Grill On

As the weather gets nicer here in upstate New York, the grill has returned to the deck.
I got this bad boy last summer and just returned from Lowe's with two filled propane tanks. Anyone is welcome to come on by and have their choice of the following (hopefully the list will grow as summer and my experience grows):

1. The Mother Burger
2. Mrs. Dash-Center Burger (by request only)
3. Grilled Chicken
4. BBQ Grilled Chicken
5. Grilled Salmon
6. Steak (now offered cooked to order)
7. Hot Dogs, Franks, Brats, or Smoked Sausage
8. Grilled Shrimp
8. BRAND NEW ITEM: Mixed Grill [pick three: salmon, shrimp, sausage, steak, chicken]

Live (the band), Plantinga, and Properly Basic Beliefs

Listening to Live today it struck me again how similar one of their song's lyrics is to Alvin Plantinga's proper functioning epistemology. This is true particularly of how Plantinga sees belief in God. For Plantinga one's belief in God is properly basic which means that one does not need any evidence to justifiably hold that belief (or hold that belief with warrant as he would prefer). Since we have the sensus divinitatis in us, certain circumstances (ie. seeing a sunset) give us an input such that when we are properly functioning we rationally output theistic beliefs, like a belief in God's existence.

Compare with Live's lyrics in their song 'Heaven':

"I don't need no one to tell me about Heaven, I look at my daughter, and I believe. I don't need no proof when it comes to God and truth, I can see the sunset and I perceive."

Seems to me like a secular rock band has been reading some philosophy of religion!

Good or Lucky?

I find issues of luck in philosophy particularly interesting. There are cases of moral luck, epistemic luck, and even religious luck (see descriptions in comments). I feel strongly that luck eliminates the lucky person from deserving praise or blame, though many do not. As such, I think that this guy only deserves at most 3/4 credit for correctly picking the Final Four (his bracket).

Better to be good then lucky, though when it comes to March Madness I am sadly neither.

Perfect Love (and the Moulin Rouge)

God is love.
We are called to love.
Love is essential to the Christian life.
So what is love? I *love* the picture of love in I Jn. 4:16-21.
The end of this passage is fairly familiar, but I think that v. 18 gives a great picture of love.

"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear"

The context has to do with punishment, but I think it applies as a general account of love.
This perfect love then: (i) does not fear what others will think (ie. whether it is seen as appropriate or not/whether it falls in line with cultural or social conventions etc.), and (ii) does not fear not being loved in return or having one's love abused (it is not consequential in nature).

It is completely other-directed.

In sum, it is a love that continues or endures 'come what may'.

Fear, or worry, is a perennial problem. A new way to look at fear is seeing it as the result of an incomplete or imperfect love.

Friday's Quotables

This will be a new weekly post.
Here are a few from me that I saved up from college, but I would love to hear some from you:
(and save some through the week for next Friday)

'Faith is believing what you cannot see. The reward for faith is seeing what you believe.' - St. Augustine

'Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.' - Epicurus

'If something's not there you won't notice it.' - A.C. Robbins

'Your best servants are those who look not so much to hear from you what they want to hear, but rather to want what they hear from you.' - St. Augustine

'Every saint has a past and every sinner a future.' - Oscar Wilde

'It is part of the cure to want to be cured.' - Seneca

'Essentially, faith is believing through deliverance or sustaining that God is greater than all that life can give or that death can take away.' - John Piper

'Life is a process of becoming.' - John Feinberg

'To really destroy a thing you need to replace it.' - Napoleon III

'There is enough time every day to fully do God's will for your life.' - Todd Harbegger

Lying

What does it mean to tell a lie?
It was recently brought to my attention how mixed our intuitions are here.

Here are five possibilities:
1. To utter something that is false.
2. To utter something that the speaker believes is false (but it is true).
3. To utter something that conversationally implicates something that is false.
4. To utter something that conversationally implicates something that the speaker believes is false (but it is not).
5. To utter something that the speaker believes will conversationally implicate something that is false (but it does not).

The parenthetical remarks are to clarify and distinguish the five possibilities.

To explicate what I mean by 'conversationally implicates' I will give an example from my childhood. My parents would often ask me if I had washed my hands or brushed my teeth. Often, I would answer, 'Yes, I brushed my teeth.' knowing that this would implicate that I had done so on the day in question -- though I explicitly uttered no such thing.

