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I've been trying to put Norman Geisler's normative theory on the map of positions I'm aware of, because I think he makes a genuine contribution to the field, and he's been pretty much on the sidelines in terms of ethical theory given that he's only published with Christian publishers for Christian audiences. He calls his view Graded Absolutism, which I think is a misleading term (and arguably a misapplication of the term, depending on how he means it).
Here are four views along a spectrum: 1. Consequentialism (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, G.E. Moore) -- consequences are the only determinant of whether an act is right or wrong; genuinely moral principles never conflict, because there is only one -- to seek the best consequences [but much of the work is determined by what counts as the best consequences, with utilitarians focusing only on pleasure and pain and more comprehensive consequentialists including many other consequences) 2. Rossian deontology (W.D. Ross) -- several moral principles are relevant, and consequences play a role as one of them; different principles take precedence in different situations 3. graded absolutism (Norman Geisler) -- several moral principles are relevant, but not consequences; the same hierarchy of importance exists for these principles no matter the circumstances 4. Kantian deontology (Immanuel Kant) -- moral truths are absolute in the sense that they never have exceptions, no matter how serious the consequences are; moral principles never conflict Consequentialism and Kantianism are absolute in the sense philosophers usually mean when they use the term about an ethical theory. Moral rules are absolute, and there is never any genuine conflict between them. There is at least one moral principle with no exceptions for consequentialists, because there is only one, and it never has exceptions. For Kant, there are several principles, but he thinks they will never conflict. Deontologists think either that there are more principles that matter than just consequences (as Ross thinks) or that consequences are entirely irrelevant (as Geisler and Kant think). Many deontologists find Kant's view implausible, because there are often cases where moral principles conflict. But they also want there to be moral principles besides just consequences. Ross and Geisler offer different views on what happens next. According to Ross, there are sometimes several moral principles that play a role in a given case, and one of them will take precedence in each case. But it's not according to a pre-existing hierarchy. Sometimes the situation will make one principle more appropriate than another, but in a different situation the hierarchy is reversed. Perhaps the lying principle is more important than the principle of seeking the best consequences when not much is at stake in terms of consequences. It might make things a little better in the world if you tell a lie, but the principle against lying is more important when the difference in your self-interest and the interest of others is not much changed whether you lie or not. But in a case where hundreds of lives are at stake, the principle of not lying becomes less significant than the principle of promoting the good of others (which is a consequence). When I teach ethical theory, I teach consequentialism and Kant and then present Ross as a moderating position, taking aspects of each but rejecting other aspects of each. Geisler seems to have found a different moderating position along this spectrum, one that's closer to Kant in two respects than Ross's view is. One Kantian element Geisler wants to retain that Ross rejects is in not counting consequences at all. There might be cases where lying is all right, according to Geisler, if a more important moral principle is at stake. But that principle won't be framed in terms of consequences, and how serious the consequences are plays no role in the moral status of the action. (On this point, I side clearly with Ross. Of course consequences can play a role in determining how good or bad an action is, even if they are not always decisive.) Second, Ross thinks which principle is more important will vary from situation to situation. Geisler doesn't like that. He wants a rigid hierarchy that is the same in every case. The only thing that determines which moral principle applies is which ones are relevant, and then you go with the highest one in the list that's relevant. This is in fact why Geisler misleadingly calls his view absolutist and why he would not think Ross's views is absolutist. What is absolute is the structure of the moral hierarchy. That never has exceptions and doesn't vary from situation to situation. But only the very top moral principle is absolute, strictly speaking, because the others all allow for exceptions. So it's not absolutist about most moral principles, like Kant's view, just about the top one and about the relative positions of all the moral principles in the hierarchy. Most ethicists who speak of absolutism are thinking in terms of whether moral principles in general are absolute, and Geisler's view would say no to that. But if absolutism is the view that at least one moral principle is absolute, then Geisler would agree with that. The top moral principle in the hierarchy is absolute. I want to distinguish both of these moderating positions from a number of views that they get confused with fairly easily. First, there's situational ethics. Situational ethics is itself often confused with relativism. Situational ethics in reality is a consequentialist position that takes love to be the only important consequence. It is not relativism, and neither is consequentialism