Reply to Wielenberg

Wielenberg presses three points: one concerning the plausibility of the denial that humans have intrinsic value, one concerning the intrinsic disvalue of suffering, and one concerning whether God, as I have characterized God, loves us. As part of his discussion of the intrinsic disvalue of pain, he describes a horrific state of affairs the possibility of which is entailed, he claims, by my account of the Anselmian being's ethics. This case raises interesting issues that merit a separate discussion.

(1) Wielenberg disputes my denial that humans have intrinsic value. The notion that humans have intrinsic value – where to have such value is, recall, to have value solely in virtue of one's intrinsic features – is a distinctly minority view in the history of philosophy, rejected by Hobbesian views, Humean views, and Aristotelian views. So Wielenberg can't claim that the weight of philosophical consensus is against my view. What he offers is an argument from the sort of isolation tests described by Moore in Principia Ethica and annihilation tests deployed in recent work by Scott Davison.Footnote ² To ask whether something has intrinsic value, imagine it isolated from other objects, so that it lacks the relational features that might give it non-intrinsic value; if you judge it to be valuable in such a scenario, then you must take it to have intrinsic value. Imagine a machine that annihilates a being; if one takes it that anyone has reason to prevent the annihilation, then one should judge that the being has intrinsic value.

I doubt the probative value of such tests. I have lots of views about the reasons that I have to prevent other creatures’ annihilation or to be glad of their continued existence. But I have no such intuitions about what all possible rational beings must do or feel in such cases. So I do not find such arguments particularly persuasive. There is more, though. Part of the book's argument is that we have good reason from Anselmianism about God – the notion that God is an absolutely perfect being – to hold that, given the possibility of an absolutely perfect being, creaturely intrinsic value is impossible. For to be absolutely perfect, a being must be the essential source of the goodness of all other things; but if it is the essential source of the goodness of all other things, then those other things all have their value relationally rather than intrinsically (76–77). So while I allow that the view that humans – indeed, all concrete objects – have intrinsic value is a logically coherent position, I think that it fits poorly with an Anselmian conception of God.

But Wielenberg has an interesting argument that I am committed – not in spite of, but in virtue of, my Anselmianism – to the view that at least some creatures exhibit intrinsic value. For I hold that the Anselmian being is intrinsically valuable, and is such in virtue of exhibiting knowledge, power, agency, etc. at their intrinsic maxima. Now, Wielenberg ascribes to me the view that these features are unqualifiedly good-making, in the sense that they ‘contribute to the intrinsic goodness of any being that instantiates them’;Footnote ³ and indeed I think that any being who exhibits such features at their intrinsic maxima will be intrinsically valuable. But I don't claim, and am not committed to the view, that any being who has knowledge, power, etc. to some degree thereby bears some degree of intrinsic value. I agree that any being is made better for having these features to some degree, but not that they are made intrinsically better. For my view is that any creature that is made better for having these features is better insofar as, and just because, by exhibiting these features a creature participates in the absolute intrinsic goodness of the Anselmian being.

Even if my view is not inconsistent, though, isn't it a bad idea for me to deny that humans, in virtue of exhibiting these features to some extent, are intrinsically valuable to some extent? I don't think so. I do think that not knowing something is enough to disqualify something from being absolutely intrinsically valuable, but I don't think that knowing something is sufficient to confer some intrinsic value. And again, there is pressure from Anselmianism to deny this; as Anselm himself thought, part of the Anselmian being's perfection is that it exhibits its perfections in such a way that only it has its value only through itself.Footnote ⁴

(2) The second line of criticism that Wielenberg advances is that I have ignored the intrinsic disvalue of pain and suffering, and thus of a distinct source of possible reasons, perhaps requiring reasons, for the Anselmian being. If pain has intrinsic disvalue and provides requiring reasons for the Anselmian being to prevent it, then that is an alternate route to a formulation of the argument from evil against the existence of an Anselmian being. But I do not think that it is plausible to think of the suffering of creatures as intrinsically bad. Suffering is relationally bad – it is bad for the being that suffers. (Isolation tests have trouble picking this up, because the suffering is always going to be present ‘in’ the subject, and you can't take away the subject without taking away the suffering too.) If the badness exhibited by pain and suffering is relational – fundamentally, badness for the beings that suffer – then any reasons that one has to ease the suffering are derivative from the reasons that one has to look after the interests of the being who might suffer. But part of the argument of the book is that the considerations to which we have appealed to give some account of why we have requiring reasons to take an interest in others’ good fail even to suggest that the Anselmian being would have requiring reasons to take an interest in our good.

