Edward Feser's Blog, page 37

Apt pupil

Justice Neil Gorsuch was a student of John Finnis, foremost proponent of the “New Natural Law Theory” (NNLT).  Is that relevant to understanding the Bostock decision?  It might seem not, given that NNLT thinkers like Robbie George (hereand here) and Ryan Anderson have strongly criticized Gorsuch’s reasoning.On the other hand, if you’re wondering: Where might someone learn a style of reasoning so tortuous and sophistical that it can read an implicit reference to sexual orientation and gender identity out of the word “sex” as it was understood in 1964?  And contradicting his earlier position, into the bargain?
How about from someone capable of reasoning so tortuous and sophistical that it can read a condemnation of capital punishment as intrinsically evil out of a 2,000-year-old tradition that has consistently affirmed capital punishment as intrinsically just?  And despite having earlier defended capital punishment himself?
Prof. Finnis may in this case deplore the results, but he cannot disapprove of his pupil’s method: jurisprudential chutzpah, weaponized in the service of overthrowing tradition.

Locke’s “transubstantiation” of the self

Locke’s agnosticism about substance led him to treat the self as essentially a bundle of attributes.  Given his empiricism, he takes it that the most we can say of a substance – whether material or immaterial – is that it is a “something, I know not what” that underlies attributes.  And that is too thin a conception to lend confidence to the thesis that the self qua substance can survive death and be rewarded or punished in the afterlife.  What to do?  Locke’s solution was to ignore substance as beside the point.  What matters for Locke is that one’s consciousness, and in particular one’s memories, can carry over after the death of the body, whether or not there is a soul for them to inhere in. That’s the point of his famous “prince and cobbler” thought experiment.  We’re asked to imagine a prince and a lowly cobbler each falling asleep one night and then awakening the following morning to find himself in the other’s body, Freaky Friday style (or Vice Versa style, for you Judge Reinhold fans).  This is at least theoretically possible – so Locke claims – and that possibility suffices to show, he argues, that being the same person over time does not entail having the same body over time.
But neither, he thinks, does it entail having the same soul over time.  For just as your consciousness can jump from body to body, so too, he argues, could it jump from soul to soul.  He famously suggests that, for all you know, the soul that currently underlies your consciousness might once have belonged to Socrates.  If the contents of your consciousness are like pins, then substance is like the pincushion in which they inhere.  Now they are in this material pincushion (the prince’s body), now in another (the cobbler’s).  Now they are in this immaterial pincushion (the soul you had yesterday), now they are in another (the soul Socrates was using centuries ago).  But really, it is only the pins that matter.  They, as a bundle, are you, and it doesn’t matter what pincushion, or even what kind of pincushion, they happen to be stuck in at any particular moment.
Coupled with the thesis that the mind is a kind of software, we have the basis for all those familiar thought experiments from science fiction – and, more recently, from pop “science” of the “transhumanist” sort – about people’s minds being downloaded into new bodies or uploaded into virtual reality worlds, puzzles about what would happen if a teleportation accident led to it being downloaded into two new bodies, and other gee-whiz head scratchers. 
It’s all complete nonsense.  For one thing, the mind is not software, though that’s not my topic here.  For another, Locke’s thinking is completely muddled.  (Par for the course with Locke.) 
To see what’s wrong with it, consider a parallel example.  Consider two bananas, which we’ll label A and B.  On Monday night, A is dark green and B is bright yellow.  Tuesday morning, lo and behold, A has exactly the same bright yellow appearance that B had had the night before, and B has exactly the same dark green appearance that A had had the night before.  What would we say if this happened?
We might suppose that something had rapidly sped up the ripening process in A and somehow reversed it in B.  We might suppose something even weirder had happened, and that the color of each banana had changed for some reason having nothing to do with the ripening process – maybe somebody injected something into each banana in order to change its color, or maybe radiation had affected them in some way, or whatever.
Here’s what I think no one would say: “Maybe the greenness of A somehow jumped into B overnight, and the yellowness of B somehow jumped into A overnight!”  I also don’t think that the sequel would be to propose scenarios where the greenness jumps into two different bananas, leaving us with a “puzzle” of which, if either, is identical with the original greenness possessed by B.  Nor would a “problem of banana identity” industry arise in academic philosophy to supplement the thriving “problem of personal identity” industry that Locke got started.  (Though I’ll be the first to admit that you never really can know for sure these days.)
The reason is obvious.  It simply makes no sense to think of the greenness of B jumping around from substance to substance.  Attributessimply don’t do that sort of thing.  Substances do, because they have a kind of freestanding existence that attributes do not.  That’s why you can throw a banana across the room, but you can’t throw the greenness of the banana across the room.  If you couldthrow the greenness across the room, then it would be a kind of substance after all.  By the same token, if it could jump from banana A to banana B, it would be a kind of substance after all, and not really an attribute.
But the same thing is true of the memories and other mental phenomena Locke imagines jumping from body to body and soul to soul.  They are attributes, and so they can’t jump from body to body or soul to soul.  End of story, before it begins.  If your shoe repairman starts talking like Chris Sarandon in The Princess Bride and demands to be known as “The Cobbler Formerly Known as Prince,” you can be sure that what has not happened is that Prince Humperdinck’s mind has entered his body.  Though you can be sure that he’s nevertheless lost his own mind.  He’s suffering from some kind of mental illness, that’s all.  Maybe through some preternatural or science fiction-like means, information from the prince’s brain has even made its way into his brain and generated the illusion of a mind-transfer.  But an illusion is all it would be, just as it would merely be an illusion if you thought that the greenness of banana A (that very greenness, and not just something similarto it) had literally made its way into banana B.
In effect, Locke really makes of mental attributes something like a bundle of little substances, so that they can jump from the prince to the cobbler and vice versa.  Which makes the whole thought experiment pointless as well as muddled, since the aim was to avoid having to talk about substance.
But what about transubstantiation?  Isn’t that like what Locke is talking about?  Don’t we have, for example, the prince essentially being transubstantiated, his accidents persisting while the substance of his body is replaced by the substance of the cobbler’s body?
No, we don’t.  In transubstantiation, the accidents of bread and wine persist, but they do not inherein the body and blood of Christ or in any other substance.  They float free of substance.  This is not possible in the natural order of things, of course, but that’s precisely why transubstantiation is supernatural, possible only by way of a miraculous suspension of the natural order.
Now, Locke evidently thinks of the memories and other mental characteristics of the prince as indeed actually coming to inherein the body of the cobbler (or perhaps in the cobbler’s soul – part of the point of Locke’s theory is to avoid having to say which).  So, this is not the same as transubstantiation, in the theological sense of that term.
But couldn’t Locke just say that maybe the memories and other mental characteristics don’t after all inhere in any substance, so that transubstantiation might serve as a model for what he has in mind?  No.  Locke is trying to tell us what the natureof a person is.  The proposal in question would make persons entirely supernatural, without any underlying nature for the “super” to build on.  And that makes no sense.  We can make sense of the accidents of bread and wine only as accidents of bread and wine, of some underlying substance, at least in the natural course of things.  There’s already a natural order there that God can go on to suspend when transubstantiation occurs.  He sustains the accidents apart from the natural underlying basis that gives them their identity conditions and makes them otherwise intelligible.
To say that memories and other mental characteristics are accidents that never naturally inhere in any substance would make them unintelligible.  If their natural home is not any kind of substance, then in what sense are they accidents?  Once again, they would end up being little substances in their own right.

