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Ratiocination

Awaiting Response: Derrick Darby


I've sent an email to Derrick Darby at Texas A&M with a link to a paper of my critiquing his central philosophical project (rights externalism). It'll be interesting to see what Darby has to say in response.

A Pentuplet of Papers


Five of my papers are currently under review for journal publication (undergraduate and professional). Given what I know, at least two of them have a high chance of acceptance, and one of them almost zilch. I look forward to getting comments back from reviewers. Even if I get rejections across the board, this has got to be a good exercise for one interested in being a professional philosopher.

• "The Logic of Immortality", submitted March 2005. Response anticipated July 2005.
• "Formal Monism", submitted March 2005. Response anticipated June 2005.
• "Thomas' Lesser Way: A Critique", submitted March 2005. Response anticipated May 2005.
• “Kuhn and Metaphysical Realism”, submitted January, 2005. Response anticipated May 2005.
• “Recalibrating the Critical Power Objection: A Reply to Darby,” submitted December, 2004. Response anticipated June 2005.

The Ides of March


In 28 hours, I'll leave for NPDA Nationals. I hear tell that it's snowing in Lubbock, Texas. That's nice--I'll bring some gloves.

In class today, I sketched out a few paper projects to work on over spring break: in the first, I plan on offering an analysis of various intuition pumps and their relation to the abortion debate. Second, I will write a takedown of Quentin Smith's paper on moral nihilism and an infinite universe. Third, I'd like to put together a few thoughts on the logical problem of evil and its relationship to 'modal epistemology,' specifically drawing upon resources from Peter van Inwagen's paper of the same name.



A project that's been on my backburner for a while is a philosophical bibliography of important classical liberal books in conjunction with a literature review. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia will obviously play a central role.



With all these ideas floating around, I've got plenty to do academically. And then there's school. But that only gets in the way sometimes.

And They're Off


Off to the NPTE. I went to the tournament last year to watch. This time, my partner and I will be competing. We begin the tournament ranked as the 33rd seed in the tournament (out of 48), and the 41st team (out of 1078) in the nation. We'll see what happens. =)

Augustine on Evil


St. Augustine’s account of evil attempts to answers the question ‘why does evil exist?’ One answer he found enticing in his early career as a thinker was Manicheanism, which posits that evil is a primary substance, just as good is. Under this view, the two have co-existed for eternity. History is nothing more than a never-ending struggle between these two equal and opposite forces. This Manichean position has a force, I think, in answering the central question of evil—it tells us what evil is, that it has a form, the purpose of its being, and the efficient cause of its existence. One troubled by the question of evil may here find answers, it would seem. But not the Christian.

As his faith matured, Augustine recognized the incompatibility of Manichean doctrine with Christianity on several points. Most broadly, it requires a conceptual shrinkage of our notion of God. Manicheanism relegates God to being only ‘one of many’—he is not the sovereign ruler of all that is. Instead, certain forces (evil) are entirely beyond his control. This is difficult to square with a robust notion of omnipotence. Recognizing the deficiency of the Manichean account of evil, Augustine, then, set out to provide his own.
I shall now offer an analysis of Augustine’s account of evil by positing it as four theses, each corresponding to an Aristotelian category of causation. This is not to suggest that Augustine explicitly had these categories in mind when formulating his account of evil; they will, however provide a helpful framework.

Most broadly, Augustine believed that evil did not have being—for an object to be evil is for it to have a privation of being, not a genuine property. He seemed persuaded by an argument like the following: All things that exist are good, evil is not good, therefore, evil does not exist. The question of evil as I have initially formulated it, then, might seem nonsensical to an Augustinian—to ask ‘why does evil exist?’ is misguided. But it still has force, I think, for it can be easily restated as something like, ‘why do some objects have a privation of being?’ To this question, Augustine gives four answers:

The efficient cause of evil is the perversion of human free will. At root, evil is the result of human choice, a “perversion of the will when it turns aside from you, O God, whoa re the supreme substance, and veers towards things of the lowest order…”

The material cause of evil is a deficiency, or a lack of being. As Geivett notes, “… one must note how Augustine defines evil. Evil is the corruption of a good. Such a corruption is never total lest that in which the evil inheres ceases to exist altogether. Every being is good insofar as it has being. Evil is a parasite on being; it is not a substance as such. Rather, it is a privation in a substance.”

