Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

So, a thermostat cannot control the future. There has to be something wrong with this, because a thermostat can control the future, in respect of temperature. That is what thermostats do. A thermostat controls the temperature by being part of the way in which the past controls the present and future. And according to compatibilism, that is how we control things. We are involved in the causal order.

But is this compatibilist freedom what we really wanted? We do not attribute any freedom to the thermostat. And compatibilism can seem more like a dismissal of the problem of freedom, rather than a solution of it. This is how it seemed to the great Immanuel Kant

The subject acted freely if she could have done otherwise in the right sense. This means that she would have done otherwise if she had chosen differently and, under the impact of other thoughts or considerations, she would have chosen differently.

revised revised compatibilist definition: The subject acted freely if she could have done otherwise in the right sense. This means that she would have done otherwise if she had chosen differently and, under the impact of other true and available thoughts or considerations, she would have chosen differently. True and available thoughts and considerations are those that represent her situation accurately, and are ones that she could reasonably be expected to have taken into account.

Recklessness and negligence are faults, and we can be held responsible for them, just as much as we are for more controlled decisions. Some philosophers have found it hard to accept that. Aristotle rather desperately held that negligent people have actually chosen to make themselves negligent, perhaps in early childhood, and that this is the only reason they can be held responsible.

The compatibilist vision describes the operation of organic beings with brains in terms of decision-making modules. But all this is just describing things in terms of what happens. It is not describing things in terms of agency, or of my doing things. It is therefore leaving out something essential to my humanity, and essential to my human regard for others, which is that we are not just passive patients and victims, but active agents.

It does not matter whether the bits remain the same, so long as this unity of function is maintained. And so long as it is, we talk properly of the same oak tree. So we have the same oak tree as a sapling, and as a mature tree, after some branches have dropped off, and so on.

Locke can use this insight to explain why we identify the same human being through the normal changes of life. ‘Same man or woman is like ‘same tree’ or ‘same monkey’. It accommodates growth and change, so long as there is continuity of function, or of organized life.

Locke says that it is ‘the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself’—and neither the subject nor third parties looking on care whether that consciousness is ‘carried’ by enduring substances, or by a succession of different ones. He himself goes on to expand the emphasis on consciousness by claiming that a person A at a time is the same person as person B at an earlier time only in so far as A is conscious of B’s experiences.

The suggestion has some consequences that we might quite like. It rules out, for instance, the possibility that I am Cleopatra, reincarnated, since I am not conscious of having done or felt anything that Cleopatra may have done or felt.

On the other hand, the suggestion has some consequences we might not like so much. It means that I cannot survive complete amnesia, for instance, since whatever person remains after such an event cannot be me. But it also has problems with partial amnesia.

A way of reconstructing his point is this. Either ‘same person’ just goes along with ‘same human being’ or it does not. If it does, we all agree that we have the one human being from infancy to death, regardless of mental capacities. And none of the thoughts on list 2 make any sense. The reason for saying that ‘same person does not go with ‘same human being’, for Locke, is that we allow that if one man has ‘distinct incommunicable consciousness’ then we have different persons, successively inhabiting the one body (we might also think of multiple personality disorders).

In God’s eyes, real amnesia really excuses. He would treat the genuinely amnesiac eighty-year-old as a different person from the one-time war criminal. This might sound attractive, but not quite so good in the case of the crime committed because of the rush of blood to the head, where we might say that it is neither here nor there that the agent has forgotten it. We might want to distinguish degrees of memory loss.

Well, ships are composite things, made up of parts, and that seems to be what gives rise to the problem. So perhaps Reid’s argument that you cannot have A = B, B = C, but not A = C, only goes through if each of A, B, C is simple, not composite. Now, as we saw, Reid himself held that the soul was simple, but Locke did not, so perhaps the argument does not count against him.

A = B if A > .55 B

Hence, consistently, he held that the self was nothing but an aggregate of its ‘perceptions’ or experiences, together with whatever connections there are between them. There was content, but no container. This is sometimes called a ‘no ownership’ theory of the self, or the ‘bundle’ theory of the self. For Hume, like Lichtenberg in the first chapter, we have ‘it thinks’, or rather, ‘thoughts go on’. But we do not have an owner or possessor or ‘I’ doing the thinking.

