Yet another argument against physician assisted suicide

Years ago, I read a clever argument against physician assisted suicide that held that medical procedures need informed consent, and informed consent requires that one be given relevant scientific data on what will happen to one after a procedure. But there is no scientific data on what happens to one after death, so informed consent of the type involved in medical procedures is impossible.

I am not entirely convinced by this argument, but I think it does point to a reason why helping to kill a patient is not an appropriate medical procedure. An appropriate medical procedure is one aiming at producing a medical outcome by scientifically-supported means. In the case of physician assisted suicide, the outcome is presumably something like respite from suffering. Now, we do not have scientific data on whether death causes respite from suffering. Seriously held and defended non-scientific theories about what happens after death include:

1. death is the cessation of existence

2. after death, existence continues in a spiritual way in all cases without pain

3. after death, existence continues in a spiritual way in some cases with severe pain and in other cases without pain

4. after death, existence continues in another body, human or animal.

The sought-after outcome, namely respite from severe pain, is guaranteed in cases (a), (b) and (d). However, first, evidence for preferring these three hypotheses to hypothesis (b) is not scientific but philosophical or theological in nature, and hence should not be relied on by the medical professional as a medical professional in predicting the outcome of the procedure. Second, even on hypotheses (b) and (d), the sought-after outcome is produced by a metaphysical process that goes beyond the natural processes that are the medical professional’s tools of the trade. On those hypotheses, the medical professional’s means for assuring improvement of the patient’s subjective condition relies on, say, a God or some nonphysical reincarnational process.

One might object that the physician does not need to judge between after-life hypotheses like (a)–(d), but can delegate that judgment to the patient. But a medical professional cannot so punt to the patient. If I go to my doctor asking for a prescription of some specific medication, saying that I believe it will help me with some condition, he can only permissibly fulfill my request if he himself has medical evidence that the medication will have the requisite effect. If I say that an angel told me that ivermectin will help me with Covid, the doctor should ignore that. The patient rightly has an input into what outcome is worth seeking (e.g., is relief from pain worth it if it comes at the expense of mental fog) and how to balance risks and benefits, but the doctor cannot perform a medical procedure based on the patient’s evaluation of the medical evidence, except perhaps in the special case where the patient has relevant medical or scientific qualifications.

Or imagine that a patient has a curable fracture. The patient requests physician assisted suicide because the patient has a belief that after death they will be transported to a different planet, immediately given a new, completely fixed body, and will lead a life there that is slightly happier than their life on earth. A readily curable condition like that does not call for physician assisted suicide on anyone’s view. But if there is no absolute moral objection to killing as such and if the physician is to punt to the patient on spiritual questions, why not? On the patient’s views, after all, death will yield an instant cure to the fracture, while standard medical means will take weeks.

Furthermore, the medical professional should not fulfill requests for medical procedures which achieve their ends by non-medical means. If I go to a surgeon asking that my kidney be removed because Apollo told me that if I burn one of my kidneys on his altar my cancer will be cured, the surgeon must refuse. First, as noted in the previous paragraph, the surgeon cannot punt to the patient the question of whether the method will achieve the stated medical goal. Second, as also noted, even if the surgeon shares the patient’s judgment (the surgeon thinks Apollo appeared to her as well), the surgeon is lacking scientific evidence here. Third, and this is what I want to focus on here, while the outcome (no cancer) is medical, the means (sacrificing a kidney) are not medical.

Only in the case of hypothesis (a) can one say that the respite from severe pain is being produced by physical means. But the judgment that hypothesis (a) is true would be highly controversial (a majority of people in the US seem to reject the hypothesis), and as noted is not scientific.

Admittedly, in cases (b)–(d), the medical method as such does likely produce a respite from the particular pain in question. But that a respite from a particular pain is produced is insufficient to make a medical procedure appropriate: one needs information that some other pain won’t show up instead.

Note that this is not an argument against euthanasia in general (which I am also opposed to on other grounds), but specifically an argument against medical professionals aiding killing.

The afterlife of humans and animals

I’ve been thinking a bit about the afterlife for non-human animals. The first thought is that there is a relevant difference between human and non-human animals in terms of flourishing. There is something deeply incomplete about the eighty or so years a human lives. The incompleteness of our earthly life is a qualitative incompleteness: it is not just that we have not had enough pieces of cake or run enough miles. Typically, whole areas of virtue are missing, and our understanding of the world is woefully incomplete, so that one of the most important things one learns is how little one knows. The story of the life is clearly unfinished, even if life has gone as well as it is reasonable to expect, and flourishing has not been achieved. Not so for non-human animals. When things have gone as well as it is reasonable to expect, the animal has lived, played and reproduced, and the story is complete.

