Tag: Philosophy

Love and Contingency

To love someone is to make that person part of our life.

Yet, the object of our love is contingent and not necessarily so. I may love Sophia (not a specific person, name means wisdom), but if Sophia had never existed or had I met someone else, I would love another person instead.

We cannot necessarily love because the condition of free will would not be present for love to be possible. The object of our love has to be contingent as love is an act of the will to choose that contingent person.

But this is precisely what makes love so beautiful – to say that I love you (as my beloved or as my friend) means that even though you are a contingent part of my life, I nonetheless want you to be a significant part of my life as if you are necessarily part of it. Someone else could have taken your place as my beloved or my friend, but it is you whom I have chosen to be my beloved, my friend.

A Stronger Interpretation of Nozick’s Experience Machine

This essay was written for an assignment on Normative Ethical Theory. I hope that this paper will be enriching for you as it was for me.

Nozick’s experience machine has been widely understood to show that there are more than just subjective states of affairs that matter to us. However, in this essay, I argue that Nozick was successful in attempting to prove that pleasure is not the only intrinsic good. This can be seen through a closer examination and reflection of the thought experiment, which I shall lay out in the course of this essay.

Imagine an experience machine that could stimulate the brain, thereby providing the user with all the experiences that he could ever want. The machine is so well-designed that the user is unable to distinguish reality from experiences fed from the machine.

There is, however, one condition in choosing to be plugged in – the user must be plugged in for the rest of his life, while his body is left floating in a tank. Nozick assures those concerned about missing out on certain experiences that they can be unplugged every two years so as to choose a new set of experiences.

You do not actually live your own life. The machine “lives” your life for you, and feeds you with experiences as you float in the tank. What you do, who you are, and how you interact with others, are not done by you, but by the machine.
Nozick invites us to reflect on this question: Would you want to be plugged into such a machine for the rest of your life?

One mistake is to imagine one’s self already in it, and then, recognising that one cannot tell the difference between reality and the machine-simulation, conclude that it is alright to spend the rest of one’s life plugged in.

Rather, the focus should be on the process deliberation: Do I want my body to remain floating in a tank for the rest of my life while a machine “lives” my life for me and feeds me with blissful experiences?

If one believes that pleasure is the only good, pleasurable subjective experiences will be enough to satisfy. How real the experiences are, is irrelevant. One should have no qualms in choosing to be plugged in.

If in the process of deliberation, one encounters distress (regardless of whether one has chosen to be plugged in), or if one refuses to be plugged in, Nozick has successfully demonstrated that there are other things that matter apart from just subjective experiences.

Nozick proceeds to highlight three key points as to what else matters: We want (1) to do certain things; (2) to be a certain sort of person; and (3) to actually interact with the real world, with real people.[1]

One could easily conclude that people do not just merely desire to experience something, but to actually satisfy it. Yet, Nozick, unsatisfied with this conclusion, upgrades the experience machine by inviting us to imagine a machine that would “fill lacks suggested for the earlier machine”[2], thereby addressing the three key points.

This new machine will not only feed the user with experiences. It will also actualise (1) what the user wants to do (i.e. the machine will move the user’s body to actualise the works); (2) transform the user to be the somebody whom he wants to be (i.e. he will be programmed with the personality and skills, and maybe even have his body transformed to match whatever he experienced); and (3) to have interaction with actual people outside of the machine (i.e. experiences of talking to someone will be actualised in the real world). In short, the machine will do things such that the physical world corresponds to one’s subjective experiences.

Now, the conditions of reality and of being plugged in to the machine are more or less the same. The only differences between being inside and outside of the machine are: (1) just as how one is possessed by an external entity, the machine will “live” your life for you; and (2) being in the machine will be more pleasurable.

If it is merely the case that people do not desire experiences but to have them satisfied, then plugging in to the machine will be the choice-worthy act. While I may desire to be a pilot, not only do I have experiences that satisfy them, but the machine satisfies my desire by making me into one, and provides many blissful experiences.

And yet, despite what awaits the user, by refusing to be plugged in, one has consciously chosen to sacrifice the satisfaction of desires and the experience of pleasure for the sake of actually being able to live one’s life. One recognises that even if desires are satisfied or pleasures are experienced, they do not matter.

After all, it is not me who is living my life; it is the machine “living” it for me.