So where are your intuitions? I have a strong intuition to accepting (1), but it is difficult to accuse some one who accidentally utters a falsehood as a liar. I think that this can be accounted for by appealing to something like secondary norms: that speaker is to be praised in a sense since she was trying to follow the relevant norm of not lying. Perhaps this secondary sense of following a norm is even more important than actually complying with the primary norm -- actually not telling a lie.

'March Madness'

Where did the term 'March Madness' originate? The origin of the phrase can be found here along with other tournament related phrases.

I think there are more important questions such as:
1. Who is scarrier Pittsnogle or Morrison?
2. Which is the better sports term 'spurtability' for basketball or 'trickeration' for football?
3. Are there more teams called 'Wildcats' or 'Huskies'?

My thoughts in the comments.

Hell

I have recently been forced to carefully evaluate my position on hell.
This analysis has left me with the continued belief in the thesis known as 'annihilationism' or 'conditional unorthodoxy' (that those in hell do not have an eternal conscious existence). This is not the traditional view (eternal conscious punishment), but it does appear to be a view gaining in strength within the evangelical community. I think this view is supported on several bases (both scriptural and philosophical).
1. Talk of the wicked dying [Rom. 6:23; Jn. 3:16; Rev. 20:14; . . .] or being destroyed [Mt. 7:13; Gal. 6:8; 2 Th. 1:9; . . .].
2. Talk of the righteous gaining eternal life [Jn. 3:15; Jn. 3:36; Jn. 5:24; Jn. 20:31; Rom. 6:23; . . ].
3. The justice of God: How can finite sins be justly punished with an infinite punishment?
4. 'Cosmological Dualism': God's justice is never fully satisfied on the traditional view since there is always those that are still paying their penalty -- there are always those that are rebelling against God. This doesn't seem to square with our picture of what things will be like then.

So why is the traditional view the traditional view? Some have suggested that it is due to the Hellenistic philosophical influence on the early church. With the idea that people are unconitionally immortal (Greek philosophy), the traditional view follows. Yet this is a philosophical thesis open to debate. Scripture does speak of the fires of hell being eternal, and if this is coupled with the thesis that people are immortal the traditional view follows. There is, however, good reason to doubt the thesis that people are unconditionally immortal. As such, the annihilationist thesis seems to me to be a scripturally tenable thesis. It certainly offers a less problematic outlook on hell with regard to the problem of evil. As of now anyway, this seems to me to be the best understanding of the matter.

New Pictures

New pictures are up here.

The password is 'Karis' and
it is case-sensitive.

Intelligent Design

Here is a commentary by Alvin Plantinga about the ruling that Intelligent Design is not science.

Counterexample Revisited

Here are my thoughts thus far on the example I posted a few days back.

Let's say that our intuitions are strong that we are to save the 2 year old child.
I think that a case can be made that there is a greater qualitative value to conscious life (defined appropriately to include sleeping individuals and such) over 'bare' human life.
The example could shift so as to have enough organisms at the early stages of life to outweigh the consciousness advantage of the 2 year old, but in such a scenario it is no longer clear that our intuitions are as clear cut.

Does this mean that one ought to save a 2 year old child instead of 5 coma patients? It depends on how we describe the coma patients and how we describe the early stage organisms. I think the issue hinges on how likely conscious life is to result from either set of organisms (perhaps this is part of our intuitions in the original case since few very early stage organisms actually make it to conscious life). If we stipulate that more than one of the organisms in either group is guaranteed to make it to consciousness, then we should save the group (once again the group could be inflated to make this guarentee, but then I think the intuition to save the child would dramatically weaken if not disappear).

Another alternative is to make the difference between the child and the early stage organisms a difference in kind not degree. This approach fits the idea that those organisms have (only) the potential for human life. This approach might be better, but it is at least more complicated.

An argument against this kind of view can be found here. I am not yet sure of its merits.

A good positive argument that I found is here.

Got Madness?

Let the madness begin. And the trash talking too of course.
As of now my bracket is no better than Karis', who picked her teams by laughs and cries.
It's a little disconcerting.
Grrrrr Seton Hall!
Yeah UWM!

State Maps

Here is a map of all the states that Lesley has been to.




Here is a map of all the states that Karis has been to (including airports) and including her upcoming trip to PA to cheer on Trina and her Lady Lions!


Here is a map of the states that I can remember visiting, but I am anxious to hear about the one's that I've forgotten.

You can complete your own state map or world map at this site.

A Counterexample to the Pro-life Position?

