Chapter 9 Arguments from Consciousness and Morality
Swinburne writes
A human would not exist unless it had a capacity for a mental life (a capacity to have sensations, thoughts, etc.); and having such a capacity is itself a mental property (one to the instantiation of which in a subject he has privileged access). Hence humans are mental substances. But there is more to humans than just having essentially a capacity for a mental life, connected to a body. That mental life itself, I now argue, is a state of the mental substance that is the embodied human being in virtue of being a state of a pure mental substance, the soul of the human, which is connected to his body. For what makes me me is the continuity of my mental life, not the continuity of a body to which it is connected. Even if normally the latter continuity is physically necessary for the former, there are two different continuities. And by the continuity of my mental life, I mean simply that the mental events are had by me, a notion which is not further analyzable; but whose non-physical nature we can bring out by giving the name of my ‘soul’ to the essential part of me which has the mental events (and which is connected to the nonessential part, my body). We can begin to see that this account of personal identity is correct by pointing out that if you knew all the 196 Arguments from Consciousness and Morality properties, physical and mental associated with bodies, you would still not know one of the most important things of all—whether you or any other human continued over time to live a conscious life. Let me illustrate this with the example of brain transplants. The brain consists of two hemispheres and a brainstem. There is good evidence that humans can survive and behave as conscious beings if much of one hemisphere is destroyed. Now imagine my brain (hemispheres plus brainstem) divided into two, and each half-brain taken out of my skull and transplanted into the empty skull of a body from which a brain has just been removed; and there to be added to each half-brain from some other brain (for example, the brain of my identical twin) whatever other parts (for example, more brainstem) are necessary in order for the transplant to take and for there to be two living persons with lives of conscious experiences. Now I am very well aware that an operation of this delicacy is not at present practically possible and perhaps never will be possible for mere human scientists with mere human resources; but I cannot see that there are any insuperable theoretical difficulties standing in the way of such an operation. (Indeed that is a mild understatement—I fully expect it to be done one day.) We are, therefore, entitled to ask the further question—if this operation were done and we then had two living persons, both with lives of conscious experiences, which would be me? Probably both would to some extent behave like me and claim to be me and to remember having done what I did; for behaviour and speech depend, in large part, on brain states, and there are very considerable overlaps between the ‘information’ carried by the two hemispheres that gives rise to behaviour and speech. But both persons would not be me. For, if they were both identical with me, they would be the same person as each other (if a is the same as b, and b is the same as c, then a is the same as c) and they are not. They now have different experiences and lead different lives. There remain three other possibilities: that the person with my right half-brain is me, or that the person with my left half-brain is me, or that neither is me. But we cannot be certain which holds. It follows that mere knowledge of what happens to brains or bodies or anything else physical does not tell you what happens to persons. It is tempting to say that it is a matter of arbitrary definition which of the three possibilities is correct. But this temptation must be Arguments from Consciousness and Morality 197 resisted. There is a crucial factual issue here—which can be shown if we imagine that I have been captured by a mad surgeon who is about to perform the split-brain operation on me. He tells me (and I have every reason to believe him) that the person to be formed from my left half-brain is to have an enjoyable life and the person to be formed from my right half-brain is to be subjected to a life of torture. Whether my future life will be happy or painful, or whether I shall survive an operation at all, are clearly factual questions. (Only someone under the grip of some very strong philosophical dogma would deny that.) Yet, as I await the transplant and know exactly what will happen to my brain, I am in no position to know the answer to the question—what will happen to me. Maybe neither future person will be me—it may be that cutting the brainstem will destroy the original person once and for all, and that, although repairing the severed stem will create two new persons, neither of them will be me. Perhaps I will be the left-half-brain person, or maybe it will be the right-half-brain person who will be me. Even if one subsequent person resembles the earlier me more in character and memory claims than does the other, that one may not be me. Maybe I will survive the operation but be changed in character and have lost much of my memory as a result of it, in consequence of which the other subsequent person will resemble the earlier me more in his public behaviour than I will. Reflection on this thought experiment shows that, however much we know about what has happened to my brain—we may know exactly what has happened to every atom in it—and to every other physical part of me, we do not necessarily know what has happened to me. From that it follows that there must be more to me than the matter of which my body and brain are made, a further essential nonphysical part whose continuing in existence makes the brain (and so body) to which it is connected my brain (and body), and to this something I give the traditional name of ‘soul’
I just disagree with Swinburne here. Parfit has argued very persuasively in reasons and persons that there is no irreducible self. But also, souls solve nothing, for reasons I explain here. Either souls are causally inert or they’re not.