So the objection to Hume is that ‘experiences’ are in the same way parasitic on persons. You cannot imagine a pain, for instance, as a ‘thing’ floating around waiting to be caught up in a bundle of other experiences, so that it might be accidental whether it, that very same pain, attaches itself to one bundle or another. In the beginning there is the person, and the onset of a pain is just the event of a bit of the person beginning to hurt, just as the onset of a dent is a bit of a surface becoming dented.

What the robot does need instead is a way of tracking its own route through the space, and the time order of the appearances it gets. It is a requirement of the solution that it has an ‘egocentric’ point of view, or in other words presents the space as centred upon ‘itself’.

It is not something else given in experience, because nothing given in experience could solve the formal problem for which an ‘I’ is needed. But a point of view is always needed: to represent a scene to yourself is to represent yourself as experiencing it one way or another.

We might find ourselves regarding one of the new people, or even both of them, as you—or we might find ourselves regarding them as newborns. An analogy used by the contemporary philosopher David Lewis is with a road that splits. We do not think it is a big metaphysical issue whether we say that just one branch is the old Turnpike Way, or whether both are, or whether neither is.

So the ‘real distinction’ Descartes thought he had proved—Cartesian dualism—does not die easily. The reader is free to try to protect it against the line of thought of this chapter and the preceding two. For what it is worth, Kant himself tried to leave room for the immortality of the soul. His rather feeble reason is that we need to suppose that goodness brings happiness, and since it does not do so always or even reliably in this life, there had better be another life in which it does.

Then people get their just deserts. Most philosophers think that this is not Kant at his best.

Beliefs are supposed to be true. ‘I believe that p’ and ‘I believe that it is true that p’ come to the same thing. You cannot say, ‘I believe that fairies exist, but I don’t think it is true that fairies exist.’

But it is not actually obvious that religion is a matter of truth, or that religious states of mind are to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity.

With this properly understood, we can now turn to the arguments. We have already met one argument for the existence of God, in Chapter 1: Descartes’s ‘trademark’ argument. It did not seem all that strong, and in fact at a later point in his book, Meditation V, Descartes supplemented it with another. The second was a version of a much older argument, the ontological argument of St Anselm (1033–1109). Anselm defines God as a being ‘than which nothing greater can be conceived’.

And surely that than which a greater cannot be thought cannot exist only in the understanding. For if it exists only in the understanding, it can be thought to exist in reality as well, which is greater . . . [T]herefore, there is no doubt that something than which a greater cannot be thought exists both in the understanding and in reality.

The notable thing about this argument is that it is purely a priori. It purports to prove God’s existence simply from considering the concept or definition of God. It is like the specimen proof in mathematics,

Suppose God only exists in the understanding, and not in reality. Then a greater being than God can be conceived: one that exists in reality. But God is defined as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. So no greater being can be conceived, by definition. But now we have a contradiction. So our original supposition was false.

Most philosophers have recognized there is something fishy about the ontological argument—as fishy as trying to make sure that Dreamboat exists by writing the right job description.

This suggests that we must not think of ‘imagined turkeys’ or ‘turkeys in the understanding’ as kinds of turkey that can, in principle, be weighed against real ones but are always found to weigh less. Yet the ontological argument requires just this kind of comparison. It is here that it fails. For even if God only exists in imagination, like Dreamboat or the five-hundred-pound turkey, it does not follow that a greater being can be described or imagined. After all, the description had the superlatives put into it.

Russell is supposed to have remarked that the first cause argument was bad, but uniquely, awfully bad, in that the conclusion not only failed to follow from the premises, but also actually contradicted them. His idea was that the argument starts off from the premise ‘everything has a [distinct, previous] cause’, but ends with the conclusion that there must be something that has no distinct, previous cause, but ‘carries the reason of his existence in himself.

