The less Rey knows, the less he knows it

Apropos my post on straw man arguments in the philosophy of religion, reader Bobcat calls my attention to this article by philosopher of mind Georges Rey, which purports to show that theism, when held to by anyone with at least “a standard Anglo-European high school education,” necessarily involves self-deception. And for Rey, that includes – indeed, maybe especially includes – highly intelligent theists who happen to be philosophers. Rey starts out by acknowledging that he is “not a professional philosopher of religion and has no special knowledge of theology.” With that much, anyway, the reader can agree, for Rey’s article proves it conclusively. Why Rey thought himself nevertheless qualified to open his mouth on this subject is another question entirely, and the answer is by no means clear. I’ll leave it to those interested in plumbing the psychological depths of academic blowhards to consider whether self-deception might be a factor.

Now, my longtime readers know that I am loath ever to indulge in polemics, but I’m afraid in this one case the temptation is simply too great to bear. For Rey’s article is not merely mistaken on this or that point. It is not merely bad. As the kids would say, it totally sucks. Indeed, although it is of course better written than the average freshman term paper, it is even less well-informed. I apologize to those whose tender ears find it hard to bear such un-collegial harshness (not that Rey himself gives a hang about that vis-à-vis his theistic colleagues). All I can say in my defense is: Read the thing yourself and see.

Rey is not an unintelligent man. Indeed, he is a very intelligent man, and anyone who wants to understand the clever ways in which contemporary materialists attempt to surmount the many difficulties facing their position would do well to read his work in the philosophy of mind. It’s mostly wrong, of course, but still intelligent and worth reading. The article in question is another story. It is an object lesson in how ignorance coupled with arrogance can lead an intelligent man to make a fool of himself. (Not that another one is needed in this Age of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens.)

If any reader out there wants to evaluate Rey’s efforts at amateur psychoanalysis, knock yourself out. I’m more interested in the excuse Rey thinks he has for indulging in psychoanalysis in the first place. Why accuse even educated theists of being, not merely mistaken, but self-deceived? The reason, Rey repeats ad nauseam, is that the traditional arguments for God’s existence are obviously fallacious, are so bad that he simply can’t believe anyone takes them seriously, commit “blatant sophistries,” etc. Yet surprisingly, he says very little about exactly what the problems with them are supposed to be. As the impatient reader sifts through the trash talk and psychobabble in search of substance, he soon finds, first, that what Rey actually has to say about the arguments probably wouldn’t fill one side of an index card; and second, that it’s all wrong anyway.

One problem with Rey’s discussion of the arguments (such as it is) is the extremely crude, anthropomorphic conception of God he is working with. Like many atheists, he supposes that God is, like us, a “mental being” (as Rey awkwardly puts it) only “not subject to ordinary physical limitations.” Start with a human being, and abstract away the body parts. Then abstract away the limits on knowledge, and expand the range of sensory experience to include immediate perception of every corner of physical reality. Imagine that every experience of willing something is followed by the realization of that which is willed – for example, wanting the Red Sea to part is followed by the parting of the Red Sea, wanting a leper healed is followed by skin returning to normal, and so on. Throw in as well the tendency always to want to do what is right. Etc. The result is something like a super-duper Cartesian immaterial substance with a cosmic Boy Scout’s merit badge, far grander than any of the objects (material or immaterial) familiar from our experience, but differing from them in degree rather than kind.

It is no surprise that, with this “working model” of God, Rey and other atheists think Him comparable to Zeus, gremlins, ghosts, etc. To be sure, something like this conception – a conception Brian Davies has labeled “theistic personalism” and others have called “neo-theism” – has (unfortunately) featured, at least implicitly, in some recent work in philosophy of religion. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the God of classical theism – of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, Leibniz, and countless others. It has absolutely nothing to do with the God of the great Christian creeds or the great Church Councils. That God is not “a being” among others, not even a really grand one, but Being Itself or Pure Act. Concepts like power, knowledge, goodness, intellect, will, etc. do apply to Him, but not (as in theistic personalism) in a univocal sense but rather in an analogous sense (where “analogy” is to be understood not on the model of Paley-style “arguments from analogy” – which in fact apply terms to God and to us in univocal senses – but rather in terms of Aquinas’s famous doctrine of analogy). And attributions of power, knowledge, will etc. to God are all necessarily informed by the doctrine of divine simplicity. Our philosophical conception of Him is not modeled on human beings or on any other created thing; rather, it is arrived at via reflection on what is entailed by something’s being that which accounts for the existence of anything at all.

Rey, it is evident, knows absolutely nothing of all this, nothing of the radical distinction between the classical theistic conception of God and every other conception. But this is not some mere family dispute between theists, something that can be ignored for purposes of making general claims about religion. If you don’t know how classical theism differs from everything else, and in particular from the anthropomorphic conceptions of God underlying tiresome pop atheist comparisons to Zeus and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, then you simply do not and cannot understand the arguments of Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al., and cannot understand the claims of Christianity as it has historically understood itself. It will not do to pretend that what your Uncle Bob or some TV evangelist has said about God can serve well enough as research for an argument against religion, any more than Uncle Bob’s or the evangelist’s conception of quantum mechanics would suffice as a “backgrounder” for an assault on modern physics.

So, Rey simply doesn’t know the first thing about what the people he dismisses as in thrall to self-deception even mean when they talk about God. That’s one problem. The other problem is that he evidently has no idea either of how the main traditional arguments for God’s existence are supposed to work. He is, for example, obviously beholden to the tiresome canard that defenders of the Cosmological Argument never explain why a First Cause would have to have the various divine attributes (unity, intellect, omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, etc.). This, I dare say, is an infallible sign of incompetence vis-à-vis the subject at hand; whenever you are reading an atheist writer who makes this common but preposterous claim, you can safely let out a contemptuous chuckle, close the book, and waste no further time with him, because you can be morally certain that he does not know what he is talking about.

As anyone who has actually cracked either the Summa Theologiae or Summa Contra Gentiles knows, Aquinas (to take just one example) actually devotes literally hundreds of pages of rigorous and painstaking argumentation to deriving the various divine attributes. (He does so in several other works as well.) Similarly detailed argumentation for the divine attributes can be found throughout the Scholastic tradition, in Leibniz and in Clarke, in more recent writers like Garrigou-Lagrange, and indeed throughout the 2,300-year old literature on the traditional theistic arguments beginning with Plato and Aristotle. The allegation that “Even if there’s a First Cause, no one’s ever shown why it would have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.” is simply an urban legend. It persists only because hack atheists like Rey tend to read only other hack atheists, or read serious theistic writers only in tiny snippets ripped from context. (To judge Aquinas’s case for God’s existence by reading only the Five Ways – which were never meant to be anything more than an “executive summary” of arguments whose details are developed elsewhere – is like judging the arguments presented in Rey’s book Contemporary Philosophy of Mind by reading only the analytical table of contents.)

Rey confidently tells us that “the one argument” that tries to show that God “has a mind” – the correct way to put it would be to say that there is in God something analogous to intellect – is, “of course,” Paley’s design argument. But Aquinas’s Fifth Way is another – rather well-known – argument that takes the divine intellect as its focus. Like Richard Dawkins and most other atheists, Rey probably assumes that the Fifth Way is a mere riff on the basic design argument idea, but if so then he is once again just manifesting his ignorance, since the arguments could not be more different. Design arguments take for granted a mechanistic conception of nature, while the Fifth Way appeals to final causes; design arguments are probabilistic, while the Fifth Way is a strict demonstration; design arguments don’t claim to prove the existence of the God of classical theism, while the Fifth Way does just that; design arguments focus on complexity and especially the complexity manifest in living things, while the Fifth Way is not especially interested in either; design arguments have to deal somehow with objections based on evolutionary theory, while the truth or falsity of evolution is utterly irrelevant to the Fifth Way; and so forth. (See The Last Superstition and my forthcoming book Aquinas for the details.)

And then, as I have already indicated, the historically most important versions of the other main theistic arguments (e.g. Aquinas’s, Leibniz’s, or Clarke’s cosmological arguments, Anselm’s ontological argument), when fully worked out, all also claim to show that there cannot fail to be something analogous to intellect in God (alongside the other divine attributes). The thing is, you have to actually read them to know this. Pretty tough break for Uncurious Georges, I know, but believe it or not, philosophy of religion is a little like philosophy of mind in requiring actual research now and again.

As always with these things, it just gets worse the more ink is spilt. “Again, I’m not a scholar of theology,” Rey reminds us, before opining on theology; “however, I’m willing to wager that few of the details [theologians] discuss are of the evidential sort that we ordinarily expect of ordinary claims about the world.” And then – hold on to your hats – he actually gives “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” as an example.

[Cue Don Martin sound effect.]

One wonders whether Rey was the sort of high school geek who desperately tried to prove his athletic bona fides to his locker room tormenters by bragging about all the “touchdowns” he used to make in Little League.

Whatever the answer to that, the all-grown-up Rey can’t resist one more self-inflicted wedgie. On the heels of his learned allusion to medieval angelology, he earnestly considers the question of whether theologians might be guilty of “intellectual sloth.”

Self-awareness, thy name is not Georges Rey.

Well, I’ve wasted enough time on this, so let me close with the following thought. Suppose someone started out an article on why all materialists are necessarily engaged in self-deception by saying “I’m not a professional philosopher of mind and have no special knowledge of the materialist literature. But here goes anyway…” Now, how do you think Rey would…

Ah, never mind.

Churchland on dualism, Part II

Let’s continue our look at Paul Churchland’s critical discussion of dualism in his textbook Matter and Consciousness. I have noted that while Churchland neglects even to mention the most important arguments for dualism and devotes space to arguments that dualist philosophers themselves don’t actually put much stock in, he does at least discuss two arguments that many such philosophers do think important: the argument from introspection and the argument from irreducibility.