This way, Nozick successfully demonstrates how one seeks the good of actually living one’s own life, for its own sake, pursuing it as an intrinsic good.

An objection might be that since the enjoyment of pleasure is worthwhile only if one is actually living his life, the good of living of one’s life is merely instrumental for the pursuit of pleasure. Nozick seems to have failed in proving his point.

The objection raises a valid point, and yet, is not inconsistent with Nozick’s argument. An intrinsic good can also be an instrumental good. Actually living one’s life is indeed instrumental towards the worthwhile enjoyment of pleasure. What Nozick tried to demonstrate with the upgraded experience machine was to put us in a situation where we have to choose between (1) actually living one’s life and (2) letting the machine live one’s life in exchange for the experience pleasure and the satisfaction of desires. If pleasure is the only intrinsic good, we would not mind sacrificing the actual living of our lives for it. However, the refusal to plug in to the machine shows that one would rather give up pleasure for the sake of actually living one’s life, thereby demonstrating that one seeks the living of one’s life in itself, and not instrumentally.

Nozick has therefore successfully shown how pleasure is not the only intrinsic good by bringing to light the point that the actual living of one’s live is desired for its own sake.

 

Endnotes

[1] Cf. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p.43; John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics, p.38-41

[2] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p.44

 

Bibliography

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp.42-45

John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1983), pp.37-42

 

Postscript

After submitting this essay, I realised that an easier explanation of the upgraded experience machine can be stated.

What Norzick was trying to get at in upgrading the machine is the equivalent of asking: If you could tell a ghost what experiences you want to have, and later be possessed by it – such that the ghost will be in full control of your entire being as your consciously live it and soak in the pleasurable experiences, thereby actually being who you want to be, doing what you want to do, and interacting with the people whom you want to – would you want to be possessed by such a ghost?

Probably, your answer would be no. If that is the case, you have proven Norzick right by showing that there really is more to life than just pleasure.

The Existence of Evil: A Justification of God’s Goodness

This paper was written for my Philosophy of Religion module in 2010.

In considering the problem of evil, a great difficulty arises. One may argue that God only permits evil for the sake of bringing about a greater good. However, in the face of tremendous evils – such as the terrible death of innocent children or of the masses in a natural disaster, but especially what seems like pointless sufferings, e.g. the death of a fawn in the middle of a forest – such arguments do not satisfy, but casts doubt on the goodness of God. It is argued that a good God would have brought about greater good in a more efficient and less painful manner. And even for the seemingly pointless evil, where suffering is so bad, how could any goodness come out of that? It appears that the very existence of evil seems to be proof in negating the benevolence of God.

In this paper, I argue that the existence of evil – even the seemingly pointless ones – do not negate the benevolence of God, but instead, are justifications of God’s goodness. Due to limited constraints in this paper, an assumption is made that God possesses the three properties of omniscience, omnipotence, and omni-benevolence. The argument shall be demonstrated by defining evil as a non-entity, and that wherever evil may be found, good is always present. Following which, an explanation as to how this world, where evil exists, is the only possible world that God could have created. Lastly, a consideration that all pointless evils have been prevented, and that deep beneath the mask of evil, one can discover the goodness and beauty of God.

Something is said to be evil in two ways: (1) absolutely, for it consists of something being deprived of a particular good required for its perfection, e.g. the massive loss of blood is evil as the creature is deprived of bodily fluids necessary for its own perfection, namely, to continue existing; and (2) in a particular respect for what is not evil as such, but what befalls something because it is deprived of a good required for the perfection of something else rather than for its own perfection, e.g. fire is evil for wood, not absolutely, but rather, for fire to attain its own perfection, wood must be deprived of its perfection by ceasing to exist.[1]

God permits evil, “not because it is evil, but because it is good, absolutely speaking, and evil in a particular respect.”[2] While we may encounter what seems to be evil, absolutely, they are in fact evil in a particular respect. From a deer’s perspective, to be hunted and mauled to death by a lion seems like an evil, absolutely. Yet, for us, who understand the bigger picture of things, i.e. the ecology and the necessity of the food chain, we accept this as part of nature for there is a recognition that the death of the deer is evil in a particular respect, but good, absolutely, for it not only contributes to the perfection of the lion, but also towards the preservation of the entire ecosystem. In like manner, even in the most intense suffering, or even apparently pointless evil, such evils, are evil in a particular respect, but contribute to the perfection of something else. (More to be explained later)