I add that, while people often do appeal to pain and suffering as paradigmatic intrinsic bads, these strike me as unlikely candidates for intrinsic bads.Footnote ⁵ Our common-sense assessment of the disvalue of someone's pain varies radically with how much that person cares about that pain, in ways that seem at odds with the marks of intrinsic disvalue. Our common-sense assessment of the disvalue of pain and suffering varies radically by temporal location – think of Parfit's great My Past or Future Operations thought experimentFootnote ⁶  – and anything the common-sense value of which varies so radically by temporal location does not have initial credibility as something intrinsically bad. I will just admit that I do not really understand well the badness of pain and suffering and how it works. (It is a Moorean fact for me that I have reason to prevent my own horrible pain, and even yours too; it is not a Moorean fact that pain has a distinctive sort of intrinsic disvalue.) So even if it is true that pain's being intrinsically bad would have untoward implications for my view, I don't think that the thesis that pain is intrinsically bad is sufficiently plausible to be a cause for concern.

(3) Put to the side questions about intrinsic value and disvalue. In the book I defend the following view: if the Anselmian being were to take on a contingent ethics by which the Anselmian being invites us into an everlasting relationship with that being, a relationship in which our good is achieved in a way that goes far beyond any good to be realized in this life, then the Anselmian being would thereby count as loving us. And, I claim, it is plausible that the Christian God – who is an Anselmian being – satisfies this condition, and thus counts as loving us (195). Wielenberg challenges this characterization of God as loving: as he sees it, the divine invitation that I describe is not really loving, because on traditional Christian views, some humans will not accept this invitation, and on traditional Christian views, God knows, and knows at the point of creation, that those humans will not accept it. So the Anselmian being brought some people into existence knowing that they would, in fact, have a life that was not worth living for them. And it does not seem, says Wielenberg, that the Anselmian being loves them in that scenario.

Note first that Wielenberg has added at least one premise that I did not commit to: anti-universalism, the view that not all created rational beings end up accepting the divine invitation to union with God.Footnote ⁷ So one might say, as Marilyn Adams would have said – as far as I can tell, she and I defend otherwise very similar views about divine ethicsFootnote ⁸  – that what I say about the divine invitation has to be strengthened, that somehow all will be well, for all, for the lovingness of God to be sustained.Footnote ⁹ Strengthening that claim is not at all in tension with any of the claims about divine ethics that I make elsewhere in the book.

If I do not avail myself of universalism – and I don't really want to say that God is loving only in the worlds in which all are saved – then I want to say two things. The first is that, whatever my difficulties here, they are not difficulties that are generated by my views on divine ethics, but rather are present in every Christian non-universalist view that affirms divine foreknowledge – that is, every traditional Christian position. Note that Wielenberg did not need to use any premise drawn from my distinctive theses about divine ethics to make his case. So, whatever problem I have here, it is not an objection to this view of divine ethics, but just to the Christian view that God loves all humans, that God creates all humans, God foreknows the fate of all humans, and that some humans may not be saved.

The second is that I am not convinced that God's knowledge that the invitation will be refused is sufficient to show that God is not loving. Consider an analogy. Suppose that there are people in a neighbourhood – the Misanthrope family – who decline all party invitations; they just don't like being with their neighbours any more than is necessary. Someone in this neighbourhood might extend a party invitation to everyone in that neighbourhood, including the Misanthropes. This is a loving act, towards all the neighbours. But the invitation can be lovingly extended to the Misanthropes even if the host knows fully well that the Misanthropes will decline the invitation. It surely would not count as loving towards the Misanthropes if the invitation were made just because it was known that they would decline it. But if the invitation is extended towards all the neighbours because all the neighbours are lovable, then the extending of the invitation to the Misanthropes seems to be an act of love towards them.

