Does Knowledge have an Intrinsic Maximum?

The usual forms of the Ontological Argument require the possibility of a maximally great being.  For such a being to be possible, it seems necessary that its attributes must have intrinsic maximums, that is, that they have a fullness that is not possible to be surpassed.  If they were surpassable, then there could be a greater conceivable being for every conceivable being.  So it’s rather important to defend this thesis.

But there’s an immediate problem:  It seems that, for at least knowledge, there is no intrinsic maximum.  For there are plausibly an infinite number of propositions. So to possess omniscience, a being must know an infinite number of things. So there is no greatest conceivable knowledge.

If the last paragraph’s line of reasoning works, we’re in trouble.  Let’s see how we can escape it. A degreed property can have both infinitely many degrees and an intrinsic maximum.  Here’s an example:  Being square-like.  Being square-like has an intrinsic maximum in that a perfect square is maximally a square.  The more sides something has, the less square-like it is.  It’s possible for something to have an infinite number of sides (circles).  So it’s possible to have be infinitely more or less square-like, and yet there’s an intrinsic maximum to square-likeness.  This example shows it doesn’t follow from there being an infinite degree of some degreed property that the property does not have an intrinsic maximum.

I’m not quite sure how strong I feel about this line of response, but something does feel intuitive about the claims that “all-knowledge” is a property with an intrinsic maximum despite there being an infinite number of propositions to know. 

Here's another line of thought to support this: The idea of the largest number would clearly be a property with an intrinsic maximum. The problem is that it’s an incoherent notion, as there’s always a greater number. Is omniscience like this? It’s clearly an intrinsic maximum. But is it coherent? Knowing all truths. There isn’t a greater amount of knowledge than knowing all truths, so it doesn’t seem to suffer from the same problem as the idea of a largest number. This seems true whether or not there’s an infinite number of propositions. Knowing them all is simply unsurpassable. So despite the tension in trying to hold together the notions of maximum and infinite, I think they can in fact be held together.

I’m also not thinking that this problem, if it is a problem, is going to beset Godelian OAs.  The ‘intrinsic maximum’ response has been specifically catered to defeat Gaunilo island type parodies, but as Rasmussen shows in his presentation of a Godelian OA, Guanilo’s objection can be defeated without an appeal to intrinsic maximums.  Briefly, Guanilo’s island has properties that entail negative properties (such as physicality), and given this negative entailment, a parody argument cannot be run--at least for the Godelian form of the argument.  

Typically, there’s three responses to Gaunilo:

1. Intrinsic Maximums

2. An island’s greatness is subjective

3. An island has negative properties so cannot be a maximally great being

Useful paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/MANTDA-4

"Arguments are Not Evidence"

The premises and support for the premises are the evidence. The argument is just a logical arrangement of the evidence. And, given that the premises are well supported and that the argument is valid, the argument will give you additional evidence in the form of its conclusion.  

The different premises in the various theistic arguments receive their evidential status from a variety of sources: The Teleological Argument clearly relies heavily on empirical reasoning. The Cosmological Argument does too, in that it can resort to arguments from science for the finitude of the past. Joshua Rasmussen's defense of the PSR, a key move for the Cosmological Argument, clearly relies somewhat on empirical evidence: "Now that we have some preliminaries out of the way, I will share a few reasons I think PE can help us extend sight. First, PE successfully predicts many observations. In this respect, PE is like the law of gravity. The law of gravity successfully predicts the many cases of gravitational attraction. Similarly, PE successfully predicts the many cases of explanation. Successful prediction provides evidential support for the theory."

But the arguments do also make use of rational intuition.  Seeing that the recombination principle is true, though getting some of its support from empirical knowledge, also relies on rational intuition in seeing that it seems possible to extend its use further.  This principle is used in formulating the Grim Reaper style paradoxes that go to support the Kalam.

God of the Gaps

Atheists often allege that some of the arguments for theism are fallacious cases of God-of-the-Gaps (GoG) reasoning.  A GoG is case of reasoning in which one appeals to God as an easy way to explain some complex empirical phenomena of which we presently know little.  It's an informal fallacy and is quite difficult to put one's finger on exactly what's wrong with GoG reasoning, but there clearly are cases in which it's a bad method of thought: For example, explaining lightning by appealing to Zeus or something of that kin. 

Are the theistic arguments like this?  As noted by WLC, the Teleological Argument (TA) doesn’t try to prove that God exists, but rather that a cosmic designer exists.  So no appeal to God is being made.  So, strictly speaking, the TA cannot be committing a GoG fallacy.

Perhaps the GoG proponent could modify the principle:  We should not hold (hastily?) that some given complex empirical phenomena is explained by an intelligent designer.  But that won't work either.  To see why, consider this case:  If we found a car on Mars, it’d be odd for someone to rule out the hypothesis of intelligent design on the basis that this is an “aliens-of-the-gap” and we should just wait for a naturalistic explanation that makes no reference to intelligent design.  That's clearly not a good principle and should be rejected.