If we think of the form of an entity as specifying the proper shape of its life, we have good reason to think that the human form specifies the proper shape of life as eternal, or at least much longer than earthly life. But there is little reason to think that form of an animal’s life specifies the length of life as significantly longer than the typical observed life-span of in its species.

If we accept the thesis which I call “Aristotelian optimism”, namely that things tend to fulfill their form or nature, we have good reason to think there is more to human life than our earthly life, but not so for non-human animals. In the case of humans, this line of argument should worry typical atheistic Aristotelian ethicists, because it would push them to reject Aristotelian optimism, which I think is central to ensuring knowledge of the forms in Aristotle’s system.

By the way, there may be an exception in the above argument for animals whose flourishing consists in relationships with humans. For there its flourishing might be incomplete if it cannot be a companion to the human over its infinite life-span. So there is some reason to think that species that are domesticated for human companionship, like dogs and to a lesser extent cats and horses (where companionship is less central to flourishing), might have an afterlife.

A Thomistic argument for the possibility of an afterlife for animals

1. Accidents are more intimately dependent on substance than substantial forms on matter.

2. If (1) is true and God can make accidents survive without the substance, then God can make forms survive without matter.

3. If God can make forms survive without matter, then God can ensure life after death for animals by making their forms survive and restoring their matter.

4. God can make accidents survive without the substance.

5. So, God can ensure life after death for animals.

The most controversial claim here is (4), but that follows from the Thomistic account of the transsubstantiation.

Of course, there is a great gap between the possibility of an afterlife for an animal and its actuality. And the above argument works just as well for plants and fungi.

Pascal's Wager and the beatific vision

To resolve the many gods and evil god objections to Pascal’s Wager, we need a way of comparing different infinite positive and negative outcomes. Technically, this is easy: we can represent these outcomes as an infinite quantity in some system like the hyperreals or vector-valued utilities, and then multiply these by probabilities, and add. The real difficulty is philosophical: how do we make probability-weighted comparisons of these infinite utilities? How does, say, a 30% chance of a Christian heaven compare to a 20% chance of a Muslim heaven? How does, say, a 30% chance of a Christian heaven compare to avoiding a 5% chance of a hell from an evil god?

I want to make a suggestion that might help get us started. On Christian orthodoxy, heavenly bliss is primarily constituted by the beatific vision—an intimate union with God where God himself comes to be directly present to consciousness, perhaps in something like the way that the qualia of ordinary acts of perception are often thought to be directly present to consciousness. How nice such an intimate union with a divine being is depends on how good the divine being is. For instance, plausibly, such a union with the kind of being who loves us enough to become incarnate and die for our sins is much better than such a union with a deity who wouldn’t or even couldn’t do that.

Gods that have morally objectionable conditions on how to get to heaven are presumably not going to be all that wonderful to spend an infinite time with—even a small chance of a beatific vision of a perfectly good God would beat a large chance of an afterlife with such a god. (Of course, some people think the Christian God’s conditions are morally objectionable.)

There is an important sense in which the beatific vision is intensively infinitely good—i.e., even a day of the beatific vision has infinite value—because the good of the beatific vision is constituted by the presence of an infinite God. Because of this, afterlives that feature something like the beatific vision may completely trump afterlives theories that do not. This may help with evil god worries, in that it is plausible that suffering we can undergo will intensively be only finitely bad. If B is the value of the beatific vision and H is the (negative) value of hell, then pB + qH will be infinitely positive as long as p > 0.

I am not saying that taking the beatific vision into account solves all the difficulties with Pascal’s wager. But it moves us forward.

An omnipotence principle from Aquinas

Aquinas believes that it follows from omnipotence that:

1. Any being that depends on creatures can be created by God without its depending on creatures.

But, plausibly:

2. If x and y are a couple z, then z depends on x and y.

3. If x and y are a couple z, then necessarily if z exists, z depends on x and y.

4. Jill and Joe Biden are a couple.

5. Jill and Joe Biden are creatures.

But this leads to a contradiction. By (4), we have a couple, call it “the Bidens”, consisting by Jill and Joe Biden, and by (2) that couple depends on Jill and Joe Biden. By (1) and (5), God can create the Bidens without either Jill or Joe Biden. But that contradicts (3).

So, Aquinas’ principle (1) implies that there are no couples. More generally, it implies that there are no beings that necessarily depend on other creatures. All our artifacts would be like that: they would depend on parts. Thus, Aquinas’ principle implies there are no artifacts.