If they’re causally inert, then they can’t establish personal identity. If souls really just connect personal identity in a way that doesn’t causally affect the physical world, then it would be possible for me to turn into a fish instantly, yet be the same person by souls.
If they’re not, then the functional role of souls can be met by other things on naturalism.
Dualisms of the physical and mental are not popular philosophical positions today. In Chapter 2 I defended explanatory dualism (two different ways of explaining events); and in this chapter I have defended two kinds of ontological dualisms—there are both pure mental and physical events, pure mental and physical substances. I find the arguments in favour of the latter dualisms (as also the arguments in favour of the former) inescapable. You have left something all-important out of the history of the world if you tell just the story of which physical events were succeeded by which other physical events. What people did intentionally (as opposed to what merely happened to them), and how they thought and felt, are allimportant. And equally important is who had those thoughts and feelings—when did one person cease to exist and another come into being. Now certainly, as I have written, we normally know the answers to these questions. Our observation of bodies normally tells us when persons are the same and what they are feeling. Of course, if a baby Arguments from Consciousness and Morality 199 screams when prodded with a needle, it is in pain. But it is not so obvious, when a human-looking organism made in a factory or a creature from another planet is prodded with a needle and emits some sound, whether that thing is in pain. And, of course, the person with this body today who has not been subject to a brain operation and shares the same patterns of behaviour as the person with this body yesterday is the same person as the latter. But after humans, let alone creatures from some distant planet, have had massive brain operations, it is not at all clear whether we are dealing with the same person as before. What these examples bring out is that someone feeling pain is a different event from their being prodded by a needle, and this person being the same person as that person is different from this body being the same body as that; even if normally an event of the latter kind goes with an event of the former kind. A full history of the world will tell the story of feelings as well as of brain events, and of persons (and so their essential non-physical parts, souls) as well as of bodies. These arguments that show that humans have two parts—body and soul—will show that any creature that has a mental life will also have two parts. The same issues will arise for a chimpanzee or a cat as for a human. If some cat is to undergo a serious brain operation, the question arises whether the cat has reason to fear the bad experiences and look forward to the good experiences that the post-operation cat will have. That question cannot necessarily be answered merely by knowing what has happened to every molecule in the cat’s brain. So we must postulate a cat-soul that is the essential part of the cat, and whose continuation makes for the continuation of the cat. Only when we come to animals without thought or feeling does such a question not arise, and then there is no need to postulate an immaterial part of the animal. Certainly human souls have different capacities from the souls of higher animals (the former can have kinds of thought—thoughts about morality or logic—that the latter cannot have; and form kinds of purpose—for example, to solve an equation—that the latter cannot). But what my arguments show is that animals who have thought and feeling have as their essential part a non-physical soul. Just as I do not wish to deny that brain events cause mental events (that is, events in the soul, once it exists) and vice versa, so I do not necessarily wish to deny that events in the brain play a role in causing the existence of souls. Maybe, at some stage of animal evolution, an animal brain became so complex that that caused the existence of a soul connected to it, and the continued development and operation of that brain sustained the existence of the soul; and, as evolution moves on, similar complexity causes similar souls. The connection between one soul and one brain that gets established is a causal one. It is events in this particular brain that cause events in this particular soul, and events in this particular soul that cause events in this particular brain; this is what the connection between this brain and this soul amounts to.
