Divine speech acts

Suppose random quantum processes result in deep marks on a stone that spell out:

• Thou shalt not eat goat. – God

What would need to be true for it to be the case that God said (or wrote) that, thereby forbidding us to eat goat?

I assume that God always cooperates with creaturely causation, so divine causation is involved in the above production. However, such divine cooperation with the production of something that looks like an inscription or sounds like an utterance does not suffice to make it be the case that God said the thing. Imagine that a cult leader makes the above inscription. God is still cooperating with the cult leader’s causality, but we don’t want to attribute the inscription to God’s authorship.

One obvious answer is by analogy to our language. A part of what makes a performance a speech act of a particular sort is a certain kind of intention, e.g., that the performance be taken to be that sort of speech act. So maybe it just depends on God’s intentions. If God merely intends cooperation with quantum processes, there is no inscription, just random marks on stone that happen to look like an inscription. But if God intends the marks to be taken to be an inscription, they are an inscription.

This solution, however, is unhelpful given divine simplicity. The intention is a contingent feature of God, and on divine simplicity the contingency of contingent divine features is always grounded in some contingent arrangement of creatures. There cannot be two worlds that are exactly alike in their created aspects but where God has different intentions in the two worlds. So given divine simplicity, there has to be a characterization of what makes the marks a divine command in terms of what creation is like. (My view of divine intentions is, roughly, that God intends F in doing A iff intending F would be a good reason for God to do A. This presupposes divine omnirationality.)

Here is one possibility.

1. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act if and only if it was directly produced by God without secondary causes.

But this seems mistaken. Imagine that in the sight of a tribe, God created a stone and a stylus ex nihilo, and then miraculously moved the stylus in such a way as to inscribe the prohibition on eating goat. Then, surely, the members of the tribe upon seeing the stylus moving through the air and gouging clear text in the stone would be right to attribute the message to God. But the inscription was not directly produced by God: it was produced by means of a stylus.

Perhaps:

2. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act if and only if it was a deterministic result of something done by God without secondary causes.

This still seems a bit too restrictive. Imagine that while God used the stylus to inscribe the stone in our previous story, he nonetheless allowed for ordinary quantum randomness in the interaction between the hard stylus and the softer stone, which randomness ensured that there was a tiny probability that no inscription would result—that, say, stylus atoms would quantum tunnel through the stone atoms.

One might replace “deterministic” with “extremely probable”. But just how probable would it have to be?

Here is a different suggestion that seems to me more promising.

3. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act to humans if and only if a normal human who knew all the metaphysical and physical facts about the production of this act, as well as the human social context of the production, would reasonably take it to be a divine speech act.

This suggestion allows for the possibility that a normal human would be mistaken about whether something is a divine speech act—but the mistake would then be traced back to a mistake about the relevant metaphysical, physical and social facts.

The applicability of (3) is still difficult. Take the initial example where the apparent divine prohibition on eating goat appears from quantum randomness. Would a reasonable and normal human who knew it to have appeared from quantum randomness with ordinary divine cooperation of the sort found in all creaturely causation think it to be a divine speech act? I don’t know. I don’t know that I am a reasonable and normal human, and I don’t actually know what to think about this.

A flip side to omnirationality

Suppose I do an action that I know benefits Alice and harms Bob. The action may be abstractly perfectly justified, but if I didn’t take into account the harm to Bob, if I didn’t treat the harm to Bob as a reason against the action in my deliberation, then Bob would have a reason to complain about what my deliberation if he somehow found out. If I was going to perform the action, I should have performed it despite the harm to Bob, rather than just ignoring the harm to Bob. I owed it to Bob not to ignore him, even if I was in the end going to go with the benefit to Alice.

But suppose that I am perfectly virtuous, and the action is one that I owed Alice in a way that constituted a morally conclusive reason for the action. (The most plausible case will be where the action is a refraining from something absolutely wrong.) Once I see that I have morally conclusive reason for the action, it seems that taking other reasons into account is a way of toying with violating the conclusive reason, and that kind of toying is not compatible with perfect virtue.

Still, the initial intuition has some pull. Even if I have an absolute duty to do what I did for Alice, I should be doing it despite the harm to Bob, rather than just ignoring the harm to Bob. I don’t exactly know what it means not to just ignore the harm to Bob. Maybe in part it means being the sort of person who would have been open to avoiding the action if the reasons for it weren’t morally conclusive?

