The Problem
of Evil
Summary: The
argument from evil is one of the oldest, and most stubborn problems surrounding
the notion of God: how can an all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God
permit suffering in the world? Fyodor Dostoevsky highlights an array of evils
that we might expect God to prevent, such as cruelty to animals and cruelty to
children. Even if God punished the offenders, he suggests, this would not
remove the problem: God should have prevented these acts of cruelty to begin
with. John L. Mackie argues that belief in an all good and all powerful God is
logically inconsistent with the fact of suffering in the world. Traditional
solutions to the problem, he argues, such as the free will defense, fail. The
only real solution is to deny God's goodness, or power, or his existence
altogether. Against Mackie's position, William L. Rowe argues that the presence
of suffering is not logically inconsistent with the existence of an all good
and powerful God. The problem, according to Rowe, is that we can't assume that
an omnipotent, wholly good being will prevent the occurrence of any evil
whatever. That is, at least some evils seem justifiable, and this blocks the
charge of logical inconsistency. John Hick offers a unique solution to the
problem of evil: human creation is a developmental process during which time we
evolve to eventually become a more perfect likeness of God. Suffering, then, is
just part of the developmental process of creation.
identity and
Survival
Summary: Are
we deluded in thinking that we have some core self, a soul, spirit or mind,
which stays the "same" throughout change? Hume and other skeptics
think so. But the skeptical position runs up against some of our strongest
intuitions, just as does determinism. Perhaps Hume simply confuses specific and
numerical identity. Two things, A and B, are specifically identical if they
have all or almost all the same traits. In that sense, I am clearly not
identical with myself as I was ten years ago. My body has changed drastically.
My "mind" has changed a lot too. My opinions have changed and so have
some of my mental habits. But in the numerical sense of identity A and B are
identical if they are the same thing, however many changes that thing has
undergone. There is one Niagara Falls; although it keeps changing, it is still
Niagara Falls and not some numerically distinct waterfall. Although the notion
of numerical identity is not without problems, it does not have the problems
that specific identity has. Or perhaps Hume and other skeptics assume that if
there is going to be personal identity through time, it will have to be rooted
in mental life, rather than physical life. Yet bodily criteria might suffice
for personal identity. My body is numerically the same as it was ten years ago.
No other body has taken over. In any case, it is not obvious what sense there
is in the notion that my identity persists through death. Perhaps the notion
that it does sits better with the idea that identity is a bodily matter, than
with the idea that it is a mental or "soul" matter.
20th Century
views on Mind and Body
Summary: The
tone for much discussion, over the last 400 years, of the nature of mind and
body was certainly set by Descartes. Cartesian dualism postulated an apparently
unbridgeable gap between minds and bodies which drove some thinkers to
materialism, others to idealism. 20th century thinkers have
developed sophisticated versions of materialism, aided by recent discoveries
about the nervous systems and the brain. Some 20th century
materialists have argued that mental states are identical with states of the
brain, or reducible to them, in a way analogous to the way clouds are
"reducible" to water droplets, or nations to individual citizens.
Others have argued for the possibility of eliminating all references to
thoughts and other mental notions in a completed account of the brain. Yet
other thinkers have thought that Descartes was conceptually confused. One of
the most powerful accounts of mental states and acts developed in recent years
is functionalism. Perhaps such mental "things" as thoughts, or fears,
or beliefs, are nothing more than names for the way in which certain purely
physical things function. Functionalism is compatible with materialism,
though it does not entail it in the way that identity theory or eliminative
materialism does.
The Social
Construction of Knowledge
Summary: Few
things are more obvious then the fact that some knowledge claims are the result
of prejudice, an "agenda" of some sort, or a limited perspective. But
in recent years some thinkers have argued that all knowledge claims, or
most of them, are infected by such factors. They point out that the very
language that we use to articulate our thought may be infected by bias. If they
are right then it may be a short step to skepticism, the denial that we can
have knowledge at all, or, at least, know that we have it. The view in question
is "social constructionism," a view that typically stresses the
operation of non-rational factors in the "construction" of knowledge.
One has only to think a little about how ones beliefs may be affected by ones
race, gender, economic status, or by individual vices, such as greed or the
desire for prestige, to realize how even socially approved claims to knowledge
may be unjustified. Code for example tries to show how gender can influence our
beliefs about how best to acquire knowledge. Kuhn argues that even in the
"hard" sciences social factors, such as peer approval, or
community-approved ways of seeing the world, affect notions of what constitutes
scientific knowledge. On the other hand the findings of the hard sciences, or
even such moral beliefs as that it is wrong to torture people for fun,
certainly seem to many people to be objectively true. Such beliefs may in fact
be arrived at by processes that deliberately screen for prejudice and other
irrational factors, as Sokal has argued.
Reason and Moral Judgments
Summary:
Like the issue of selflessness, the question of the role of reason in morality
has to do with the source of moral assessments within human thought. One
extreme position is that morality involves our emotions, with no role for
reason. A contrasting position, equally extreme, is that morality is purely a
matter of rational judgment, with no role for emotions. Hume represents the
first view and argues that moral assessments are nothing but emotional reactions.
His view is represented in the statement that "ought cannot be derived
from is" - that is, statements of fact can never lead to moral
assessments. Contrary to Hume, Searle argues that if we begin with statements
of institutional facts - facts about social rules and expectations - we can
indeed arrive at statements of obligation. Following Hume, Ayer holds that
moral assessments are emotional and not rational judgments. Ayer argues more
particularly that moral judgments express feelings (emotivism) and are used to
recommend that others adopt our attitudes (prescriptivism). Baier takes the
reverse side of the dispute and argues that moral assessments are not emotional
reactions but instead involve surveying the relevant facts and weighing those
facts in order to arrive at the best reasons for acting one way rather than
another.
. Sources of
Political Authority
Summary:
During the 17th century, philosophers formulated several theories of
political authority, which have impacted views of the subject down to present
times. According to Pufendorf, moral duty and political authority are both
grounded in natural law. The main principle of natural law, as authored and
mandated by God, is that we should be sociable. We construct civil governments
as a means of having a suitable environment in which we can follow natural law.
Hobbes defended social contract theory, which is the view that, to secure our
survival, we mutually agree to set aside our hostilities and establish a
government to assure that we abide by our agreements. Without this agreement,
we will be in a constant state of war, each of us selfishly battling it out in
competition for a limited supply of necessities. For Hobbes, the transition
from a state of war to a state of peace is facilitated by following laws of
nature. The three most important laws are, first, to seek peace as a means of
self-preservation, second, to mutually divest ourselves of hostile rights, and,
third, to keep the agreements that we make. Locke defended a view of natural
rights: God has invested all people with fundamental rights to life, health,
liberty and possessions. We retain our right to life unless we forfeit it by
violating the rights of others. We create private property when we mix our
labor with an object held in common. We form larger communities for the benefit
of mutual protection, but in exchange for this we give up some of our liberty.
