Thomas Metcalf

bd-from-kg :

Compatibilist Freedom

Sorry, I was sloppy. There are instances in which someone causes someone to do something unfreely, and instances in which someone causes someone to do something freely. Let the first case be "unfree weak actualization" or UWA, and the second case be "free weak actualization" or FWA. God can only bring about "some person learns" via UWA, whereas I can bring it about via UWA and FWA.

Well, I'm going to avoid getting too specific. I think you have to agree that both UWA and FWA exist, don't you?

But recall my discussion of being able to bring about other, equally power-granting states of affairs. God cannot bring about A', but Smith cannot bring about A'' (A, and A was not brought about by Smith), Jones cannot bring about A''' (A, and A was not brought about by Jones), etc. But Smith can bring about A' and A''', and Jones can bring about A and A'', etc. These rather particular actions don't present a problem because there's one of them for everyone.

Omnipotence and Omniscience

I'm not too concerned with this. Just suppose it were. Suppose it were possible for it to be alethically necessary that you're locked in that bakery. In that situation, you wouldn't even have the capability to perform "to eat a donut," because of a necessary truth about you: you're stuck in a bakery. It's not an intrinsic property, but my intuitions exclaim strongly that you lack some kind of power if you can't perform "to eat a donut." Especially if "bd-from-kg eats a donut" is a logically possible, bring-about-able state of affairs. So you might need to find a new definition of "omnipotent," too, and Flint and Freddoso and Hoffman and Rosenkrantz would recommend you stick with states of affairs.

Maybe a different example will make more sense. Suppose that the way out of the room is past a sophisticated lock. Only persons of IQ of 140+ can figure out how to open the lock. Suppose you lack the requisite IQ, and you're stuck. Do you have the capability to leave the room? Well, yes, you have legs, and enough energy to do so. What's stopping you is just a locked door, something about your environment. But it's also something about yourself, because you don't have the right intrinsic property to be able to leave. Similarly, God doesn't have the right intrinsic property (semiscience) to be able to learn.

I'm not so sure. That you know calculus isn't an intrinsic property of you? And you could really learn calculus without forgetting it first?

And I'm going to say that's not omnipotence. To say that omnipotence is as much power as a MPB can have, and that such an analysis is not identical to "as much power as any being could have," is to admit that God's other attributes limit his power. And I don't think anyone, even apologists, will have a principled reason not to want omnipotence to be maximal power. That just seems to me to be what omnipotence is. Why would omnipotence not be maximal power? It makes just as much sense, more to me, to say that a MPB simply wouldn't be omnipotent, because it detracts from other qualities. Only if you assume at the outset that omnipotence must be a great-making property are you led to try to redefine it.

Well, the reason to suppose God would have it would be a naive view of Divine attributes, the mistaken view that omnipotence is consistent with omniscience and with moral perfection. Imagine the being just like God except that it is purely evil instead of purely good. My intutions say this being, alas, would be just as powerful as God.

Well, that's kind of what I've done. God can be omnipotent, or he can be omniscient, moral perfect, and necessarily existent. (Assuming those other attributes don't, themselves, conflict.) A MPB, to me, would be the latter sort of entity, plus omnipotence* where omnipotence* is as much power as an omniscient, morally perfect, necessary existent being could have.

Omnipotence and Necessary Moral Perfection

So you think Morriston's being with severe permanent indecision, who can never decide to do anything, might be omnipotent? If she could only make a decision, she could do whatever she wanted to, but she never can make such a decision in the first place. This being could be omnipotent? Or there's the being such that, intrinsically, all it ever chooses to do is to scratch its ear. If it chose to do something else, it would be able to, but it never chooses to do anything else.

I think what you need now is a definition of capability that solves the "necessary severe indecision" problem.

And I don't know about you, but my intuitions are still saying that if I can say "If I had chosen to do T, I wouldn't have been able to do it," I'm not omnipotent. For God, T is "to choose evil." Have you read Morriston's "Omnipotence and the Power to Choose" in a recent Faith & Philosophy?

Here's another attempt to get at omnipotence, pretty plausible I think: If there is no logically possible task T such that if I had chosen to perform T, I would have failed (in other words "I can do anything I could choose to do"), then I am omnipotent. This analysis yields my result. Can you think of counterexamples? (Besides the problems of reflexive tasks such as "To know something God doesn't know," etc., discussed above.)

bd-from-kg

Thomas Metcalf:

Compatibilist Freedom

The only change here from what you said before seems to be the replacement of “L” with “some person learns” in the last sentence. But my question was why my learning about Sue [sorry, got the names confused last time] is “unfree” – that is, why it isn’t an instance of L. You seem to be arguing that if I learn that Sue is my new neighbor by voluntarily listening to her when she comes to my door and introduces herself, this learning is not “free” because ..., well, I have no idea what’s supposed to follow the “because”.

