RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Seven Saudi men convicted of theft, looting and armed robbery were executed on Wednesday, according to the country's official news agency, more than a week after their families and a rights group appealed to the king for clemency.
The executions took place in Abha, a city in the southern region of Asir, the Saudi Press Agency said. A resident who witnessed the execution said the seven were shot dead by a firing squad, a first in the kingdom, which traditionally has beheaded convicts sentenced to death.
[. . .]
The original sentences called for death by firing squad and crucifixion.
That's the one extreme, justice Sharia-style. Here is the other, justice liberal-style, if you want to call it 'justice':
Amnesty International called the executions an "act of sheer brutality."
"We are outraged by the execution of seven men in Saudi Arabia this morning. We oppose the death penalty in all circumstances, but this case has been particularly shocking," said Philip Luther, Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa director. (emphasis added)
I say that what we have here are equal but opposite forms of moral insanity. That Sharia is morally insane needs no argument. But anyone who opposes the death penalty in all circumstances is equally morally obtuse and has no conception of justice at all. I argue this in detail in my Crime and Punishment category and I won't repeat myself here. In any case, argument with the morally obtuse is pointless since their lack of sound moral sense prevents them from accepting the premises from which alone one can fruitfully argue.
Arguing with the morally obtuse about moral matters is like arguing with the empirically uninformed about empirical matters
In my last post on this topic I advanced a double-barreled thesis to the effect that (i) unconditional forgiveness is in most cases morally objectionable, and (ii) in most cases conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness. But now we need to back up and focus on the very concept of forgiveness since deciding whether (i) and (ii) are correct depends on what exactly we take forgiveness to be. So here is my preliminary stab at an analysis. After this task is completed, it may be necessary to back up once more and ask how I arrived at my analysis. Ain't philosophy fun?
1. Forgiveness has a triadic structure: to forgive is for someone to forgive someone for something. X forgives y for z, where x and y are persons (usually but not necessarily human) and z is typically an action or an action-omission. We typically forgive deeds and misdeeds, but perhaps states can be forgiven, for example, the state of being insufferably arrogant. An interesting side-question is whether x and y could be the same person. Is it possible to forgive oneself for something? I mention this question only to set it aside.
2. Only those we perceive to be guilty can be forgiven. Necessarily, if x forgives y for z, then x perceive, whether rightly or wrongly, y to be guilty of doing or having done z, or guilty of failing or having failed to do z. The necessity of this necessary truth is grounded in the very concept of forgiveness.
3. It follows from (2) that only what one rightly or wrongly takes to be a moral agent can be forgiven or not forgiven. For anything one takes to be morally guilty one must take to be a moral agent. I can neither forgive nor not forgive my cat for sampling my lasagne. Not being a moral agent, my cat cannot incur guilt.
4. It also follows from (2) that what I forgive a person for must be a wrongful act or act-omission. Tom, unlike my cat, is a moral agent; but it is not possible to forgive Tom for feeding his kids.
5. Forgiving works a salutary change in the forgiver: it alters his mental attitude toward the one forgiven. True forgiveness is not merely verbal but involves a genuine change of heart/mind (a metanoia if you will) that is good for the forgiver.
6. Forgiving cannot remove the guilt of the one forgiven if he is indeed guilty. Suppose you steal my money. You don't admit guilt or make restitution. But I forgive you anyway. Clearly, my forgiving you does not remove your moral guilt. You remain objectively guilty of theft. The demands of justice have not been satisfied.
7. Forgiving cannot retroactively make a person innocent of a crime he has committed. Suppose again that you steal my money. You admit guilt and you make restitution. My forgiving you does not and cannot change the fact that you wrongfully took my money. Forgiveness does not retroactively confer innocence. It follows that you remain guilty of having committed the crime even if you do admit guilt and satisfy the objectve demands of justice by making restitution, etc.
Assuming that the above analysis is correct, albeit not complete, does it allow for the possibility of unconditional forgiveness? It does. Suppose again that you steal my money, but don't admit guilt let alone make restitution. If I forgive you nonetheless, then I do so unconditionally, as opposed to on condition that you admit guilt, make restitution, etc.