in general or utilitarianism in particular, despite all these views sometimes being called relativism. The views most commonly called moral relativism are meta-ethical views about the nature of moral language. They find ways to account for moral language without there being objective moral truths. Subjectivism says what's right is just whatever the individual person considers right. Cultural relativism says what's right is whatever your culture says is right. Emotivism says there are no truths or falsehoods about right and wrong, and attempts to say something is right or wrong are more like expressing your approval (they mean, roughly, things like "Hooray for helping people out!" and "Boo! Abortion!" but don't express any content that can be true or false). There are other variations, but what all these views have in common is that there is no truth or falsity of moral statements except, possibly, to express truths about the person making the statement or about that person's culture. Sometimes an incoherent view common among college students is called relativism. This view is basically an inconsistent combination of one of the above meta-ethical views (usually subjectivism or cultural relativism or an inconsistent adoption of both) with the moral absolute that we ought not to criticize other people's moral views or other culture's moral views. I don't consider that a genuine view, just a confusion and an attempt to combine incompatible claims. But the views I'm talking about here are very different from what's usually called relativism. They are not situational ethics, because they are not consequentialist, and situational ethics is a consequentialist theory involving love as the only important consequence. They are not meta-ethical relativism. The meta-ethical position they endorse is objectivism. The moral principles for Ross and Geisler are objectively true. It's just that sometimes one principle is more important than another (for Ross) or some principles are always more important than certain others (for Geisler).In both cases, the facts that determine which principles are relevant in a case are objective. For Geisler, the hierarchy of principles remains constant across situations. For Ross, it doesn't. But even for Ross there are objective facts about the situation that make certain principles more appropriate for that situation than other principles. Contrast the view that your psychological makeup, moral views, or cultural background is what determines which principles are important. These views are not relativism but genuinely objectivist moral theories.
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Alan Turing famously devised the Turing test, which was intended to test whether a machine can think. If it could show enough behavior consistent with thinking, Turing claimed that it really does think.
Turing tests have come under quite a lot of criticism for relying on the fallacious inference from something appearing to have a certain property to the conclusion that it does have that property. Turing tests take the behavior that follows from genuine thinking to be sufficient to establish that there is such thinking, even if the same behavior can be produced by a computer program. I would take the fact that it comes from a computer program to be sufficient reason to think such behavior can occur without genuine thinking. So the usual criticism of Turing tests is that they assume thinking is occurring just because the usual behavior resulting from thinking is occurring. While I'm not interested in diminishing that objection, it occurred to be recently that Turing tests aren't just not sufficient for thinking (things that pass the test might not be thinking). They're not even necessary (things that think might fail the test). For one thing, someone who thinks might simply refuse to comply with the test and thus could fail. But more poignantly, someone with a communication-related disorder, e.g. someone with autism and dyspraxia who is completely non-verbal, simply cannot display the behavior the test is looking for. Being unable to communicate is certainly not a sign of being unable to think. I would argue that more harm is caused by those who take passing a Turing test to be necessary for intelligent thought than is caused by those who take passing such a test to be sufficient for intelligence. We recently attended a communication seminar for parents and educators of non-verbal and mostly non-verbal children. At one session an autistic college senior was present. He can now speak in a somewhat limited manner, but he can communicate by typing on a portable device at a level that's almost certainly far beyond what most kindergarten teachers would have ever expected if they had seen his communication level in his younger years. He had no verbal language until age 12, but because his teachers taught him to type they knew that he was able to grasp much higher levels of thought than most teachers would have even speculated. At last night's session, there was a guy with Down Syndrome and autism who, as far as I could tell, can even as an adult do little more than grunt was typing out sentences that indicate a pretty high-level grasp of some pretty abstract and complex phenomena. With a son who can't speak much more than five syllables at a time (unless he's singing or engaging in echolalic repetition of Veggie Tales or some other TV show), we've been able to see something like this firsthand. We knew in kindergarten that he was reading fairly complex words for the level of verbal behavior we normally saw, because he'd occasionally see a word and say it. (I remember him saying "banana" one time when there were no pictures of a banana, just the word.) But