Gratitude to the cosmos

Some non-theists, without thinking that the cosmos is a person, want to say that we can be appropriately grateful to the cosmos. This is supposed to do justice to our deep human need to be grateful for the good things to happen to us.

I have two lines of thought that this doesn’t work. Both start with the thought that the cosmos’s connection the good and bad events in our lives is relevantly symmetric. The cosmos is not an agent, so no kind of Principle of Double Effect can be employed to say that the good stuff is to be attributed to the cosmos and the bad stuff is not. Moreover, since the cosmos is not an agent, its activity is beyond moral justification.

Now, my first line of thought. Suppose Fred has, with no moral justification, fed me poison and an hour later he gave me an antidote. I should not be grateful for the antidote. Similarly, if I get cancer and then the cancer goes into remission, I shouldn’t be grateful to the cosmos for the remission. Yet cancer going into remission is a paradigm case of the sort of thing that we feel the need to be grateful for. But since the cosmos gave us the cancer, and did so with no moral justification, there is no call to be grateful for the cosmos taking the cancer away. (The reason for my “with no moral justification” clause is this: If the poison constituted a case of morally justified capital punishment, and the antidote constituted a morally justified pardon, then gratitude for the antidote is appropriate.)

The second is this. Given that the cosmos’s relation to the bad stuff in our lives is relevantly like its relation to the good stuff:

1. If it is appropriate to be grateful to the universe for good stuff, it’s appropriate to be resentful against the universe for bad stuff.

But:

2. It is not appropriate to be resentful against the universe.

First, intuitively, such resentment seems a paradigm case of a spiritually unfruitful attitude. I think we have all felt resentments against non-agential things—say, pieces of machinery—but clearly such resentments are something to be ashamed of.

Second, I should feel no resentment against people who, without in any way doing anything wrong, have caused bad things to happen to me. If someone running in the dark from a vicious animal accidentally knocks me down because she didn’t see me, no resentment is appropriate, because there was nothing inappropriate. Everything the cosmos does to me is in some sense an accident, because the cosmos is not an agent.

Perhaps the last argument could be countered by saying that even if the cosmos is not an agent, it might have a teleology, and perhaps we could be resentful when it departs from it (and grateful when it follows it). But I don’t think the cosmos is a substance, and only substances have an intrinsic teleology (as opposed to a teleology induced by external agency—which in this case would require something like theism).

Fear and epistemic probability

If I resent your doing A and you didn't do A, then my resentment was perhaps justified (if I was justified in thinking you did A) but it was nonetheless misplaced. On the other hand, if I am crossing the road and I notice a car speeding towards me, and I fear it will run me over, but then the driver brakes and stops just barely in time, my fear was entirely appropriate and not at all misplaced.

The proper object of resentment, thus, is an event (or action) taken as actual (and wrongful), and when that action doesn't occur, the resentment is misplaced. But the proper object of fear is an event merely taken to be a serious chance. What kind of chance? An objective chance or a merely epistemic probability?

I will argue that it's an epistemic probability. Suppose that I fear that my investments will fail. I get into a time machine, travel to the future, and notice that my investments won't in fact fail. I go back in time and it would be appropriate for my fear to go away. Nonetheless, there is an objective chance of the investments failing: the chancy processes that make investments go up and down continue to run despite my knowledge. But there is no longer a serious epistemic probability. So it looks like epistemic probability is what is relevant. Moreover, I think it can be appropriate to have fears about things that are in fact necessarily false. For instance, if I have an answering a multiple choice exam in calculus, and I the question asks whether the definite integral of some function over some range range is 2, 3, 5, or π/2. I think it's probably 5, but there is something in my calculation that I am not confident of, and I realize that if I got that wrong the answer is π/2. My fear that the definite integral might be equal to π/2 is in fact appropriate, even if it is necessarily true that the answer is 5.

This makes fear very different from resentment: fear is made appropriate by epistemic probabilities--either the actual ones or the ones my evidence justifies (which one?), while resentment is made appropriate by what people have actually done.