Note that unconditional forgiveness is not an inter-personal transaction between the forgiver and the person forgiven, but something that transpires intrapsychically in the forgiver. This is because unconditional forgiveness doesn't require the one forgiven to acknowledge anything or even to be aware that he is the recipient of forgiveness. One can unconditionally forgive dead persons and persons with whom one has no contact. Since unconditional forgiveness is merely intra-personal as opposed to inter-personal, one may question whether it is forgiveness in the strict sense at all. Accordingly, one might add to the list of the concept's features:
8. Necessarily, if x forgives y, then y perceives himself as having done something wrong and admits his wrongdoing to x.
Now I don't think that features 1-7 are controversial, but #8 is. For it rules out unconditional forgiveness. The underlying issue is whether forgiveness is an inter-personal transaction or merely an attitude change within the mind/heart of the forgiver. If forgiveness is inter-personal, the one forgiven must accept forgiveness. But he can do that only if he acknowledges guilt.
But if unconditional forgiveness is possible, and not ruled out by the very concept of forgiveness, it doesn't follow that it is morally acceptable. I say it is not. To forgive unconditionally is to refuse to take a stand against it. But I will leave the elaboration of this point for later.
The other main question is whether conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness. I say it is.
One might think that there is nothing left to forgive after the offender has admitted guilt, made reparations, etc. But there is something left to forgive, namely, his having committed the offense in the first place.
A second consideration. If unconditional forgiveness is possible, then what makes forgiveness forgiveness has nothing to do with the the one forgiven: it does not require his admission of guilt, his doing penance, or even his being guilty. If I forgive a person, I must take him to be guilty, but he needn't be in fact. Unconditional forgiveness is merely an alteration of the forgiver's mental state. Now if forgiveness is what it is whether or not there is any non-relational change in the one forgiven, then it doesn't matter whether or not the conditions are satisfied. So conditional forgiveness will be just as much forgiveness as unconditional forgiveness is.
So for these two reasons conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness.
Atheist Malcolm Pollack gets it right too and refers us to a fine piece by Pat Buchanan.
And then there is this by Michael Brendan Dougherty on the ascendancy of Jorge Bergoglio:
But the other way to look at the dawn of this papacy is that it is one more in the pile of recent Catholic novelties and mediocrities. He is the first Latin American pope, the first Jesuit to be pope, and the first to take the name Francis. And so he falls in line with the larger era of the church in the past 50 years which has been defined by ill-considered experimentation: a “pastoral” ecumenical council at Vatican II, a new synthetic vernacular liturgy, the hasty revision of the rules for almost all religious orders within the church, the dramatic gestures and “saint factory” of Pope John Paul II’s papacy, along with the surprise resignation of Benedict XVI. In this vision, Benedict’s papacy, which focused on “continuity,” seems like the exception to an epoch of stunning and unsettling change, which—as we know—usually heralds collapse.
"Ill-considered experimentation" is right. I would go further and call it profoundly stupid. People who are drawn to religion tend to be of a conservative bent. Conservatives don't like change, tolerating it only when necessary. For a conservative, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of keeping things as they are, a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional formulations and usages, beliefs and practices. Now the world outside the Church is rife with change, not all of it bad, of course, but much of it unsettling. The Church ought to be a place of stability and order, an oasis of calm, a venue where the ancient is preserved as a temporal reminder of the eternal.
So you drive people away from the Church by instituting 'reforms' that accommodate the Church to the crap culture outside it. This is a large topic and a fit one for a large-scale rant, but it is time to punch the clock. I will just mention three stupidities: getting rid of the Latin mass; abolishing the no-meat-on-Friday rule, and the asinine PC re-labelling of confession as 'reconciliation.' Pee-Cee crapola and just the tip of the iceberg.
Even if Catholicism is pure buncombe with no transcendent warrant, if it wants to survive immanently speaking, then it must not allow itself to be watered down into some form of namby-pamby secular humanist bullshit.
Have I succeeded in expressing my disapprobation of recent developments?
The dopes inside the Church are worse than those outside it.
Finally, a post on forgiveness. 🙂 But my spirit within me won't permit me to forgo responding to what you've written. You characterize the paradox this way: It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc. But if forgiveness is made conditional upon the doing of these things, then what is to forgive? Conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness. That is the gist of the putative paradox, assuming I have understood it.