it's been very hard to get him to demonstrate his intelligence with writing, until this year, with his teacher and support staff working very hard with him to get him typing. Six months ago we could get him to trace over words we wrote out with a highlighter, or we could get him to point to words sometimes on a communication device, which could then pronounce them for him (but they had to be programmed in first, since he wasn't typing them). Now he's showing reading comprehension by completing "because" clauses to answer why certain characters did certain things. It makes me wonder how much he's been wanting to be able to communicate for years but unable to get his mouth or hands to do anything to show it. The Turing defender might now say that he is able to show it, so it's not an objection to the test, but he's only now able to show it, and there's no reason to think he just started to be able to think on this level. I suspect most teachers would have assumed he couldn't handle the level of math that he's doing (basically right on second grade level) or the vocabulary and reading that he's doing (which is, as I said, at a pretty good level for demonstrating reading comprehension, better than his older brother could demonstrate at that age). He happens to have a teacher with 25 years of experience working with kids like him, who is informed about technology and methods to get kids like him communicating. Many educators encountering a kid like him might well assume low ability levels and not work to get him to communicate. In effect, they're using a reverse Turing test and concluding that someone isn't intelligent because they can't show it in the typical ways. In a paragraph in my dissertation, I explain a (supposedly) pre-theoretical approach to mixed race that made sense to me when I was a kid. It seemed to me that a helpful way to explain what I would have thought (and what many Americans seem to me to think) is sort of parallel to the way Tolkien speaks of half-elves in his fictional world. In the process, I realized how Tolkien speaks of this is much more complicated than I'd though, and I couldn't in good conscience leave it the way I had initially stated it, so it led to a long clarificatory footnote that I thought a number of the readers of this blog might appreciate for its geekiness.
Here is the sentence in the text of my dissertation that led to this: "I confess that this is how I thought of these matters in my unreflective, supposedly-pretheoretical analysis of things in high school. I would have taken a Barack Obama to be half-black in the same way that I took Elrond in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to be half-elf, his daughter Arwen to be three-quarters elf, and her children with Aragorn to be three-eighths elf." I realized there was a complicating factor, though. Aragorn had an elvish ancestor as well, and I wanted to check to see how far back it was. In the process, I was reminded that Elrond himself wasn't the product of a full elf and a full human, and it led to a much longer and much geekier footnote than I ever expected to be putting into my dissertation, but it's hard to be fair to Tolkien without acknowledging this, and it turns out to illustrate a different phenomenon in how racial classification works in some places outside the U.S. Here is the footnote as it stands now: "Tolkien buffs may quibble here, and they would be right to, for two reasons. (1) Aragorn was the sixteenth in the line of Elros, Elrond's brother, and thus he himself has elvish ancestry, even if minuscule (I believe one over two the thirty-second power). (2) Elrond and Elros themselves weren't exactly half-elves to begin with. Their father was actually half-elf, and their mother was one-fourth human, one-eighth Maia (a kind of lesser angelic-like divinity), and five-eighths elf. That would make Elrond and Elros nine-sixteenths elf, three-eighths human, and one-sixteenth Maia. Arwen's son twenty-five sixty-fourths elf, by these measurements, not the three-eighths that would result if Elrond were literally half elf. But we get the language of half-elves for a number of Tolkien characters with mixed ancestry, regardless of actual percentages. What this suggests is that the culture of Tolkien's world seems to treat someone as half-elf for having any level of mixed ancestry, eschewing a one-drop rule in either direction but insisting on little expression of nuance or gradation among those labeled half-elves. This would presumably operate something like the label 'brown' in some Latin American and Caribbean countries, applying to anyone of mixed heritage regardless of the particular number of ancestors of each race." This doesn't (at this point) make it into my dissertation, but compare Rowling's terminology in the Harry Potter books. There are two systems of classification, the one that is dominant until Voldemort's rise to power (and presumably again afterward) and the one operating during his reign of terror. In the method of classification that we learn throughout most of the series, someone with a magical parent and a Muggle parent is a half-blood. Harry's mother, Severus Snape, and Voldemort himself are half-bloods. Someone with no magical parentage but who has magic is called a Muggle-born. But in the generation after a half-blood, if the other parent is magical, there is no discussion of being a half-blood. Harry himself is never called a half-blood by anyone in the mainstream of wizarding society. There's no one-drop rule in either direction, but there's a sufficient-drop rule apparently, because once you get to three-fourths magical parentage you're no longer consider partial, and even if you have no magical parentage you're treated as