But what exactly is evil? Blindness is not an entity that exists on its own. Rather, the eye (an entity) can be said to have this blindness.[3] Likewise, evil is not an entity but an entity that may be said to have it, since evil is only the privation of a good within that entity.[4] According to St. Augustine, “there cannot be evil except in good.”[5] Evil may be likened to a hole in the wall. Without the wall, there can be no hole. There must be something good for the privation of goodness (evil) to occur, just as how there must be a wall for a hole to be made in the first place. Evil lessens the good that a subject is made of, and of its proper functioning insofar as the perfection is removed, but the subject still remains.[6] Furthermore, “evil can only originate from good”.[7] Herbert McCabe elaborates:

You can’t have badness unless there is some goodness, whereas you can have goodness without any badness. The two are not symmetrical, so to say. I mean that if a washing machine is to be a bad one it must be at least good enough at being a washing machine for us to call it one. If I produce a cup and saucer and complain that is a useless washing machine because it never gets the clothes clean, you will gently correct me and explain that what I have is not a washing machine at all. So even the worst washing machine must be a little good, otherwise it is not even a washing machine and cannot therefore be a bad one.[8]

The good of a wood is in its firmness and strength. This property is the reason why it is used as support beams in construction. Yet, the very same property is the reason for misuse, as the wooden beam may be used to clobber a person and injure him.[9] For such evil to occur, the weapon of injury must be good enough to inflict it, while the person must be “good enough” to acquire the injury. Therefore, the person must be good enough to sustain an injury in order to be injured. Otherwise, the evil of incurring an injury will not happen in the first place. Though this may be odd, it serves to demonstrate an important point:  Whenever there is evil, one may also find good. It is not as if there is some great evil that overwhelms and affects a being. But things have been made good by a benevolent God in such a way that the good of one acts with the good of another in such a way that the good of one being privates goodness from the other. This is what we would call evil.

But surely, if God is all powerful and good, it would be within His power to create a world where evils of any form, like in the above example, would not occur. One could conceive of a world made by God, whereby the same piece of wood, when used for violence would become as soft as a cushion, thereby not injuring anyone. While it may seem like a beautiful place to be in, such a world would mean that wrong actions would not be possible: the exercise of free will is thus not possible. Furthermore, there would be no stability in that world. “Fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any life is possible.”[10] This is not the “best of all possible universes,” but perhaps “the only possible one.”[11]

St. Therese of Lisieux, wrote about the unseen goodness of God:

The father, aware that a dangerous stone lies in his son’s path, is beforehand with the danger and removes it, unseen by anyone. The son, thus tenderly cared for, not knowing of the mishap from which his father’s hand has saved him, naturally will not show him any gratitude, and will love him less than if he had cured him of a grievous wound. But suppose he heard the whole truth, would he not in that case love him still more?[12]

Considering the complexities of nature and of human society, there is already a very high chance of evil occurring just by accidental causes or by the misuse of free will to exercise evil. Yet, many rarely pause to consider just how many evils, trials, and sufferings could have actualised in our very lives, but did not. Just as how a loving parent would remove all harmful obstacles in the path of an infant learning how to walk, but would permit the child to fall as it plays an essential part in the process of learning, so too does a benevolent God remove all harmful and pointless evils from our paths, but allow only certain evils to befall on us for a greater good.

Kindness, according to C.S. Lewis, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, but only that it escapes suffering.[13] Love is more than kindness whereby, while there may be rebukes or even condemnation, as would a parent to a naughty child, there is no contempt, but only a wish to make the child into the sort of human being God wants him to be, according to the superior divine wisdom.[14] By understanding love in this light, the existence of evil, especially as suffering, and the benevolence of God can be reconciled.

Moreover, there is a special relationship between God and Man. Much like military training, or kung-fu training, the trainee allows himself to undergo evils – and sometimes even “pointless evils”, such as having to carry out training/exercises in the harshest of conditions without any seemingly rational reason for it – with the firm trust that these are provided for one’s own perfection. In such cases, the trainer/master puts the trainee through instances of evil, not because it is evil, but because it is good, absolutely, for it aids the trainee to attain the perfection required, despite evil in a particular respect, e.g. exhaustion and pain from the intensive training. Hence, it is through suffering that God seeks to aid Man in attaining his due perfection.