Swinburne’s arguments for dualism seem pretty lackluster. The fact that it seems to him that there are souls isn’t great evidence for souls. Mental events being emergent doesn’t prevent them from being real. Heat emerges from very simple things, but that doesn’t mean heat isn’t real. While it may be hard to deduce from fundamental physics how we get consciousness, the same is true of quite literally all higher order physical phenomena. It’s very hard to explain a table starting at quantum mechanics.
Given the scientific laws as we believe them to be, which operated to govern the inanimate world for the first nine of the first fifteen billion years since the time of the Big Bang, there is not the slightest grounds for supposing that conscious life would evolve. The laws of Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory, integrated perhaps into a ‘Grand Unified Theory’ or ‘Theory of Everything’ by which everything physical might be explained (fully or partially, even if not completely), give not the slightest reason to suppose that some brain state would cause a green sensation or a sensed smell of coffee. But maybe there is more to the laws of nature than the relatively simple integrated system of physical laws envisaged in a vast physical theory. Maybe there are also psycho-physical laws connecting brains and their states with souls and their states, which would produce experienced effects only when brains had reached a certain stage of development. Since brain events often cause mental events, and mental events often cause brain events, scientists could perhaps establish a long list of such causal connections in humans. The list would state that brain events of a certain kind cause blue images, and brain events of a certain kind cause red images; brain events of another kind cause a strong desire to drink tea; and that a purpose to eat cake together with a belief that cake is in the cupboard cause the brain events that cause leg movements in the direction of the cupboard. And so on. Also, just possibly, scientists could list which primitive brains give rise to consciousness—that is, to souls. The reason why I wrote ‘just possibly’ is that our only grounds for believing that any other organism—whether some animal whose body was formed by normal sexual processes on earth, or some creature on another planet, or some machine made in a factory—is conscious is provided by the similarity of its behaviour and brain organization to ourselves. We do not have an independent check on whether it is conscious. And when the similarities are not strong—as between frogs, say, and human beings—it is in no way obvious whether the animal is conscious. But let us waive difficulties about how we could establish such things, and suppose that we have lists of causal connections in humans between brain events and mental events, and lists of which kinds of primitive brain give rise to consciousness—that is, souls—in which subsequent brain events cause subsequent mental events, and mental events cause brain events. These causal connections constitute very detailed generalizations, similar to descriptive generalizations of chemistry about which particular substances combine under what circumstances with which other substances to form which new substances. So does the true scientific theory of the universe consist of the hoped-for integrated theory of physics plus these trillion or so causal connections. That is immensely improbable. By the criteria set out in Chapter 3, a scientific theory (of given scope) is likely to be true in so 202 Arguments from Consciousness and Morality far as it has considerable explanatory power, and in so far as it is simple. Such an imagined psycho-physical theory would have the requisite explanatory power. (It would lead us to expect the correlations that we find—since they would be part of the theory.) But it would be so complicated that it would be immensely improbable that it provided a full explanation of mind–body interaction. For that, we need an explanation of these causal connections in terms of their derivability from a theory consisting of a few relatively simple laws that fit together (in the way in which the low-level laws of chemistry proved derivable from the atomic theory of chemistry). The theory would need to explain why the formation of a brain of a complexity as great as or greater than that of a certain animal (perhaps an early vertebrate) gives rise to consciousness—that is, to a soul with mental states. And the theory would need to explain why brain events give rise to the particular mental events they do—why a brain event of this kind causes a blue image, and one of that kind causes a red image, and not vice versa; why eating chocolate causes the brain events that cause the taste we call chocolatey rather than the taste we call pineappley? It would need to explain why this brain event causes the thought that Russia is a big country, and that one causes the thought that every human has a vocation; and why this mental event causes the brain event that causes my lips to utter this sentence, and that mental event causes the brain event that causes my lips to utter that sentence.
