The Non-Problems of Philosophy

A lot of the supposed questions of philosophy appear because we have weird ways of speaking. In other languages these problems disappear entirely. As an example, there is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of language over "what words mean", which exists entirely because the English language confuses the notions of the speaker's intention (what Germans call Meinung) and the thing that words are ordinarily understood to mean by the listener or reader (correspondingly the Bedeutung).

This all looks very silly from the outside. For example, here is a short excerpt from Heidegger's What is Metaphysics?:

In anxiety, we say, "one feels ill at ease." What is "it" that makes "one" feel ill at ease?

Heidegger uses this as part of a long spiel about how humans are greatly affected by a curious entity called "nothing". To those of us who are accustomed to thinking in English, however, his question makes no sense.

The issue is that Germans do not literally say "I am ill at ease"; rather they say "it is unsettling to me" (Es ist mir einem unheimlich). So there is a hanging "it" which is taken by a naive reading of German to be an actual thing.

Apologies if this is a poor attempt at exposition of Heidegger. In my defence, Heidegger's own exposition is even worse.

Response to Kane on luck, indeterminism and free will

"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are far more than our abilities."
      - Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone


In this article I shall provide a summary of Robert Kane's paper Responsibility, Luck and Chance: Reflections on Free Will and determinism (Journal of Philosophy 96 (5), pp217-240; 1999). I shall then present two challenges to the view he elucidates.

Before I get into the serious meat of the paper, allow me to quote its opening words:

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that "to solve the problems of philosophers, you have to think even more crazily than they do". This task (which became even more difficult after Wittgenstein that it was before him)...

Oooh! Burn!

Summary

Kane is responding to the arguments of Daniel Dennett. Dennett is a compatibilist of sorts - he argues that we have moral responsibility, and this is frequently taken to entail possession of free will but to me it feels more like a denial that moral responsibiliity requires one to act freely. (Dennett's position is actually very similar to one I very briefly wondered about back when I was a naive fresher who hadn't read much philosophy - see the section titled Moral Identity here.) Furthermore, Dennett argues that libertarian free will is in fact rather unsatisfying: it seems to involve people doing things for no very good reason, as opposed to his conception in which people perform actions in accordance with their character and may be judged for an action in terms of how representative the action is of their character. If  under similar but non-identical circumstances the agent would have acted differently, then the action may be seen as an aberration for which the agent should not be held responsible. If large changes to the situation would have been required to change the action, then an action is representative of a wider trait of the agent and is therefore something for which the agent ought to be held responsible.

Kane's aim is to present a view of libertarianism which actually seems worthwhile. He argues that rather than having a character which determines our actions, we form our character through the actions we take. He labels the key decisions we make which determine we shall become "Self-forming actions", and argues contra Dennett that there are good reasons for making these choices, but they are not all immediately visible - indeed, many of them lie in the future.

A particular challenge that Kane aims to deal with is as follows: suppose a man has the choice of going on holiday to either Hawaii or Alaska. He deliberates over this decision, and finds several good reasons for going to Hawaii - it is more pleasant, cheaper, etc - and none for Alaska. At this point, what kind of freedom is it which allows the man to still choose Alaska? This is surely less a case of meaningful choice than of perverse randomness.

Kane's response it that we do not possess free will in that kind of case - it would indeed be perverse to choose Alaska. Instead, we possess free will pretty much entirely in our SFAs, but the preferences which dictate our many other choices stem from SFAs. The man's choosing to go to Hawaii would not be an SFA, and would not of itself be a meaningful choice; however, his preference for hot over cold might stem authentically from his past enjoyment of summers, and so the choice may still be indirectly meaningful.

He also responds to the problem of "moral luck". Suppose a woman is walking to an important interview, when she sees a person being mugged in an alley. She has pepper spray in her handbag, and so could save the person who is being mugged, but this would cause her to be late for her interview. If it is truly indeterminate as to whether or not she does the moral thing by stopping the mugging, then what is there to distinguish it from luck as to whether she saves the person? How, then, can she be either praiseworthy or blameworthy for her action?

