A paper I gave at the 2008 Eastern APA (at the Philosophy of Time Society group meeting):
FATALISM, INDETERMINACY, AND NO-FUTURE VIEWS
Presentists and growing block theorists reject the idea of a concrete, determinate future. Such ‘No-Futurism’ is often in part motivated by an incompatibilist or libertarian view of free will and the desire to avoid the fatalism which is thought to accompany the denial of No-Futurism. However, this avenue to No-Futurism can be successfully blocked – we can show that the very assumptions which are meant to entail the incompatibility of a determinate future with libertarian freedom actually also entail, in conjunction with the common assumption that bivalence fails for future contingents, the incompatibility of an indeterminate future with such freedom. And in fact, what we are in the end forced to say is that this freedom, when conjoined with a denial of bivalence, is straightforwardly incompatible with No-Futurism in general, whether or not all of the No-Futurists’ assumptions are accepted in the first place. Far from providing a successful route to the nonexistent future, considerations from human freedom and incompatibilism actually point, if anywhere, in the opposite direction or, at least, to some other No-Future views which have their own share of problems.
I. The Open Road
Many people reject the existence of a real, concrete and determinate future because they think it leads to fatalism and hence a lack of freedom on our part. These people tend to fall neatly into one of two camps: presentists, who believe that neither the future nor the past exist (or at least that they do not do so except as parts of the present), or growing block theorists, who believe that only the future fails to exist. More carefully, presentists take it that everything which exists is present and exists at the present, whereas growing block theorists take it that everything which exists is either present or past and exists at the present or in the past. Though these two groups disagree about the ontological status of the past, they agree for the most part about the future. From now on, I will call such views ‘No-Future’ views.
Many No-Futurists hold the beliefs they do at least in part because of a widespread belief in Libertarianism about free will and the looming threat of fatalism which a determinate future is thought to provide. According to Libertarians about free will, free will both exists and is incompatible with determinism (that is, Incompatibilism is true). Libertarians will also take it that free will automatically rules out fatalism about our actions – that is, it rules out the possibility that we might have no power (at every given time) to affect what we will do in the future. So if fatalism turned out to be true, that would automatically rule out the existence of free will as understood by Incompatibilists. According to many of those who hold such views, though, the only way to avoid the fatalism supposedly provided by a determinate, real future is to get rid of it. Indeed, one often sees reasoning such as the following: “If it really is determinately the case that I will eat a burger even before I do it, then I had to do it. So there can be no determinate future featuring my eating of a burger – otherwise my eating would not have been a free action. So there is no future.”
Diekemper (2007, 429) expresses this attitude of the No-Future theorist as follows:
…if the event of the Third World War exists eternally, then in what sense is that event—prior to its occurrence—not inexorable? The [No-Future theorist’s] intuition is that there is no sense in which it is not inexorable; and so, in order to preserve the potentiality of the future, many philosophers of time have rejected the B-Theoretic doctrine of an existent future.
Tooley (1997, 45-46) describes (but does not endorse) such an argument as denying the existence of future facts because such facts would thereby be unpreventable, even by an omnipotent person. Lucas (1973) seems to endorse this sort of reasoning as, in several places, does Prior and those many who would equate eternalism with a deterministic block universe. Indeed, many people seem to take a real, determinate and concrete future to be a very grave threat to our freedom.
These sorts of lines of thought generally proceed from a largely Incompatibilist or Libertarian view of free will, according to which the predetermination of what I shall do by facts beyond my control render my actions thereby unfree. Let us state a formal, stripped down version of the Incompatibilist view as follows:
Incompatibilism: If either □N F(p) or □N F(~p), then ~Free (F(p)).
Here, ‘p’ stands in for some claim ascribing an action to me and ‘F’ is an operator making the claim future-tensed. ‘Free(F(p))’ claims that I am free with respect to whether I will perform the action described in ‘p’. Assuming a standard logic for tense, we can take ~F(p) to either entail or be equivalent to F(~p). It is important to note that the modality expressed in the modal operators here is not one of absolute metaphysical modality or logical modality. Rather, such a modality is meant to be understood in terms of the temporally-relative modality of ‘accidental’ or ‘temporal’ necessity – the modality of inevitability at a given time and future contingency. The basic idea of this sort of modality is that something is possible with respect to a given time if and only if it is compatible with the facts about that very time (plus the laws of nature and perhaps facts about earlier times). The Incompatibilist might add here that something can only be something I really have a choice about or say in if it is possible in this sense. So we should take ‘□t ’to mean roughly the same as ‘It is inevitable at t that…’ and ‘t’ to mean roughly the same as ‘It is not inevitable that it is not the case at t that…’. All modal operators in this paper should be understood to express this sort of modality and, unless stated otherwise, all verbs should be taken as present-tensed. In our statement of Incompatibilism, then, the subscript ‘N’ should be taken as referring to the current time, so that the whole claim can be read, ‘If it is either now inevitable that p or now inevitable that not-p, then I am not free with respect to whether it will be the case that p.’
On this sort of incompatibilist view we are looking at, then, causal determinism of the ordinary sort is straightforwardly incompatible with free will since if my performing a certain action at a later time is now causally determined, it will not be possible now for me to do otherwise and hence I will not have the power to do so and hence will not be free with respect to that action.
So far, however, none of this gives us any lack of free action when conjoined merely to a determinate, real future. On its own, Incompatibilism may appear prima facie compatible with a determinate future unless we add some further assumption or set of assumptions. As one might expect, though, some No-Future folks will also accept the following controversial principle (though not always stated in this precise form) :
Fatalistic Principle (FP): If Det(F(p)) then □N F(p).