As Churchland summarizes the argument from introspection, it states that the thoughts, sensations, desires, and emotions we encounter in introspection are just plainly different from electrochemical activity in neural networks. As he summarizes the argument from irreducibility, it states that language, reasoning, the introspectible qualities of sensations, and the meaningful contents of our thoughts cannot plausibly be accounted for in materialist terms; for example, knowledge of the molecular structure of a rose and/or of the brain would not allow a physicist or chemist to predict what it would be like to experience the smell of a rose.

Churchland’s summary of these arguments is superficial. For example, it is clear from his gloss on the argument from irreducibility that he regards Frank Jackson’s famous “knowledge argument” as an important instance of it. Yet he does not actually state Jackson’s argument, thus denying the unwary reader an opportunity to appreciate its full power. (Churchland does briefly discuss Jackson’s argument later in the book, but only after having disposed of dualism and plumped for materialism, thus giving the misleading impression that the argument is merely a puzzle an already-established materialism must solve rather than an independent argument for dualism in its own right.)

Worse than this, though, are the responses he gives to the two arguments in question, which are presented as decisive but are in fact exceedingly feeble. The argument from introspection has no force, Churchland assures us, because introspection cannot be trusted in light of the fact that there are clear cases from the history of science showing that our natural powers of observation have misled us in other domains. What cases are these? “The red surface of an apple does not look like a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths, but that is what it is,” Churchland says; “The sound of a flute does not sound like a sinusoidal compression wave train in the atmosphere, but that is what it is. [etc.]”

The problem with this response should be obvious, at least to someone with knowledge of the history of the mind-body problem and of modern philosophy generally. In particular, there is an obvious reason why the cases Churchland appeals to not only do not make the point he thinks they do, but in fact make the case for dualism even stronger. For the reason the identities in question – red with such-and-such a light wavelength, sound with a such-and-such a wave pattern, etc. – are plausible in the first place is that the early modern thinkers who inaugurated the “mechanical” conception of nature that informs modern science introduced a crucial distinction between features of the observable world that are observer-relative and those that are observer-independent – the famous primary quality/secondary quality distinction (spelled out in different ways by Galileo, Descartes, Locke, et al.). Colors, sounds, heat, cold, and the like as common sense understands them were relegated to the “observer-relative” side of the divide, and color, sound, heat, cold, etc. as objective, physical properties were, accordingly, redefined in terms of wave activity, the motions of particles, or some other “observer-independent” phenomena.

To see how this works in the case of one of Churchland’s examples, let’s distinguish between RED (in caps) and red (in italics) as follows:

RED: the qualitative character of the color sensations had by a normal observer when he looks at fire engines, “Stop” signs, Superman’s cape, etc. (which is different from the qualitative character of the sensations had by e.g. a color blind observer)

red: whatever physical property it is in fire engines, “Stop” signs, Superman’s cape, etc. that causes normal observers to have RED sensations

Now what seems to common sense to be very different from “a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths” is RED. And sure enough, what science has shown to be identical to “a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths” is only red, not RED. Indeed, part of the reason for distinguishing red and RED is precisely that RED seems clearly not to be identical to something like “a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths,” since the “matrices of molecules” etc. are what they are regardless of who is looking at them while qualitative character is observer-relative.

Part of the problem with Churchland’s response to the argument from introspection, then, is that it commits a fallacy of equivocation: The sense of “red” in which “Red seems different from any property of a matrix of molecules etc.” (i.e. RED) is different from the sense of “red” in which “Science has shown that red really is just a property of a matrix of molecules etc.” (i.e. red). A similar fallacy is committed when he appeals instead to sounds or any other sensory qualities. Thus his examples do not show that our powers of observation have misled us in other domains, and thus should not be trusted in the case of introspection.

That’s one problem with his response. Another is that when we understand what is really going on in the history-of-science examples Churchland appeals to, we can see that they actually strengthen the case for dualism rather than undermine it. For if colors, sounds, heat, cold, etc. as common sense understands them – that is, in terms of their qualitative, phenomenal character – exist only in the mind of the observer and not in the physical world (which is comprised of nothing more than colorless, odorless, soundless, tasteless particles in motion, or whatever), then it seems clear that they cannot exist in the brain, or in any other physical object or system of physical objects, either. Hence they must be immaterial. As I have noted before, that was exactly the conclusion explicitly drawn by early modern thinkers like Cudworth and Malebranche – and at least implicitly by Descartes, Locke, and the other early modern advocates of the “mechanical philosophy” who also happened to be dualists – and by several philosophers since. Their view was that dualism, far from being a pre-scientific holdover destined to be abandon once we have sufficient knowledge of the brain, in fact follows from the very mechanistic conception of matter taken for granted in modern science. The basic problem was one of the themes of Thomas Nagel’s celebrated 1974 article “What is it like to be a bat?” (though Nagel is less committal there about precisely what philosophical conclusion we ought to draw from the problem). It was explicitly appealed to in defense of dualism in Richard Swinburne’s 1986 book The Evolution of the Soul.

Now Churchland or some other materialist might think there is a way to carve up the conceptual territory that doesn’t have such an implication. Fine and dandy, let’s hear it and evaluate it. But he oughtn’t to pretend that the “reductions” in question clearly favor materialism when in fact, historically, they were taken to favor the opposite view! And, especially, he oughtn’t to convey this false impression when purporting to offer an evenhanded presentation of the case for dualism.

Churchland’s treatment of the argument from irreducibility is equally bad. As evidence that our powers of reasoning can in fact be accounted for in materialistic terms, he appeals to the existence of electronic calculators. As evidence that language can be similarly accounted for, he appeals to the existence of “computer languages.” He fails even to mention the most glaringly obvious reply to such “explanations” – that they involve nothing more than a couple of bad puns, since so-called calculators don’t literally “calculate” and computers don’t literally possess “language.” Rather, both electronic calculators and computers generally are inherently devoid of any intentionality or powers of reasoning whatsoever, and have simply been designed by human beings – who do have genuine powers of reasoning and language – to carry out certain operations that aid us in our exercises in calculation and the like by simulating certain mental processes. To “explain” mental phenomena in terms of what computers do is thus precisely to get things back-asswards, since what computers do cannot be accounted for apart from the human minds which assign to their states and operations whatever meanings they have.

Again, the point isn’t that Churchland might not have a way to respond to such arguments. The point is that he pretends that the claims he makes easily and uncontroversially rebut the argument from irreducibility when in fact his claims are extremely controversial even among non-dualists. (John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus are only the two most prominent non-dualist philosophers to have criticized the suggestion that mental processes can be explained in terms of “computational” ones.) The hapless beginning student coming away from Churchland’s discussion would have no idea that his “Gee whiz, look what computers can do!” shtick is, by itself anyway, philosophically about as serious as “proving” that time travel is theoretically possible based only on what one saw once in a Star Trek episode.

Churchland also suggests that whatever explanatory difficulties materialism has are at least equally matched by any dualist attempt to explain mental phenomena in terms of “nonphysical mind-stuff.” Here again Churchland proves only that he doesn’t understand what the main arguments for dualism actually say. As I noted in my first post in this series, those arguments are not quasi-scientific “explanatory hypotheses” in the first place, but rather attempts at metaphysical demonstration. They do not “postulate” “mind-stuff” (whatever that is) any more than mathematicians “postulate” the existence of the number 48 as the “best explanation” of why 47 and 49 do not fall right next to each other in the series of natural numbers. If the arguments fail, they do not fail for the sorts of reasons that explanatory hypotheses fail (considerations of parsimony, lack of fit with existing empirical theory, etc.), any more than an attempted mathematical proof, when it fails, can fail for such reasons.

But that brings us to Churchland’s positive arguments against dualism, which we’ll look at in a third post.

Pre-Christian apologetics

Christianity did not arise in a vacuum.  The very first Christians debated with their opponents in a cultural context within which everyone knew that there is a God and that he had revealed himself through Moses and the prophets.  The question, given that background, was what to think of Jesus of Nazareth.  Hence the earliest apologists were, in effect, apologists for Christianity as opposed to Judaism, specifically.  That didn’t last long.  As Christianity spread beyond Judea into the larger Mediterranean world, the question became whether to accept Christianity as opposed to paganism.  Much less could be taken for granted. 

Still, significant common ground for debate was provided by Greek philosophy.  In Book VIII of The City of God, Augustine noted that thinkers in the Neoplatonic tradition had seen that God is the cause of the existence of the world; had seen also that only what is beyond the world of material and changeable things could be God; had understood the distinction between the senses and their objects on the one hand, and the intellect and its objects on the other, and affirmed the superiority of the latter; and had affirmed that the highest good is not the good of the body or even the good of the mind, but to know and imitate God.  In short, these pagan thinkers knew some of the key truths about God, the soul, and the natural law that are available to unaided human reason.  This purely philosophical knowledge facilitated Augustine’s own conversion to Christianity, and would provide an intellectual skeleton for the developing tradition of Christian apologetics and theology.

Linking for thinking

Busy week and a half coming up, but I’d never leave you without something to read.

Nautilus recounts the debate between Bergson and Einstein about the nature of time.

Preach it.  At Aeon, psychologist Robert Epstein argues that the brain is not a computer.

A new Philip K. Dick television anthology series is planned.  In the meantime, gear up for season 2 of The Man in the High Castle.

John Haldane has been busy in Australia: a lecture on sex, a lecture on barbarism, a Q and A, and an essay on transgenderism and free speech.  Full report from The Catholic Weekly.

How to go to hell

How is it that anyone ever goes to hell?  How could a loving and merciful God send anyone there?  How could any sin be grave enough to merit eternal damnation?  How could it be that not merely a handful of people, but a great many people, end up in hell, as most Christian theologians have held historically?

