Aquinas on drunkenness and sleep

Aquinas argues that

drunkenness is a mortal sin, because then a man willingly and knowingly deprives himself of the use of reason, whereby he performs virtuous deeds and avoids sin, and thus he sins mortally by running the risk of falling into sin.

On the other hand, Aquinas also argues that sleep suspends the use of reason:

What a man does while asleep, against the moral law, is not imputed to him as a sin; as Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. xii, 15). But this would not be the case if man, while asleep, had free use of his reason and intellect. Therefore the judgment of the intellect is hindered by suspension of the senses.

One might try to reconcile the two claims by saying that sleep is something that befalls us involuntarily, and that it would be wrong to willingly and knowingly go to sleep. But that would not fit with ordinary human practice, and would contradict Aquinas’ own rejection of the claim that it is “against virtue for a person to set himself to sleep”. Moreover, Aquinas notes without any moral warnings that sleep—like baths, contemplation of the truth and other apparently quite innocent things—assuages sorrow.

So what’s going on?

And to add a further complication, Proverbs 31:6 seems to recommend the use of alcohol as an analgesic.

I can think of three things one could say on behalf of Aquinas.

First, one might attempt a Double Effect justification. In sleep, the body rests. Aquinas certainly thinks so: the discussion of the suspension of reason during sleep presupposes that the primary effect of sleep is on the body. It is this bodily rest, rather than the suspension of reason, that is intended. One might worry that the suspension of reason is a means to rest. However, non-human animals, who lack reason in Aquinas’s sense of the word, also sleep. Presumably whatever benefits they derive from the sleep are available to us, and it seems not unlikely that many of these do not depend on the suspension of reason. Similarly, alcohol helps with pain in non-human animals, and so the mechanism by which it helps may not depend on the suspension of reason.

That said, I don’t think Aquinas would want to take this approach (though it may well work for me). For Aquinas thinks that it is stupid we cannot claim that an invariable or typical effect of something intended counts as unintended (Commentary on the Physics, Book II, Lecture 8, paragraph 214). But the suspension of reason is indeed an invariable or typical effect of sleep.

A second approach focuses on Aquinas’ response to the question of why the loss of rationality during the sexual act does not render the sexual act wrong, from which I already quoted the rejection of the claim that it’s vicious to set oneself to sleep:

it is not contrary to virtue, if the act of reason be sometimes interrupted for something that is done in accordance with reason … .

This approach does not seem to be based on Double Effect, but rather on some sort of principle that it is permissible to suspend a good for the sake of that same good. This principle applies neatly to sleep as well as to the biblical case of analgesic use of alcohol (given that reason opposes suffering the pain).

But this approach would also moderate Aquinas’s seemingly absolute rejection of drunkenness. For we can imagine cases where it seems that reason would recommend drunkenness, such as when a tyrant will kill you if you refuse to get drunk with them. And once one allows drunkenness in such extreme cases, what is to prevent allowing it in more moderate cases, such as getting drunk with one’s boss in the hope of getting a deserved promotion… or maybe just for fun? Aquinas can say that these cases are immoral and hence against reason, but that would beg the question.

A third approach would note that sleep, unlike drunken stupor, is a natural human state, and information processing in sleep is itself a part of our human rational processing. However, while this gives a neat explanation of why it’s permissible to set oneself to sleep, it doesn’t explain the permissibility of the analgesic use of alcohol or, more significantly in modern times, of the use of general anaesthesia during medical procedures.

A different approach for justifying sleep, the analgesic use of alcohol and general anaesthesia insists that temporary suspension of a good is different from willful opposition to the good. To eat in an hour rather than now does not oppose the good of food. The down side of this fourth approach is that it seems to destroy Aquinas’s argument against drunkenness as opposed to the good of reason. And it seems to let in too much: can’t one say that by torturing someone, one is merely suspending their painless state?

I think the best philosophical solution is the first, Double Effect. Aquinas alas can’t use it because his version of Double Effect is too narrow, given his view that typical effects of intended things count as intended.

Multiple levels of multiple realizability

We could have sophisticated beings who reason about the world via numerical Bayesian credences. But we could also have sophisticated beings who reason in some other way—indeed, we are such beings. And there is one sophisticated being who reasons about the world via omniscience. This suggests that reasoning and agency are multiply realizable at multiple levels, including:

1. brain/mind architecture

2. algorithms implementing general reasoning and representation strategy

3. general reasoning and representation strategy.