Here, ‘Det’ should be read as ‘It is determinate that…’. I suppose the basic intuition behind FP (which seems on many interpretations to play the key role in Aristotle’s “sea-battle” discussion in De Interpretatione) is that if it is already true that I will perform a certain action, then this settled and hence, in order for it to be possible for me to do otherwise, I would have to be able to causally effect what is already settled (that is, the truth that I will perform that action) – an activity which to many seems impossible or at least beyond the powers of mortal ken. In other words, given that it is already true that I will A in 2010, for it to be possible for me to do otherwise than A, I would need to continue to have the ability to causally influence whether I will do A in 2010. But that would require an ability to causally influence whether it is now or was in the past true that I will do A in 2010. But since those things are already settled, it is supposed, I can have no such ability since those sorts of things cannot be causally influenced. So, on this intuition, if it is indeed true that I will perform an action it must also be necessary now that I do it – it is inevitable and completely unavoidable. And it is precisely this principle, FP, which in conjunction with Incompatibilism, entails the controversial position held by many that freedom with respect to some future action requires that it be indeterminate whether I will take such an action. From Incompatibilism and FP, then, we get:
Openness Principle (OP): If either Det(F(p)) or Det(F(~p)), then ~Free(F(p)).
And so these No-Future theorists will take it that, since there are instances where I am free to do something, there are therefore instances where my doing it in the future is indeterminate. So the Incompatibilist who accepts the Fatalist Principle will thereby be committed to OP and hence, if they believe in free will, will be forced to reject the idea that there is a real and determinate future. No-Futurism follows.
II. The Fatalistic Principle Strikes Back
That OP follows from the assumptions of the previous section is, I think obvious. But that these same assumptions are compatible with the existence of free will is, I think, taken for granted. As I hope to show now, one need not make any further substantive assumptions beyond what many No-Futurists already accept to reach the conclusion that Incompatibilism and FP, together with a common No-Futurist assumption, jointly entail that we have no determinate freedom, so that rejecting a determinate future will not help us to save free will after all.
A key assumption that we need here is one that is widely adopted by many No-Futurists, and this is just the denial of bivalence for future contingents – that is, that for any statement which neither is inevitable nor whose negation is inevitable, such a statement is neither true nor false (not that it is indeterminate whether it is true or false, but rather genuinely neither). We could take this to mean either that future contingents possess a third truth-value separate from truth and falsity, or simply that they are truth-valueless. I do not believe which one we choose will make much of a difference in what follows, so long as we deny bivalence in either case. On this sort of view, for some truth to be determinate is simply for it to be true (and vice versa) and for it to be indeterminate is simply for it to fail to be true and also fail to be false. That is, indeterminacy is a third option – a claim may be true, false, or neither. This view, then, is committed to the following principle:
Alethic Determinacy (AD): If p then Det(p).
Now what should someone who rejects bivalence think about the law of the excluded middle for future contingent propositions? That is, should we take the following as true or not:
Future Excluded Middle (FEM): Either F(p) or ~F(p).
One option here is to adopt a supervaluationist branching future view, accept the truth of FEM, and save the law of the excluded middle. On this strategy, there are many possible futures branching out from the present (and hence many possible complete histories) and if a given claim is true on all branches (that is, on all histories) then it will count as true, if false on all branches then it will be false, and indeterminate otherwise. And since on every history the action described in p occurs or it does not, FEM is also true on every history and hence is true simpliciter. Supervaluation, however, will not be much help here. Consider that we can here distinguish between two notions or modes of truth – there is super-truth (truth at all possible histories) and there is local truth (truth at a given possible history). Super-truth, then, is merely local truth relative to every possible history. A statement like p, then, can be locally true relative to some possible history while failing to be super-true. Local truth, that is, does not entail super-truth. Since Det(p) is generally taken to be true just in case p is super-true, p can be locally true without being determinately true. That is, for a given possible history, it could be true that p while false that Det(p). But this means that, given the existence of some future contingent, AD fails to be locally true relative to every possible future. If we take AD to be super-true just in case it is true at every possible history, then it follows that AD is in fact not super-true.
Along similar lines, we could show that on this understanding of the branching time framework that for any statement F(p) which reports a future contingent, it ends up the case that Det(F(~Det(p))), from which it would follow via the No-Futurist’s principles that I am not free as to whether or not it will be determinately the case that p. This may be better than it not being the case that I am free as to whether or not it will be the case that p, but for someone who wants a robust Libertarian free will it does not seem all that much better. There are various moves that could be tried at this point to avoid all these apparently bad consequences, but in every case I think the rejection of AD will be more plausible than any view which happens to retain it. The truth that AD is trying to capture, it seems, is simply the triviality that if it is determinate that p then it is determinate that p. This is admittedly a rather short dismissal of other supervaluationist alternatives, but for now I will leave the discussion at that and simply assume from now on that such gambits will not ultimately deserve our acceptance.
Supposing, however, we simply stipulate that AD is true at every possible history really is necessarily true in the strongest sense and really does hold even in each of these possibilities. In that case, it is important to remember that FEM is supposed to be true at each history. But that is simply because, for each history, either one disjunct is true or the other is. Given a possible history where F(p), it is also true that either F(p) or ~F(p), and the same for any history where ~F(p). But then, by AD, in histories where F(p), it will also be true that Det(F(p)) and hence that either Det(F(p)) or Det(~F(p)). Similarly for histories where ~F(p). But then, by OP, it follows that in each of these possible histories there is no freedom. But since this holds for every possible history, it holds simpliciter and hence there is no freedom, period.
Since the supervaluationist option was a bust, the anti-bivalentist might instead suppose that FEM, like its atomic constituents, is neither true nor false. This would be a desperate move indeed but perhaps not hopeless. Let us introduce a new operator, ‘Ind’, which obeys the following rule: For any claim c, ‘Ind(c)’ is true just in case c is neither true nor false; it is false otherwise. ‘Ind’ should, then probably be interpreted as saying something like ‘It is indeterminate that…’. Since FEM, we are supposing, is neither true nor false, the following proposition will be true:
Indeterminate Excluded Middle (IEM): Ind(Either F(p) or ~F(p)).