Russell’s dismissal is a little glib. For the point of the argument, from the theological perspective, is that although everything material or physical has a distinct previous cause, this very fact drives us to postulate something else, that has none. In the theological jargon, this would be a thing that is ‘necessary’ or ‘causa sui’: a thing that is its own cause. And since this is not true of the ordinary things that surround us, we need to postulate something extraordinary, a Deity, as the bearer of this extraordinary self-sufficiency.

There are two important points about this argument. First, it is an argument by analogy. The world resembles the objects of human design. Therefore, just as it would be reasonable, coming across a watch, to postulate a human designer, so it is reasonable, coming across the entire frame of nature, to postulate a godly designer. Second, the argument is ‘a posteriori’. That is, it argues from experience, or from what we know of the world as we find it. It is here that the evidence for design shines out.

After Darwinism had begun to offer a natural explanation of the way in which complex biological systems become adjusted to one another, the argument began to lose some of its lustre.

Theodicy is the branch of theology that attempts to cope with the problem of evil. One move is to point out that some values seem to presuppose pains. We can cheer up people in the mixed and spotty dormitory, by extolling the virtues of patience or fortitude—goods that require deprivation and difficulty to flourish.

Again, people sometimes defend belief in a genuinely good deity, good in a sense we can understand, against the problem by what is known as the ‘free will defence’. The idea is that God created a good universe, and out of his goodness created us with free will. But by misusing the freedom thus granted, we ourselves brought evil into an otherwise perfect world. The myth of the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden embody the idea.

My own view about this is that religious traditions are at their best when they back away from the classical virtues of God. God is elevated in some traditions to being above good and virtue, or in Hume’s down-to-earth phrase, has no more regard to good above ill than heat above cold. In other traditions, he is by no means omnipotent, but subject to forces not of his own making.

When any one tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle.

This would also be Hume’s answer to the protest that so many people cannot be wrong. Whichever way the cake is cut, a huge number of people have to be wrong.

The argument is this. First, Pascal confesses to metaphysical ignorance: Let us now speak according to natural lights. If there is a God, he is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts, nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what He is, or if He is... Who then will blame the Christians for not being able to give a reason for their belief, since they profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason?

It is not too clear why this excuse is offered for the Christians, as opposed to those of other faiths, as well as believers in fairies, ghosts, the living Elvis, and L. Ron Hubbard. Still, suppose the choice is between religious belief and a life of religious doubt or denial: You must wager. It is not optional. Which will you choose then?... Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

Pascal starts from a position of metaphysical ignorance. We just know nothing about the realm beyond experience. But the set-up of the wager presumes that we do know something. We are supposed to know the rewards and penalties attached to belief in a Christian God. This is a God who will be pleasured and reward us for our attendance at mass, and will either be indifferent or, in the minus-infiinity option, seriously discombobulated by our non-attendance. But this is a case of false options. For consider that if we are really ignorant metaphysically, then it is at least as likely that the options pan out like this:

There is indeed a very powerful, very benevolent deity. He (or she or they or it) has determined as follows. The good human beings are those who follow the natural light of reason, which is given to them to control their beliefs. These good humans follow the arguments, and hence avoid religious convictions. These ones with the strength of mind not to believe in such things go to Heaven. The rest go to Hell.

But the problem for Pascal is that if we really know nothing, then we do not know whether the scenario just described is any less likely than the Christian one he presented.

Obviously the attitude one takes to the ‘fideism’ that simply lets particular religious beliefs walk free from reason may depend heavily on what has recently been happening when they do so.

The working parts of an argument are, first, its premises. These are the starting point, or what is accepted or assumed, so far as the argument is concerned. An argument can have one premise, or several. From the premises an argument derives a conclusion.

First, we might reject one or more of the premises. But second, we might reject the way the conclusion is drawn from the premises. The first reaction is that one of the premises is untrue. The second is that the reasoning is invalid.

Logic has only one concern. It is concerned whether there is no way that the premises could be true without the conclusion being true.

modus ponens for short, just goes: p; If p then q; So, q.

We want our reasonings to be valid. We said what this means: we want there to be no way that our conclusion could be false, if our premises are true.

This new formula, ¬(p & ¬p), reverses the truth-value of the old contradiction. So it is true, whatever the truth-values of its components. It is called a tautology.