Presumably the problem has something to do with the fact that God has affected the causal chain leading to Sue’s coming to the door at some point, even though this intervention may have been at a point years before our encounter. But this sort of thing is simply not considered to make a choice “unfree” in the compatibilist sense. If the mere fact that an act could be traced ultimately entirely to causes outside oneself made it “unfree”, in a deterministic world there would be no “free” acts whatever. But the “compatibilist” in “compatibilist free will” means that it’s compatible with determinism. So a condition on freedom that cannot be satisfied in a deterministic world cannot be a valid condition on compatibilist freedom. And there seems to be no reason to single out an external influence (i.e., partial cause) consisting of someone’s doing something as disqualifying when other external influences aren’t. Indeed, under standard definitions of compatibilist freedom, a choice can be very strongly influenced by someone else yet still considered “free”. Specifically, the fact that I learned about Sue partly because she came to my door to introduce herself simply does not make my choice to learn about her “unfree”. And this is true no matter why she came to my door.

Yes. But the sort of thing that I’d consider to constitute UWA would be either (1) bringing about a coercive situation or other type of situation in which I would ordinarily be said not to be acting freely, or (2) tampering directly with my brain or my mental processes in such a way as to change the choice that I would otherwise have made. Of course, you may call the latter “strong actualization”; I’ve never been clear about what you meant by the “strong/weak” distinction.

Power-granting states of affairs

This brings me to my objection to allowing “a description of how a state of affairs was brought about to be part of the description of the state of affairs itself”. Your point about my example of adding “and A was not brought about by God” to a description of a SOA is well taken, but I still think that requiring that a being must be able to bring about a given SOA “strongly” rather than “weakly” to qualify as omnipotent is unreasonable. In fact, it’s not even clear that this distinction can be sustained.

Ordinarily, to say that X caused Y is to say that X and Y are part of a causal chain in this space-time-continuum, with Y following X. But this is never what it means to say that God “caused” Y. To say that God caused Y is to say that He intervened in the STC in such a way that Y became part of the STC. These things are so very different that they really should be given different names to avoid confusion. We can say, for example, that God “actualized” Y. But I have no idea what would constitute “weak” actualization as opposed to “strong”. Actualization is actualization. God actualizes; something within the STC causes; and ne’er the twain shall meet. In this sense, of course, there are lots of things that God can’t do that a human can: the human can cause a certain state of affairs and God can’t. But as you point out, God has an “equally power-granting alternative”: He can actualize the state of affairs in question and the human can’t.

Let’s compare these two ways of bringing about a state of affairs. for example, Mary asks me to play the piano, so I play it. Mary has caused me to play the piano. But God might actualize a state of affairs in which Mary asks me to play the piano, thereby causing me to play it. Unlike Mary, God has produced the entire causal sequence leading to (and including) my playing the piano rather than merely being an element of the causal sequence. Which alternative is more “power-granting”?

The same analysis applies to my learning about Sue. Sue’s coming to my door is merely an element of the causal sequence leading to this result, whereas God (if He is responsible for Sue’s coming to my door) actualized the entire causal sequence.

It seems pretty obvious to me which mode of operation is the more “power-granting”.

Omnipotence, Alethic necessity, and Perfection

I guess I wasn’t as clear as I could have been in the section beginning “I'm not too concerned with this...”that I was basically granting that if a being’s inability to do something is a result of an alethically necessary (i.e., essential) property that it has, this inability amounts to incapability. I discussed the case of learning explicitly. As I explained, my real complaint on reflection (aside from a disagreement about whether “necessarily unwilling” entails “unable”) was in your sloppy habit of attributing alethic necessity to conditions which obviously cannot be alethically necessary, as if this were a property that one could simply stipulate arbitrarily of any situation. Your latest example is much more satisfactory.

I was a little sloppy in using the word “intrinsic”. I should have said “essential”. My knowing calculus is not an essential property of me. I didn’t become another person by learning calculus.

I guess it depends on your point of view. If the notion that God is omnipotent flows from the notion of God as a MPB, it’s perfectly natural to define omnipotence as I did. After all, if the whole idea is derived from contemplating what “maximal perfection” means and is meant to be a description or identification of one aspect of MP, obviously one’s understanding of what it means will be conditioned on this.

