Edward Feser's Blog, page 91

A second exchange with Keith Parsons, Part II

Prof. Keith Parsons has posted his own opening statement in our second exchange, which is devoted to the topic of atheism, naturalism, and morality.  (An index of the posts in our first exchange can be found here.)  As it happens, there is a remarkable amount of agreement between what Keith says in his newest post and what I said in my opening post.  Both of us take a broadly Aristotelian approach to ethics, grounding the good for human beings in the biology of human nature.  Unsurprisingly, though, there is also disagreement.  I have argued that human biology can have moral import only if interpreted in light of an Aristotelian metaphysics.  Keith argues that it ought to be interpreted in light of a purely naturalistic metaphysics.  He would interpret the biological functions that ground what is good for us, not as instances of immanent teleology of the sort the traditional Aristotelian affirms, but rather in terms of Darwinian natural selection.  As Keith indicates, in this regard his views parallel those of Larry Arnhart.Let me begin by noting that evolution per se is not what is at issue between us.  Given Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) essentialism, questions about a natural substance’s nature or essence -- and thus its natural ends, and thus what is good for it -- are metaphysically and epistemologically independent of questions about its origin.  Interested readers can find a useful discussion of the relationship between essence and origins in David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism (see especially pp. 170-76 and 214-24), but it is important to emphasize that you don’t need to be an Aristotelian or a Thomist to think that questions about the nature and function of a thing are independent of questions about its evolutionary history.  As Jerry Fodor once put it, “you don’t have to know how hands (or hearts, or eyes, or livers) evolved to make a pretty shrewd guess about what they are for.”

The trouble, from the A-T point of view, is in interpreting evolution and human nature within a naturalist metaphysical framework.  For given such a framework, there can be no irreducible teleology in nature, and therefore (as I argued in my opening post) there can be at most only “as if” teleology (as opposed to either “intrinsic” or “derived” teleology).  And if it is only “as if” teleology exists (if I can channel Alicia Silverstone in Clueless), then it can be only “as if” natural goodness exists, and thus only “as if” morality exists.  Morality can in this case be at most a useful fiction.
In my view, the lack of a traditional Aristotelian metaphysical foundation prevents Keith from successfully rebutting the objection that his position cannot account for the categorical force of moral imperatives.  To be sure, I agree with him that morality has a hypothetical component.  Much of it can be captured in propositions of the form: If you want x, you ought to pursue y; andif you want y, you ought to pursue z.  But this does not suffice for moral obligation.  Suppose it is true that if I want to see the movie from the beginning, I’d better get to the theater by 3 pm; and if I want to get to the theater by 3 pm, I’d better leave now.  The imperative Leave now will be rationally binding on me only if the imperative See the movie from the beginning is rationally binding on me.  But of course there are few situations, if any, in which that particular imperative has the binding nature that moral imperatives are supposed to have.
So, if a series of hypothetical imperatives is to have rationally binding force, it has to trace ultimately to some imperative at the head of the line that has categorical force.  It is only if I regard some imperative of the categorical form Pursue x is binding on me that I will be rationally obliged to pursue y and thus z.  With that much it seems Keith would agree.  But where can we find such imperatives?  Keith’s position is essentially that there are certain imperatives that most people will in fact treat as categorical.  An example of such an imperative implicit in what he says is Pursue happiness (in the Aristotelian sense of eudaimonia).  Keith considers the following potential objection:
[W]hat do you say to those who reject the antecedents of your hypotheticals?  What, for instance, would you say to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man who rejects happiness, including his own, and prefers to act out of spite?  In general, if someone does not already value one of your “natural goods,” how do you get them to recognize your moral norms? Why not just be spiteful if that is what you want?
In response, he says:
If the Underground Man genuinely scorns happiness, including his own, then there is not much that [my view] can say to him.  But then there is not much that any ethical perspective can say to him. Kant might tell him that he is being unreasonable or Christians might tell him that he is going to hell, but he will just scorn that too. Sheer defiance is not a rational act and so cannot be addressed by appeals to reason.
Now I think this is correct as far as it goes.  If someone is simply stubbornly determined to be irrational, we are not likely to reach him by appealing to reason.  The question, though, is whether someone who rejects an imperative like Pursue happiness, or any other purportedly categorical imperative – and continues to reject it no matter how hard we try to talk him out of doing so -- really is, necessarilybeing irrational.
From the A-T point of view, the answer is: “Yes, he is per se irrational.”  But from the Humean point of view, the answer is: “No, he’s not necessarily irrational; he’s just different from most other people, that’s all.”  As Hume famously wrote:
'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg'd lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than for the latter. (Treatise of Human Nature 2.3.3.6)
Now, if, contra the Aristotelian, there were no such thing as irreducible teleology immanent to the natural order, then it is hard to see how Hume’s position could be avoided.  For in that case nothing would be inherently foranything, would not be of its nature directed toward any particular end.  Thus practical reason would not be inherently directed toward the good, so that there would nothing per se contrary to reason in refusing to choose the good.  And of course, as I have already argued, nothing would in that case really be good in the first place.  It would only be “as if” there were goodness.  And since as a matter of statistical fact most people tend to want to pursue their happiness and tend to agree at least in a very general way about what is good and bad, it would be “as if” their practical reason were directed at the good.  Hence it would be “as if” there were such a thing as morality.  But there wouldn’t really bemorality, and if everyone knew that it was merely “as if” there were morality – that morality was at best a useful fiction – then even the pretense of morality couldn’t long survive.
On the other hand, if the Aristotelian is right to hold that natural substances, powers, and processes are inherently directed toward certain ends, and in particular that practical reason is inherently or of its nature directed toward the pursuit of the good, then there would be something contrary to reason in choosing against the good, and thus (given that happiness in the sense of eudaimonia is constitutive of the good for us) something contrary to reason in choosing against one’s own happiness.  For the Humean, someone who really at the end of the day doesn’t want the good or his own happiness is just statistically unusual, but that’s all.  For the Aristotelian, by contrast, such a person is necessarily irrational.  And to the extent his irrational desires are so deep-seated that he doesn’t even feel the attraction of the good or of happiness, he is as objectively disordered or defective an instance of the kind rational animal as a dog with three legs is a disordered or defective instance of its kind, or a tree with sickly, weak roots is a disordered and defective instance of its kind, or an eye covered over with cataracts is a defective or disordered instance of its kind.
Since Keith is a naturalist, I imagine that at the end of the day he will say that the Humean metaphysical picture is the correct one.  In that case, though, I would argue that he cannot coherently maintain the neo-Aristotelian position in ethics he wants to defend.  To be sure, given an Arnhart-style reinterpretation of Aristotelian function talk in Darwinian naturalist terms, he can certainly make the case that human nature is such that it is “as if” an Aristotelian system of morality, specifically, were true.  But what he cannot coherently do is hold that it is in fact true.  An Aristotelian moral theory necessarily requires an Aristotelian metaphysical foundation; a naturalist metaphysical foundation can only ever get you a simulation, and not the real McCoy.
So that is one criticism I have of Keith’s version of neo-Aristotelian ethics.  Another is this.  Morality, from the A-T point of view, is something intelligible only for rational creatures.  It is because we are rational animals that we are moral animals.  As I indicated in my opening post, there is a sense in which a tree or a lioness can be a good or bad tree, a good or bad lioness, but it is not a moral sense, since trees and lionesses lack intellect and will and thus cannot understand or freely choose either what is good or what is bad for them.  Keith seems to take a different view when he writes:
There is one way… that the Darwinian developments must alter ethical naturalism deeply.  We now know, as Aristotle did not, that we humans are kin—not just metaphorically but in an absolutely literal sense—to all other living things… Advancing research shows that non-human animals share many of our feelings, even our “moral” feelings, and display a remarkable range of cognitive aptitudes. These developments have rendered the definition of ethics as concerned only with human life too narrow and parochial. We must expand our understanding of natural goods to encompass, at least, the well-being of sentient non-human animals…
I’m not sure exactly what conclusions Keith would draw from this, but in response I would make several points.  First, I think it is incorrect to say that Darwinism tells the Aristotelian anything new of a morally relevant sort about our relationship with other animals.  It would, after all, not have been news to Aristotle, Aquinas, or any other pre-modern Aristotelian that human beings are, like dogs and dolphins, a kind of animal.  On the contrary, they defined human beings as animals of a sort, viz. rational animals.  In their view, our animality, since it is part of our nature, is relevant to our moral lives, but only because it is in us conjoined to rationality.  Naturally they were aware that other animals are sentient -- indeed, their being sentient is part of what makes them animals in the first place (as opposed to merely vegetative forms of life) -- but this did not in the traditional Aristotelian view suffice to make them moral agents.  It is hard to see why our having non-human animals as ancestors would make any difference.  The traditional Aristotelian view is that non-rational animals cannot be moral agents, precisely because they are non-rational(not because we are not related to them in other ways).  How exactly does our having inherited genetic material from such animals change that?
Second, while Keith does say that “non-human animals share many of our feelings, even our ‘moral’ feelings, and display a remarkable range of cognitive aptitudes,” this does not, for the traditional Aristotelian, show what he seems to think it shows.  When the A-T philosopher talks about “intellect,” “rationality,” “will,” “choice,” and the like, he has something very specific in mind.  Intellectual or rational powers involve the capacity to form abstract concepts, to put them together into propositions, and to reason logically from one proposition to another.  And willing and choosing have to do with pursuing ends in light of what intellect grasps.  Now, the A-T philosopher agrees that, like us, non-human animals have all sorts of complex internal representational and affective states -- perceptual experiences, mental imagery, feelings, appetites, etc. -- but none of this amounts to intellect or volition as the A-T philosopher understands those notions.  Hence the research Keith cites, which I think would not in fact have been surprising to an Aristotle or an Aquinas, does not in the traditional Aristotelian view really change anything.  And even if it turned out that certain non-human animals such as apes had genuine rationality, that would mean they are really “human” after all in the traditional Aristotelian sense, i.e. they would in that case be rational animals.  (Not that I believe for a moment that this is remotely plausible.  Like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, I think the “evidence” for ape language is bogus.) 
Third, on the traditional A-T natural law account of rights, rights essentially follow from duties.  It is because I have an obligation to pursue what is good for me given my nature that I have a right to pursue it; rights are safeguards to our ability to fulfill our obligations under natural law.  Hence if a creature cannot intelligibly be said to have obligations, it cannot intelligibly be said to have rights.  (To forestall a potential objection, this does not entail that human fetuses and infants cannot have rights.  While qua fetuses or infants they are not yet capable of understanding or following obligations, they are nevertheless immature instances of creatures of the kind which can do so.  Similarly with severely brain damaged people -- they are damaged instances of a kind of creature which canunderstand and follow obligations.  Non-human animals, by contrast, cannot understand or carry out moral obligations even when mature and in good working order.  For A-T, it is the mature and normalinstance of a kind that determines what is natural and good for the kind in general.)
Now, even someone who wants to attribute more impressive cognitive abilities to non-human animals than A-T philosophers do would surely agree that it is odd, to say the least, to think of non-human animals as having moral obligations.  What exactly would it mean to attribute moral duties to apes and dolphins, let alone to dogs, pigeons, snakes, or goldfish?  How exactly would we hold them to their obligations?  (Shaming?  Jail time?  Should we get the U.N. to sanction tigers and other predators for animal rights violations?)  Yet if it makes no sense to attribute moral duties to animals, why would it make sense to attribute rights to them?
Now perhaps Keith would not go so far as to attribute rights to animals, but is merely claiming that there are other moral reasons why we ought not to do absolutely any old thing we feel like doing to them, however cruel or wasteful.  But the traditional A-T natural law philosopher will agree with him about that much.  He would just deny that the reasons have anything to do with animals having rights, or with Darwinism. 
These are large issues which cannot be settled here.  (For a traditional A-T natural law account of the source of rights, see David Oderberg’s Moral Theory , chapter 2.  For a traditional A-T natural law account of the morality of our treatment of animals, see Oderberg’s Applied Ethics , chapter 3.)  Suffice it to say that it does not seem to me that Keith has shown that Darwinism requires us to “alter ethical naturalism deeply” (as he puts it).
Anyway, I would like once again to thank Keith (and our moderator Jeff Lowder at Secular Outpost) for a very fruitful set of exchanges.  It has been particularly interesting to see just how much significant agreement there is between us on various issues, despite our deep differences.  One further area of agreement is evident at the end of Keith’s latest post, where he writes:
I think that Alasdair MacIntyre was right when he… claimed that the extreme dysfunction of ethical discourse in our society—with opposing sides rapidly reduced to strident rhetoric and ad hominem abuse—is due to the comprehensive failure of what he calls “the Enlightenment Project” in ethics. He argues that the Enlightenment philosophers attempted to base ethics only upon reason and failed, leaving a de facto subjectivism in place. He thinks that the only way back from our current desolation is to return to the Aristotelian idea of humans as having a natural telos, a potential for mental and moral excellence—humans as they could be rather than how they so often are. I think he is right.
Naturally I concur.  I would only add that I think that the confusion MacIntyre identifies in modern moral philosophy is paralleled by confusion in modern metaphysics and modern theology.  And in my view the remedy in the latter cases is the same as in the former -- a reconsideration of classical philosophy, especially the Aristotelian variety. 
The last word is yours, Keith!

