Maverick Philosopher

Thus few if any will say that Jones, an adult human, lacks the right to life when he is sleeping, or passed out drunk, or under general anaesthetic, or temporarily incapacitated due to an auto crash, or having a serious stroke or heart attack, or reversibly comatose, or in some similar state. Nor would we say that Jones' right to life varies with his alertness (or any other mental variable) or his age. Suppose a male is at his prime (all things considered) at age 50. Few would say that a person under or over 50 has less of a right to life. And if anyone were to say that, I wouldn't consider it worthwhile to discuss moral questions with him.

RP, explicitly stated, is CP. Now suppose someone, call him 'Peter,' tries to mount an argument against CP. He begins by reminding us of a couple of conceptual truths:

CT1. A capacity C's being unexercised at time t excludes C's being exercised at t. (This is an analog of the principle that a thing's being a potential F at t excludes its being an actual F at t.)

CT2. The properties that make an exercised capacity exercised, or supervene upon a capacity's being exercised are not properties of the corresponding unexercised capacity. (This is an analog of the principle that the properties that make an actual F actual are not properties of the same thing when it was potentially F.)

From these conceptual truths, Peter then infers that CP is false. He reasons as follows. "Since the right to life supervenes upon the exercise of such capacities as rationality, agency, and the ability to make and implement plans, there is no right to life when none of them are being exercised." Suppose Peter's argument is sound and shows that CP is false. Then Peter's argument will have 'proved too much': it will have proved that RP is also false since CP is just an explicit statement of RP.

Of course, Peter might bite the bullet in one of two ways. He might concede that RP entails CP and reject both of them. Or he might cleave to RP while prising it apart from CP. He would then be holding RP in tandem with CCP. Either way, I would consider the discussion to be at an end. For then we would lack common moral ground for profitable discussion.

The right thing to say is that a person's right to life, which supervenes upon such capacities as rationality and agency, is had by the person not just at the times at which the capacities are exercised but at other times as well. It is the person's having of the capacity (whether exercised or not) that confers the right to life.

Young children lack even the capacities associated with moral personhood and rights-possession. But they have a second-order capacity, the capacity to develop these capacities. The potentialist grounds the right to life in the potential to develop the first-order capacities. If one argues against the potentialist by invoking the truisms that the potential is not actual and the properties of the actual are not properties of the potential, then one should also argue that first-order capacities are not enough to ground a right to life, and that the actual exercise of these capacities is necessary. But then one must accept the counterintuitive consequence that a person's right to life is had by him only when he is fully exercising such capacities as rationality, agency, and the ability to make and implement plans.

In numerous previous posts, with the help of commenters, I have made precise the sense of 'potentiality' in play in PA and PP and have refuted various objections to PP including Joel Feinberg's "logical point," Peter Lupu's somewhat similar objection, as well as some of the probative overkill or proves-too-much objections. There is still an objection or two to turn aside, but the time has come to give positive arguments for PP.

To understand PP one must understand that it grounds the pre-natal right to life in the very potentiality of a genetically human individual to develop, in the normal course of events, into a being that actually possesses such rights-conferring properties as rationality. Therefore, if there are any post-natal genetically human individuals to which we ascribe rights on the basis of their potentiality to develop into individuals that actually possess rights-conferring properties, then subscription to PP is already a fact and its extension to the pre-natal cases will be mandatory unless there can be shown to be a morally relevant difference between the pre-natal and the post-natal cases. Now there are such post-natal cases. Therefore, since we already accept and apply PP to these post-natal cases, we ought to apply it to the pre-natal cases as well unless there is a morally relevant difference between the two sorts of case.

Consider post-natal humans from birth on to the age of seven or so. Do they have rights? Liberals, who believe in all sorts of rights, will presumably maintain that children have rights to health care, education, food, shelter, clothing and what all else. But underlying all of these is surely the right to life without which none of the others has any purchase. Now what is the basis for ascribing rights to neonates or one year olds? They cannot walk or talk, syllogize or philosophize. Chess is out of the question as is cell phone use. They cannot even control their bowels. They are helpless and in a sense good-for-nothing. They don't cook or clean or shop or work or pay taxes. They are more useless than cats who at least can fend for thmselves and control the rodent population. There is little that is actual about them. They don't realize much value or exercise the capacities that confer value or a right to life. And yet, as matter of fact, we consider them precious.

On what basis, then, do we ascribe value and rights to them? We value them for their promise and potentiality. We value them for what they will, in the normal course of events, become. I am not saying that there is nothing actual in young children that we value. We may value their openness to experience, their curiosity, their ability to learn, their sheer existence. But their potentiality outweighs their actuality and this potentiality is the ground of our ascription to them of the right to life and other rights that presuppose this fundamental right. So my first argument goes like this:

1. We ascribe the right to life to neonates and young children on the basis of their potentialities.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between neonates and young children and fetuses.
3. Principles -- in this case PP -- should be applied consistently to all like cases.
Therefore
4. We should ascribe the right to life to fetuses on the basis of their potentialities.

What I am arguing is that we already do accept PP and that we ought to be consistent in its application. To refuse to apply PP to the pre-natal cases is to fail to apply the principle consistently.

Let S be a sperm cell, and O an ovum. Suppose S and O unite to form zygote Z, which then develops into person P. P is perhaps transtemporally numerically identical to Z, but P is certainly not transtemporally numerically identical to S. (From here on, 'identical' is short for 'transtemporally numerically identical.') For there is nothing to make P identical to S rather than to O. Therefore, P is identical to S only if P is identical to O as well. But since S and O are numerically distinct, P cannot be identical to each of them. This is because identity is transitive and symmetrical. If P were identical to S, and P were identical to O, then S and O would be identical to each other — which is not the case. So P is not identical to S. But then S is not a potential person. It follows that S is not a counterexample to PP.

In order to understand this argument it is important to realize that when we say that x is a potential person, what we mean is that x is transtemporally numerically identical to any actual person who realizes x's potentiality to become a person. Potentiality in the sense in play in PP and in the Potentiality Argument is intimately bound up with diachronic numerical identity. To say of a human neonate that it is a potential speaker of English is to say, among other things, that this neonate is transtemporally numerically identical to any actual English speaker who realizes the neonate's potentiality to speak English. In general: to say of x that it is a potential F is to imply that x is transtemporally numerically identical to any actual F that realizes x's potential to become an F.

A sperm cell S has the potential P to combine with an egg cell O to form a zygote. But this potential P would be the potential P* to become a person only if S is transtemporally numerically identical to any actual realizer of P*. But no sperm cell can be transtemporally numerically identical to any actual person. And this for the reason given above in the Stone argument.

You may recall our discussion of zygotic fission. Well, this is a case of fusion: S and O combine to form Z. At a time t before fusion, S and O each exist. But does S exist at a time t* after fusion? This is equivalent to the question: Is S transtemporally numerically identical to Z? The answer is in the negative. For if S is identical to Z, then so is O: whatever reasons support saying that S is identical to Z apply just as well to O's identity with Z. But since S and O are numerically distinct, they cannot each be identical to Z, otherwise they would be identical to each other. Therefore, S is not identical to Z. And if S is not identical to Z, then S cannot be identical to any actual person.

One kind of probative overkill objection is easily sent packing, namely, the sort of objection that is based on the confusion of potentiality with the mere logical possibility of transformation. It is thinkable without contradiction that a pumpkin seed become a rabbit. Indeed it is thinkable without contradiction, and thus logically possible, that anything become anything. But of course a potentiality is something quite specific and has nothing to do with an empty logical possibility of transformation. After all, we know that pumpkin seeds do not become rabbits; they become pumpkins. Rabbits give birth to rabbits, not kangaroos or pumpkins. Nature is orderly. If there are potentialities in nature, they are directed at specific outcomes. They are like dispositions in this regard. Solubility is the disposition to dissolve, not the disposition to shatter or explode. And just as a disposition can go unmanifested, a potentiality can go unrealized. But to say that a potentiality can go unrealized is not to say that the potentiality is not itself something real, indeed something actual. Anyone with an elementary grip on the notion of potentiality can see that the first kind of overkill objection fails.

According to a less crude objection, there is no principled way to ascribe potential personhood to a zygote without also ascribing it to spermatazoa, unfertilized ova, and pairs of sperm cells and egg cells.

Let's consider first the pair (S, O). Let S be one of my sperm cells and O an unfertilized egg cell of a nun in India. This pair exists because its members exist. But this pair is not a potential person. The very idea is incoherent. For one thing, a pair is either a set or a set-theoretical construct, and as such an abstract object; but surely no abstract object has the potentiality to become a concrete individual person. But whether or not pairs are abstract objects, the notion that the pair in question is a potential person is absurd on the face of it. For a sperm cell out of all contact with an egg cell simply cannot develop into a person. "It takes two to tango."

Now consider a sperm cell S. Given that there are potentialities in nature, S has the potentiality to fertilize an egg. But as noted, potentialities are directed to specific outcomes. The potentiality to fertilize an egg is not the potentiality to become a person. Surely, a sperm cell out of all relation to an ovum does not have the potentiality to become a person.

But in rebuttal someone might argue as follows:

a. Had S penetrated O, then zygote Z would have resulted.
b. Had Z resulted, then Z would have become person P.
-----
c. Had S penetrated O, then Z would have become P.

The idea behind the rebuttal is that S's power to penetrate and thus fertilize O can be represented by the subjunctive conditional (a), and zygote Z's potential to become a person can be represented by subjunctive conditional (b). But then it seems to follow that S's potentiality to fertilize O is a potentiality for S to become a person.

The trouble with this rebuttal is that it assumes transitivity. Transitivity fails, however, for subjunctive conditionals. Consider:

d. If J Edgar Hoover had been born a Russian, then he would have been a communist.
e. If J Edgar Hoover had been a communist, then he would have been a traitor.
-----
f. If J Edgar Hoover had been born a Russian, then he would have been a traitor.

This is clearly an invalid argument; its invalidity is due to a failure of transitivity in the case of subjunctive conditionals. The (a)-(c) argument is similarly flawed. So the rebuttal fails.

As for an unfertilized egg O, we can say that it has the passive potentiality to be penetrated and fertilized. But this is not to say that it has the active potentiality to become a person.

Of course, the removal of all the objections to an argument does not amount to a positive demonstration of the argument's soundness. But at the risk of being tedious, the issue before us is solely whether Feinberg's objection is a good one.

The PA in a simplified form can be set forth as follows, where the major premise is the PP:

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
2. The fetus is a potential person.
-----
3. The fetus has a right to life.

What Feinberg calls the "logical point about potentiality" and finds unanswerable is "the charge that merely potential possession of any set of qualifications for a moral status does not logically ensure actual possession of that status." (Matters of Life and Death, ed. Regan, p. 193) Feinberg provides an example he borrows from Stanley Benn: A potential president of the United States is not on that account Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.

It seems to me that Feiberg's objection, far from being unanswerable, is easily answered. Let me begin by conceding something that is perfectly self-evident, namely, that inferences of the following form are invalid:

4. X is a potential possessor of qualifications for a certain moral or legal status S
ergo
5. X is an actual possessor of qualifications for status S.

This is a glaring non sequitur as all must admit. If x potentially possesses some qualifications, then x does not actually possess them. So of course one cannot infer actual possession from potential possession. A five-year-old's potential possession of the qualifications for voting does not entail his actually having the right to vote.

But what does this painfully obvious point have to do with PP? It has nothing to do with it. For what the proponent of PP is saying is that potential personhood is an actual qualification for the right to life. He is not saying that the fetus' potential possession of the qualifications for being a rights-possessor makes it an actual rights-possessor. He is saying that the actual possession of potential personhood makes the fetus a rights-possessor. The right to life, in other words, is grounded in the very potentiality to become a person.

What Feinberg and Co. do is commit a blatant ignoratio elenchi against the proponents of PA. They take the proponent of the PA to be endorsing an invalid inference, the (4)-(5) inference, when he is doing nothing of the kind. They fail to appreciate that the potentialist's claim is that potential personhood is an actual (and sufficient) qualification for the right to life.

Of course, one can ask why potential personhood should be such a qualification, but that is a further question, one logically separate from the question of the soundness of Feinberg's objection.

I have just decisively refuted Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality" objection. What Peter Lupu et al. must do now, without changing the subject or introducing any extraneous consideration, is to tell me whether they accept my refutation of Feinberg. If they do not, then there is no point in discussing this topic further. If they do, then we can proceed to examine other objections to PA, and the positive considerations in favor of PA.