But since ‘Either F(p) or ~F(p)’ entails that I am not free with respect to F(p), it follows that either I am not free with respect to F(p) or it is indeterminate whether I am not free with respect to F(p). That is, ‘~Free(F(p))’ will be the case or ‘Ind(~Free(F(p)))’ will be the case. The former is straightforwardly inconsistent with a Libertarian position, but what of the latter? Since ‘Ind(F(p))’ will only be true just in case ‘Ind(~F(p))’ is also, it follows that ‘Ind(Free(F(p)))’ is also true and hence it is not determinate that I am free with respect to F(p). That is, it is indeterminate whether I have free will. This might be slightly better than having no free will at all but, again, if it is better, it is not much so. After all, a genuine Libertarian is surely going to be committed to its actually being the case – to its being determinately true, in fact – that I am free, not just that it is neither true nor false that I am free. So even if this gambit does not exclude free will, we can surely describe it as excluding determinate free will and that is about as bad. From now on, I will drop the ‘determinate’ adjective and simply assume that the free will we are interested in here is supposed to be determinate. Whether FEM or IEM is accepted, then, freedom is excluded. Instead of securing freedom, it looks like our No-Futurist must reject it.
III. Why No-Futurists Must Accept the Fatalistic Principle
To get out of this mess, it seems we must reject one of the following: free will, Incompatibilism, FP, AD, or FEM. Since I cannot see how anyone would plausibly accept all the other assumptions and yet reject FEM as false, I will leave that option aside. The live options, then, are these: either give up free will, reject Incompatibilism, give up the Fatalist Principle, or accept bivalence and reject AD. Although I would opt for both of the latter two options, it is perfectly open to the Libertarian No-Futurist to take only one. That option, however, cannot be the rejection of the Fatalist Principle – the No-Futurist is committed to this principle by their very views about the future and, hence, the only way for a No-Futurist to adopt a Libertarian position is for them to accept bivalence and reject AD. What I claim, then, is that the following is true:
No-Future and Fatalism (NFF): If No-Future then FP.
NFF, of course should probably be restricted in such a way that it is true only of future truths – that is, as far as facts about the future are concerned, if No-Future, then if these future things are determinate they are necessary. Take this as understood. But how does FP follow from a No-Future view? Here is one way to go – we can say that it follows largely due to the principle that Truth Supervenes on Being (TSB) – a difference in truth value for a given proposition across two worlds requires a difference in the objects or instantiations of properties between those two worlds (that is, a difference in what there is and how things are between them). I take this to be an intuitively obvious principle (even though some may want to deny it) – after all, if the truth of a statement floats freely of the way the world is, we lose any grip on its really being about anything in the world in the first place.
But now, given TSB, if we believe No-Future we are going to be hard pressed not to accept FP as well. After all, if there is no future then all facts about the future must be grounded in the present (or the present together with the past) plus any relevant nomological laws. So if it is determinately true that p, then that fact is grounded in (let’s say) present facts. But for p to be temporally contingent, it must be temporally possible at this time both that p and that ~p. And that is only so if the intrinsic facts about the present (along with, perhaps, the past) do not determine that p. But if that were so, then given No-Future the present facts could not ground the truth that p. But, again, given No-Future and TSB, if that were so then it cannot be determinately true that p. So if it is determinate at this time, it is not possible at this time for it to be otherwise. Hence for the No-Futurist, NFF follows straightforwardly from TSB.
None of the various versions of the kinds of truthmakers No-Futurists give to ground truths about the future will work here. Take, for instance, the view that what grounds truths about the future are simply the current states of things plus the laws of nature. This is straightforwardly ruled out by Incompatibilism as a way of grounding truths about future free actions. Consider also the view that there are primitive, irreducible future-tensed properties such as being such that one will do A possessed by individuals or the world which ground truths about the future (see Bigelow 1996). The having of some such properties rather than some others clearly will be temporally necessary. Appeals to temporally distributional properties will seem to fare similarly, as will verificationists or dispositionalist accounts of the grounding of future truths. If any of those posited truthmakers now ground in the present what will happen in the future, such future occurrences are inevitable – that is, they are temporally necessary.
An ersatzist about times such as Bourne (2006) or Crisp (2007) – who treats times as abstract objects arranged in order via primitive ersatz earlier-than relations – will not do any better here. Such a view treats future truths as being grounded in what is represented as being the case by an ersatz time which is ersatz-later than the ersatz time which correctly represents the present. So if some such time represents p then it is true that p at the corresponding distance from the present time. But this is just as inevitable as any of the other options. These states of abstract objects are, after all, present states – as in all the other options, they render my future actions temporally necessary. Similar sorts of views which make future truths depend on God’s memories or will or some such divine mental state will obviously not do any better.
The argument for NFF I have been giving is similar to ones that have been given in the literature attempting to show that Libertarians and their ilk must reject bivalence or at least determinacy for at least some future-tensed statements. Rhoda, Boyd, and Belt (2007), for instance, argue that the guarantee by present conditions of the truth of future-tensed statements about my actions is straightforwardly inconsistent with Incompatibilism (though they do not use this exact terminology). And Michael Rea (2006) has skillfully argued that, if Presentism is true and all statements about the future are determinate then, since future truths about someone’s actions have not in the past been even partly grounded in the person such truths are about (since they were true before that person even existed), such a person never has and never will have a choice about such actions. And hence such a person will not be free with respect to such actions.
Rea considers ways someone might try to resist fatalism, but most of the ways out of principles like FP end up being available only to one who actually believes in a real, concrete and determinate future. At this point, though, one might think that if TSB is rejected for statements about my future contingents (as might be done by certain Molinists) then we would have a way out of NFF. But, as Rea (2006, 521-522) has in effect argued, even if TSB is false (as claimed by Merricks 2007), if No-Future is true and all statements of future contingents are now either true or false, then such ‘future contingents’ will indeed be temporally necessary. After all, these ungrounded truths are still present (or past) truths and, being ungrounded, they are not made true by anything outside of the present (or past). So the fact that F(p) is a wholly present fact, not dependent on anything future, and this fact guarantees or fixes what will occur in the future. Hence, any future contingents will be inevitable. So whether or not TSB is true, NFF follows once we accept a No-Future view.