God, man, and classical theism

In the discussion generated by my recent post on classical theism (both here and at What’s Wrong with the World), several people have raised the question of whether the seemingly remote and abstract God of classical theism can plausibly be thought to take any interest at all in human beings, and in particular whether he can plausibly be identified with the God of Christianity, who definitely has such an interest. The theistic personalist claims that the conceptions are incompatible, which is why he rejects classical theism. I want in this follow-up post to note some of the problems with this position.

1. As Aquinas says, the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments when the authority in question is a human one. But it is still an argument. And it is the strongest of arguments when the authority is divine. Consider, then, that many of the great classical theists referred to in my previous post – thinkers like Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas (to stick just with the A’s) – were also among the greatest of Christian theologians, and not only saw no difficulty in identifying the God of classical theism with the God of the Bible, but appealed to scriptural passages no less than to philosophical considerations in defending classical theism. Consider also that some of the key elements of the classical theist conception of God – such as God’s simplicity, immutability, and eternity – are considered irreformable, de fide doctrines of the Catholic Church, affirmed by the fourth Lateran council and the first Vatican council. For Catholics, who believe on independent grounds that the solemn doctrinal pronouncements of such councils are infallible, that suffices to show that classical theism is backed by divine authority. Non-Catholics will, naturally, take a different view, but if they take Christian tradition seriously they must at least regard the testimony of Church fathers, and of eminent theologians and ecclesiastical councils over the course of many centuries, as weighty evidence in favor of classical theism.

2. It is no good merely to point out that certain biblical passages seem to conflict with the conception of God affirmed by classical theism. For no one, not even theistic personalists, believes that all biblical descriptions of God are to be taken literally in the first place. For example, no one thinks that God literally has eyelids (Psalm 11), or nostrils (Ezekiel 18:18), or that he breathes (Job 4:9). These can’t be literal descriptions given that the organs and activities in question presuppose the having of a material body, which God cannot have since He is the creator of the material world. So, if the theistic personalist wants to insist on a literal reading of some passage that seems incompatible with classical theism, he needs to give us some account of why we should take that passage literally even though we shouldn’t take other ones literally. And he is going to have a hard time doing that. For notice that the reason why we don’t take the passages about eyelids, nostrils, etc. literally is that a literal reading would conflict with other things we know about God from the Bible, such as that He is the creator of the material world. But this same consistency criterion poses problems for some of the things the theistic personalist wants to affirm. For example, some theistic personalists hold that God is (contrary to what classical theism holds) capable of changing, on the basis of biblical passages which when taken literally would imply that God sometimes changes His mind. But other biblical passages (e.g. Malachi 3:6 and James 1:17) insist that God does not change. How do we reconcile them? The classical theist answers that we already know from following out the implications of God’s being the first cause of all things that He must be simple and thus unchanging, so that it is the passages that imply otherwise that must be given a metaphorical reading.

3. Of course, the theistic personalist may at this point decide to modify his understanding of God as creator rather than accept classical theism. For example, he might acknowledge that the classical theist is correct to say that if God has the sort of absolute metaphysical ultimacy classical theism attributes to Him, then He must be simple, immutable, and eternal, in which case biblical passages like those which seem to imply that God sometimes changes His mind could not be taken literally. But the theistic personalist might then respond by rejecting the idea that God is absolutely metaphysically ultimate in the way the classical theist claims He is, so as to preserve a literal reading of the passages in question. But there are two problems with this sort of move. First, it is doubtful that it can be reconciled with what has traditionally been understood to be Christian orthodoxy – though this would, of course, not necessarily trouble process theologians and other theological revisionists. But second, the move in question does nothing to show that the arguments of classical theists are wrong. After all, the classical theist typically claims that we can show through philosophical arguments that the God of classical theism exists. If this is correct, then if we also accept the biblical descriptions of God, it follows that the only right way to read them is in a way consistent with classical theism. And as I have said, that is, of course, exactly what the great Christian theologians of the past and the councils cited above did. The Christian classical theist holds that his approach is the only way to reconcile what we know of God from both reason and revelation. It won’t do, then, for the critic of classical theism to dig in his heels and insist on a literal reading of biblical passages that seem to support theistic personalism. He has to show that the philosophical arguments for classical theism are mistaken, and thus that the possibility of a literal reading is open to him in the first place.

4. It is in any event a serious mistake to think that classical theism is motivated by purely philosophical considerations (and “Greek” or “pagan” ones at that) while theistic personalism is more sensitive to specifically Christian and biblical concerns. Consider the central theistic personalist thesis that God is a person like we are, only without our bodily and other limitations. As Brian Davies points out in The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, one of the most remarkable things to note about this sort of claim is how foreign it is to what has historically been regarded as Christian orthodoxy:

The formula ‘God is a person’ is (given the history of theistic thinking and writing) a relatively recent one. I believe that its first occurrence in English comes in the report of a trial of someone called John Biddle (b. 1615), who in 1644 was brought before the magistrates of Gloucester, England, on a charge of heresy. His ‘heresy’ was claiming that God is a person. Biddle was explicitly defending Unitarian beliefs about God, already in evidence among Socinians outside England.

In other words, Biddle’s ‘God is a person’ was intended as a rejection of the orthodox Christian claim that God is three persons in one substance (the doctrine of the Trinity). One can hardly take it to be a traditional Christian answer to the question ‘What is God?’ According to the doctrine of the Trinity, God is certainly not three persons in one person. And when orthodox exponents of the doctrine speak of Father, Son, and Spirit as ‘persons,’ they certainly do not take ‘person’ to mean what it seems to mean for [Richard] Swinburne and those who agree with him. They do not, for example, think of the persons of the Trinity as distinct centres of consciousness, or as three members of a kind. (pp. 59-60)

Davies goes on to emphasize that as used within the context of Trinitarian theology, “person” translates the Latin persona, which in turn was intended to translate the Greek theological terms prosopon and hypostasis – both of which have precise theological meanings and neither of which is intended to convey the idea of a “person” in the sense in which a human being is a person. Indeed, even apart from questions of orthodoxy, the idea that God is three Persons in one substance entails that God cannot “a person” in the way that we are, since for there to be two or more human persons is precisely for there to be two or more substances. (This is true regardless of which theory of personal identity one endorses, even a Lockean “continuity of consciousness” account. For even if two streams of consciousness, and thus two Lockean persons, existed in the same body, qua persons they would be only contingently associated with that body and thus not “in” that one material substance in the sense in which the three divine Persons are “in” one divine substance.)

In short, for the classical theist, theistic personalism is bad philosophy and bad theology.

5. As I emphasized in the earlier post, that does not mean that God is impersonal, since according to classical theism there is in God something analogous to what we call intellect and will in us, and other attributes too which presuppose intellect and will (such as justice, mercy, and love – where “love” is understood, not as a passion, but as the willing of another’s good). And this brings me to one final point, which is that even apart from biblical revelation, and on philosophical grounds alone, we have reason to conclude that the God of classical theism takes a special interest in man.

Consider that for at least some classical theists, philosophical arguments alone can tell us not only that there is a God, but also that human beings have immaterial and immortal souls. For Thomists, they tell us further that the soul is related to the body as form is to matter, so that though the soul survives the death of the body, the human person does not, and can come to life again only if soul and body are reunited; that the soul cannot arise out of the material processes that suffice for the generation of lower animals but must be specially created by God with each new human being; and that our natural end is God Himself, so that we cannot be happy apart from Him. Now, that there will indeed be a resurrection of the dead, as well as the details of the Christian account of salvation, are further facts that cannot be known apart from divine revelation. But what (many) classical theists regard as knowable through reason alone and apart from specifically Christian theology already suffices to show that God has a very special interest in man indeed – so much so that He specially creates each individual human soul for a natural end that involves knowing Him everlastingly, in a way that requires a further divine intervention in the form of a resurrection if it is perfectly going to be fulfilled. It can hardly be that surprising, then, that the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob turn out to be the same.

Deus ex machina?

One more post related to the “Intelligent Design” theory (ID) versus Aristotelico-Thomism (A-T) controversy and then we’ll be done with it for a while. I have emphasized repeatedly that the central objections A-T has against ID are (a) that ID presupposes a mechanistic conception of the natural world, and (b) that ID applies language both to human designers and to God in a “univocal” rather than “analogous” way (in the sense of “analogous” associated with the Thomistic doctrine of analogy). As I have noted before, ID defender VJ Torley has essentially conceded point (b) (though without seeming to realize that this suffices to put ID at odds with A-T), and those who have taken issue with what I have said seem for the most part not to have challenged it. The attention has focused instead on point (a), the charge of mechanism. Defenders of ID concede that the ID approach is mechanistic, but those among them who claim that ID and A-T are compatible insist that this mechanism is purely “methodological” or held only “for the sake of argument,” in a way that need not offend A-T metaphysical scruples. I have argued that ID and A-T are incompatible even if ID’s mechanism is purely methodological.

Let’s leave that debate aside for the moment, though, and consider why it matters. So what if ID is mechanistic? We can begin our answer to that question by recalling what “mechanism” means in this context. Obviously it has something to do with conceiving of the natural world as a kind of “machine” and of the objects within it, including living things, as lesser “machines” within this larger machine. But that is not the core of the notion, and if all that “mechanism” involved was the view that organisms or other natural objects are in some respects comparable to the things people make insofar as they are composed of intricately arranged parts, etc. there would be no objection to it. As I have repeatedly emphasized, what makes a conception of nature “mechanistic” in the sense objectionable to A-T is that it denies the existence of final causality or teleology as an immanent feature of the natural world. For the mechanist, nothing in the natural order inherently or of its nature “points to” anything else as an end or goal, and nothing is inherently or of its nature “for the sake of” anything else. Accordingly, the mechanist also rejects what the Scholastics called “substantial forms” – immanent natures or essences of things, by virtue of which they have the ends or final causes they do. Mechanists who are also theists hold, accordingly, that any final causality, teleology, essences or natures that exist in the world are extrinsic to it, imposed from outside in a fashion comparable to the way the function of serving as a mousetrap is imposed by an artificer on bits of wood and metal that have no inherent tendency to kill mice specifically. This is the view of thinkers like Newton, Boyle, Paley, and other modern defenders of the “design argument” for the existence of God. By contrast, mechanists who are naturalists or atheists deny that there is any genuine teleology in the natural world at all, of either the intrinsic or extrinsic sort.