As for the Kalam Argument, the empirical evidence isn’t being used to support that God exists, but that the universe began. So no God-of-the-gaps is happening there either.  Instead, we reach the conclusion that God exists through analysis of what it would mean to be a cause of the universe.

And of course the Ontological Argument clearly isn't a case of GoG reasoning.

I'm thinking that to really diagnose what's involved in GoG reasoning it'd be helpful to break purported cases into a probabilistic argument form--to see whether an intelligent designer is the most intrinsically likely explanation, whether the explanation could be adequately expected on alternative hypothesis, and so on.  If a purported case of God explaining some phenomena really does adequately raise that thing's probability, if there are no alternative explanations on offer that do as well of a job, and given that God is not priorly unlikely, then a case of GoG may very well be justified!  

God and Creation more Valuable than God?

Perfect Being Theology (PBT) holds that God is the most valuable being.  Either creation is valuable or it is not.  If it is, then it seems that God+creation is more valuable than just God alone.  If creation isn’t valuable, then it seems odd to motivate God to create--this, on top of the seemingly overwhelming evidence that creation *is* valuable.  What’s the solution?

Thomas Morris holds that we should just think that PBT asserts that God is the most valuable *being*, and that God+creation is not a being, but a sum of beings.  So God is not the greatest sum of things, though he is the greatest being. 

A better route, I think, is to hold that creation has its value extrinsically.  Nothing created is intrinsically valuable.  This seems to mesh well with the intuition behind St. Thomas’s “participation” doctrine.  Mark Murphy defends this view well.  

In Murphy’s words: “This is what goodness by participation is like. If one being is intrinsically good and another is good simply because it participates in the intrinsic good’s goodness, there is an additional good (and even agent-neutrally good) thing, but there is no more goodness than if the intrinsically good thing alone existed.”

A Construction Problem for Theism?

The Argument from Consciousness for theism (or against naturalism, depending on the version) proceeds on the basis of a construction problem:  Material objects are not the right sort of thing for constructing minds.  Given that this is the most plausible naturalistic theory for the origin of mind, our best alternative is to hold to a mind-first ontology.  This is supposed to support theism by showing that a fundamental mind like God precedes the material world and explains both matter and other minds.

But I think there may be a construction problem for classical theism, too.  Remember that CT holds that God creates everything out of nothing.  If it’s difficult to see how matter can be fashioned into a mind, then it certainly seems more difficult to see how nothing can be fashioned into a mind.  

But that’s too fast.  The creatio ex nihilo (CEN) doctrine does not hold that God fashioned some thing, called nothing, into creation.  It’s rather holding that, in the act of creation, God did not use what Aristotle called a material cause.  CEN more refers to the sequence of God’s act; God existed alone, and without using a material cause, created things distinct from himself.

But even in light of this response, it still seems that theism may still suffer from a construction problem.  One suggestion is to hold that God fashioned minds from his own minded self, using his own nature as the material cause.  That’d be a sort of creatio ex deo (CED) view, and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, violates strong commitments of CT and thus should be rejected.

So what is the Classical Theist to do?  First, I think it’s important to note that this particular “theistic construction problem” is just a part of the broader problem of how to conceive of CEN and whether CEN is possible at all.  I’ve argued elsewhere that CEN is both possible and coherent.  If we make this move, though, are we not giving up the game on the special construction problem for materialism?  Here’s one further move to think not, to think that we can still press the Argument from Consciousness:  Take it that consciousness is necessarily, of its own nature, more than mere material properties, and that material things are necessarily not conscious taken on their own.  These natures constrain God’s creative act.  Just as God could not have made water something other than H20, so too God could not make a merely material mind.  So even though God has the capacity to create objects out of nothing, not even God has the capacity to create a purely material object that is also conscious. We can still run a construction problem for material views of the mind.  

There’s a few steps required to successfully modify the Argument from Consciousness in light of what was said above, but I think this pushes the conversation forward.

Chisholmian Criteria for Defeating Evil

The Chisholmian Requirement:  To defeat evil, it must be integrated into a morally valuable whole that is incommensurably better than it could be without the evil.  The evil remains evil, but becomes a prerequisite for an otherwise unattainable whole that is overall good.   There's also an awareness requirement on the part of the victim of the evil, in that they must be able to acknowledge the evil as a part of an overall good-whole.