School’s out forever?

John Farrell, Forbes science blogger extraordinaire (and friend of this blog), comments on my recent talk at Thomas Aquinas College, over at his own personal blog.  As you know if you’ve read or listened to the talk, I call for a return to Scholasticism within Catholic intellectual life as essential to sound theology and apologetics.  John has some kind words about my talk, for which I thank him, but he also expresses skepticism about the prospects of the metaphysics of the School and its Schoolmen (to use the jargon of the good old days).  Writes John:
My own sense is that Scholasticism can't work now because it presupposes an Aristotelian philosophy of nature that is simply not adequate to support what modern science has uncovered about the natural order.  Which is not to say it is no longer valid, but rather that it is too limited. [No one says Newtonian physics is wrong, but it only addresses a limited aspect of a much wider, broader nature.]He qualifies these remarks in an update to the post as follows:

I think what fascinates me most is not the degree to which science has moved on--and that was a poor analogy on my part if that is how it came across. But rather, to the degree that Aristotle's philosophy of nature was itself inspired to some degree by his science (in particular his observations as a biologist), in what ways could a modern philosophy of nature be inspired by science now? And could it be useful in apologetics? 
End quote.  So, the School’s out forever?  Naturally, I beg to differ, and if John is channeling Alice Cooper I guess I’ll have to play Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School.    
I’m a bit puzzled by John’s statement that “Scholasticism presupposes an Aristotelian philosophy of nature that is simply not adequate to support what modern science has uncovered about the natural order,” since I and other writers whose work John knows and respects (e.g. William Carroll) have argued that there is no conflict between an Aristotelian philosophy of nature and modern science.  Indeed, we argue that the latter is best interpreted in light of the former.  I’m pretty sure John is familiar with those arguments in at least a general way, so it would be interesting to know exactly what he thinks is wrong with them.  Unfortunately, he not only doesn’t tell us, but doesn’t give the reader an indication that the arguments even exist! 
I’m also puzzled by the rhetorical question about how an Aristotelian philosophy of nature might be useful in apologetics, given that I never shut up about how crucial the theory of act and potency is to causal arguments for God’s existence, how crucial immanent teleology or final causality is to Aquinas’s Fifth Way, the role hylemorphism plays in the Third Way, etc.  (I’ve explained all this at length in Aquinas and in various academic articles, and of course here at the blog.)
Since I deal with the question of the compatibility of modern science and Aristotelian philosophy at some length in Scholastic Metaphysics , and since David Oderberg does the same in Real Essentialism -- to cite just two sources (there’s also, of course, the work of Bill Carroll, William A. Wallace, James Weisheipl, Charles De Koninck, and others) -- I’ll direct the interested reader to those books. 
It is also worth reminding the reader that it is not just Scholastics like me who think that a broadly Aristotelian philosophy of nature is, not only “adequate,” but indeed necessary in order to account for what we know from modern science.  For example, we find a recapitulation of the Aristotelian notion of causal powers in the work of non-Scholastic philosophers of science like Nancy Cartwright, John Ellis, Anjan Chakravartty, and Rom Harré and in the work of non-Scholastic metaphysicians like Stephen Mumford, Rani Lill Anjum, C. B. Martin, John Heil, George Molnar, and U. T. Place.  (You’ll find a primer on this recent work in Scholastic Metaphysics, and some of the important work being done in the mini Aristotelian revival currently underway in analytic philosophy can be found in anthologies like Tuomas Tahko’s Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics , Ruth Groff and John Greco’s Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism , Daniel Novotný and Lukáš Novák’s Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics , and my own Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics .)
It also needs to be emphasized that it is simply not the case that modern scientists have thought through the philosophical issues raised by their work and have found a non-Aristotelian way to answer them.  The truth is rather that they have in general become so hyper-specialized that they have largely lost sight of the most fundamental philosophical issues, and do not realize how amateurish, naïve, and conceptually sloppy their remarks often are when they do deign to address them.
To take just one example, consider that most fundamental notion of modern science, that of a “law of nature.”  It is routinely tossed around as if it were obvious what it meant for something to be a law of nature, and as if it were obviously unproblematic to think of scientific explanation as a matter of appealing to laws of nature.  In fact the notion is fraught with philosophical difficulty, as writers like Nancy Cartwright and Stephen Mumford have shown.  As I have noted many times, the notion of a “law of nature” was originally (in thinkers like Descartes and Newton) explicitly theological, connoting the decree of a divine lawmaker.  Later scientists would regard this as a metaphor, but a metaphor for what?  Most contemporary scientists who pontificate about philosophical matters not only do not have an answer but have forgotten the question.
One contemporary scientist who does see the problem is physicist Paul Davies, whose essay “Universe from Bit” (in Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen, eds. Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics), I happen to have been reading a few days ago.  Davies there writes:
The orthodox view of the nature of the laws of physics contains a long list of tacitly assumed properties.  The laws are regarded, for example, as immutable, eternal, infinitely precise mathematical relationships that transcend the physical universe, and were imprinted on it at the moment of its birth from “outside,” like a maker’s mark, and have remained unchanging ever since… In addition, it is assumed that the physical world is affected by the laws, but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe… It is not hard to discover where this picture of physical laws comes from: it is inherited directly from monotheism, which asserts that a rational being designed the universe according to a set of perfect laws.  And the asymmetry between immutable laws and contingent states mirrors the asymmetry between God and nature: the universe depends utterly on God for its existence, whereas God’s existence does not depend on the universe…
Clearly, then, the orthodox concept of laws of physics derives directly from theology.  It is remarkable that this view has remained largely unchallenged after 300 years of secular science.  Indeed, the “theological model” of the laws of physics is so ingrained in scientific thinking that it is taken for granted.  The hidden assumptions behind the concept of physical laws, and their theological provenance, are simply ignored by almost all except historians of science and theologians.  From the scientific standpoint, however, this uncritical acceptance of the theological model of laws leaves a lot to be desired… (pp. 70-1)
Now the naïve atheist reading this blog for the first time may suppose that at this point I am going to exclaim triumphantly that there cannot be law without a lawgiver and proclaim victory for theism.  But in fact, like Davies I don’t accept the theological account of laws.  I think it is bad philosophy of nature and bad theology (insofar as it tends toward occasionalism).  I want rather to make the following two points.  First, when scientists like Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Victor Stenger confidently proclaim that we can explain such-and-such in terms of the laws of physics rather than God, they show only how comically clueless they are.  What they are saying, without realizing it, is: “The explanation isn’t God, it’s rather the laws of physics, where ‘law of physics’ originally meant ‘a decree of God’ and where I don’t have any worked-out alternative account of what it means.”  Hence the “alternative” explanation, when unpacked, is really either a tacit appeal to God or a non-explanation.  In short, either it isn’t alternative, or it’s not an explanation. 
Second, the original, explicitly theological Cartesian-Newtonian notion of “laws of nature” was intended precisely as a replacement for the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy of nature.  The Scholastics held that the regularities in the behavior of natural phenomena derived from their immanent essences or substantial forms, and the directedness-toward-an-end or immanent teleology that followed upon their having those forms.  In other words, regularities reflected the formal and final causes of things.  The early moderns wanted to get rid of formal and final causes as immanent features of nature, and thus replaced them with the notion of “laws of nature” conceived of as externally imposed divine decrees.   To keep talk of “laws of nature” while throwing out God is thus not to offer an alternative to the Scholastic view at all, but merely to peddle an uncashed metaphor.  So, “science has moved on” from Scholasticism (as John puts it) only in the sense that it has not only chucked out Scholasticism but has also chucked out its initial proposed replacement for Scholasticism, and has offered nothing new in its place.  This is hardly a problem for the Scholastic; on the contrary, it is a problem for anyone who wants to resist a return to Scholasticism.
Like other contemporary Aristotelians, I would say that the right way to interpret a “law of nature” is as a shorthand description of the way a thing tends to operate given its nature or substantial form.  That is to say, “laws of nature” actually presuppose, and thus cannot replace, an Aristotelian philosophy of nature.  There are other accounts of laws, such as Platonic accounts and Humean accounts, but these are seriously problematic.  Platonic accounts, which treat laws of nature as abstract entities in a Platonic heaven, push the problem back a stage.  To appeal to such-and-such Platonic laws as an explanation of what happens in the world only raises the further problems of explaining why it is those laws rather than some others that govern the world, and what makes it the case that any laws at all come to be instantiated.  Humean accounts, meanwhile, interpret a law as a statement that such-and-such a regularity holds, or would have held under the right conditions.  But in that case an appeal to laws doesn’t really explainanything, but only re-describes it in a different jargon. 
There is, of course, more to the story, and I discuss these issues in detail in Scholastic Metaphysics.  The point for the moment is just that whatever the right view of laws of nature turns out to be, contemporary scientists seem to be mostly unaware that there is even a problem here.  And that’s just one area where modern science raises philosophical problems that its practitioners mostly neither perceive nor try to solve.  As Paul Feyerabend once complained:
The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach, and so on.  But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth… (See Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, For and Against Method, p. 385)
Needless to say, Hawking, Krauss, Stenger, and Co. are even worse than the generation Feyerabend was complaining about. 
As if calling in reinforcements, a reader alerts me today to philosopher of biology John Wilkins’ recent remarks about the Aristotelian hylemorphism implicit in the free use physicists and biologists make of the notion of “information” and related notions.  This is a point I’ve been making for years, e.g. in The Last Superstition and in earlier posts like this one and this one.  (James Ross has made a similar point as well.)  Wilkins is, accordingly, suspicious of “information” talk, whereas my view is that in at least some cases it does track what Dennett would call “real patterns” in nature, and thus points to the reality of immanent formal and final causes.  (In re: what Wilkins says about atomism and hylemorphism, see Scholastic Metaphysics, chapter 3, especially pp. 177-84.)  Either way, it reinforces the point that, the standard “heroic age of science” narrative notwithstanding, the Aristotelian philosophy of nature is by no means the historical relic John and so many others suppose.