That is not quite right.
The problem is this. Forgiving unconditionally — forgiving someone without their apology, repentance, penance, etc. — seems to amount to little more than condoning what they've done; it's hardly forgiveness but more of an acceptance of the wrong. On the other hand, forgiving on the condition that the wrong has been atoned — the wrongdoer has apologized, repented, made reparations, performed penances, etc — seems to be superfluous, insofar as after atonement has been made, the wrongdoer is not guilty of anything any longer and thus there is nothing to forgive, nor would continued resentment be appropriate.
BV: That's exactly what I said, though in a lapidary manner. So I think we agree as to what the putative paradox is. I call it 'putative' because I don't see it as a genuine paradox.
You write that, The first limb strikes me as self-evident: it is indeed morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, etc. But this is contentious; not everyone sees this the way you do. For instance, Jesus seems to forgive wrongdoers unconditionally on two occasions, once in the pericope adulterae (at John 7.53-8.11) and again at Luke 23.34 when he is being crucified. A significant number of contemporary philosophers (e.g., David Garrard, Eve McNaughton, Leo Zaibert, Christopher McCowley, Cheshire Calhoun, Glen Pettigrove) defend the practice of unconditional forgiveness, as well. So it's unacceptable simply to accept the first horn of the paradox as is; there is the argumentation of all these philosophers to deal with!
BV: Yes, my assertion is debatable, but then so is almost everything in philosophy and plenty of what is outside of philosophy. I don't think bringing Jesus in advances your argument. Either Jesus is God or he is not. If he is not, then he lacks the authority to contravene the existing law and forgive the adulteress. If he is God, then two problems. First, your argument then rests on a highly contentious theological presupposition. (I will remind you that in conversation you said that you were not trying to work out the Christian concept of forgiveness, but the concept of forgiveness in general.) Second, granting that God has the authority to forgive and forgive unconditionally, that has no relevance to the human condition, to forgiveness as it plays out among mere mortals such as us. For one thing, God can afford to forgive unconditionally; nothing can touch him. But for us to adopt a policy of forgiving unconditionally would be disastrous.
At Luke 23:34, Jesus is reported to have said, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Note that Jesus is not forgiving his tormenters; he is asking God the Father to forgive them. So this passage is not relevant to our discussion. Besides, there is nothing here about unconditional forgiveness. Jesus could have been requesting his Father to forgive the killers after punishing them appropriately.
Your mention of contemporary philosophers who support your position is just name-dropping. To drop a name is not to give an argument. I would have to see their arguments. Is it unacceptable for me to hold to my understanding of forgiveness according to which it is morally objectionable to forgive the unrepentant in advance of studying the arguments of those you mention? No more unacceptable than holding to the view that motion is possible in advance of studying the arguments of Zeno and his school, or holding to the reality of time despite my inability decisively to refute McTaggart. I might just stand my Moorean ground: "Look, I just ate lunch; therefore time is real!" Similarly with forgiveness: "Look, it is a wonderful thing to forgive, but only on condition that the offender own up to his wrongdoing, make amends, etc."
You also write, I admit that once the miscreant has paid his debt, he is morally in the clear. His guilt has been removed. But I can still forgive him because forgiveness does not take away guilt, it merely alters the attitude of the one violated to the one who violated him. You are forgetting another important aspect of forgiveness beyond the change in attitude, however, namely that it is a way of responding to wrongdoers as wrongdoers. Another way of putting this is that forgiveness is only possible when someone stands before us as guilty for some wrong done and is thus an appropriate candidate for resentment, anger, etc. If someone has atoned for their wrong and is no longer guilty, then there's no ground for resentment and thus there's nothing more to forgive! So the change in attitude after atonement has been made may resemble forgiveness, but it's hardly genuine forgiveness since there's no wrong to forgive any longer.