magical in one sense. It's what you can do and not your parentage that makes the difference in terms of the law. But then there's Voldemort's regime. Muggle-borns are Mudbloods by the pureblood mindset even before Voldemort's return to power, but once he takes control of things they simply become Muggles. They're assumed to have stolen their wands, because they're not magical. Half-bloods (other than Voldemort and Snape) are sometimes called Mudbloods, and Harry (who had a full magical parent and a Muggle-born magical parent) is considered a half-blood, because his mother was a Muggle. There's something more like the one-drop rule operating here, although not quite. But neither of these systems of classification works out quite like Tolkien's. And keep in mind that elves in Tolkien don't think of humans as corrupting or impure. A half-elf can choose to be mortal or to be an elf in ways that don't involve just legal status. It affects whether they become mortal. Arwen, with much more elf ancestry than human, still could chose to become mortal. There's nothing parallel to that in Rowling's classifications. Perhaps if we had enough evidence for how half-orcs were classified (there are only a couple suggestions in Tolkien that there are such things but no clear cases where it's more than just simple one-human, one-orc parentage). If he treated three-fourths orcs as half-orcs in a case where the human is mixed with something seen as corrupting, we'd have a good test case for whether his principle would expand to other cases of mixing. But I know of nothing in his fictional world that gets any more complex than simple one-one mixing except when it comes to elves (and the one Maia in the line of Elrond). There’s a fascinating element in the discussion of the Sabbath year in Deuteronomy 15. The general law requires releasing people from their debts every seven years. That means if you lend to someone a few months before the release of debts, and the person is too poor to pay it back in time, you have to release them of the debt. You might expect this to give rise to unprecedented amounts of stinginess in the time before the year of debt-release. The law anticipates this, though, and it commands Israel not to use such fears as excuses not to give. It’s sin to refuse to give in such a situation, and they were commanded to give and not grudgingly. It says God will reward those who get stiffed in such a situation.
In the debate between complementarianism and egalitarianism about gender distinctions in marriage, egalitarians often say that calling on a woman to submit to her husband is unfair when the man isn’t called on to do the same. This does ignore that the same Ephesians 5 that tells women to submit to their husbands commands husbands to love their wives as self-sacrificially as the love that brought Christ to die for the church, which I think should count as at least as significant a level of sacrifice as what the wife is asked to do. But one thing complementarians often say strikes me as missing the point. They say that in any ideal marriage this shouldn’t be an issue. If the husband is loving his wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, then it won’t be difficult at all for the wife to submit to the husband. One hint that something is amiss here comes from considering the flip-side, which would be: If the wife submits to the husband, then it won’t be difficult to love her as Christ loved the church. Really? I suspect it would still be immensely difficult for a sinful husband or wife to follow these commands even with a sinless spouse. But I think the main reason I don’t like that complementarian response is that you shouldn’t have to go to the ideal situation to see that these commands are all right. If complementarianism is correct, then wives should submit to their husbands even if their husbands are complete jerks, and husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the church even if their wives are as unlovely as someone’s inner self could be. Indeed, I would say this is so even with an egalitarian interpretation of this passage. This is simply Christian teaching. Philippians 2 makes this utterly clear. Christ’s model of giving himself for us is just plain the model for Christians and how we should treat others, regardless of how those others treat us. And this is simply continuous with the Hebrew scriptures, including the Mosaic law, since the very same principle underlies the command in Deuteronomy 15 that lenders should give to the poor even when there’s little chance of getting the money back before the debt-release year (and many other places in the Torah, Proverbs, prophets, etc. along these lines). So, while I don’t think the complementarian reply above is correct (i.e. saying that in an ideal situation it isn’t all that bad to follow complementarianism), at the same time I think objections to complementarianism that involve any claim that it asks too much are, at the very least, contrary to the very spirit of Christ and his call on the church. There are those who will resist such an ethic. They will say that Nietzsche was right in his diagnosis of Christianity as a slave-morality. I’m willing to grant that to a point, as long as they recognize that they resist Christianity in doing so. What I will have little patience for is those who think they can maintain a Christian ethic while thinking any unfairness here is immoral. It reminds me of a discussion I overheard between two atheist philosophers, both of whom had some Christian influence when they were younger. One was giving a certain argument against a certain conception of hell, saying that it would be unfair, and the other said that it won’t make much sense to use an argument