Kane responds that, since the businesswoman has good reasons for multiple courses of action, and these courses of action conflict with each other, she is at an SFA. She may be viewed as simultaneously attempting both courses of action - stepping in to stop the mugging, and hurrying along to her interview - and succeeding at one, failing at the other. Suppose that, in the event, she keeps out of the mugging and just rushes along to her interview. Kane would say that she could not control whether or not she succeeded at stepping in, nor could she control whether or not she succeeded at moving along; nevertheless, she could control which one of the two it was that she succeeded at. Hence she is responsible for her decision to move on.

So much for what I intended to be a quick summary. I find his account very appealing, and would very much like to believe it. Unfortunately, I have two key issues with it.

Multiplicity of potential SFAs

Brian is addicted to smoking. He knows it is bad for him, and every single day he swears to himself that he will quit. Yet, every day without fail, he will give in and sooner or later he will pick up the first cigarette of the day.

It seems in this case that each and every one of Brian's attempts to quit smoking has the potential to be an SFA. If he were to succeed, it would be a classic example of an SFA. It also seems strange to claim that certain decisions can be SFAs only if they go in a particular direction. Yet this seems to commit us to the idea that Brian is making an SFA every single morning, in spite of the fact that each and every one of these SFAs is the exact same decision.

If it does not seem strange to classify a decision as an SFA only when it goes a particular way, consider Brian's brother Steve. Steve also smokes, and has been thinking about giving up. However, he decided once and for all that he is approaching retirement and has earned a vice or two to keep him going in his old age. This seems like a very good candidate for an SFA, and does not seem importantly different from the decision made every day by Brian.

Lack of responsibility for failure to act

Let us go back to the case of the businesswoman. She did the presumably immoral thing of moving on and abandoning the mugging victim. This is something for which we want to be able to hold her morally responsible. Unfortunately, according to Kane it seems that we cannot.

Remember, according to Kane the businesswoman was simultaneously trying both to help the person and to move on. She failed at the first and succeeded at the second. According to Kane, then, she was trying to move on and therefore is responsible for doing so; however, she was also trying to help the person, and it was not in her power to succeed at this. Suppose then that we ask her; "Why didn't you help the mugging victim?" She can then honestly respond: "It's not my fault! I was trying to, it's just that I failed at doing so!" I see no reason why this should not generalise across all actions where we wish to hold someone responsible for failing to do something. "I was trying to give money to the poor! I just failed, because I was prevented by buying this shiny new iPhone!" "I was trying to fulfil the terms of the contract! I just failed, because I was prevented by my desire to save money and effort!" "I was trying to resist my urge to do unspeakable things to this person! I just failed, because of my desire to forcibly have sex with them!"

Conclusion

While I would very much like to endorse Kane's account of free will, it has severe problems which seem to vastly exaggerate the importance of certain small decisions, and which prevent us from holding people responsible for failing to act in certain ways.

My philosophical views

Having an hour to spare and nothing better to do, I've decided to write down my current answers to the questions on the PhilPapers survey of philosophers' views. First, a couple of notes and caveats:

• At first, I wasn't going to look at any (potentially new-to-me) arguments for the positions while doing this. However, upon reflection it seems strange to reject a chance to be motivated to learn.
• One of the options on the original survey was "insufficiently familiar with the area." This really ought to be my default answer - I am, after all, a mere undergraduate student - but where would be the fun in that. Instead, for any given issue you should assume that I am probably not as familiar with the issue as I ought to be.

A Priori knowledge: yes or no?

Umm... lean no, maybe? I lean towards the view that logic, maths etc are constructed rather than discovered, and given that they are supposed to be the paradigm cases of a priori knowledge, I guess that places me in the No category.

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?

Is this asking whether I believe that there are no abstract objects, or which of these positions I lean towards on a greater number of subjects? I'm not willing to completely rule out abstract objects (fictional objects in particular strike me as things which might exist but be abstract) but I don't believe in the existence of numbers, of propositions, or of many of the other abstract objects which have been postulated to exist. Put me down as leaning towards nominalism.

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

I have actually put serious effort into trying to work out why anyone might think that aesthetic value is objective, and the closest I've seen to an argument is SEP's mention of the fact that "people tend to agree about which things are beautiful." Sigh. Accept subjective.

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

I don't believe in it, the only question is whether I go down as Lean No or Accept No. Quine was very convincing... go on, put me down as Accept No.