However, there’s not much point in pursuing this, so far as I can see. It seems to be just a question of definition. According to my “MPB-compatible” definition the question of whether omnipotence is incompatible with His other “omni” qualities doesn’t arise. But one can still ask whether His other qualities necessarily condition His omnipotence in any way, which is really the same question in a different form.

An interesting point. It seems that your definition suffers from the same problem to only a slightly lesser degree. Thus, imagine a being who is omnipotent by your definition (or any “standard” definition – take your pick), but who (by alethic necessity) will only ever do one thing at most, is far more likely to do something of no importance than something important, and is almost certain to do nothing at all. (We might define this as: the cardinality of possible worlds in which this being does anything is smaller than the cardinality of all possible worlds, etc.) This being would seem to be almost as ineffectual as the one who never does anything.

My first reaction to this is that omnipotence, considered in isolation, doesn’t amount to much. But if we couple it with moral perfection we can get somewhere. Now it will feel compelled to do T if it ought to do T. And since this will presumably apply to a great many possible acts, we should then have a very active being. And of course it would be highly desirable for such a being to know everything (so that it can figure out what it ought to do), so if “learning everything” is a logically possible act, it will be sure to do it, thereby becoming omniscient.

So it seems that you may have succeeded in showing that taking omnipotence in isolation is meaningless, and that this property therefore only makes sense as a component of maximal perfection. And this in turn would seem to be a more than adequate principled reason not to want omnipotence to be “absolutely maximal power”, but to take it to be the “power” component of maximal perfection.

Yes, I’d say that too. This is covered by my definition. For a being to be omnipotent it must be true that if it chooses to do something it will do it.

This seems to suffer from the “necessary severe indecision" problem”. It also falls victim to a problem that my definition was designed to avoid: a non-omniscient being might be able to perform an action if it was aware of the possibility of doing it, but fail to be aware of the possibility. (This could be the result of ignorance or stupidity, or a mental blind spot of some kind.)

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by bd-from-kg :

Compatibilist Freedom

It's never been particularly clear in the literature. Roughly, it's weak when there's another agent's choice in between you and the state of affairs. But if you agree that UWA and FWA exist, then the state of affairs

some person brings about "some person learns" not via UWA

is un-bring-about-able by an omniscient being. (Right?) And if you accept Flint & Freddoso's, and Hoffman & Rosenkrantz's definitions, God fails to be omnipotent.

I'm sorry, but my intuitions don't say that having produced a greater proportion of a causal sequence means something is more power-granting. And of course, Jane (the semiscient version of God, very roughly), could also bring about the entire causal sequence.

Omnipotence and Maximal Perfection

I would be very wary of a definition that seemed to result from an antecedent goal that would color the way the definition turned out. Omnipotence is maximal power. This is the conclusion (in different words) of every dictionary, most theistic philosophers of religion, and almost all atheistic philosophers of religion.

Here's another way of approaching this. Suppose I were to grant that our definition of omnipotence must be formulated to be compatible with MPB-ness. Even then, it would not follow that omnipotence is compatible with omniscience. It would follow, instead, that a MPB is either not omnipotent or not omniscient. Do you really think the following is a coherent sentence? "Smith is omnipotent, but Jones is more powerful than Smith."

Then let us choose a definition of omnipotent that requires its instantiator to be able and capable of bringing about any logically possible bring-about-able state of affairs. All the beings who suffered from severe indecision about anything, unable to choose some task, would be semipotent.

I recommend Morriston's "Omnipotence and the Power to Choose" in one of the recent few issues of Faith & Philosophy.

But even if God chooses to do evil, he will not do it. Right?

Well, yes. If the NSIP is taken to be nugatory, I will employ the above definition and secure my conclusion that God is semipotent.

bd-from-kg

Thomas Metcalf:

I saw your latest post last night and will be replying to it ASAP. But first I want to post the following, which I’ve been preparing in the meantime.

Since my last reply I’ve looked at Morriston’s paper Omnipotence and Necessary Moral Perfection: Are they Compatible?. In this post I want to comment on a few things that he has to say there that seem particularly relevant. [Note: The quotes are from an earlier version of the paper and may not match exactly the version cited.]