Murphy on Mackie's Queerness Objection

An excerpt from Murphy's Natural Law and Practical Reason: 

The ontological worry about substantive theories of rationality is that the notion that there are independent reasons waiting to be grasped by agents is just too Platonically lush to endure.  In addition to our ordinary world of experience, there is an extra realm of things, reasons, which are quite unlike the usual things that we deal with.  But the real identity thesis along with the analogy to first- and third-person judgments on which it is based, suggests that this is but one, not terribly charitable, way to describe the situation presupposed by the defender of a substantive view of rationality.  When I say that it is straightforwardly true both that I am in my office and that Murphy is in his office, I am not committing myself to the existence of two worlds, the ordinary world, describable in a third-person way, and a peculiar, shadowy first-person world, in which there is a strange thing called 'I.'  Rather, there is but one world, which can be described in one way using indexical concepts and another using non indexical concepts.  When I say that it is straightforwardly true that there reasons for action, that certain states of affairs are goods, thing that make agents better off, this does not - if the real identity thesis is true - require me to say that there is another realm, in addition to the ordinary world with which we are acquainted; rather, I am speaking of a certain aspect of reality using normative rather than nonnormative, practical rather than theoretical, concepts.

Rasmussen's Gödelian OA

Seeing that there is no entailment versus not seeing that there is an entailment.

This is the distinction that drives Joshua Rasmussen’s recent Gödelian flavored Ontological Argument.  If we possess the concept of perfection, and can just *see* that no negative properties are implied by positive properties, then it seems that this argument can be run successfully.  But, if we’re instead just merely failing to see that positive properties do entail negative ones, the argument fails.

I’m still worried about value nihilism as a potent objection to this type of OA, though.

Here is the best presentation of the argument: https://joshualrasmussen.com/ontological/

Do We Worship the Same God as Islam?

There's a sense in which someone can refer to a thing under a false description.  Take it that I try to refer to a woman in the corner by the following description: "The woman over there drinking coffee," while the woman is actually drinking water.  We'd take it, I assume, that I've successfully referred to the woman despite my including a false description.  

So I think it's possible that Islam oftentimes successfully refers to God under false descriptions, e.g., "God inspired the prophet Muhammad," while being a false description, seems to attempt to pick out what we usually mean by God.

Still, despite being able to successfully refer to God under false descriptions, it doesn't follow that Islam's conception of God is acceptable.  I think that it isn't.  Their conception of him fails to understand his gracious and loving nature.  So, in one sense, while they successfully refer to him, they refer to him with idolatrous and wrong descriptions, substituting a false image of him for the truth of his character.  God wants us to have a right conception of him, and relate to him as he truly is.  

Animal Rights

Intro
I remember in my first philosophy class that we were required to watch the film Earthlings, which is a propaganda piece on behalf of animal rights.  I wrote a paper in response to it.  I think that my previous conclusions are still right, but I wanted to take another jab at the topic.  

Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.  The permissibility of eating meat is explicitly taught in the New Testament.  Christians thus ought to endeavor to understand and justify the practice.

Inviolable Rights?

Rights talk is difficult to track and somewhat ambiguous.  Rights are, I think, inherently a social notion regulating how two moral beings interact with one another.  Take an inviolable right to be one that may never be violated.  Do such rights exist? I think so.  What’s the ground for such rights?  I think they lay primarily in personhood. In doing a wrong-act against another’s right, a perpetrator violates one of the victim’s legitimate moral claims.

It seems plausible to think that only persons have inviolable rights, and what makes a thing a person is the capacity to rationalize, to experience, and to have moral duties.  John Finnis develops this thought in regards to the way in which humanity enjoys human goods--we enjoy it in a distinctly personal way.[1]

The Data Points

Here are two data points that seem to strongly imply that animals do not have inviolable rights.

1. The Intuition: It can, under appropriately dire circumstances, be permissible to kill and eat an animal.  Imagine a starving child that has nothing available to eat but a nearby cow.  The strong intuition of most of us is that it’s permissible to kill and eat the cow. But it’s never permissible, even in the starving case, to murder and eat another human.

2. If animals had an inviolable right to life, then we would need to prevent lions from killing gazelles, i.e., we would be obligated to prevent all forms of natural predation.

If these two points are correct, and I take it that most of us judge that they are correct, then animals do not have inviolable rights.  It may be that a vegetarian believes that it’s only permissible to kill and eat an animal under *dire* circumstances; but this would still show that animals do not have an inviolable right to life.  The debate then turns to what sort of circumstances can justify killing and eating an animal, in other words, it turns to a calculus.  

The Calculus

If the debate turns to a calculus, then it is true that animals are deserving of moral consideration.  It becomes a matter of trying to probe what sort of consideration and how far these considerations should go.  The good that animal meat brings to humanity must be factored into the calculus:  How it enriches our palate and brings diversity to our plates.  The pain of animals in the process also seems like it should be taken into account.  Does the pain of the animals outweigh the palate consideration?  Perhaps not, especially so if we strive to eliminate the pain and suffering involved in the animal industry.  It seems that we can kill and consume cows with virtually no pain at all.  A person who advocates for the meat industry can take Temple Grandin’s methods to heart.