Epistemic justification: Internalism or Externalism?

I can never remember which is which. Assuming I correctly understand the issue, one of them is the view that knowledge-seeking has intrinsic value, the other is that we should seek knowledge because it is useful to us. Yudkowsky put this very nicely in the Sequences, saying that seeking knowledge out of curiosity has a certain purity to it, but the advantage of seeking knowledge because it is useful is that it creates an external criterion by which to measure our success. Accept whichever one it is which says we should seek knowledge because it is useful.

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-sceptical realism?

Accept non-sceptical realism. You can't achieve absolute certainty that you aren't being deceived by a demon, but (a) there is no reason to believe you are either and (b) in any case, suppose you were. You don't know anything about what the demon wants, so there's no particular reason to change the way you act.

Free-will: compatabilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

I'm fairly well convinced that if determinism is true, then (a) people cannot act differently than they do but (b) they are still morally responsible for their actions. I believe this makes me a compatibilist, although it strikes me as a bit weird that this is counted as believing in free will rather than denying that free will is necessary for moral responsibility.

God: theism or atheism?

Damn, no option for deism. Lean deism if that's acceptable, otherwise I place higher probability mass in atheism than in any of the "revealed religions".

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

Given that I deny a priori knowledge, it would be rather odd if I were to say rationalism. (At least, it appears that way; perhaps this is one of the many things on which I shall come to be corrected.) Accept empiricism.

Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

No familiarity with the subject area.

Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?

Accept Humean.

Logic: classical or non-classical?

This is an interesting one. As said above, I lean towards the view that logics are constructed rather than discovered, and that different logics may be appropriate for different purposes. The philosophical justification for intuitionistic logic is something I find very appealing, so let's say Lean non-classical.

Mental content: internalism or externalism?

No familiarity with the subject area.

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

I lean towards constructivism. I believe this makes me a moral realist, although that's a bit weird since I started working out my metaethics by explicitly assuming there were no genuine moral facts floating around.

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

Is the question "Which is it more fruitful for us to assume as a default?" or "Which do I beliee is actually true?" Accept naturalism on the first, lean non-naturalism on the second.

Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?

Next to no familiarity with the subject area.

Moral judgement: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?

I looked at this at some point, but I can't remember much of what it was about.

Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?

Is this related to the amoralist's challenge? I've been thinking about that for ages, and still don't have a satisfactory answer despite reformulating my metaethics at least partially in an attempt to produce an answer to this question.

Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?

Accept one box. Although even if I were the type of person who would two-box, would I go around telling people that?

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

Virtue ethics, subject to deontological constraints, and with the choice of virtues justified on pluralist-consequentialist grounds. Yes, really.

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

When I studied this in first year, it seemed like a slam-dunk for sense-datum theory. However, given that (a) that was before I had read The Sequences, (b) I can't even remember what the first two of these were or if they were even mentioned, and (c) I have rejected almost every other view I picked up on that course (belief in the a priori, epistemological foundationalism, free-will libertarianism, near-universal scepticism... I must just about hold to a sensitivity condition regarding knowledge, so not quite everything), I'm inclined to take that past belief with rather a lot of salt.

Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?

I don't hold to a biological view, but I' not greatly satisfied by the leading psychological accounts (though if I had to choose one, I would go with Schechtman's). I don't even know what the further-fact view is, and looking at the relevant SEP and Wikipedia articles suggests that either I'm misunderstanding the question, or that there is something odd about it. I was reading section 3 of Reasons and Persons, but my Kindle has gone missing.

Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?

Accept libertarianism. Have you read my blog?

Proper names: Fregean, or Millian?

I prefer the Millian view, and I believe that Nathan Salmon's discussion of "guises" solves most of the problems for it; that said, I need to do more reading, so put me down as merely leaning Millian.

Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Scientific realism. Because, you know. Duh.

Teletransporter (new material): survival or death?

Can I suggest the answer is somewhat subjective? Personally I would regard it as survival, but I'm very open towards difference of intuitions and I think that the disagreement is more to do with people having different values than to do with some (or all) people being wrong about an actual fact in the world.

Time: A-theory or B-theory?

B-theory is the one which holds all times to be equally real, and suggests that we move through time rather than time itself moving, right? Accept that one.