Objections and Replies

A. Peter objects to premise (2): "Even if we grant that rights apply to every entity that possesses the required rights-making properties it does not follow that these rights also apply to an entity which has the potential to acquire the appropriate right-making properties." I cheerfully admit that it does not follow. Note, however, that (2) is not an argument but an assertion. The assertion is that the right to life is grounded directly in the potentiality. So I would say that Peter is committing an ignoratio elenchi. I grant that if x is F, one cannot validly infer that a potential x is F. (Oak trees provide shade, acorns do not.) But that is not the point. The point of (2) is that the right to life is grounded in the very potentiality to develop into a being that clearly and actually possesses rights-conferring properties. Think of a one-month old infant. What is it actually? Not much! And yet it is precious, intrinsically and not because mother and relatives value it. We rightly ascribe a right to life to it, not on the basis of its actual possession of rights-conferring properties, but on the basis of its potential possession of such properties.

Note that there is nothing 'speciesist' about the above argument. The idea is not that the right to life is grounded in the (undeniable) being human of the fetus; it is grounded in the potentiality of the fetus to become a rights-possessor. A rights-possessor is a person in the normative sense of the term, and I admit the possibility of there being nonhuman persons, including persons who belong to other animal species.

B. Peter has a second objection to premise (2): It is ". . . too broad: There are many entities that have the potential to acquire the said right-making properties, but we are not ready to endow them with rights." Consider the innumerable unfertilized egg cells in the body of a fertile nun who adheres to her vows. It would be absurd to claim that the nun, by her way of life, is violating the right to life of those ova. But she would be if the above potentiality argument were sound, says Peter. For each of these eggs has the potentiality to become a being that actually posesses rights-conferring properties. I respond by denying that the unfertilized eggs have any such potentiality. Here I must appeal to your common sense: is there not an obvious difference in respect of potentiality between an unfertilized egg and a conceptus? To employ a more homey example: is there not an obvious difference in respect of potentiality between the yeast used to make pizza dough and the pizza dough? The latter has the potentiality to rise, but the yeast does not.

C. Peter's third objection expands on his second: "While Bill is ready to grant to Hartshorne that it is possible that every unfertilized egg should develop into a mature human being that features the requisite right-making properties, he maintains that 'no egg cell by itself has this potential.' 'Why not?' one might legitimately ask." Well, isn't it just obvious that there is a distinction between the weak sense of 'possibility' in play when we say of an unfertilized egg that it is possible that it be fertilized and the very strong sense of 'possibility' involved in potentiality?

Let me spell this out a bit. Consider the fertile celibate nun and one of her ova, O. It is of course possible that the nun break her vows, have sex, get pregnant, and that O is the 'lucky' ovum. Clearly, there is a de re possibility with respect to O, namely, that O be penetrated by a spermatazoon. In possible worlds parlance we can say that, in the actual world, O remains unfertilized, but that there are many merely possible worlds in which O is fertilized. (There is the world in which O is penetrated by sperm cell S1, the world in which it is penetrated by S2, etc.) But in the actual world, there is nothing in O that is its potentiality to develop into a fetus or a full-fledged human being. It has no such potentiality, though of course it is possible that it be fertilized, in which case a certain potentiality comes into existence, namely, the potentiality that the result of O's being penetrated by a certain sperm cell develop into a full-fledge human being.

The difference strikes me as obvious. An unfertilized egg cell in its normal environment (in a female body) has no power to develop into a human being. It has this power or potential only when it is fertilized. But then it is not a mere egg cell. For this reason, the potentiality argument cannot be accused of proving too much. It does not extend to sperm cells and egg cells. I am afraid that people who don't see this are playing fast and loose with 'potentiality.' It is a very specific mode of possibility, not to be confused with less specific modes.

The question, then, is whether (P1) and (P2) are logically consistent. To say that two propositions are logically consistent is to say that they can both be true. To say that two propositions are logically inconsistent is to say that they cannot both be true. To show that two propositions are consistent it is not necessary to show that they are true; it suffices to show that it is possible that they be true. Thus, BV is a worldclass runner is logically consistent with BV is a worldclass mountainbiker even though both propositions are (spectacularly!) false.

Now are (P1) and (P2) logically consistent in the sense lately defined? Obviously they are. Suppose that the right to life is grounded in the potentiality to develop into something to which one accords person-status, where a person is a rights-possessor. This is a possible view, and indeed one actually held by many. Any Aristotelian worth his salt will be able to spell it out coherently and perhaps even persuasively. Suppose also that a similarly coherent case is made for (P2). One will then have made a case for the possibility of their both being true. So why should anyone think that (P1) and (P2) are inconsistent? On the face of it, they are logically consistent.

So why do so many people think they are inconsistent? Perhaps these people are not concerned with the question of logical consistency, which is a relation between or among propositions. Perhaps they are thinking in terms of consistency in the application of a principle. Consistency in this sense is not a relation between or among propositions, but involves a relation between a principle and cases that it may or may not subsume.

To apply a principle consistently is to apply it to all like cases in a like manner. So if the principle is to cherish, value, uphold human life, then perhaps their thought is that to apply this principle to the unborn but not to certain criminals is to apply it inconsistently. "How can you oppose the killing of the unborn, when you favor the killing of certain criminals? Be consistent!"

The answer to this should be obvious. The cases are dissimilar. The unborn are innocent while the criminals are not. This is a difference that makes a moral difference; it is a difference that justifies a difference in treatment. No doubt principles should be applied to like cases in a like manner. But there is no inconsistency in refusing to apply a principle to cases that are relevantly dissimilar.

One who is 'pro-life' need not hold the absurd view that in no circumstances may human life be taken. For surely there are circumstances in which it is morally permissible, and perhaps even morally obligatory, to take human life. Self-defense is one case, just war is another, and capital punishment is a third. Indeed, it precisely because one is pro-life that one will defend oneself and others from murderers using means up to and including the talking of their lives!

This is all so obvious that I am astonished that people routinely repeat the charge that it is inconsistent to support both a right to life for the unborn and the death penalty. Where is the inconsistency? There is no logical inconsistency and there is no inconsistency in the application of a principle.

For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument will fall afoul of the dreaded quaternio terminorum, the four-term fallacy. There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (1) is unexceptionably true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (2) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction. Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (2) is more reasonably rejected than accepted. Indeed, one can say that the argument begs the question at (2). For one cannot know (2) to be true without knowing (3) to be true.

If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (2) is acceptable, but (1) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.' I wrote "perhaps (2) is acceptable" because it is arguable that (2) is not acceptable. For a woman's body is an improper part of her body; hence if a woman has a right to do anything she wishes with her body, then she has a right to kill her body by blowing it up, say. One who has good reason to reject suicide, however, has good reason to reject (2) even when 'part' is construed narrowly. And even if we substitute 'proper part' for 'part' in the original argument, it is still not the case that a woman has a right to do whatever she wishes with any proper narrow part of her body. Arguably, she has no right to cut out her own heart, since that would lead to her death.

My conclusion, then, is that the Woman's Body Argument is not rationally compelling. Indeed one can easily 'run it in reverse' with no breach of logic:

1. The fetus is a (wide) part of a woman's body.
~3. A woman has no right to do whatever she wants with the fetus.
Therefore
~2. Some (wide) parts of a woman's body are such that she has no right to do whatever she wants with them.

The 'forward' argument and the 'reverse' argument cancel each other. This shows that neither one, taken by itself, is rationally compelling.

Conservative Argument

1. The pre-natal offspring of human parents are innocent human beings from conception.
2. It is morally wrong to kill innocent human beings.
Therefore
3. It is morally wrong to kill the pre-natal offspring of human beings from conception.

Note that one cannot validly move from (1) to (3) by immediate inference; one needs the mediation of (2), and for two reasons. First, there is the formal-logical point that without (2) there is no middle term. Second, there is the substantive Humean point that one cannot validly derive an 'ought' from an 'is': to validly infer a normative conclusion, there must be a normative proposition among the premises.

I hope it is clear to everyone that the question beloved of journalists and politicians -- When does life begin? -- is singularly inept because multiply ambiguous. First, it does not make clear that we are talking ontogenetically rather than phylogenetically. Second, it does not make plain that our concern is with human life and not some other kind or life in general. Third, as deployed by most, it conflates the ontological question with the normative question of the moral/legal permissibility of abortion.

The Moral Question. This is the normative question as to whether abortion is ethically permissible or impermissible. The moral question is not the same as the ontological question because an answer to the latter does not entail an answer to the former. Suppose you are talking to a liberal and suppose he accepts (1) above. He may with no offence to logic reject (3) by rejecting (2). He might hold that killing innocent human beings is wrong, except in the case of the unborn! He might support this with the assertion that the pre-natal lack the properties possession of which is necessary for being worthy of moral consideration, or worthy of sufficient moral consideration to trump the rights of the mother. Our liberal interlocutor my insist that the pre-natal lack rights-conferring properties.

This disagreement shifts the discussion from the non-normative ontological question to the normative question of the exact circumstances in which killing members of homo sapiens is wrongful.

The Legal Question. Now imagine you are talking with someone who accepts the above Conservative Argument: he holds that, from conception on, it is morally wrong to kill pre-natal human beings. He might still maintain that abortion ought to be legal (legally permissible) at some or all stages of fetal development. For surely morality and legality are distinct. Here are three principles that I believe are true:

P1. Not everything morally impermissible should be legally impermissible.
P2. Not everything morally obligatory should be legally obligatory.
P3. Not everything morally permissible should be legally permissible.

I defend these three principles here. Now if (P1) is true, as surely it is, then it is open to someone to argue that abortion, though morally impermissible, ought to be legally allowed. What this means is that further argumentation is needed to take us from the moral unacceptability of abortion to its legal unacceptability. One cannot assume that just because X is morally unacceptable, then X ought to be legally unacceptable.

In political debate, the legal question is paramount. But the positive law codifies and rests upon (some) of our moral judgments. For example, we outlaw rape because we believe it is immoral. So the legal question about abortion leads us back to the moral question.

1. The moral status of a human fetus cannot be greater than that of an animal such as an adult cat.
2. An animal such as an adult cat does not have a right to life.
3. Like cases ought to be treated in a like manner.
-----
4. We ought not ascribe to human fetuses a right to life.

Now let's consider two responses to this argument. I'll call them the animal rights response and the traditionalist response.

A proponent of animal rights might reject the argument by rejecting (2) and then go on to give the following pro-life argument:

1*. The moral status of a human fetus cannot be less than that of an animal such as an adult cat.
~2. An animal such as a cat does have a right to life.
3. Like cases ought to be treated in a like manner.
-----
~4. We ought to ascribe to human fetuses a right to life.

Commenter Spur can tell me whether this second argument is one he would endorse. Remarks of his in earlier threads suggest that he would. The gist of the argument is that if nonhuman animals have rights, then surely human fetuses have rights.

A traditionalist response to the original argument would be to reject premise (1). The traditionalist holds that the human fetus, just in virtue of being human, is elevated in moral status above the moral status of the members of every other animal species. But to reject (1) is to open oneself to the charge of speciesism. A speciesist consider the members of his own species to be superior to the members of other species, just in virtue of being members of his own species. Thus a human speciesist considers a human fetus, however undeveloped, to have a moral status superior to that of even the most developed members of other species, whether the other species be an actual species or merely possible (e.g. extraterrestrial) species.

What's wrong with being a speciesist? It is similar to what is wrong with being a racist. The racist holds that the members of his race, just in virtue of being members of his race, are superior in moral status to the members of other races. Thus a black racist holds that blacks are superior in moral status to whites and Asians just in virtue of being black. This is morally offensive since the moral value of a person is not a function of race, or sex for that matter. In a famous phrase, what matters is not the color of one's skin but the content of one's character. Similarly, it is morally offensive to think that the members of one's own species are morally superior to the members of other species just in virtue of being members of one's own species. Someone who considers a human zygote to have a higher moral status than a mature healthy porpoise, say, owes us an explanation of the disparity in status. To simply claim that the zygote is a member of the human species is not sufficient, and attracts the charge of speciesism.

As a pro-lifer, I must turn aside the original argument. But since I reject animal rights, I cannot turn aside the argument by rejecting (2). So I must reject (1). But then how do I avoid being taxed with speciesism? I cannot say that a human fetus has a special moral status just in virtue of being a member of homo sapiens.

The problem is this: How can I maintain that a human fetus at whatever stage of development from conception on has a right to life while denying that a mature healthy porpoise has a right to life?

I solve this problem by pointing to a morally relevant difference between human fetuses however undeveloped and the members of nonhuman animal species. The difference is one of potentiality: human fetuses in the normal course of events will develop into beings that actually possess properties that ground their higher moral status, properties that make them rights-possessors. The argument is along these lines:

5. Although the human fetus does not actually possess the properties that confer moral status, such properties as self-consciousness and rationality among others, it has the potential to acquire them in the normal course of events.
6. No non-human animal has the potential to develop into a being whose morally relevant actual properties are those of a mature human.
-----
7. The higher moral status of human fetuses is not due to their membership in the human species, but due to their potential for development.

Of course, the potentiality solution gives rises to further questions. But it is time to punch the clock. Tomorrow's another day.