IV. The No-Futurist’s Options
Given the truth of NFF, the No-Futurist is thereby stuck with FP. Hence, per the discussion of the previous sections, for the No-Futurist, the only options left are to abandon No-Futurism (so they can reject FP), abandon free will, accept compatibilism, or take bivalence on board. So for someone committed to both No-Futurism and Incompatibilist freedom, the only option is to accept bivalence and reject AD. Presumably, this would have to involve invoking some kind of perhaps entirely non-semantic metaphysical indeterminacy where F(p)’s indeterminacy is compatible both with its truth and its falsity – that is, where it really is either true or false, and hence bivalence holds for it, yet it is simply indeterminate which. On this view, indeterminacy would not be some third option over and above truth and falsity, but rather a kind of primitive state where the world is simply indeterminate between the two options. The problem here, of course, would be to make sense of this sort of metaphysical indeterminacy and the idea that something could be true but not determinately so.
Another bivalence-accepting strategy would be to take ‘~F(p)’ as true, and differentiate this from ‘F(~p)’. So far I have been taking these two claims to be either equivalent or for the former to entail the latter. However, were one to differentiate them, denying that one entails the other, and take all ‘will’ claims such as ‘F(~p)’, where they express future contingents, to be false, one could still affirm the truth of ‘~F(p)’. In this case, the inference from IEM to the denial of free will is rendered invalid. The basic idea of this view, then, is to accept bivalence and still get out of my argument by, in effect, denying that ‘will’ and ‘will not’ sentences are genuine contradictories. Contraries, yes, but not contradictories. This strategy, of course, has its own problems dealing with the way we ordinarily treat ‘will’ and ‘will not’ as contradictories and dealing with truth-value links between previous predictions about what were once future contingents and the truth of propositions about these same events occurring in the present..
So, from what we have seen, far from requiring a No-Future view of time, Libertarianism is straightforwardly incompatible with it (or at least with many common forms of it). To escape from this incompatibility, I have suggested two strategies the No-Futurists might make use of, both of which will involve a lot of work, if not substantial difficulties. Whatever the case may be, the denial of bivalence for propositions about future contingents in order to uphold our free will is a self-defeating gesture and No-Futurists who deny bivalence in the name of saving free will are instead attacking the very thing they set out to defend.
WORKS CITED
Aristotle, De Interpretatione
Asher, N., J. Dever, and C. Pappas (draft) “Supervaluations Debugged”
Bigelow, John (1996) “Presentism and Properties” in Tomberlin, James (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 10: Metaphysics. Oxford: Blackwell, 35–52.
Bourne, Craig (2006) A Future for Presentism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cameron, Ross (draft) “Truthmaking for Presentists”
Crisp, Thomas (2007) “Presentism and the Grounding Objection”, Noûs 41.1: 90-109.
Diekemper, Joseph (2007) “B-Theory, Fixity, and Fatalism”, Noûs 41.3: 429-452.
Ludlow, Peter (1999) Semantics, Tense, and Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McGee, V. and B. McLaughlin (1995) “Distinctions without a Difference”, Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 Supplement: 203–251.
Merricks, Trenton (2007) Truth and Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Naylor, Margery Bedford (1980) “Fatalism and Timeless Truth” in Inwagen, Peter (ed.), Time and Cause: Essays Presented to Richard Taylor, 49-65. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Parsons, Josh (2000) “Must a Four-Dimensionalist Believe in Temporal Parts?”, Monist 83.3: 399-418.
__________ (2004) “Distributional Properties” in Jackson, F. and G. Priest (eds.), Lewisian Themes, 173-180. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rea, Michael (2006) “Presentism and Fatalism”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84.4: 511-524.
Rhoda, A., G. Boyd, and T. Belt (2006) “Open Theism, Omniscience, and the Nature of the Future”, Faith and Philosophy 23: 432–59.
Tooley, Michael (1997) Time, Tense, and Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Varzi, Achille (2007) “Supervaluationism and its Logics”, Mind 116: 633-676.
Williamson, Timothy (1994) Vagueness. London: Routledge.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
A Divine Memorial to the Past? Memories in Presentist Truthmaking
In A Treatise on Time and Space, J R Lucas suggests the theory that it is God's memories that ground purported truths about the past. More recently, Alan Rhoda has argued at length for this view, noting that it is common fair among process theists. There are some troubles for this theory, though, which show that such a theory needs to be radically restructured and restated if it is to be at all viable. In this paper, I explore these problems and, in doing so, the question of how exactly to formulate the divine memories theory in a plausible way. It turns out that producing a version of the theory that preserves all of its purported strengths and yet still avoids the problems of the other versions is much more difficult than it seems – and, indeed, we seem to have very good reason to be skeptical that such an ideal version will ever see the light of day.
Presentists take it that everything which exists is present and exists at the present. The past, in a very strong sense, is no longer and the future, correspondingly, is not yet. This creates a problem, however, with accounting for truths purportedly about the past. If only present things exist on the presentist view, in what are presentists supposed to ground past-tensed truths? This ‘Grounding Problem’, as it is sometimes called, has elicited numerous responses, almost all of them attempting to point out some present entities or facts that are supposed to be doing the grounding of past-tensed truths. Some appeal to primitive or brute past-tensed states of affairs or properties, others to arrangements of abstract maximal propositions, and still others to temporally distributional properties (among other things).[1]
Despite such varied responses, many of them have met a number of objections – that they are metaphysically ‘cheating’, that they do not really guarantee the truths they are meant to ground, that they have implausible logical consequences, and so on.[2] One view that might be put forward as an ideal solution to all of these problems is to suppose that all the grounding work for past-tensed truths is done by God’s memories – so that God’s remembering my past trip to
At first blush, the statement of such a view appears rather straightforward:
GMem1: It was the case that p iff God remembers that it was the case that p.