Each level is an abstraction from the previous. So now we have a very deep question: Is there a fourth level that abstracts from the third, to get the concept of reasoning as such? Or are the various general reasoning and representation strategies unified analogically, say by similarity to some primary case? And if so, what is the primary case? Omniscience? Logical omniscience plus numerical Bayesianism?

Christianity and paradox

Suppose we have a religion whose central tenets are paradoxical, verging on the contradictory. What would we expect? We might predict that the religion would be unsuccessful. But that would be too quick. The religion could be successful by adopting strategies like the following:

1. Hiding the central tenets from the bulk of the members.
2. Obscuring the paradoxical nature of the central tenets from the bulk of the members.
3. Downplaying the central tenets as unimportant.
4. Appealing almost only to the uneducated and ignorant.
5. Denigrating reason, and thus appealing to anti-intellectual impulses among uneducated and anti-rational impulses among the educated.

But now consider Christianity. It has central paradoxical doctrines, including Trinity, Incarnation and Real Presence. It does not hide them from the members. Nor is there any attempt to hide the paradoxical nature of these doctrines: that paradoxicality is plain to see, and if anything it is gloried in. Through much of the history of Christianity, the central tenets have been insisted on very publicly and are central to the liturgy. While Christianity has always had a special love for the downtrodden, its appeal has always also included many men and women of very high intellectual stature. Finally, while there are occasional instances of Christians denigrating reasons in history, the main thread of Christianity has been a defender of the importance of reason, even to the point of a significant part of the tradition embracing the Greek idea of humans as distinctively rational animals. How did it do it? Well, in addition to the five strategies above (and perhaps some others) there is also a sixth possibility:

6. Having true central tenets and having God work in the hearts and minds of members and nonmembers.

A possible limitation of explicitly probabilistic reasoning

Bayesian reasoners will have their credences converge to the truth at different rates depending on their prior probabilities. But it's not as if there is one set of prior probabilities that will always lead to optimal convergence. Rather, some sets of priors lead to truth faster in some worlds and some lead to truth faster in others. This is trivially obvious: for any world w, one can have priors that are uniquely tuned for w, say by assigning a probability extremely close to 1 to every contingent proposition true at w and a probability extremely close to 0 to every contingent proposition false at w. Of course, there is the question of how one could get to have such priors, but one might just have got lucky!

So, a Bayesian reasoner's credence converges to the truth at rates depending on her priors and what kind of a world she is in. For instance, if she is in a very messy world, she will get to the truth faster if she has lower prior credences for elegant universal generalizations, while if she is in a more elegant world (like ours!), higher prior credences for such generalizations will lead her to truth more readily.

Now suppose that our ordinary rational ampliative reasoning processes are not explicitly probabilistic but can be to a good approximation modeled by a Bayesian system with a prior probability assigment P₀. It is tempting to think that then we would do better to explicitly reason probabilistically according to this Bayesian system. That may be the case. But unless we have a good guess as to what the prior probability assignment P₀ is, this is not an option. Sure, let's suppose that our rational processes can be modeled quite well with a Bayesian system with priors P₀. But we won't be able to ditch our native reasoning processes in favor of the Bayesian system if we do not have a good guess as to what the priors P₀ are. And we have no direct introspective access to the priors P₀ implicit in our reasoning processes, while our indirect access to them (e.g., through psychological experiments about people's responses to evidence) is pretty crude and inaccurate.

Imagine now that, due to God and/or natural selection, we have ampliative reasoning processes that are tuned for a world like ours. These processes can be modeled by Bayesian reasoning with priors P₀, which priors P₀ would then be tuned well for a world like ours. But it may be that our best informed guess Q₀ as to the priors will be much more poorly tuned to our world than the priors P₀ actually implicit in our reasoning. In that case, switching from our ordinary reasoning processes to something explicitly probabilistic will throw away the information contained in the implicit priors P₀, information placed there by the divine and/or evolutionary tuning process.

If this is right, then sometimes or often when trying to do a formal probabilistic reconstruction of an intuitive inductive argument we will do less well than simply by sticking to the inductive argument. For our ordinary intuitive inductive reasoning is, on this hypothesis, tuned well for our world. But our probabilistic reconstruction may not benefit from this tuning.

On this tuning hypothesis, experimental philosophy is actually a good path to epistemological research. For how people reason carries implicit information as to what priors fit our world well.