The argument seems to be this:

1. The fetus is human in exactly the same sense that the unfertilized eggs of a human female are human.
2. There is nothing wrong in preventing the development of such eggs into human beings.
-----
3. There is nothing wrong in preventing the development of fetuses into full-fledged human beings.

This argument is unsound due to the falsity of its initial premise. Hartshorne ignores the potentiality of the fetus to develop, in the normal course of events, into a full-fledged human being. No egg cell by itself has this potential. This is a crucial difference that Hartshorne papers over by confusing possibility and potentiality. Every potentiality is a possibility, but not conversely.

Hartshorne speaks of the "possible destiny" of a fetus and of an ovum, as if the sense of 'possible' is the same for both. Not so. There is a very thin sense of 'possible' according to which each of a fertile sexually abstinent female's ova is possibly such as to develop (if fertilized) into a human infant. But no one of these eggs has the potential so to develop.

Here is a simple analogy. When I make pizza, I begin by making the dough. I use flour, water, eggs, and yeast. Having mixed those ingredients, I have a blob of stuff with the potential to rise. But surely no one will say that the flour itself, or the water or eggs or yeast by themselves, has the potential to rise. Of course it is possible that a certain portion of flour (water, etc.) become an ingredient in a risen mass of dough. But I don't have to worry about the flour in my pantry turning into a mass of wet and moldy dough on its own.

Every potentiality is a possibility, but not every possibility is a potentiality. Sperm and egg, on their own, have no potential to develop into a human being. But a human zygote does. This is the point that Hartshorne seems to miss.

Of course, a potential person is not an actual person, and one might claim that only actual persons have a right to life. But this is a further question.

3. When does life begin? This question ought to be avoided because it is imprecise. Presumably we are interested in ontogeny not phylogeny, and in humans rather than other animals. We are not asking when life first arose on earth, or when human life first arose on earth. So the question to ask is: When does an individual human life begin? The answer to this question is easy: at conception. For if an individual human life begins at some time t after conception, then what existed before t would have to be either not an individual or not human or not alive. And the absurdity of that ought to be self-evident.

Suppose my human life began six months after I was conceived. Call this time t. Was I dead before t? No, I was alive. Was I composed of nonhuman genetic material before t? No, I was composed of human genetic material. Was I not an individual before t? Was I perhaps a species or a universal or a set or some other kind of abstract object? No, I was an individual or particular living organism.

Someone might grant all this and still deny that I was a human being from conception on. "The sperm and egg cells whence you sprang were individual, human, and living, but you wouldn't say that these precursors of you were human beings; so could it not be the case that before t you did not exist as a human being?"

It is clear that human sperm and eggs cells are not human beings, just as it is clear that the individual, living, human parts of a human being are not human beings. For example, I have a human heart as opposed to an artificial heart or a pig's heart; said heart is fortunately alive and kicking; and it is an individual entity. But no one will say that my human heart is a human being. Granting all this, however, seems consistent with maintaining that the new thing that comes into being when my gametes were joined was a human being. Can I argue for this? Well, if my neonate self was a human being, which it was, then how could it be denied that my fetus self the day before birth was a human being? And so on back to conception.

So I maintain that an individual human life, an individual human being, first begins to exist at conception.

4. But the real question, the hard question, and the question that the abortion debate centers on is different from the above easy questions. It is the question: When does an individual human life acquire person-status, the normative status of being a person, a status that confers upon it rights such as the right to life?

In a simpler form, the question is: When does an individual human life become a rights-possessor? The answer to this question is not obvious. At conception? At viability? At birth?

5. Here is one argument you can try out on pro-choice 'adversary.' Get her to concede that infanticide is morally wrong, and wrong because it violates the right to life of the infant. Then ask her if there is a difference that makes a moral difference between a neonate (a fresh born infant) and an unborn fetus that is just about to emerge from the mother's womb. When she is unable to point to a difference that would justify a difference in treatment, then say that abortion near the end of the pregnancy is just as morally wrong as infanticide is. Of course, she might bite the bullett and claim that both are morally acceptable!

Here is an analogy. Whether you kill me inside my house or outside my house makes no moral difference. Whether you kill me a little earlier or a little later makes no moral difference. So whether you kill a fetus inside the mother or outside, a little earlier or a little later, makes no moral difference.

2. Pastor Rick Warren puts the question to Obama: "At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?" Obama's response is abysmally bad. He says that whether one views the matter theologically or scientifically, for him to give a definite answer ("to answer the question with any specificity") is "above my pay grade."

Note first of all that there cannot be a scientific answer to Warren's question. The question is normative in nature: When does a human fetus acquire such rights as the right to life? Biology cannot answer this question. Biology has nothing to say about rights or duties or any normative notion. For Obama to mention science shows that he doesn't understand the question, or else that he is trying to obfuscate the issue. A second thing to note is that theology has nothing essential to do with the question either. The question is about rights. You do not have to be a theist to believe that there is a right to life and that it is possessed by the unborn. A fortiori, one needn't be a Christian to hold this view. An atheist could easily maintain, and some atheists do maintain, that the rights we grant infants should be extended to the unborn on the ground that there is no morally relevant difference — no difference that makes a moral difference — between an infant and a human fetus. It does not take a genius to see that there are anti-abortion arguments that do not rely on any religious or theological premises.

A third thing to note is the vacuity of some of what Obama says. He earnestly informs us that "There is a moral and ethical element to this issue" — as if that needed to be said. He then, at 2:46, goes on to show what he does not understand Warren's question when he characterizes pro-life advocates as holding that "life begins at conception."

The question is not when life begins. For that question has an easy and uncontroversial answer: individual human life begins at conception. Were one to deny that, maintaining that the fetus becomes human only some time after conception, then one could ask what it was before that time: bovine? lupine? The question is not when life begins but when an individual human life acquires such rights as the right to life.

But most important to note is that Obama fails to take a definite position. He fails to give a plain and coherent answer to the simple and direct question that Warren posed, namely, "At what point does a baby get human rights?" McCain, by contrast, answered with alacrity: "at conception." That is not an uncontroversial answer, but it is a direct and defensible answer. We know where McCain stands. Where Obama hems, haws, and obfuscates, McCain takes a stand.

One idea worth exploring is that there is room for supererogatory acts in Kant's scheme under the rubric of imperfect duties. Kant tells us that ". . . by a perfect duty I here understand a duty which permits no exception in the interest of inclination . . . ." (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, AA 421, fn) A perfect duty can be either towards oneself or towards another. Kant gives the prohibition of suicide as a perfect duty to oneself and the prohibition of deceitful promises as a perfect duty towards others. These are proscriptions that admit of no exception, and I take it that perfect duties are perfect in that they are excepttionless: in no circumstance may one take one's own life, and in no circumstance may one make a deceitful promise. If so, then imperfect duties are prescriptions that admit of exceptions. This interpretation fits the examples Kant gives (423-424). There is the duty to oneself of cultivating one's talents, and the duty to to others of benevolent assistance. Both of these duties are prescriptions and both admit of exceptions. My general duty to cultivate my talents is not a duty to cultivate all my talents, or even any particular talent. And the duty of benevolent assistance cannot be a duty to assist everyone. Paul Guyer's reading is similar:

In the Groundwork, Kant's principle of morality gives rise to a fourfold classification of duties, resulting from the intersection of two divisions: between duties to oneself and to others, and between perfect and imperfect duties. Perfect duties are proscriptions of specific kinds of actions, and violating them is morally blameworthy; imperfect duties are prescriptions of general ends, and fulfilling them by means of performing appropriate particular actions is praiseworthy. The four classes of duty are thus: perfect duties to oneself, such as the prohibition of suicide; perfect duties to others, such as the prohibition of deceitful promises; imperfect duties to oneself, such as the prescription to cultivate one's talents; and imperfect duties to others, such as the prescription of benevolence (4: 422-3, 429-30 ). It is straightforward what a perfect duty prohibits one from doing; it requires judgment to determine when and how the general ends prescribed by imperfect duties should be realized through particular actions.

Note that Guyer states that the fulfilling of imperfect duties is praiseworthy. Now it is the supererogatory that we praise: it is inappropriate to praise people for doing what they are obligated to do. How morally absurd to praise a pater familias for paying the rent and putting food on the table! That is what he is supposed to do, what he morally must do. The failure to do such is blameworthy, but the performance is merely required, hence not praiseworthy. Since the fulfilling of imperfect duties is praiseworthy, it seems we can conclude that in Kant the class of supererogatory acts either is or is a proper subclass of the class of imperfect duties.

Further support for this interpretation comes at Grundlegung 429-430 where Kant speaks of "necessary or obligatory duties to others" and a "contingent (meritorious) duty to oneself." In English, 'obligatory duty' smacks of pleonasm, but that might not be the case for Kant's schuldige Pflicht. If duties divide into the obligatory (schuldigen) and the meritorious (verdienstlichen), then we can say that Kant accommodates supererogatory acts under the rubric of imperfect or meritorious duties.

There is more to it than this, of course, and there is a technical literature on this topic only a small amount of which I have read; but I think I can safely say two things: (i) a case can be made for Kant's being able to accommodate the supererogatory, and (ii) Kantians are more hospitable to the supererogatory than are utilitarians.

For my part, I have always thought it a fundamental error and an impoverishment of moral philosophy to reduce its scope to duties and obligations. Aristotelian and Stoic philosophy acknowledged that we had duties we should fulfill, but this was only one part and not the central part of morality. The central moral question was how we should live our lives in the best way possible. Part of the answer was indeed fulfilling the duties that pertain to the roles we assume (spouse, parent, citizen, teacher, etc).

BV: I think you are right about the impoverishment you mention. An adequate ethics would probably have to synthesize the insights of consequentialist, deontological, and virtue-ethical approaches. It is also worth investigating whether virtue theories will also have trouble accommodating the supererogatory. Suppose one maintains that

An action is right if and only if it is what an agent with a virtuous character would do in the circumstances.

This seems to imply that it is morally required that one act as a virtuous agent would. Now Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa are virtuous agents. But is one who is in their circumstances morally required to engage in their heroic and saintly acts? See here.

I’ve been thinking about how an Aristotelian would react to your example of feeding some street people. The Aristotelians (and Phil) would emphatically reject the claim that you had an obligation or duty to feed them. They were not relatives or anyone else that you could be thought responsible for. You never promised to help them. You were not responsible in any way for their becoming impoverished street people, were you? In short, you did nothing to obligate yourself to feed these strangers.

BV: Right, I did nothing to obligate myself to feed those strangers. But not all duties (obligations) are contractually acquired, or acquired by some act or ommission. Do you deny this? Arguably, one has some obligations just in virtue of being a moral agent. Surely I am morally obliged not to harm other persons. I have that obligation just in virtue of being a moral agent. It is not so clear that I have a positive duty to help other people, or that they have the positive right to be helped. But suppose I see a stranger having a heart attack. It would strike me as morally dubious in the extreme were you to maintain that I am under no obligation to pull my cell phone out of my pocket and dial 911. And don't forget we are talking morality here, not the positive law.

What you did in feeding them was perhaps a generous act, and if so, virtuous as such. I say perhaps, because we first need to consider whether your act observed the classical modalities of giving the right thing to the right people at the right time in the right amount for the right reason, ETC. I think it could be argued that giving money to people begging in this way is not a wise or proper choice. This is certainly debatable, but is rewarding apparently able-bodied people for begging in this fashion a good idea? I would not do it if accosted in an outdoor café by street people. I would see that they were promptly removed from the restaurant! That kind of rude, intrusive behaviour is not acceptable. This is not heartlessness, but a genuine concern to show them that aggressive begging is not an acceptable way to get by. Unless they are totally incapacitated, they need to be offering some service or entertainment (Ockham’s case) for which I might be willing to reward them. But begging or demanding money of people trying to eat their dinner is not a service.

It depends on the exact circumstances. In my example I described the bums as harmless (and thus no threat to other people in the cafe) and as truly needy. I never give money or anything to the panhandlers I run into on Mill Ave. in Tempe for they are young, able-bodied, shiftless, and not truly needy. Indeed, one is in some circumstances positively obliged to not help them.

Your point, I take it, is that in no conceivable circumstances is anyone under a moral obligation to help a stranger unless one has contracted to help him or done something (inadvertently damaged his property, say) that gives him a claim on one. If that is your point, then it needs defense, and I would say it is more in need of defense than its negation.

To avoid unprincipled appeals to moral intuition, though, one needs a systematic theory, and that is hard to come by.

Clear examples of precepts are the Ten Commandments. Poverty, (complete) chastity, and obedience, on the other hand, are counsels:

As there are three great hindrances to the higher life, so also the counsels are three, one to oppose each. The love of riches is opposed by the counsel of poverty; the pleasures of the flesh, even the lawful pleasures of holy matrimony, are excluded by the counsel of chastity; while the desire for worldly power and honour is met by the counsel of holy obedience. Abstinence from unlawful indulgence in any of these directions is forbidden to all Christians as a matter of precept. The further voluntary abstinence from what is in itself lawful is the subject of the counsels . . . . Vide.