Great minds on wokeness

If you want to understand woke totalitarianism, I recommend reading Plato on democracy, Aristotle and Aquinas on envy, and Nietzsche on ressentiment.
  
Or you could just watch a few minutes of John Cleese, Seinfeld , South Park , and Family Guy .   (But do it soon, before it’s all removed.)

Theology and the analytic a posteriori

Philosophers traditionally distinguish between analyticand synthetic propositions.  An analytic proposition is one that is true or false by virtue of the relations between its constituent concepts.  A stock example is “All bachelors are unmarried,” which is true because the concept of being unmarried is included in the concept of being a bachelor.  A synthetic proposition is true by virtue of something beyond the relations between its constituent concepts.  For example, the proposition “Some bachelors are lonely” is true by virtue of a contingent empirical relation between being a bachelor and being lonely, rather than a necessary conceptual relation between them. A second traditional distinction is that between propositions knowable a priori and those knowable a posteriori.  A priori propositions are those knowable independently of sensory experience.  A stock example would be an arithmetical proposition like 2 + 2 = 4.  An a posteriori proposition is one that is known through sensory experience.  An example would be “There are two cars in the parking lot.”
Kant noted that combining these notions yields four putative classes of proposition:
1. Analytic a priori
2. Analytic a posteriori
3. Synthetic a priori
4. Synthetic a posteriori
Classes 1 and 4 are relatively unremarkable.  The analytic proposition “All bachelors are unmarried” is knowable a priori precisely because we know that the concept of being unmarried is included in the concept of being a bachelor.  You don’t need to rely on observation in order to determine that it is true, but merely need to understand the concepts.  “Some bachelors are lonely” is known a posteriori precisely because it is only the observable facts that reveal to us its truth.  Understanding the concepts is not enough.
Class 3, the synthetic a priori, is of course the one that Kant was famously concerned about.  Such a proposition would be one which is not true merely by virtue of the relations between its constituent concepts, but nevertheless can be known without relying on experience.  Kant held both that it is difficult to see how there could be such propositions, but also that there must be if knowledge of the natural order is to be possible. 
The reasons had to do with the implications of Hume’s empiricism.  For example, Hume seemed to have shown that necessary causal connections between things could not be known a posteriori, since we have no impression (in Hume’s sense of the term) of any force or power in a cause that necessitates its effect.  But he also seemed to have shown that such causal connections are not analytic either, insofar as causes and effects are “loose and separate” and in principle any effect or none might follow upon any cause.  Hence to be knowable, causal connections would have to synthetic a priori.  Explaining how there could be such knowledge is the starting point of Kant’s system.
Naturally, as a Scholastic Aristotelian I don’t agree with the whole way Hume, Kant, and the other early moderns frame these issues, much less with their conclusions.  But that’s not my topic here.  My topic has to do with something else Kant says, which is that in fact there cannot be such a thing as class 2 or analytic a posteriori propositions.  For analytic propositions are necessary, and what is necessary, Kant thinks, is knowable a priori. 
But knowable to whom?  Consider the proposition “God exists” as understood by classical theists like Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas.  Addressing the question whether this is a self-evident proposition, Aquinas writes:
A thing can be self-evident in either of two ways: on the one hand, self-evident in itself, though not to us; on the other, self-evident in itself, and to us.  A proposition is self-evident because the predicate is included in the essence of the subject, as “Man is an animal,” for animal is contained in the essence of man.  If, therefore the essence of the predicate and subject be known to all, the proposition will be self-evident to all… If, however, there are some to whom the essence of the predicate and subject is unknown, the proposition will be self-evident in itself, but not to those who do not know the meaning of the predicate and subject of the proposition… Therefore I say that this proposition, “God exists,” of itself is self-evident, for the predicate is the same as the subject, because God is His own existence... Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature – namely, by effects.  (Summa Theologiae I.2.1)