Neo-Cartesianism

It’s at this point that I want to mention a very unpopular idea with regards to animals to which I’m attracted, the Neo-Cartesian view.  This view holds that animals do not have, or do not have in a relevant sense, the sort of conscious awareness that would make their pain deserving of moral consideration.  Take the death of a deer in a forest fire. It just wouldn’t count as a good or a bad thing on this view, it’d just be a neutral event--more akin to me turning off my computer than to a human’s death. Many think that this hypothesis is far too speculative and unintuitive.  But this isn’t necessarily so.  We’re capable of researching pain as it manifests in physiology and neurobiology, and there have been suggestive experiments that show that pain can be felt under two distinct modes:  (a) a perception that something in one’s body is in pain along with a perception of the intensity of the pain (b) a perception of the unpleasant nature of the pain.  There are human subjects who, for various reasons, seem to suffer physical pain only in the sense of (a), who do not feel the “badness” of pain.  These human subjects still react to pain stimuli, they still pull away from heat and so on.  They just don’t experience its badness or its horror.  The suggestion is that animals may only suffer such a pain as well, and that higher cognitive function would be required to suffer from (b).   The further suggestion is that only pain of the (b) type would be worthy of moral consideration, while the pain of (a) type is not.  There are some experiments involving rats in which they are spinalized and still seem to exhibit pain avoidance behavior, even *learned* pain avoidance behavior.  This would seem to go some way towards showing that animals only experience pain of type (a).

The Intrinsic Tele

Here’s another speculative hypothesis, but one that has a very good chance of being correct given the truth of Christian theism:  Some moral goods depend upon the constitution of the agent before they become goods. Education falls under good for a human, but not good for a cat. Photosynthesis falls under good for a plant but not good for a human.  And so on.  

With this understanding of species-relative goods in mind, consider the following scenario: Given a theistic metaphysic, there could be a range of possible creaturely natures present to God for him to create, with some such natures including among their goods photosynthesis, to grow in education and so on.  Perhaps among those possible natures there’s also the good of serving the higher organisms. Now suppose that animals are created with a particular nature that has as a telos the pleasure given to humans when we eat them.  In other words, God, in electing to create particular natures from the range of possibilities present to him, selected animal natures that are fulfilled when they serve mankind.  For if it is not a telos of animals to be eaten by humans, then to kill an animal for human food, apart from special circumstances, is to do a harm to the animal--its death is contrary to its tele on this view--without proportionate reason. But if God has instantiated animal natures that do include such a tele, then it is literally a good for them to serve mankind.  

One Further Argument

I’m not sure what to think of this argument.  But for completion’s sake, here it is.  

1. The axiom of morality requires the doing of good and avoidance of evil.

2. Inviolable moral rights exist to protect individuals in pursuit of this axiom.

3. There are certain requirements needed in order to pursue the axiom in the relevant moral sense.

4. Animals do not meet these requirements.

C1. Animals do not pursue the axiom. (From 3 and 4)

C2. Animals do not have moral rights. (From 2 and C1)

Premise 2 is the central premise and premise 3 requires some flesh. Here’s some measure of justification for premise (2.): “Rights exist because we are obliged to guard the moral value of our being and fulfill our function by voluntary observance of the moral law. To this kind of action rights are essential, because we must be guaranteed immunity from hindrance in our choice of the necessary means.”  And here’s the closest I’ll get to fleshing out (3.)’s “requirements”: rationality, intent, and some sense of free-will.

This is an ought-to-ought argument.  Persons ought to obey morality and pursue the goods in a moral way.  This personal ought of individual agents transfers to those in the community--others ought, societally, not interfere with the individual’s ought.  But animals do not have a moral ought.  Having the possession of a moral ought requires rather strong intent, rationality, and free-will.  Animals do not possess these sufficiently, they just do what they in fact do.  So animals do not possess a personal individual ought in any of their behavior, so there is no ought of theirs to be transferred. 

The question becomes whether this personal individual ought-protection is a plausible grounds for our talk of rights.  Perhaps the ability to feel pain is instead that which grounds some rights, specifically the right to not feel pain.  But maybe that’d be best classified under some other moral category other than rights, perhaps falling under some more generic “due moral consideration” category.

Further Reading:

Finnis: Natural Law and Natural Rights, ch. 8 Mark Murphy David Oderberg: Moral Theory, ch. 2

Notes:

[1.] So while there are clearly good and bad states of affairs for an animal, these states lack the distinctive personal dimension.  And it’s this personal dimension that transforms these goods into rights.