I am at a loss to explain how any viable ethical scheme, whether 'humanist' or 'theological,' could fail to admit a category of actions called 'supererogatory.' And this quite independently of Catholic moral doctrine which to me qua philosopher is just another topic to be examined. Act utilitarianism as standardly formulated implies that that there cannot be a category of supererogatory actions, but then I have never quite understood the appeal of utilitarianism, and am tempted to respond, 'So much the worse for act utilitarianism.' But this remark calls for a bit of discussion which, of course, can only begin to scratch the surface of the surface.

Roughly, what the act-utilitarian is saying is that an action is right iff it maximizes utility. If our utiliarian is a hendonist, then utility is cashed out in terms of pleasure and we get something like:

An action A is right iff A leads to the greatest pleasure of the greatest number.

Now a right action is presumably not merely one that is permitted, but rather one that is obligatory. The right thing to do is what one must do. If so, then the above biconditional, read right-to-left, says that acts that are pleasure-maximizing are obligatory. But this is wildly counterintuitive.

Suppose I have ordered an expensive dinner in an upscale outdoor cafe for you and me, and three hungry but harmless bums approach our table. If they are truly needy, then I am inclined to say that it is obligatory that we feed them by, say, taking them to across the street to McDonalds and buying them burgers and fries. But that action would not maximize the pleasure of all concerned. There would be a greater total pleasure if I were to buy the bums meals equal in excellence to my own. Suppose I could easily do so, money being no object, and my doing so would not anger any of the other patrons of the restaurant or cause the place to becomne flea-infested. Still, it is obvious to me that I am under no obligation to do any such thing. At the very most, I am morally obliged to see to it that the bums get something to eat. Treating bums to pollo alla marsala is surely in excess of anything that could be morally demanded, even if they have the palate for such fare.

No doubt a sophisticated act-utilitarian would have ways of responding to this. But my present purpose is merely to bring out in schematic fashion how the topic of supererogation bears upon various ethical doctrines.

Since by definition a supererogatory action is one that is good but not obligatory, the above amounts to an argument for supererogatory actions. The argument is valid and the first premise self-evident. So the soundness of the argument rides on the second premise. Here, I suppose, an appeal to intuition is unavoidable.

So I will simply state that it is morally obtuse to praise someone for doing what he is obligated (whether legally or morally) to do. You don't praise a person for driving in accordance with the traffic laws, you blame him for failing to do so. It is a sign of moral confusion and moral decline to praise people for doing what they ought to do.

Praise and blame attach to the supererogatory and the prohibited, respectively. Neither attach to the obligatory.

While I'm on the topic of moral confusion, I saw an official sign on a pedestrian traffic signal in Tempe, Arizona. It read: Please do not cross against the light. The pertinent code was cited. Now what moral idiot formulated this sign? 'Please' is a word used in making a request, not in issuing a command. Am I being requested to not cross against the signal? If it is a request, then it is permissible for me to decline. "No thank you, I prefer to do as I please regardless of public safety and order." And if it is a request, why cite the traffic code? Or am I being commanded to not cross against the signal? But then 'please' is out of place.

If you cannot see the difference, then you cannot think in moral categories.

1. There are supererogatory actions
2. Whatever is good to do ought to be done
---
3. There are two moral senses of 'ought,' one prescriptive the other commendatory.

Ad (1). I am using 'supererogatory' in a wide sense. Accordingly, an action can be supererogatory (roughly: above and beyond the call of duty) even if it is not heroic or particularly costly (financially or otherwise) to the agent. It can be something as trifling as leaving a 50% tip in a restaurant. If an action is obligatory, then it is good to do, and bad to leave undone. If an action is supererogatory, then it is good to do, but NOT bad to leave undone. Suppose I have lunch in a restaurant in which the food is good and the service adequate. Then

a. I am legally and morally obligated to pay the bill.
b. I am morally but not legally obligated to leave a 15% tip. (Or so I would argue.)
c. I am neither legally nor morally obligated to leave a 50% tip.

Nevertheless it is a good thing to leave a large tip (other things being equal), but not bad if I fail to leave a large tip. So the action is supererogatory in the wide sense here in play.

Ad (2). The principle that whatever is good to do ought to be done is theoretically attractive. It is attractive because it forges a partial link between the axiological and the deontic which are two aspects of the normative. Axiological terms include 'good,' 'evil',' 'value,' 'disvalue,' 'ideal.' Deontic terms include 'obligation,' 'prohibition,' 'permission,' 'right,' 'duty.'

Note the difference between (2) and

4. Whatever is good ought to be done.

(2) is about the good-to-do; (4) is about the good-to-be, which is a wider category. (4) says that everything which would be good were it to exist ought to be brought about by someone. It suffices to refute (4) to adduce a state of affairs that would be good if realized, but is not in the power of any finite agent to realize. Well, it would be good if none of us had to to die; but the immortality of human beings is not a state of affairs that can be brought about by any finite agent or agents.

Much more needs to be said about the principle (2) but let's assume that one accepts it.

Now under what conditions can it be true both that (1) there are supererogatory actions, and (2) whatever is good to do ought to be done? On the face of it, these seem contradictory. The supererogatory is that which it is good to do but not obligatory. But if what is good to do ought to be done, then it seems to follow that what is good to do is obligatory — which contradicts (1).

The contradiction is avoided if we distinguish between two moral senses of 'ought.' In the prescriptive sense, what one ought to do is what one is obligated to do. In the commendatory sense, what one ought to do is good to do but not obligatory.

But are there any sentences that feature moral uses of 'ought' that do not impute obligations? Suppose my wife says to me, 'We ought to give more of our income to charity.' Suppose further that there is an obligatory percentage and that we are already giving that percentage. In saying what she says, my wife is not imputing an obligation to us; she is recommending that we do more than we are obligated to do. Since the context is moral, this seems to be a moral use of 'ought' that does not impute an obligation. This seems to be a clear counterexample to (P) above.

Suppose instead she had said to me, 'We ought to check out the Roy Orbison exhibit at the Tempe Center for the Arts before it is too late.' Visiting such an exhibit is a morally indifferent action: neither prohibited, nor obligatory, nor supererogatory. The use of 'ought' in this example is nonmoral. It like the 'ought' in 'If you want to get to Tempe from Gold Canyon by freeway, then you ought to head East on the Superstition Freeway.'

Robert Merrihew Adams (Finite and Infinite Goods, Oxford 1999, p. 235) offers this example: "The religious leaders of the world ought to launch an appeal to protect the physical environment in which humanity must live." Someone who says this is not saying that the leaders are under an obligation; he is saying that it would be a good idea were they to act as recommended.

To sum up. There are nonmoral and moral uses of 'ought,' but not every moral use is an obligation-imputing use. So the biconditional (P) is false. What is true is the conditional,

P*. If agent A is morally obligated to X, then A ought to X.

Note first that the following is not a counterexample to (P):

1. You really ought to get out for a hike while the wildflowers are still in bloom.

Someone who asserts (1) is not speaking from a moral point of view. He is using 'ought' in a nonmoral sense. He is saying to the addressee that it would be a good idea, not morally but aesthetically, to hike while the wildflowers are still blooming. The sense of 'ought' in (P), however, is moral. So (1) is not relevant to (P) and cannot tell against it. But consider

2. Given the amount of vile and irresponsible speech engaged in by cyberpunks, you ought not allow just anyone to comment at your site.

In (2) the sense of 'ought' is moral just as it is in (P). But someone who asserts (2) does not by so doing imply that the addressee is under a moral obligation to not allow just anyone to comment. (2) expresses a moral recommendation. It is morally commendatory rather than morally imperative. One who asserts (2) is saying that it is a morally good idea to not give a forum to just anyone.

Since (2) and (P) both feature the same sense of 'ought,' a moral sense of 'ought,' and (2) does not impute an obligation, (2) is a counterexample to (P). So it looks as if I ought to replace the biconditional (P) with the conditional

P*. Necessarily, if agent A is morally obligated to X, then A (morally) ought to X but not conversely.

This result seems to tie in nicely with what I said about the obligatory and the supererogatory. The morally obligatory is that which it is morally good to do but morally bad to leave undone, while the morally supererogatory is that which it is morally good to do but NOT morally bad to leave undone. What counterexample (2) shows is that there are actions that are morally supererogatory: morally good but not required.

Thanks to correspondent Phil O. Sophy the TerraVitan for help in sorting this out. Any errors that remain are of course also in part his responsibility!

Pursuing the analogy, we note that the following two alethic modal principles each has a deontic analog, where 'p' ranges over propositions and 'A' over actions:

1A. If p is necessary, then p is possible, but not conversely.
1D. If A is obligatory, then A is permissible, though not conversely.

2A. P is impossible iff ~p is necessary.
2D. A is impermissible iff ~A is obligatory. (e.g. Sexually molesting children is impermissible iff not sexually molesting children is obligatory.)

But of course the following ab esse ad posse principle has no deontic analog:

3A. If p is true, then it is possible that p is true.
3D. If A is done, then A is permissible.

This is not surprising since the deontic is a species of the normative.

Now let's try to characterize (not define) the deontic concepts of the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory in terms of the axiological concepts of good and bad:

4. If A is impermissible, then A is bad to do and good to leave undone.
5. If A is obligatory, then A is good to do and bad to leave undone.
6. If A is permissible then A is axiologically indifferent: neither bad to do and good to leave undone, nor good to do and bad to leave undone.

These characterizations seems to leave conceptual room for two other sorts of actions, actions that are good to do but NOT bad to leave undone, and actions that are bad to do but NOT good to leave undone. The former are supererogatory in a wide sense of the term, and the latter are suberogatory.

For example, paying one's bill in a restaurant is (legally and morally) obligatory: it is good to pay the bill and bad to leave without paying. But tipping is (legally, though perhaps not morally) supererogatory: it is good to tip but not legally required, and in this sense not bad to leave no tip. If this is unclear, consider tipping in excess of 20%. Surely this would be supererogatory: good to do (ceteris paribus) but not bad to leave undone. One could plausibly argue that restaurant patrons are morally obligated to tip in the amount of 15-20% of the tab given that waiters and waitresses work for minimum wage and rely on tips for a livable wage; but surely no one is obligated to leave a 50% tip, say. And yet it would be a very nice thing to do for that pretty waitress working her way through school. It would be good to do but not bad to leave undone.

Do you balk at calling such trifling actions supererogatory because they are not grand or heroic like throwing oneself on a grenade to save one's buddies? Well then, I will accommodate your point by distinguishing between wide and narrow senses of 'supererogation.' Or I might just give you the word as long as you grant me a category of actions an example of which I have just provided.

Now for some examples of suberogation. A supererogatory act is a good act that is in excess of what is morally or legally required. A suberogatory act is then one that is bad but not so bad as to be impermissible. The following might be examples: talking too much, public displays of affection, breaking wind in public, picking one's nose in front of others. The practitioner of public rhinotillexis does nothing legally or morally impermissible, but it is something bad, and not just aesthetically. I want to say that it is a morally bad action that not impermissible. So I say it is suberogatory.

More needs to be said. I am not sure that in the end the sub- and supererogatory don't collapse into the permissible thus obviating the need for two further categories of actions. Further reading: My essay On Tipping, and the SEP article, Supererogation.

I don't see that "x is something I ought to do iff x is something I'm morally obligated to do" is a conceptual truth, or even true. [. . .] Non-consequentialist moralities allow room for good deeds that are not obligatory. If helping a stranger is a good deed and you are fully able to perform it without endangering others, then I am quite comfortable recommending to you that you ought to do it. But I am not suggesting you have any duty or an obligation to do so. [. . .] So, you ought to help does not imply you have a duty to help.

I will now demonstrate that you ought to help does indeed imply that you have a duty to help, assuming that one is not equivocating on 'ought' and is using 'ought' as it is used in (P).

I agree that there are good deeds that are not obligatory. Suppose my neighbor is away when an important-looking package is delivered to his door. I take it into my house for safekeeping until he returns. Surely I am under no obligation, moral or legal, to do such a thing. Yet it is a good deed.

But it does not follow that it is a deed that I ought to do, or that I have a duty to do; it is precisely a supererogatory action, one above and beyond the call of duty. (A supererogatory action can be something as trifling as this, and need not be grand or heroic, but more on this in a separate post on supererogation.) If I ought to X, and I omit to X, then I do something wrong. Therefore, if I ought to pick up my neighbor's package, but omit to do this, then I do something wrong. But obviously I do nothing wrong in leaving my neighbor's package where it lies. Hence it is not the case that I ought to pick up my neighbor's package. Nor do I have any duty to pick up my neighbor's package.