BV: This is an interesting and weighty point, but I disagree nonetheless. You may be conflating two separate claims. I would say that it is a conceptual truth that if X forgives Y, then X perceives Y as having done wrong, whether or not Y has in fact done wrong. This truth is analytic in that it merely unpacks our ordinary understanding of 'forgiveness.' But it doesn't follow from this conceptual truth that there is nothing left to forgive with respect to a person who has atoned for his misdeed. I say there is: the mere fact that he has done me wrong in the first place. Suppose he stole my money, but then apologized and made restitution. In that case the demands of justice have been met. But there is still something left to forgive, namely, his having stolen my money in the first place. The apology and restitution do not eliminate the whole of the guilt, for the offender remains guilty of the misdeed. After all, his apology and restitution do not retroactively make him innocent. He remains guilty as charged. The fact of his having committed the misdeed can in no way be altered. Though contingent at the time, it now has the modal status of necessitas per accidens.
There is obviously a difference between one who is guilty of an offence and one who is innocent of it. That distinction remains in place even after the guilty party pays for his crime. Your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent — which is absurd.
Consider this. Forgiveness is commonly thought of as gracious; it is a generous way of responding to wrongdoers that goes beyond strictly what they deserve. How is it at all generous to change one's attitude towards a wrongdoer only once atonement has been made and she is effectively no longer a wrongdoer?
BV: I agree that forgiveness is gracious and not strictly a matter of desert. It is nevertheless generous to forgive even after atonement has been made. For one is forgiving the offender of having committed the misdeed in he first place. I deny that the offender is no longer a wrongdoer after the penalty has been paid. Again, your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent.
Remember the Derrida quote I cited:
Imagine, then, that I forgive on the condition that the guilty one repents, mends his ways, asks forgiveness, and thus would be changed by a new obligation, and that from then on he would no longer be exactly the same as the one who was found to be culpable. In this case, can one still speak of forgiveness? This would be too simple on both sides: one forgives someone other than the guilty one. In order for there to be forgiveness, must one not on the contrary forgive both the fault and the guilty as such, where the one and the other remain as irreversible as the evil, as evil itself, and being capable of repeating itself, unforgivably, without transformation, without amelioration, without repentance or promise? Must one not maintain that an act of forgiveness worthy of its name, if there ever is such a thing, must forgive the unforgivable, and without condition? (On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, pp. 38-9)
BV: John Searle once said of Derrida that he gives bullshit a bad name. So an appeal to the authority of Derrida will have as little effect on me as an appeal the supposed authority of Paul Krugman in an economic connection. The Derrida passage smacks of sophistry what with the rhetorical questions and the typically French amorphousness. He seems to be advancing the following sophism. If one forgives the one who has atoned, then "one forgives someone other than the guilty one." But that is to confuse numerical identity with qualitative identity.
Thus I have to hold, pace tua, that genuine forgiveness must be unconditional, and conditionalized forgiveness is less than true.
BV: And I continue to maintain, pace tua, that only conditional forgiveness is morally unobjectionable and that conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness.
You are free to psychologize your opponent when his position is demonstrably false or incoherent. If his reasons are worthless, then you are justified in exposing the motives that drive his commitments.
What the presentist affirms, roughly, is that only (temporally) present items exist: there are no nonpresent existents. The anti-presentist denies this, maintaining that there are nonpresent existents. Now there is no genuine dispute here unless the identity of the presentist thesis is perfectly clear and the anti-present is denying that very thesis.
Following some earlier suggestions of Peter Lupu, I will now try to formulate this dispute using the concept nonpresent existent. I will use 'NPE' to refer to this concept, a concept we may assume both the presentist and his opponents understand. A nonpresent existent, by stipulative definition, is one that exists in time, but is either merely past or merely future. Using NPE, presentism and anti-presentism may be defined as follows:
P. NPE is not instantiated
AP. NPE is instantiated.
The dispute, then, is about whether NPE is instantiated. NPE is a concept both parties understand. So it is common ground. The dispute is not about this concept, but about whether it is instantiated.
But note that 'is' occurs in both formulations. Does it have exactly the same sense in both (P) and (AP)? If not, then the common ground afforded us by NPE avails us nothing.
Yesterday (see link below) I distinguished five time-related senses of 'is.' Starting with (P), which sense of 'is' is operative in it? We can right away exclude the 'is' of atemporality since presentism is a thesis about temporal items. We can also exclude the 'is' of temporal presentness. The presentist cannot be charitably construed as saying that NPE is not now instantiated, for that is trivially true.