I’m optimistic about discovering an explanation of consciousness. We’ve discovered explanations for lots of things including disease, heat, life, fire, neural correlates of love, and many other things. We can make AI’s play near perfect chess—much better than humans. Explaining that starting at the basic laws of physics would seem near impossible. Iphones are hard to explain starting at just the laws of physics, but physics can explain Iphones. It seems like if we can explain how intelligence arises from physics, we can do the same with consciousness. Perhaps, as Searle suggests, consciousness is a biological phenomena no more mysterious than a pancreas. Once we realize how it works, the mystery will disappear.
But does not science always surprise us with new discoveries? The history of science is punctuated with many ‘reductions’ of one whole branch of science to another apparently totally different, or ‘integration’ of apparently very disparate sciences into a superscience. Thermodynamics dealing with heat was reduced to statistical mechanics dealing with velocities of large groups of particles of matter and collisions between them; the temperature of a gas proved to be the mean kinetic energy of its molecules. The separate sciences of electricity and magnetism came together to form a super-science of electromagnetism. And then optics was reduced to electromagnetism; light proved to be an electromagnetic wave. How is it that such great integrations can be achieved if my argument is correct that there could not be a simple and so probably true super-science that predicts the connections we find between mental events and brain events? There is a crucial difference between these cases. Every earlier integration into a super-science, of sciences with entities and properties apparently qualitatively very distinct, was achieved by saying that really some of these entities and properties were not as they Arguments from Consciousness and Morality 205 appeared to be. A distinction was made between the underlying (not immediately observable) physical entities and physical properties, on the one hand, and the sensory properties to which they gave rise. Thermodynamics was initially concerned with the laws of temperature exchange; and temperature was supposed to be a property inherent in an object that you felt when you touched the object. The felt hotness of a hot body is indeed qualitatively distinct from particle velocities and collisions. The reduction to statistical mechanics was achieved by distinguishing between the underlying cause of the hotness (the motion of molecules) and the sensation that the motion of molecules causes in observers, and saying that really the former was what temperature was, the latter was just the effect of temperature on observers. That done, temperature falls naturally within the scope of statistical mechanics—for molecules are particles; the entities and properties are not now of distinct kinds. Since the two sciences now dealt with entities and properties of the same (measurable) kind, reduction of one to the other became a practical prospect. But the reduction was achieved at the price of separating off the felt hotness from its causes, and only explaining the latter. All other ‘reductions’ of one science to another and ‘integrations’ of separate sciences dealing with apparently very disparate properties have been achieved by this device of denying that the apparent properties (such as the ‘secondary qualities’ of colour, heat, sound, taste) with which one science dealt belong to the physical world at all. It siphoned them off to the world of the mental. But then, when you come to face the problem of the mental events themselves, you cannot do this. If you are to explain the mental events themselves, you cannot distinguish between them and their underlying causes and only explain the latter. The enormous success of science in producing an integrated physico-chemistry has been achieved at the expense of separating off from the physical world colours, smells, and tastes, and regarding them as purely private sensory phenomena. What the evidence of the history of science shows is that the way to achieve integration of sciences is to ignore the mental. The very success of science in achieving its vast integrations in physics and chemistry is the very thing that has apparently ruled out any final success in integrating the world of the mind and the world of physics.
I don’t think that this is true at all. For example, we now know how to make AI’s play chess—something that would have once seemed to require consciousness. Heat being quick molecules involves an explanation of how the heat like property that we observe comes from simpler things—I don’t see why the same can’t happen from consciousness. Heat is not just an illusion—we’ve discovered how simple laws can result in a heat like thing. Same with life, water, neural correlates of consciousness, intelligence, and numerous others.
But even if consciousness requires positing new physics, that’s still more plausible than God. Consciousness emerging form the brain is more likely than it emerging from nothing in a disembodied mind.
However, consciousness seems to be a prime example of Swinburne committing the fallacy of understated evidence. Here are facts about consciousness that theism explains badly.
Why it’s tied to the brain. What is the reason for harm to the pink fleshy skull substance making people more violent and affecting their subjective experiences? Surely a world where lead in water didn’t decrease IQ and make people more violent would be a better world.