The demonstrations Aquinas refers to in the last sentence are arguments like the proof of a first cause in De Ente et Essentia, which argues that anything the essence of which is distinct from its existence must have a cause the essence of which is identical to its existence.  (This is “the Thomistic proof” that I defend in Five Proofs of the Existence of God .)  The proof shows that the ultimate cause of things cannot be something which merely has being in a derivative way, but must be something which just is subsistent being itself.
Now, because God just is being itself, to know the essence of God would entail knowing that God exists.  In that sense, the proposition “God exists” has in itself the self-evidence of an analytic proposition.  But we know this only because we’ve reasoned from the existence of the things of our experience to an ultimate cause having this essence.  So we’ve arrived at it in an a posteriori way.  And that’s the only way we can arrive at it.  Because of the limitations of our intellects, our conceptualization of God is too imperfect to enable us to “cut to the chase” and get to knowledge of his existence directly, merely from a grasp of the concept of God.  (You might say: The ontological argument works, but not for intellects as limited as ours.)
In the same article from which I just quoted, Aquinas cites the proposition “that incorporeal substances are not in space” as an example of something “self-evident only to the learned.”  You need a certain amount of sophistication to grasp the constituent concepts well enough to know it a priori.  Someone who is not learned could still know it on the basis of the authority of someone who is.  But the unlearned person could also at least in principle come to know it a priori himself, once he acquires sufficient knowledge.  That possibility might make Kant reluctant to concede that an example like this is a genuine case of an analytic a posteriori proposition. 
But the proposition “God exists” differs from this example, in Aquinas’s view, insofar as failing to know it a priori is not merely a consequence of lacking sufficient learning.  No amount of learning would make it knowable a priori for the human intellect left just to its natural capacities.  We human beings can reason a posteriori to the conclusion that God exists and that his essence must be such that to know it perfectly would suffice all by itself to afford us knowledge of his existence.  So we know that the proposition “God exists” must be analytically true and knowable a priori for anyone with a sufficiently penetrating grasp of the constituent concepts.  But we don’t have such a grasp, and so we don’t know the proposition in that manner.  Hence, we have in this case an example of a proposition that is in a clear sense analytic a posteriori, at least for us.
This particular example comes from natural theology, that body of knowledge about God’s existence and nature that is available to us via purely philosophical arguments and apart from special divine revelation.  But other examples would come from revealed theology, which includes propositions about the divine nature that could not in principle have been arrived at through purely philosophical means and are knowable only if specially revealed by God.  The doctrine of the Trinity is an example.  If we had a perfect grasp of the divine essence, we would see that the claim that God is three Persons in one divine nature is as necessary and self-evident as “All bachelors are unmarried.”  But in fact our grasp is so imperfect that we cannot arrive at knowledge of this claim even through indirect natural means, through philosophical arguments, as we can with “God exists.”  We need supernatural assistance.
This assistance comes via a divine revelation backed by miracles, and in particular via the teaching of Christ.  And that is something we know about only a posteriori.  So, once again we have an example of a proposition that is in a clear sense analytic a posteriori.

Pod people

With woke fanaticssuddenly overrunning The New York Times , the public health profession, peaceful protests, and even the knitting community (!), life in these United States is starting to look a little like the 1978 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers .  If you’re looking for something timely to watch this evening, I recommend it.  (It’s a great flick anyway.) 
The metaphor is near perfect.  People are transformed into robotic pod people only after first falling asleep and (get this) waking up.  One moment they’re polite fellow citizens, the next they are all gaping maws, shrieking at you so as to summon the rest of the mob over for reeducation or a beat down.  After their transformation, even longtime friends and loved ones suddenly turn on you.  And in a nice touch, much of the focus of the movie is on the pod people’s commandeering of… the local health department.
If you want to turn it into film festival, next rent The Last Emperor and check out its chilling portrayal of the Maoist Red Guard.  (Some of our wokesters have apparently seen it, and thought it a “How to” video.)
And then, to see where this mentality leads if unchecked, The Killing Fields . 