One animal rights proponent holds that since animals can participate in goods that it follows that they have rights.  But poison ivy can clearly participate in goods; it can flourish and have proper amounts of sun and water, or it can wither and die.  Yet it presumably does not possess a right to these things.  It’s the ‘personal’ element of our enjoyment of goods that generates our rights.

An Objection to the Causal-Likeness Principle

My nephew presented a fun objection to the Causal-Likeness Principle (C-LP) the other day, and I wanted to take the time to respond to it.  

Recall that C-LP holds that a cause cannot give to its effects what it does not itself have in some way.  My nephew urged God's creation of the physical universe as a counter-example to the principle, in that God is not physical yet created physical reality.  Isn't this a case of a cause giving to an effect what it itself does not possess? 

Here's a suggestion to think otherwise.  Read "physical" as implying a limitation or a lack.  So God's lack of physicality is his lacking of a certain kind of limit, and with that in mind, here's the solution: God has presence.  In fact, he has the greatest amount of presence.  Physicality is just a limited presence.  So God is able to cause limited presences, as these are just lesser ways of being present.  So God creating a physical universe is not a counter-example to the C-LP.  

God: Broadly Logically Necessary, Narrowly Logically Necessary, Neither or Both?

I just wanted to make a brief post discussing the nature of God’s necessity.  It seems that we can conceive of God’s necessary existence.  It seems that we can conceive of God’s non-existence.  Given that conceivability is taken as a guide to possibility, is this a stalemate?  Chalmers argues that it isn’t, that conceiving of God’s non-existence wins given that it doesn’t depend on a meta-modal notion like necessity.  But as Rasmussen argues here, Chalmers is mistaken.  There is a parity tie between these two positions and neither wins out.

Swinburne holds that God exists neither in a broad nor narrowly logical sense.  

Narrow necessity:  Implies a contradiction.  

Broadly logically necessary:  A posteriori identity claims.  Something that is green all over not being capable of being red all over also seems necessary though not to imply a contradiction.   

Leftow attacks Swinburne’s conception of God’s contingency here.  PBT, as well as some versions of the PSR, seem to urge us in the direction of thinking that God is at least broadly logically necessary.  PBT also seems to urge us towards thinking that God is narrowly logically necessary if it can be coherently maintained. 

Both Leftow and Rasmussen set out arguments to think that God exhibits both sorts of necessity.  Leftow from God’s relationship to modality and Rasmussen through trying to show that atheism entails a contradiction. 

The Problem of Animal Pain

The problem of animal pain has been a bone of contention in the Christian community.  There have been a few answers provided in an attempt to address the problem:

1. The fall of Adam
2. The fall of Satan
3. Animal pain doesn’t count for any moral concern
4. PDE-style response
5. Soul-building theodicy for animals (I won't be discussing this one)

YEC often urges (1.) as the only biblically satisfactory solution to the problem, but nowhere does Scripture teach that the death and pain of animals is the result of Adam’s fall.  This, paired with YEC’s vast implausibility, removes this as a live option for me.  It of course would face a further objection in that it seems odd that animals would suffer due to Adam’s wrongdoing.  But (1.) at least escapes the criticism that God initially designed the world in such a violent way as we observe in the animal kingdom.

(2.), on the other hand, is also not taught in Scripture.  It is a speculative hypothesis but can be quickly proposed as a way to relieve the tension.  That it fits well within an OEC framework keeps it alive as an option for me.  It of course also suffers from the objection for why animal suffering and Satan’s wrongdoing would be linked, but would, again, escape the initially designed violent objection.  

Lately, I’ve been more interested in (3.) and (4.) as possible solutions.  For (3.), the proposal is that animal pain isn’t worth moral consideration--so that the death of a deer in a forest fire just wouldn’t count as a good or a bad thing, it’d just be a neutral event--more akin to me turning off my computer than to a human’s death.  This is clearly a Cartesian conception of animals.   Many may think that (3.) would be a speculative hypothesis.  But this isn’t necessarily so.  We’re capable of researching pain as it manifests in physiology and neurobiology, and there have been suggestive experiments that show that pain can be felt under two distinct modes:  (a) a perception that something in one’s body is in pain along with a perception of the intensity of the pain (b) a perception of the unpleasant nature of the pain.  There are human subjects who, for various reasons, seem to suffer physical pain only in the sense of (a), who do not feel the “badness” of pain.  These human subjects still react to pain stimuli, they still pull away from heat and so on.  They just don’t experience its badness or its horror.  The suggestion is that animals may only suffer such a pain as well, and that higher cognitive function would be required to suffer from (b).   The further suggestion is that only pain of the (b) type would be worthy of moral consideration, while the pain of (a) type is not.  There are some experiments involving rats in which they are spinalized and still seem to exhibit pain avoidance behavior, even *learned* pain avoidance behavior.  This would seem to go some way towards showing that animals only experience pain of type (a).