Note that this is not my own idiosyncratic definition of what a “mechanistic” conception of nature amounts to. To be sure, the early modern thinkers who put mechanism at the center of Western thought often had other things in mind as well – such as the now-discredited notion that all causality could be reduced to a crude “push-pull” contact model – but it is widely agreed that the core of their position, and the part that has survived to the present day, is the rejection of substantial forms and immanent final causes. Philosopher of science David Hull says that “historically, explanations were designated as mechanistic to indicate that they included no reference to final causes or vital forces. In this weak sense, all present-day scientific explanations are mechanistic” (from the article on “Mechanistic explanation” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy). Philosopher of religion William Hasker holds that “mechanistic causation and mechanistic explanation are fundamentally nonteleological” and that “it was the expulsion of final causes from physics by Descartes and Galileo that marked what was perhaps the most decisive break between ancient and modern natural science” (The Emergent Self, pp. 63 and 64, emphasis in original). Philosopher of mind Tim Crane writes that “in the seventeenth century… the Aristotelian method of explanation – in terms of final ends and ‘natures’ – was replaced by a mechanical or mechanistic method of explanation… To put it very roughly, we can say that, according to the mechanical world picture, things do what they do not because they are trying to reach their natural place or final end, or because they are obeying the will of God, but, rather, because they are caused to move in certain ways in accordance with the laws of nature” (The Mechanical Mind, Second edition, p. 3). Historian of philosophy Margaret Osler notes that while it is not quite right to exclude God per se from mechanistic explanation (as Crane does), “most seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers rejected immanent final causes – in the sense of the actualization of forms – [and] accepted an idea of finality as imposed on nature from without… With the mechanical reinterpretation of final causes, the idea of individual natures that possess immanent finality was replaced with the idea of nature as a whole which is the product of the divine artificer. Nature became a work of art” (“From Immanent Natures to Nature as Artifice: The Reinterpretation of Final Causes in Seventeenth Century Natural Philosophy,” The Monist vol. 79, no. 3 (July 1996), pp. 389-90).

Now, the A-T philosopher would strongly object to the suggestion that science per se is mechanistic in this sense. The truth is that mechanism is not an empirical discovery at all, but rather a philosophical or methodological preference that has been imposed on modern scientific inquiry by fiat; and the actual empirical findings of modern science are all perfectly compatible with an A-T philosophy of nature. But the authors just quoted are all correct to hold that it is the rejection of final causes and substantial forms that is definitive of mechanism, and that mechanism in this sense is commonly (if mistakenly) regarded as essential to science.

In any event, and as Osler’s remarks indicate, it is in light of this rejection of Aristotelian formal and final causes that the significance of the modern tendency to think of the world as a “machine” – in the sense of an intricate mechanical object comparable to a watch or some other artifact – must be understood. As I have said, to call attention merely to the intricacy and interconnectedness of the parts of organisms and other natural phenomena is by itself unobjectionable. The problem, for A-T, is to think of these parts as having no more inherent or built-in tendency to function together to fulfill a common end than the parts of a watch or a mousetrap do. It is because theistically-inclined mechanists deny such inherent tendencies no less than naturalists do that they focus on questions of probability; for if there is no inherent tendency of the parts of any natural object to function together as they do in the first place, the only way to show that some particular natural object (a biological organ, say) is not susceptible of a naturalistic explanation would seem to be to argue that it is so complex that it is improbable that the parts could have gotten together in just the way they have via purely natural processes. (When A-T philosophers criticize the arguments of Paley or ID theorists for being probabilistic, then, it is not at bottom the appeal to probabilities per se that they object to, but rather the mechanistic conception of nature that motivates such an appeal in this particular context.)

But again, so what if ID or any other theory is mechanistic in this sense? Part of the answer is, naturally, that A-T regards mechanism as false, which is enough reason to reject any view committed to it. But mechanism is a particularly pernicious metaphysical error. Indeed, it is from an A-T point of view arguably the cardinal error of modern thought, from which all the other moral and philosophical pathologies of modern world derive. I noted in an earlier post that it is in mechanism that the modern philosophical tendency toward reductionism is rooted. And I argue at length in The Last Superstition – especially in chapter 5 – that it is also in mechanism that we find the roots of such so-called “traditional” philosophical problems as the mind-body problem, the problem of personal identity, the problem of induction, the problem of giving rational foundations to morality, the problem of epistemological skepticism, and the problem of free will. (At least the latter three problems admittedly predate the modern mechanistic revolution, but were made particularly intractable by it.) Morality and even science itself become unintelligible when one attempts to interpret them in a mechanistic context. As W. T. Stace once wrote, the moderns’ abandonment of final causes was “the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world,” and in its conception of the natural world as inherently “purposeless, senseless, meaningless” lay “the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values” (“Man Against Darkness,” The Atlantic (September 1948)). Stace – who was writing from an empiricist rather than an A-T perspective – also recognized that this revolution was purely philosophical and not grounded in any actual empirical scientific discovery. And as I noted in another earlier post, other thinkers outside the A-T orbit (such as Alfred North Whitehead and E. A. Burtt) have also acknowledged the philosophical rather than scientific foundations of the mechanistic revolution, and noted its philosophically problematic implications for the science in whose name mechanists have defended their revolution.

More to the present point, though, is that mechanism is simply incompatible with classical theism – the conception of God historically central both to Christian orthodoxy and to classical philosophical theology, and defended by such thinkers as Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and (outside the Christian context) by Maimonides, Avicenna, and others. At the core of classical theism is the doctrine of divine simplicity (discussed in this earlier post) according to which there is in God no composition whatsoever. He is not “made up” of either physical or metaphysical parts, the way everything else that exists is – of form and matter, say, or act and potency, or essence and existence. Rather, he just is “pure act” and subsistent existence. He is not “a being” alongside other beings, but rather Being Itself. Also central to classical theism is the notion that the world of created, contingent things could not continue in existence even for an instant were God not continuously preserving it in being. These doctrines are linked. It is because everything in the created order is composite that it must be “held together” in being by something outside it; and it is because God alone is simple or non-composite that He alone can be that which preserves everything else in being in this way.

Now, for A-T, the Aristotelian distinction between act and potency is crucial to understanding divine simplicity, divine conservation, and the connection between them. The essence of a contingent thing (and thus the contingent thing itself) is merely potential or “in potency” until that essence is actualized through being conjoined to an “act of existence.” Matter is merely potential unless conjoined to and actualized by form. In general, potency cannot exist on its own but only when conjoined to actuality. But only that which is Pure Act can possibly end any regress of “actualizers,” precisely because it is simple and has no parts whose conjunction needs to be actualized. Thus the world of composite things could not exist for an instant unless that which is purely actual and absolutely simple were continually holding it together. (As usual, see The Last Superstition and Aquinas for the full story.)

As I have noted before, the act/potency distinction and the notion of final causality are intimately related: A potency or potential is a potency for some act or actuality, toward which it points as an end; and to have an end is to be in potency towards it. It is no accident, then, that when the moderns abandoned final causality for mechanism, the act/potency distinction was abandoned as well. And it is no accident either that the world came to seem like a “machine,” not only in the sense of a kind of artifact cobbled together from parts having no inherent tendency to function toward a common end, but also in the sense of being the sort of thing that might in principle continue to exist even in the absence of a “machinist.” The doctrine of divine conservation gave way to deism, and deism in turn to atheism.

Keep in mind that for Aristotle and the Scholastic tradition influenced by him, the act/potency distinction is crucial to avoiding the extremes represented by Parmenides and Heraclitus, on either of which science becomes impossible. For Parmenides, change is illusion, and thus so too is the world of our experience, on which any empirical science would need to base its findings. For Heraclitus, permanence is the illusion and there is nothing that can unite the deliverances of experience into an orderly scientific system. Aristotle argued, contra Parmenides, that change is possible because in between being and absolute non-being – the only two categories recognized by Parmenides – there is potency or potentiality. But (contra Heraclitus) permanence is also possible, because within the flux of experience emphasized by Heraclitus there are unchanging forms or essences which matter must take on if it is to be actualized at all. It is because these actualizing forms are universal, common to the myriad individuals which instantiate them, and because they persist even as the individual things come and go, that science is possible. For it is the unchanging and universal forms or natures of things that form the proper subject matter of scientific investigation.

Now, the ancient atomists sought to avoid the Parmenidean and Heraclitean extremes in another way. For them, the world of our experience is indeed the flux Heraclitus said it was, but only because underlying it is a world of unobservable unchanging and indestructible (and in that sense “Parmenidean”) elements – the atoms, interacting according to patterns of efficient causation and devoid of any inherent teleology or final causality. But there is nothing further to be said in explanation of the atoms themselves. Limited as the various atoms are to their particular shapes, sizes, positions in space, etc., they cannot intelligibly be said to be purely actual, simple, or in any other way comparable to (and as “self-explanatory” as) the God of classical theism. Nor, devoid as they are of final causality, do they necessarily point beyond themselves to anything else. Accordingly, they constitute the proverbial “brute fact.” Instead of truly avoiding the Parmenidean and Heraclitean extremes, then, the atomists essentially embraced both of them at once: Like Parmenides, they held that the world of our experience is illusory; in reality there is “nothing but” the atoms. And like Heraclitus, they make the world ultimately unintelligible.