Thomists are sometimes tempted to say that artifacts, heaps and the like are accidental beings. But the above argument shows that that won’t do. God’s power extends to all being, and whatever being creatures can bestow, God can bestow absent the creatures. If the accidental beings are beings, God can create them without their parts. But a universe with a heap and yet nothing heaped is absurd. So, I think, we need to deny the existence of accidental beings.

If we lean on (1) further, we get an argument for survivalism. Either Socrates depends on his body or not. If Socrates does not depend on his body, he can surely survive without his body after death. But if Socrates does depend on his body, then by (1) God can create Socrates disembodied, since Socrates’ body is a creature. But if God can create Socrates disembodied, surely God can sustain Socrates disembodied, and so Socrates can survive without his body. In fact, the argument does not apply merely to humans but to every embodied being: bacteria, trees and wolves can all survive death if God so pleases.

Things get even stranger once we get to the compositional structure of substances. Socrates presumably depends on his act of being. But Socrates’ act of being is itself a creature. Thus, by (1), God could create Socrates without creating Socrates’ act of being. Then Socrates would exist without having any existence.

I like the sound of (1), but the last conclusion seems disastrous. Perhaps, though, the lesson we get from this is that the esse of Socrates isn’t an entity? Or perhaps we need to reject (1)?

Aquinas and Descartes on substance dualism

Roughly, Aquinas thinks of a substance as something that:

1. is existentially independent of other things, and

2. is complete in its nature.

There is a fair amount of work needed to spell out the details of 1 and 2, and that goes beyond my exegetical capacities. But my interest is in structural points. Things that satisfy (1), Aquinas calls “subsistent beings”. Thus, all substances are subsistent beings, but the converse is not true, because Aquinas thinks the rational soul is a subsistent being and not a substance.

Descartes, on the other hand, understands substance solely in terms of (1).

Now, historically, it seems to be Descartes and not Thomas who set the agenda for discussions of the view called “substance dualism”. Thus, it seems more accurate to think of substance dualists as holding to a duality of substance in Descartes’ sense of substance than in Aquinas’.

But if we translate this to Thomistic vocabulary, then it seems we get:

3. A “substance dualist” in the modern sense of the term is someone who thinks there are two subsistent beings in the human being.

And now it looks like Aquinas himself is a substance dualist in this sense. For Aquinas thinks that there are two subsistent beings in Socrates: one of them is Socrates (who is a substance in the Thomistic sense of the word) and the other is Socrates’ soul (which is a merely subsistent being). To make it sound even more like substance dualism, note that Thomas thinks that Socrates is an animal and animals are bodies (as I have learned from Christopher Tomaszewski, there are two senses of body: one is for the material substance as a whole and the other is for the matter; it is body in the sense of the material substance that Socrates is, not body in the sense of matter). Thus, one of these subsistent beings or substances-in-the-Cartesian-sense is a body and the other is a soul, just as on standard Cartesian substance dualism.

But of course there are glaring difference between Aquinas’ dualism and typical modern substance dualisms. First, and most glaringly, one of the two subsistent beings or Cartesian substances on Aquinas’s view is a part of the other: the soul is a part of the human substance. On all the modern substance dualisms I know of, neither substance is a part of the other. Second, of the two subsistent beings or Cartesian substances, it is the body (i.e., the material substance) that Aquinas identifies Socrates with. Aquinas is explicit that we are not souls. Third, for Aquinas the body depends for its existence on the soul—when the soul departs from the body, the body (as body, though perhaps not as matter) perishes (while on the other hand, the soul depends on the matter for its identity).

Now, let’s move to Descartes. Descartes’ substance dualism is widely criticized by Thomists. But when Thomists criticize Descartes for holding to a duality of substances, there is a danger that they are understanding substance in the Thomistic sense. For, as we saw, if we understand substance in the Cartesian sense, then Aquinas himself believes in a duality of substances (but with important structural differences). Does Descartes think there is a duality of substances in the Thomistic sense? That is not clear to me, and may depend on fine details of exactly how the completeness in nature (condition (2) above) is understood. It seems at least in principle open to Descartes to think that the soul is incomplete in its nature without the body or that the body is incomplete in its nature without the soul (the pineal gland absent the soul sure sounds incomplete) or that each is incomplete without the other.