But we quickly run into a problem here – is the content of God’s memories past-tensed or present-tensed? From ordinary memory statements like “God remembers that I went to
GMem2: It was the case that p iff God has a memory whose content is that it was the case that p.
I think, however, that we ought to reject GMem2 and instead assign the past-tense involved in ordinary memory-statements not to the content of the memory state itself but rather to the temporal perspective of the speaker on the content. So “Sam remembers that he hit the ball” tells us (at least) that (1) Sam has a memory whose content is normally expressed with the present-tensed “I am hitting the ball”; and (2) the content of that memory is ascribed to a time earlier than the memory. This situation is similar to that involving statements such as “At one time, Sam believed he was the tallest man in the Communist Party”, where the “was” does not indicate that Sam once believed some past-tensed statement about his comparative height in the Communist Party but rather indicates the speaker’s own current, shifted temporal perspective on the purported obtaining of that content. So the analysis of GMem1 should, perhaps, more exactly read as follows:
GMem3: It was the case that p iff God has a memory whose content is that p.
But why is GMem3 needed by the divine memory theorist as opposed to GMem2 in the first place? Well, consider what would happen if we regarded the content of a memory to be past-tensed as in GMem2. The right-hand side of the biconditional in GMem2 contains exactly what we needed to find grounding conditions for in the first place (that is, its having been the case that p). Because of this fact, GMem2 is simply not a successful statement of the grounding conditions for it having been the case that p – it is plainly circular, since whatever grounds the right side is a function of what does so for the left. The sentence ‘it was the case that p’, even though it is used all on its own on the left-hand side and, arguably, appears in an intensional context on the right, still appears on both sides in a manner objectionable enough to defeat the account. To put it in a different way – to give the right-hand side of the biconditional content requires that we are already independently able to give content to the left (since the content of the right incorporates – or at least is a function of – the content of the left). And doing this for the left-hand side will, among other things, require giving it grounding conditions. But this is just what we cannot do since it is precisely the right-hand side of the biconditional which is meant to do that job for the left-hand side in the first place. As a statement of grounding conditions, GMem2, then, simply fails. So the divine memories theorist should formulate their view as GMem3 has it, not as it is in GMem2. The content of God’s memory must be present-tensed (or even maybe tenseless), not past-tensed as GMem2 would have it.
Now that we have GMem3, do we have yet a perfect formulation of the divine memories view? Unfortunately not – we are instead faced with a brand new problem that needs solving. After all, what makes something a memory in the first place? What seems to make something a memory with the content that p – as opposed to some other attitude towards p – is, at least partly, that it is true that it was the case that p. Additionally, for episodic memory, we would also require both that one has a past (perhaps causal) acquaintance with its being the case that p and that this past acquaintance is the cause of the current memory. If Rhoda (draft) is right that God’s acquaintance with facts is direct and that his current memories are a result of these past acquaintances, this additional condition may be required on all of these divine memories which are meant to be doing the grounding of past truths.
But now there is trouble – as just mentioned, the fact that it was the case that p is one of the grounds for the fact that God has a memory with the content that p. And not just that, if we apply the conditions for episodic memory to God’s memories, then all sorts of past-tensed truths will be involved in grounding the fact that God has a memory with the content that p – including the fact that it was the case that p itself. But, on GMem3, the fact that God has a memory with the content that p is itself supposed to ground the fact that it was the case that p! We clearly have a vicious circle that we somehow must break out of. If we want to keep something like the divine memories view of presentism, I take it that the only option is to come up with some other way of picking out the appropriate mental states which are supposed to be doing the grounding work – that is, other than as memories – and in such a way that we do not already presuppose what we are supposed to be explaining – that is, the truth of things like its having been the case that p.
So, where we let ‘M’ designate some type of mental state of God’s which is supposed to meet these criteria just mentioned, the divine memories view should really be formulated something like as follows:
GM: It was the case that p iff God has a mental state of type M with the content that p.
But, having been forced into GM, the divine memories presentist is now faced with challenges they did not formerly seem to face. Many presentist accounts of the grounding of past truths, for instance, are susceptible to conceivability arguments against their proposed truthmakers. Consider a verificationist account, for instance, on which past truths are grounded in present evidence.[3] If this account were correct then, given the current evidence, it would necessarily follow that we have exactly the past truths we in fact have. But this does not seem right. It is certainly conceivable that our universe have the evidence it in fact has yet have a completely different past (say, because God decided to miraculously make it so at this particular point in time, with no taking into account anything that came before). So it seems false that evidence is what grounds past truths since the two seem to be only contingently related.
Now, one virtue of cashing out divine memories presentism in terms of memories (as it was done in GMem1-3) was that it logically guaranteed the truth that it was the case that p – no conceivability argument was possible against it.[4] But now that we cannot specify M in GM in terms of memories, it looks like the view is probably going to be susceptible to conceivability arguments after all – it seems likely that it will indeed be conceivable that God have a state M with the content that p and yet it fail to be true that it was the case that p. Indeed, it will be conceivable precisely because of this that M is not a memory at all, since (as was already mentioned) to be a memory is at least in part to have some content that p which was formerly the case.
But if one cannot already assume that M is a memory, it is not clear there is any other way of specifying M such that it will logically guarantee the truth that p was the case. M cannot be some kind of belief or knowledge since, unless p is still true, that would imply that God knows or believes something false, which is impossible given divine infallibility. Perhaps it is a kind of perceptual state; but if such a state is to account for cases where p is presently false, it cannot be of the sort that guarantees the veridicality of its content. We cannot appeal to causal facts either, since causal facts, on a presentist view, will be partly about the past and hence in need of the same grounding as the truth that it was the case that p. Rhoda (draft), in his argument for the divine memories view, puts it this way:
This dual reference—to a predecessor state and a successor state—naturally requires our analysis of “c caused e” to quantify over both c and e. The presentist, however, will insist on placing at least one of those quantifiers within the scope of a tense operator. Thus, if “c caused e” then either e exists and it was the case that c exists, or e existed and it was then the case that c had existed.