What “the science” is saying this week (Updated)

Andrew Sullivan calls our attention to epidemiologist Tara C. Smith, who moves with that curious herd of “experts” suddenly not terribly concerned about social distancing when the protesters filling the streets are left-wing rather than right-wing.  Writes Sullivan: “The message to normies: going outside is killing grandma. The message to woke kids: never mind!”
So which is it?  Were people like Smith lying before about the danger of spreading the virus, in order to promote a political agenda?  Or being honest about it but now willing to endanger countless lives, in order to promote a political agenda?Adding smug cluelessness to her dishonesty and/or recklessness, Smith also sniffs that the difference is that those who rallied to end the lockdown were merely “protesting for their ability to get a haircut.” 
Yes, of course, haircuts.  It had nothing to do with wanting to get back to work in order to support their families, salvage businesses it took a lifetime to build, avoid depleting their life savings, get their kids back in the classroom, etc.  It was all about haircuts.
As I have argued, though a reasonable initial response to an imminent emergency, the lockdown was in the nature of the case harder to justify with each passing week, and has by now long passed the point of moral justifiability.  Indeed, if people like Smith aren’t urging this week’s protesters to get back indoors lest they endanger lives, they can hardly blame anyone but themselves if non-experts start to wonder whether the whole thing has been exaggerated.
The hypocrisy extends beyond Smith and underlines the danger of falling into fallacious thinking when appealing to authority, including the authority of “the science” we’re constantly told is being followed.  “The science” doesn’t tell us anything.  People who happen to be scientists tell us things.  And these are people who alsohappen to have egos, political views, moral opinions, career interests, peer influences, personal idiosyncrasies, and so on, all of which inevitably color what they think and say.  That doesn’t mean that what they say should be dismissed.  It means that what they say should not be taken as a revelation from some oracle, but rather as the fallible advice of paid professionals whose word should be taken with the same grain of salt as that of any other paid professional (your auto mechanic, your financial advisor, your doctor, your electrician, etc.).  Two grains, actually, since theseprofessionals have tenure and captive classroom audiences, and thus never have to pay a price for giving bad advice.
As last month’s crisis goes on the backburner (if only because it has been pushed aside by another crisis), it may be possible to get some perspective on it.  I would suggest that now is the time to get your Paul Feyerabend on and dust off those copies of Science in a Free Society and The Tyranny of Science (which, as I noted in a review, would have been better titled The Tyranny of Scientism). Yes, he sometimes says things that are intentionally provocative and indeed over the top.  But Feyerabend provides a much needed corrective at a time when we’re shrilly told to shut up, sit back, and suck it up while the “experts” drive 40 million people out of work.  More on that soon.

UPDATE 6/4: Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic reports that:
This week, hundreds of people in the public-health community signed an open letter, first drafted by infectious-disease experts at the University of Washington, that explicitly counsels an ideological double standard on protests…
[T]he signatories declared [that] “Infectious disease and public health narratives adjacent to demonstrations against racism must be consciously anti-racist, and infectious disease experts must be clear and consistent in prioritizing an anti-racist message…”
“[A]s public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission”…
Notice the weaselly construction. The signatories “do not condemn these gatherings as risky” not because the potential risk for disease transmission is lower than at the Michigan protests, but because they are unwilling to criticize an anti-racist gathering, no matter how risky it might be…
NPR writer Bill Chappell quotes an elected official, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, as saying, “I’m so concerned about [the risk] that I’m urging everybody to consider their exposure…”
In other words, the politician is emphasizing the epidemiological risk, while disease experts stress the potential political gains.
End quote.  If you respond to all this with “But it’s for a good cause!” you are completely missing the point.  The point has nothing to do with whether the cause is good.  The point is that it is politics, and not merely “the science,” that partially determines the advice that “the experts” give.  And that was as true when anti-lockdown protesters were told to stay home as it is now that other protesters are not being told to stay home.
Whatever you think about it, the judgment that protesting police brutality is a good enough reason to relax the lockdown, but protesting the loss of 40 million jobs is not a good enough reason to relax it, is not a scientific judgment.  It is a moral and political judgment, and scientists have no greater expertise on such things than anyone else.
Friedersdorf correctly judges that “to frame today’s protests not only as a defensible choice but as a choice validated by experts – as if their expertise somehow encompassed all the trade-offs implicit in the judgment – is to pass politics off as public health.”  He worries that the fallout will be that “more Americans will decline to heed any public-health advice or journalism, seeing it as ideological and hypocritical.”  He sees what “the experts” do not, viz. the obvious.