I wonder if this focus on the epistemic dimension isn't partly responsible for the notorious way that fears resist rational thought. No matter how much I reflect on the very good statistics for indoor wall climbing injuries (the chance of injury during a session is about the same as that while driving 26 miles) and what I know about the stringency of Baylor's training of my belayer, when I look down from 50 feet up, I feel fear. This fear is misplaced: my epistemic probability for a fall is tiny (and justifiedly so given the evidence). Why? Because it looks dangerous. Now, in the absence of defeaters, appearances yield epistemic probabilities. Moreover, many times even though a defeater to an appearance of an impending bad is sufficient to defeat belief, a sufficient epistemic probability will remain (after all, we may be wrong about the defeater), and it could take quite a bit of time to evaluate whether the defeater is complete or only partial. Given that physical danger may require a quick response, and the examination of defeaters takes time, it makes sense for us to be wired in such a way that appearances have a strong tendency to directly drive fear. So in cases like my climbing case, while the fear is misplaced, inappropriate and unjustified, it is nonetheless understandable (unlike my pathological fear of dogs!).

(Well, when I reflect on the fact that an indoor climbing session has equal injury probabilities to a 26 mile drive, this actually makes me feel a bit afraid. For I do think driving (or being driven) by an average driver is genuinely dangerous. And so perhaps my fear is justified, just as I would be justified to be afraid of a 26 mile drive (even if in fact I don't always feel afraid). If so, then change the example, say to standing on a five inch thick glass floor above a precipice.)

A gratitude/resentment argument

This argument is inspired by an argument of Kenneth Pearce.

1. (Premise) It is sometimes appropriate to be grateful for or to the universe or to be resentful for or at the universe.
2. (Premise) It is only appropriate to be grateful for or to A if A is an agent or an effect of an agent.
3. (Premise) It is only appropriate to be resentful for or at A if A is an agent or an effect of an agent.
4. Therefore, the universe is an agent or an effect of an agent.
5. (Premise) If the universe is an agent or an effect of an agent, naturalism is false.
6. Therefore, naturalism is false.

On forgiving and forgetting

Somewhere in his diaries, Kierkegaard thinks forgiveness by an omniscient being is paradoxical. (Of course, that's no reason to deny either divine forgiveness or divine omniscience, for Kierkegaard—paradox here is good.) One way of filling out the paradox is that forgiveness is a kind of forgetting, and an omniscient being can't do that. There is a story, quite possibly anecdotal, of a girl who claimed to have visions of Jesus. Eventually she has an audience with her bishop, who to check if the visions were genuine, asked her to ask Jesus what he (the bishop) confessed in his last confession. Next week the girl comes back: "Jesus said he forgot." And of course our language has the phrase: "Forgive and forget."

However, forgiveness is actually very different from forgetting. First of all, forgetting is insufficient for forgiveness. Forgiveness (when valid) has a crucial normative consequence—there is something that the forgiven malefactor no longer owes her forgiving victim. Forgetting has no such normative consequence. I may be glad that my misdeed has been covered over by mist in your memory, but I am in no way off the hook. If anything, I am in a tougher place once you have forgotten, because the only way I can get forgiveness from you is by reminding you of what I have done, and that might be undesirable (it might cause pain to you again).

Moreover, forgetting has no place in ideal cases of forgiveness. For if you have forgetten the ill I have done you, you surely have likewise forgetten that you have forgiven me that ill, unless your logical skills have gone haywire. But now it is possible that you will come across evidence of what I did to you, without at the same time coming upon any evidence of your forgiveness. And if you do not know that you have forgiven me this offense, you may well experience the kind of resentment towards me that you had put away when you forgave me, and even seek vengeance. Forgiveness includes an objective and a subjective component: the objective component is a certain normative canceling of debt (as it were?), while the subjective is a putting away of resentment and a surrender of the desire for vengeance. But if you do not remember having forgiven, the resentment may return, until you go through the subjective component of forgiveness again.

In the ideal case, when you have forgiven me, you keep track of your new commitment not to resent such-and-such a deed and of my new normative status as "forgiven former malefactor".

This, however, carries a danger with it. For if you keep track of what you have forgiven me, then surely you run the danger of your priding yourself on your moral superiority in not holding me bound. To dwell on having forgiven is dangerous—forgiveness does, after all, put us in a position of superiority, and there is a danger that our forgiveness will be haughty and humiliating to the one forgiven. The cure for this is love, and we sinners have an additional help, which is meditation on our own sinfulness—we do not forgive haughtily, but we forgive as we wish to be forgiven.