My thought, then, is that God's reason for extending an invitation to all humans may be independent of, and not in any way based on, the fact that some will accept and some will reject that invitation. It may then be a loving act towards all humans, even though God knows that some humans will reject it. And it is in virtue of that loving act that I claim that God counts as loving us.

(4) Consider now what I will call Wielenberg's ‘horrendous creation scenario’. He asks us to

Wielenberg wields the horrendous creation scenario to make a point about the intrinsic disvalue of pain and the relation of that disvalue to what we can plausibly believe about the ethics of an Anselmian being. While I responded to his theses about intrinsic disvalue of pain above, I do not think that this eliminates the interest of the horrendous creation scenario. For one might just think it is obvious that this is not a world that an absolutely perfect being could create. But Wielenberg has taken pains to ensure that the creation of the world described in the horrendous creation scenario is compatible with the ethics I have ascribed to the absolutely perfect being, including that the Anselmian being does not intend, though that being may make use of, evils (117–120). So one might think that this is itself a reason to reject the book's main line of argument.

I myself do not have confidence that an absolutely perfect being could not actualize such a world. But I am also not confident that the horrific creation scenario's being actual is compatible with the ethics that I ascribe to the Anselmian being in the book. Not because of considerations regarding intention, foresight, and use of evils; I think Wielenberg's characterization of the case is such that I could not claim that its being actualized by the Anselmian being must involve the Anselmian being's intending evil. But there is some reason to wonder whether its being actual is consistent with the ethics of the Anselmian being as formulated in the book.

The objective that Wielenberg ascribes to the Anselmian being in bringing about the horrific creation scenario is ‘to produce a beautiful and complex visual display followed by a beautiful symphony.’ Why, though, is such a thing something the Anselmian being could bring about? As I argue in chapter 4, there is a pressing question about why the Anselmian being would create, given that no intrinsic value is added to the world thereby (83–84). There I endorse one solution: that God creates for the sake of some of the beings that God creates. That creatures would be made well-off – that is, that the agent-relative value of well-being is realized in them – gives God justifying reasons to bring them into existence, for these beings’ own sake.

Now, in defending this view of the reasons for creating that an Anselmian being could have, though, I take no stand on how extensive is the class of creatures for the sake of which the Anselmian being might thereby act. One might think that in order to act for some creature's sake, that creature must be a rational being. Or one might think that it needs to be a sentient being. Or one might think that it could be any being capable of being benefited or harmed. At any rate, the presence of such a limitation might help to make sense of the view that the horrible creation scenario is impossible even on the discretion-friendly ethics that I ascribe to the Anselmian being. For suppose that there is a limited class of creatures who can be brought into existence for their own sake – say, rational creatures – and suppose that no such creatures are in any way well-off in the horrible creation scenario. (For all such creatures, it would have been, to put it colloquially and very misleadingly, better for them had they never existed.) Then one might say: the reason why this scenario is impossible is that the Anselmian being would have had no reason to bring it about. There must be some point to what the Anselmian being does, but this is pointless; and its pointlessness makes it impossible.

I hesitate to put too much weight on that reply, for it is not as if I offer in the book an impossibility proof that shows that every other account of why the Anselmian being might create is in some way inconsistent with Anselmianism.Footnote ¹¹ So even if my speculation here is correct, perhaps there is some other good reason the Anselmian being has for bringing about the horrific creation scenario, though we are shocked and horrified by the notions that the Anselmian being has such good reasons to do so and that the horrible suffering of the rational creatures in that scenario need not move the Anselmian being to decline to bring it about.

If it does turn out to be a possible creation scenario, that is because there is something in it that the Anselmian being has good reason to bring about. Its way of doing so is no doubt to our eyes prodigal or wasteful, treating beings like us, which we are bound to expend great energy preserving and protecting, as of very little account. But the Anselmian being is under no rational pressure, at all, to bring about worthwhile ends in what we can call, crudely, an efficient way. Requirements of efficiency are for beings who are limited in power and/or beings for whom the means by which they propose to realize their objectives have a claim on them beyond their status as means.Footnote ¹² Since the Anselmian being is all-powerful and we have no claims on the attentions of that being, it could be no objection to the Anselmian being's treatment of some human being simply that the Anselmian being is not acting such that that human would flourish more fully.