Liar-like dizziness without truth

Can one run the liar paradox without the concept of truth?

Suppose I write on my board: "At no point today do I believe anything written on this board", and know that nothing else will have been on the board today. Now there is no problem of inconsistent truth assignment: there is no logical contradiction in the sentence on the board being true (in which case I don't believe it) and there is no logical contradiction in the sentence in the board being false (in which case I do believe it). But while there is no contradiction, there is dizziness as I try to figure out whether to believe what is on the board.

The dizziness results from two plausible principles:

1. I should avoid false beliefs.
2. If the evidence conclusively points to p, I should believe p.

Principle (1) prohibits me from believing what is on my board. For I know ahead of time that were I to believe what's on the board, I would be believing something false. The case somewhat resembles the surprise exam. For, it seems that knowing myself, I may know that I won't violate norm (1) in this regard. I also know that not violating norm (1) entails not believing what's on the board. But then I know p, and I know that p entails q, but I don't know q even though I am, plainly, thinking about q. That is, surely, at least a very unstable situation.

Perhaps, though, (1) is mistaken. Maybe it's rationally acceptable to believe something even when one knows that the belief would be false, when the belief is self-referential? Is the norm that I should refrain from believing something when I know that believing it would be the having of a false belief, or is the norm that I should refrain from believing something that I know to be false? I do not know that what is written on the board is false, because I do not know what I will in fact believe. Still, (1) does seem very plausible.

Or is this a case where, whatever I do, I do something irrational?

Or should I say what I say about the liar, and deny that what is written on the board has meaning, even though an exactly similar token would have meaning?

Bringing theology into metaphysical discussions

As readers of this blog know, I am not a big fan of the compartmentalization of knowledge, and specifically of a compertmentalization on which theological knowlege does not affect one's philosophical beliefs. Here I just want to note one thing. A lot of contemporary metaphysical arguments have some form rather like this:

Here's a phenomenon F. Look, it's puzzling. Here are three accounts of F. Look, they all fail. Here's a fourth account of F. Look, it doesn't fail for the reasons for which the three fail.

We're then supposed to accept the fourth account.

But of course such arguments are weak (there is nothing wrong with weak arguments, except that strong ones are preferable). Unless there is a further argument that any account must be one of the four, while such argument provides evidence for the fourth account, it should not give one very strong confidence in the fourth account. And at least in such a case, if the theology has a rational basis (e.g., in apologetic arguments), it seems clearly unproblematic to say, e.g., "Ah, but the fourth account fails, too, because it contradicts transubstantiation."

After all, if the fourth account of F contradicts transubstantiation, then the philosopher who accepts the fourth account and accepts transubstantiation needs to revise her beliefs. She could do so by rejecting transubstantiation. But assuming there is the kind of rational basis for her acceptance of transubstantiation that we might expect an intelligent Catholic to have (e.g., she is appropriately convinced by the apologetic arguments that show that Christ founded a Church whose basic beliefs would always be true and by the historical evidence that transubstantiation was, at least at one point in history, one of the basic beliefs of the Church), wouldn't it be silly for her to reject transubstantiation merely on the grounds of the fact that we have not yet found a satisfactory account of F that coheres with transubstantiation, but we have so far found an otherwise satisfactory account of F that does not cohere with transubstantiation? The confidence engendered by arguments of the form that was given for the fourth account of F is just too low to make it rational to reject transubstantiation.

Consider, too, that the revision to her web of beliefs in rejecting the fourth account of F is likely to be much smaller than the revision in rejecting transubstantiation if she is Catholic. (If she rejects transubstantiation, she will need to reject conciliar infallibility or else go Orthodox and deny that Trent was an ecumenical council. In either case, a lot of other beliefs would likely have to change.) It would be strange indeed if such significant transformation of one's belief system were to be made rational merely by the fact that three accounts of F are unsatisfactory and the only one we know of that doesn't fail in this way contradicts transubstantiation.

What is further typically true of these kinds of metaphysical arguments is that the fourth account, while not subject to the deficiencies of the first three, has some implausible consequences, too, which the author finesses. Even if in fact the author of the argument is right that these implausible consequences are less problematic than those of the first three accounts of F, it seems really clear that at least in such a case bringing in the theological consequences is entirely appropriate.

(I sometimes argue for a significantly weaker conclusion than the one I hold. This is certainly true in this post.)