1. Strong vs. weak actualization.

Morriston gives this explanation of the difference between strong and weak actualization:

He then argues:

The problem here (from a compatibilist point of view) is that God doesn’t have to “ask” anyone to do something (call it A), nor is He restricted to actualizing a state of affairs in which He knows (because of His foreknowledge) that some agent will choose to do A, even though (in another world) in the exact same circumstances that agent would have chosen not to. If this were His only option, it might be a valid point that He doesn’t seem to be as powerful as a being who could “directly” bring it about that the agent chooses to do A. But this is not God’s only option. He can instead bring about a state of affairs in which the agent will certainly choose to do A – he would choose to do so, under the given circumstances, in any possible world. The point is that this is not incompatible with compatibilist free will.

It seems to me that the only more direct way that God could bring about the state of affairs "someone does A" would be to do it Himself. But if what we’re asking God to do is to bring it about that someone else does A, (or if it's logically impossible that God should do A) I can’t imagine any more direct way of doing it than this. (And if A does not include as part of its definition that it is done unfreely, He can bring it about that the person in question does A freely in the compatibilist sense.)

2. What does “having the power to do X” mean?

Morriston begins his article with three propositions which taken together entail that God cannot be both omnipotent and morally perfect. He starts by postulating (what seems very plausible) that there is some state of affairs E so morally repugnant that God's moral perfection prevents him from actualizing it. The propositions are then:

He then points out:

Oddly enough, after saying this Morriston discusses some plausible reasons that libertarians might give for denying P3. But for now let’s assume that he’s right that libertarians are likely to regard P3 as obviously true. This says nothing about how compatibilists are likely to regard it. A compatibilist, by definition, denies:

P3': If P has the power to do A at t, then there is a possible world in which things are exactly the same at t as in this world, and P does A at t.

Thus for a compatibilist P3' does not serve to define what it means to “have the power” to do something. In view of this, there seems to be no reason for a compatibilist to suppose that P3 is true.

3. Is there such a thing as a power to do evil?

Morriston offers yet another possible reason to reject P3:

This argument strikes me as very cogent, provided that one replaces “one necessarily chooses what one conceives of as good” with “a perfectly rational being necessarily chooses what it conceives of as the good.” (It seems to me that this may be what Morriston [and Aquinas et al] had in mind anyway, so this may not be so much a revision as a more precise statement of the argument.)

Morriston then points out that:

It’s not clear that this criticism is valid (at least against my version of the argument). It may well be that a perfectly rational person would have no choice but to choose good over evil, but of course humans are not perfectly rational. And for God one can simply repeat what Aquinas said almost verbatim: To be able to act irrationally is to be able to fall short in action, which is repugnant to omnipotence.

And for the compatibilist Morriston’s argument simply falls flat, as he himself realizes.

Thus it appears a number of “escape routes” from the dilemma posed by P1-P3 are available to a compatibilist that are foreclosed to a libertarian.

P.S.: You’ve recommended Morriston's paper "Omnipotence and the Power to Choose" from a recent issue of Faith & Philosophy. I’d love to take a look at it, but since I live out in the boonies I can’t just walk into the local research library and browse through recent issues of such journals. (And it doesn’t seem to be on the net.) I could order it from the local library if I could give them an exact citation. In particular I’d need to know just which issue it appeared in.

bd-from-kg

Thomas Metcalf:

Compatibilist Freedom

No. Suppose God places X in a situation where he does A but was free to do otherwise. If the “free” here is meant in a libertarian sense, this is a case of FWA; if it’s meant in a compatibilist sense, it may be that X was certain to do A through the operation of deterministic causal laws, in which case (as I understand it) this would be an instance of FSA (free strong actualization). Either way, if A involves learning, God will have brought about “some person learns” not via UWA.

The point isn’t that God has produced more of the causal sequence, but that He has actualized the causal sequence, whereas Mary hasn’t; she is merely an element of the causal sequence. If I cause a button to be pushed by setting up a row of dominos and knocking over the first domino, thereby producing a causal chain of falling dominos, the last of which pushes the button, I have brought about the pushing of the button in a stronger sense than (say) the twelfth domino, which was merely part of the causal chain. (We ignore, of course, the fact that I am myself merely part of a larger causal chain here; presumably this would not be true of God.) From God’s point of view, Mary is just one of the dominos leading to the “pushing of my button” causing me to play the piano.

Sorry, I don’t follow. How does that fact that some other hypothetical being could also do what God can do impinge on God’s omnipotence?