But the atomists were the original mechanists, and their modern successors simply repeat their errors. As I have noted in several earlier posts and have argued at length in The Last Superstition and Aquinas, to reject immanent final and formal causes is to make efficient causality unintelligible as well. For if nothing of its nature “points beyond itself” to anything else, then causes and effects become “loose and separate”; any effect or none might in principle follow upon any cause. This not only paves the way for the paradoxes of Hume, but undermines the possibility of showing how the very fact of efficient causation as such – that is to say, of potency being actualized – presupposes a sustaining, purely actual Uncaused Cause. The metaphysically necessary connection between the world and God is broken; in principle the world could exist and operate just as it does apart from God.

There are of course still questions about how the elements of the world machine (whether we think of these elements as Democritean atoms or in more contemporary terms) come to form more or less complex structures. But the weighing of probabilities vis-à-vis whether this or that structure could have come about through known natural processes can never get you one inch closer to the God of classical theism, because that God has already been ruled out the moment it is conceded that the machine might at least in principle have existed without Him. This remains so even if one’s mechanism is adopted only “for the sake of argument.” Making a case for the God of classical theism on a mechanistic basis even arguendo is like saying “Let’s concede just for the sake of argument that whoever murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman could not have been a man. Now, let me show you why it is probable, given that assumption, that O. J. Simpson was the killer…” The procedure is absurd, because the opening concession has already eliminated the desired conclusion from the running.

But couldn’t one argue that the elements themselves must have come from God? Yes, but not in a “mechanistic” way. For if one affirms of these elements something like an act/potency composition, then one will indeed get to God, but (since such a composition entails final causality) only because one has implicitly abandoned mechanism. But if one insists on denying of the elements any kind of immanent final causality, then one will thereby implicitly be denying of them any sort of potency that needs to be actualized by something outside them. And in that case, the elements will not be necessarily sustained in being by God. Thus, whatever one appeals to in order to explain them could never be the God of classical theism, but only some idolatrous ersatz. Similarly, the God of classical theism is Being Itself, and nothing could exist – that is to say, have being – even for an instant, even in principle, without participating in Being Itself (whether “participation” is understood in Neo-Platonic terms or in the Aristotelianized terms of Aquinas’s Fourth Way). To “weigh the probabilities” that the elements of a mechanistic universe might themselves have a cause is thus implicitly to rule out the God of classical theism as the cause one is arguing for, since whether a thing participates in Being Itself cannot intelligibly be said to be a matter of probability, any more than whether a geometrical theorem follows from certain axioms is a matter of probability.

As Kant famously held, the “physico-theological” or “design” argument for God’s existence really doesn’t get you to God at all, but only to a grand but finite cosmic architect – something like the Ralph Richardson Supreme Being character from Time Bandits, as I pointed out in a previous post. The same is true of any argument that proceeds, as Paley and his successors have done, by portraying God as a tinkerer who cobbles together a mechanistic universe. And the point, as I cannot repeat too often, is not that such arguments don’t get you all the way to the God of classical theism, but that they get you positively away from the God of classical theism. You can get a god from a machine, but never the God.

Nagel and his critics, Part VI

We’ve been looking at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos.  Having examined the objections raised by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg, Elliott Sober, Alva Noë, and John Dupré, I want to turn now to some interesting remarks made by Eric Schliesser in a series of posts on Nagel over at the New APPS blog.  Schliesser’s comments concern, first, the way the scientific revolution is portrayed by Nagel’s critics, and second, the role the Principle of Sufficient Reason plays in Nagel’s book.  Most recently, in response to my own series of posts, Schliesser has also commented on the status of naturalism in contemporary philosophy.  Let’s look at each of these sets of remarks in turn.

Body movin’, mind thinkin’

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

We recall that John B. Watson did not claim that quite all thought was incipient speech; it was all incipient twitching of muscles, and mostly of speech muscles.

W. V. Quine, “Mind and Verbal Dispositions”

We're getting down computer action
Do the robotic satisfaction

Beastie Boys, “Body Movin’”

To perceive a human being behaving in certain characteristic ways just is to perceive him as thinking.  There are two ways to read such a claim: Quine’s and Watson’s reductionist way, and Wittgenstein’s anti-reductionist way.  The Beastie Boys, of course, were putting forward a computational-functionalist variation on Quinean behaviorism.  (OK, not really.  Just pretend.  It’s a better quote than any I could have gleaned from a functionalist philosopher.)

Computers, minds, and Aristotle

The recently published Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions, edited by Luciano Floridi, is a collection of quasi-interviews with prominent philosophers, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists. (The same five questions were sent to each of the contributors, who were asked to respond to them either question-by-question or in the form of an informal essay. Hence my label “quasi-interviews.”) Several of the contributions are particularly interesting from an Aristotelian point of view.

As readers of The Last Superstition know, I argue there that the “computationalist” view that the mind should be thought of as “software” run by the “hardware” of the brain is either incoherent or (if it is to be made coherent) implicitly committed to a broadly Aristotelian metaphysics. And in neither case can it vindicate a materialist conception of human nature. One reason for this is that the key concepts required to spell out this position – “software,” “program,” “information,” “algorithm,” and so forth (all of which are somehow to be understood as purely physical properties alongside mass, electric charge, and the like, if the materialist is going to make hay out of the view) – are suffused with intentionality, the “directedness” of a thing toward something beyond itself. Now on at least one common interpretation of the computationalist view, intentionality is among the features of the mind the view is supposed to explain – in which case it cannot coherently appeal to notions which presuppose the existence of intentionality. Even those versions of computationalism which do not claim to explain intentionality face the problem that nothing like intentionality is supposed to exist at the level of physics, at least given the mechanistic conception of nature materialists are implicitly committed to. As Jerry Fodor puts it in Psychosemantics:

“I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep.” (p. 97)

Hence the notions in question are simply not available to a consistent materialist. And if a materialist nevertheless digs in his heels and insists that “information,” “algorithms,” and the like really are somehow intrinsic to the physical world, then he will in effect have conceded that something like Aristotelian final causes exist after all, and thus abandoned materialism. For if purely physical processes embody genuine “information,” follow “algorithms,” etc., then that entails that of their nature (by virtue of their form, as Aristotelians would say) they point beyond themselves as toward a goal, after the manner of a final cause. (“Information” is information about something; an “algorithm” has an inherent end the rules it embodies are meant to lead to; and so on.) Materialists fail to see this because, like most modern philosophers, they have only the vaguest idea of what Aristotelian formal and final causes are, and labor under all sorts of crude misconceptions (e.g. that for a physical process to have a final cause is for it to seek a goal in something like a conscious way).

For the details, see The Last Superstition (especially pp. 235-47). It was interesting, though, to see that at least one contributor to Philosophy of Computing and Information seems to have come to something like the conclusion I defend in the book. Specifically, the neuroscientist Valentino Braitenberg says:

“The concept of information, properly understood, is fully sufficient to do away with popular dualistic schemes invoking spiritual substances distinct from anything in physics. This is Aristotle redivivus, the concept of matter and form united in every object of this world, body and soul, where the latter is nothing but the formal aspect of the former. The very term ‘information’ clearly demonstrates its Aristotelian origin in its linguistic root.” (Floridi, p. 16)

In other words, to describe some physical process as inherently embodying “information,” while it does rule out dualism of the Cartesian sort, nevertheless is not consistent with the crude materialist claim that “matter is all that exists”; for it is implicitly to accept something like Aristotle’s notion of formal cause (precisely, I would add, because it is implicitly to accept something like his notion of final cause). As I have put it in earlier posts, the neural processes underlying e.g. a given action are merely the material-cum-efficient causal side of an event of which the thoughts and intentions of the agent are the formal-cum-final causes, to allude to all of the famous Aristotelian four causes. (I develop the point a little bit in this review of the psychologist Jerome Kagan’s An Argument for Mind.)

To be sure, Braitenberg’s own claims are only suggestive, and I do not claim he would accept everything I say about this issue in my book (much less everything, or anything, else I say there!) But he clearly sees that the standard materialist assumptions are faulty, as do some other contributors to the Floridi volume. Brian Cantwell-Smith’s chapter, which is among the more lengthy and philosophically substantial contributions, is very good on the deep conceptual problems underlying much work done in this area. Key concepts are ill-defined, and unjustified slippage between or conflation of various possible senses of crucial theoretical terms (including “computation” itself) is rife. But the key problem, as he sees, is what he calls the “300-year rift between matter and mattering” that opened up with Descartes (p. 46) – that is to say, the early moderns’ conception of matter as inherently devoid of meaning or significance. Cantwell-Smith calls for a new metaphysics to “heal” this rift (being apparently unaware of, or at least not reconsidering as Braitenberg does, the old Aristotelian metaphysics the rejection of which was precisely what opened up the rift in the first place).

In his own chapter, Hubert Dreyfus, summarizing themes that have long characterized his work, also criticizes “Descartes’ understanding of the world as a set of meaningless facts to which the mind assigned what Descartes called values” (p. 80). Attempts to find some computational mechanism by means of which the brain assigns significance or meaning to the world always end up surreptitiously presupposing significance or meaning, and attempts to avoid this result tend to lead to a vicious regress. (This, as Dreyfus argues, is what ultimately underlies the well-known “frame problem” in Artificial Intelligence research and the “binding problem” in neuroscience.) As is well-known, Dreyfus makes good use of the work of writers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in criticizing AI, and in particular the notion that we can make sense of the idea of a world inherently devoid of significance for us. But this phenomenological point does not answer the metaphysical question of how and why the world, and ourselves as part of the world, have significance or meaning in the first place. For that – as I argue in The Last Superstition – we need to turn to the Aristotelian tradition, to the concepts of formal and final causation rejection of which set modern thought, and modern civilization, on its long intellectual and moral downward slide.