I suspect my correspondent is simply playing fast and loose with 'ought,' a word with several meanings in English. Some examples:

a. 'The car ought to start; I installed a new battery.' This looks to be a non-normative use of 'ought,' one with no relevance to moral theory.

b. 'If you want to get to Tucson from Phoenix by interstate highway, you ought to take I-10 East.' This sentence is a hypothetical imperative, and the subject-matter is morally indifferent.

c. 'If you want to be a successful hit man, then you ought to learn how to kill with a .22 caliber gun.' A second hypothetical imperative. Here the subject-matter is not morally indifferent, but the 'ought' has noting to do with a duty.

d. 'If helping a stranger is a good deed, and one wants to be helpful, then one ought to help.' Another hypothetical imperative, and close to what my correspodnent said above. But this use of 'ought' is not the use in principle (P) above.

e. 'You ought to pay your debts.' A categorical imperative, and a morally relevant use of 'ought.' This is the use of 'ought' that is featured in (P) above.

In sum, (P) seems rock-solid and I will continue to adhere to it until someone can instruct me otherwise.

What I just said is by no means obvious, but it is very plausible; suppose you grant it. The question that interests me is this: How far must one go in the prevention/alleviation/elimination of evils? If I am obliged to give the poor devil in the lonesome canyon some of my water, am I obliged to prevent/alleviate/eliminate every evil I know about and can prevent (etc.) involving anyone as long as I don't shirk other duties to myself and others? Or are there some such evils the prevention (etc.) of which by me would be supererogatory, i.e., above and beyond the call of duty? (I assume it to be a conceptual truth that whatever one ought to do one is morally obligated to do, and vice versa.)

Suppose the poor devil in the canyon is not only thirsty but also hungry and blistered. It seems reasonable to say that although I am morally obliged to give him water (to ward off imminent heatstroke), I am not obliged to give him food and moleskin, even though the pains of hunger and blistered feet are evils. If I minister to him in those further ways inessential to his survival, then my deeds are supererogatory.

As I understand the obligatory/supererogatory distinction, an agent's failure to perform a supererogatory act that he can perform in no way diminishes his moral goodness. This suggests a definition:

D1. An action X performed by agent A is supererogatory =df (i) X is permissible but not obligatory; (ii) X exceeds what is morally required; (iii)A's failure or refusal to perform X in no way diminishes A's moral goodness.

Now I have just given two examples of acts that look to be supererogatory: giving the greenhorn food, and giving him moleskin. The guy's feet hurt and that is a low-level evil. Suppose the evil is dysteleological: it serves no good purpose such as that of teaching the bonehead that setting out on a ten mile hike in brand-new boots is a stupid thing to do. (For if he truly is a bonehead, he won't learn from the experience.) Even on the assumption of dysteleologicality, it seems that I am under no moral obligation to provide foot care, and that my failure to provide foot care to the witless biped does not diminish my moral goodness.

Further examples are easily constructed. Now if there are supererogatory actions, then one or both of the following principles would seem to be false:

P1. A morally perfect being prevents/alleviates/eliminates all gratuitous or dysteleological evils that it knows about and can eliminate.

P2. A morally perfect being prevents/alleviates/eliminates all evils that it knows about and can eliminate.

Now suppose that an argument from evil employs (P1) or some equivalent as I think Peter Lupu's LAFE does. Then it may be possible to neutralize such an argument by citing a possible case in which an omni-qualified being does not prevent (etc.) a dysteleological evil, but without prejudice to his being perfectly (completely) good, because the removal of the evil would be a supererogatory act.

Suppose I stub my toe, mildly, twice in a row. Perhaps the first toe-stubbing serves the purpose of warning me to be careful. It leads to a greater good. But the second stubbing is dysteleological, and the pain, which is a low-level evil, is gratuitous or dysteleological. How then can an all-good God, who is all-knowing and all-powerful, allow such an evil to occur? Surely God could have created a world in which Vallicella on 25 March 2008 stubs his toe only once! On some versions of LAFE (and perhaps on Lupu's) just one such instance of evil suffices to prove the nonexistence of God. For on LAFE an all-good God simply cannot exist if even one instance of gratuitous evil exists!

The 'evil' premise in Lupu's LAFE is simply this: Evil exists in the world. (p. 4) Now for evil to exist it suffices that there be just one instance of evil, e.g. the evil of my second toe-stubbing. But how could one instance of evil, even if it is gratuitous, prove the nonexistence of God? That sounds absurd. It is on a level with saying that if God existed, then turkeys would fly around ready-roasted, thereby saving us much bother on Thanksgiving; but they don't, so God does not exist.

The reasonable thing to say, it seems, is that God's failure to stop me from stubbing my toe a second time does not diminish his goodness one bit. And this for the reason that such an intervention would have been supererogatory. So I am wondering whether logical arguments from evil can be neutralized by appeal to the obligatory/supererogatory distinction. Evidential arguments from evil are of course another story.

On my view morality and legality are both 'notionally distinct' and 'extensionally distinct.' Thus I maintain both that the concept of a morally qualified action is distinct from the concept of a legally qualified action, and that there are instances of each concept that are not instances of the other. If the following three principles are defensible, then the notional and extensional distinction between morality and legality is defensible.

P1. Not everything morally impermissible should be legally impermissible.
P2. Not everything morally obligatory should be legally obligatory.
P3. Not everything morally permissible should be legally permissible.

Ad (P1). This could be put idiomatically by saying that not everything morally wrong should be illegal. I hope you will agree with me that drinking oneself into a stupor is morally wrong. It's a Friday night, you are alone, you stay in your house the entire time, but you down a quart of whiskey. I hope you will agree with me that this is morally wrong. (I could give an argument, but it belongs in a separate post.) Though morally wrong, such behavior should not be illegal. If you don't like my example, you are invited to concoct one of your liking that makes the same point.

Why should not everything morally wrong be illegal? The positive law is made by human beings and enforced by state power. But it is notorious that power tends to corrupt its possessors, and this is especially clear in the case of the agents of the state. (Ever have a run-in with a cop, a sheriff, an IRS agent who overstepped the bounds of his legitimate authority?) Given the egregious violations of individual liberty including mass murder that state agents have been known to commit, reasonable people support limited government. One way to limit government is to restrict its sanctions to behavior that impinges upon public welfare. Thus there need to be laws against drunk driving. But laws against private drunkenness (as in my example above) tend to give too much power to the state, besides being unenforceable. Laws that are unenforced, however, tend to breed disrespect for law. Laws should be few in number, rational in content, and enforced with credible sanctions. So not everything morally wrong should be illegal.

Ad (P2). If you morally must do (ought to do, are obligated to do, have a duty to do) X, should the positive law require it of you? I answer in the negative. Consider the philosophical/religious duty to worship no such 'false gods' as money, power, sexual pleasure, Lady Luck, but to worship or devote yourself only to worthy objects such as God, truth, justice, benevolence, and the like. I would argue that it is morally impermissible to worship any such thing as money, sex, etc. and morally obligatory to apportion your highest concern only to worthy objects such as truth and justice. But these views of mine, thought rationally defensible, can be opposed with a show of rationality by sincere people. A hedonist might sincerely and thoughtfully maintain that pleasure alone is the good and that there can be no grounded distinctions among pleasures, and that therefore the pursuit of sexual pleasure among consenting adults is a perfectly legitimate and morally permissible object of pursuit. I would consider it better if people devoted themselves to truth over sexual pleasure, but the abuses that would result from using state power to enforce that view of mine would be worse than the positive outcomes would be good.

For a second example, consider the moral obligation to maintain one's physical health by the usual measures including good diet and vigorous exercise. If you value individual liberty and understand what I wrote above, you will not want laws that mandate these measures. (By the way, this is why 'universal health care,' i.e., government conrol of the delivery of health services ought to be opposed: a government that controls health care will be in a position to demand 'apropriate' behaviors from people including not engaging in activities deemed risky.)

Ad (P3). If an act is morally permissible, should it also be legally permissible? No. Surely there are circumstances in which running a red light is morally permissible. Suppose at three in the morning you slowly and cautiously coast through a red light at a deserted intersection in the proverbial 'middle of nowhere.' Surely that is morally permissible. Yet it ought not be legally allowed: a well-crafted law cannot have a clause that reads, "A motorist shall not run a red light except when it is safe to do so."

For a second example consider that is it morally permissible for some 15 year olds to drive. But it ought not be legally permissible for 15 year olds to drive. The same goes for voting. There are 15 year olds more mature than some 50 year olds and more fit to cast a vote. Yet it ought not be legal for 15 year olds to vote. Finally, it seems obvious that some marijuana use by some people in some circumstances is morally permissible, but it scarcely follows that marijuana use ought to be legalized. What is harmless for some will be dangerous for many. Laws crafted for the common good cannot take into account individual differences.

Consider a mother and her child. The mother has various prima facie obligations with respect to the child. One of these obligations is to protect the child from preventable instances of needless suffering. Among the definitions and principles I assume are these:

P1. One is obligated to do X iff one ought to do X.
P2. 'Ought' implies 'can.'
P3. Prima facie obligations can be overridden.
P4. If X is obligatory, then X is permissible, but not conversely.

Suppose the child will die unless he has a series of painful operations. On this supposition the mother's prima facie obligation to protect the child from preventable instances of suffering is overridden by the 'greater good' of being cured of a terminal disease. Therefore, the mother is morally justified in permitting her child to suffer the pains that are the unavoidable concomitants of the series of operations. We can express this by saying that the mother's allowing of her child's suffering is morally permissible. Now if an act is permissible, it does not follow that it is obligatory. But in the case before us, the mother's allowing of her child's suffering, since it is necessary for her child's cure, is also morally obligatory. That is, the mother ought to allow the suffering; it is not the case that she merely may allow the suffering. For she ought to do what she can to help her child, and among the things she can do is allow the operations; therefore, she ought to allow the operations and the suffering that is unavoidably concomitant with them.

It seems to follow that the suffering associated with the operations ought to occur, and that the mother has the moral obligation both to permit it and to do what she can to bring it about. Now suppose the suffering occurs. Then it both is and ought to be. It is because it occurs. It ought to be because its occurrence is necessary for a greater good. Is this paradoxical or counterintuitive? I think not. It may sound paradoxical to say that the child ought to suffer certain pains; but the paradox is removed when it is realized that this ought to be the case only on condition that without these sufferings the child would be worse off than with them.

Perhaps a paradox can be generated if God is put in place of the mother, and in place of the child's suffering (which is necessary for a greater good) we put every instance of suffering in the actual world. The idea is that all the instances of suffering in the world, although prima facie such that they ought not exist, are morally justified by their roles in contributing to greater goods. It would seem to follow that not only would all of those instances of suffering be permissible, but they would also all be morally obligatory in that without them the maximal amount of good would not be attained.

Now Lupu finds this paradoxical and indeed incoherent:

Therefore, every existing instance of suffering ought to have occurred; and every moral agent, including a perfect God, has the moral obligation to permit it or bring it about. So, according to this theodicy, whatever is the case, ought to be the case.

What an astonishing an counterintuitive result! It threatens to obviate moral distinctions and undermine the very purpose of our moral conceptual system. (p. 26, emphasis in original)

Now it surely sounds absurd to say that, since a world containing the Holocaust is (tenselessly) the case, that it ought to be the case. But the counterintuitivity may be lessened if we bear in mind that a world containing free agents is of greater value than one without them, and that God has no control over the actions of free agents. Absolutely considered, there ought to be no evil. But given free agents and their wrong choces, there is evil and this evil must be permitted by God if there is to be the greater good of finite free agents.

What follows from a higher-goods theodicy is not that whatever is the case ought to be the case, but that whatever is the case ought to be the case GIVEN that free finite agents exist and make wrong choices. Thus God is not morally obligated to actualize a world containing genocide; he is morally obligated to permit the existence of a world containing genocide given that a world containing free agents is better than one without such agents.

As far as I can see, Lupu hasn't made the case that a higher-goods theodicy entails the collapse of the distinction between is and ought.

In developing the argument for atheism based on the existence of evil, it will be useful to focus on some particular evil that our world contains in considerable abundance. Intense human and animal suffering, for example, occurs daily and in great plenitude in our world. Such intense suffering is a clear case of evil. Of course, if the intense suffering leads to some greater good, a good we could not have obtained without undergoing the suffering in question, we might conclude that the suffering is justified, but it remains an evil nevertheless. For we must not confuse the intense suffering in and of itself with the good things to which it sometimes leads or of which it may be a necessary part. Intense human or animal suffering is in itself bad, an evil, even though it may sometimes be justified by virtue of being a part of, or leading to, some good which is unobtainable without it. What is evil in itself may sometimes be good as a means because it leads to something that is good in itself. In such a case, while remaining an evil in itself, the intense human or animal suffering is, nevertheless, an evil which someone might be morally justified in permitting.

Suppose that to be restored to health a child must undergo an extremely painful medical treatment. So the parents of the child allow the treatment to be administered. We will agree that the infliction of the suffering upon the child is morally justified by the fact that the treatment is necessary to prevent a greater evil which we may assume to be the child's death. Now what Rowe is saying above is that in a case like this, the suffering is (morally) justified but evil nevertheless.