The only way to save such attempts at typing M seems to be to regard the content of M not as p but as its having been the case that p. But once we do this, we are again faced with the same problem as that which plagued GMem2 since we are explaining its having been the case that p in terms of God having some mental state with the content of its having been the case that p. GMem2 is, in fact, just one particular instance of this class of doomed views. But if, as seems obvious now, such a way is blocked, it does not seem that any way of typing M can get out of the conceivability problem without either running into the problems faced by GMem2 or those faced by GMem3.
So once we properly formulate the divine memories view, one of the main virtues it had over other presentist views seems to evaporate. The divine memory view, as formulated in GM, seems to lack any resources to block conceivability arguments against it. It appears to be possible that God have such states and yet the past be different than it in fact was. But the only alternatives to this version seem to be versions like GMem2 and GMem3 which seem to be plainly unviable. So GM seems to be the only remaining version of the divine memories view left on the table, problems and all. But if the presence of such problems is taken to be good evidence against a version of presentism, as well it should, that means we have good reason to look elsewhere for an appropriate theory of time and persistence – either to a non-presentist view or to some presentist theory which can in fact do better. Despite whatever initial appeal it might have had, it seems then that the divine memories constitute little more than a divine memorial to the past and are simply not the presentist truthmakers some presentist-leaning theists may wish them to be. God may be ultimate or exalted and much may depend on him for its existence, but just not in this particular way in this particular case.
WORKS CITED
Bigelow, John (1996) “Presentism and Properties” in Tomberlin, James (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 10: Metaphysics.
Bourne, Craig (2006) A Future for Presentism.
Cameron, Ross (draft) “Truthmaking for Presentists”
Craig, William Lance (2000a) The Tensed Theory of Time: A Critical Examination.
_____ (2000b) The Tenseless Theory of Time: A Critical Examination.
Crisp, Thomas (2007) “Presentism and the Grounding Objection” Noûs 41.1: 90-109.
Hartshorne, Charles (1984) Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes.
Keller, Simon (2004) “Presentism and Truthmaking” in Zimmerman, Dean (ed.),
Lucas, J. R. (1973) A Treatise on Time and Space.
Parsons, Josh (2005) “Truthmakers, the Past, and the Future” in Beebee and Dodd (eds.), Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate.
Rhoda, Alan (draft) “Presentism, Truthmakers, and God”
Sider, Theodore (2003) Four Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time.
[1] See Bigelow 1996, Bourne 2006, Cameron draft, Craig 2000a and 2000b, Crisp 2007, Keller 2004, and
[2] For various criticisms see, for instance, Cameron draft, Sider 2003, and Rhoda draft.
[3] See, for some brief discussion, Parsons 2005.
[4] Rhoda draft says something similar in favor of the divine memories view over and against many other presentist views.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
An Abridged Introduction to Christian Ethics
From a paper I wrote for an Intro to Christian Ethics class I took during the Winter 2010 Intersession:
There are a number of different questions the study of ethics may address. One might want to know which things are good or evil, or right or wrong, and may also want to know what makes these things so. One may focus these sorts of questions on things as diverse as motives, actions, character, lives, even entire communities or social structures. To focus simply on, say, motives or actions alone, however, leaves the false impression that being ethical is simply a matter of, in each discrete situation, doing what is best or right in that situation in isolation from everything else. Instead, we should see that actions and motives are shaped by and in turn shape a person’s character. Actions are not simply isolated events but integral parts of a life-long process of character-expressing and character-building and hence cannot be considered apart from this project of self-formation.
Even this is too limited, though, since one’s character and character-building project itself falls into the broader scope of and provides a kind of personal frame for one’s life as a whole. It is not simply isolated actions or even actions as part of one’s character-project that matters but also the shape of one’s life as a whole – what kind of life, beginning to end, should I have? Given what has come before, how can I make the best overall shape for my entire life, taken in its entirety?
But we still do not have enough, for our lives are not lived isolated from others or from our environment – these are all closely interconnected, overlapping and interlocking. Ultimately, we must also ask how our lives, actions, and so on, ought to fit into the communities, social structures, and cosmos we find ourselves in. And this will ultimately involve our role and fit within the broader story of God’s interactions and interrelations with his created world. The goal of this paper, then, is to provide an Evangelical introduction to Christian ethics which will focus on the ethical task of our attempt to live ethically within the context of all of these various roles and responsibilities in which we may find ourselves. Due to space, some of these aspects of our ethical lives will receive more attention than others, but that should not be seen as a judgment that these aspects are necessarily more central or important.
I. The Biblical Story
An Evangelical ethic is based first and foremost on the belief in the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture in matters of faith and practice. Children of the Fall, we have finite minds corrupted by sin. God does not suffer such limitations and hence a reliance on the arbitration of Scripture, however treacherous working out how to apply it may be, is a must. In particular, the biblical story ought to be a key starting point in our understanding of ethics. The gospel – the biblical story of God’s mighty works and relations with his people, particularly as centered in Christ – is the key ingredient here. Creation, Fall, Exodus/Torah, Exile, Return, Jesus, Church, Eschaton – all of these are important for understanding our place in the unfolding story (and for understanding the place of various biblical commands in the story in relation to our own respective places[1]) and much of it is vital for thinking in Christian ways about our natures, roles, and responsibilities in a fallen world.
God created everything good, making humanity in his own image and giving them the great goods and awesome responsibilities of stewardship over the creation, marriage, relationships, and work. Humanity has fallen into sin, however, and all of creation is shaken and marred by our sin – we ruin creation, live in broken or destroyed marriages or relationships, and indulge in soul-destroying, unsatisfying, or unethical work. But God has redeemed us and creation, making a way for a renewed humanity and renewed creation set at rights, united by love for God, humanity, and creation. The new age, the kingdom of God, where everything is perfect, has come but is not fully consummated or realized – the age of sin and death overlaps with the age of righteousness and life. Christians live in the midst of this crossroads, having begun the life of the kingdom which they will live forever, but also remaining part of the sin-marred world.
