latter.

3. Ensembles of properties

Another point that you have made repeatedly is that some properties are logically connected in ways that are not immediately obvious. Thus we might prefer that Tom not have such a temper, but love his sense of humor and his tendency to make impulsive self-sacrificing gestures from time to time. But it may be that these traits are a “package deal”; you can’t get rid of one without losing the others as well. But I don’t see the relevance of this point. Of course God, in creating someone, would have to choose a logically compatible ensemble of properties. So what? The fact remains that God is responsible for which of the logically compatible ensembles He chooses to endow His creation with.

4. Moral implications

The point of all this was to challenge my point (2). But I have yet to see why any of it is at all relevant to this point. You said:

OK. God isn’t responsible for making Smith’s nature what it is; He’s responsible for creating a person with this nature. The point being?

In explaining why you thought this was relevant to the justice of punishing Smith for doing what he must inevitably do because of his nature, you said:

That is to say, God didn’t make Smith defective; He made a defective Smith. Sorry, I still don’t get it.

The situation seems pretty clear: Smith comes into existence with an irresistible tendency to reject God. Eventually he is punished severely. You say he is not being punished for having a nature that makes it inevitable that e will reject God, but for actually rejecting God as a result of having it. I don’t see the difference. Once again it seems to me that we are merely describing God’s act of punishing Smith in different ways. How can describing it differently change whether it’s just or not? How is punishing Smith for the inevitable manifestation of his fatally flawed nature different from punishing him for having this fatally flawed nature? Or, how can the one act be just and the other unjust?

5. On Smithy and Smith

Now regarding my example of Smithy, whom I created with a nature such that his only purpose in life was to kill Jones, and then punished severely for killing Jones, you said:

This is where we part company. Given that I created Smithy to achieve my purposes, not his, and that in order to achieve these purposes I “programmed” him in such a way that he couldn’t help but do Y, I regard it as absolutely self-evident that my punishing Smithy for doing Y would not only be grossly unjust, but inexpressibly cruel, sadistic, and depraved. Perhaps our conceptions of “justice” are just so fundamentally different that we have no basis for a meaningful discussion. But I’m not yet convinced of this, so I’ll persevere for a while more at least.

You then questioned my analysis of the situation regarding Smith:

I suppose that depends on what you mean by “intend”. I’d say that X, in doing Y, intended Z if he intended to do Y and expected that Z would be a result. It doesn’t matter whether he regarded Z as desirable. This is consistent with the way the word “intent” is used in criminal law. If someone uses a bomb to open a safe knowing that this will result in the deaths of people in the adjoining room, he is deemed to have intended this result even though this was no part of his purpose.

Since I mentioned that Smith might have fulfilled God’s purpose simply by existing, clearly I was not implying that Smith intended to make the Universe a better place. Just the same, he did make it a better place.

The point is that, given all of the factors I listed, it is very difficult to understand what exactly God would be punishing Smith for. So far as I can see, God would be punishing him solely for the “crime” of being Smith, or more precisely, for the “crime” of existing.

Note: I plan to focus in a subsequent post (coming soon) on the crucial issues of whether someone who would reject God in all possible worlds is insane in a sense that would disqualify him from being considered a moral agent, and your interpretation of the principle that a person can only be held responsible for an act if it is “possible” for him to do otherwise.

Jayhawker Soule

Or, for that matter, by the wholly unnecessary cruelty associated with the Exodus. He arms Moses with some tricks and some warnings, and then takes steps to insure that the warnings go unheeded. Apparently, when YHWH had all these plagues lined up, he wanted to be absolutely sure that they did not go unused ...

And you've determined this how?