that assumes God is fair against the followers of Jesus, since Jesus described God in terms of an employer giving the same amount of pay to the laborers who only worked an hour as he gave to those who had been working all day. These were day-laborers who subsist on a day’s wage to live for the day. The Torah even requires people to pay day-laborers every day for that very reason. Jesus says God is like the farmer who pays the day-laborers a full day’s wage even if they don’t earn it. There’s nothing fair about that arrangement, and yet Jesus says it represents what God’s character is like. It’s not remotely fair to ask Israelites to give to their poor fellow Israelites who will almost certainly end up with no debt due to the closeness of the year of debt-release. But it’s very clear that biblical morality requires doing exactly that sort of thing and much more. [cross-posted at First Things] Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, I anoint you king over the people of the Lord, over Israel. And you shall strike down the house of Ahab your master, so that I may avenge on Jezebel the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the Lord. For the whole house of Ahab shall perish, and I will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel. And I will make the house of Ahab like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha the son of Ahijah. And the dogs shall eat Jezebel in the territory of Jezreel, and none shall bury her. [ESV, II Kings 9:6b-8]
These are the words of an unnamed prophet to Jehu, the first king in the last dynasty of the northern kingdom of Israel. The prophet instructs Jehu to supplant Ahab's heir and kill of the remaining heirs. Every male of Ahab's house will perish. This isn't just a command. It's a prediction. The only problem is that Ahab's daughter Athaliah was married to King Jehoram of Judah, and Jehoram's son Ahaziah was also killed off in Jehu's purge as a descendant of Ahab. In fact, all of Jehoram and Ahaziah's children were killed, except Jehoash, who would eventually become the next king of Judah, thus preserving the line of David. But isn't Jehoash a male descendant of Ahab? Do we actually have conflicting prophecies here, one confirming the Davidic dynasty in perpetuity and the other confirming the dying out of Ahab's dynasty? If so, then there's no way they could both be fulfilled, but even one false prophecy disqualifies a prophet. The author of Kings seems to treat this prophecy as fulfilled, however. So what's going on? It doesn't do to treat the text's author as a bunch of unrelated, ignorant buffoons who edit a text without allowing for quality control enough for the text to be consistent with some of the driving ideology purposes of the very book itself, which would include the 100% reliability of prophecy from genuine prophets. I haven't seen anyone do that in this case, though. (Not to say that I've never seen biblical prophets make that kind of mistake. They often do. I just didn't see anyone doing it here.) Surprisingly, I couldn't find any commentary that raises this issue at all. I looked at several. Someone whose work I didn't look at might have raised it, or maybe one of the commentaries I looked at raises it in a different place (there are other prophecies about this transfer of power and references back to it later on). But it apparently never occurred to any of them that there might be some issue with a prophecy here that seems to conflict with a different one (and indeed seems not to have been fulfilled if taken the way I took it above). So what might the author or final editors of this text have taken this text to mean if they obviously did think it fulfilled? If Ahab's line was preserved in the very line of David that was prophesied to go on perpetually (and on the Christian view leads to Jesus Christ as great David's greater son), then the prophecy must not mean "every male descendant of Ahab". This expression is literally something like "everyone of Ahab who urinates on the wall", and it's possible but unlikely that it means something else besides "every male of Ahab". Nonetheless, I find those proposals much less likely than just the males of his household. But that's the key, I suspect. Perhaps the males descended from Ahab aren't included among the males of his household that this passage refers to. So Jehoash would then not have been part of the intended end to Ahab's house, since he's not actually of Ahab's house but David's. So it turns out this isn't that difficult question. It just surprises me that no one whose work I looked at on this verse had even raised it. I heard late last night about William P. Alston's death earlier in the day, strangely not through any departmental channels but through a friend who never met him. He was one of the professors I've most respected in my entire academic career. He wrote his dissertation with Wilfred Sellars on the work of Alfred North Whitehead but spent most of his career on philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, and epistemology. Along with Alvin Goldman and Alvin Plantinga, he helped spearhead the externalist/reliabilist revolution in epistemology, a tradition that I think took things in the right direction. He also was one of the most important figures in the revival of philosophy of religion in the last four decades from a point where it had become looked upon as a joke except to reject traditional religious views to a point where some of the most important philosophers today are Christians or other theists. Alston himself was not a Christian when he began his philosophical career, a path shared with several other notable Christian philosophers (Norman Kretzmann and Peter van Inwagen come to mind).