Why there’s so much unnecessary suffering. One could imagine a world in which psychophysical laws didn’t make us suffer as much as it does—and instead made us happy.
Why there are things like depression.
Why we don’t have better dreams. Given that dreams are forgotten about usually, it seems God would make dreams that we forget later really awesome, because bad dreams can’t serve any instrumental purpose.
Why so many undesirable things affect consciousness. For example, why people’s conscious minds get distracted despite them not desiring that.
Why people have a limited memory.
Why people can’t shut off their pain when in intense agony (for example, when being tortured).
Why we can’t solve the hard problem of consciousness. If we don’t know what beings are conscious, we risk accidentally inflicting tons of suffering.
Why people often have lots of small pains such as headaches, toe stubs, and numerous other things that plausibly serve no greater purpose.
Why animals suffer so much, experiencing almost certainly more suffering than joy.
Why desirable conscious experience doesn’t only correlate with good things. For example, why does God make lots of people get pleasure from molesting children, yet gain no pleasure from helping others?
Why do people lack moral knowledge in their consciousness. It seems we could have direct awareness of what is right.
I could keep going, but I think you get the point. When we consider consciousness in full, it’s evidence for atheism, because it has features that theism can’t explain.
So then, because we have every reason to believe that there can be no scientific theory and so scientific laws correlating brain states with souls and their states, we have every reason to believe that the causal connections that exist between them do not have a scientific explanation in terms of the properties of brain states; they are additional causal connections independent of the set of scientific laws governing the physical world. Nothing about the physical world makes it in the very least probable that there would be these connections.
We can just posit extra psychophysical laws. For example, we can just posit that a law of physics makes consciousness arise whenever there’s a particular assemblage of brain activity.
I cannot see any force in an argument to the existence of God from the existence of morality. The Argument from Moral Awareness Very different from the argument from the fact that there are moral truths is the argument from human awareness of significant moral truths. If humans are to make significant choices at all they must have the concepts of moral goodness and badness (in my sense of overall goodness and badness). They must be able to see some actions as good to do, and of these to see some as obligatory; and to see some actions as bad, and of these, some as wrong.
There’s a plausible naturalistic account of how we would know moral truths. Here are several
1 Reasoning leads us to arrive at moral conclusions, the same way it allows us to arrive at factual conclusions and mathematical conclusions.
2 We have direct access to the badness of pain because we experience it. We can reason our way to realize that other people’s suffering is bad like ours.
3 We evolved empathy for evolutionary reasons, making us care about others when they suffer.
4 Our perceptual awareness evolved to be reliable because it increase survival.
Etc.
However, theism is a poor explanation of lots of facts about moral knowledge including
Irreconcilable moral disagreements. If God writes a moral law on our hearts, why are there irresolvable disagreements, such that smart people like Singer and Foot would probably never converge, however much they reflect.
Moral uncertainty. We know that most people have thought horrific things like slavery were morally okay throughout much of human history. Theism gives a bad account of that. We also know that many people have incorrect moral judgements that they arrive at through intuition—so many people are deceived through their intuitions. This is very surprising on theism. Why would God make us unable to reliably figure out what to do about population ethics, the trolley problem, bridge, and numerous other hard philosophical cases.
Cognitive dissonance—why are we biased by self interest in our moral deliberation, even when we don’t desire to have biased verdicts?
People who lack moral awareness—for example, moral anti realists who don’t think they’re in touch with objective morality.
Moral beliefs differing by time, place, and culture.
Many people finding the bible supportive of horrific beliefs including the purging of gay people, slavery, subjugation of women, and numerous others.
Many people’s morality leads them to conclude the problem of evil shows God doesn’t exist. It’s hard to explain God would make us deceived about morality in that way.