I find this difficult to understand. It sounds like a contradiction. For if the infliction of the suffering is morally justified, then the infliction is morally permissible. But if the suffering is morally evil, then its infliction is also morally evil, which is to say that its infliction is morally impermissible. But surely it is a contradiction to affirm of any action A that A is both morally permissible and morally impermissible.

If the suffering is morally justified in that it leads to a good unobtainable without it, then the suffering, though certainly unpleasant, diagreeable, repugnant, awful, excruciating, etc., is not under the conditions specified evil. In the situation we are imagining, it is not only morally permissible but also morally obligatory for the parents to allow the painful treatment to be administered. This implies that the treatment ought to be administered. Therefore, if you say that the child's suffering remains evil despite its leading to a greater good, then you are committed to saying that the infliction of evil upon the child is morally obligatory, something that ought to be done. But this smacks of absurdity since it is hard to understand how any infliction of evil could be morally obligatory. Since in our example the infliction of suffering is morally permissible, I conclude that (intense) suffering is not in every case evil.

What Rowe is saying is that (intense) suffering is intrinsically evil, and that its evilness remains the same whether or not the suffering is instrumentally good. What I am suggesting contra Rowe is that whether or not suffering is evil depends on whether or not it is instrumentally good. For me, suffering that is instrumentally good is not evil. I concede of course that such suffering remains unpleasant, disagreeable, repugnant, awful, excruciating, etc. But I do not understand how suffering in itself, or intrinsically, can be said to be evil.

Perhaps the problem is that there are two senses of 'evil' in play, one nonnormative the other normative, and that Rowe is appealing to the former sense. Accordingly, the nonnormatively evil is that which elicits aversion. In this sense, mental and physical suffering is evil in that beings like us are prone to shun it. The normatively evil, on the other hand, is that which ought not exist. So perhaps my puzzle can be resolved by saying:

1. Every instance of suffering is evil in the nonnormative sense that, as a matter of empirical fact, beings like us are prone to shun it. (Being prone to shun X does not entail the shunning of X.)

2. Some instances of suffering are not evil in the normative sense that it is false that they ought not exist.

3. If an instance of suffering conduces to a good that outweighs it, and the good is unobtainable by any other means, then the instance of suffering ought to exist. Thus the child's suffering in our example ought to exist. Admittedly, this sounds paradoxical. But note that this 'ought' is not categorical but hypothetical or conditional: the child's suffering ought to exist given that, on condition that, the treatment that causes it is the only way to avoid the child's death, which would be an evil worse than the child's suffering from the treatment.

4. (3) is not paradoxical or incoherent.

5. The moral goodness of God is called into question not by the existence of evils in the nonnormative sense, but by the existence of evils in the normative sense. Thus the mere existence of suffering, which is nonnormatively evil, does not by itself cause a problem for the divine moral goodness. For it may well be that all instances of suffering are morally justifiable in the light of a greater good. This does not make these sufferings any less repugnant; but this repugnance is not a moral repugnance but the nonnormative property of thwarting desire.

Now imagine that this structure upon first being discovered by white explorers had been completely destroyed by them. Its destruction, I claim, would have been an evil state of affairs even though no suffering would have been involved. The Sinagua Indians who constructed and lived in the structure were long gone by the time the white explorers arrived. So they could not have suffered from the castle's destruction. Assume that none of these Indians or their descendants ever returned to the site of the castle. Let us also assume that the white explorers were all of them thoughtless vandals who cared not a bit about the preservation of antiquities. So none of their number suffered in any way from the destruction of the cliff dwelling. Assume further that the vandals accomplished their demolition without hurting themselves in any way physically or psychologically, that no animals were in the structure when it was demolished, that no one other than the vandals witnessed the destruction, and that no reports of the destruction were transmitted, and that all the vandals died shortly after the destruction without having told a soul.

Given these assumptions, no sentient being suffered physically or mentally as a result of the castle's destruction. And yet its destruction was evil. Indeed it was morally evil in that it was brought about by free agents. Therefore, it is not the case that all instances of evil involve suffering. Of course, the destruction I described is a merely possible state of afairs. It is something that merely might have occurred. But it still functions as a valid counterexample to 'All instances of evil involve suffering.' For when a philosopher makes a claim like this, he intends it to be a necessary truth, whether a conceptual truth or some other kind of necessary truth. And it is clear that to invalidate a statement of the form Necessarily, all Fs are Gs, the mere possibility of an F that is not a G suffices.

In rebuttal, Peter or someone on his behalf could just insist that evil by its very nature involves suffering and that therefore it is impossible that there be an instance of evil that does not involve suffering. But then I would want to know why we ought to believe that evil must involve suffering in the face of counterexamples like the one I have provided.

a) The physical substratum of the pain. The cause of the pain. In the case of lower back pain, for example, a pinched nerve. But not just the salient cause, e.g. the pinched nerve, but the totality of causal conditions in the body that 'underpin' the experience of pain. All that makes up the physical substratum of a physical pain.

b) The pain-as-felt, the felt pain. This is the pain one experiences or lives through. Pain as Er-lebnis. The phenomenal pain to which the subject of pain alone has access. With respect to felt pain, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. So for a felt pain, appearance and reality coincide. Its being as a mental datum is exhausted by its appearing.

c) The sensory quale of the felt pain, its raw feel to use an old expression of Herbert Feigl. This is the qualitative content, the Nagelian what-it-is-like of the pain. Each pain feels like something to the one who has it, though he would be hard pressed to put this feeling into words.

d) The painfulness of the felt pain. The felt pain has a quality, but this quality is not the same as its painfulness. Thus I factor the felt pain into the sensory quale (raw feel) and the painfulness of it. Suppose I am outside in the cold and I feel a stinging sensation in my bare hands. It seems that the painfulness of this sensation depends, at least in part, on my attitude toward it, my aversion. Or consider any olfactory sensation you take to be unpleasant, the smell of cooking broccoli, say. One can learn to overcome such aversions, which is not to say that one overcomes the sensation itself. Or perhaps you are in a public restroom. You focus on the stench and remind yourself that it is only a sensation and one that betokens nothing harmful to the body. As a result of this reflection, the unplesantness diminishes while the sensation itself remains constant. A reasonable inference from phenomena such as these is that the sensory quale of a pain and its painfulness are distinct, and not just conceptually, but in reality. In some cases it is the attitude of aversion that makes a sensory quale into a pain sensation, but I don't claim that this is true for all cases. Two Theses

T1. Felt pain is mental, a conscious phenomenon. This is true of both physical and psychological pain. Physical pain, toothache, headache, backache and the like are called 'physical' because of their physical substrata — see (a) above — even though in themselves they are mental. Felt pain cannot be identified with any physical process. Correlated, but not identified.

T2. Felt physical pain is a conscious state with no intentional object. Pains are non-intentional experiences. They are not of or about anything in the way that believing and desiring are object-directed. But here I need an argument since Alexander Pruss and others maintain that pains exhibit intentionality or object-directedness.

Suppose we compare a visual perceiving of my foot, and a feeling of pain 'in' my foot. The perceiving of my foot is an intentional experience: the act of perceiving 'takes an accusative,' is directed to an object. The perceiving presents the foot as having such and such properties. But what does the pain present? It doesn't present damage to the foot, although there presumably is damage to the foot, a torn Achilles tendon, perhaps. The torn tendon is the cause of the pain sensation, but it is not the intentional object of the pain sensation. The torn tendon is hidden from the pain experience in the way the foot is not hidden from the visual experience. So what is the intentional object of the pain sensation? I say there is none. There is a pain sensation and its cause, but no intentional object. The cause is not presented to me by the pain sensation.

The relation of intentional experience to intentional object is nothing like the relation of pain to its cause. If X is caused by Y, then both X and Y must exist. But if X is an awareness-of Y, if X is intentionally related to Y, then Y need not exist.

Now pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' I developed this suggestion yesterday and found reason to reject it.

B. Or one might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. One might point to the fact that pains are often very useful warning signals that indicate that something is going wrong in the body or that some damage is being done to the body: the pains in my knees inform me that I am running too long and hard and am in danger of an overuse injury. On this suggestion, then, pains are real but not evil. Consequently, pains are not counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni.

But this response is not very convincing. There are several considerations.

1. If pains are warning signals, then they are instrumentally good. But what is instrumentally good may also be intrinsically evil. The searing pain in a burnt hand, though instrumentally good, is intrinsically evil. Its positive 'entity' (entitas in scholastic jargon) is apparently not well accommodated on the classical doctrine that evils are privationes boni. Again, the pain is not the mere absence of the good of pleasure, but something positively bad. After all, the hand is not numb or as if aenesthetized; there is a positive sensation 'in' it, and this positive sensation is bad. So even if every pain served to warn us of bodily damage, that would not detract from the positive badness of the pain sensation. One cannot discount the intrinsic positive badness by pointing to the fact that the pain is instrumentally good.

2. If pains are warning signals, it seems that many of them could perform this function without being so excruciating. The intensity of many pains seems out of all proportion to the good that they do in warning us of bodily damage. This excruciatingness is part of the evil of pain.

3. It is a fact that the pain in my hand that warns me to remove it from the hot stove typically does not subside when the hand is removed. It continues to hurt. But what good purpose does this serve given that the warning has been heeded and the hand removed from the hot stove? The argument that pain is good, not evil, because it warns us about bodily damage fails to account for the pain that persists after the warning has been heeded. The pain in my burnt hand continues, of course, because the hand has been damaged; but then that pain is intrinsically and positively evil and the evil cannot be discounted in the way the pain at the time of the contact of hand with stove can be discounted.

4. There is no necessity that a warning system be painful. A robotic arm could have a sensor that causes the arm to retract from a furnace when the furnace temperature becomes damagingly high. The robot would feel nothing. We might have had that sort of painless warning system.

My interim conclusion may be set forth as follows:

Pains are natural evils
The evil of pain is not a mere absence of good
Ergo
Not all evils are privationes boni.

REFERENCE: Jorge J. E. Gracia, "Evil and the Transcendentality of Goodness: Suarez's Solution to the Problem of Positive Evils" in Scott MacDonald, ed., Being and Goodness (Cornell UP, 1991), pp. 151-176.

For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present --namely, the diseases and wounds — go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils — that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem — dating back to Epicurus — of reconciling the existence of God (as standardly defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.

Without going that far, let us note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Thus in one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.

The Problem of Pain

But then how are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils. Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The Nagelian what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.

The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness.

Two Possible Responses. Pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' One might flesh this out as follows. There is a certain sensory quale that I experience when my knee slams into the leg of the table. Call this the experiential substratum of the pain. But the painfulness of this substratum is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The substratum, the sensory quale, exists in objective reality despite the fact that its esse est percipi. But the painfulness, and thus the evil or badness of the sensory quale is an interpretation from the side of the sufferer.

What's more, this interpretation or projection can be altered or withdrawn entirely. Thus, with practice, one can learn to focus one's attention on a painful sensory quale and in so doing lessen its painfulness. If you try this, it works to some extent. After a long day of hiking over rocky trails, my feet hurt. But I say to myself, "Tt's only a sensation, and your aversion to it is your doing." Focusing on the sensation in this way, and noting that one's attitude towards it plays a role in the painfulness, one can reduce the painfulness. This suggests that the painfulness is merely subjective.

Unfortunately, this response is not convincing. Imagine the physical and mental suffering of one who is being tortured to death. And then try to convince yourself that the pain in a situation like this is just a matter of 'attitude' or aversion. "Conquer desire and aversion" is a good Buddhist maxim. But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.

B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response until tomorrow.

Consider this quartet of claims:

1. Money is the root of all evil.
2. Love of money is the root of all evil.
3. Inordinate love of money is the root of all evil.
4. Inordinate love of money is the root of some evil.

It is easy to see that each of (1)-(3) is false, and that (4) alone is true. Money is an abstract form of wealth and wealth is obviously good. How can something good be the root of all evil? It is not even the the root of some evil. It makes more sense to say that the love of money is the root of all evil. But this too is plainly mistaken. Since money is good, a certain ‘love’ or desire of it is both wise and morally legitimate. It is the inordinate love of money that bears some connection to evil. But to all evil? Surely some of the evil in the world derives from such other sources as the inordinate love of power, sex, and fame. Therefore, the most we can say with a show of plausibility is that the inordinate love of money is at the root of some evil.

An inordinate love is an excessive love, a love unhinged and unbalanced. One form of excess consists in taking for an end in itself what can only be viewed as a means. Thus the miser’s mistake is in taking money to be an end in itself when it can only be a means.

Generalizing the opening quartet yields:

A. X is the root of all evil.
B. Love of X is the root of all evil.
C. Inordinate love of X is the root of all evil.
D. Inordinate love of X is the root of some evil.