It was always encouraging to me to think about how successful he was in philosophy given his personality and philosophical temperament, which I think are similar to mine in a number of ways that I'm not like most of my philosophical colleagues. He wasn't a system-builder. He wrote about what he had something to say about but wasn't trying to put together a comprehensive philosophical view on every issue he could have something to say about. Most of his work didn't involve coming up with brilliant views on cutting-edge issues that no one had ever thought of before (although I think there are a few occasions of that in his work, especially in his most recent work in epistemology). He tended to favor traditional views, sometimes so traditional that the majority in philosophy had left the view so far behind that they considered it a joke until people like him came along to disabuse them of such notions by defending the views in novel ways. Some of the most important philosophical figures are noteworthy for one or both of those reasons (system-building and novel views). Alston, however, filled a role of simply doing good philosophy, often in small but important details. He might see a fallacious argument that was nonetheless popular and apply an important distinction, perhaps one known to the medievals but often ignored by contemporary philosophers, to show why the argument fails. He found elements of competing views that might be compatible and explained why a moderating position might be better than either original view. He applied new arguments in epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, or metaphysics to some problem in philosophy of religion to show why a new trend in a completely different area makes Christian belief more favorable (e.g. his application of functionalism, a recent view in materialist philosophy of mind, to explain how language about God can be literally true even if not used in exactly the same sense as the same terms are used for us). It was clear to me that his long-time colleague and friend Jonathan Bennett had little interest in a lot of the issues in philosophical theology that Alston spent a good deal of time on. In one instance in their Locke/Leibniz class, Bennett dismissed an objection I was raising against his criticism of Leibniz because he didn't want to get into the particular theological issue of God's relation to time, whereas Alston had been nodding along with my objection the whole time. Yet Bennett had tremendous respect for Alston and had been so thoroughly impressed with Alston's argument in Perceiving God that he insisted he publish the bits that weren't about God separately so as to get a wider audience, which resulted in his The Reliability of Sense Perception. Bennett had so much respect for Alston that he insisted on having Alston teach four of the six sessions on Locke in his Locke/Leibniz seminar whenever Alston was available to do it, and he tried for two decades to get Alston to publish his fascinating paper on how Locke's philosophy of language in a relatively obscure section of the Essay requires innate ideas, which he famously rejects earlier in the Essay. Several directions in his work were influential in my own thinking: Jerome Walsh's commentary on I Kings is probably the best thing out there on narrative issues in I Kings. I've heard good reports on it from several commentary reviews, and two people who have used it in their sermon preparation for our current sermon series in Kings have found it very helpful. It's fairly rare that he says anything that evangelicals would find problematic with regard to the nature of scripture, but I did identify one thing when reading his commentary on I Kings 11, and I don't think he can consistently maintain it given other things he says.
A lot of people think it's irrational to vote if your vote isn't going to have an effect on the outcome. I live in an extremely blue district of a slightly red county in a very blue state. In local and statewide elections, my vote has so little an effect that it's not worth voting if the only point of voting is for my one vote to have an effect on the outcome. New York is overwhelmingly going to continue to support Senators Schumer and Clinton, and they tend to vote Democratic in governor elections except when there's a very moderate Republican like George Pataki on the ballot. County-wide races are closer, and so is the U.S. House district, which was almost a toss-up in 2006. Things were even more one-sided when I lived in Rhode Island.