The 'is' of omnitemporality is not a suitable candidate either. For if NPE is not instantiated at every time, then we have quantification over times. But one cannot quantify over what does not exist. So nonpresent times exist. But if so, then NPE is instantiated, contrary to what the presentist intends.
On the disjunctively detensed reading of 'is', the presentist is saying that NPE was not instantiated or is not instantiated or will be not instantiated, and the anti-presentist is saying that the NPE was instantiated or is instantiated or will be instantiated.
Does this do the trick? At the moment I cannot see that it doesn't. But time is the hardest of nuts to crack and my 'nutcracker' may not be up to the job . . . .
I understand Aurel Kolnai has a paper on this topic. I haven't read it. But the paradox has been put to me as follows in conversation.
It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc. But if forgiveness is made conditional upon the doing of these things, then what is to forgive? Conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness. That is the gist of the putative paradox, assuming I have understood it.
This is something I need to explore, but off the top of my head I fail to see a problem. The first limb strikes me as self-evident: it is indeed morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, etc. But I reject the second limb. I admit that once the miscreant has paid his debt, he is morally in the clear. His guilt has been removed. But I can still forgive him because forgiveness does not take away guilt, it merely alters the attitude of the one violated to the one who violated him.
Suppose you take money from my wallet without my permission. I catch you at it and express my moral objection. You give me back my money and apologize for having taken it. I forgive you. My forgiving you makes perfect sense even though you have made restitution and have apologized. For I might not have forgiven you: I might have told you go to hell and get out of my life for good.
By forgiving you, I freely abandon the justified negative attitude toward you that resulted from your bad behavior. This works a salutary change in me, but it also does you good, for now you are restored to my good graces and our mutual relations become once again amicable.
So I see no paradox. The first limb is self-evidently true while the second is false. Only conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness.
It is of course possible that I am not thinking deeply enough!
I dedicate this post to that loveable rascal Bill Clinton who taught us just how much can ride on what the meaning of 'is' is.
Credit where credit is due: Some of the inspiration for this post comes from a conversation with Peter Lupu and from an article he recommended, S. Savitt, Presentism and Eternalism in Perspective.
1. There is first of all the 'is' of atemporality. Assuming that there are timeless entities such as God (concrete) and the number 13 (abstract), any sentences we use to talk about them must feature tenseless verbs and copulae. Consider the proposition expressed by the sentence, '13 is prime.' 13 is prime, but not now and not always. If the truth were always true, it would be in time. The truth is timeless and so is the object 13 and the property of being prime. The same goes for '13 exists.' It is not true now nor at every time. It is true timelessly. It is worth noting that the timeless is' and 'exists' do not abstract from the temporal determinations of pastness, presentness, and futurity for the simple reason that numbers and such are not in time in the first place. So the 'is' of atemporality is not the result of a de-tensing operation whereby we abtract from the temporal determinations to lay bare the pure copula, the copula that merely 'copulates.' The 'is' in question is tenseless from the 'git-go.'
Perhaps we should distinguish between grammatical tense and logical tense. Every verb has a grammatical tense. Thus the verb in 'God exists' is in the present tense. But God exists timelessly, and so 'exists' in this instance is logically without a tense.
Consider John 8:58: "Before Abraham was, I am." Is that ungrammatical? Yes, but logically it makes sense.
2. At the opposite end of the spectrum we find the 'is' of temporal presentness. Examples: 'Peter is smoking' and 'There are 13 donuts in the box.' There are now 13 donuts in the box.
3. The 'is' of omnitemporality. Savitt gives the example of 'Copper is a conductor of electricity.' The sentence is true at every time, not just at present. But it is not timelessly true since it is about something in time, copper. I think the example shows that the tenseless is not the same as the timeless. What is timelessly true is tenselessly true, but not conversely.
4. The Disjunctively Detensed 'Is.' We can de-tense 'is' as follows: x is detensedly F just in case x was F or is F or will be F. We can do the same with 'exists.' Thus, Socrates is detensedly wise iff Socrates was wise or is wise or will be wise. De-tensing involves abstracting from temporal determinations. A detensed copula is a pure copula: all it does is 'copulate' or link.