The formal cause of evil is a negation of the good. In Platonic language, there is no Form of Evil. It is parasitic on the good, defined only in terms of the good. Augustine makes this clear, speaking to God, “For you evil does not exist, and not only for you, but for the whole of your creation as well…”

The final cause of evil is the greater good brought about by a world with human free will. That evil is occurs only as a result of human agency, that much is certain. Geivett explains, “Augustine’s account depends upon a subtle distinction between the having of human free will and the exercise of human free will. The former obtains through divine agency, the latter through human agency.” If human agency carries with it the possibility of evil—why would God allow it in the first place? Augustine would respond that human freedom is itself a greater good: “such is the generosity of God’s goodness… As a runaway horse is better than a stone which does not run because it lacks self-movement and sense perception, so the creature is more excellent which sins by free will than that which does not sin only because it has no free will.” God, of course, may have additional purposes behind his broad policy of permitting evil, but the most basic explanation of evil’s existence is that it is brought about by God’s creation of something of intrinsic value: human freedom.

Augustine has provided, I think, a robust framework from which to answer the Manichean problem of evil. He need not posit evil as an uncreated substance, as eternal and powerful as the good or God. Instead, seeing evil as a privation puts it on the ‘bottom of the food chain,’ so to speak. This is a thesis the Christian can be consistently comfortable, with, it seems. Additionally, Augustine provides a means of laying the moral responsibility for evil at a doorstep other than God’s.

I shall now argue that, while promising, this account is insufficient to answer the question of evil. I shall do this by investigating further his notion of the efficient cause of evil. If one is at all troubled by the question, ‘why does evil exist?’ or ‘why do some objects have a privation of being?’ the causal origin of evil is a pressing one. If Creation were good when created by God, how could it have possibly fallen into evil? That God may have created some seed of evil which sprouted into the Fall seems inconsistent with an entirely good God. If evil is not a substance equal to and eternal with God, by what means was the initial evil caused to be?

Augustine’s suggestion that human will is at root responsible is a starting place, but it is not satisfactory. To note that some perversion of human will brought about evil suggests immediately the following question: ‘What is the efficient cause of this perversion of will?’ Is not this perversion of will itself an evil in need of causal explanation? To this, Augustine has little to say. He notes that “Moreover, if we seek an efficient cause of the evil will… we shall find none. For what is it that makes the will evil, when it is the will itself that makes an action evil? Thus, an evil will is the efficient cause of evil action, but nothing is the efficient cause of an evil will.” Even more dishearteningly, Augustine asserts, “No matter how thoroughly we examine the matter… we can discover nothing which caused the particular will of one of them to be evil.”

It is difficult to know what to make of the claim that the evil will’s being evil is without efficient cause. What is even more puzzling, however, is Augustine’s final assertion that, “Let no one, then, seek an efficient cause of an evil will. For its cause is not efficient, but deficient.” The puzzlement I have when reading such a saying can be put more precisely in the form of an argument. This argument will reveal an inadequacy of Augustine’s account.

P1. Every event has an efficient cause
P2. The perversion of some human will is an event.
C. Therefore, the perversion of some human will has an efficient cause.

If this argument, or something like it is sound, Augustine is misguided in claiming that the perversion of a will is without efficient cause. I shall now defend its two premises.
P1 is one formulation of the principle of sufficient reason. That is, for everything that happens, there is an explanation of why it happens, which includes an account of the causal history which brought it about. I note that P1 has counterexamples (indeterminate quantum events, for example), but that these do not neuter the force of the argument. P1 could easily be restricted in scope to exclude certain microscopic events while still including events we are currently interested in (a change of state in a human will or soul, for example). At the very least, it seems to me that the intuitive drive behind P1 is strong—this offers prima facie justification for it absent an argument showing otherwise.

The Augustinian may have grounds to reject P2, which I will here discuss. She might argue as follows: It is foolish to look for an efficient cause of evil in its most basic form; precisely because evil is non-being, it has no efficient cause. This quest “is like wishing to see darkness or hear silence.” In response, I note that P2 does not claim that some evil object has an efficient cause. Rather, it claims that any bringing about of evil is an event. Consider some object O at t, which loses some good-making property P at t2. At t3, it would be accurate, under the Augustinian account, to call O evil. The absence of P at t2 and t3 is not itself a property. The leaving of the property, however, was an event, and this is all P2 needs to get off the ground.

My argument, then, does not foolishly ask to see darkness. Instead, it asks what process brought about this absence of illumination: who flipped the light switch? I tentatively conclude, then, that the Augustinian project does not explain one crucial facet of evil, its efficient cause, and that this facet is an important one to account for.

Aquinas' Lesser Way: A Revised Critique


Radically revised my Aquinas paper last night--I'm much happier with this iteration.