But it simply isn't true that voting is only worth doing if you're going to be the deciding vote. There are other reasons people give for voting, some better than others. One that often occurs to me when it seems hopeless for my candidate is that if everyone voting for the other side thought it wasn't worth voting because the outcome is assured then my candidate might have a chance. Other reasons include that it helps you psychologically to feel like you're contributing and that it's simply your obligation to do what you can to influence things for the better even if what you can isn't by itself going to make the difference in who wins the election. Any of those responses would be sufficient by itself, except perhaps the psychological benefit one (at least if that involves self-deception, and if it doesn't then it's not a distinct reason but depends on one of the others). I think there's an even better reason to vote, and I think it might actually be what motivates me most, but I hadn't actually thought about it in these terms until today. It takes a page from Calvinist responses to the objection that if the future is already determined then there's no point in praying. Calvinists come in several varieties, but the most common sort of Calvinist (which isn't the same as being the most noticed kind on the internet) is compatibilist about human freedom and divine predetermination. If God has a plan that includes everything I'm going to do, everything every other person is going to do, and an outcome for every prayer I ever pray, then is it worth praying? My prayer isn't going to change anything, after all. Of course, my prayer would also be in this plan, and if I didn't pray then a different outcome may well have been in the works. Compatibilists about divine predetermination and human action are going to insist that God works through our choices and doesn't just force things outside our control. Our prayers are part of how God's plan works itself out as history unfolds. One thing Calvinists sometimes say is that praying is not so much for the outcome but for us. God wants us to pray because of what God will do in us because we pray. I don't want to deny that, but it's certainly not the emphasis in scripture on reasons to pray. The emphasis seems to be on two things. One is that prayer does affect things. It doesn't change them, because the future can't be changed anymore than the past or present can. If the future is a certain way then it can't be changed. Even open theists don't think the future can be changed. Why should someone who thinks there's a definite future think it can be changed? But for the reasons in the previous paragraph, the future can be influenced. It can be caused by things in the present, and I can be part of that process of bringing it about. A compatibilist should have no trouble saying that sort of thing. But there's another reason in scripture for why we should pray, even though God has worked out the end from the beginning, and this one (unlike the previous one) does have some relevance for voting. God wants us to communicate our dependence on him and to express our desires to him. He wants us to see him as the Father who cares for us and meets our needs and our wishes, provided that our wishes are righteous and as long as there isn't some other reason beyond our ken for why God wouldn't grant a particular wish (as there may well be). As Jesus points out, what father when presented with a request from a child for bread or fish will give a snake? God wants to bestow good things on his children and delights when we come to him with requests, for the same reasons a giving parent delights in such things. Given that, it's a privilege to call him Father, which is why it's a big deal that Jesus starts out the Lord's prayer with "our Father". Those who don't avail themselves of that title in addressing him are missing out on something great. Those who don't address him at all are missing out on even more. The same dynamic plays out in a smaller way with voting. I'm privilege to live in a country that seeks my opinion on who should occupy certain offices. Even if my vote doesn't have an effect in putting someone in office, it's a privilege to be able to contribute my thoughts in the process of the communal decision that an election involves. I don't believe voting is a moral right. But I think I'd be wasting an opportunity to express my opinion if I didn't vote, and wasting a privilege is at least unfortunate (and I would even argue that it's immoral). This seems to me to be a much better reason to vote than any of the more common ones that I hear, even if most of them are good enough reasons. Elliot Sober has a new paper, "Intelligent Design Theory and the Supernatural: The 'God or Extra-Terrestrials' Reply", in the latest issue of Faith and Philosophy (January 2007). I received my copy today, and I was amazed that this paper could get past the reviewers of a top philosophy of religion journal without serious modification, even from such an important philosopher of science as Sober.