So, here is where we are at this point: When discussing Aquinas, Descartes and substance dualism we need to be very careful whether we understand substance in the Thomistic or the Cartesian sense. If we take the Cartesian sense, both thinkers are substance dualists. If we take the Thomistic sense, Aquinas clearly is not, but it is also not clear that Descartes is. There are really important and obvious structural differences between Thomas and Descartes here, but they should not be seen as differences in the number of substances.

And here is a final exegetical remark about Aquinas. Aquinas’ account of the human soul seems carefully engineered to make the soul be the sort of thing—namely, a subsistent being—that can non-miraculously survive in the absence of the substance—the human being—that it is normally a part of. This makes it exegetically probable that Aquinas believed that the soul does in fact survive in the absence of the human being after death. And thus we have some indirect evidence that, in contemporary terminology, Aquinas is a corruptionist: that he thinks we do not survive death though our souls do (but we come back into existence at the resurrection). For if he weren’t a corruptionist, his ontology of the soul would be needlessly complex, since the soul would not need to survive without a human being if the human being survived death.

And indeed, I think Aquinas’s ontology is needlessly complex. It is simpler to have the soul not be a subsistent being. This makes the soul incapable of surviving death in the absence of the human being. And that makes for a better view of the afterlife—the human being survives the loss of the matter, and the soul survives but only as part of the human being.

A metaphysical argument for survivalism

Corruptionist Thomists think that after death and before the resurrection, our souls exist in a disembodied state and have mental states, but we do not exist. For we are not our souls. Survivalist Thomists think we continue to exist between death and the resurrection. They agree that we are not our souls, but tend to think that in the disembodied we have our souls as proper parts.

Here is a metaphysical argument against corruptionism and for survivalism.

1. An accident that has a subject is a part of that subject.

2. There are mental state accidents in the disembodied state.

3. All mental state accidents in the disembodied state have a subject.

4. The soul does not have accidents as parts.

5. Therefore, the mental state accidents in the disembodied state have something other than the soul as their subject.

6. The only two candidates for a subject of mental state accidents are the soul and the person.

7. Therefore, the mental state accidents in the disembodied state have the person as their subject.

8. Therefore, the person exists in the disembodied state.

(This argument is a way of turning Jeremy Skrzypek’s accident-based defense of survivalism into a positive argument for survivalism. Maybe Skrzypek has already done this, too.)

The argument is slightly complicated by the fact that Thomists accept the possibility of subjectless accidents existing miraculously (in the Eucharist). Nonetheless, I do not know of any Thomists who think the disembodied state is such a miracle. Given that Thomists generally think that the survival of the soul after death is not itself miraculous, they are unlikely to require the miracle of subjectless accidents in that case, and hence will accept premise 3.

Premise 2 is common ground between survivalists and corruptionists, as both agree that there is suffering in hell and purgatory and joy in heaven even in the disembodied state.

I think the controversial premises are 1 and 4. I myself am inclined to deny the conjunction of the two premises (even though I think survivalism is true for other reasons).

Premise 1 is a core assumption of compositional metaphysics, and compositional metaphysics is one of the main attractions of Thomism.

One reason to accept premise 4 is that the soul is the form of the human being, and one of the main tasks for forms in Aristotelian metaphysics is to unify complex objects. But if forms are themselves complex, then they are also in need of unification, and we are off on a regress. So forms should be simple, and in particular should not have accidents as parts.

Another reason to accept 4 is that if the soul or form has mental state accidents as parts, it becomes very mysterious what else the form is made of besides these accidents. Perhaps there is the esse or act of being. But it seems wrong to think of the form as made of accidents and esse. (I myself reject the idea that objects are “made of” their parts. But the intuition is a common one.)

Exercise and posession of virtue

The exercise of generosity is good to have. So is its possession. How do the two compare?

One might think the possession of generosity only has value as an instrument towards generous activity. But that seems wrong. It is bad for one to be deficient in generosity even if one will never again have the opportunity to practice generosity (say, because there is no afterlife and one has been marooned on a desert island).

But at the same time, it seems to me that the possession of generosity is of fairly low value as compared to the exercise of it. Suppose I am going to be a coma for the rest of my life and there is no life after death, and I have a choice between two actions, one of which will be generous and the other will increase my generosity (e.g., I have a choice whether I should give some money to a hungry person or to spend it on neurosurgery to eliminate something that blocks me from having much of a virtue of generosity). It seems plausible that I should do the generous deed: living (even in a coma) with generosity is better than living without it, but not by much. Similarly, if I am going to be in a coma for the rest of my life, and I have the opportunity to have one last look at a beautiful landscape, that seems worth doing, even if the price of that look is that I will lose my eyes. It is better to have eyes than not, but if the eyes aren’t going to ever get used, the value of merely having them seems small.