Omnipotence and Maximal Perfection

After reading Morriston’s article, I have to agree. As he points out, it’s possible to carry this sort of thing to the point where the property being analyzed no longer bears a close resemblance to the pre-theoretic concept of “omnipotence” that we started with, and in this case it may be legitimately questioned whether the property in question can still properly be called “omnipotence” at all. So as a general, all-purpose solution to the problem, simply defining omnipotence as “the maximum degree of power consistent with God’s other attributes” (or as I’d put it, “consistent with all other perfections”) won’t do. We have to look at the effect each of the other alleged perfections has on God’s “abilities” or “capabilities” and consider whether this sort of thing is just flat-out incompatible with our pre-theoretic notion of omnipotence.

In the case of omniscience preventing God from learning (because He already knows everything) it seems clear that this does not violate most people’s pre-theoretic concept of omnipotence. (In fact, I ran this idea past several non-philosophically-inclined Christians, and they all rejected the notion that God’s “inability” to learn by virtue of being omniscient infringed in any way on His omnipotence [as they conceived it] with scorn and derision.) On the other hand, it’s much less clear that God would still satisfy the pre-theoretic notion of omnipotence if He lacked the power to do evil, so this one can’t be tossed off so easily in this fashion.

Not so. If anything, it would follow that omnipotence isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. (But see my comments above on this supposed conflict.)

No. Clearly the notion of omnipotence entails that only one being (at most) could have the property. And if you modify it to say “... but I can conceive of a being more powerful”, the theist would presumably reply that it might seem to you that you can conceive of a being more powerful than God, but since God is a necessary being, you can’t really conceive (without self-contradiction) of a more powerful being, since this would involve conceiving of either a world in which God does not exist or a world with two omnipotent beings.

Omnipotence and the Power to Choose

But your definition already does that. My point was that it’s consistent with a being who does bring about any bring-about-able state of affairs in some possible world, but who is almost certain (with probability 1) to do nothing at all, and again almost certain (again with probability 1) to do nothing significant even if it does do something. (If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of something having probability 1 but not being absolutely certain, consult a good textbook on probability theory. A good example is the probability of choosing a specific number if you choose a real number at random from a uniform distribution over any interval.)

Now here’s a possible solution to the NSIP problem. We can say that in order for a being to qualify as omnipotent, it must be the case that:

(1) For any two SOA’s, it prefers one to the other
(2) If it prefers SOA2 to SOA1 and SOA3 to SOA2, it prefers SOA3 to SOA1.
(3) For any SOA, it will choose to actualize either that SOA or one that it prefers to it.

Then the attribute of moral perfection simply stipulates what set of preferences God has. Specifically, for any two states of affairs, He always prefers the “better” one – i.e., the one with the most “intrinsic goodness”, or the greatest balance of intrinsic goodness to intrinsic badness.

Wrong. If God were to choose to do evil, He would do it. But He never would choose to do evil.

Of course, in both cases we have an impossible conditional, so in standard logic both of them come out to be trivially true. Morriston comments on this in a footnote:

Goober

Is it just me or is it a bit unfair to allow actions that contain a clause that refers to the agent performing the action? For example the action 'to write an essay that has been written by a being that is not omnipotent' rules out the possibility of anything being omnipotent, doesnt it?

In my opinion, actions that contain a clause that refers to the type of agent causing them shouldn't be considered as proper actions in determining omnipotence, because there is a whole set of such actions that would preclude anything from being omnipotent, making the concept worthless.

That would include actions such as 'John freely walks' because 'freely' precludes anyone else from causing it except for John.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Goober :

Oh, I agree with that much. If they're defined de dicto to be such that an omnipotent being didn't perform them, we rule them out, because then nothing could be omnipotent.

But this isn't the same kind of case. Of course God can't bring about "John freely walks," and John can't bring about "God freely walks." But there is one more state of affairs John can bring about, that God can't (if we assume God can't walk), which is "Some person freely walks." So you're going to need a new definition of "omnipotent" if you don't want the being just like God except that it can walk to be more powerful than God.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by bd-from-kg :

Morriston

Your objections are very similar to T. J. Mawson's in a recent Religious Studies. You can find the citations for all three of the Morriston articles and Mawson's in the endnotes of my paper. I understand how hard it would be to track down these papers for yourself, so I can summarize for you if you can't find them. I'm lucky enough to work and study in one of the largest academic research libraries in the country, so I forget that not everyone has those resources.

I really don't find that sort of objection compelling, mostly because to do evil isn't necessarily irrational. It might be if God exists, but only because doing evil will win you eternal damnation, which isn't really a problem for God himself. We need to remember to imagine a being just like God except with the ability to do evil, who existed instead of God.