I claim that whatever one plugs in for ‘X’ — whether it be money, property, progeny, power, influence, sex, fame, knowledge, alcohol, tobacco, firearms — results in a pattern of three falsehoods and one truth. You may verify this for yourself. Or else present me with a counterexample.

One conclusion I draw is that evil has no one root. So one should not speak of the root of evil. Evil has many roots corresponding to our many inordinate loves. Since there is no one root of all evil, the eradication of evil is no simple matter. Or if there is a single root, it lies not in things desired, but in the disordered human heart. Only metanoia, a change of heart/mind, could eradicate evil, assuming evil can be uprooted.

In previous entries I spoke of objective evil but failed to make very clear what it means for evil to be objectively real. To this task of clarification I now turn. To give credit where credit is due, I have been helped by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord's introduction to Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Sayre-McCord, Cornell UP, 1988, pp. 1-23. But what follows is my own take on the matter.

Let's think about sentences like

1. Slavery is a great moral evil.

(1) is a grammatically indicative sentence that appears to predicate the property of being evil of an action-type or an institution-type. If it puzzles you how an action-type can be evil, I say: an action-type is evil just in case actual or possible tokens (instances) of the type are evil.

But is (1) a fact-stating piece of discourse? If yes, then it has a truth-value. But note that if sentences like (1) are truth-valued, it does not follow that some are true and others false. It might be that they are all false, as on J. L. Mackie's Error Theory. Now let's introduce some terminology.

TERMINOLOGY AND DISTINCTIONS

Cognitivist: One who maintains that sentences like (1) are either true or false.

Moral Realist: A cognitivist who maintains that some sentences like (1) are true and others false. For the moral realist, there are moral facts. Thus, if sentences like (1) are true, then there are moral facts that make them true.

Subjectivist: A cognitivist who thinks that the truth-maker of a moral claim is a fact about an individual's mind. On this view, what makes 'Slavery is evil' true is a fact about some individual's mind, for example, the fact that Lincoln feels slavery to be repugnant. This implies that moral claims of the form 'A is good/evil' are elliptical for claims of the form 'A is good/evil-for-X.' For the subjectivist, then, it is objectively true that slavery is wrong-for-X and there is an objective moral fact that makes it true; it is just that this fact is X's being in a certain state.

What makes subjectivism subjective is that it allows that what is good/evil for one subject may not be good/evil for another. If subjectivism is true, and I am an abolitionist who is repelled by the thought of slavery, but you are a Southern slave-holder who feels no repugnance at the thought of slavery and desires to own slaves, then our respective moral judgments, despite their objective truth-makers, do not conflict. It is easy to see that 'Slavery is wrong-for-me' and 'Slavery is not wrong-for-you' are not logical contradictories. Thus they can both be true.

It is important to realize that moral subjectivism as here defined does not imply alethic relativism, relativism about truth. Don't confuse 'It is true that slavery is wrong-for-Abe' with 'It is true-for-Abe that slavery is wrong.' What the moral subjectivist is maintaining is that moral claims, if true, are objectively true; but what makes them true are the subjective states of some person, states of desire, aversion, preference, and the like.

Intersubjectivist: A cognitivist who holds that the truth-maker of a moral claim is a fact about the practices and conventions of groups of people. Thus the truth-maker of 'It is wrong to eat human flesh' is the fact that we in our society do not do such a thing. This implies that moral claims of the form 'It is wrong to do A' are elliptical for claims of the form 'It is wrong-for-the-members-of-group-X to do A.'

Objectivist: A cognitivist who maintains that the facts that make-true moral claims are not facts involving the desires, aversions, preferences, goals, etc. of individual minds, nor facts involving the practices and conventions of groups. For the objectivist, we value kindness because kindness is good; it is not good because we value it. The good is not good because it satisfies desire, need, wish, or will; it satisfies because it is good. The evil is not evil because it thwarts desire, etc.; it thwarts desire, tc. because it is evil. Thus for the objectivist, kindness is good and cruelty is evil, objectively, intrinsically, i.e., not in relation to individuals or groups of individuals. Slavery is wrong in and of itself regardless of the going practices in a given society and regardless of anyone's desires or aversions.

Suppose you happen upon a defenceless person under physical assault by a much stronger person. If you are a moral objectivist, you will perceive the state of affairs as one that objectively ought not be, and will maintain that the ought-not-be-ness is what it is quite apart from social practices and conventions and individual desires and aversions.

Noncognitivist: One who denies that sentences like (1) have truth-values, and thus denies that there are moral facts as their truth-makers. The noncognitivist is a sort of instrumentalist about moral language. The moral instrumentalist denies that when we employ moral language we are ascribing moral properties to actions, state of affairs, people, or institutions. What we are doing is essentially practical, not theoretical. When I say that slavery is wrong I am attempting to change your attitude to it, or trying to persuade you to work towards its eradication.

Emotivist: A noncognitivist who holds that moral language is not fact-stating but expressive of feeling. Thus one who utters (1) expresses his disapprobation or repugnance.

Prescriptivist: A noncognitivist for whom moral claims such as (1) are essentially commands, while denying that commands have any ontological backing. A prescriptivist who says that abortion is wrong is not predicating a moral property of abortion; he is prescribing that one not commit abortion or permit them to be performed or do anything that encourages or supports their performance.

APPLICATION TO THE GOD PROBLEM

If evil is to bear upon the existence/nonexistence of God, then evil must be objectively real. But evil cannot be objectively real if noncognitivism is true. And it cannot be objectively real if subjectivism or intersubjectivism — forms of cognitivism — are true. For evil to be objectively real and to be relevant to the existence/nonexistence of God, objectivism as explained above must be true.

Now suppose you are an atheist who rejects objectivism. Even if you were to construct a sound argument from objective evil to the nonexistence of God, that argument could be of no use to you in justifying your belief that God does not exist. And this for the simple reason that you deny objectivism.

1. Evil is not a substance, a self-subsistent reality in its own right: it is a lack, an absence, a privation of good, privatio boni. Good and evil are not opposing Manichean 'powers' on an ontological par: Good is the primary reality, and evil is a privation thereof.

2. What has no reality in its own right has no need of an objective foundation.

Therefore

3. Evil has no need of an objective foundation.

Therefore

4. Evil has no need of God as its objective foundation.

In order to validate the inference from (1) to (3) I had to supply premise (2). But (2) is false. To paraphrase something Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching, the use of the bowl depends on the part of the bowl that is void. Now it is good that bowls are useful and thus good that they partially bound empty space; but my point is that the privation of bowl-matter upon which the usefulness of the bowl rests does have an objective ontological foundation, namely, in the bowl minus the empty space it partially bounds. There is the primary reality of the bowl-matter without which that particular region of empty space could not exist. The 'void' in question is individuated by and is ontologically dependent upon the bowl-matter.

Now if this analogy 'throws you for a loop,' FUGGEDABOUTIT. (I tell myself I should never give analogies, but I can't help it; they fascinate me and are conducive to the kind of synthetic understanding I am after; but people almost always seize upon the wrong points of comparison.)

To make my point directly: the objective foundation of evil as privatio boni is in that primary reality of which the privation is a privation. For example, we say of a man who habitually tortures defenceless animals that he is an evil man. We mean he is objectively and intrinsically evil; not just evil from the point of view of the animals tortured. His evilness is not nothing, but it is also not something self-subsistent: it is a lack of goodness. But this is not to say that his evilness lacks an objective foundation: its foundation is in the positive reality of the man as a person possessing free will. The man in his positive reality is good: he is good insofar as he exists: ens et bonum convertuntur.

On an Augustinian-Thomistic scheme, with its undeniable Platonic and neo-Platonic elements, the goodness in creatures refers us back to goodness in its primary instance, God, who is Goodness Itself. So perhaps we can say that evil has a two-fold objective foundation. Reverting to our example, the man's evilness is objectively founded in his reality as a person. But this reality, which is itself good qua reality, derives its existence and goodness from Goodness itself, God. So God is the ultimate foundation of creaturely goodness, and thus the ultimate foundation of the lack of this goodness, which lack is evil construed as privatio boni.

Thus the following two propositions are logically consistent: Evil is privatio boni and Good and evil have an objective foundation. I should add, however, that if God is the foundation of the objectivity of evil it doesn't follow that God is the source of particular evils such as the evilness of the torturer in our example: he himself is responsible for his evilness.

To put it another way: without God there is no objective distinction between good and evil as objective 'properties.' But it doesn't follow that God is responsible for any instances of the property of objective evil. This property can exist uninstantiated. Or pehaps we could say this: the existence of God is the condition of the possibility of objective evils; but it does not follow that actual instances of evil derive from God.

My question, however, is whether there are states of affairs that ought to be even in situations in which there are no moral agents with power sufficient to bring them about, and states of affairs that ought not be even in situations in which there are no moral agents with power sufficient to prevent them. In other words, are there non-agential oughts? Does it make sense, and is it true, to say things like 'There ought to be fewer diseases than there are' or 'There ought to be no natural disasters' or 'There ought to be morally perfect people'? Or consider

1. I ought to be a better man that I am, indeed, I ought to be morally perfect.

(1) expresses an axiological requirement but (arguably) not a moral obligation because it is simply not in my power to perfect myself, nor is it in any finite person's power or any group of finite person's power to perfect me. Now consider the following

Inconsistent Triad

1. I ought to be morally perfect.

2. I lack the power to be what I ought to be, and this impotence is due to no specific fault of my own. (My impotence is 'original,' part and parcel of the 'fallen' human condition, not derived fom any particular act or act-omission of mine.)

3. 'Ought' implies 'Can': one can be obliged to do X only if one has an effective choice as to whether to do X.

The triad is inconsistent in that (1) & (3) entails ~(2). How can the inconsistency be removed?

Solutions

A. One solution is simply to deny (1) by claiming that there is no sense of 'ought' in which one ought to be morally perfect. This strikes me as counterintuitive. For there does seems to me to be some sense in which I ought to be perfect. I feel the force of the NT verse, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect." I have the strong intuition that I ought to be, if not perfect, at least better in respects where I simply lack the power to bring about the improvement.

B. A second solution is to distinguish between agential and non-agential oughts. We can then maintain (1) as true by maintaining that the 'ought' in (1) is non-agential and expresses an axiological requirement as opposed to a moral obligation. So interpreted, (1) is consistent with (2) and (3).

We can then transform the above triad into an argument:

4. (1)-(3) are all true.
5. (1)-(3) would not all be true if there were no distinction between agential and non-agential oughts.
Therefore
6. There is a distinction between agential and non-agential oughts.

C. A third solution is to maintain the truth of (1)-(3) while also maintaining that all oughts are agential. But then how avoid inconsistency? One might maintain that, when restricted to my own resources, I lack the power to do what I ought to do; yet I am morally obliged to perfect myself; and since 'ought' implies 'can,' the power that I need must be supplied in part from a Source external to myself. "And this all men call God."

In short, the inconsistency is avoided by bringing God into the picture as one who supplies individuals with the supplemental power to do what they are morally obliged to do when that power is insufficient from their own resources. This gives rise to an argument for the existence of an external source of moral assistance:

7. I am morally obliged to do things that I cannot do on my own
8. 'Ought' implies 'can'
9. I can do things that I cannot do on my own
Therefore
10. There is an external source of moral assistance that makes up the difference between what I can do on my own and what I cannot.

Summary

I have sketched two arguments which need closer scrutiny. The one based on the (B) response to the triad gives some, though not a conclusive, reason for accepting a distinction between agential and non-agential oughts.

In his usual crisp and clear manner, Burgess-Jackson sets forth elementary distinctions that one must make if one wishes to think clearly about torture or indeed about any ethical problem. After explaining the differences among conceptual, factual, and evaluative questions, he distinguishes between legality and morality. "A thing can be morally permissible but legally impermissible, just as a thing can be legally permissible but morally impermissible." This is a point worth underlining. Since Keith does not provide examples, I will give two (with which he may not agree). It is morally permissible, but legally impermissible (in many jurisdictions), to grow marijuana plants for one's own (smoking) use. It is legally permissible but morally impermissible to drink oneself into a stupor in one's own house. Having made the distinction between the law and morality one must also distinguish factual questions about what the law is from evaluative questions about what the law ought to be.

There follows an outline of normative ethical theories. These divide into two main types, consequentialist and deontological. Consequentialism is of two sorts, act and rule, depending on whether the principle of uitlity is applied to individual actions or to rules and practices. Deontological theories divide into absolute and moderate.

These theories are quite relevant to the torture question. As I see it, it is by no means obvious that waterboarding is torture. But let's assume that we answer the conceptual question as to what torture is in such a way that waterboarding is counted as torture. Then the evaluative question arises: Is torture morally permissible? Now one point that needs to be underscored is that how one answers this depends on one's ethical theory. Allow me to illustrate.