However, there is still one issue left to resolve. In the face of tremendous sufferings or seemingly pointless sufferings, the image of God as a compassionate and loving father evaporates away, leaving behind what seems to be an image of a cruel and wicked tyrant, who delights in the death and torture of many helpless victims. How can one still say that God is all-loving, all-compassionate, all-merciful, and all-good? The problem with having a hole in the wall is that the hole – even if it is just a very small one – draws much attention to itself. It sticks out like a sore thumb, and cannot be easily ignored. In looking at the wall, one cannot help but notice that hole. In the same way, all attention on the wall of goodness is drawn to the hole of evil. And yet, it is essential to remember that without the wall, there cannot be a hole. Without goodness, there can be no evil: no privation of good. Where evil exist, good may be found. Though difficult, one must try to recognise the wall around the hole – the good surrounding the bad. Only in contemplating the goodness that surrounds the evil can one then recognise the benevolence of God, and recognise that such evil occurred not because it is evil, but because it is good, absolutely speaking, but evil in a particular respect.

Endnotes

[1] St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, Q1, A1. p.63
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] St. Augustine, Enchiridion, 11, cited in St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, Q1, A1. p.57
[5] St. Augustine, Enchiridion, 14, cited in St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, Q1, A2. p.73
[6] St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, Q1, A2. p.67
[7] St. Augustine, Enchiridion, 14, cited in St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, Q1, A3. p.85
[8] Herbert McCabe, God Matters, p.30, cited in the Introduction by Brian Davies in St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, pp.24-25
[9] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 2, p.24
[10] Ibid, p.25
[11] Ibid, p.26
[12] St. Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of the Soul, p.63
[13] Ibid, Chapter 3, p.37
[14] Ibid.

Bibliography

C.S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain”. (New York: HarperOne, 2001)

St. Thérèse of Lisieux, “The Story of the Soul”, translated by Thomas N. Taylor. (New York: Cosimo Inc., 2007)

St. Thomas Aquinas, “De Malo”, translated by Richard Regan. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Learning (學 Xue)

xue

Wrote this today with a new calligraphy pen brush that I bought from Daiso (I just love this Japanese shop a lot!)

This is another favourite word of mine.

學 refers to learning/studying.

This word has a very beautiful etymology.

On the left and right of the top portion, is a pair of hands. But what are the hands holding? It’s holding this thing that is signified by the character, 爻, which refers to two things. (1) It refers to dried grass used for divination. (2) It also refers to the Book of Changes (an ancient book that records the changes in seasons and what should and shouldn’t be done). Both of which are associated with religious practices.

In the middle, is the character, 冖, which represents a table.

At the bottom, is the character, 子, which represents a person. But it is not just any person, but a child.

So, what we have is a child, holding the dried grass or Book of Changes, on top of a table.

What’s do all these mean?

Learning (學) is a religious act! St. Thomas Aquinas himself said that when learning takes place, the God’s light of Truth shines into one’s mind, raising the knowledge from potential knowledge to actual knowledge!

But learning not just about simply memorising what’s before you. One of my professors said that if learning is simply about memorising, there’s this thing in the world that does exactly the same task, but even better – a scanner!

Learning involves the study and contemplation of the subject, and being able to apply it in day-to-day life, just as how the ancient Chinese would closely study the Book of Changes (or the dried grass) and use it for the application of their daily life.

But why is a child (子) in the the word? It does not literally mean that learning is confined to children. In fact, the great masters of Chinese philosophy have the title, 子, after their names. E.g. Confucius (孔子), Mencius (孟子), Hsün Tsu (荀子), Lao Tzu (老子), Chuang Tzu (莊子) and more.

Learning requires us to be like little children, who with great inquisitiveness, seek out knowledge for itself, and be marvelled and wondered at the beauty of newly acquired knowledge. When was the last time you went “WOW!” at something that you just learnt? If it had been a long time back, perhaps it’s time to be like a little child once again, and marvel at the beauty of Truth.

A child is, more often than adults, open to what comes his way. As we grow older, we become more narrow minded. As such learning becomes harder as we tend to mis-interpret or simply brush aside things based on whatever biasness we may have developed.

The great masters of philosophy were open to the study of whatever came their way. They were open to see what the other side has to say, and if there was any merit to their arguments worth learning.