Sober makes the following argument. Defenders of intelligent design often point out that ID arguments are not religion, and one support for this (a relatively less important one, in my view) is that the conclusion of ID arguments is silent on what the designer is like other than that the designer is intelligent and must have worked purposes into nature somehow. Sober's paper is a response to that argument, and his response is extremely strange. He argues that supernatural assumptions are implicit in the ID argument, and thus the ID defender is committed to a conclusion that there is some supernatural being. Suppose that's all true. I'm not invested very seriously in whether that part of his argument is correct, since I happen to believe there is a supernatural being. I don't even care whether ID defenders are committed to the existence of a supernatural being, since I know no one who accepts ID who doesn't also accept a supernatural being. So I'll assume for the sake of argument that Sober is correct, and ID arguments do involve a commitment to the existence of some supernatural being. My question is how this helps Sober. His point in the paper is to show that ID arguments involve a religious conclusion. The only way he should be able to conclude that is if he thinks being implicitly committed to the existence of a supernatural being is somehow itself religious. Yet it isn't. Lots of people think moral evaluation commits you to the existence of a supernatural being. They don't necessarily think that calling an action wrong is a religious practice. So it doesn't seem that being implicitly committed to the existence of a supernatural being is the same as practicing a religion. What's worse is that plenty of people accept theistic arguments on philosophical grounds without being religious practitioners. I personally know several people myself who do exactly that. Their theism is merely a philosophical view. It is not religious in any sense. It doesn't even affect their life. They are areligious. So how can implicitly being committed to the existence of a supernatural being amount to religion when even being explicitly committed to theism doesn't count as religion? Now perhaps there's a deeper argument Sober could make, and we should interpret these strange claims in the light of that deeper argument. Maybe he thinks you could only accept the premises of the ID argument if you are already religious. If that's what he has in mind, then maybe it would show that ID arguments are religious. But of course he'd be relying on a false premise. People can and do accept ID arguments without accepting any religion. There's no necessary religious support for ID arguments. They are entirely theoretical (as opposed to practical) arguments for a philosophical conclusion, with no need for religious premises. The argument relies on one scientifically observed premise about a certain kind of complexity in nature, and it relies on a further philosophical inference to a best explanation. Neither the scientific premise nor the inference is religion. One is science, and the other is philosophy, and ID arguments are a common enough kind of philosophical inference in science. That doesn't make them good arguments, but it does mean they are not religion. This leaves me thinking that Sober is either fundamentally confused about what religion is or simply redefining it to suit his political purposes the same way he would insist that the ID movement redefines science to suit its political purposes. Neither should be true of a paper published in a top philosophy of religion journal. In the Torah, Aaron is the first high priest of the Levitical order of priests. He had four sons: Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar. The first two died in Leviticus 10, leaving Eleazar as the eldest inheritor of the high priestly line. We see in Joshua that Eleazar's son Phinehas had become the high priest by the time of the conquering of the land. Then we lose any record of what was going on with tabernacle worship until we get to Samuel, where there seems to be a fixed temple structure built up around the tabernacle implements of worship from the end of Exodus. Perhaps the most surprising feature of the priestly situation at the beginning of the book of Samuel is that the high priest Eli was not descended from Eleazar but his younger brother Ithamar. Where are the descendants of Eleazar, then? What happened after Phinehas?
This surprising fact in the Samuel history has led a number of scholars to propose a skeptical reconstruction of what really happened. On this view, the high priestly family has always been descended from Ithamar, and Eli's family in Samuel was the original high priestly family. With David we get the insertion of a priest named Zadok alongside the final remaining Elide priest Abiathar/Ahimilech. I Chronicles 24 tells us that Zadok is the head of the the Eleazar clan of priests, which Ahimelech (perhaps the same man called Abiathar in Samuel, perhaps his son) was head of the Ithamar clan of priests. The revisionist theory takes Zadok to be a complete outsider from the conquered Jebusite city of Jerusalem. David allowed him to continue his priestly duties, casting him as a priest under the order of Melchizedek, the original priest-king of Salem (which became Jerusalem) from Genesis 14. This allowed David to assert his legitimacy to be king in the Jebusite city, and then Chronicles and the other places that list him as a descendant of Eleazar are just reworking the tradition to make him fit the Israelite origin story, casting Zadok as a son of an older brother of the ancestor of the Elide priests. Thus no sign was left of the Jebusite origin of Zadok. My first thought upon hearing this theory is that it seems entirely unmotivated by the evidence. After all, the only texts we have indicate Zadok as Levitical priest in the line of Aaron, Eleazar, and Phinehas. There is a difficult issue about what's going on in the Elide line of the Ithamarites, i.e. whether Ahimelech and Abiathar are the same person or father and son (or whether there's some other explanation why the texts say what they do in a way that seems to conflict), but that doesn't affect the issue of Zadok. The argument for this reimagining of the history of Israel's priestly line is pretty much that you can read the evidence this way if you really, really want to as long as you're willing to deny most of what the text actually says on the issue. That's a pretty flimsy argument, but much 20th century biblical studies is like that. We really have no further evidence besides the text on this issue, so I've never understood the motivation for this view apart from the need to come up with something new to maintain a job as a scholar. |
AuthorJeremy Pierce is a philosophy professor, Uber/Lyft driver, and father of five. Archives
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