Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I'm thinking today, for no good reason, about the "free will solution" to the problem of evil in theology. Practitioners of theodicy who rely on the free will solution maintain that evil must be attributed to the independent actions of human beings, supposed to have been endowed by God with freedom of the will. This by itself would not solve the problem. It only works as a solution if it can be shown that God has a Good Reason to allow human beings to be independent of His will. Then one can conclude that it is for a greater good that He allows us to allow evil into the world. This point was insisted upon by J.L. Mackie in what a much debated publication on this subject, his EVIL AND OMNIPOTENCE (1955). Theists, as Mackie understands them, must treat free will as a “third order good.” I'm not going to argue the underlying issues today. I have done that here before. I will confine this post, rather, to simply outlining those three orders of good. ...

I hope every reader of mine has had a fine Thanksgiving break and is ready for another work week. In New England, the home of the origin story of this feast, we certainly had great weather for it: weather harsh enough that we could think of ourselves as new settlers in a harsh dangerous land and show some Calvinist  fortitude in facing up to it! The following may have some connection to Calvinism, but not much. I'll inflict it upon you anyway.  A young friend of mine, in college, taking a course on the philosophy of religion, was recently assigned to write a paper about the dispute between Mackie and Plantinga over free will and the problem of evil.  Mackie has argued (as have many others, but the Mackie version of the case has become a focal point of recent debate) that it is logically impossible to reconcile three claims: that an omnipotent God exists; that this is also an ideally benevolent being; and that evil exists. Any theology with any hope of plausibility ...

On the 16th and 17th of November I posted here discussions of the "error theory" in meta-ethics [hereafter ET in ME]. This is nihilism by a somewhat fancier name. It is the view that our statements about right and wrong mean what they sound like they mean to untutored ears, they mean that we are making claims of knowledge about actions, situations, duties, etc. -- but they are always wrong, because we never really have such knowledge. I put off the matter of my own evaluation of error theory. But here we go. Note that a key argument is simply how ":queer" a sort of thing a moral fact is if it exists. Why does the error theorist think moral judgments are inherently "queer"? Mackie put it this way, to say that they are knowable facts is also to say that they are "intrinsically action guiding," independent of the "desires or purposes" of the one who is guided. Of course it is open to the opponent of ET/ME to say "it doesn't ...

Relying on yesterday's prelude, let's dive right in. If I understand it correctly, the error theory holds that (1) cognitivism is right about what ethical statements try to do but, (2) cognitivism is wrong in that ethical statements ALWAYS fail to do it, to convey knowledge. Error theorists rather boldly refuse to re-interpret such errors in non-cognitivist fashion to turn them into anything that could be non-erroneous. An ethical statement in the pertinent sense says that some normative predicate is true of some subject. The classic text for error theory is J.L. Mackie, ETHICS: INVENTING RIGHT AND WRONG (1977). It contends that there are no true statements with normative predicates -- that is, of the form "X is just" or "X is a breach of trust." In arguing for this view, Mackie coined the phrase, "the argument from queerness." He contended that ethical statements could possibly be right only if ethical facts somehow "supervene...

Assume a discussion between someone who believes in objective moral facts of some sort (however conceived) and someone who who believes that there are no such facts, and that as a consequence any first-order moral judgments are an error. The error theorist observes the vast differences between what different times and different places regard as right and wrong. He says there is an "argument from relativity," leading to a presumption against moral facts existing at all. The moral realist replies that one cannot make this inference. After all, there are people who believe in a hollow earth, or a flat earth. It does not follow that there are no geological facts, only that people are subject to small and large errors about them. To this an error theorist might reply -- oh wait, let's quote exact words here. "The argument from relativity has some force simply because the actual variations in the moral code are more readily explained by the hypothesis that they r...