Corrupting the Calvinist youth [UPDATED]

Some guy named “Steve” who contributes to the group apologetics blog Triablogue informs us that “Feser seems to have a following among some young, philosophically-minded Calvinists.”  (Who knew?)  “Steve” is awfully perturbed by this, as he has “considerable reservations” about me, warning that I am not “a very promising role model for aspiring Reformed philosophers.” And why is that?  Not, evidently, because of the quality of my philosophical arguments, as he does not address a single argument I have ever put forward.  Indeed, he admits that he has made only an “admittedly cursory sampling” of my work -- and, it seems, has read only some blog posts of mine, at that -- and acknowledges that “this may mean I'm not qualified to offer an informed opinion of Feser.”  So he offers an uninformed opinion instead, making some amazingly sweeping remarks on the basis of his “admittedly cursory” reading.  (Why that is the sort of example “aspiring Reformed philosophers” should emulate, I have no idea.)
Normally I ignore this sort of drive-by blogging, but since Triablogue seems to have a significant readership among people interested in apologetics, I suppose I should say something lest “Steve” corrupt the Calvinist youth by his rash example.“Intelligent Design” theory

So, what’s “Steve’s” beef?  The first of his by-his-own-admission-uninformed objections to my work is this:
[Feser]'s a vociferous critic of intelligent-design theory. Now, ID-theory is fair game. However, it's philosophically unenlightening when philosophers like Feser (and Francis Beckwith) criticize ID-theory because it isn't Thomism. Unless you grant that Thomist epistemology and metaphysics should be the standard of comparison, that objection is uninteresting. 
Now, he’s right that I’m a critic of ID theory.  But his philosophy-by-power-browsing method has failed him badly if he thinks that my criticisms boil down to: “Well, it isn’t Thomism, ergo…”  First of all, as I have emphasized many times, I have two main problems with ID theory.  First, I hold that it presupposes, even if just for methodological purposes, a seriously problematic philosophy of nature.  Second, I hold that it tends to lead to a dangerously anthropomorphic conception of God that is incompatible with classical theism.  (See the posts linked to above for detailed exposition of these lines of criticism.)
Now, to take the second point first, lots of classical theists are not Thomists.  And I imagine there are lots of people who might find it worthwhile inquiring whether classical theism and ID theory are compatible whether or not they are classical theists, or Thomists, or ID theorists for that matter.  For knowing how various ideas cohere or fail to cohere with one another is part of the philosophical task.  So, surely it can be “philosophically enlightening” to consider the arguments of those who hold that classical theism and ID theory are incompatible, no? 
To come to my other line of criticism of ID, it is true that my reasons for rejecting the philosophy of nature that underlies ID theory are Aristotelian reasons, and Thomists are Aristotelians.  However, this in no way entails that these reasons should be regarded as “philosophically unenlightening” to those who happen not to be Thomists.  For one thing, you don’t need to be a Thomist to find it of interest whether ID theory is compatible with Aristotelianism.  Not all Aristotelians are Thomists -- for example, many contemporary neo-Aristotelian metaphysicians and philosophers of science are not Thomists -- so that if ID theory is incompatible with Aristotelianism, it isn’t just Thomists who will reject ID’s underlying philosophy of nature.  And as with the relationship between classical theism and ID theory, the relationship between Thomism and ID theory should be of philosophical interest in itself.  (For example, if it turns out that Thomism and ID theory really are incompatible, surely this can be “philosophically enlightening” for those who are drawn to Thomism but don’t know what to make of ID theory, or who are drawn to ID theory but don’t know what to make of Thomism.)
Finally, I have, of course, given arguments -- at length, in depth, and in various books and articles -- for the various aspects of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature.  I don’t say: “If you just happen by arbitrary preference to be a Thomist like me, then you should reject ID theory.”  I say:  “Here are the arguments for why you should accept the Aristotelian position vis-à-vis act and potency, substantial form, final causality, etc.; and since ID theory is incompatible with all that, you should reject ID theory.” 
“Steve,” despite his touching concern for the sound formation of “aspiring Reformed philosophers,” does not answer, or indeed even seem to be aware of, any of these philosophical arguments.  But when a Thomist [or a Leibnizian, or a naturalist, or whatever] offers arguments for a position, it is no good for an “aspiring philosopher” to say: “Well, I’m not a Thomist [or a Leibnizian, or a naturalist, or whatever], so I don’t find all that ‘philosophically enlightening.’”  An “aspiring philosopher” should respond to the damn arguments.  Awful luck for those who would prefer to limit their philosophical investigations to the “admittedly cursory” kind, but there it is. 
I absolutely love this addendum by “Steve,” by the way:
[T]he problem is compounded by the fact that Feser's understanding of Paley and ID-theory have both been challenged. Consider the running debates between his blog and Uncommon Descent.
That’s it.  That’s all he says about the matter.  Do you hear that, “aspiring Reformed philosophers”?  Feser’s views have been challenged!  That never happens to serious philosophers.
“Doctrinaire” Thomism
“Steve’s” second by-his-own-admission-uninformed objection to me is that my Thomism is “doctrinaire,” “purist,” etc.  We shouldn’t be concerned with “expounding or repristinating Aquinas, but in advancing the argument,” sniffs “Steve.”  For “ultimately, philosophy is about ideas.  It doesn't matter where you get your ideas.”  (Unless they’re from Feser, naturally.) 
The funny thing is that “Steve” never actually cites a case where I claim that something is true merely because Aquinas or some prominent Thomist like Cajetan said it, or where I have rejected a claim merely because it deviates from Aquinas or from the Thomist tradition -- which he couldn’t have done even if he’d bothered to give my work more than an “admittedly cursory” reading, because I have never said such a thing.
“Steve” piously avers, as if he were saying something I would disagree with:
From an intellectual standpoint, a misinterpretation can be more useful than a correct interpretation. Suppose you improve on Aquinas by unintentionally imputing to him a better theory than he held. That's bad exegesis, but good philosophy.
Yet compare this passage from my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction :
No great philosopher, no matter how brilliant and systematic, ever uncovers all the implications of his position, foresees every possible objection, or imagines what rival systems might come into being centuries in the future.  His work is never finished, and if it is worth finishing, others will come along to do the job.  Since their work is, naturally, never finished either, a tradition of thought develops, committed to working out the implications of the founder’s system, applying it to new circumstances and challenges, and so forth.  Thus Plato had Plotinus, Aristotle had Aquinas, and Aquinas had Cajetan – to name just three famous representatives of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Thomism, respectively.  And thus you cannot fully understand Plato unless you understand Platonism, you cannot fully understand Aristotle unless you understand Aristotelianism, you cannot fully understand Thomas unless you understand Thomism, and so on.  True, writers in the traditions in question often disagree with one another and sometimes simply get things wrong.  But that is all the more reason to study them if one wants to understand the founders of these traditions; for the tensions and unanswered questions in a tradition reflect the richness of the system of thought originated by its founder.  (pp. 7-8, emphasis added)
But to be fair, “Steve” can’t have been expected to see passages like that, since it would require actually bothering to read someone’s work before criticizing it; and that, it seems, is not an approach to research he would commend to “aspiring Reformed philosophers.”  Apparently, it is Jerry Coyne to whom young Calvinists should be looking for methodological guidance.
“Steve” compares me unfavorably to other Catholic philosophers.  After all, “Geach… did groundbreaking work on Frege” and “Pruss doesn't hesitate to synthesize Aristotelian and Leibnizian insights.”  Since Idon’t try to assimilate Aquinas to Frege, that simply must be because my method is to stick my fingers in my ears and chant: “If Aquinas himself didn’t say it, it isn’t true!”  It can’tbe because I have actual philosophical reasons for thinking that there is more to the notion of existence than is captured by Frege (see Aquinas, pp. 55-59 and Scholastic Metaphysics, pp. 250-55).  And if I am critical of the Leibnizian approach to possible worlds, that must be because I couldn’t find it in the index to the Summa.  It definitely isn’t because I think the Aristotelian conception of modality is actually superior on the philosophical merits (Scholastic Metaphysics, pp. 235-41).
Then there’s all that non-existent work of mine synthesizing Aristotelian and Kripkean insights; synthesizing Aristotelian insights and insights drawn from Karl Popper; defending the principle of sufficient reason, despite its origins in Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism, against Gilsonian Thomists who reject it as a foreign import (Scholastic Metaphysics pp. 138-40); defending the classification of Aquinas as a kind of dualist despite the fact that many Thomists strenuously disavow that label; and bringing Scholastic thought and analytic philosophy into dialogue (see Scholastic Metaphysics, Aquinas, and indeed most of what I’ve written for the past ten years).  Again, none of that exists.  Or, to be more precise, none of it showed up on “Steve’s” iPhone when he was doing research for his blog post on the subway to work Monday morning.
“Isn't Feser basically a popularizer?” asks “Steve.”  And it’s a reasonable enough question for him to ask, given that he hasn’t actually read any of my academic stuffbut only a couple of blog posts, and thus doesn’t know that the answer is: “No, he isn’t.  Haven’t you read any of his academic stuff?  What did you do, just read a couple of blog posts?” 
Not being a mere popularizer, it seems, involves tossing off half-baked blog posts of your own putting forward sweeping judgments based on what you acknowledge to be a cursory knowledge of the facts.  Ecce blogger, aspiring young Reformed philosophers!  