What “the science” is saying this week

Andrew Sullivan calls our attention to epidemiologist Tara C. Smith, who moves with that curious herd of “experts” suddenly not terribly concerned about social distancing when the protesters filling the streets are left-wing rather than right-wing.  Writes Sullivan: “The message to normies: going outside is killing grandma. The message to woke kids: never mind!”
So which is it?  Were people like Smith lying before about the danger of spreading the virus, in order to promote a political agenda?  Or being honest about it but now willing to endanger countless lives, in order to promote a political agenda? Adding smug cluelessness to her dishonesty and/or recklessness, Smith also sniffs that the difference is that those who rallied to end the lockdown were merely “protesting for their ability to get a haircut.” 
Yes, of course, haircuts.  It had nothing to do with wanting to get back to work in order to support their families, salvage businesses it took a lifetime to build, avoid depleting their life savings, get their kids back in the classroom, etc.  It was all about haircuts.
As I have argued, though a reasonable initial response to an imminent emergency, the lockdown was in the nature of the case harder to justify with each passing week, and has by now long passed the point of moral justifiability.  Indeed, if people like Smith aren’t urging this week’s protesters to get back indoors lest they endanger lives, they can hardly blame anyone but themselves if non-experts start to wonder whether the whole thing has been exaggerated.
The hypocrisy extends beyond Smith and underlines the danger of falling into fallacious thinking when appealing to authority, including the authority of “the science” we’re constantly told is being followed.  “The science” doesn’t tell us anything.  People who happen to be scientists tell us things.  And these are people who alsohappen to have egos, political views, moral opinions, career interests, peer influences, personal idiosyncrasies, and so on, all of which inevitably color what they think and say.  That doesn’t mean that what they say should be dismissed.  It means that what they say should not be taken as a revelation from some oracle, but rather as the fallible advice of paid professionals whose word should be taken with the same grain of salt as that of any other paid professional (your auto mechanic, your financial advisor, your doctor, your electrician, etc.).  Two grains, actually, since theseprofessionals have tenure and captive classroom audiences, and thus never have to pay a price for giving bad advice.
As last month’s crisis goes on the backburner (if only because it has been pushed aside by another crisis), it may be possible to get some perspective on it.  I would suggest that now is the time to get your Paul Feyerabend on and dust off those copies of Science in a Free Society and The Tyranny of Science (which, as I noted in a review, would have been better titled The Tyranny of Scientism). Yes, he sometimes says things that are intentionally provocative and indeed over the top.  But Feyerabend provides a much needed corrective at a time when we’re shrilly told to shut up, sit back, and suck it up while the “experts” drive 40 million people out of work.  More on that soon.