If I stick to the initial intuition, then we get a principle of perfect deliberation: In perfect deliberation, the deliberator does not ignore any reasons—or, perhaps, any unexcluded reasons—against the action one eventually chooses.

If this is right, then it suggests a kind of a flip side to divine omnirationality. Divine omnirationality says that when God does something, he does it for all the unexcluded reasons that favor it.

Incompatible reasons for the same action

While writing an earlier post, I came across a curious phenomenon. It is, of course, quite familiar that we have incompatible reasons that we cannot act on all of: reasons of convenience often conflict with reasons of morality, say. This familiar incompatibility is due to the fact that the reasons support mutually incompatible actions. But what is really interesting is that there seem to be incompatible reasons for the same action.

The clearest cases involve probabilities. Let’s say that Alice has a grudge against Bob. Now consider an action that has a chance of bestowing an overall benefit on Bob and a chance of bestowing an overall harm on Bob. Alice can perform the action for the sake of the chance of overall harm out of some immoral motive opposed to Bob’s good, such as revenge, or she can perform the action for the sake of the chance of overall benefit out of some moral motive favoring Bob’s good. But it would make no sense to act on both kinds of reasons at once.

One might object as follows: The expected utility of the action, once both the chance of benefit and the chance of harm are taken into account, is either negative, neutral or positive. If it’s negative, only the harm-driven action makes sense; if it’s positive, only the benefit-driven action makes sense; if it’s neutral, neither makes sense. But this neglects the richness of possible rational attitudes to risk. Expected utilities are not the only rational way to make decisions. Moreover, the chances may be interval-valued in such a way that the expected utility is an interval that has both negative and positie components.

Another objection is that perhaps it is possible to act on both reasons at once. Alice could say to herself: “Either the good thing happens to Bob, which is objectively good, or the bad thing happens, or I am avenged, which is good for me.” Sometimes such disjunctive reasoning does make sense. Thus, one might play a game with a good friend and think happily: “Either I will win, which will be nice for me, or my friend will win, and that’ll be nice, too, since he’s my friend.” But the Alice case is different. The revenge reason depends on endorsing a negative attitude towards Bob, while one cannot do while seeking to benefit Bob.

Or suppose that Carl read in what he took to be holy text that God had something to say about ϕing, but Carl cannot remember if the text said that God commanded ϕing or that God forbade ϕing—it was one of the two. Carl thinks there is a 30% chance it was a prohibition and a 70% chance that it was a command. Carl can now ϕ out of a demonic hope to disobey God or he can ϕ because ϕing was likely commanded by God.

In the most compelling cases, one set of motives is wicked. I wonder if there are such cases where both sets of motives are morally upright. If there are such cases, and if they can occur for God, then we may have a serious problem for divine omnirationality which holds that God always acts for all the unexcluded reasons that favor an action.

One way to argue that such cases cannot occur for God is by arguing that the most compelling cases are all probabilistic, and that on the right view of divine providence, God never has to engage in probabilistic reasoning. But what if we think the right view of providence involves probabilistic reasoning?

We might then try to construct a morally upright version of the Alice case, by supposing that Alice is in a position of authority over Bob, and instead of being moved by revenge, she is moved to impose a harm on Bob for the sake of justice or to impose a good on him out of benevolent mercy. But now I think the case becomes less clearly one where the reasons are incompatible. It seems that Alice can reasonably say:

1. Either justice will be served or mercy will be served, and I am happy with both.

I don’t exactly know why it is that (1) makes rational sense but the following does not:

2. Either vengeance on Bob will be saved or kindness to Bob will be served, and I am happy with both.

But it does seem that (1) makes sense in a way in which (2) does not. Maybe the difference is this: to avenge requires setting one’s will against the other’s overall good; just punishment does not.

I conjecture that there are no morally upright cases of rationally incompatible reasons for the same action. That conjecture would provide an interesting formal constraint on rationality and morality.

On a criticism of union theories of love

On some union models of love, like Robert Nozick’s, our well-being extends to include our beloved: good and bad things happening to our beloved count as happening to us.

A standard criticism of the union models (I first saw it in Jennifer Whiting’s criticism of Aristotle) is that we end up pursuing the other’s good not for their sake but for our own, since their good is a part of our well-being.