Perhaps, though, in a full Christian picture of life that includes the afterlife, there aren’t going to be cases where one is choosing between the exercise and the possession of generosity. If before the coma I don’t do the generous deed, then maybe I am like the guy who buried his talent, and the generosity will be taken away from me in the next life. Or at least it won’t be increased a hundredfold. I am inclined to say that given the full Christian picture, the exercise of generosity (and other virtues) should generally be chosen over the immediate possession of generosity, but will tend to result in greater possession of generosity.

Faith and fear

Every so often I worry that my fear of death (which, I have to confess, is more a fear of non-existence than a fear of hell) shows that I lack faith in the afterlife. I think this is a mistaken worry.

I regularly climb our 53-foot climbing wall. One can “rainbow” climb, using whatever holds one sees fit, or one can follow a route, with a broad range of route difficulties. On the easiest routes, at least if I am not tired and am wearing climbing shoes, I know I will succeed. On the hardest routes, I know I would fail. Of course I always use proper safety equipment (rope belay, and there are also mats around the base), and usually I am not scared, because on the basis of good empirical data I trust the safety setup.

Now imagine that all the safety equipment was gone, but that to save someone’s life I needed to climb to the top. Once at the top, I’d be safe, let’s suppose (maybe there would be an auto-belay there that I could clip into for the descent). I could choose the side of the wall and the holds. Without safety equipment, I would be terrified. (The mere thought experiment literally makes my hands sweat.) But you could would be quite correct in telling me: “Alex, you know you will succeed.”

Here’s the simple point. When much is at stake, knowledge of success is compatible with great fear. But if knowledge is compatible with great fear, why shouldn’t faith be as well?

The blink of an eye response to the problem of evil

I want to confess something: I do not find the problem of evil compelling. I think to myself: Here, during the blink of an eye, there are horrendous things happening. But there is infinitely long life afterwards if God exists. For all we know, the horrendous things are just a blip in these infinitely long lives. And it just doesn’t seem hard to think that over an infinite future that initial blip could be justified, redeemed, defeated, compensated for with moral adequacy, sublated, etc.

It sounds insensitive to talk of the horrors that people live through as a blip. But a hundred years really is the blink of an eye in the face of eternity.

Wouldn’t we expect a perfect being to make the initial blink of an eye perfect, too? Maybe. But even if so, we would only expect it to be perfect as a beginning to an infinite life that we know next to nothing about. And it is hard to see how we would know what is perfect as a beginning to such a life.

This sounds like sceptical theism. But unlike the sceptical theist, I also think the standard theodicies—soul building, laws of nature, free will, etc.—are basically right. They each attempt to justify God’s permission of some or all evils by reference to things that are indeed good: the gradual building up of a soul, the order of the universe, a rightful autonomy, etc. They all have reasonable stories about how the permission of the evils is needed for these goods. There is, in mind, only one question about these theodicies: Are these goods worth paying such a terrible price, the price of allowing these horrors?

But in the face of an eternal future, I think the question of price fades for two reasons.

First, the goods gained by soul building and free will last for an infinite amount of time. It will forever be true that one has a soul that was built by these free choices. And the value of orderly laws of nature includes an order that is instrumental to the soul building as well as an order that is aesthetically valuable in itself. The benefits of the former order last for eternity, and the beauty of the laws of nature—even as exhibited during the initial blink of an eye—lasts for ever in memory. It is easy for an infinite duration of a significant good to be worth a very high price! (Don’t the evils last in memory, too? Yes, but while memories of beauty should be beautiful things, memories of evil should not be evils—think of the Church’s memory of the Cross.)

Second, it is very easy for God to compensate people during an infinite future for any undeserved evils they suffered during the initial blip. And typically one has no obligation to prevent someone’s suffering when (a) the prevention would have destroyed an important good and (b) one will compensate the person to an extent much greater than the sufferings. The goods pointed out by the theodicies are important goods, even if we worry that permitting the horrors is too high a price. And no matter how terrible these short-lived sufferings were—even if the short period of time, at most about a mere century, “seemed like eternity”—infinite time is ample space for compensation. (Of course, it would be wrong to intentionally inflict undeserved serious harms on someone even while planning to compensate.)

Objection 1: Can one say this while saying that the fleeting goods of our lives yield a teleological argument for the existence of God?