Reply to Irwin

Irwin raises four distinct worries in her reflections on the relationship between the ethics that I ascribe to the Anselmian being and our reasons to worship and have allegiance to that being: one about the reasons to worship the Anselmian being, one about the relationship between being worthy of allegiance, being the Anselmian being, and being God; one about the precarious conditions under which the Anselmian being would count as God; and one about the moral repugnance of the notion that God lacks requiring reasons to prevent setbacks to our well-being, including horrific such setbacks.

(1) Irwin wonders whether the reasons we will have to worship the Anselmian being will be, on my account, the right sort of reasons. It seems to Irwin that, in the absence of a common morality shared by the Anselmian being and us, our reasons for worship will be simply prudential. And those are the wrong sort of reasons for worship, or at least to make for worship-worthiness. I agree fully that having prudential reasons, even overwhelming prudential reasons, to worship some being is not sufficient for that being to count as worthy of worship. But I don't see why my account so much as suggests that the reasons to worship the Anselmian being will be merely prudential.

On the account that I offer in the book, reasons to worship are expressive reasons (129–134). What is expressed is the value of the Anselmian being and the gap between that being's value and our own. But in the case at issue, that of the Anselmian being, the value is literally maximal and the gap between that being's value and our own is infinite. So these expressive reasons are at their most wide-ranging and most powerful. I don't appeal to prudential reasons at all to explain our reasons to worship the Anselmian being, and I don't think that such reasons need to be appealed to in order to explain why we should worship that being.Footnote ¹³

(2) Irwin objects that my view entails that the Anselmian being is not necessarily God, if to be God is to be worthy of full worship and allegiance. For on my view it is not a necessary truth that rational creatures should have full allegiance to the Anselmian being, and so it follows from my view that the Anselmian being is not necessarily God, if we take being worthy of full allegiance to be a conceptual entailment of being God. I just acknowledge the point that being an Anselmian being is not sufficient to entail being worthy of the full allegiance of every possible creature capable of having such allegiance, and I argue for the acceptability of this point in chapter 7 of the book.

I do not, however, accept the view that Irwin seems to endorse, that proposed by Moser,Footnote ¹⁴ that being worthy of full allegiance entails being morally perfect. Moser does not explain why he accepts this entailment. If his explanation presupposes that being morally perfect is just part of what it is to be an absolutely perfect being, then I think he is mistaken, and the first part of God's Own Ethics shows why this is a mistake. If Moser thinks that we can give an account of full allegiance-worthiness from which we can derive the implication that full moral perfection is required for full allegiance-worthiness, he has not provided it, and in chapters 8 and 9 of God's Own Ethics I give an account of allegiance-worthiness that seems not to have this entailment. So, I allow that if one takes it to be a conceptual truth that to be God is to be fully worthy of allegiance, then the Anselmian being is only contingently God, but I deny any suggestion that moral perfection is a condition of allegiance-worthiness.

(3) Irwin suggests that my response to the argument from evil as posed against the existence of the Christian God – that the Christian God has taken on a contingent ethics that entails that being's full allegiance-worthiness but nevertheless does not entail that God is motivated generally to prevent setbacks to human well-being – ‘threads a very small needle’. I take it that this ‘needle-threading’ worry is that the possibility space within which the Anselmian being is worthy of allegiance by beings like us looks really small in comparison to the possibility space within which both beings like us and the Anselmian being exist.

I am not sure whether this is true, and I am not sure whether, if it is true, it is an objection to my view. As to its truth, I really don't know to what extent God's having the inclination to bring beings like us into existence is correlated with God's having the inclination to make commitments with respect to us that make God fully worthy of our allegiance. This is where I just want to go sceptical theist: I just have no idea what the connections are, and since they are connections between God's reasons, I wouldn't really expect to know them.