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?) 

switch or don't switch?

I would lean towards switching. I'm not entirely comfortable with it, but David Friedman's variation on Fat Man (in which both the Fat Man and yourself are required to does a fair job of convincing me that we should probably be willing not only to turn the trolley, but to push the fat man in its way.

Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?

I read The Simple Truth and it sounded sensible. Then again, I haven't done a great deal of engagement with the views other than correspondence - certainly I could not explain what they are - so I'll have to just say I have insufficient engagement with the subject area.

Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

Again, especially insufficiently familiar, but leaning towards one of the not-metaphysically-possible positions.

Metaphysics of Identity for Fictional Characters

Earlier this week, I was studying Saul Kripke's Identity and Necessity, in which he sets out an argument as to precisely which relations of identity are metaphysically necessary. Briefly, he divides all names and descriptions into "rigid" and "non-rigid" designators: rigid designators, such as proper names and technical terms such as 'heat' refer to the same thing across different possible worlds; non-rigid designators, on the other hand, refer to different things across different possible worlds. (This is not to be confused with different worlds using different words to refer to the same thing - in Kripke's system, "Andrew" refers to me even in worlds where I am known as "Christopher" or "Timothy" or even "Jessica").

According to Kripke, any identity statement in which both objects are referred to by rigid designators is necessarily either true or false. So "Andrew is the son of Tim" is necessarily true for all worlds where I exist, and "Andrew is the brother of Chris" is necessarily true for all worlds where both my brother and I exist; however, "Tim is the editor of Overdrive" and "Andrew was the Chess captain 2010-12 at Camp Hill Boys" are merely contingently true - that is to say, there are possible worlds where they are not true.

As it happens, I do not agree with Kripke's view of personal identity - he relies on the assumption that there is something which is irreducibly "me", whereas I would tend towards viewing objects merely as the sum of their properties. However, suppose he is correct regarding identity of real-life people. Does this still hold for fictional characters?

One old trope of fanfiction is to change who one or more parents of a character is. This is mainly done for shipping purposes - for example, making Harry Potter the son of Snape in order to ship Snape/Lily, or removing the sibling relationship between Elsa and Anna so that "it isn't incest". Except that, under Kripke's theory of identity, it is incest and there's nothing you can do about it without making them two fundamentally different characters.

Under my preferred theory of identity, this is not the case since the characters in a fanfic cease to be the same characters as those of the original as soon as even the slightest difference appears between them. I'm still a bit concerned as to precisely why one would want to ship Elsanna, but I can sort-of allow that "it isn't incest". (Even if it was, that would be far from the worst relationship going on in fanfiction - that 'honour', within the bounds of what I've encountered, would be Harry/Fem!Harry fics...)

A few notes on Freedom, as a concept and in practice

Two notes. The first comes from The Great Escape but has nothing to do with religion, the second is entirely about religion but is from the most recent Student Bible Study I went to, on Thursday.

I

There are many senses in which political philosophers down the years have used the words 'freedom' and 'liberty'. Some of these can be ignored - for example, Hegel's use of the word (roughly, "acting in accordance with reason,") seems rather abusive of the intuitive meaning we attach to it - but there are at least three meanings worth considering.

First, Negative Liberty, or the absence of oppression. If someone threatens to hurt you if you carry out an action of which they disapprove, they are violating your negative liberty.

Second, Positive Liberty, which is somewhat vague but refers to a general idea of autonomy and self-mastery. The key difference with Negative Liberty is that anything can count as a restraint on your liberty - while Negative Liberty focuses upon limitations emanating from other agents, Positive Liberty considers physical impossibility, absence of necessary materials, even lack of self-control.

As a side note, I do not personally think about either of these (at least directly) in terms of my value judgements, I tend to think more in terms of the inherent wrongness of imposing your will upon another person. Of course, then I have to explain precisely why I think that this is wrong, so I probably do attach some value to freedom.

These are the two main ones. The distinction was introduced by Isaiah Berlin in his speech "Two Concepts of Liberty" and there is a notable debate over which of the two better reflects the meaning we attach to the words 'freedom' and 'liberty'. However, there is also a third way in which the words may be used - that is, "Freedom as Non-domination" or "Republican Freedom", roughly defined as the absence of being subject to arbitrary power - the emphasis of that being on the word 'arbitrary'.