The 'am' in 'I am dead' is a pure copula, and the sentence is tenselessly true, but not presently true or timelessly true or omnitemporally true. Gott sei dank!
5. The Hypertenseless 'Is.' God exists atemporally and thus tenselessly while Socrates exists temporally but not presently or omnitemporally and thus he too exists tenselessly. If there is a hypertenseless sense of 'exist' it applies to both God and Socrates and abstracts from the way each exists, atemporally in the case of God, temporally in the case of Socrates.
In 'God and Socrates both exist,' the 'exist' is hypertenseless in that it is abstractly common to both the tenselessness of the 'exists' in 'God exists' and the tenselessness of the 'exists' in 'Socrates exists.'
Now what is this hypertenseless univocal sense of 'exists' that applies to both God and Socrates? Persumably it is the quantifier sense according to which x exists iff (Ey) x = y. Existence in this sense is identity-with-something-or-other. Absolutely everything, whatever its mode of existence, exists in this hypertenseless sense.
Now the presentist wants to say that, necessarily, it is always the case that only present items exist. But in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot be the first four, for reasons given in previous posts. So let's try the fifth sense. Accordingly, only present items are identical-with-something-or-other.
What makes for a good marriage? It is not enough to like your spouse. It is not enough to love her. The partners must also admire one another. There has to be some attribute in your spouse that you don't find in yourself (or not in the same measure) and that you aspire to possess or possess more fully. Must I add that we are not talking mainly about physical attributes?
What is admiration?
To love is not to admire. If God exists, he loves us. But he certainly doesn't admire us. For what does he lack? He doesn't aspire to possess any attribute that we have and that he lacks. Closer to the ground, one can easily love a sentient being, whether animal or human, without admiration.
To value is not to admire. Prudence is a valuable attribute; so if you are prudent, I will value you in respect of your prudence; but if I am as prudent as you, then I don't admire you in respect of your prudence. Admiration is for attributes the admirer does not possess, or does not possess in the measure the admired possesses them.
To respect is not to admire. I can and ethically must respect the rights of those who are inferior to me in respect of admirable attributes.
My suggestion, then, is that a necessary though not sufficient condition of a good marriage is that it be a two-membered mutual admiration society.
When I encountered 'transpicuous' for the first time today, I thought the writer was either neologizing by combining 'transparent' and 'conspicuous,' or else just confused. But the word, though rare, has been in the English language since the 17th century.
I wanted to sound an alarm bell from coast to coast. I wanted everybody to know that our Constitution is precious and that no American should be killed by a drone without first being charged with a crime. As Americans, we have fought long and hard for the Bill of Rights. The idea that no person shall be held without due process, and that no person shall be held for a capital offense without being indicted, is a founding American principle and a basic right.
If the Obama Administration whose Attorney General is Eric Holder can get away with killing by drone an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without owning up to it, what is to stop such a mendacious and power-hungry administration from killing U.S. citizens in the homeland without due process?
Even the shysters of the ACLU and the bunch at The Nation are on the right side of this issue. It would be nice if we could convince the aforementioned crapweasels that it is the Second Amendment that backs up the others, including the Fifth, but they are too morally corrupt and intellectually obtuse for that.
Is everything in time? Or are there timeless entities? So-called abstracta are held by many to be timeless. Among abstracta we find numbers, (abstract as opposed to concrete) states of affairs, mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets, and Fregean (as opposed to Russellian) propositions, where a Fregean proposition is the sense of an indexical-free sentence in the indicative mood. The following items are neither in space, nor causally active/passive, but some say that they exist in time at every time: 7, 7's being prime, {7}, 7 is prime. If an item exists in time at every time, then it is omnitemporal. If an item is 'outside' time, then it is timeless or eternal or, to be helpfully pleonastic in the manner of McCann, timelessly eternal.
Let us agree that a temporalist is one for whom everything is in time, while an eternalist is one for whom some things are not in time.
On p. 55 of his Creation and the Sovereignty of God (Indiana University Press 2012), Hugh McCann argues that the temporalist cannot formulate his thesis without presupposing that there are timeless states of affairs, at least of the negative sort. Here is how I see the argument.