So the suggestion is that there is no problem of animal pain.  Animal pain doesn’t count as worthy of independent moral consideration.  What does the last sentence’s use of “independent” imply?  I’ve got something in mind along the lines of what Aquinas teaches about animal pain:  The pain of animals is only worthy of consideration in view of the effect such pain has on the psychology of men.  For instance, it’s wrong to torture an animal because it reinforces bad habits and bad tastes on the man who’s doing the act.  Animals do share the experience of (a.) type pain with us, and if a man begins to like to see animals in pain states of type (a.), this may carry over to cruelty to humans.

I like (3.) and it’s been my preferred solution for quite awhile.  But I’ve been thinking of (4.) lately as well.  Take it that animal pain is in fact an inherently bad thing and that option (3.) is wrong, then (4.) would suggest the following:  God intends to bring about a lawful, harmonious, and diverse created order.  To achieve such a balance between the aesthetic and lawful qualities, there must be animal pain.  God intends to achieve the aesthetic and lawful qualities, but merely foresees the animal pain that results from such a harmonious and lawful order.  If PDE is right, and if the aesthetic beauty and lawfulness of the order is proportionate to the resulting animal pain, then PDE would permit or justify such a creative act.  

I think (4.) has some real potential, but I still really like (3.), for it easily justifies the eating of animals, which is something that I really like to do.   (3.) is dependent on this paper by Calum Miller.

PDE Questions and Abortion

Abortion and R-PDE

Imagine that a pregnant mother wishes to avoid the burdens associated with pregnancy and finds a method to do this that leads to the death of the fetus.  Further, imagine that this method, though including the cause of the death of the fetus, does not include the death of the fetus itself.  I’m not sure that there’s a manner in which such an action can be carried out given the metaphysical facts of pregnancy.  But at this stage, let’s just grant that it’s possible.  How would R-PDE address such a case? Presumably this action could still be defeated via Prop.

If the death of the fetus contributes to the success of the mother’s plan to relieve herself of the burdens associated with pregnancy, then the death constitutes an accomplishment of her’s and is defeated by the Accomplishing criteria.

But:  If the cause of the death of the fetus contributes to the mother’s plan to relieve herself of the burdens associated with pregnancy, then the death would not necessarily constitute an accomplishment of her’s.  And this . . . sort of seems possible?  Imagine that a doctor just removes, without killing, a non-viable fetus.  The fetus dies shortly after on a table; but its death doesn’t seem to be an accomplishment of the mother’s, but merely the cause of its death.

Four responses:  The last option would be defeated by Prop.  A human life is not overruled, proportionally, by the burdens of pregnancy.

Second; relief of pregnancy is not the main reason given for women who are seeking abortions.  The usual reason is the kid is seen as a burden himself.

Third; the methods used to accomplish the relief of the burdens of pregnancy do not usually just include the cause of the death of the fetus, but the death of the fetus itself.  The fetus’s death *does* contribute to the success of the mother’s plan, and thus counts as an accomplishment of her’s, and not merely the cause of the death.  The usual methods taken to “end the burdens of pregnancy” are inherently violent and include the death of the fetus as a means: It would be analogous to the case of a person who, rather than withdrawing the ventilator, shoots the person on the vent.  It’s hard to argue that it isn’t part of one’s action plan for the human to die when such a direct means and method is taken.  

Fourth:  The action may violate NWO.  We can’t, generally, accomplish an endangerment of another without having their consent

And, one sorta response that could be further developed:  The crushing of the skull of the fetus, it’s brain, constitutes, in *this* case, the death of the fetus.  This is a rendition of FitzPatrick’s “constitution” defense.

Other Difficult Cases: 

One can knowingly cause an evil without being responsible for it in the sense of "responsibility" that implies culpability. If I distribute a polio vaccine to all children, I may well know that some children will die of the vaccine. I thus cause some children to die, I know that I would be so causing it, and I cause it nonetheless. It seems I do knowingly cause the children to die. But I am not responsible in a sense that entails culpability. Why? Because I do not intend these deaths, either as an end or as a means (and the deaths are proportionate to the intended saving of life).

The fat man in the mouth of the cave:  One intends to disperse particles but to not kill the man.  But the fat man’s death would count as an accomplishment as it contributes to the success of one’s plan to escape the cave.  So it violates R-PDE.

The fat man thrown in front of the trolley: Pruss originally holds that this is not wrong on account of a basic evil resulting, as one can accomplish the cause of the death without accomplishing the death itself.  He thinks it violates the NWO condition, specifically in violating the person’s authority over themselves. 

Jumping on the grenade:  It’s wrong to intend to end one’s life, but it is permissible to intend to absorb an explosion (the cause of death) in order to save others.  