UPDATE 4/30:  Some readers are wondering why I put quotation marks around “Steve’s” name.  The reason is that “Steve” is evidently not a real person but a spambot, and not a very sophisticated one.  That was obvious enough from “Steve’s” original post, and in a follow-up post and in various spambot-generated combox remarks beneath it, the telltale signs are all there -- oddly robotic repetition of statements that have already been refuted, failure to address what an interlocutor actually said, non sequiturs, etc.  (Triablogue guys, get some better AI software, huh?)

A second exchange with Keith Parsons, Part I

I’d like once again to thank Keith Parsons, and moderator Jeffery Jay Lowder, for the very fruitful first exchange we had a few weeks ago.  You can find links to each installment here.  Per Jeff’s suggestion, our second exchange will be on the topic: ”Can morality have a rational justification if atheism or naturalism is true?”  Jeff has proposed that we keep our opening statements to 2500 words or less, and I will try to rein in my logorrheic self and abide by that limitation.  That will be difficult, though, given that my answer to the question is: “Yes and No.”
Let me explain.  I’ll begin by making a point I’m sure Keith will agree with.  Many theists and atheists alike suppose that to link morality to religion is to claim that we could have no reason to be moral if we did not anticipate punishments and rewards in an afterlife.  I am sure Keith would reject such a line of argument, and I reject it too.  To do or refrain from doing something merely because one seeks a reward or fears reprisals is not morality.  I would also reject the related but distinct claim that what makes an action morally good or bad is merelythat God has commanded it, as if goodness and badness were a matter of sheer fiat on the part of a cosmic dictator who has the power to impose his will on everyone else.  This too would not really be morality at all, but just Saddam Hussein writ large.So, I reject crude divine command theories of morality.  That is one reason I think it is not quite right to claim that there can be no justification of morality if atheism were true; or at least, what (probably) most people understand by that claim is, in my view, false.  Crude divine command theories simply get morality wrong.  They get God wrong too.

More on that, perhaps, later in this exchange.  But first, another reason the claim in question is not quite right -- or at least way too quick -- has to do with what actually is the foundation of morality, or in any event the proximate foundation.  Like Philippa Foot, I would argue that goodness and badness are natural features of the world.  In particular, they have to do with a thing’s either realizing or failing to realize the endstoward which it is directed given its nature.  For example, a tree, given its nature, is directed toward ends like sinking roots into the ground, carrying out photosynthesis, and so forth.  To the extent it realizes these ends it is a good tree in the sense of a good specimen or instance of a tree, a healthy or flourishing tree.   To the extent it fails to do so, it is a bad tree in the sense of a bad specimen, a sickly or defective tree.  Similarly, a lioness is directed by her nature toward ends like hunting, moving her cubs about, and so forth.  To the extent she does so she is a good or flourishing specimen of a lioness, and to the extent she fails to do so she is a bad or defective specimen.  And so on for other living things.
Now so far this is a non-moral sense of “goodness” and “badness,” but moral goodness and badness are just special cases of the more general notions.  In particular, moral goodness or badness is the sort exhibited by a rationalcreature when he chooses either to act in a way conducive to the realization of the ends toward which his nature directs him, or to act in a way that frustrates those ends.  The goodness or badness of a plant or non-human animal is sub-ethical because they cannot understand what is good for them or will to pursue it.  Our goodness or badness is of an ethical sort because we canunderstand and will these things.  And it is irrational for us not to try to understand and to will them insofar as practical reason is by nature directed toward discerning the good, and the will is by nature directed toward pursuing the good. 
This is just a brief summary of the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) natural law conception of the good, and obviously it raises many questions.  I have developed and defended this conception at greater length elsewhere (such as in chapter 5 of my book Aquinas , in the first half of my Social Philosophy and Policy article “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” and in my article “Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good,” in the volume Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics , edited by Daniel Novotný and Lukás Novák).  Keith would no doubt disagree with a lot of what the A-T position has to say, but the point for the moment is to emphasize something else with which Keith might agree.  Just as what is good or bad for a tree or lioness is grounded in the natures of those things, so too is morality grounded in human nature.  Moral goodness, like these other kinds of goodness, is in that way what Foot calls “natural goodness.”  But human nature is something a person can know and understand whether or not he believes in God, just as he can understand the nature of an oak tree or a lioness whether or not he believes in God.  Hence there is a sense in which one could give a rational justification of morality even if he were an atheist.
I say that Keith might agree with this not just for the obvious reason that he is an atheist, but also because, if I understand his views correctly, he is sympathetic to the broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to ethics represented by Foot.  So, if I understand him correctly, there is a pretty significant amount of common ground between us on this issue.  Now let me explain where I think we differ.  First of all, while there is a sense in which morality might be rationally justifiable if atheism were true, I would say that morality could notbe rationally justified if naturalism were true.  The reason is that morality presupposes the existence of what Foot calls “natural goodness,” and natural goodness in turn presupposes the reality of natural teleology, of natural substances being inherently directed toward the realization of certain ends.  And naturalism is simply incompatible with the reality of natural teleology.
To forestall a possible misunderstanding, the reason I say that naturalism and natural teleology are incompatible is not because naturalists deny “intelligent design.”  I am not saying that natural objects are like watches or other artifacts which have functions only insofar as those functions have been imposed by an artificer, so that affirming that they have functions requires affirming an “intelligent designer” of the William Paley or ID theory sort.  That would make the teleology of natural substances extrinsic to them, as the time-telling function of a watch is extrinsic to the metal bits out of which it is made.  From an A-T point of view, that just gets natural teleology fundamentally wrong.  Natural teleology is natural precisely because it is intrinsicto a thing, following from its nature or substantial form.  And you can know the nature of a thing, and thus determine its teleological features, whether or not you believe in God.
(That does not mean that natural teleology does not ultimately entail a divine ordering intelligence.  I think it does.   But the reason why it does -- a reason which Aquinas sets out in his Fifth Way -- is more complicated and less direct than Paley and ID theory suppose.  It has nothing to do with complexity, probability calculations, analogies to artifice, etc.  In my view, ID theory has succeeded only in kicking up a gigantic cloud of dust that has badly obscured the proper understanding of natural teleology and its relationship to natural theology.  I have discussed this issue in a number of blog posts, in chapter 3 of Aquinas, in my Philosophia Christi article “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide,” and at greatest length in my Nova et Vetera article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way.”)
The reason is rather that naturalism is committed to the “mechanical world picture” (to use Tim Crane’s apt phrase) that the philosophers and scientists of the 17thcentury put at the center of modern Western thought.  Not every element that was originally part of that picture has survived, but the core of it has.  And that core is the idea that there is in the natural order no irreducible teleology of the sort affirmed by Scholastics and other Aristotelians.  All genuine explanations must, on this view, either be non-teleological or, if they make use of teleological notions, still be “cashable” in non-teleological terms. 
Now, if I may digress for a moment: The idea that the natural order is fundamentally non-teleological is often characterized as if it were a finding or result of modern science, but it is not that at all.  It is rather a methodological stipulationabout what will be allowed to countas “scientific.”  It’s like the rule against traveling in basketball.  It would be preposterous to argue: “In every basketball game played so far, traveling has not been allowed.  So, the history of basketball gives us overwhelming empirical evidence that there can be no legitimate traveling in basketball.”  That traveling isn’t allowed isn’t some inference we’ve drawn, but rather is just part of the rules of the game.  The reason you don’t see legitimate cases of traveling in actual basketball games is that they’ve been ruled out by fiat from the start.  Similarly, the reason you don’t find explanations in modern science that make use of irreducibly teleological notions is not that “science has shown” that there is no irreducible teleology.  It is rather for the completely trivial reason that appeals to irreducible teleology have been ruled out by fiat as “non-scientific.”
Hence the “argument from science” against irreducible teleology, though often tossed out matter-of-factly as if it were obviously correct -- for instance, by Alex Rosenberg, to take a recent example -- is in fact utterly fallacious.  Whether there is such a thing as irreducible teleology in nature is not a question for empirical science to settle, but rather a question for metaphysics and philosophy of nature.  And as I have argued many times, we cannot make sense either of our own thought processes, or of the irreducible causal powers of different natural substances, or indeed of the very possibility of there being any efficient causation at all, unless we affirm irreducible finality or teleology in nature.  (See e.g. chapter 6 of The Last Superstition , chapter 2 of Aquinas, my article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way,” and chapter 2 of Scholastic Metaphysics .) 
But again, that is a digression, because whether there really is irreducible teleology in nature is something we need not settle for present purposes.  The point for now is just that if there is no irreducible teleology in nature, then there can be no “natural goodness” either and thus no morality.  Here I imagine that Keith would disagree.  I presume -- and Keith, please correct me if I am wrong -- that Keith would say that teleology can be given a naturalistic reduction, perhaps after the fashion suggested by writers like Ruth Millikan.  Hence (the argument would continue) natural goodness, and thus morality, can be given a naturalistic foundation. 
Atheist philosopher and blogger Daniel Fincke has defended a view like this, but as I argued a couple of years ago in a post criticizing his position, it will not work.  To see why not, consider a distinction between kinds of teleology inspired by John Searle’s distinction between intrinsicintentionality, derived intentionality, and as-if intentionality.  Derived intentionality is the sort that the ink marks and sounds we call words have.  The meaning or intentionality of words is real, but in no way intrinsic to the ink marks and sounds themselves.  Instead it derives from the intrinsic or “built-in” intentionality of thought.  As-if intentionality is what is in play when we describe things as if they had intentionality, e.g. when you say of a marble you’ve dropped that it “wants” to roll away.  Of course, it doesn’t really want to roll away, because it is not the sort of thing that can wantanything.  As-if intentionality is not really intentionality at all, but just a useful fiction.
Now if there were no intrinsic intentionality (as an eliminative materialist might claim) then there could not be any genuine intentionality at all.  For derived intentionality can exist only if there is intrinsic intentionality from which non-intrinsic intentionality might be derived; and as-if intentionality isn’t real intentionality in the first place. 
But now consider a parallel distinction between intrinsic, derived, and as-if teleology.  Intrinsic teleology would be the sort that Aristotelians attribute to natural substances, an inherent or “built-in” directedness toward an end.  Derived teleology would be a “directedness toward an end” that a thing does not have intrinsically, but only insofar as it is imparted to it by something else.  The purposes of watches and other artifacts would be teleology of this sort.  As-if teleology would be what is in play when we find it useful to describe a thing as if it were directed toward an end. It is not genuine teleology at all, but at most just a convenient fiction. 
Now, the naturalist claims that there is no intrinsic teleology in the sense just described.  That means that all teleology must somehow be either derived or as-if; in particular, a Millikan-style reductionist account of natural teleology would have to say that the teleology of any substance is either derivative from the teleology of something else, or mere as-if teleology.  Yet if there is no intrinsic teleology for things to derive their non-intrinsic teleological features from, then they cannot really coherently be said to have derived teleology.  Their teleology must be mere as-if teleology.  In particular, Millikan-style reductions of teleology in terms of natural selection are really just ways of attributing as-if teleology to biological phenomena. 
But as-if teleology isn’t really teleology at all, any more than as-if intentionality is genuine intentionality.  It is at most merely a convenient fiction.  Accordingly, accounts like Millikan’s don’t really imply that teleology is real but reducible, but rather at best that it is not real, but a useful fiction.  (Searle has made a similar point about views like Millikan’s.)  And in that case you cannot really get natural goodness, and in turn morality, from a naturalistic account of teleology.  The most you can do is argue that it is as if there were teleology in nature, and as if there were goodness in nature, and as ifthere were such a thing as morality.  But to say it is as if morality existed is, needless to say, not to give a justification of morality.  It is at best a justification for pretending that there is morality.  (And could even the pretense of morality long survive if we all knew it to be mere pretense?  To ask the question is, I think, to answer it.) 
So, even if there is a sense in which atheism is consistent with there being a rational justification of morality, naturalism is not consistent with there being such a justification.  But then, most modern atheists are probably atheists because they are naturalists.  And in that case, their atheism is not consistent with there being a rational justification of morality.  Only a non-naturalistic atheism -- whatever that would look like -- would be consistent with it. 
But even that is true only with qualification.  For I would argue that even intrinsic teleology (and by extension natural goodness and thus morality) is ultimately, when a complete metaphysical analysis of teleology is given, intelligible only in light of classical theism.  The reasons, as I indicated above, are those given in the Fifth Way, properly understood and developed.  (Again, see my book Aquinas and my Nova et Vetera article for the full story.)  There is a parallel here with efficient causality.  You can know that things have causal powers, and what those causal powers are, whether or not you believe in God.  Still, as the Scholastic argues, when a completed metaphysical analysis of causation is carried out, it turns out that a thing could not even for an instant exercise the causal power it has -- the power to actualize potentials -- unless there were a purely actual uncaused cause which continuously imparts to things their causal power.
All that raises lots of questions, of course, but I have already gone a little over the word count.  (Feel free to do the same, Keith!)  Maybe we can return to some of these issues later in this exchange.  (I addressed the relationship between theism and morality in an earlier post a few years ago, and addressed the Euthyphro objection in yet another post.  Interested readers are directed to those posts, but for now I must shut up!)