Metaphysical taxidermy

I’ve often emphasized that the reason consciousness poses such a persistent problem for materialism has less to do with consciousness itself than it has to do with the desiccated conception of matter that we’ve inherited from early modern philosophy and science.  Barry Dainton makes the same point a couple of times in his book Self .  For example, he writes: Descartes’ conviction that consciousness could not be physical is rooted in the austere conception of the basic nature of material things which he and the other scientific revolutionaries endorsed.  One of the key advances of the Scientific Revolution was the adoption of the atomistic and mechanistic conception of the physical world.  Animating Scholastic forms were excluded from the physical realm as part of this move, but so too were all the phenomenal properties, the properties we encounter in our ordinary experience.  According to the new scientific worldview, physical things themselves possess only ‘primary’ properties, such as mass, motion, charge, shape, and so forth.  Material things don’t possess experiential properties such as colour, sound, warmth, or pain.
As Descartes was perhaps the first to appreciate clearly, if the physical world is as the new science says, experiences and conscious subjects are banished from it.  In which case, dualism – in some form – seems to be unavoidable.  (p. 153)
Dainton goes on to note that while contemporary physics does not attribute to matter exactly the same list of properties that Descartes and other early moderns did, it nevertheless still leaves off of its list anything experiential.  Hence, contemporary materialism faces the same difficulty vis-à-vis consciousness that materialists of Descartes’ day did.  Dainton concludes:
So the relationship between the physical world and consciousness remains deeply puzzling; indeed, it has often been said that this is the biggest remaining mystery of them all (though those working at the frontiers of cosmology and particle physics might want to disagree). (pp. 158-9)
That catches the eye, or my eye, anyway.  Dainton locates the three biggest mysteries facing science at:
1. The relationship between the physical world and consciousness
2. The frontiers of cosmology
3. The frontiers of particle physics
I’d expand the list, but let’s stick with Dainton’s for now.  I would say that all threemysteries are a consequence of the turn from Scholastic Aristotelianism to the mechanical conception of nature.  How so?
The conquest of abundance
The Scholastic Aristotelian conception of matter is much richer and more pluralistic than that of the mechanical world picture.  And it is in harmony with common sense, even though it systematizes common sense and adds to it notions of which the man on the street never dreamed.  It takes the natural world to consist in innumerable distinct physical substances, just as common sense does.  It takes qualitative features like color to exist in those substances, just as common sense does.  And it holds that there are irreducibly different kinds of physical substance, just as common sense does.  In particular, it takes inanimate objects, non-sentient living things, and sentient living things to be irreducibly different, even if all of them are material.
To make sense of all this, Scholastic Aristotelian philosophy deploys notions like actuality and potentiality, substantial form and prime matter, efficient and final causality, substance and attributes, essence and proper accidents, immanent versus transeunt causation, and so on.  It argues that we simply cannot do justice to the actual physical world of everyday experience, in all its richness and diversity, without recognizing this conceptual framework as giving the skeletal structure of the natural order. 
What the mechanical world picture did was to drain out all of this richness, flatten out all the diversity, and replace the organic skeleton with a cold steel frame, like a taxidermist.  It denied the distinctness and diversity of physical things.  All material objects are, on the mechanical view, really just variations on the same one kind of thing, viz. colorless, soundless, odorless, tasteless particles in motion, their nature and interactions to be described in purely mathematical terms.  And their numerical differences are as superficial or even illusory as their differences in kind.  The whole physical world can be seen as a single vast lump, and the apparently diverse objects in it as modes of this one substance.  Or, alternatively, it is like a vast sea of particles, with apparently diverse objects like mere waves on its surface.  A stone, a tree, a dog all seem to common sense to be sharply distinct objects of sharply distinct kinds.  For the mechanical world picture, they are really all just local variations in a single system of a single kind – different eddies in the same sea of atoms, different geometrical structures in the same Cartesian coordinate space, or what have you.
Philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend has aptly characterized this as modern science’s “conquest of abundance,” its replacement of the “richness of being” with an “abstraction.”  The abstraction is a mathematical framework, and anything that cannot be fitted into it is re-defined, explained away, or frankly eliminated.  Color, sound, taste, odor, heat, cold, pain, pleasure are all removed from nature and relocated in the conscious subject.  And if this subject is in turn identified with something material, the reality of these qualities is effectively denied, either implicitly (in reductionist versions of materialism) or explicitly (in eliminativist versions).  The abstraction also reduces all change to local motion, and local motion in turn to a succession of points in an abstract coordinate space.  Real change disappears, and real time (which, for the Aristotelian, is the measure of change) vanishes along with it.
New metaphysics, same as the old metaphysics
Feyerabend traces the tendency to try to replace the richness of the natural world with a static abstraction back to Parmenides, and for those with eyes to see, Parmenides lives today in every physicist who seriously believes that the natural world can be entirely captured in the notion of a four-dimensional block universe, or in the idea of a universal wave function.  Such constructs are no less fantastic and untrue to actual concrete reality than Parmenides’ monism. 
That is not to say that they are untrue full stop.  They docapture reality, but only in the partial and distorted way that any abstraction does.  And that they are not quite as abstract as Parmenides’ own monism is the source of the technological and predictive successes that give rhetorical(even if not logical) strength to the arguments of those who take these abstractions to afford us a complete metaphysical picture of nature.
Now, back to Dainton’s list.  By “the frontiers of cosmology,” he means the cutting edge of a science that has in modern times been defined by general relativity.  And by “the frontiers of particle physics,” he means the cutting edge of a science that has in modern times been defined by quantum mechanics. 
The picture of nature afforded us by general relativity is, I would suggest, essentially an approximation to a description of a world that is purely actualized and devoid of potentiality.  It is not quite that, but it is an approximation to it.  It is a highly Parmenidean model of nature.  Meanwhile, the picture of nature afforded us by quantum mechanics is an approximation to a description of the world that is purely potential and in no way actualized.  It is not quite that, but it is an approximation to it.  It is a highly Heraclitean model of nature.  (Or rather, some interpretations of quantum mechanics are like that.  Interpretations like Everett’s “many worlds” interpretation effectively actualize all the potentiality and transform quantum mechanics into another riff on Parmenideanism.)