Response: One can. One can be quite sure from a single paragraph in a novel that it is written by someone with great writing skills. But one can never be sure from a single paragraph in a novel that it is not written by someone with great writing skills. (For all we know, the author was parodying bad writing in that paragraph, and the paragraph reflects great skill. But notice that we cannot say about the great paragraph that maybe the author has no skills but was just parodying great writing.)

Objection 2: It begs the question to suppose our future lives are infinite.

Response: No. If God exists, it is very likely that the future lives of all persons, or at the very least of all persons who do not deserve to be annihilated, will be infinite. The proposition that God exists is equivalent to the disjunction: (God exists and there is eternal life) or (God exists and there is no eternal life). If the argument from evil presupposes the absence of eternal life, it is only an argument against the second disjunct. But most of the probability that God exists lies with the first disjunct, given that P(eternal life|God exists) is high. Hence, the argument doesn't do much unless it addresses the first disjunct.

A theological argument for four-dimensionalism

One of the main philosophical objections to dualist survivalism, the view that after death and prior to the resurrection we continue existing as disembodied souls is the argument that I am now distinct from my soul and cannot come to be identical with my soul, as that would violate the transitivity of identity: my present self (namely, I) would be identical to my future self, the future self would be identical to my future soul, my future soul would still be identical to my present soul, and so my present self would be identical with my present soul.

(This, of course, won’t bother dualists who think they are presently identical with souls, but is a problem for dualists who think that souls are proper parts of them. And the latter is the better view, since I can see myself in the mirror but I cannot see my soul in the mirror.)

It’s worth noting that this provides some evidence for four-dimensionalism, because (a) we have philosophical and theological evidence for dualist survivalism, while (b) the four-dimensionalist has an easy way out of the above argument. For the four-dimensionalist can deny that my future self is ever identical with my future soul, even given dualist survivalism. My future self, like my present self, is a four-dimensional temporally extended entity. Indeed, the future self and the present self are the same four-dimensional entity, namely I. My future soul, like my present soul, is a temporally extended entity (four-dimensional if souls have spatial extension; otherwise, one-dimensional), which is a proper part of me. And, again, my future soul and my present soul are the same temporally extended entity. At no future time is my future self identical with my future soul even given dualist survivalism. At most, it will be the case that some future temporal slices of me are identical with some future temporal slices of my soul.

Surviving furlessness and inner earlessness

If we are animals, can we survive in a disembodied state, having lost all of our bodies, retaining only soul or form?

Here is a standard thought:

1. Metabolic processes, homeostasis, etc. are defining features of being animals.

2. In a disembodied state, one cannot have such processes.

3. Something that is an animal is essentially an animal.

4. So something that is an animal cannot survive in a disembodied state.

But here’s a parody argument:

5. Fur and mammalian inner ear bones (say) are defining features of being mammals.

6. In a furless and internally earless state, one cannot have such structures.

7. Something that is a mammal is essentially a mammal.

8. So something that is a mammal cannot survive in a furless and internally earless state.

I think 5-7 are no less plausible than 1-3. But 8 is clearly false: clearly, it is metaphysically possible to become a defective mammal that is furless and internally earless.

The obvious problem with 5, or with the inferences drawn from 5, is that what is definitory of being a mammal is being such that one should to have fur and such-and-such an inner ear. The same problem afflicts 2: why not say that being such that one should have these processes and features is definitory of being a mammal.

If naturalism is true, there is an infinite afterlife

1. Deontology is true.
2. A finite being could not have the kind of dignity that deontology ascribes to human beings.
3. So, human beings are infinite. (1-2)
4. If human beings are infinite, they are infinite synchronically or diachronically.
5. If naturalism is true, human beings are finite synchronically.
6. If there is no infinite afterlife, human beings are finite diachronically.
7. So, either naturalism is not true or there is an infinite afterlife. (3-6)
8. So, if naturalism is true, there is an infinite afterlife. (this is a material conditional following from 7)

Of course, there are also arguments that if naturalism is true, there is no afterlife, and if these are sound, then together we get an argument that naturalism is not true.

Justice and the afterlife

1. If there is no afterlife, then promoting justice sometimes requires acting unjustly.

2. Promoting justice never requires acting unjustly.

3. So, there is an afterlife.

In support of 1, just think of cases where it looks like great injustices can only be stopped by minor injustices. Perhaps the only way to get an unjust dictator out of power is to spread the rumor that he is unfaithful to his wife. Perhaps the only way to bust a criminal organization is to have an informer make false promises. Of course, these cases presume that this life is all there is. If there is an afterlife, perhaps things are so arranged that all wrongs are righted in some way, so on the whole all will have justice. But without an afterlife, these cases are very compelling.