God’s wounds

The God of classical theism -- of Athanasius and Augustine, Avicenna and Maimonides, Anselm and Aquinas -- is (among other things) pure actuality, subsistent being itself, absolutely simple, immutable, and eternal.  Critics of classical theism sometimes allege that such a conception of God makes of him something sub-personal and is otherwise incompatible with the Christian conception.  As I have argued many times (e.g. here, here, here, and here) nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, to deny divine simplicity or the other attributes distinctive of the classical theist conception of God is implicitly to make of God a creature rather than the creator.  For it makes of him a mere instance of a kind, even if a unique instance.  It makes of him something which could in principle have had a cause of his own, in which case he cannot be the ultimate explanation of things.  It is, accordingly, implicitly to deny the core of theism itself.  As David Bentley Hart writes in The Experience of God(in a passage I had occasion to quote recently), it amounts to a kind of “mono-poly-theism,” or indeed to atheism.
But it is not only generic theism to which the critics of classical theism fail to do justice.  It is Christiantheism specifically to which they fail to do justice.  One way in which this is the case is (as I have noted before, e.g. here) that it is classical theism rather than its contemporary rival “theistic personalism” that best comports with the doctrine of the Trinity.  But to reject classical theism also implicitly trivializes the Incarnation, and with it Christ’s Passion and Death.Theistic personalists are, as I have said, explicitly or implicitly committed to regarding God as an instance of a kind.  Their core thesis, to the effect that God is “a person without a body” (Swinburne) or that “there is such a person as God” (Plantinga), seems to give us something like the following picture: There’s the genus person and under it the two species embodied persons and disembodied persons.  Disembodied persons is, in turn, a genus relative to the species disembodied souls, angelic persons, and divine persons.  And it’s in the latter class, it seems, that you’ll find God.  Perhaps he is for the theistic personalist a unique instance of this kind, though how this relates to the doctrine of the Trinity is not clear.  (Is God, for the Christian theistic personalist, three persons in one person?  Presumably not.  What, then?  Are there actually three instances, though only three, of the species divine persons?  No wonder Swinburne’s position on the Trinity seems to amount to a kind of polytheism.  Some thoughts on Plantinga and the Trinity from Dale Tuggy here -- be sure to read the comment by Dale in the combox.) 

For the theistic personalist, then, the biblical assertion that “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” seems to amount to something like “a certain instance of a species within the genus disembodied persons acquired a body.”  Now, when you think about it, that’s essentially the plot of Ghostbusters II.  Not as bad as the critics took it to be, I suppose, but hardly the Greatest Story Ever Told.   And it doesn’t get much better if you add that the “person without a body” in this case “exemplifies” “great-making properties” like omnipotence, omniscience, etc.  What you’ve got then is at most something like a sequel that ups the ante, the Incarnation as a movie pitch:
Fade in: We meet God, a divine person who’s at the top of the game.  Think Olivier in Clash of the Titans, but invisible and with something even cooler than the Kraken: we call it ‘maximal greatness.’  I think we can get Anthony Hopkins, though maybe he’ll worry about typecasting after the Thor movies.  Anyway, God’s an Intelligent Designer too, like Downey, Jr. in Iron Man but with angels.  We’ll show him making bacterial flagella and stuff -- CGI’s pretty good now, so it’ll look realistic.  Now, here’s the twist: He takes on a human body and comes to earth!  It’s The Ten Commandments meets Brother from Another Planet.  We gotta go for 3D on this…
Well, we’ve seen that movie a hundred times.  Horus was incarnate in the Pharaohs, Zeus changed into a swan, the Marvel Comics version of Thor took on the human guise of Donald Blake, and so on.  If God were, as theistic personalism claims, “a person” and “a being” alongside all the other persons and beings that populate the world, then he would differ only in degree from these other gods.  His Incarnation would be more impressive than theirs only in something like the way having the president of the United States show up at your costume party would be more impressive than having a local city alderman show up. 
Now for the classical theist, God is not “a being” -- not because he lacks being but on the contrary because he is Being Itself rather than something which merely “has” or “possesses” being (in “every possible world” or otherwise).  Nor is he “a person” -- not because he is impersonal but on the contrary because he is Intellect Itself rather than something which merely “exemplifies” “properties” like intellect and will.  (As I have put it before, the problem with the sentence “God is a person” is not the word “person” but the word “a.”)  Describing God as “a being” or “a person” trivializes the notion of God, and it thereby trivializes too the notion of God Incarnate. 
For the classical theist, what the doctrine of God Incarnate entails is that that which is subsistent being itself, pure actuality, and absolutely simple or non-composite, that in which all things participate but which itself participates in nothing, that which thereby sustains all things in being -- that that “became flesh and dwelt among us.”  That is a truly astounding claim, so astounding that its critics often accuse it of incoherence.  The accusation is false, but those who make it at least show that they understand just how extremely strange and remarkable the claim is -- and how radically unlikethe “incarnations” of the various pagan deities it is.  You can plausibly assimilate the incarnation of the “God” of theistic personalism to those of Horus, Zeus, et al.  You cannotso assimilate the Incarnation of the God of classical theism.  It is sui generis.
For this reason it is superficial in the extreme to think that the story of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection bears any interesting relationship to the various dying-and-rising deities of pagan mythology.  The story of Christ is as different from theirs as classical theism is from belief in one of the various pagan pantheons.  Hence, to think that calling attention to these myths is an embarrassment to Christianity is as frivolous and point-missing as the “one god further” objection to theism in general is. 
Thus do we see yet again how crucial classical theism is to a sound Christian apologetics.  But its significance is no less crucial for Christian spirituality.  The “God” of theistic personalism was already “one of us” -- an instance of our genus if not of our species -- before he took on flesh.  The God of classical theism most definitely was not.  Indeed, unlike the “God” of theistic personalism, the God of classical theism, the only God worthy of the name, is immeasurably different from any creature -- “Wholly Other,” in the apt phrase popularized by Rudolf Otto.  And yet he became one of us anyway.  It is because of this -- because Christ is so radically unlike us in his divinenature, so “Wholly Other” -- that his having become so much like us in his human nature is so incomparably profound and moving.  We will not understand the Incarnation, and we will not understand the divine lovefor human beings that it evinces, if we conceive of that divine nature in anthropomorphic terms.  Is God’s love for us like the self-sacrificing love of a father for his children or the love between brethren or friends?  Indeed it is -- except insofar as it is incomparably greater, incomparably more self-sacrificial, than those merely human sorts of love.
Nor does even the thought of God’s having become man -- mind-boggling enough as that thought is when properly understood -- entirely capture the depths of that love.  For the second Person of the Trinity did not take on the body of an Adonis, or of an emperor.  He was a carpenter in a backwater province of the empire, having “no form nor comeliness… no beauty that we should desire him,” who suffered and died as other human beings suffer and die.  He not only lived as a man, but lived as most men have to live, with all their weaknesses and defects, albeit without sin.  As Aquinas writes, he did so in part precisely to make it evident that he really was God become man:
It was fitting for the body assumed by the Son of God to be subject to human infirmities and defects…  in order to cause belief in Incarnation.  For since human nature is known to men only as it is subject to these defects, if the Son of God had assumed human nature without these defects, He would not have seemed to be true man, nor to have true, but imaginary, flesh, as the Manicheans held.  And so, as is said, Philippians 2:7: "He… emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man." Hence, Thomas, by the sight of His wounds, was recalled to the faith… (Summa theologiae III.14.1)
In his book Our Idea of God , Thomas Morris notes how, according to some philosophical theists, God is too grand even to know about the humbler parts of reality:

There is one ancient view according to which it would seem beneath the dignity of a perfect being to even bother to attend to certain details in the world.  On this conception, it would be inappropriate for a being of God’s exalted status to acquaint himself intimately with dirt, hair, mud and filth, to cite only a few standard examples…  [T]he fastidious deity of Plato’s Timaeus… must have lesser gods interposed between himself and the squalor of this world as buffers to guard his eminence from any taint of cognitive pollution. (pp. 85-86)
Now classical theism, when worked out consistently, in fact should lead us to reject such a view.  For classical theism entails that nothing -- most certainly including dirt, hair, mud and filth -- could continue in being even for an instant if God were not sustaining it.  He can hardly be said not to know about these things, then.  But the doctrine of the Incarnation goes far beyond that.  It asserts that God not only knows about “dirt, hair, mud and filth,” but out of love for us took on human flesh -- with its hair, and with its susceptibility to getting dirty, muddy, filthy. 
Nor does even that entirely capture the depths of his love.  For Christ did not take on human flesh only to get rid of it as soon as he could; nor did he even restore that flesh to perfect integrity as soon as he could.  He retains the flesh with its wounds perpetually.  As Aquinas writes (quoting Bede), among the reasons for this are:
"that He may convince those redeemed in His blood, how mercifully they have been helped, as He exposes before them the traces of the same death" (Bede, on Luke 24:40). (Summa theologiae III.54.4)
He who is Being Itself, pure actuality, and divine simplicity -- has, now as on the Cross, holes in his hands, holes in his feet, a gash in his side.  With these wounds, Christ says to us: I am one of you, now and always.  They are a valentine to the human race, given to us on Good Friday, on Easter, and forever.
For some other posts related to the Easter Triduum, see:
The meaning of the Passion
The meaning of the Resurrection
Putting the Cross back into Christmas

What We Owe the New Atheists

Last week I gave a lecture at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA, on the theme “What We Owe the New Atheists.”  You can read the text and/or listen to the audio of the lecture at TAC’s website.  The faculty, students, and guests who attended were a wonderful bunch of folks and I thank them for their very kind hospitality. 

Anthony Brueckner (1953 - 2014)

Philosopher Tony Brueckner of UC Santa Barbara died this week.  Tony was a professor of mine when I was in graduate school, and served on my dissertation committee.  I remember him as an excellent teacher, a formidable philosopher, and a nice guy with a droll sense of humor.  I recall a phony pop quiz he handed out in class one day.  The first multiple-choice question read: “What is your name? (A) Bruce, (B) other.”  After a reference he once made to the tune in a comment in the margins of a term paper of mine, I can never listen to Steely Dan’s “The Fez” without thinking of Tony.
Tony was a philosopher’s philosopher, and his work was largely devoted to a rigorous investigation of the philosophical issues surrounding Cartesian skepticism.  No one seriously interested in that topic can avoid grappling with Tony’s work on it, most of which is collected in his book Essays on Skepticism .  Related issues are pursued in Debating Self-Knowledge , co-written with Gary Ebbs.
By all accounts (such as this one) he was a kind man.  R.I.P.

Self control

The relationship between memory and personal identity has long been of interest to philosophers, and it is also a theme explored to good effect in movies and science fiction.  In Memento , Leonard Shelby (played by Guy Pearce) has largely lost his ability to form new memories following an attack in which he was injured and his wife raped and murdered.  He hunts down the attacker by assembling clues which he either writes down or tattoos on his body before he can forget them. 
In Philip K. Dick’s short story “Paycheck” (which is better than the movie adaptation starring Ben Affleck), the protagonist Jennings has agreed to work for two years on a secret project knowing that his memory of it (and of everything else that happened during those years) will be erased when the task is completed.  When he awakens after the memory wipe, he learns that he had, during the course of the two years, voluntarily agreed to forego the large paycheck he had originally contracted for in exchange for an envelope full of seemingly worthless trinkets.  He spends the rest of the story trying to figure out why he would have done so, and it becomes evident before long that it has something to do with the secret project’s having been a device which can see into the future. 
(Readers who haven’t either seen Memento or read Dick’s story or seen the movie version are warned that major spoilers follow.)Memento is a terrific movie and deserves the hype it has gotten.  Its philosophical interest lies not only in its relevance to discussions of memory and personal identity, but also in the way it illustrates the problems of interpretation and indeterminacy raised by twentieth century philosophers like Wittgenstein, Quine, and Davidson.  Leonard supposes that taking photographs, writing himself notes, and getting tattoos will allow him to preserve the information he acquires before he can forget it.  The trouble is that he still forgets the context in light of which the photographs he took and the words he writes down or tattoos got the sense he originally had in mind.  Deprived of this forgotten context, he is unable correctly to understand what the words and pictures really mean, so that neither he -- nor, really, even the viewer -- knows just how very far off track he has gotten as he pursues his attacker.  We know, and eventually he knows, that he has been manipulated in ways he cannot fully fathom, but what is deliberately left unclear by the movie is the extent to which this is the case or how long it has been going on.