Now, actual concrete material reality is in fact a mixture of actuality and potentiality.  Hence, if you try to represent it entirely in terms of actuality and strip it of potentiality, or entirely in terms of potentiality and strip it of actuality, you are bound to end up with various puzzles and paradoxes (especially of the sort into which Parmenidean and Heraclitean views are traditionally led).  And a picture of nature which largely collapses all reality into actuality is naturally going to be very hard to marry to a picture which largely collapses all reality into potentiality.
This, in my view, is the deep metaphysical reason why the frontiers of cosmology and particle physics remain mysterious, as Dainton says, and why relativity and quantum mechanics remain difficult to reconcile with one another.  Were Aristotle to rise from his grave and see all these neo-Parmenideans and neo-Heracliteans wringing their hands, he’d say: “Well, duh.  What did you expect?” 
Stuffing a corpse
It is the first mystery, the relationship between consciousness and the physical world, that Dainton focuses on.  And he discusses two possible non-materialist ways of dealing with it that have gotten increasing attention in recent philosophy: naturalistic dualism and Russellian monism (named for Bertrand Russell).  Both of these views accept the mechanical conception of nature but try in different ways to reincorporate phenomenal or qualitative features like color, sound, etc. into it.  These days, philosophers generally refer to these features as the “qualia” of conscious experience, so that the issue is usually framed as the question of how to fit qualia into the material world.
Naturalistic dualism holds that qualia are non-physical (that’s the dualism part) but that they are correlated with certain physical features of the brain by virtue of as yet unknown laws of nature (that’s the naturalistic part). 
Russellian monism holds that physics gives us only a description of the mathematical structure of nature, but not of the intrinsic nature of the entities that have that structure (that’s the Russellian part of the view).  It then suggests that the qualia we know from introspection of our conscious experiences not only give us knowledge of the intrinsic nature of the matter that makes up our brains, but also afford a model for the intrinsic nature of all matter (that’s the monism part).  Russellian monism is sometimes claimed to lead to a kind of panpsychism.  The reason is that since qualia are mental, and Russellian monism takes qualia to be the model for the intrinsic nature of all material entities, it entails that all material entities have mental properties – that mind is everywhere.
Now, though both of these views are superior to materialism in frankly acknowledging the reality and irreducibility of consciousness, they are nevertheless ultimately little more than further riffs on the same mechanistic error rather than corrections of it.  They merely dress up the corpse that the mechanical conception makes of nature, rather than restoring it to life. 
Again, common sense and Scholastic Aristotelianism take matter to be more or less the way it seems.  (Note very carefully that this is not to deny that science reveals that there is more to matter than common sense or Aristotelian philosophy knows.  It is merely to insist that science does not show that there is less to matter than common sense and Aristotelian philosophy says there is.) 
One implication of this is that consciousness really is in non-human animals in just the way that common sense supposes.  This is not because non-human animals have any non-physical properties.  They don’t.  It is because non-human animals are simply of a different kind of matter than inanimate things.  Not all matter is the same.  The mechanical world picture assumes otherwise.  That is why Descartes held, notoriously, that animals are devoid of consciousness.  Since he was committed to the desiccated mechanistic conception of matter, and took animals to be made of nothing more than that kind of matter, he concluded – quite reasonably, if you accept that conception of matter – that they lack consciousness.  The only other place for consciousness to be, on Descartes’ picture of reality, is in the res cogitans or thinking substance.  And since animals lack intellects, they lack res cogitans. 
This is also why, in contemporary non-materialist philosophy of mind, it is commonly supposed that to attribute qualia to non-human animals (like bats, in Thomas Nagel’s famous example) is to attribute non-physical properties to them.  That will seem to follow only for those operating with an essentially mechanistic model of matter.  If instead you think of matter the way common sense and Aristotelianism do, this won’t seem to follow at all.  Non-human animals have qualia and they are therefore conscious, but this does not entail that there is anything non-material in them.  It simply entails that matter isn’t as desiccated as the purely quantitative, mathematical conception of the mechanical philosophy supposes.
But neither does it give any reason whatsoever to believe (contra Russellian monism) that all matter has qualia.  Animal matter does, but the matter that makes up stones and copper and water does not.  You would only suppose otherwise if you were starting with a mechanistic conception of matter, come to realize that its deletion of qualia from nature is a problem, and then start shoving qualia back into matter willy-nilly, including into places they don’t belong.  It’s analogous to killing an animal, gutting the corpse, and then coming to regret it and sticking the organs back in in bizarre ways – putting the kidneys in the eye sockets, the intestines in the throat, the leg muscles where the arm muscles should go, etc.  The right approach when what you want is a properly functioning animal is not to kill it in the first place.  And the right approach when what you want is a conception of nature that is safe for qualia and consciousness is not to start with a mechanistic conception of matter in the first place. 
If Russellian monism is like re-stuffing a corpse, naturalistic dualism is like strapping the gutted organs onto the outside of the corpse, Ed Gein-style.  Naturalistic dualism essentially accepts the mechanical conception of matter, regrets that it leaves qualia out, and then simply attaches qualia to this desiccated matter, from outside as it were, rather than seeing that qualia should never have been taken out in the first place.
The mechanical conception of matter was simply a mistake, at least as a metaphysics or philosophy of nature.  Like other abstractions, it certainly has its utility a method.  But it is merely a methodological abstraction rather than a true representation of the concrete natural world in all its richness and diversity.  To pretend otherwise is like mistaking a corpse for a real living thing.  And to try to patch it up in the way that naturalistic dualism and Russellian monism do is an exercise in taxidermy, or even corpse desecration.  The true solution to the problem of how to relate consciousness to the physical world is to resurrect the commonsense Aristotelian conception of nature.
Note that I am only talking here about the kind of consciousness we share with non-human animals.  The intellectual capacities that are distinctive of human animals are a different story.  They are incorporeal.  But that’s another issue for another time.  Readers interested in pursuing the issues discussed in this post in greater depth are urged to consult Aristotle’s Revenge . 
Related posts:
Materialism subverts itself
Concretizing the abstract
Chomsky on the mind-body problem
Zombies: A Shopper’s Guide
Nagel and his critics, Part VIII
Reading Rosenberg, Part X
When Frank jilted Mary