Compatibilist Freedom

I think you have to admit that it makes sense to talk about weak or strong actualization. My guess is that the difference is that there's another agent in between you and the state of affairs, choice-wise. There's really a genuine difference between me bringing about "someone reads a book" by actually reading a book, and by convincing someone else to read a book.

I think you also have to admit that there are some cases in which a person does something freely, and some cases in which she does not. And God creating someone and causing them to learn by altering their mental state would not be a case of freedom -- causing them to learn by weak actualization, by putting them in a situation in which they're likely to want to learn, say -- would not be a violation of freedom.

So our state of affairs is "some person brings about 'some person learns' by strong actualization." It doesn't seem to me that I need to provide a strict analysis of weak vs. strong actualization or compatibilistly free vs. unfree actions, just point to some poles.

But both God and Mary have only weakly actualized the state of affairs. Really, suppose I want a big fireworks show on Lake Union every fourth of July. I'm more powerful if I can do it myself, instead of having to hire a bunch of pyrotechnicians and convince them to produce the show. These are very strong intuitions for me.

Because we're taking a summation of states of affairs. Jane can do everything God can do, plus bring about "some person freely chooses evil" or "some person freely learns." Jane can bring about the entire causal sequence and do things by strong actualization. She can go either way, and therefore has more abilities.

Omnipotence and Maximal Perfection

Then they need to provide us atheists with a better definition of omnipotent, because by the ones most apologists accept, omniscience genuinely precludes omnipotence. As I say in my paper, I think the only reason people think omniscience gives a person extra power is that they tacitly assume the omniscient person will be able to use her omniscience to be able to do more.

Think about it this way. If it were true that omniscience grants a person extra powers, then an omnipotent omniscient being would be more powerful than an omnipotent semiscient being. But that's absurd. (Isn't it?) Omnipotence can't require omniscience, either -- at least, I don't think anyone's intuitions will say that it does. There doesn't seem to me to be any necessary connection between power and knowledge. (The current President of the United States seems to be extremely powerful. Less flippantly, I seem to be able to imagine an extremely powerful buffoon who knows very little but can do a lot of damage, perhaps bring about any state of affairs she wants to bring about.)

Morriston answers this in his paper. Omnipotence is the maximum conceptually possible or logically possible simpliciter degree of power, not the maximum metaphysically possible degree of power. If God doesn't allow any more powerful beings, then no one can be omnipotent. (I deny that a world without God is conceptually impossible. I think we have reliable introspective access to what we are conceiving.)

The Power to Choose

The first seems really ad hoc to me, and just generally dubious. Now omnipotence requires that I prefer "ten people experience one unit of happiness" to "one person experiences ten units of happiness"?

I can grant transitivity of preference in (2).

But (3) seems really strange. Why would an omnipotent being actualize a soa it didn't prefer? It seems to me almost part of the definition of an omnipotent being that it only actualizes what it prefers to actualize.

Do you think God can choose to make an evil choice? That is, can God bring about the state of affairs "God chooses to do evil"? (I'm prepared to argue that choosing to choose to be evil isn't necessarily, itself, evil.)

Goober

OK, that makes sense. Thanks Thomas.

bd-from-kg

Thomas Metcalf:

Had a little excitement around here lately, but here finally is my reply to your latest post. (By the way, I do think this discussion is winding down. I suspect that we don’t have that much new left to say.)

Morriston

I’m not sure whether you’re referring to the first two “objections”, or only to the third. The main point of the first two sections was that certain arguments purporting to show an incompatibility between omnipotence and other omni-qualities don’t work against a compatibilist conception of free will.

I have no idea what Mawson has to say about all this.

OK, here’s my reconstruction of the argument. The basic idea is that a rational being (o perhaps any agent) will take into account the effects of his actions on anyone just to the extent that he understands (in an empathetic sense) and is aware of those effects. It can be argued that the only reason that most of us tend to put our own interests first is that we have a much better understanding of ourselves than of others and are more immediately aware of our own desires and goals than we are of others’. But this could not be true of God. God, I would argue, has no interests in the direct sense; nothing that anyone (including God Himself) does can affect Him. So the only interests that His actions can affect are those of His creatures. And of course, He has a perfect empathetic understanding of all of His creatures, so He will (as a perfectly rational being) take all of their interests equally into account. But this is precisely what it means to act rightly. To do otherwise (for God) would be like making a mistake in arithmetic: He would have to miscalculate the aggregate effects of His actions, which of course He cannot do.