On the way back from The Great Escape, I listened to a podcast in which Philip Pettit was interviewed about a book he had written defending this interpretation of liberty. He made reference to a play by Henrik Ibsen - I can't remember which, but it was most likely A Doll's House - in which there is a woman, subject to a man (her husband?) who dotes upon her and will give her whatever she wants, but also holds complete power over her. He argued that she was not truly "free" because of the fact that her apparent freedom was entirely reliant upon the will of the man.

I personally find this unconvincing. I would say that she is free, and that perhaps there is an X such that we value X, X corresponds to non-domination, and we don't actually value freedom. This seems rather closer to the actual political and philosophical issue than merely arguing over precisely what we intuitively mean by "Freedom". As a somewhat rough analogy, we have distinct concepts of 'total utility', 'average utility', 'eudaemonia', and 'preference satisfaction'. When arguing about what is valuable, we do not argue about which of these is somehow a more authentic representation of what our intuitions conjure up when presented with phrases like 'utopia' and 'the good life' but instead argue about which is actually more valuable.

II

A second distinction in types of freedom: I shall refer to "metaphysical" freedom and "political freedom". By political freedom I mean the stuff I have just been talking about - a general notion of "not being enslaved". By metaphysical freedom I mean freedom of the will. I believe there to be a tendency for people to confuse the two - I don't blame them, most people are not trained to be absolutely clear in their language, there are several other words which can mean more than one thing (e.g. Libertarian and Libertarian).

In particular, there is one confusion which I have only just understood. The Bible often promises that we may have freedom through Christ. It is easy to see how this may be understood as political slavery - we were slaves to sin and death, but now are no longer subject to judgement.

Except that we don't become fully autonomous agents: we become servants of God. I'm not denying that this is an improvement in our condition (see, again with the "it's not precisely freedom which is valuable"!) but it doesn't really seem like an increase in our freedom. We go from one master to another master - a better master, to be sure, but at no point do we cease to be owned in some sense.

But take this passage, Romans 7:15-25 (taken from the NIV):

15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.[a] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature[b] a slave to the law of sin.

Now it becomes clear that the freedom we achieve through Christ is metaphysical: we are unable to control ourselves and to avoid sin due to our sinful natures, but due to his intervention we are not controlled by sin and can do what we desire - that is, to love and worship our Lord God.

Dialectic Materialism

The writing of the famous psuedo-philosopher Hegel is remarkably difficult to understand. This is partly because the translation from German is difficult to render without losing shades of meaning. It is partly because what he said was itself not that clear, being the kind of system one typically expects to hear from stoned students. And it is partly because he was deliberately unclear, so as to conceal his atheism and thus be able to get a job at a university.

One way in which he went about achieving this stunning lack of clarity was through the use of what are known as Dialectical Triads. This was a rhetorical device which might be used in one of two ways.

The first way was for him to present an idea (e.g. master), then to present its opposite (e.g. slave) and then to present the two as the same idea (e.g. master = slave).

The second way was for him to present a pair of ideas (e.g. poverty and unconciousness), then to present a second pair consisting of the opposites to the first pair (e.g. riches and unconciousness); finally, he would choose one idea he liked from each pair and present them together (e.g. riches and conciousness).

Hegel had some wacky ideas, most obviously his disputing the Law of the Excluded Middle. (The law of the excluded middle roughly states that for two propositions P and not-P, exactly one of them is true). However, so far as I am aware he never saw the Dialectical Triads as anything more than rhetorical devices. Certainly, he didn't see them as powerful metaphysical forces which determined the course of history. It took Karl Marx for that particular idiocy to arise.

Marx believed that the driving force of history was a triad of:
Common Ownership & Poverty
Private Ownership & Wealth
leading to
Common Ownershio & Wealth

Based on this, he argued that prehistoric humans had lived under primitive communism in order to survive; there were then the stages of tyranny, feudalism and capitalism; and finally, the great capitalist economies would see workers' revolutions, leading to true communism - the third stage of the triad.

This was Dialectic Materialism; it was also, of course, compkete and utter tosh.

Ethics without free will?