I think the weakness here is the "requires". There is a normative and a non-normative sense of "requires". Justice non-normatively requires A provided that justice cannot be had without A. Justice normatively requires A provided that in light of justice we are morally required to provide A. My line of thought above established claim 1 in the non-normative sense of requiring, whereas claim 2 is most plausible only in the normative sense of requiring.

Maybe. But I still think that 1 also has some plausibility with the normative sense of "requires" and 2 has some plausibility with the non-normative sense, so the argument as a whole has plausibility when "requires" is read consistently. The argument raises the probability of the conclusion. By how much, I do not know.

Dualist survivalism

According to dualist survivalism, at death our bodies perish but we continue to exist with nothing but a soul (until, Christians believe, the resurrection of the dead, when we regain our bodies).

A lot of the arguments against dualist survivalism focus on how we could exist as mere souls. First, such existence seems to violate weak supplementation: my souls is proper part of me, but if the body perished, my soul would be my only part—and yet it would still be a proper part (since identity is necessary). Second, it seems to be an essential property of animals that they are embodied, an essential property of humans that they are animals, and an essential property of us that we are humans.

There are answers to these kinds of worries in the literature, but I want to note that things become much simpler for the dualist survivalist if she accepts a four-dimensionalism that says that we are four-dimensional beings (this won't be endurantist, but it might not be perdurantist either).

First, there will be a time t after my death (and before the resurrection) such that the only proper part of mine that is located at t is my soul. However, the soul won’t be my only part. My arms, legs and brain are eternally my parts. It’s just that they aren’t located at t, as the only proper part of me that is located at t is my soul. There is no violation of weak supplementation. (We still get a violation of weak supplementation for the derived relation of parthood-at-t, where x is a part-at-t of y provided that x is a part of y and both x and y exist at t. But why think there is weak supplementation for parthood-at-t? We certainly wouldn’t expect weak supplementation to hold for parthood-at-z, where z is a spatial location and x is a part-at-z of y provided that x is a part of y and both x and y are located at z.)

Second, it need not follow from its being an essential property of animals that they are embodied that they have bodies at every time at which they exist. Compare: It may be an essential property of a cell that it is nucleated. But the cell is bigger spatially than the nucleus, so it had better not follow that the nucleus exists at every spatial location at which the cell does. So why think that the body needs to exist at every temporal location at which the animal does? Why can’t the animal be bigger temporally than its body?

Of course, those given to three-dimensional thinking will say that I am missing crucial differences between space and time.

Living on in people's memories

There is a philosophical (in the popular sense of the word--professional philosophers don't tend to defend this) outlook on death that says that we live on in people's memories of us. I was discussing this view with students in my Death and Afterlife class, and one of them connected this to the memory theory of personal identity. My first reaction was that this was completely confused. But after reflection, I thought that there was a deep point about the memory theory of personal identity there.

Start by observing how unsatisfying this kind of "afterlife" in people's memories is--it's not really "living on". Now, the student's potential confusion was that on canonical versions of the memory theory of personal identity, we live on through a chain of first-person memories, while the memories through which we are said to live on are third-person ones. But does that point matter? Suppose one or more of the people through whose memories I was said to live on actually managed to acquire first-person (apparent) episodic memory of my life, say by thinking about me so much. That's a bit creepy, but it's no more satisfying as an afterlife than when the memories were third-person.

Of course the proponent of the memory theory can say I am unfair. The memory theory requires that there be only a single person with those memories, and it has restrictions on what sort of causal chain is allowed to pass the memories on. But these matters of detail do not, I think, affect whether I am living on in any robust sense through a person who has memories of my life.

Can a life of eternal pain be worth living?

Sally is in moderate pain and opts for a painless medical intervention that extends her life by one more day just because she wants to experience another day. Surely Sally is not being irrational. It's not irrational to choose to experience another day, even if that day involves moderate pain. Further, whatever the merits of a defense of euthanasia in the case of severe pain (in the end, I will reject euthanasia even in those cases), defending euthanasia in the case of moderate pain is implausible.

This suggests that it can be worth living for a finite amount of time in moderate pain. Moreover, it can be worth doing so even if there is no prospect of pain-free life afterwards. The rationality of Sally's decision doesn't depend on her beliefs about the afterlife. All this suggests a strong intuition that the experience of life, by itself, is enough to make life worth living despite moderate pain. But if it makes life worth living for a finite amount of time, why not an infinite?