What is of interest for present purposes, however, is that we find out by the end of the movie that among the people who have been deliberately leading Leonard down blind alleys is Leonard himself!  It turns out that, realizing at one point that he has been manipulated by others, Leonard decides to get revenge on one of those manipulators -- Teddy -- by leaving himself clues falsely implicating Teddy as the man who raped and murdered his wife.  Leonard knows that he will forget that he has himself laid these false clues, and that his future self will kill Teddy, supposing that he is avenging his wife’s death when in fact he is really punishing Teddy for having manipulated him.
Now what I want to focus on is a question raised by Leonard’s planting of false clues for his later self to misinterpret.  As background, keep in mind that for us Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) philosophers (unlike, say, for Lockeans), Leonard’s anterograde amnesia in fact raises no problems of personal identity.  Leonard remains the same person over time as long as he is the same form-matter composite over time, which he is as long as he is alive and whether or not he can remember anything of his past life.  Indeed, he would remain the same person even if his brain had been so damaged that he spent the rest of his life totally unconscious.  (Since this is not a post about personal identity per se, I’m not going to pursue this issue further but just take for granted in what follows the A-T view.  See David Oderberg’s essay “Hylemorphic Dualism” for exposition and defense of the A-T approach to personal identity.)
A second background assumption I’m going to make is the correctness of the standard Thomistic natural law view about lying.   Part of that standard view is that lying is intrinsically wrong.  But that doesn’t mean we always have to reveal the truth -- we can remain silent or, under some circumstances, even speak evasively using a broad mental reservation.  It doesn’t rule out certain customary forms of speech that are not literally true -- joking, for example, or saying “I’m fine, how are you?” when meeting someone even though you are feeling miserable -- because the standard view is that given the nuances of linguistic usage, these don’t count as lies.  Nor, on the standard view, does deception always involve lying, and neither is deception itself always and intrinsically wrong (though of course it often is wrong given the circumstances).  For you might know and intend that someone be deceived when you use evasive language that isn’t strictly untrue and thus not a lie.  But directly and unambiguously communicating some meaning that is contrary to what you really think would be a lie.  And while outright lying is not necessarily seriously wrong -- probably most lies are not -- it is still at least mildly wrong.  (Here too I’m not going to pursue this set of issues further at present, because the post is not about lying per se; and I have in any event discussed the ethics of lying many times and at considerable depth in previous posts, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  Please do not waste time raising questions or objections concerning this issue in the combox unless you’ve read those posts, because I’ve probably answered your question or objection in one of them.) 
Now, coming back to Memento, let’s ask: Was Leonard lying when he arranged misleading clues for his later self?  Obviously he was deceivinghimself and -- given that his aim was to bring about a murder -- doing so immorally.  But was he doing so by means of a lie in the strict sense?  Can you literally lie to yourself?  One Thomistic natural law theorist, Austin Fagothey, thinks not.  Discussing the conditions under which a sign of some sort (whether linguistic, a gesture, or whatever) counts as a lie, Fagothey writes that “the sign must be made to another person, for speech is communication between minds.  It is impossible to lie to oneself…” (Right and Reason, Second edition, pp. 309-10).
To understand Fagothey’s point here it is crucial to reemphasize that not all deception involves lying.  Again, if I speak evasively I may deceive you without lying.  For example, if I tell the proverbial murderer who comes to the door looking for you that “He is not inside this house” -- suppose you are actually hiding in my backyard -- and he goes away thinking that you are nowhere around, I have deceived him but I have not lied.  Similarly, if I don’t let myself dwell on certain unpleasant truths, knowing that I am likely to forget them if I keep my mind off of them long enough, there is a sense in which I have deceived myself.  Fagothey isn’t denying that that is possible.  His point is that that is different from lying.  What he has in mind by “lying” is the sort of thing I would be doing if I told the murderer flatly: “He is nowhere in the vicinity, neither in the house, nor in the backyard, nor the garage, nor anywhere else nearby as far as I know.  Nor, Mr. Murderer, am I in any way speaking evasively or using any sort of mental reservation.  You can take my word for it.”  If I said that while knowing full well that you were in the backyard, I would be lying.  (Never mind for now about the morality of it -- the point is that it would be a lie, whether justifiable or not.)  Fagothey is saying that it is impossible to lie to yourself in thatstrict sense. 
Obviously there is something to what he is saying.  Imagine me talking, not to the murderer, but to myself -- while looking in the mirror, say, trying to appear sincere -- saying “Your friend isn’t really in the backyard, Ed.  Honest!”  It’s ridiculous to think this would count even as an attempt at lying.  I would know, in the very act of “communicating” the meaning that is contrary to what I really think, that it is contrary to what I really think.  This seems a bit like trying to get yourself to think that you are not really thinking -- a self-defeating exercise.  At most my little monologue while looking in the mirror might count as a kind of joke.  (That’s an interesting question -- can you literally jokewith yourself even if you can’t lie to yourself?  Maybe so, though perhaps this really just amounts to thinking about jokes or other funny things.) 
So, should we conclude that Leonard was not lying to himself -- even though he was of course deceiving himself -- when he laid those clues for his later self to misinterpret? 
A Lockean who takes continuity of consciousness to be definitive of personal identity might argue as follows.  Given Leonard’s condition, there is no significant psychological continuity between the “Leonard” who decides to deceive his future “self” and the later “Leonard” who is deceived.  So (the argument might go) they are really different persons.  And in that case “Leonard” really has lied to “himself”; or rather, the earlier “Leonard” has really told a lie to the later “Leonard” precisely because they are notthe same person.  This would be a way of arguing that the scenario involves genuine lying, consistent with Fagothey’s view that it is impossible to lie to oneself.  For there are, on this view, really twoselves in question, not one.  As I’ve indicated, though, from an A-T point of view the Lockean is just wrong and there is only one person here, in which case this would not be a way of showing that there is genuine lying (again, as opposed to self-deception) involved.
And yet there really does seem to be something like actual lying going on in the scenario in question.  Leonard writes down Teddy’s license plate number as if it were a clue, knowing that his future self will falsely suppose it to be that of his wife’s killer.  In his internal monologue, he even describes what he is doing as “lying” to himself.  He is, in effect, deliberately “communicating” what he knows to be the falsehood that Teddy is the killer to a mind, albeit to his own future mind.  We can even imagine him leaving a note for himself that says flatly “Note to self: Teddy is the killer!” (though he doesn’t actually go that far, wanting to leave at least a little in the way of further investigation for his future self to carry out).
I am inclined to think, then, that this may in fact be a case of lying, Fagothey’s remarks notwithstanding.  What Fagothey should say is that you can’t lie to yourself in ordinary circumstances precisely because in ordinary circumstances the “recipient” of the message (namely you) cannot even in principle take what you say for truth.  And the recipient’s being able at least in principle to take what you say for truth seems a necessary condition for lying.  (That’s why you cannot in principle lie to a stone, a plant, or an earthworm, since they cannot even entertain propositions at all, let alone regard them as true.)  In unusual cases, though, such as those involving anterograde amnesia like Leonard’s, lying to yourself seems possible insofar as the “recipient” of the message (your future self) can in principle take it to be true.
If lying in the strict sense is always at least mildly wrong (as the standard Thomistic view holds) then it would be wrong to lie to yourself the way Leonard does, even if you are lying for a good end (unlike Leonard, who lies to himself for a bad end).  But what about what Jennings does to his future self in “Paycheck”?  Here there is no lying involved, but Jennings does do something that would at least in ordinary circumstances be wrong if done to another.  If you had contracted for a large paycheck and someone rigged things so that instead of getting it you got a bag of trinkets, I think it would in most cases be wrong for him to do so even if the trinkets will benefit you (as they end up benefiting Jennings, in ways his post-memory-loss self doesn’t foresee, in the story). 
Now, in the movie version, the trinkets end up not only benefiting Jennings, but saving his own life and the lives of millions of other people.  It would not be wrong, given the nature of property rights, for one person to deprive another of his contracted paycheck and give him the trinkets instead if that was what was at stake.  But suppose that what was at stake was something far less dramatic.  Suppose that by replacing the paycheck with the trinkets without your consent, I could guarantee that you would be better off in some significant way that nevertheless fell far short of being a matter of life and death.  (Perhaps this would, in ways you are unable at present to see, enable you to get a better job, or make a friend you wouldn’t otherwise have met.)  Would it be morally permissible for me to do it?
It depends.  If you were one of my young children, it seems clear that there are cases where I could, for your own good, legitimately override some contract you had made.  (Suppose you had agreed to mow a neighbor’s lawn for five dollars and I arrange to have a bag of trinkets delivered to you instead, knowing that one of them is a valuable baseball card that will fetch you $50.)  But if you were a perfect stranger, it seems equally clear that I could not legitimately do this.  What we are describing here is a kind of paternalistic intervention, and that is appropriate only where someone has something like paternal authority over another. 
Now, obviously we are in something like a paternalistic relationship to our future selves.  We have not only the right but the duty to do what is in our future best interests.  Hence what Jennings does to his future self, though initially unpleasant -- Affleck’s stunned and angry reaction on opening the envelope of trinkets (when what he expected was $92 million) is one of the better scenes in an otherwise disappointing movie -- is perfectly morally legitimate.

Welcome to the machine

Not too long ago I attended a conference on theology and technology sponsored by First Things.  Unsurprisingly, the question arose whether modern technology is on balance a good or bad thing, and the general view seemed to be that it was in itself neutral -- its goodness or badness deriving from the circumstances of its use.  As Fr. Thomas Joseph White pointed out, however, from a Thomist point of view, while circumstances can certainly make the use of technology bad, of itself it is actually good rather than merely neutral.  It is the product of the practical intellect, the exercise of which per se helps perfect us (even if, again, circumstances can make technology, like other products of practical reason, evil). 
Naturally I wholeheartedly agree, being not only a Thomist but a confirmed city dweller and something of a technophile.  Still, it is worthwhile considering whether there is something special about modern circumstances that makes technology morally problematic.  I think there is, though by no means do I think these circumstances suffice to make modern technology on balance a bad thing.  On the contrary, I think on balance it is a very good thing.  But all good things can lead us to hubris if we are not careful, and there is a special way in which we moderns need to be careful.To see how requires some metaphysical background.  I’ve written many times about the Aristotelian distinction between “nature” and “art,” as set out in Book II of Aristotle’s Physics.  What is “natural” in Aristotle’s sense is what has an intrinsic principle of operation.  To use one of my stock examples, a liana vine (the kind of vine Tarzan swings around on) is a “natural” object insofar as its vine-like activities -- taking in water through its roots, exhibiting certain characteristic growth patterns, etc. -- are the result of tendencies inherent to it.  By contrast, a hammock that Tarzan might make out of living liana vines is an “artifact” rather than a natural object insofar as its distinctive hammock-like function -- serving as a comfortable place to take a nap -- is not intrinsic to the vines but has to be imposed from outside by Tarzan.  That is why, left to themselves, the vines will tend to lose the hammock-like arrangement Tarzan imposes on them.  Tarzan might have to keep re-tying the vines and/or to prune them to keep them functioning as a hammock, but he will not have to interfere with them to keep them functioning as vines.  That is, of course, just what they are inclined to do on their own, without interference. 