The world and everything in it is God’s and God in Christ is bringing all things under his heavenly rule which has already begun with Christ.[2] The church is the new humanity for the new creation, called out of the old, composed of the old, and living amidst the old. God’s kingdom – his imperial rule that has been won in Christ and is now being applied – is not the same as the church and is not to be identified with a particular place, people, community, or nation.[3] It is an act of God and it is the church’s task to live in accordance with it as the people of the kingdom, the people of God’s current phase in the biblical story. The whole world is fallen and Christ died for the whole world.
II. Good reasons and good actions
Christian ethics is traditionally against the idea that it is only the consequences of an action that matters for assessing goodness or badness, right or wrong. The ends do not necessarily justify the means from the Christian standpoint. Instead, in deliberating about what to do, one thinks about and weighs all the various reasons for or against various courses of actions – the ethical agent is by definition a (at least minimally) rational agent. The sorts of reasons (or sources of reasons) we ought to consider in deciding what to do are many – moral principles, duties and responsibilities, context, consequences, non-moral facts, our own motives or emotions, character or roles, created human nature, revelation, etc. Scripture and the Christian tradition in particular are both excellent resources for various kinds of reasons that might be relevant in any particular situation.
When evaluating what to do, however, we need to always be careful of ethical consistency. All persons have dignity and are of infinite value – each is made in the image of God, is loved by God, and is purchased by his grace expressed on the Cross. Each person, then, is of incomparable worth and we should not treat ourselves as somehow privileged to special exemptions from moral considerations. This consistency, in dealing with others as ends-in-themselves like myself, requires me to be careful with the reasons I act on. If I would not want everyone else to do something in the same sort of situation for the same sort of reason (or if it would defeat the whole purpose of the action if this was so), then I am being inconsistent if I go ahead and do it anyway[4] – I am treating myself as a special exception over and above everyone else. This is the rational basis for the Golden Rule.
III. Good actions and good persons
In discerning the moral value of an action, there are different levels or contexts in which we may evaluate it. We may evaluate the deed on its own as a physical act, ignoring what is “behind” the action or what is going on inside the person who performs it. A more stringent context is to evaluate it also in terms of whether the agent exhibited proper motives or reasoning in performing the action. Going still further and deeper, we may ask whether the act expresses a good character trait which the agent has and from which they are acting. And finally, we may ask whether all of this is finally rooted in a regenerate heart whose foundational direction is towards God and exists in right relationship with him. Actions, then, can be good in a broader sense of being examples of proper physical actions or proper physical actions resulting from proper motives and reasoning but fail to be good in a narrower sense of, say, also resulting from a good character and proper relationship with God (cf., maybe, Romans 14:23).
We do not begin life with unqualified, fully formed good characters, however. Nor do we begin in proper relationship with God. As somewhat-free creatures, we have been given a limited power of self-formation. Our character constrains our options, depending on how deeply it is rooted, and even effects how we see, feel, or value things. At the beginnings of our lives, freedom expresses itself through the ability to form different characters and take a wide variety of actions. At the end, freedom or responsibility expresses itself through the inability to form a different character or choose from certain actions – the fixed character is itself a result of this freedom. On such a picture, we are responsible for our fixed character and the actions that flow from it.[5]
Our self-making projects proceed through a process of habit-formation. It is by doing virtuous actions of a certain sort that one develops that virtue[6] and the same goes for vice. Of course, at first one will not be doing such virtuous actions virtuously. For that, one must have a steady character – that is, a virtuous one – from which the virtuous action is flowing, one must have knowledge of the action, and must choose the virtuous action for its own sake.
Being virtuous, though, means not merely doing the appropriate actions but having the appropriate feelings in the correct proportions and with regard to the correct things, having appropriate motives, and taking pleasure and pain in the appropriate things in the appropriate amount. If one is not virtuous, one’s feelings will not always be appropriate, nor will one’s actions or the apportionment of pleasure or pain. Pleasure is the natural response to getting what we most want or from doing what is most natural to us and pain the opposite. The bad person will take great pleasure in bad things and will be pained by good things (or at least find them boring or unexciting compared to bad things) precisely because they are bad and their character is off. Certain things, after all, can only be understood from the inside. The person who does not already believe in or properly see right and wrong will not understand morality or see how or why certain judgments are true or why they should be followed. They will not see what the big deal is or why one should be moral (either generally or in a particular instance). The truths of Christianity are similar. The person who has not internalized such things simply will not have a mind appropriately formed to handle such things in the appropriate manner.[7]
Following in the spirit of Kierkegaard, we can thus distinguish three phases of life. In the initial one, one is not an ethical person and one does not grasp ethical truths or seek to be ethical. In the next stage, one seeks the ethical and can now have some understanding of it. The last stage of human fulfillment – the pinnacle of human life – is the religious life, how our lives were meant to be. Here we now seek the religious and have some understanding of it – our life is now organized under a single guiding light, it is focused, free, and unified and not divided or enslaved by all the various goals or external goods which vie for attention. In this stage you “become who you are” – that is, your most important identities line up in a single true identity in Christ. The less we line up with our design as bearers of God’s image, though, the less we live up to being human. To be fully human would be to make oneself into a complete human being – fully formed in complete perfection, something which will not likely occur within the course of our earthly lives. To tie all of these threads together, to become who you really are, to progress to the fullness of your own humanity, requires making yourself a virtuous, religious person, slowly progressing in understanding and knowledge but driven along initially in the faith that things will work out.
This discussion so far points out some of the reasons why, the more firmly a vice is entrenched, the harder it is to get rid of it – one’s character, actions, feelings, and so on get formed around and by performing these vicious deeds. And the more one’s character gets formed as a vicious one, the more one will be vicious and the more vicious one is the more one will form a vicious character, and so on. Both virtue and vice in this sense are self-perpetuating cycles. This is why it is so important to seek virtue as early as possible and to teach others to do likewise, wherever they are at – each vicious action forms one’s character and actions for the future and begins or renews or firms up a cycle of viciousness that could potentially destroy a person morally.