As to whether, if true, it constitutes an objection to my view: for almost all of us, there are contingent special relationships that each of us has with some other person, out of which arise contingent normative requirements with respect to that other, such that of the possible worlds in which both parties exist, in only a very small subset of such worlds are the parties related to each other in such a way that those requirements arise. So, for example, if you consider the set of all of the possible worlds in which both Jeanette Ryan and Mark Murphy exist, in only a small sliver of those worlds do Jeanette Ryan and Mark MurphyFootnote ¹⁵ come to be related to each other in such a way that the very strong normative requirements that they are actually bound by with respect to each other are realized. But if one wanted to deny that Ryan and Murphy are actually bound to act in certain special ways with respect to each other, it would not be a powerful objection that the circumstances required for there to be such mutual obligations must ‘thread a very small needle’.

(4) Irwin objects to my view that God ‘does not owe us any duties of care’ – or, perhaps, not to its truth, but to its use as a response to the existence of horrendous earthly evils. Let me clarify first the context in which I claim that God does not owe us any duties of care. The point of that remark is in defence of the idea that God's assurance of our overall good may indeed be something that will be brought to fruition only in some life to come. This idea has been derided as holding that God is going to compensate us in some afterlife for mistreating us during this life. My point is that this talk of ‘compensation’ is deeply confused, because the Anselmian being, simply as such, lacks the duties of care towards us failure to satisfy which triggers the need for compensation (192–193).Footnote ¹⁶ I could have added, though, that God, by taking on contingent norms, may indeed have duties of care towards one. But this duty of care towards one may be no more than to ensure that one's overall good will be realized, or to ensure that one's overall good will be realized if one subordinates oneself to the divine will. Neither of these, as I argue in the book, entails that God has any requiring reason to prevent particular setbacks to our earthly well-being.

The notion that our sufferings and joys – especially our deep sufferings – need not be, generally, requiring reasons for the Anselmian being is a hard saying. Wielenberg, who is not a theist, also finds it implausible. I find it plausible enough because I have become comfortable with the background view on which the Anselmian being's stance to us is, by rational default, indifference. My thought is that we should marvel at divine willingness to seek our good (under that description) at all. So God is not in any way missing something, on this view, when divine action does not preclude some horror. (Am I, in giving this response, showing a morally deficient lack of care for those undergoing horrendous evils, as Irwin suggests? Maybe. I don't know. But believing this view is compatible with doing all one can to avert the evil and with joining the sufferer in solidarity. And it is compatible with hitting one's knees and begging God: please, God, I know you are in no sense required to, but please, please help us.)

Reply to Draper

Draper raises three problems. First, he notes that by relying on a variety of contentious theses of metaethics, philosophical theology, etc., I have incurred a ‘probabilistic cost’ that undermines the success of my claim that the presence and distribution of evils does not make trouble for the view that there exists an Anselmian being. Second, Draper claims that even the very minimal contingent ethics that I have ascribed to the Christian God is enough to supply premises for an argument based on the evils of nonconformity with morality. Third, Draper thinks that I have made more trouble for Anselmian theism by dividing Christian and non-Christian Anselmian theists against one another.

(1) Draper argues that in claiming that I have undermined the argument from evil against the existence of an Anselmian being, I haven't taken into account that my claims about the nature of the Anselmian being are not certain, and thus even if the facts of evil are not antecedently more probable on naturalism than they are on Anselmian theism as I understand it, they have not been shown to be more probable on naturalism than on Anselmian theism simpliciter, for Anselmian theism as I understand it is less likely to be true than Anselmian theism is. Of course he is right that it does not follow from the facts of evil not being antecedently more probable on naturalism than they are on my formulation of Anselmian theism that they are not antecedently more probable on naturalism than on Anselmian theism simpliciter. But I take Humean arguments from evil like Draper's to be attempts to show that the facts of evil are ‘much (that is, many times) less probable under the hypothesis that there exists a morally perfect God than under alternative hypotheses like naturalism or David Hume's hypothesis of indifference’.Footnote ¹⁷ That is, these Humean arguments are trying to show that there is a very significant boost for non-theism over theism provided by the facts about evil. My response is just that the probabilistic costs that I incur are not sufficiently great to make trouble for the claim that I undermine the argument from evil, with its conclusion understood in this way.