Part of what the temporalist says is that
1. There are no timeless states of affairs.
How is 'there are no' in (1) to be understood? The temporalist must intend it to be taken in a way consistent with temporalism, thus:
2. There never have been, are not now, and never will be any timeless states of affairs.
Unfortunately, the eternalist will agree with the temporalist on the truth of (2). Consider 7's being prime. Both agree that at no time does this state of affairs exist. The agreement is unfortunate because it shows that the bone of contention cannot be formulated in terms of (2). The bone of contention must be formulated in terms of (1) taken tenselessly. But then the temporalist ends up presupposing that there are timeless states of affairs. For he presupposes that there is the timeless state of affairs, There being no timeless states of affairs.
Temporalism, when properly formulated, i.e., when formulated in a way that permits disagreement between temporalist and eternalist, refutes itself by implying its own negation.
Is this 'Mavericked-up' McCann argument a good argument or not? Have at it, boys.
A Parallel with the Problem of Formulating Presentism
We have seen in previous posts that to avoid tautology the presentist must reach for a tenseless sense of 'exists.' He cannot say, tautologically, that whatever exists (present-tense) exists now. For that is not metaphysical 'news.' It is nothing to fight over, and fight we must. He has to say: Whatever tenselessly exists, exists now. But then he seems to presuppose that there are times, as real as the present time, at which temporal individuals such as Socrates tenselessly exist. The upshot is that when presentism is given a nontautological formulation, a formulation that permits disagreement beween presentist and anti-presentist, it refutes itself. For if there are non-present times as real as the present time, then it is not the case that only present items exist.
Addendum (10 March): Hugh McCann Responds
On the argument from my ch. 3 about timeless states of affairs, I of course stand by it (as of this moment, at least). But I don’t think this argument alone would suffice to show that there is a B-series. It might be, for example, that the only timeless states of affairs that there are pertain to abstracta; things like Seven’s being prime, and so forth. If that were so we would get no B-series, because abstracta exhibit no temporal features at all, whereas entities in a B-series share before and after relations.
BV replies: Well, I didn't claim that McCann's argument suffices to show that there is a B-series, a series of events related by the so-called B-relations: earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with. Perhaps my use of 'eternalist' misled him. All I meant by it above, as I stated, is someone who holds that some entities are timeless. I wasn't using it in the more commonly accepted sense in which it implies a commitment to the B-series. So we agree that the above argues does not suffice to show that there is a B-series. It could be that there are timeless entities, and entities in time, but no B-series.
As for the analogous anti-presentist argument you go on to give, I subscribe to it. But all it shows, as far as I can see, is that we have to consider talk of tenseless states of affairs legitimate. But to show that isn’t to show very much. It doesn’t yet follow, for example, that we have to speak of Socrates as existing tenselessly. Socrates is not a state of affairs, and there is nothing paradoxical about saying there neither is, was, nor will be a tenseless Socrates. The question is just whether it is true, and there I am unsure of the answer. Furthermore, I can imagine someone claiming that when it comes to the concrete world, tenseless states of affairs—the B-series, in effect—is just a necessary fiction, something we need in order to be able to keep proper track of our memories. I have no knockdown argument for or against this position. I am inclined to think, however, that it is a vast oversimplification, just as I think presentism is.
BV replies: I think what McCann is getting at here is that an adequate formulation of presentism must presuppose the meaningfulness of talk of tenseless states of affairs, but needn't presuppose that there are tenseless states of affairs involving entities in time. If that is what he means, then my quick little argument seems unsound, and McCann shouldn't have subscribed to it. I'll have to think about it some more. What a miserably difficult topic this is!
More proof, as if we needed it, of the stupidity of liberals. Should we respond respectfully and rationally to fools? Mockery and ridicule are often more effective. Many of the members of Generation Screwed voted for Obama because they perceived him as 'cool.' Rational persuasion is not likely to work on such people. Their perceptions need to be changed from 'cool' to 'uncool' by the ridicule dished out by the likes of Dennis Miller and Adam Carolla.
If you want to win, make the fools look uncool to those who think coolness the criterion, but have solid arguments at the ready for those who can think.
Gail Collins' NYT op-ed gun outburst is another example of liberal stupidity. I won't sully these pages by quoting any of it. Here is an adequate response.
