Rust Belt Philosophy

Very few things in philosophy are quite as satisfying as letting a person's own claims be your counter-arguments (just ask Socrates). Take, as a case in point, Peter van Inwagen's objections to the problem of animal suffering. Yet another variation on the problem of evil, the problem of animal suffering asserts that animals would not suffer (as much as they do) if a perfect being existed and, as such, that no such being exists, including the Christian God. Like the human-centric problems of evil, it too focuses on God's purportedly flawless moral nature and points out that animal suffering seems not to fit in with any workable moral framework. Van Inwagen, of course, disputes this idea, using the following story:

"(1) Every world God could have made that contains higher-level sentient creatures either contains patterns of suffering morally equivalent to those of the actual world, or else is massively irregular.
(2) Some important intrinsic or extrinsic good depends on the existence of higher-level sentient creatures; this good is of sufficient magnitude that it outweighs the patterns of suffering found in the actual world.
(3) Being massively irregular is a defect in a world, a defect at least as great as the defect of containing patterns of suffering morally equivalent to those found in the actual world.
(4) The world—the cosmos, the physical universe—has been created by God."

He holds that each of these "is true for all anyone knows," and therefore this story defeats the problem of animal suffering. Right off the bat, this fails as a defense because of his nonexistent justification for it - relying on mere possibilities does not suffice to establish premises in a philosophical argument. Strangely, even though he never tries to positively establish (1) through (4), he does try somewhat to defend them from attack. Some of these attempts merely lack completeness; others, though, indicate a fatal inconsistency on van Inwagen's part.

In the first category one finds his idea of massive irregularity. "A massively irregular world" in van Inwagen's terminology "is a world in which the laws of nature fail in some massive way. A world, a physical universe, containing all the miracles recorded in the Old and New Testaments would not, on that account, be massively irregular, for those miracles were too small (if size is measured in terms of the amounts of matter directly affected) and too few and far between." Preventing animal suffering, on the other hand, would qualify as massively irregular, he says, and then proceeds to tell a story filled with roundabout ways in which God could prevent animal suffering. There are two obvious problems with this argument strategy. First, van Inwagen himself has no sense whatsoever of the scale on which physics would have to be violated in order for Torahic and New Testament miracles to happen, let alone how these violations would compare to the ones in his needlessly complex story: for instance, how much miraculously prevented animal suffering is equivalent to the miracle of the flood, in which God created a huge amount of water, allowed Noah to build and maintain what would be by all accounts an impossible nautical structure, prevented all the animals thereon from dying in any number of ways, removed that same huge amount of water from existence altogether, and then somehow scattered all the animals (including humans!) onto different continents (all the while maintaining a miraculous and massively irregular connection between souls and bodies)? Posed in those terms, van Inwagen would have not the slightest idea how to answer the question - and that's using his specifically constructed version of a world in which animals don't suffer. This is where his second mistake comes in: he only ever discussed one such world. To make a universal claim ("Every world God could have made that contains higher-level sentient creatures either contains patterns of suffering morally equivalent to those of the actual world, or else is massively irregular") and then attempt to justify it with a single, non-arbitrary example is, to borrow his phraseology, a massive fallacy.

Also in the first category - although pointing towards the second - is van Inwagen's defense of (3). He wants regularity, he says, because "it is plausible to suppose that deception, and, a fortiori, massive deception, is inconsistent with the nature of a perfect being." How very true - and yet, how very much more useful a premise for van Inwagen's opponents than for van Inwagen himself. As it turns out, the world we live in actually is massively deceptive. Just think of how long it took humans to understand the heliocentric model of the solar system, or that thunder and lightning are naturally occuring events, or that non-human animals have mathematical ability and moral instincts, or that the starlight we see is actually incredibly old, or that the universe is not mechanistically ordered, or that drug-induced experiences are (or aren't) meaningful - and think of how many humans are still wrong about which gods, if any, exist, how many are still wrong about evolution, how many fail to understand even the most basic precepts of mathematics, history, chemistry, physics, psychology, and so on. The human psyche, in fact, seems so geared to making mistakes that it might be more fair to say that humans are massively deceived (both in extent and scope) far more often than not. If, as he says, this deception points strongly to the nonexistence of a perfect being, then he has just given the skeptic a devastating argument against theism. But, as it turns out, he may not endorse this defense after all, because of his epistemological basis for it.

Recall that van Inwagen's justification for (3) had only intuitional components: "it does seem that massive irregularity is a defect in a world," he says. Moreover, "deists and other thinkers who have deprecated the miraculous on the ground that any degree of irregularity in a world is a defect, a sort of unlovely jury-rigging of things" [bold mine]. In other words, the only place he can look for evidence that irregularities even amount to defects at all - let alone moral defects of such strength that they outweigh all animal suffering - is people's intuitions. Rebutting this stance, I give you Peter van Inwagen: "One's intuitions about value are either a gift from God or a product of evolution or socially inculcated or stem from some combination of these sources. Why should we suppose that any of these sources would provide us with the means to make correct value-judgments concerning matters that have nothing to do with the practical concerns of everyday life? ... our modal intuitions, while they are no doubt to be trusted when they tell us that the table could have been placed on the other side of the room, are not to be trusted on such matters as whether there could be a 'regular' universe in which there were higher sentient creatures that did not suffer." Of course, this latter argument was one he employed against skeptics: their modal intuitions do not suffice for premises in arguments. When it comes to his modal intuitions, though, be assured that you can trust them entirely - after all, they are the sole bases of premises (1), (2), and (3) in his story above.

Van Inwagen goes on to commit more fallacies later (just to pick a short example, he falsely compares integers to real numbers in saying that "[t]here may well be no minimum number of cases of intense suffering that God could allow without forfeiting whatever good depends on the suffering of beasts [this would be an integer]—just as there is no shortest sentence that a legislature can establish as the penalty for armed assault without forfeiting the good of effective deterrence [this would be a real number]"), but his inconsistent use of logic early on utterly dooms this defense. Either all modal intuitions are valid (in which case he must accept his opponents' modal premises as well as his own) or none are (in which case he has to abandon this argument altogether) or something distinguishes his from his opponents' (which he could not plausibly show without begging the question). He simply cannot assert the second option while actually holding to the third.

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Labels: false analogy, fantasy world, hasty generalization, inconsistency, merely possible, problem of evil, religion