The basic reason for thinking this is that I think that the arguments of the first part of the book both are pretty good arguments and do not rest on narrow and contentious theses that drive up the relevant probabilistic costs in a way that is sufficient to support Draper's objection. I will not survey these arguments again here. But I note that the considerations that I rely upon for premises are often disjunctive. In the main argument that the Anselmian being's ethics is not ours, for example, I do not rely upon one contentious normative view, but point out that on all of the various contenders, there is good reason to reject the view that the Anselmian being's ethics is ours (48–62). In arguing that the Anselmian being must have reasons to act in accordance with any moral norms that bind that being, I relied on independent arguments from metaethics and from the nature of the Anselmian being as a free being (25–29, 62–65). While I agree that the arguments that ascribe a particular positive ethics to the Anselmian being are much more speculative and tenuous, the most tenuous of these claims, by my assessment, are the claims regarding the impossibility of the Anselmian being's intending evil – which is the only thesis regarding divine ethics that I affirm that increases the burden on the Christian theist in the face of the argument from evil (116–122). So while I agree with Draper that it is obviously right that I incur some probabilistic costs in adding a specification of Anselmian theism to generic Anselmian theism, I deny that this makes trouble for the chapter 6 argument that my account undermines the argument from evil against the existence of an Anselmian being.

(2) Draper thinks that I have provided resources for an argument against Christian Anselmian theism from facts about the goodness of acting virtuously and the inhospitability of this world for the realization of the goodness of acting virtuously. Draper does not assume, contrary to the view I defend in the book, that the goodness of acting virtuously – whether understood as an aspect of human well-being, or simply as something that adds to the perfectionist value of human lives – is something that God has requiring reason to promote. Rather, he appeals to my acknowledgement that God takes an interest in our acting well, an interest that is exhibited in the content of God's covenants with and commands to human beings (188). Draper's thought, then, seems to be this. Given the familiar morality by which we humans are bound, the patterns of moral and immoral conduct that we see, and the ways in which we are helped or hindered from acting well, fit well with a non-theistic hypothesis. But if we assume that God takes as a goal our acting morally well, then it seems that God has arranged things very poorly to hit this target.

But I am not thinking of God's commitments to our acting well in the way that Draper seems to suppose. Draper seems to be supposing that, given the commitment that I ascribe to God, I must be thinking that God has a simple interest in our acting well, and we need to ask whether God effectively implemented a plan for realizing this intention. But perhaps we should say that God has an intention that we act well given the unevenly hospitable world for acting well that God has, for other reasons, chosen to create. God's aim with respect to us may be that we act well in this morally inhospitable world, and the ascription of that aim to God would of course not provide any basis for thinking the inhospitability of this world for acting well to be evidence against the existence of a God with that aim.

(3) Draper suggests that I have made the problem worse for Christian theists by dividing Anselmian theists against themselves – Christian Anselmian theists versus other sorts of Anselmian theists (‘aesthetic’ Anselmian theists, say, who hold that the contingent will of the Anselmian being is set on aesthetic value), and noting that the evidence does not seem to favour the Christian over the others (again, say, the aesthetic).

In response I want to say two things. The first is that I want to be very clear how close to aesthetic Anselmian theism Christian Anselmian theism can be, on my view. One thesis defended in the book is that the divine commitments that make for a God worthy of complete allegiance are much more minimal than on views now typical. So an aesthetically oriented Anselmian being who nevertheless takes enough interest in Her characters would satisfy the conditions for being wholly worthy of allegiance, and thus the sort of evidence that Draper mentions wouldn't discriminate between them.

The second point is that, to be blunt, we already knew that to be a Christian Anselmian theist is to be more than an Anselmian theist – one has to affirm various additional claims, some of them about necessary truths, some of them about contingent truths, claims about Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement, among others. What is the warrant for those additional claims? Well, whatever it is, it is the same sort of warrant that I would put forward for the theses that God has indeed made the sort of commitments to us that make that being fully worthy of allegiance in the way that the Christian theist supposes. So I don't see that I have made things worse for Christian Anselmian theism than they were before by dividing Christian Anselmian theists from other sorts of Anselmian theists.