In fact, as I’ve argued elsewhere, I think that a reasonable definition of a “morally right” choice is the choice that one would make if one were perfectly rational and had sufficient knowledge and understanding. By this definition, of course, it’s impossible by definition for God to act wrongly – not because whatever He does is defined to be “right”, but because He is perfectly rational and has the maximal possible knowledge and understanding. Thus His moral perfection (on this theory) is not an additional, independent property, but is entailed by His rationality and omniscience.

Compatibilist Freedom

Yes. I discussed this in my last post. But it doesn’t appear, from the passage from Morriston that I quoted, that the difference consists of having “another agent in between you and the state of affairs, choice-wise.” The key difference is whether the “actualizer” relies on “help” from some indeterministic process. The most common example is a choice made by someone else that is free in the libertarian sense.

But compatibilist free will does not require any indeterministic process. A person can act freely in the compatibilist sense even though he is absolutely certain, under the circumstances, to make the choice that he does.

Neither of these is an accurate description of the sort of thing I’ve talked about. Of course, almost anything that affects a person’s choices must be “altering their mental state” in some way, but not all ways of altering a person’s mental state make the resulting choice “unfree”. For example, if I ask you to go to a Lakers game with me, this could cause you to choose to go to a Lakers game with me when you wouldn’t have done so otherwise, but this hardly makes your choice to do so “unfree”. And in a deterministic world, if you do decide to go with me, it was certain under those circumstances that you would so decide. This is still a free choice in the compatibilist sense, regardless of the fact that, in a sense, you “could not have chosen otherwise”.

Well, it seems to me that you do. For several posts I’ve explained why I think that my learning about my new neighbor Sue (under circumstances, such as living in a deterministic world, where I was certain to do it under the circumstances) is a free act and why God’s causing me to learn this is an instance of strong actualization. At some point you’re going to have to explain what makes it a case of weak actualization or what makes it unfree. I honestly don’t get it. It seems to me that in effect you’re denying that an act can be free if you’re certain to do it under the given circumstances. But this is a rejection of the very concept of compatibilist free will.

But God is not convincing anyone to do anything in my scenario. He’s actualizing an entire causal chain, an element of which is my playing the piano. That’s hardly the same thing. He’s not “dependent” on anyone else’s choosing to do what He wants. It’s true that I do what He wants, but this is a deterministic event.

Perhaps the problem here is that we’re conceptualizing this “actualization” event differently. As I envision it, God actualizes the entire causal chain directly and at one go. He can do this because it is a causal chain, (there are no “libertarian free will” events, or any other kind of indeterministic event, in it). As you envision it, I gather, God actualizes the “originating” event and then sits back and waits for events to unfold. But God does not have to sit back and wait for events to unfold. The “instant” He actualizes the chain of events, my playing the piano is “there”, as a part of the space-time continuum. I honestly cannot imagine a more direct or “stronger” form of actualization than this.

Omnipotence and Maximal Perfection

Agreed. Here’s another attempt to clarify at least one aspect.

Let’s consider what it means to “learn” something by considering a computer model. Let’s say that a certain computer is programmed to analyze a deterministic two-person game similar to chess but simple enough to be analyzable in a reasonable time frame (but complicated enough so that the “best” moves aren’t “obvious”; it takes a long time for human or computer to work them out in most cases.) When the computer is fed (perhaps by a second computer) a given position, it finds all of the possible moves that preserve the game-theoretic outcome (for example, if the game is a game-theoretic win for the player with the move before the move, it’s still a win after any of these moves, but not after any other move) After working this out, the computer stores this information in its database. (Presumably it has some systematic way to retrieve this information as needed.) It does not check to see whether the given position has already been analyzed.

It seems reasonable to say that the computer has “learned” the best moves for the input position if it hasn’t already analyzed this position before, but not if it has.

No let’s suppose that the computer has analyzed every possible position and stored the results. It would seem that the computer has “lost” the ability to learn, since it won’t learn the best moves for the input position no matter what position is input. But has it actually lost an ability that it had before? No, it has not. It can still do everything that it could do before. The only thing that has changed is that in no case will “doing its thing” constitute “learning” because of how we define “learning”. In other words its supposed “loss of the capability to learn” is purely a linguistic phenomenon, not a loss of an actual capability that it once had. It’s like saying that one has “lost the ability to visit Paris for the first time” because one has already been to Paris. Having been to Paris does not deprive one of a capability that one had before; it’s just that nothing that one does will any longer qualify as “visiting Paris for the first time”.