Since we do not begin with original flawlessness, however, and do not live in a perfect world, our processes of ethical formation will almost necessarily involve sinning – this will simply be part of the process that we should accept. Just as one learns to ride a bike partly through making mistakes, overcorrecting (and hence making more mistakes), slowly zeroing in on a proper way of doing things, so goes the process of learning to live. We must act in a timely fashion and hence cannot spend all our time analyzing situations to make sure we are always doing the right thing. If we analyze too much, we will miss opportunities to do good and will not grow. We never have perfect information, perfect reasoning, perfect character or emotions, or perfect perceptions of the values of things. Instead, the process of acting and living in the world will involve taking ethical risks and sometimes, frankly, falling down and then learning from our mistakes. Paradoxically, to over-analyze and make it one’s primary goal on each occasion to make as sure as possible that one is not sinning results in stunted ethical growth and a decrease in one’s ability to make sure one is not sinning or to fulfill one’s roles in life.
Instead, we lean on God and the power of the Holy Spirit to guide us in our formation process[8] and trust in his grace that he will forgive us when we inevitably do mess up and will aid is in getting back up on our feet again. God regenerates our hearts, our innermost selves, and then works from there. Only in his power can we hope to complete our projects of formation (Philippians 1:6). Until then, we practice living our eternal lives now, but in the context of our fallen selves and fallen world, slowly being conformed to the image of Christ, who is himself the image of God par excellence.[9]
IV. Good persons and good communities
Every person is in relationships and has roles and responsibilities in the context of these and in the context of the various social structures and communities in which they find themselves. As Christians, the task is to live faithfully and responsibly in these contexts in which God has placed us. Not everyone can do or help with everything, not everyone has been called to give of the same amount of their resources or in the same way, but everyone is still called in some way or another to do and be a light in their own contexts.
Of course, not everyone has the same vocation or calling either in the church or outside of it (cf. I Corinthians 12, Romans 12). The church itself is the community which provides a context for Christian ethical formation and cooperation both in communal formation and in transformation of the world – a springboard for the kingdom-transformation of the entire cosmos. The church is an instrument to create and seek out justice in the world, to spread the gospel in word and in deed, and to care for and promote our shared creation.
Government, family, marriage, and the world as a whole have all been instituted by God as special structures or contexts for responsible, ethical living. How we live in the particularities of our lives is in part dependent on where we find ourselves with respect to these different institutions. The
V. Good God
Without love, none of this ethical stuff is going to work for long. Proper love of God, self, others, and creation ought to be at the heart of all that the church does, even if it cannot always be the only motivation or reason behind things. All things, at least in part, ought to be done for the love and glory of God, not merely for what we or others can get out of it.[12] Along with loving others, if we can do this, we will have “fulfilled the law”. In biblical terms, we might speak here of righteousness – right relations with God, self, other persons, and the rest of creation. Complete, universal love and righteousness awaits the Eschaton and the final consummation of God’s new creation.
[1] For example: as the New Testament affirms, at least some of the Old Testament laws were accommodations to less-than-ideal practices and structures then present, trying to limit them even. These laws were addressed to
[2] As such, we as Christians are stewards of what God has given us – of our money, our time, our skills, creation, our very selves, and so on. None of this is ours but has been given to us as a responsibility to take care of on behalf of God, who is working on the renewal of all creation. Cf. the Parable of the Talents.
[3] Thus identifying one’s own or one’s own nation’s cause or interests with God’s is not a good idea. Patriotism – proper love and sense of duty towards one’s own country – is good, but not at the expense of hatred or unloving neglect of other countries.
[4] Cf. Kant’s ideas here. Section III, meanwhile, will be more influenced by Aristotelian ideas, particularly as they have come down through the Christian philosophical tradition.
[5] Consider two kinds of perfection: perfection as original flawlessness versus perfection as completion. Adam and Eve, prior to their sin, were perfect in the first sense – there were no moral flaws since there was as yet no exact moral character (they had just begun their self-formation) and hence they were utterly blameless. Now consider the other end of the self-formation process. At this end, one might be perfect in the second sense by holding a fixed, maximally good moral character.
Suppose someone is on the road to completion – their character is neither fixed nor yet maximally good. Since they are morally incomplete in this sense, they may choose wrong or not. The complete, however, cannot – they have completed the ethical project. So freedom expresses itself in flawlessness through the possibility of falling into vice while it expresses itself in completion through the impossibility of the same. Our time of making, however, can be ended with ourselves ethically incomplete and so not able to go on to completion.
[6] Following many others in the virtue tradition, I include among the virtues not just the “ethical” virtues as we normally understand them but also personal excellences which may vary from person to person. The duty to develop ourselves into virtuous persons, then, includes not just developing a character that results in “good actions” but also developing our own natural talents and abilities. A good character, in this sense, will be slightly different, then, for different people since different people possess different natural talents or abilities. Stewardship of one’s own self will involve personal as well as more narrowly moral goods.
[7] Cf. this paragraph with some of Augustine’s similar ideas.
[8] Tradition, Scripture, other Christians, the promptings of our own hearts, etc. are all tools that the Spirit can use to communicate with us. The Spirit guides both generally and in specific situations where God is calling us to not just any permissible or correct action but a specific action he wants for us to take.
[9] Spiritual disciplines will play a key role – not as necessarily good ends in themselves but rather as important tools in eternal-life-training and in personal formation.
[10] Hence, it is like the first bursts of color across an otherwise colorless page of a child’s coloring book, enlivening various parts but not necessarily filling them fully yet with color either.
[11] Christians are therefore subject to those civil laws which are just and have a responsibility to them and to their nations and governments, but their first loyalty is always to God, not to their nation or its laws or government. Much of the way I have framed this section has been inspired by Bonhoeffer’s works.
[12] Hence, I have to disagree with John Piper’s notion of “Christian Hedonism”, which gets proper motivational structures, in a sense, upside down.
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