Well, maybe an infinite life of moderate pain would result in extreme mental pain of hopelessness and ennui. But notice that this is a contingent consequence. A person who doesn't think much about the future can avoid the pain of hopelessness, and a person who doesn't remember having had many such days can avoid the pain of ennui. Thus it is logically possible to have a worthwhile infinitely long life of moderate pain without any great compensating goods besides the good of experiencing life itself, at least as long as one wasn't very thoughtful.

Thus, it is logically possible to have a painful but mildly worthwhile eternity in hell. It could be a life where enough of people's memories are wiped to prevent excruciating ennui, and where the people's minds have degenerated to a point where they don't care much about the future. (Would it be surprising if the minds of the damned weren't in tip-top shape?)

Now, one of the main reasons people reject the doctrine of hell is because they think that a loving and just God would not allow a person to exist for eternity in a state worse than nonexistence. But if it is possible to have a painful but mildly worthwhile eternity in hell, so that we need not suppose that eternity in hell is worse than nonexistence, this particular argument against hell disappears.

Objection: The biblical picture of hell involves not merely moderate but excruciating pain.

Response: Let's grant a literal picture of eternal burning. Now, being burned is normally an excruciating pain. Either divine goodness would rule out eternal excruciating pain or it wouldn't. If it wouldn't, the objection to hell disappears. But if divine goodness would rule out eternal excruciating pain, then it follows logically that if there is a God and eternal burning, then God does not allow that eternal burning to be eternally excruciating. Perhaps he provides fairly effective painkillers.

Death, materialism and resurrection

Consider two Christian materialist theories about how life after death works:

1. Snatching: At the last moment of life, God snatches a central part of the person (say, the cerebrum), transports it away to heaven, purgatory or hell, keeps it alive there, and replaces it in the corpse with a replica.
2. Fission: At the last moment of life, the cells in the body or a central part of it get the power to split into two cells. One of these cells is a dead cell found in the corpse and the other is in heaven, purgatory or hell.

Here's problem both Snatching and Fission face: there is no death on these stories, since death requires the cessation of biological life. But on both, biological life is continuously maintained. These are stories about life after teleportation rather than about life after death. But we do in fact die: Scripture is completely clear on this.

Maybe one could modify my formulations of Snatching or Fission to solve this problem. Rather than the snatching or fission happening at the last moment of life, it happens at the first moment of death. Thus, God snatches or fissions a central part of the person after the person is already dead, and then resuscitates the part in heaven, purgatory or hell. The problem with this is that Snatching and Fission are meant to preserve biological continuity. But while typically after death cells remain with some semblance of biological life, this need not always happen. Suppose that someone dies by having a laser blast their brain. That person dies precisely when those cells central to biological life have been destroyed. But it is precisely those cells that would need to be snatched or fissioned after death.

(I used to think, by the way, that the interim state--the state between death and the resurrection of the body--was also an objection to Snatching and Fission. But it's not. For the materialist can say that after Snatching or Fusion, the person exists as a mere brain in a vat in heaven, purgatory or hell. And then only at the second coming does that brain regain the rest of the body. The materialist can even say that the brain plays the functional role of the soul here.)

Presentism and ethics

Presentism has some ethics problems stemming from its claim that persons who don't exist now don't exist.

1. Weight: Non-existent persons should count for a lot less than existent persons in our moral deliberations. But future persons shouldn't count a lot less than present persons in our moral deliberations. So, presentism is false.

2. Murder: If there is no afterlife and presentism is true, murder can be a victimless crime. For when the crime is complete, there is no victim. But that would be absurd even if there were no afterlife.
3. Promises: A promise to a nonexistent person has no force. But even if there were no afterlife, a promise to someone who had died would have force.
4. Mourning: If there were no afterlife, it would be appropriate to mourn beloved departed persons because we love them. But a love for someone who doesn't exist is not appropriate.
5. Love: Ethics is grounded in love. But one shouldn't love non-existent persons. This creates a problem for duties towards people who do not yet exist, if presentism is true.

Physicalism, swollen heads, heaven and recurrence

Assuming physicalism, for any fixed volume V, there are only finitely many internalistically-distinct mental states that a human brain of volume less than or equal to V can exhibit. (There may be infinitely many brain states, space and time perhaps being continuous, but brain states that are close enough together will not yield mentally relevant differences. There may also be infinitely many externalistically-distinct states given semantic externalism.) Therefore, given physicalism and a robust supervenience of the mental on the physical, in heaven either the volume of the human head will swell beyond all bounds, or else eventually we will only have reruns of the internalistically-same mental states. Neither option is acceptable. So, Christians should reject physicalism.