The Trolley and redirecting:  What one has accomplished is that the trolley takes a different path, which is not innately dangerous.  It’s only dangerous when we add the fact that there is a person in the way, which is not part of one’s accomplishment, being incidental.  This differs from the fat man and the trolley in that in throwing the man we have accomplished an innately dangerous situation, violating NWO.

Ectopic pregnancy: Standard RC teaching; permissible to remove tube with the child.  Intending to remove danger of the tube with the death of the child being a foreseen consequence.  Why is it not permissible to just kill the child?

Astronaut case:  Two astronauts. Bomb will go off in air tank when unconscious astronaut reduces oxygen in tank to 20%.  The conscious astronaut throws out the oxygen tank knowing this will kill the astronaut.  Proximate source of danger: air tank.  Distance source: His breathing.  It seems right to say that it’s okay to throw the tank and wrong to shoot the astronauts lungs.

Having one’s heart removed to save another:  This would be suicide, and not parallel to the grenade jumper, as the grenade jumper did not throw the grenade; but the heart-remover would be intending the surgery, which would be an analogue to the throwing of the grenade.  This would probably count as “accomplishing” one’s own death.

The possibility test for intentions: (from Grisez) If it’s possible for some action to be fully successful without E occurring, then E is not intended.  But that’s too strong, it seems; for it follows that the person who blows up the fat man in the cave was not intending death, as there’s a possible world in which God reduces the fat man to a single atom and yet the action is successful.  Pruss (2020) thinks this really is true, and we cannot avoid the conclusion that it is possible to intend to blow the man in the mouth of the cave to single atoms without intending to kill him. But I am now inclined to think that an intention to kill is not a necessary condition for murder, and so the action could still be a murder.

If something follows invariably from an action that one intends, then that is also intended.  (Koons/Aquinas).  This rules out cutting off the heads of people too tall to fit the bed claiming that the intent is to shorten rather than kill.  But this undermines the view that things that are intended are intended as either a means or an end.

Doing and refraining on PDE:  Pruss holds that there’s a significant moral distinction between doing and refraining given PDE.  To see this, consider:  It seems PDE forbids throwing Hitler a life-preserver, but also forbids pushing him off a cliff.  But maybe there’s more to it. In pushing, one’s purpose is that Hitler dies.  In not throwing a life-preserver, one’s purpose would be to not violate PDE.  All refrainings are intrinsically neutral.  One’s purpose in withholding the life-preserver should not be to cause the death of Hitler, but to avoid the vast death.  

But wait. I don’t know if the last paragraph can go through in light of the next section’s discussion of Strict Proportionality.  

Strict Proportionality and an Application to the Abortion Case

This section relies heavily on this post: https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-two-stage-view-of-proportionality-in.html

Intending to crush the skull but not kill the fetus:  I think this is a possibility.  Imagine that a doctor is practicing on a dead fetus and intends to crush the skull.  He clearly has no intention to kill a fetus as the fetus is already dead.  But then he realizes the fetus begins to move and is still alive.  He takes this to be merely incidental to the plan, still intending to crush the skull but now merely foreseeing that the fetus will die.  This seems possible, and so the action would not be defeated either by an Intention criteria nor an Accomplishment criteria.  It seems Prop must do the work in forbidding the doctor’s action.

Here’s a relatively analogous case:  Intending to shoot the shirt but not kill the man.

Strict Proportionality:  The good effects that are casually downstream of the bad effect do not count.  So, in the shirt-ripping case, the intended effect of knowing how a shirt rips when shot is not proportionate to the unintended effect of the person’s death, so is disallowed on this understanding of proportionality.  The saving of the 5 is not allowed to be counted in the proportionality calculus as it is downstream from the bad effect.

How would this work in regards to jumping on the grenade?  You intend to absorb kinetic energy in order to save the 5, the cause of your death.   The bad effect is your death.  Your death is independent of their being saved, but the cause of your death is not so independent.  The cause of the death is neutral, but the death itself isn’t.  The cause of your death is what saves the 5 and not your death.

So apply this to abortion:  Imagine that the doctor intends to crush the skull to fit it through the birth canal but not to kill the fetus.  The crushing of the skull is not necessarily constitutive of the death (see Pruss).  Is the death of the fetus casually downstream of the crushed skull?  Or is the death of the fetus independent of the crushing of the skull?  It seems that it’s casually downstream and not so independent, as it is in the grenade case.  In the grenade case, the saving of the 5 happens simultaneously or slightly before the death of the jumper.  But the good effect of fitting through the birth-canal only happens downstream from the death of the fetus, so is disallowed on this understanding of proportionality.

Though, of course, fitting through the birth canal to relieve the burdens of pregnancy is just flat-out not proportionate to the death of a human and would be overruled even without Strict Proportionality, I think it’s useful to pursue this line of thought.  And, of course, in usual cases of abortion, the mother and doctor are both just outright intending the death of the fetus as a means to some other lesser good, so is just outright murder.