Suppose an atheist advanced the following line of thought:

"The Universe must have a cause for its existence. The only thing capable of causing the Universe to exist is a deity of some kind. However, it is impossible to disprove the proposition that a deity of some kind exists. Hence, it is not a scientific theory and so I need not worry about it."

We would clearly see this as a silly way of thinking. (I do not intend this reasoning as a defence of the causal argument for God's existence, but rather as an illustration). And yet my own "thought" regarding determinism has been rather similar for a while. Something like:

"Assuming we accept that events cause other events, it seems obvious that pretty much any event can be traced backwards through time as the natural consequence of the previous state of the world. That is to say, given the exact positions and velocities of all particles in the universe at one point in time, you could in principle predict the exact future of the universe. Thus, everything that happens, has happened, and is yet to happen, was set in stone from the very beginning of the universe. However, it is impossible to disprove this, since one can always say of any experimental data 'Oh, that's how it must have been set to happen given the prior state of the universe,' regardless of the results. Thus determinism is not a scientific theory, which I may therefore avoid worrying about."

To be fair to myself, I don't think I was ever particularly happy with this. It entails a blatant ignorance of the difference between epistemological methods and metaphysical truth. I would happily admit that this "thinking" was motivated by a desire to believe in free will and therefore to preserve a notion of ethics, combined with an honest rejection of compatabilist views of determinism and free will. Indeed, it would be dishonest to pretend that I will believe pretty much anything if it allows me to preserve ethics. However, I'm moving towards the idea that perhaps ethics is possible without free will. I see two ways in which this might be true. There may well be more, which I have missed; indeed, neither truly satisfies me.

1: Moral identity
When put in identical situations, different people will make different choices. This is because they are different people. When we pass moral judgement, we judge not the action but the person doing the action; the action is simply evidence towards the moral nature of the agent.

2: "Non-judgemental Consequentialism"
The morality of an action may be judged entirely by its consequences. Since the sets of consequences may be ordered in terms of their preferability, so may the actions themselves. Note, however, that since the agent's actions were pre-determined, they cannot actually be judged for their actions; this is therefore a somewhat narrower theory than standard consequentialism.


What implications might these theories have? Moral identity as a system is heavily at odds with my Christian belief - after all, one of the most fundamental tenets of Christianity is that we are not and cannot be saved by our own works or goodness, but are entirely reliant upon Christ and his death for us. The phrase "love the sinner, hate the sin" comes to mind as a principle in pretty much exact opposition to this theory. However, this may salvage a way of constructing ethics for those of a different background. One potential problem for the theory would be how to judge people doing wrong who genuinely believe themselves to be doing right. Let us assume that, in carrying out the Holocaust, Hitler genuinely believed himself to be doing what was morally good. Under a standard view of morality, we could say, "Yes, he believed himself to be doing right, but he was disastrously mistaken, and was in fact doing wrong." Under this "Moral Identity" theory, it becomes a lot harder to reconcile actions which seem obviously wrong with someone who genuinely believes themselves to be doing good.

What then of "non-judgemental consequentialism"? Well, this faces all the usual problems of consequentialist and utilitarian views of morality. But also, the idea of a world where actions are objectively good and bad, yet you cannot be praised for doing good nor criticised for doing bad seems completely alien. It would be like an action film in which the hero saved the entire world, everyone knew that he had done this (at great personal cost, no less!) and yet when he returned home, he did not receive the slightest bit of congratulations or thanks. This is not to say that it is wrong, merely that it would only make sense from a distinctly non-human perspective. Coming from a Christian background, the fact that the logic behind it is deeply counter-intuitive and requires a non-human set of intuitions seems like it should be evidence in its favour. The lack of moral judgement doesn't necessarily contradict Christian theology - after all, it is not our own morality which gets us into heaven. The key problem from a Christian perspective seems to be that the removal of any notion of moral judgement also seems to make thankfulness irrelevant, yet God is thanked many times, not only by fallible humans but by heavenly creatures and, of course, by Jesus himself.

So what then are my options?
1) Find a good reason to reject determinism, which leaves open the possibility of objective ethical judgement
2) Give up on objective ethical judgement
3) Adopt an extreme version of utilitarianism which precludes judgement of people
4) Find a new way in which determinism could be consistent with objective ethical judgement

The search for my chosen moral system continues...