The other day I read this thought provoking intuition pump that was taken by the presenter to be a counterexample to any pro-life position (actually it was posed as a problem for the anti-choice position):

Whenever you say that human life begins or whenever you have a morally relevant being (where a morally relevant being is a being that ought to be protected and preserved -- perhaps for some potential that it has), imagine that you have 5 organisms that are at that stage. There is a fire in a building and you can save either the 5 organisms that are at that stage or a 2-year old child, but not both. (the target of this example was those who believe that human life begins at conception)

The idea is that the obvious answer is that you should save the 2-year old child. However, if the pro-life advocate says this, it is supposed to undermine her pro-life position. The earlier that one believes that human life or moral relevancy begins the more pull the story seems to have.

First, I think that the example can be made stronger. One seemingly good reason to choose the 2-year old in this situation is that she has perceptions and feelings which would make her death in the flames a tortuous event which would not be shared by the 5 organisms. Perhaps some case (perhaps a utilitarian one) can be made where this would give the pro-life advocate an advantage. So let us instead suppose that the death that awaits either of the groups is a quick and painless death.

I think that sets everything up in the broadest way that is most to the point.
This case is interesting and worth investigation. In the end I don't think that it succeeds.
I'll post some reasons later in the comments, but I would like to hear some input from others.

Grade Change Form

I know that a lot of you are teaching, TA-ing, or tutoring. Having just returned the midterm for my Logic class, I am already being hounded about the grades students received. It made me think of this universal grade change form, so I thought that I would pass it along.

Causation

In the second chapter of The Cement of the Universe, J.L. Mackie tries to unpack our concept of causation. His claim is that statements about causation are statements about necessity. The only kind of sufficiency that Mackie finds in causation is a weak sufficiency, ‘given the circumstances if x occurs, so will y.’ What he denies is that in calling something a cause we require anything about strong sufficiency, ‘given the circumstances, if y had not been going to occur, x would not have occurred.’ The idea is that strong sufficiency generally holds of causation, but it is not required for recognition of causation.

He uses the following intuition pump to try and persuade his readers. We are to imagine an indeterministic slot machine which may or may not give out a chocolate bar upon a coin being inserted. Whether or not the chocolate bar appears is entirely a matter of chance once the coin is inserted. In normal circumstances it is necessary to put a coin into the machine to get a chocolate, but it is not sufficient.

Imagine that you put in coin and receive a chocolate – lucky you. Mackie believes that in such a case we are inclined to say that inserting the coin caused the chocolate to appear. In this case, inserting the coin was weakly sufficient for receiving the chocolate, but it was not strongly sufficient: in the circumstances, if you did not receive a chocolate it would not mean that you had not inserted a coin.

I am totally not convinced that we would call the insertion of a coin a cause of receiving the chocolate in such a case. Does anyone else share my sentiments?

Cereal Time Part 2

Justice and Grace

This is a follow up to the Christian Service post a few days back.
I am trying to get a handle on what the relationship between justice and grace is supposed to be for the Christian. We are called to both love justice and be full of grace, yet grace overrides justice in some sense. We might think that we ought to always pursue grace, but this does not seem right. It seems at least that when we are looking out for others we ought to seek justice for them. We are to seek justice for the widow and orphan. Are we to seek grace instead for their oppressor? Perhaps this is the best approach -- the others-centered default approach:
To seek justice for others, but not for oneself; and to seek grace for one's oppressors but not for the oppressors of others. (perhaps there is some parallel with forgiveness here)
I don't know. This is tough. I would appreciate thoughts.

Linking

Here are some philosophy blogs that I enjoy:

Certain Doubts -- a blog about epistemology
The Prosblogion -- a blog about philosophy of religion
PEA Soup -- a blog about ethics
The Garden of Forking Paths -- a blog about agency

Dogs and Desires

In discussing the merits of moral expressivism the following example came up. I was maintaining that desires are inherently evaluative in that they represent something as something that should be the case. Put differently, what it means to desire/want something is to think that it should be the case -- If S desires that x, then S believes that it would be better if x were true than not. If this is so, then the expressivist cannot appeal to desires.
My claim is that the only thing that trumps our desire for x (belief that x being true would be better than not) is a higher-order desire for y (belief that y being true would be better than not and better than x being true and y and x cannot both be true).
A collegue presented the idea that his dog has desires (to go outside, for a treat) but that he (the dog) lacks the capacity to think that if the world realized those desires it would be better than if it did not.
I don't think so. I think that once we grant desires we've granted the capacity to think of something as better. I'm not sure whether the dog has both though or neither, but I'm leaning toward both.

Cereal Time