This criticism seems to me to only apply if one adds to such a union model the thesis that our actions are always solely in pursuit of our own good. But such a thesis leads to the problem that we don’t pursue other people’s good for their own sake independently of the union of love. The criticism, thus, is not a criticism of the union model of love, but of an egoistic theory of motivation.

The fact that the other’s good is a part of my good does not entail that I pursue the other’s good because it is my good. After all, we sometimes do things that we know benefit us but do them for reasons other than the benefit to ourselves. If after adding up the scores, I see that I am the winner of a game, my announcing the scores benefits me. However, I do not announce them because this benefits me, but because it’s the truth.

It is true that if I were omnirational, and if my own good were not excluded by a higher-order reason, then whenever an action benefited me, that benefit would be a part of my reasons for the action. But that is not objectionable: on the contrary, it is a part of the charm of love that the lover acts not just for the sake of the beloved but also for their own sake. That fact helps make the lover’s generosity not be a demeaning condescension.

Perhaps the criticism comes from a deeper mistake about love, the mistake of thinking that when we act lovingly, then typically the love is itself a part of the reasons for the action. For if the love is constituted by the other’s good being included in mine, and if the love is a reason for the action, then it does seem that when I act because of the love, I act because of the other’s good being included in mine. However, typically when we act lovingly, we do not act because we love. If my friend needs help, helping them is loving, but to reason “I love, so I should help” is to think a thought too many. Instead, one should just reason: “They need help.” My antecedent love makes it more likely that I will act on that reason, and my acting on that reason is partially constitutive of the continuation of the love, but the love is not itself the reason. After all, imagine that five minutes before finding out that my friend needed something, I stopped loving them. That would be no excuse not to help!

In fact, it seems to me that the best kind of union model would say something like this: What makes it be the case that my beloved’s good is a part of my good, what makes my beloved be “another me”, is the fact that I am pursuing my beloved’s good for their own sake. In other words, one could hold that love is constituted by union, but the union is constituted by pursuit of the beloved’s good.

Divine speech acts and classical theism

Here is a question I have wondered about and have never heard or seen much discussion of:

1. What does it mean to say that God engaged in some speech act, such as commanding or asserting?

The more anthropomorphic one’s theism, the easier the question can be answered, because the closer the analogy between divine speech acts and ours. But the setting that interests me here is classical theism (both because it’s the truth theory of God and because it’s more challenging). In particular, let’s take on board divine immutability and simplicity.

Let’s think about the human case first. We’re going to have to pay close attention to such factors as intention and context. Thus, the same words in the same tone are an assertion in an ordinary conversation but not an assertion when spoken on a stage. The same handwritten sentence can be a command in one case and in another can be a handwriting exercise. Theorists will differ as to the balance between intention and context in the correct theory. But I think it is easy to argue that an important part of the distinction between assertion and play-acting or between command and handwriting exercise will be constituted by intentions. For instance, it is not simply being on a stage that makes one’s words not be assertions. The actor on stage can yell “Fire!” upon seeing the flames licking the back of the room, and that will be an assertion—even if that word happens to be exactly what the script calls for at this time. (It may be an assertion that is not taken up, though, much as an assertion might not be heard in a loud rooom.)

Very roughly speaking, to engage in a speech act of kind K, one has to form the intention to be taken by one’s audience as engaging in a speech act of kind K.

Now, there are natural rock formations that look like faces. Suppose that somewhere in the solar system there is a natural rock formation that spells out “God exists”, and one day an English speaking astronaut comes across it. Is it an assertion by God?

It is certainly something made by God. For God made everything other than himself. But did God make it with the intention that it be taken as an assertion? Or is it just a formation of rocks intended for some other purpose than to be taken as an assertion? (Presumably, it’s not a handwriting exercise, since God doesn’t need to practice being already perfect.)

On more anthropomorphic theisms, there is no special problem here about the God case. God can form the intention to make an assertion just as a human being can or, just as a human being, he can fail to form that intention. But if divine simplicity is correct, then there are no contingent intrinsic divine properties. There is just God. Any contingency is on the side of creation. In particular, there cannot be two worlds that are exactly alike except with respect to divine intentions intrinsic to God. Divine intentions must supervene on creation and on necessary truths about God. But what contingent facts about creation and necessary truths about God can make it be that the rock formation is or is not a divine assertion?