Thus it can be argued that God’s “inability to learn” doesn’t represent a lack of an actual capability, but is purely a linguistic phenomenon based on how we define “learning”. If God were to somehow “take in” the information that Chicago is north of Texarkana and “store” it in His “database”, He still wouldn’t have “learned” that Chicago is north of Texarkana because this information will have already been in His database. But if (per impossible) this information had not been in His database, this act would have constituted “learning”. His “inability” to learn is not an inability to perform the actions that constitute “learning”, but a mere logical consequence of the linguistic fact that we wouldn’t count these acts as “learning” on the grounds that He already knows the fact(s) in question.

I don’t really understand the distinction between “logically possible and “metaphysically possible”. I know theologians talk about it a lot, but I really don’t get it. How, or in what sense, can something be logically possible but “metaphysically” impossible? Especially when the “something” is God’s existence or nonexistence. There can be no constraints of any kind on what’s possible (other than logical ones) that are “logically prior” to God.

But leaving that aside, as I understand it the usual reason given for thinking that God is a “necessary being” is the Ontological Argument (in one of its many forms). And the Ontological Argument turns on the claim that it is impossible to conceive of God’s not existing. (I don’t buy that argument, of course, but I’m trying to argue from the point of view of someone who does buy it.) If this argument is correct, my point that it’s not really possible to conceive of a more powerful being than God seems to me to be entirely sound. Obviously it’s not possible, by any reasonable definition of “omnipotent”, to conceive without self-contradiction of two omnipotent beings existing at the same time. So if it’s also not possible to conceive without self-contradiction of God’s nonexistence (as the ontological argument purports to prove) it follows that it’s not possible without self-contradiction to conceive of a being more powerful than God.

The Power to Choose

My “preference axioms” are admittedly in need of some work. The idea was to require an omnipotent being to have “significant” preferences; i.e., that it wouldn’t be completely indifferent as between all SOA’s. (Since I’m thinking of a SOA’s of consisting of everything that exists, we’ll call them possible worlds [PW’s] from now on.)

But on reflection, it’s not clear that this is needed anyway. Perhaps all we need is that a being has preferences (if we count indifference as between two PW’s as a “neutral” preference) and acts on them in the rational way (i.e., it chooses what it prefers over what it does not prefer).

The first obvious problem here is that God (in this context our name for the hypothetical unique omnipotent being) might find all PW’s equally desirable, and thus not prefer any PW to any other. But suppose this is the case; does that mean that God isn’t omnipotent after all? I think not. This isn’t the same as the “necessary severe indecision” problem. In this case it’s perfectly rational for God to choose to do nothing (although He might equally well choose to do anything); it’s a choice, not a failure to make a choice due to indecision. In fact, it has been argued that a MPB could have no rational motive for creating anything since nothing it could do or create could be an improvement on maximal perfection. If such a being rationally chose to do nothing, how would this make it less than omnipotent?

A more serious problem could be that there might be no most preferable PW; it may be that for any PW there is a preferable one. Thus any choice would be a choice of a PW He did not prefer over one that He preferred.

One possible solution to this would be as follows: given two desirable PW’s (i.e., PW’s that God would prefer to the “empty” PW that would result from His doing nothing at all), God should be able to create the union of the two. To put it another way, if there are two possible worlds that God finds desirable, He can simply create both. Provided that they do not interact with each other in any way, it seems clear that the resulting PW must be at least as desirable as either of the original PW’s.

Extending this, God can actualize an infinity of possible worlds PW1, PW2, ... such that for any possible world PW, there is at least one (and therefore infinitely many) that God prefers to PW. It’s not clear that actualizing all desirable PW’s would be necessary in this scheme; given the way infinities “work”, the total desirability of the union of all desirable PW’s would probably not be more desirable than the total desirability of any such “unbounded” union.

The point is that (if we accept that such unions of PW’s are possible and that their desirability is simply the sum of the desirabilities of the constituent worlds) there will be some possible worlds that are “maximally desirable” (namely, any of these unbounded unions). So an omnipotent being can (and therefore will, by (3)) actualize one of the maximally desirable PW’s.

The point here is that all that’s required for omnipotence is that God have preferences as between different states of affairs, and that He act on those preferences (and, of course, that His acts should be effective – i.e., that He accomplishes what He wills). Why should being “able” to choose what one does not prefer over what one prefers be part of the definition of omnipotence? Who would want such an “ability”? It seems to me that this would be more in the nature of a curse; certainly it would be a defect rather than a perfection.