The lockdown is no longer morally justifiable

As I have said before, I think that the lockdown that was put in place in the United States two months ago was morally justifiable given the circumstances at the time.  In my opinion, under current circumstances, it is no longer morally justifiable.  To be sure, I am not denying that some social distancing measures are still justifiable and even necessary.  I am also not denying that a more modest lockdown may still be defensible in some localities.  But the draconian total lockdown that was put in place across most of the country is at this point no longer defensible, and state and local authorities who are relaxing it are right to do so.The natural right to earn a living
The basic natural law grounds for this judgment are straightforward.  Breadwinners have a natural right to labor in order to provide for themselves and their families.  Hence, governing authorities may not prevent them from doing so unless strictly necessary for preserving the common good.  Now, a strong case could be made at the beginning of the lockdown that preventing such labor was indeed strictly necessary.  But such a case cannot be made now.  Hence, while a total lockdown was justifiable at the beginning, it is no longer justifiable, and governing authorities have a strict duty in justice to relax it.  The details of how this might be done in this or that locality are debatable, but the general principle is clear.
One reason this is not more widely recognized is because of the seriously misleading way in which the issue is routinely framed, viz. as a matter of balancing “the economy” against “saving lives.”  First of all, what is in jeopardy is not some abstraction called “the economy.”  What is in jeopardy is the basic natural human right to earn a living.  To talk about how the lockdown affects “the economy” tends to disguise the true moral situation, because it makes it sound as if public authorities are merely tinkering with the operation of some impersonal mechanism.
What they are actually doing is preventing millions of human beings from exercising their fundamental right to support themselves and their families.  And the vast majority of them are people who live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford to have their life savings depleted.  Chatter about the effects of the lockdown on “the economy” can give the false impression that government officials may decide what to do about the situation at their leisure.  Keeping in mind that what we are really talking about is interference with a basic human right reminds us of the situation’s true urgency.
There are important further considerations, such as the ill effects the lockdown is having on the education of children and on the psychological well-being of young and old alike.  By no means the least of the lockdown’s harms is its interference with the practice of religion, such as the deprivation of the sacraments in the case of Catholics.  All of these too are harms that follow from governmental actions that violate natural rights unless they are strictly necessary for protecting the common good.
“Saving lives”
Again, the response will be that such actions are necessary in order to “save lives.”  But talk of “saving lives,” when kept vague, is demagogic and papers over crucial moral distinctions.  “Saving lives” could mean:
(a) refraining from directly and intentionally causing people to die,
(b) refraining from acts that have a strong likelihood of resulting in unintended deaths, or
(c) refraining from acts that have only a remote chance of resulting in unintended deaths.
Now, everyone in the debate over the lockdown favors (a) and (b) and no one in the debate favors (c).  For example, no one believes that we have a general duty to avoid driving, or construction work, or going out of doors when one has the flu, or other common actions that have a remote chance of resulting in unintended deaths.  No one believes that public authorities have a right or duty to forbid such acts, even though doing so would “save lives.”  And everyone agrees that driving at 100 mph down residential streets, setting off fireworks near dry brush, going out of doors when one has the Ebola virus, and other acts that have a strong likelihood of resulting in unintended deaths ought to beforbidden by public authorities.
What people disagree about is simply whether certain acts forbidden under the lockdown (like operating a barbershop or a clothing store) more plausibly fall into category (b) rather than (c), especially when safety measures are taken (wearing masks, letting only a certain number of customers in at a time, etc.).  Even if a compelling case could be made for thinking that they fall into (b) rather than (c), it would be an outrageous calumny to accuse people who in good faith believe otherwise of being “murderers” or a “party of death.”  Such inflammatory rhetoric evidences a lack of the objectivity and charity required to deal with the crisis and promote the common good.
Mission accomplished
But in fact there is no compelling case.  Certainly there is at least as strong a case to be made for the other side.  And that is sufficient reason to relax the lockdown, because it is those who do notwant to relax it who have the burden of proof.
The original rationale for the lockdown was to “flatten the curve” so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed and crucial medical equipment such as ventilators would not become scarce.  Ordinary work like running a clothing store or cutting hair was said to be dangerous because in the aggregate such activities threatened to increase the number of Covid-19 infections to the point that the medical system could not deal with them, let alone all the other ailments that bring people to the hospital every day.
But that aim has for some time now been accomplished.  The curve has been flattened and, more to the point, hospitals are in general not in danger of being overwhelmed and ventilators are not scarce.  Not to relax the lockdown under such circumstances is prime facie unjust.  When politicians and pundits move the goalposts in order to maintain it anyway, it is not unreasonable for workers whose lives and livelihoods have been upended to complain that they’ve been sold a “bait and switch.”  
Ever-receding goalposts
The response will be that lifting the lockdown will result in an increase in deaths.  But once again, such a claim is too vague to prove anything.  After all, even if the novel coronavirus was annihilated tomorrow, lifting the lockdown would still result in an increase in deaths – from the traffic accidents, construction accidents, deaths from ordinary flu, etc. that would result just from people returning to ordinary life, with its ordinary risks. 
What the lockdown defender needs to show is that the increase in deaths would be dramatic enough to override the strong presumption against interfering with the natural right to earn a living.  That’s a very tough burden to meet, and I submit that it has not been met.  What the original “flattening the curve” rationale had going for it is that an imminent and completely general breakdown in the medical system would clearly be contrary to the common good, which gave a plausible rationale for overriding the right to work.  But the alternative rationales being offered by the lockdown’s defenders are nowhere near as clear and compelling as that.
In particular, there is no compelling argument for preserving a total lockdown as a method of fighting the virus (as opposed to using it as a method to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed).  Totallockdowns of vast populations (as opposed to more limited quarantines) are not a time-tested way of dealing with pandemics, but a very recent novelty.  Not only is there is no evidence that they are more effective than less extreme measures, but there is now evidence that they are notmore effective.  Some experts argue that the virus has likely already worked its way through the population anyway and is on its way out regardless of the lockdown.
It is also clear at this point that the virus is not equally dangerous to all.  It is primarily the elderly and those with certain medical conditions who are at risk, and they can be protected by way of more modest measures than a general lockdown.  Then there is the argument that while relaxing the lockdown might result in more deaths in the short run, it will yield relatively fewer deaths in the long run, since it will facilitate achieving herd immunity.  And there is the further consideration that the lockdown itself threatens livesinsofar as ailments other than Covid-19 are not being treated as frequently or effectively, medical workers are being laid off, and so forth.
Yes, much of this is controversial.  But again, it isn’t those who favor relaxing the lockdown who have the burden of proof.  The burden is on those who want to preserve it.  Two months ago, they could make a strong case for having met it.  Not any longer. 

Oderberg on the hierarchy of being

In February, David Oderberg gave a lecture in Oxford on the theme “Recovering the Hierarchy of Being.”  You can now watch it on YouTube.  Be sure also to check out David’s new book The Metaphysics of Good and Evil (about which you can find information at the publisher’s website).