The comedy keeps coming

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but while we’re on the subject of humor, here’s another mistake that is often made in discussions of it: failing to identify precisely which aspect of the phenomenon of humor a theory is (or is best interpreted as) trying to explain.  For instance, this is sometimes manifest in lists of the various “theories of humor” put forward by philosophers over the centuries.

The metaphysics of bionic implants

Take a look at the classic title sequence of The Six Million Dollar Man.  Oscar Goldman (the bionic man’s superior in the Office of Scientific Intelligence) says the following in the famous voiceover:

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him.  We have the technology.  We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man.  Steve Austin will be that man.  Better than he was before.  Better, stronger, faster.

Now that raises an interesting philosophical question.  Aquinas holds that:

[T]here exists in everything the natural desire of preserving its own nature; which would not be preserved were it to be changed into another nature.  Consequently, no creature of a lower order can ever covet the grade of a higher nature; just as an ass does not desire to be a horse: for were it to be so upraised, it would cease to be itself. (Summa Theologiae I.63.3)

Now, Steve Austin loses an arm, an eye, and his legs.  They are replaced with artificial parts which allow him to surpass his previous levels of strength, speed, and visual distance perception.  Still, they are artificial.  His normal human organs are not restored; instead, he becomes a cyborg.   We might even suppose that he likes being one -- certainly to every teenage boy, and to some of us middle-aged types, the idea sure seems pretty cool.  So, is the bionic man a counterexample to Aquinas’s claim?  For isn’t a cyborg -- being “stronger, faster” than an ordinary human being -- also “better” than an ordinary human being?  And doesn’t the fact that someone might plausibly desire to be a cyborg show that a thing could desire to be another kind of thing?

Scruton on “neuroenvy”

We’ve had several occasions (e.g. here, here, and here) to examine the fallacies committed by those who suppose that contemporary neuroscience has radically altered our understanding of human nature, and even undermined our commonsense conception of ourselves as conscious, rational, freely choosing agents.  In a recent Spectator essay, Roger Scruton comments on the fad for neuroscientific pseudo-explanations within the humanities, labeling it “neuroenvy.”

There’s no such thing as “natural atheology”

In his brief and (mostly) tightly argued book God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga writes:

[S]ome theologians and theistic philosophers have tried to give successful arguments or proofs for the existence of God.  This enterprise is called natural theology… Other philosophers, of course, have presented arguments for the falsehood of theistic beliefs; these philosophers conclude that belief in God is demonstrably irrational or unreasonable.  We might call this enterprise natural atheology.  (pp. 2-3)

Cute, huh?  Actually (and with all due respect for Plantinga), I’ve always found the expression “natural atheology” pretty annoying, even when I was an atheist.  The reason is that, given what natural theology as traditionally understood is supposed to be, the suggestion that there is a kind of bookend subject matter called “natural atheology” is somewhat inept.  (As we will see, though, Plantinga evidently does not think of natural theology in a traditional way.)

Supervenience on the hands of an angry God

In his book Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Jaegwon Kim puts forward the following characterization of the materialist supervenience thesis:

I take supervenience as an ontological thesis involving the idea of dependence – a sense of dependence that justifies saying that a mental property is instantiated in a given organism at a time because, or in virtue of the fact that, one of its physical “base” properties is instantiated by the organism at that time.  Supervenience, therefore, is not a mere claim of covariation between mental and physical properties; it includes a claim of existential dependence of the mental on the physical. (p. 34)

Progressive dematerialization

In the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition, it is the intellect, rather than sentience, that marks the divide between the corporeal and the incorporeal.  Hence A-T arguments against materialist theories of the mind tend to focus on conceptual thought rather than qualia (i.e. the subjective or “first-person” features of a conscious experience, such as the way red looks or the way pain feels) as that aspect of the mind which cannot in principle be reduced to brain activity or the like.  Yet Thomistic writers also often speak even of perceptual experience (and not just of abstract thought) as involving an immaterial element.  And they need not deny that qualia-oriented arguments like the “zombie argument,” Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument,” Thomas Nagel’s “bat argument,” etc. draw blood against materialism.  So what exactly is going on here?

Development versus decay

A reader asks an interesting question: 

You write often of the loss of Aristotelian metaphysics (specifically as adopted and developed by St. Thomas) and all the modern philosophical "problems" that have arisen as a result. Discussions of God's existence, the mind-body relation, ethics, etc. all become "problematic" when we remove formal and final causality.  I find this amazingly effective in answering modern arguments because it is often their metaphysical presuppositions that cause problems in the first place.

My question is: were the concepts of final and formal causality present in the Patristic era?  As I understand it, most of the Church Fathers were only marginally (if at all?) influenced by Aristotle, and were typically more dependent on Platonic or Neo-platonic metaphysics.  Does this mean that up until the time of Aquinas, when Aristotle is "rediscovered" in the West, that Christian philosophy was incoherent because it depended more on a Platonic metaphysics than an Aristotelian metaphysics? 

Bühler? Bühler?

Psychologist Karl Bühler distinguished three main functions of language, to which his student, the philosopher Karl Popper, added a fourth.  Popper discusses this distinction in several places, most notably in The Self and Its Brain, and at greater length in Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: A Defense of Interaction.  I think it is very useful.  (I am no Popperian, but I find that Popper’s work is always interesting.  The Self and Its Brain – a gigantic volume co-written with John Eccles – is unjustly neglected by contemporary philosophers of mind, and a great book to dip into now and again when one is looking for something different from the same old same old.) 

The four functions are as follows:

Rothbard revisited

I called attention in a recent post to Prof. Gerard Casey’s reply to a critique of Murray Rothbard that I had posted some years ago at the old Right Reason blog. What follows is a response to Casey. (If they have not already done so, interested readers are urged to read both my original piece and Casey’s reply before proceeding, since I will not be recapitulating everything already said.)

The main point of my original piece was to show that, whatever one thinks of his writings on economics, Rothbard was a bad philosopher and therefore unjustified in the stridency with which he asserted some very extreme positions in moral and political philosophy and attacked those who disagreed with those positions. As I emphasized in that piece, the issue is not whether there might be some way or other to salvage this or that Rothbardian claim. The point is rather that Rothbard’s own arguments for his positions in ethics and political philosophy are extremely bad.

Casey begins his defense of Rothbard’s philosophical abilities by saying that “it is not all that difficult to find examples of fallacious, contentious or less-than-perfectly articulated arguments in the works of philosophers who, by general consensus, are far from being mediocre. One could instance David Hume’s treatment of infinite divisibility in A Treatise on Human Understanding, or cite J. S. Mills’ [sic] erstwhile proof of the principle of utility in Chapter IV of his Utilitarianism, or select Aquinas’s Third Way in the Summa Theologiae which, according to some critics, exhibits modal, quantifier shift, and scope fallacies!”

The comparison of Rothbard to Hume, Mill, and Aquinas might seem too risible to be worth responding to. But presumably Casey means to suggest, not that Rothbard was in their rank as a thinker, but only that these eminent philosophers vividly illustrate that an occasional lapse into fallacy does not entail that one has no talent as a philosopher. Fair enough. But I did not claim that Rothbard was a bad philosopher merely because he committed a fallacy here or there. I claimed he was a bad philosopher because his philosophical arguments were as a matter of course crude, superficial, and unoriginal even when otherwise interesting, that his most central philosophical positions maintained a crude and fallacious quality even when developed and restated over the course of several years, and that his absurd confidence in them was in any event out of all proportion to their actual merit. I focused on one of Rothbard’s key arguments in particular as an illustration, but I emphasized that the point was that the kinds of faults it exhibited could easily be found elsewhere in his writings. These faults cannot be attributed to the thinkers Casey mentions.

There are other problems with Casey’s examples in any event. The trouble with the Hume example is that it does not concern something central to Hume’s philosophy, whereas my Rothbard example concerned, again, his key argument in ethics and political philosophy. And contrary to popular belief (and as I show in my forthcoming book Aquinas) Aquinas’s Third Way in fact commits none of the fallacies Casey mentions. (This is yet another instance in which ignorance of the metaphysical assumptions underlying Aquinas’s theistic arguments has led modern commentators badly to misinterpret them.) To be sure, the Mill example is stronger, since the principle of utility is certainly central to Mill’s moral philosophy; and Casey could have added Berkeley’s “master argument” to the list too (though some would defend even Mill and Berkeley from the charge of fallacy). Still, Berkeley gave other and more interesting arguments for his immaterialism, and Mill’s body of significant philosophical work extends well beyond this one argument for utilitarianism, indeed well beyond ethics altogether. Similarly, Hume’s reputation, and Aquinas’s, are well-established apart from the arguments in question. (As my regular readers know, I do think Hume is quite overrated. But I do not deny that he was nevertheless an important philosopher.)

The trouble with Rothbard is that he has no generally recognized body of serious work in philosophy to which one could appeal, in defense of his philosophical significance, in the face of an attack on some particular argument. His handful of arguments in moral and political philosophy just are his philosophical oeuvre; if they are especially bad, his general badness as a philosopher is undeniable. (“But who ever thought Rothbard was a serious philosopher in the first place?” you ask. Well, Rothbardians think he was; indeed, they regard him as a kind of “renaissance man,” and their absurd overestimation of his significance in the history of thought is comparable to Objectivists’ overestimation of Ayn Rand’s significance.)

But let’s move on to the details of Casey’s reply. In my original piece, I set out four main lines of criticism of Rothbard, and Casey’s paper is divided into sections corresponding to each of them, which he labels “Feser’s First Criticism,” “Feser’s Second Criticism,” etc. (with some sub-sections responding to particular issues arising in the course of dealing with each line of criticism). For ease of exposition I will respond to Casey section by section, each section of what follows corresponding to one of his sections or sub-sections. Hopefully this will make our exchange easier to follow that it otherwise would be.