One might try to make use of divine reasons. I have argued that divine simplicity entails divine omnirationality: whenever God does something, he does it for all the good reasons there are for doing it, rather than choosing which of the good reasons to act on. Now, suppose that in fact the astronaut’s faith in God is strengthened by the rock formation. That’s a good thing. Goods provide reasons. So, God has a good reason to make the rock formation in order to strengthen the astronaut’s faith. But the astronaut’s faith is presumably strengthened by her taking the formation as a divine assertion. So, God has a reason to have the astronaut take the formation as a divine assertion. And, thus, by omnirationality, God is acting on that reason, and the rock formation is an assertion.

But take a variant case. Our astronaut lands on a planet with a rock formation that says “Kneel!” But, now, kneeling is both good and bad for the astronaut. Perhaps it is spiritually good but physically bad, because our astronaut has bad knees. The astronaut takes it as a command. That’s a good and a bad thing: she kneels, hurts her knees, and the mission is in jeopardy. But she spent a few minutes in prayer, and that was good for her. And, in fact, in a complex world there will generally be pluses and minuses of anything. Even in the case of the “God exists!” rock formation, there is some benefit to believing without such overt signs, perhaps a greater maturity of faith.

We could try to make the intention condition work something like this: God counts as intending that something assertion-like or command-like (structured symbolically in the right way) be taken as an assertion or command provided it’s good in some way that it be taken as such. But that seems overbroad. Or we could say it’s an assertion or command provided it’s good on balance that it be taken as such. But when we are dealing with incommensurable values, there may be no “on balance”. These objections aren’t fatal: but they point to a need to do serious philosophical work here.

Here is a possible different solution. We don’t need to advert to speaker intentions in every case to figure out whether something is a speech act of the right sort. When yelled from the stage, we may need to know whether “Fire!” is intended as a warning or as part of the script. But when yelled from the seats, there is no reasonable doubt. There are contexts where no reasonable person in the relevant audience would fail to take something as a certain kind of speech act. You come across the Summa Theologica in a heath. Of course, it’s a speech act, of whatever sort a theological discourse is (a series of arguments and assertions). Every reasonable person who knew the language (that’s perhaps the relevant audience component) would take it as such.

Perhaps we can now say this:

2. In contexts where every reasonable person in the relevant audience who knew the relevant context sufficiently well would take something to be a divine speech act of a certain kind, it is a primary case of a divine speech act of that kind.

For primary divine speech acts, we need some kind of reasonable luminosity: they need to be the sort of thing that one couldn’t reasonably doubt to be divine speech acts if one knew the relevant circumstances. Perhaps God builds into our nature an ability to recognize divine speech acts.

And then we have derivative cases of divine speech acts, which are when the initial audience is enlarged by means of the members of the initial audience becoming heralds of the message, and the process continues. When the herald is being faithful to the message, what the herald says counts as a speech act of the original speaker. So, the heralds pass on the word of God. And since the heralds are human, their intentions are relevant and raise no deep ontological concerns.

This story would lead to a rather restrictive view of divine speech acts. The rock formations, in a vast universe, could be reasonably doubted. So they aren’t primary divine speech acts. The primary divine speech acts may, rather, be more like cases of prophecy, where God makes it reasonably impossible for the prophet to doubt what kind of a speech act it is.

I am not very happy with any of the stories above. This is just a vague and inchoate start. I don’t really want to finish off this task. It would make a really interesting philosophical theology dissertation, though.

When God doesn't act for some reason

Here’s an argument for a thesis that pushes one closer to omnirationality.

1. God is responsible for all contingent facts about his will.

2. No one is responsible for anything that isn’t an action (perhaps internal) done for a reason or the result of such an action.

3. If God doesn’t act on a reason R that he could have acted on, that’s a contingent fact about his will.

4. So, if God doesn’t act on a reason R, then either (a) God couldn’t have acted on R, or (b) God’s not acting on R itself has a reason S behind it.