But Strict Proportionality seems to require throwing Hitler a life-preserver.  For in intending the good of preserving PDE, one foresees the bad consequence of Hitler’s death.  But one is not allowed to count the good effects casually downstream of the bad effect; so one cannot count the saving of those in the Holocaust. 

ANH and PDE

Take it that the intentional death of a human being is inherently wrong, so that on R-PDE, accomplishing a human death would be morally wrong.  So on R-PDE the death of a human can at most be a foreseen consequence.  Still, this consequence can be defeated via the proportionality constraint.  

So it’d be wrong to withdraw ANH with the intention of killing a patient.  It’d also be wrong to withdraw ANH so that one can instrumentally use the patient’s death as a means of relieving the cost and suffering associated with the patient being alive.  

Still, it’s isn’t wrong to give up a resuscitation after multiple prolonged attempts.  The idea that we have an obligation to preserve life at all costs isn’t right.  Even Roman Catholic teaching holds that removing a ventilator is permissible.  So why not ANH?

The abandonment of resuscitation efforts can be easily justified on R-PDE.  The doctor aims to dispense with the treatment, and not with the life.  The doctor is not intending that the patient die; they’re merely accepting it as a consequence of their giving up medical efforts.  Nor do the withdrawal of these medical efforts constitute the death, nor are they the cause of the death. Nor is the doctor intending the death of the patient as a means to quit the medical efforts. So R-PDE permits this sort of practice.  There’s presumably an underlying condition that is the cause of the patient’s death. This can be easily drawn to the removal of a ventilator. (But even accomplishing the cause of a death is permissible on R-PDE, so long as the death itself doesn’t count as an accomplishment.)

Removal of ANH isn’t in principle an inherent wrong.  If we suppose a technological society in which ANH is just as difficult, expensive, and painful as a ventilator or an amputation, then withdrawing or rejecting ANH would be exactly parallel to the removal of a ventilator. So if the removal of ANH with death seen as a mere consequence of one’s action, it can in principle be justified.

Some have suggested that withdrawing ANH versus withdrawing a ventilator can be differentiated in that in the former case, there isn’t an underlying health condition that leads to death, while in the latter case there is an underlying condition that causes the death. But there is an underlying condition in ANH: The inability to swallow.  So I don’t think this line of argument is successful.

The proportionality criteria is doing the lion's share of the work in prohibiting the practice.

In the case of repeated resuscitation, the gaining of a few moments of life at the expense of a prolonged and intense medical effort does not balance out, favoring a cessation to the medical effort.  Presumably something similar to the ventilator can be said.  But what about ANH?

ANH does not require as intense an effort as the ventilator, and those who depend on ANH are not typically in an immediate danger of death.  ANH can, generally, also be performed in a relatively cheap fashion; with its usage possible in a home setting, and the necessary food not being prohibitively expensive.  This situation offers an analogy:  ‘[imagine] a husband withholding needed insulin from his wife: since the administration of the insulin is not very burdensome, the withholding of insulin is probably chosen as a means of avoiding other burdens, ones associated with the continued life of his wife—but those are avoided only if the wife is dead, so the insulin is probably withheld as a means of bringing about death. In both cases death is intended, and the means chosen to bring it about are omissions.’

Moreover, those PVS patients who depend upon ANH are not, contrary to popular thought, worthless.  Their mere life, even in an unconscious state, is immensely valuable.  Humans are their animal bodies, so these people continue to live as long as the animal which they are continues to live.  Just as a tree or a gecko has value in their lives, so too does an unconscious human.  Moreover, it’s appropriate to value a sleeping friend who will be executed immediately upon awakening.  That seems appropriate, despite the lack of consciousness or even future consciousness.  Nor does letting a PVS patient die benefit them, for they are not suffering.  These patients also offer their caregivers a chance to care selflessly for another, to have solidarity with the patient. 

We can also offer a quick slew of additional arguments:  The methods used to test whether a patient is conscious or not is fallible.  There may be minimally conscious states.  The diagnosis of someone in PVS is relatively certain after specific time periods, but is not infallible, and there are cases of people recovering from PVS.

Further: One may choose for oneself to reject ANH if the situation is ever to come about that they become comatose; this is not necessarily a choice to kill oneself.  They can be merely intending that they avoid the burden such a situation puts on others, and willing the means of having ANH withdrawn.  Willing ANH withdrawn is not willing oneself death, which would be sucide and wrong, but rather willing the cause of the death.  This is a permissible stance according to R-PDE.  Similar to how a soldier who jumps on a grenade to save others intends to absorb the kinetic energy of the explosion, and does not intend their own death.  They merely intend the cause of their death.