Saturday, 09 May 2009

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  A Rave Concerning Good, Evil, and Freedom: Part the Fourteenth

  Counterparts, Providence, and Recalcitrance

  Allow me to recap the last blog. Middle Knowledge faces an ontological difficulty; it cannot stand on its own but must be seen as a special case of either Natural or Free Knowledge. If Natural, then there aren't any relevant possible worlds where you or I act other than we do in the actual world. If Free, then God can only know (at best, given a so-called B¹ view of time) upon strongly actualizing or perhaps only after we've actualized states of affairs. At this stage one could simply concede the point and admit that God only knows what we could do. The deity's knowledge of what we would do is only to a very high probability. In an earlier series of raves I discounted this option and shan't repeat my objections here. So where does that leave us in terms of human freedom? In a later installment of same rave on subjective counterfactuals, I had presented some alternatives that I should like to recast here. Even so, one may ask whether such a recasting of human freedom is of any use to the Free Will Defense or if some other line of inquiry presents itself.
  

  If God's knowing what we would do if he decided to actualize a certain state of affairs², in what sense can we say that we could have acted otherwise? Perhaps one place to start would be with David Lewis' Counterpart Theory. Lewis held that notion of actuality was simply indexical, that all possible worlds were as real as this one and that this world had the privilege of being “actual” by virtue that we inhabit it. That's not the interesting part, however. What caught my attention was one could locate a counterfactual instance in this world by comparing it to a very similar world. Let us say that in this world I am playing a hand of poker but am not sure whether to call or fold. In the end I fold only to discover that the one opponent I was most worried about was bluffing and had I called, I would have won the hand. On Lewis' conception, there is a counterpart to me in some world who is identical to me in every way, save that he called the bluff. On that basis, Lewis would say that I could have won the hand because my counterpart did. All this assumes, of course, that we are not physically, psychologically, or sociologically determined. One does not need to assume that all possible worlds are realized, however. One can still talk about counterparts in other possible (but unactualized) worlds. In an earlier rave I made a distinction between what are normally seen as interchangeable terms: quiddities (whatnesses) and haeccetities (thatnesses). Basically I took quiddities to be a sort of generic version of an individual and her counterparts, call it a smallest common denominator indexed off of an actual individual.³ Of course, generics don't get actualized, real and substantial beings do. As such generics can't do anything at all. This leads to the objection that while there might not be anything external that compels one action, that under this view one cannot determine one's essence and that one's essence entails one's action in a given state of affairs. The somewhat Leibnizian reply (which I've been known to give) that such bifurcation between self and essence is an artificial result of self reflection and that to wish for a different essence is to wish for someone else in one's place falls on deaf ears. I see the point and indeed there may be at least trivial (or not so trivial) points where we ourselves could have acted differently, but how to square that with God necessarily knowing what we would do?

  Perhaps then God does not know what we would do by necessity at all, or at least some free actions are not known by necessity. They are in fact part of God's free knowledge. Early on William Hasker presented three possibilities for who brings about the truth of a counterfactual of freedom (subjective counterfactual) (i) God (ii) the subject, or (iii) no one. Hasker rejected (i) out of hand, I accepted his critique of (ii) and tentatively rejected his critique of (iii). As it turns out, I had to turn right around and accept (iii) as well since my criticism was based on Middle Knowledge being a special case of Natural Knowledge and Hasker was working on the assumption that it was a species of Free Knowledge. Perhaps (i) deserves another look.
  

  As I had stated in dealing with subjective counterfactuals, what follows is rooted in my understanding of John Duns Scotus. Let us assume that for some person P and action A in state of affairs S, that there really are worlds W and W* that include S and that in W P performs A and in W* P refrains from A. Now, given what has gone before, if God cannot strongly actualize W or W*, he cannot know which world would in fact be actualized until it is actualized. So, the alternative is that God does strongly actualize one world or the other.
  

  Does this mean that God causes P to take the action she does? That very much depends one one's view of causality. In a vaguely Aristotelian or Thomistic sense, yes God does cause P to act. On a counterfactual view one might also say as much, but this is of some dispute. Note, however, that under this view (excluding God choosing one possible world over another) all the antecedents to S are identical but the consequences are different. So we cannot say that the antecedents (physical, psychological, social, etc.) cause P's action. It may be a sort of theological determinism, but it seems to be one that is compatible with human freedom.⁴ As I mentioned before, Hasker's objection to God causing a subjective conterfactual being true was under the assumption that God subtly alters the antecedents.
  

  Yet is this any use to the Free Will Defense? Not in itself. Mackie's entire objection is that God could actualize a world that includes a great deal of significant good and no evil. If God can indeed strongly actualize any possible world, then it would seem that Mackie is right. Or maybe not. It assumes that that what I have styled the Scotian analysis of subjective counterfactuals is exhaustive. It may well be that the counterpart theory accounts for at least some subjective counterfactuals. It also assumes that we are correct in our judgments that for any action that we could have done the right thing that we in fact failed to do. Just because it may be possible that for any given situation we do the right thing does not mean that for every situation we can. Or we could put it more conservatively, that for any world that adequately reflects the plenitude of Being (this comes very early in the current rave) would be one that includes some evil (recall, for instance van Inwagen's Extended Free Will Defense in this context). Finite being would seem to be either recalcitrant or unable fully comprehend Being as Being.
  

  Granted, the above needs fleshing out. Perhaps next time I'll take a shot at that.

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  1Contemporary philosophers divide between two views of time, one that sees time as past, present, and future (the A series) where the past is fixed, the present is actual and the future is potential and the other that sees time as before, now, and after (the B series) where all times are actual and “now” serves a simple indexical. So, if counterfactuals are part of God's free knowledge, he would only know after he created. On the B theory, God would know what we in fact do the instant he creates, on the A theory, only after we act.

  2Even though I've presented a conditional statement, the statement as a whole would still be necessarily true.

  3This construction may not be altogether different from Molina's notion of supercomprehension. What we comprehend is the quiddity of a thing but God comprehends beyond the quiddity to one's haecceity. Or one may turn things around and say that a haecceity is like Saurez's habitio (and so removing the opaqueness of what it means to supercomprehend.

  4Here I correct my analysis in my rave on Subjective Conterfactuals where I stated that God absolutely does not cause one's free action.

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