Mercenary motives

A stranger is drowning in a crocodile-infested river. To pull him out, you'd need to go in the water yourself, and there is a moderate chance (say, 25%) that you would be eaten. You have no dependents to whom you owe it not to risk your life, but of course you don't like being eaten by a crocodile. It would be praiseworthy for you to engage in this heroic act. But if you don't do it, you aren't doing anything morally wrong. I want the story to be set up so this is clearly a case of supererogatoriness.

You have decided not to do it. But then the stranger offers you a million dollars. And so you leap in and pull him to safety.

You're not particularly morally praiseworthy. But have you done anything morally wrong in acting on the mercenary motive? Nothing wrong would have been done had you refused to take the risk at all. Why would it be wrong to do it for money? Indeed, is your case any different from that of someone who becomes a firefighter for monetary reasons? But wouldn't it be odd if it were permissible to be a businessman for profit but wrong to be a firefighter for profit?

So the mere presence of a mercenary motive, even when this motive is a difference-maker, does not make an action wrong. Nor does this constitute the agent as vicious.

But what if the mercenary motive were the only operative motive? That would be constitutive of vice. There need be no vice if the decision whether to save another at significant risk to self is decided in favor of caution, and there need be no vice if money overrides the caution. But if the mercenary motive were the only motive, then that suggests that had there been neither danger to you nor promise of payment, you wouldn't have pulled out the stranger, because you simply don't care about the stranger's life. And that's vicious.

It is morally important, thus, that care for the stranger's life be among your motives, even if the mercenary motive is necessary (or even if it is necessary and sufficient) for the decision to save. Likewise, if you decide not to save, the motive of care for the stranger's life had better be operative. The decision had better be a conflicted one. Only for a vicious person would the decision not to save be a shoo-in.

Divine omnirationality, reward and punishment

Omnirationality is the divine attribute in virtue of which when God does A, he does it for all the non-preempted reasons that in fact favor his doing A. (Here is an example of a reason preempted by a higher order reason: God promises me that as a punishment, he won't hear my prayers for the next hour; then that I ask God for something creates a preempted reason for him.) He does not choose only some of the relevant reasons and act on those, in the way a human being might.

One consequence of omnirationality is that when I pray for an event F, and F is good and in fact takes place, then I can safely conclude that F took place in part as a result of prayer. For a request is always a good reason to do something good, and while in principle the reason could be preempted, in fact it seems very unlikely that there was a preempting reason in this case. At this same time, in this case we cannot say that the good took place entirely as a result of prayer, because the very fact that it was a good was also, presumably, a non-preempted reason for God to bring it about.

Here is another example. Suppose Job leads a virtuous life in such a way that there is good reason for Job to have good things bestowed on him as a reward for the virtuous life. And suppose that, in fact, good things befall Job. Then we can confidently say that they befell Job in part in order to reward Job. For by hypothesis, God has a reason (not a conclusive one, as we learn from the Book of Job!) to bless Job, and the reason seems unlikely to be preempted, so when he blesses Job, he does so in part because it rewards Job.

The flip side of this is that, by omnirationality, if a sinner who has not been forgiven for a sin has a bad thing happen to her whose magnitude is not disproportionate to the sin, that bad thing happens to her at least in part as a divine punishment, unless some sort of preemption applies, since God has a reason to punish.

Forgiveness, of course, would preempt. But I assumed here the sin was unforgiven. Maybe one could claim that the redemptive events of the New Testament changed everything, preempting all of God's reasons to punish, but that does not seem to be the message of the New Testament. It really does seem that God's reasons to punish unforgiven sin are not preempted even in New Testament times. This does not, of course, mean that all evils that happen to people are best seen as divine punishments. First of all, forgiveness of a sin preempts, and probably annuls, the reasons of justice. Second, even when the justice of the matter is a non-preempted reason for God to allow the evil to befall, it need not be the most important one. God's desire to use the evil to reform the sinner or to glorify himself in a deeper way, may be a more important reason, sometimes to the point where it would be misleading, and maybe even false, to say that the evil befell because the person sinned—we could only say that the evil befell in small part because the person sinned.

Finally, as Jesus himself warns, that an evil befalls A and does not befall B does not imply that A was more worthy of the evil than B. For God may have had many additional reasons for allowing the evil to befall A and keeping it from B besides the merits of the wo.

We can try to probe more deeply by asking counterfactual questions: Would God still have had the evil befall A had A not sinned? But I think such counterfactual questions tend not to have answers.