Suppose one is a hedonistic act-utilitarian. The utilitarian seeks to maximize the good. That is the principle he uses to assess moral rightness or wrongness. As an act-utilitarian, he applies this principle to individual acts such as the torture of a particular jihadi, call him Ali, on a particular occasion. As a hedonist, one identifies the (non-instrumental) good with pleasure. To determine whether it is morally permissible to waterboard (and thus torture, given the above assumed answer to the conceptual queastion) Ali the jihadi, the hedonistic act-utilitarian must consider whether the waterboarding will tend to maximize pleasure or not. If it is known that Ali knows the locations and detonation times of dirty bombs scattered around New York City, then the decision will be made to torture him since by doing so one will minimize overall suffering and maximize overall pleasure. The greatest good of the greatest number will be served by the act of torture, whence it follows that the act is morally permissible.

On this ethical scheme, then, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with torture; it is not wrong as such; if wrong it is wrong in virtue of its consequences. So if the consequences are good, the act is good. My main point is that how one decides on the moral permissibility/impermissibility of torture (and not just torture) depends on one's ethical theory. In case anyone is interested , I am neither a hedonist nor a utilitarian.

The public debate on questions like this is at a pathetically low level as you will have gathered from the recent CNN-YouTube Republican debate. Philosophers have something to contribute by way of clarification. But how many people will bother to read carefully articles like that of Burgess-Jackson? An indication of this is the idiotic comments he has received. So there is no reason to be sanguine about the effect of reason on public affairs.

Thinking is hard work, thinking clearly is harder, and people lack the will to do either. Their intellectual failures derive from moral failures. And in a hyperkinetic, dumbed-down, sex-saturated crap-culture, the distractions are legion and shirking is easy.

My question is whether we can extend the 'Ought' implies 'Can' principle to what ought to exist in non-agential contexts. I argued earlier that 'ought to exist' and 'ought not exist' are predicates that can be applied meaningfully to states of affairs whose obtaining/nonobtaining is not traceable to any agent. Thus the existence of God (classically defined as ens perfectissimum) is not up to God or any agent, and yet it seems to be meaningful to claim that the state of affairs God's existence ought to exist or obtain, while the nonexistence of God ought not exist or obtain. If one insists on reserving 'ought' for the agential cases, then we could speak of the existence of God being axiologically required.

As I said, I argued for that earlier. Suppose you agree. Does it follow that God's existence is possible? In the agential case, possibility is interpreted as ability. If I ought to do A, then I can, am able, to do A. But abilities are the abilities of agents, and in the non-agential case there are no agents. So if God ought to exist, and "Whatever ought to exist can exist," then 'can' in this formula cannot be cashed out in terms of ability.

But this is not a problem since 'can' can be read in terms of metaphysical (broadly logical) possibility. Accordingly, whatever ought to exist is metaphysically-possibly such that it exists. Alexander Pruss is uneasy:

I am also not sure that oughtness of this sort satisfies the "What ought to be, can be" principle. The plausibility of the latter principle lies in the fact that we shouldn't hold agents responsible for failing to do what they can't. But once agents aren't in the picture, then the principle becomes less plausible.

My response is that there are two different principles related to each other only analogically:

Agential Principle: What an agent ought to do, an agent must be able to do.
Non-agential Principle: What ought to exist, must be metaphysically possible.

Both can be classified as 'Ought' implies 'Can' principles, but while in the agential case the 'ought' is an 'ought to do' and the 'can' signifies an agent's ability, in the non-agential case the 'ought' is an 'ought to be' and the 'can' signifies metaphysical possibility.

By my lights, both principles are true, and indeed analytically true. If you tell me that I am under a moral obligation to do X even in circumstances in which it impossible for me to do X, then I will respond that your view is incoherent and that you do not understand the relevant concepts. Similarly, if you agree that there are non-agential contexts in which some state of affairs S ought to exist even though S is impossible, then I will respond that your view is incoherent and that you do not understand the relevant concepts.

I do concede, however, that more work is needed to show that it makes sense to speak of axiologically required states of affairs in non-agential contexts.

I steal $100,000 from you. I give it to my son, and head for the hills. My son is $100,000 richer than you. Do you have a right to ask for it back? Why? He didn't take it from you - he is no perpetrator. He is innocent. [. . .] Where do you draw the line? One can extrapolate individualism to absurd, unworkable levels - a baby may have no milk that he hasn't earned, for instance. No, if it is possible for your children and friends to benefit from your actions, then by benefiting from unjust actions, they become connected to the injustice.

There are many cases in which one who does not directly commit a crime, aids and bets the commission of a crime. The case mentioned above could be subsumed under 'trafficking in stolen goods.' One who knowingly does this, though not as guilty as the thief, is also guilty. Or suppose two enraged men are engaged in a violent dispute that threatens to become physical. I hand one of the men a loaded revolver, and he shoots the other. Have I done anything wrong? Of course. Even though I have not shot anyone, I have aided an abetted a shooting.

In cases like these the direct perpetrator is not the only guilty party. Accomplices, enablers, inciters are also guilty. Indeed, I would say that someone who incites violence merely by speaking shares some responsibility for any crimes that result.

But now consider this case. I sell you my car in good faith, observing all the local statutes regulating auto sales. I have no reason to suspect you of having any criminal intent. But once title is transferred, you use the car to mow down some kiddies on a school yard, or to commit some other crime. Do I bear any responsibility for the crime? Of course not. My being part of the causal chain that eventuated in the deaths of schoolchildren does not make me morally responsible for the deaths. You alone are morally responsible.

Surely it would be morally absurd to maintain that those involved in the manufacture and sale of automobiles share in the guilt of those who commit crimes using automobiles. And the same goes for those involved in the manufacture and sale of guns. If I hand a loaded revolver to an enraged man who is in an altercation with another man, then of course I bear a considerable amount of responsibility for the outcome. But if I am a gun retailer, and I run the standard background checks and have no reason to suspect criminal intent on the part of my customer, then I bear no responsibility for any crime that said customer might commit with the gun I sold him. And the same holds for the gun manufacturers.

So when liberals want to hold gun manufacturers responsible for crimes committed with 'their' guns, these liberals betray a profound level of moral obtuseness. They demonstrate once again that they simply cannot think in moral categories.

Examples can be multiplied ad libitum. A diet consisting solely of hamburgers and cheesecake will lead to arteriosclerosis and an early grave. But if you choose such a diet, you are responsible and not Burger King and The Cheesecake Factory.

Returning to black reparations, it is simply morally obtuse to think that people who were not even alive at the time of slavery are responsible for it in any way. Even if there is a sort of 'collective guilt' in the case of a man who steals and gives the stolen money to his son, this is not a sense of 'collective guilt' sufficiently robust to support the legitimacy of black reparations.

But haven't we contemporary Americans benefited from slavery? That has to be argued, not merely stated. But even if the powerhouse economy of the U. S. is a result of blacks' toiling on Southern plantations, then everyone has benefited, including contemporary blacks. So by this reasoning well-off blacks should pay reparations to poor blacks.

Nevertheless, my above principle needs a little refining. So here is an improved formulation:

Only those who are victims of a crime are entitled to reparations for the crime, and only those who are the perpetrators of a crime or the immediate accessories to the perpetration of a crime are obliged to pay reparations for it.

In short, there is no one alive obliged to pay reparations and no one alive entitled to receive them. Therefore, there is a double injustice involved in the demand for black reparations for slavery. Some will be forced to pay what they do not owe, while others will get what they are not entitled to.

It is clear, I hope, that a collectivity such as the white race, whatever the exact ontological status to be ascribed to this collectivity, cannot possibly have moral obligations. Only a person can have moral obligations, and whatever the white race is, it is not a person. And the same goes for the black race. Whatever it is, it is not a person; hence it is not entitled to awards or damages for crimes.

The first premise of my argument cannot be denied since it records a simple empirical fact. The second premise might be disputed by saying that the victims include not only those who were enslaved, but also their descendants, who suffered the consequences of their ancestors' being enslaved. But although it is arguable that the early descendants of slaves are secondary (tertiary . . .) victims of slavery, it is not plausibly arguable that the currently living descendants of slaves are also victims. So even if the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves can be accounted victims of slavery, victim status is not ascribable to blacks presently alive.

But even if it is maintained that (2) is false, this premise is not needed to generate the second conjunct of (4), namely, no one now living is obliged to pay reparations. And this suffices to refute the very notion of black reparations.

(3) does not record an empirical fact, but expresses a moral principle. It strikes me, however, as self-evident. If A steals B's property, for example, it is just that A be forced to make restitution, and it is just that B receive his property back. But it would surely be unjust, and indeed morally absurd, to force C to make restitution to B, or, even worse, to D. Imagine a judge ordering that, since Kramer stole George's DVD player, Jerry should make restitution to Newman.

But it is that sort of moral absurdity that is involved in the very notion of black reparations. It is absurd to demand that first or second generation Polish Americans pay reparations for pre-1865 slavery in the U. S. to blacks who recently came from Jamaica, or worse, are descended from blacks who themselves held slaves. (There were black slaveholders in the U.S.!) Indeed it is racist to ignore the specifics of injury and focus the issue on race alone. It is morally absurd to think that the mere fact that X is black entitles him to reparations or that the mere fact that Y is white obliges him to pay them.

There are many more arguments that can be given agaist black reparations, but they are unnecessary once one grasps the simple and decisive argument just given. Nevertheless, I plan to review some of the other arguments later. The cumulative force of these arguments is overwhelming.

You say that you "do not support" laws regulating the sexual behavior of consenting adults, but I think what you really mean is that you oppose such laws. 'Oppose' implies 'not support,' but the latter does not imply the former. One way to not support something is by taking no stand on the issue. So I'll take you to mean that you oppose laws regulating the sexual behavior of consenting adults in private.

I tend to agree. To supply some examples concerning which you will probably agree, there should be no laws against fellatio, cunnilingus, sodomy, or sadomasochism, except perhaps in cases where the SM practices run a serious risk of terminating the life of one or more of the partners. Suppose some pervert becomes sexually aroused by being shot. That could count as a sexual act, in private, among consenting adults, but one ought to hesitate to argue that it ought to be legal. There are also cases of sexual arousal brought about by partial asphyxiation. Such perverts 'get off' being hanged, and then cut down at the right moment. The Marquis de Sade waxes eloquent on this theme in one of his books. (I forgot the technical term for this perversion.) Etc. In a thorough think-through one would have to consider all such cases.

I take it you think that morality and legality ought not be conflated. So when you say that certain practices should be legal, that does not commit you to saying that those same practices ought to be deemed morally permissible. If that is what you intend, then we are in agreement.

You say the State has no business regulating "various communal arrangements involving consenting adults." You may need to re-think or reformulate this. Marriage is a communal arrangement involving consenting adults. I don't believe you want to say that the State has no business regulating marriage, divorce, alimony, child support and the like, or providing tax incentives for marriage. If it is right to have laws against child abuse, then it is arguably also right to have laws against spouse abuse, non-support of a spouse, 'deadbeat dads,' etc. I also don't think, though I could easily be wrong, that you are in favor of so-called 'gay marriage.'

As for your 'inconsistency,' I don't see it. Your position implies that there should be no laws against sodomy if the act is consensual, private, and between adults. But this is consistent with not wanting to associate with homosexuals because you consider sodomy morally repugnant. It is surely consistent to maintain both that an act is morally wrong and that said act ought not be illegal. (I think Giuliani's stance on abortion is like this.) Or if you don't consider sodomy morally repugnant, and consider it merely 'aesthetically' or in some other non-moral way repugnant, that too would be consistent with holding that the act ought not be illegal.

I don't agree with you about prostitution, but that requires a separate post. One would have to examine whether the reasons for legally allowing a range of sex acts in private are also reasons for allowing the same sex acts to be done in the context of a business. I suspect the reasons wouldn't transfer.

Ethics as a philosophical subdiscipline is definable as the normative study of human action. Its object is not to describe or explain human behavior, but to evaluate it in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, using rationally supportable criteria. So defined, I discern no difference between ethics and moral philosophy.

Of course, there are contexts in which cognates of the two terms are not interchangeable salva significatione. For example, 'Jackson was brought up on a morals charge' connotes something different from 'Jackson was brought up on an ethics charge.' On the other hand, no one will refer to an ethics committee as a 'morals committee.'

This is because 'morals' is widely associated with sexual behavior. This helps explain why many are tempted to say that 'You can't legislate morality!' But I see no reason to acquiesce in the confusion of the species sexual morality with the genus morality as I just got finished explaining.

People get hung up on words and often fall to fighting over them. It is not an edifying spectacle. One should realize that it is not the labels that matter but the things labelled. Morality, shmorality. Ethics, shmethics. I'll give you the word as long as you leave me the distinction. Don't confuse a distinction with the terms in which it is couched.

You don't like the sound of 'morality'? It sounds too namby-pamby? Too Victorian? Fine, we'll call it ethics. I'm flexible. A wise man never quibbles over words. Now let's get on with the substantive debate.