As I’ve noted many times, the distinction Aristotle is getting at here is really the distinction between substantial formand accidental form, and whether something came about through human interference or not is at the end of the day a secondary issue.  For there are man-made things that have substantial forms and are thus “natural” in the relevant sense (e.g. new breeds of dog, water synthesized in a lab) and there are things that are not man-made but rather the result of natural processes that are nevertheless not “natural” in the relevant sense but have only an accidental rather than substantial form (e.g. a random pile of stones or dirt, qua pile, that has formed at the bottom of a hill).  The usual cases of things with merely accidental forms are man-made, though, so that we tend (wrongly) to regard the man-made as per se “unnatural,” and the usual cases of objects that occur apart from human action are “natural” in the sense of having a substantial form, so that we tend (wrongly) to assimilate what is “natural” in the sense of occurring apart from human action to what is “natural” in the sense of having a substantial form or intrinsic principle of operation.
Metaphysically speaking, only “natural” objects, i.e. those with substantial forms, are true substances.  For example, a liana vine, a stone, a tree, a dog, or a human being are all true substances.  The acquisition of a mere accidental form cannot generate a new true substance but merely modifies a preexisting substance.  A hammock that Tarzan makes from the vines, for example, is not a true substance.  Rather, it is the vines that are the true substances, and the hammock-like arrangement is a mere accidental form that the substances have taken on.  A watch is also not a true substance.  Rather, the bits of metal and the like that make up the watch are the true substances, and the time-telling feature is a mere accidental form (or collection of accidental forms) that have been imposed upon them.  (And the bits of metal, in turn, are true substances only qua bits, and not (say) qua gears, for the form of being a watch gear is also a merely accidental form.  The bits have an inherent tendency to behave as metal -- conducting electricity, being malleable, etc. -- but not an inherent tendency to function as parts of a time-telling device.) 
True substances -- “natural” objects in the relevant sense, objects with substantial forms -- are thus metaphysically more fundamental than accidental arrangements, or “artifacts” of the usual sort.  There could, perhaps, be a world with only things having substantial forms, but certainly not a world with things having only accidental forms.  (This is why it is a deep mistake to think of the world on the model of an artifact and of God on the model of an artificer, after the fashion of William Paley and ID theory.  That gets the world fundamentally wrong and it gets divine creative activity fundamentally wrong.  But that’s an issue I’ve addressed many times in other contexts.) 
Even if atomism or some modern variation on it were the correct account of the ordinary objects of our experience (which it most definitely is not), that would not eliminate the distinction between substantial and accidental forms, but merely relocate all substantial form to the level of the atoms (or whatever the fundamental particles turn out to be) and make of everything else in the universe mere accidental forms.  The idea that modern science “refuted” the doctrine of substantial form is one of the many urban legends of modern intellectual life. 
Obviously these are large claims, but the point isn’t to expound and defend them here; I‘ve already done that elsewhere.  (See my book Scholastic Metaphysics , especially chapter 3, for my most detailed exposition and defense of the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of substances and substantial forms.  See also David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism .  I’ve discussed these issues several times here on the blog, e.g. hereand here.)
The point, rather, is this.  That there is a difference between “nature” and “art” -- or more precisely, a difference between objects having substantial forms and those having merely accidental forms -- and that the former are metaphysically more fundamental than the latter, is easier to perceive in a low tech society than in a high tech society.  Just think of the examples Aristotle gives in the Physics of objects that are not “natural” in the relevant sense but have merely accidental forms -- beds, cloaks, and the like.  And think of how crude a bed or a cloak of Aristotle’s day would be compared even to the cheap sort of thing you can buy at Ikea or Target today.  It would wear its “natural” origins on its face.  You would see the rough and knotty wood of the bed, say, or the animal skin out of which the cloak was made, and perceive right away that the wood or the skin was the real substance and the bed- or cloak-like shape and function as a relatively superficial pattern imposed on it.  The metaphysically secondary nature of such accidental forms would be manifest.  And you would be living in a larger environment in which, even in the cities, “natural” objects in the relevant Aristotelian sense -- wood, stone, dirt, etc. -- would surround you, and would not look all that terribly different from what they were like before the sculptor applied his chisel or the carpenter his hammer.
By contrast, the objects that surround us in everyday life in the modern city are almost always things whose underlying “natural” substrates -- those things which are the true substances and which underlie the accidental forms -- have been highly processed.  They do not wear their “natural” origins on their sleeve.  This is true even of the most “natural” (in the sense of non-man-made) materials.  The wood and metal that make up the pieces of furniture now right in front of me, for example, are so highly processed and have been so slickly painted or varnished or otherwise made so sleek that what strikes you most clearly is not this is metalor this is wood, but rather this is a filing cabinet and this is a desk.  It is even more obviously true of the great many everyday objects made out of plastic.  As I have noted in a recent post, plastic is plausibly “natural” in the Aristotelian sense of having a substantial form, since it has irreducible causal powers (a mark of the presence of a substantial rather than accidental form).  The same can be said of other common man-made materials (Styrofoam, glass, etc.).  Since they don’t occur “in the wild” but are man-made, that they are “natural” (in the sense, again, that they have substantial forms) doesn’t hit you in the face as it does with the wood or stone you’d see in the wild; and since plastic etc. have, on top of that, all sorts of accidental forms imposed on them (e.g. the shapes, colors, textures, etc. of cups, Frisbees, computers, and the like, and the associated observer-relative functions) their underlying natural/substantial form basis is far from obvious to casual inspection.
Moreover, even when objects that are clearly natural (again, in the relevant sense of “natural”) are present in the modern city -- trees, grass, etc. -- they are present in a way that is often so much the result of human planning that the accidental forms -- the shape of the lawn and the uniformity of the length of the blades of grass, the shape of the hedges, etc. -- strike you as much as the natural object itself does.
So, you might say that the world around us modern city dwellers is so covered over with accidental forms that the substantial forms that underlie them are visible only with effort.  And as a result, it is easier for us to fall prey to the illusion that there is no deep difference between substantial and accidental forms, and indeed no such thing as “nature” in the Aristotelian sense.  That this is an illusion there can be no doubt, because on analysis it can be seen that we cannot even make coherent sense of a material order that did not at some level exhibit what Aristotelians call substantial forms.  (Again, see Scholastic Metaphysics.)  But it takes more work for those immersed in highly technology to see that it is an illusion -- or it does, anyway, if (as is so often the case) their natural metaphysical sensibilities have been dulled by the post-Cartesian, post-Humean assumptions that they have picked up from the surrounding intellectual culture.
Now, when I made this point at the conference referred to above, Prof. Peter Lawler made, in response, the important point that even the modern city dweller knows one natural substance very well indeed, namely himself.  But I think even our awareness of ourselves as “natural” has been dulled in the modern world by the layers of accidental forms, as it were, through which we have come to perceive ourselves.  There are, for one thing, the perfectly legitimate adornments and grooming practices -- clothing, jewelry, coiffed hair and trimmed nails, shaving, bathing, perfuming, etc. -- that have always been a part of human culture.  Then there are the morally more problematic bodily and psychological alterations familiar from modern life -- extensive plastic surgery, extensive tattooing and body piercing, heavy use of drugs to alter behavior, etc. 
These practices are problematic, for the natural law theorist, when they cross the line separating beautifying adornment or correction of defects (which are perfectly legitimate) from deliberate mutilation (which is not legitimate, except when done to preserve the whole organism).  Where exactly the line is to be drawn would take some careful analysis to determine, but the morality of bodily modification is not, in any event, our present subject.  What is important to note for present purposes is that the more we modify ourselves -- even when we do so legitimately -- the less obvious is our status as “natural” objects in the relevant, Aristotelian sense.  We can even start to take seriously the suggestion that we are “really” just “machines” of a sort -- a machine being a paradigm instance of something having a merely accidental rather than substantial form.  (On that subject, some relevant posts can be found here, here, here, here, and here.)
The moral implications all of this has from a traditional natural law perspective are obvious.  For good and bad as objective features of the world are, for natural law theory, determined by what is “natural” in the technical Aristotelian sense of what tends to fulfill the ends toward which a thing is directed by virtue of its substantial form.  To the extent that we lose sight of the “natural” in the sense of that which has a substantial form or intrinsic principle of operation -- an intrinsic principle by virtue of which it is naturally directed to the realization of certain ends -- we thereby also lose sight of “good” and “bad” as objective features of the world, and thus lose sight of the preconditions of an objective moral order.
(Critics are asked kindly to spare us the common stupid objections to the effect that everything is really natural since everything is governed by the laws of nature; or that a consistent natural law theorist would have to reject eyeglasses and ear plugs as unnatural; etc. etc.  I’ve discussed the sense of “natural” relevant to natural law theory in previous posts, such as this one, this one, and this one.  For more detailed exposition and defense of traditional natural law theory, see chapter 5 of Aquinas , my Social Philosophy and Policyarticle “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” and my forthcoming article “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument,” an excerpt from which recently appeared in National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly.)
So, to the extent that modern technology dulls our awareness of the natural, it poses a moral hazard -- not in itself but by virtue of circumstances.  But it is possible to overstate the hazard, and people do not (and, I think, never could) consistently treat themselves or the world as if there were no such thing as “nature” in the Aristotelian sense.  (For example, I suspect that the fad for “organic” goods reflects a confused sense of the natural in something like this sense.)  As Horace wrote, you can throw nature out with a pitchfork, but she’ll come back in through the window.  Until she does, welcome to the machine. 

What’s around the web?

John Searle is interviewed at New Philosopher.  He’s in fine Searle form (and well-armed, as you can see from the photo accompanying the interview):  “It upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries, the theory of extended mind makes me want to throw up.”
Jeremy Shearmur is interviewed at 3:AM Magazineabout his work on Karl Popper and F. A. Hayek.  Standpoint magazine on Hayek and religion.
A memorial conference for the late E. J. Lowe will be held this July at Durham University. 
Steely Dan is being sued by former member David Palmer.  GQ magazine looks back on Steely Dan’s Aja, and The Quietus celebrates and cerebrates the 40thanniversary of Pretzel Logic.  Donald Fagen’s book Eminent Hipsters is reviewed in City Journal and in the New York Observer .John Haldane discusses Alasdair MacIntyre, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis at Ethika Politika. 

In The New Atlantis, Roger Scruton on “Scientism in the Arts and Humanities.”
Philosopher of language Scott Soames is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.  Soames discusses, among other things, his defense of a variation on the originalist approach to interpreting the U.S. constitution.  This is a subject explored in some of the essays in Soames’ new book Analytic Philosophy in America and Other Historical and Contemporary Essays , wherein he comments on Roe v. Wade and other crucial Supreme Court cases.

That Sony holds the rights to make Spider-Man movies has so far kept him from joining the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  But there are several ways it could still happen.

Elmar J. Kremer has just published Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller's Approach to God .  Bill Vallicella comments on the book. 

Some other recent books of interest: Stephen Boulter, Metaphysics from a Biological Point of View , “a defense of Scholastic metaphysical principles based on contemporary evolutionary biology”; Charlie Huenemann, Spinoza’s Radical Theology ; Peter Adamson, ed., Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays (reviewedat Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews); and Stephen Mumford and Matthew Tugby, eds., Metaphysics and Science (also reviewed at NDPR).
Some forthcoming books: From Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary ; and from Mark Anderson, Plato and Nietzsche: Their Philosophical Art .
When was the last time you heard the Thomist A. D. Sertillanges, or even Aquinas himself, being discussed on the radio?  For me it was (to my surprise) this afternoon after tuning in to The Hugh Hewitt Show.  Turns out that Lee Cole, who teaches philosophy at Hillsdale College, and Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale, have been discussing Aquinas with Hewitt in a series of shows.  You can find the show transcripts here.