FIRST CRITICISM:

Casey notes that I object that the principle of self-ownership doesn’t follow from the premises Rothbard seems to adduce in support of it, and he concedes that it does not follow from them. But this is irrelevant, Casey says, because Rothbard was not trying to argue for the principle of self-ownership in the first place; he intended it instead as an axiom. Hence my objection is (Casey holds) misdirected.

Now it is true that Rothbard sometimes refers to the thesis of self-ownership as an “axiom.” Still, there are two problems with Casey’s line of defense. First of all, if Rothbard seriously intended the principle of self-ownership as an axiom, then that surely only bolsters my claim that he was a bad philosopher. For the principle of self-ownership is extremely controversial; whether or not it is true, there are many people – including intelligent, rational, and well-informed people – who do not believe that it is. It is in this respect very different from other principles often put forward as axiomatic – the principle of non-contradiction, for example – which have a “self-evident” character and which very few people have ever seriously denied. Hence it is neither at all prima facie plausible to suggest that the thesis of self-ownership be taken as axiomatic, nor wise as a strategy for convincing people to accept a political philosophy that is extremely controversial (as anarcho-capitalism is) to base it on an equally controversial first principle. Even a non-philosopher can see this. Surely a non-mediocre philosopher would have seen it too.

Secondly, in dealing with this first criticism, Casey does not quote in their entirety the relevant passages from For a New Liberty and “Justice and Property Rights.” I do quote the entire For a New Liberty passage toward the beginning of my original piece. The reader who goes back and takes a look at it will see that Rothbard does indeed clearly give an argument – let’s call it the “reductio argument,” since he tries to reduce the denial of self-ownership to absurdity – in defense of the thesis of self-ownership.

Now it is also true, as Casey says, that it is a logical solecism to argue for an axiom or first principle. But given the textual evidence, what follows from this is not that Rothbard didn’t argue for the principle, but that since he did argue for what he claimed was an “axiom,” he was even more muddleheaded than I let on in my original piece. This judgment is given further support by another passage from For a New Liberty where Rothbard asks of what he calls the “nonaggression axiom,” “how is this axiom arrived at? What is its groundwork or support?” and suggests that “there are three broad types of foundation for the libertarian axiom… the emotivist, the utilitarian, and the natural rights viewpoint” (p. 26). How can an axiom be “arrived at” or given a “foundation”? And even if there is some sense in which it can (see below) how is it even intelligible to suggest that that foundation might in theory be utilitarian or emotivist? (Obviously Rothbard himself rejected utilitarian and emotivist approaches; the point is that if some moral principle really is axiomatic, the very idea of an emotivist or utilitarian “foundation” for it cannot even arise in the first place. For if a principle is emotive in content then it is non-cognitive and therefore cannot be an axiom; and if it is supported by utilitarian considerations, then those considerations are logically prior to it and, again, it is therefore not axiomatic.)

Furthermore (and as the passage just quoted indicates) while Rothbard sometimes speaks of self-ownership as axiomatic, he also often speaks instead of the “nonaggression axiom” as what is fundamental to libertarianism, where the “nonaggression axiom” rules out the initiation of violence or the threat of violence against another person or his property. This is evidently a different principle from the self-ownership principle, though there is obviously a connection between them. Indeed, Rothbard treats the principle of self-ownership as a justification for the nonaggression principle: the reason you should not initiate violence against others is that they own themselves. But if the nonaggression principle is itself justified only by reference to the self-ownership principle, in what sense is it “axiomatic”? And if it is not axiomatic – if Rothbard’s reference to the “nonaggression axiom” is not meant seriously (given that the nonaggression principle is actually something he thinks needs to be justified by reference to some other principle) – then the fact that he sometimes refers to the principle of self-ownership as an “axiom” does not show that he really believed it to be strictly axiomatic either.

Hence, either Rothbard was not serious about treating self-ownership and/or nonaggression as axiomatic – that is, he was using “axiom” in some loose, popular sense and not a technical philosophical sense – or, again, he was serious about it, and thus was simply muddleheaded in raising the question of what “foundation” one ought to give such principles. Either way, Casey’s first line of defense fails.

SECOND CRITICISM:

Now Casey also suggests, in the next section of his article, that what I have called Rothbard’s “reductio argument” be understood, not as a direct argument for the thesis of self-ownership, but rather as an indirect defense of the sort that tries to show that anyone who denies self-ownership must be led into a performative self-contradiction. This would be an application of what is known as the method of “retortion,” and it is sometimes deployed in defense of axioms, as Aristotle deploys it in defense of the principle of non-contradiction. So, while a direct argument for an axiom would be a solecism, an indirect defense of the retortion sort is perfectly legitimate; and this, Casey claims, is what Rothbard was up to.

But there are three problems with Casey’s suggestion that the “reductio argument” was intended as an application of the method of retortion. First, while Rothbard deploys the “reductio argument” in For a New Liberty, where he makes much of the idea that libertarianism rests on an “axiom” of non-aggression or (alternatively) self-ownership, he also deploys versions of the same argument in both “Justice in Property Rights” and The Ethics of Liberty, where, interestingly, the “axiom” idea does not play a role. But if this argument was not intended as an application of the retortion strategy in the latter two works (since there is no talk there of an “axiom” of self-ownership), but rather as a direct argument for self-ownership, then we have good reason to think it was intended as a direct argument in For a New Liberty as well (where, as we have seen, Rothbard’s use of the term “axiom” is very slippery in any event).

Moreover, even if Rothbard shifted strategies between For a New Liberty and the later works – that is, even if he intended his argument as an application of the retortion strategy in the earlier work but not in the later works – that would hardly help Casey’s defense. For it would constitute a tacit admission on Rothbard’s own part that the “axiom” approach is implausible and should be abandoned. And in that case, Casey’s appeal to the “axiom” interpretation as a way of rescuing Rothbard’s arguments from my criticisms would be undermined.

Second, the retortion interpretation of what I have called Rothbard’s “reductio argument” is implausible even apart from these textual considerations. For the “reductio argument” goes well beyond the appeal to performative self-contradiction that is central to the retortion strategy, making reference as it does to various empirical economic claims.

Third, even if Rothbard really did for all that intend the “reductio argument” as an exercise in retortion, it is still a very bad argument, for all the reasons set out in my original piece. Indeed, given all the problems outlined in that piece, it is an even worse argument if interpreted as an exercise in retortion, since the whole point of retortion arguments is to provide a crisp and conclusive proof that will close off any further debate.

In my original piece, I noted that Rothbard fails to consider and respond to a number of obvious alternatives to self-ownership that a critic might put forward. Casey considers each of these in turn:

The “no one owns anybody” alternative:

Rothbard argued that “since ownership signifies range of control, [the claim that no one owns anybody, not even himself] would mean that no one would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly vanish.” In response, I pointed out that “while having ownership of something does imply having a range of control over it, having a range of control over it doesn’t imply ownership … Animals have a range of control over their environment, but since ownership is a moral category implying the having of certain rights, and animals (by Rothbard’s own admission) have no rights, it follows that they have no ownership of anything. And of course, their lack of ownership of anything hasn’t caused animals as a whole to ‘vanish,’ ‘quickly’ or otherwise.”

Casey suggests that I am interpreting Rothbard uncharitably here, and that he intended the claim that “ownership signifies range of control” not as a conditional – in which case he would be guilty of affirming the consequent (since from “If I own x, then I have a range of control over x” it doesn’t follow that “If I have a range of control over x, then I own x”) – but rather as a technical definition and thus a biconditional. In particular, for Casey, what Rothbard is saying in the passage in question is that “the term ‘own’ in the context of one’s body” entails by definition “the right to control one’s body free of coercive interference.”

One problem with this move is that it simply does not fit the textual evidence. In the passage in question, Rothbard doesn’t say that “ownership of one’s body signifies the right to a range of control over it” but rather merely that “ownership signifies range of control.” That is to say, in this particular passage Rothbard is evidently concerned with ownership in general and not merely with self-ownership; and he is not making the (normative) point that ownership entails a right, but rather the (descriptive) point that it entails certain practical abilities such as the ability to feed, clothe, and shelter oneself.

Another, related problem is that Casey’s proposal entirely strips Rothbard’s argument of whatever force it might have had. If Rothbard is saying that the rejection of self-ownership would entail the practical impossibility of doing what is necessary to stay alive, then he is making an interesting claim that, if true, would constitute very strong grounds for endorsing the thesis of self-ownership. But if he is saying only that the rejection of self-ownership would entail the rejection of a “right to control one’s body free of coercive interference,” then he is not saying anything his critic doesn’t already know. The critic can say “Yes, of course denying self-ownership entails denying such a right. But so what? Since I deny self-ownership, I’m quite happy to deny also that there is such a right. What you need to show is that denying self-ownership would also entail something that I would not want to accept – such as the extinction of the human race. And your merely definitional point does nothing at all to show that.”

The “God owns us” alternative:

In response to my point that Rothbard fails even to consider the possible objection that it is God, rather than we, who own us, Casey points out that I myself once asserted in my book On Nozick that “someone might respond that God owns us, so that we cannot own ourselves … But self-ownership is no more inconsistent with belief in God than private property is.” He then says that “Professor Feser is entirely within his rights to change his mind on the matter of self-ownership, if that is what he has in fact done, but he would surely not wish to have it held against his competence as a philosopher that he once endorsed a position that is substantially the same as that put forward by Rothbard.”

But this is weak even as an ad hominem. There is no inconsistency between what I said in On Nozick and what I said in criticism of Rothbard. For my criticism of Rothbard was not that there is no way to reconcile self-ownership with God’s ownership of us. My criticism of Rothbard was rather that he did not even address the issue in the first place, even though it is (as Casey himself acknowledges) an objection that many theists might naturally suppose (whether correctly or incorrectly) has force against the thesis of self-ownership. (Why Casey thinks Rothbard himself held “substantially the same position” as the one I took in On Nozick is something he does not tell us.) Nor is it any good to say, as Casey does, that Rothbard should not be expected to address every possible criticism, since the objection at hand is hardly an obscure one, raising as it does an issue that goes back at least to Locke. Moreover, Rothbard was famously on friendlier terms with theists than many other contemporary libertarians have been, and in other contexts more sensitive to their concerns than (say) a Rand or a Nozick would have been. There is simply no excuse for his having failed to address this issue.

Moreover, to say that self-ownership can be reconciled with God’s ownership of us does not entail that a radically libertarian conception of self-ownership can be reconciled with it. For example, Locke, who claims both that God owns us and also that there is nevertheless a sense in which we own ourselves, denies, on theological grounds, that our self-ownership rights can possibly be absolute. In particular, for Locke, they cannot be strong enough to allow either suicide or the selling of oneself into slavery. (See my book Locke for detailed discussion of this issue.) And since Casey raises the question of my current views on this matter, I should note for the record that they have indeed changed: I would now say that the standard contemporary libertarian conception of self-ownership is not compatible either with classical natural law theory or with theism. (Some of the reasons for this judgment are given here, and my current views on self-ownership are developed in my essay “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” forthcoming in Social Philosophy and Policy.)

The various “partial ownership of others” alternatives:

Casey’s treatment of these alternatives is brief, and can be found on page 9 of his essay. Go read it if you haven’t already, because since I’m not even clear what his argument is supposed to be, I fear I might misrepresent it if I try to summarize it.

In response to my criticism of Rothbard here, Casey says that “ownership implies the right to dispose of one’s possessions in any way one chooses, subject to the limitations of not infringing upon the rights of others. To the extent that one cannot so dispose, to that extent one is not an owner.” I can only speculate that his point is that talk of “partial ownership” in my proposed alternatives is therefore somehow suspect: one either owns something or one doesn’t. But Casey himself uses the qualifier “to that extent,” which appears implicitly to acknowledge that ownership can be partial. And that it can be partial is in any case obvious from everyday experience. For example, you and your roommate might buy a car together and come to some agreement as to who can drive it and when. True, to the extent that you can’t drive it just whenever you want, “you are not an owner,” but only to that extent; and this is just a roundabout way of saying that you and your roommate are each partial owners, rather than either being a complete owner. So, I am not clear how what Casey says is supposed to be a problem for my criticism of Rothbard.

Casey also suggests that Rothbard’s assertion of “the absurdity of ‘proclaiming that every man is entitled to own a part of everyone else, yet is not entitled to own himself’” shows that there is something inherently fishy in the very idea of everyone having partial ownership of everyone else. For that idea too entails (Casey claims) “the peculiar situation of people being able to own all or some of other people but not able to own themselves.” Again, I am not at all clear what Casey is talking about. The “partial ownership of others” scenarios in question do not involve “people being able to own all or some of other people but not able to own themselves.” Rather, they involve people who do own themselves at least partially while also having partial ownership of others. Hence the absurdity Rothbard thinks he sees in the scenario he describes is not even relevant to the cases I was describing. Casey seems to be just insisting dogmatically that ownership is all-or-nothing, when whether this is the case or not is precisely (part of) what is in question.

THIRD CRITICISM:

One of Rothbard’s claims was that to assert a right of ownership over others entails asserting that those others are subhuman. In response, I pointed out that some defenders of slavery would deny this, and insist that recognizing the full humanity of others is consistent with claiming a right to keep them as slaves. Once again, I am not clear about what Casey’s reply to this objection is supposed to be. It seems to me he does little more than simply re-assert Rothbard’s position. He does say that any claim on the part of some to have ownership rights over others would have to be “grounded in some significant difference between the two groups. Accidental differences of height or weight, or hair colour or language will obviously not suffice to ground such a right in one group of human beings as against another.” True enough. But it doesn’t follow that the difference in question would entail that the one group is less human than the other. For example, a would-be slave owner might try to argue that while he and his prospective slave are both human, the (alleged) fact that the slave has a much lower degree of intelligence shows that he is more like a human child than a human adult and thus cannot be trusted to run his life for himself. To answer such a would-be slave owner, then, one must do more than merely point out that slaves are human.

For what it is worth, classical natural law theory would absolutely rule out chattel slavery, not on the grounds of the sort of radical self-ownership Rothbard affirms, but rather on the ground that each human being has a natural end to which all other ends – including those of a would-be slave owner, but including also his own contingent ends – are subordinate. That is to say, since I am ordered by nature to certain ends, I cannot be turned away from them by some other human being, as if I were his property; but neither do I have a natural right to do just whatever I feel like doing with myself, as if I were, in some strong sense, my own property. Libertarians often claim that the only way to show that chattel slavery is wrong is to affirm (their understanding of) self-ownership. But in fact, the actual, natural law reasons why chattel slavery is wrong also entail that libertarianism is wrong. (Classical natural law theory does allow that some lesser forms of servitude – a life-long work arrangement as punishment for a crime, say, or as a way of paying off a debt – can in principle be legitimate, but in practice are too fraught with moral hazard to be justifiable.)

Here as elsewhere, though, the issue is not whether Rothbard’s position is or is not correct or defensible. The point is that Rothbard’s own arguments for his position are subject to obvious objections that he does not even consider.

FOURTH CRITICISM:

Rothbard asserted that “allowing Class A to own Class B means that the former is allowed to exploit, and therefore to live parasitically, at the expense of the latter. But this parasitism itself violates the basic economic requirements for life: production and exchange.” In response, I pointed out that “animals do not engage in ‘production and exchange,’ certainly not in the laissez-faire economics sense intended by Rothbard, but they are obviously alive.”

In defense of Rothbard, Casey says: “Rothbard is clearly not saying that those who do not engage in production and exchange are not alive. If he had claimed this, there would be some point to Feser’s animal counterexample.” Well, of course Rothbard wasn’t saying that, but neither was I claiming that he was. The question isn’t whether those who don’t engage in production and exchange in Rothbard’s sense will instantly die. The question is whether life could continue over time without production and exchange. Rothbard is evidently claiming that it could not; as Casey puts it, “Rothbard’s point, if I understand it correctly, is an economic one to the effect that production and exchange are substantive human activities that are essential to human survival.” But that Rothbard is wrong is obvious from the animal example. Animals don’t ‘produce’ or ‘exchange’ things in the economic sense, and yet they are able to sustain themselves in existence. Human beings could do the same if they needed to, hunter-gatherer style. To be sure, this wouldn’t be a very satisfying way of life for us civilized people, but that’s beside the point. Rothbard is trying to show that unless you accept his conception of self-ownership, you are logically committed to a system that would make continued human life impossible. And he simply fails to come anywhere close to showing that. Indeed, it is obvious that he fails to show it – the animal counterexample is hardly that difficult to come up with – which was exactly my point. Here, as elsewhere, Rothbard makes preposterously bold claims without even bothering to address obvious possible objections.

There are also obvious difficulties with Rothbard’s claim that the “parasitism” of one group living off another is inconsistent with the system of production and exchange. One problem is that it obviously isn’t true: By Rothbard’s own anarcho-capitalist lights, the history of the human race is largely a history of “parasites” (e.g. governments) living off of the wealth generated by those who produce and exchange. If such “parasitism” is incompatible with a system of production and exchange, how has this system been able to survive so long, “parasites” and all?

Of course, Rothbard might claim that, even if this is possible as a practical matter, there is no economic principle that could justify it. But (a critic might ask) since it is practically possible, how could any economic principle that ruled it out itself be justified? Wouldn’t the centuries-long empirical, practical success of such a “parasitic” system falsify any such economic principle? Alternatively, Rothbard might hold that such parasitism is ruled out by a moral rather than economic principle. But if so, it cannot be the principle of self-ownership that rules it out, because that would make the argument in question – which is intended to establish self-ownership – a circular one.

Moreover, it has to be a moral principle strong enough to rule out, not just slavery – which, as we have seen above, there is ample moral reason to reject in any case – but all forms of “parasitism,” since Rothbard’s claim seems to be that parasitism as such is incompatible with production and exchange. But such a principle would therefore entail that children, elderly parents, the infirm, etc. – all of whom are “parasites” in Rothbard’s sense, since they live “at the expense” of others without producing or exchanging – have no right to our assistance. Some Rothbardians would no doubt try to fudge this obscene consequence by claiming that we have in many cases “consented” to help such people, so that our obligations to them are contractual and thus compatible with the system of production and exchange. This is not only ad hoc and implausible – such a libertarian reduction of all human relationships to economic ones is, for my money, as preposterous and repulsive as the Marxist version – but clearly won’t cover every case even by the Rothbardian’s own lights. Fetuses resulting from unplanned pregnancies and cripples without friends, families, marketable skills, or a nearby charity are just out of luck in a Rothbardian “society.” (Indeed, for Rothbard, unwanted unborn children must be regarded as “coercive parasites” – which, from a classical natural law theory point of view, is pretty much a reductio ad absurdum of his entire moral and political philosophy.)

Any moral principle strong enough to get Rothbard what he needs in order to salvage the argument in question would, then, be either question-begging or prima facie highly implausible. But again, whether such a principle could ultimately be defended is not what is at issue. The point is that the potential problems with Rothbard’s position should be obvious, and yet he failed even to consider them.

So, Casey’s defense of Rothbard fails. Indeed, our consideration of it has indicated that Rothbard may have been an even worse philosopher than I let on in my original post. Which is saying something.