Chapter 10: The Argument From Providence
This argument from the opportunities we have for making significant differences I call the argument from Providence. The world in which we are placed is in this all-important respect providential. The argument echoes points made by many thinkers over the past two or three millennia; but I do not know of anyone who has put them together in the form of precise argument for the existence of God. However, these opportunities to make significant differences require the occurrence of actual evils,1 and the possible occurrence of many more evils; and the question inevitably arises of whether a good God would be right to give us these opportunities in view of the evils they bring with them
This seems probable on naturalism—there’s an evolutionary advantage to being able to affect the world. However, theism can’t explain
Why we don’t have greater ability to change the world.
Why ability to change the world is contingent on random lucky factors. MLK would have done much less if he’d been born in the third century.
Why ability to change the world differs based on time and place.
Why many people die at a young age, making them unable to change the world.
Why people often have hinderances to changing the world including severe mental disabilities that render people unable to understand the world in depth, depression that makes it hard for people to operate and improve the world, dementia, limited opportunities from birth, etc.
I have been arguing for the last few pages that a God would have reason to make a world in which agents have the opportunity to benefit or harm each other. There are a variety of different possible worlds, according to the time scale and nature of the mutual dependence involved. First you could have what I shall call a World-I. Here there would be an unchanging set of immortal humanly free agents. The world and its inhabitants would have their evils and imperfections, but the world would be perfectible by the cooperation of agents within a finite time. By the world being perfectible I mean that all evils would be removable and the world and society could be brought to a very happy and beautiful state such that no effort of agents could make it more beautiful. For the rest of eternity all they would need to do would be to keep it ticking over. There would be reason for God to make such a world—the happiness of agents is a good thing, and each agent (after enduring a little) would be able to attain it in such a world. But the trouble with such a world is that, after a finite time, agents would have nothing demanding to do. Although they could always tinker with the world, it would (once their initial labours were completed) as a result of the tinkering be no better a world than it was before; and, having attained much knowledge, agents would realize this
God could make this world be such that agents can improve it, benefitting others, but things start out very good. It’s also not clear why agents need to do anything. The reason it makes sense to help others is not so you can occupy your time, it’s so others can be helped. If everyone was unfathomably well off, no one would be bored by not doing anything other than basking in the perfection of God’s love.
For this reason God seems to me to have more reason to make what I shall call a World-II. Here once again there is an unchanging set of immortal humanly free agents, but in this case there is an infinite number of such agents, and there would be no limit to the extent to which they could go on improving each other and their world. There would be an infinite amount of world and of agents to improve, infinite knowledge and freedom to acquire; and all this in World-II would need an infinite time. However, by the very description of World-II, one good thing would be barred to agents—giving birth to new agents and forming them from the beginning of their existence. Clearly it is good that agents should have such power
Why?? Making infinite perfectly well of agents would be good even if we couldn’t give birth.
In what I call a World-III the number of immortal agents can be increased through the activity of existing agents. If a God has reason to make a World-II, he has, a fortiori, reason to make a World-III. Birth is fine, but what about death? Does a God have reason to make a world in which, either by natural causes or by the action of agents, there is death? I believe that he does have a number of reasons to make mortal agents. The first is that, if all agents are immortal, there is a certain kind of bad action (of a qualitatively different kind to other bad actions) that agents cannot do either to themselves or to others—they cannot deprive of existence. However much I may hate you or myself, I am stuck with you and me. And in this vital respect humanly free agents would not share the creative power of God. In refusing them this power, a God would refuse to trust his creatures in a crucial respect. To let a person have a gun is always a mark of profound trust.
A world in which people couldn’t kill others wouldn’t make them better off. No part of the quality of my life is determined by my ability to kill people. God trusting people to kill people wouldn’t make them well off. It doesn’t make sense to trust beings with a loaded gun if you know it will result in tons of killings. This also can’t explain non human caused death, which is most death.
Secondly, a world without death is a world without the possibility of supreme self-sacrifice and courage in the face of absolute disaster. The ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of oneself, and that would not be possible in a world without death. (‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’) Supreme generosity would be impossible. So too would cheerfulness and patience in the face of absolute disaster. For, in a world without death, the alternatives would always involve continuance of life and so too the possibility that others would rescue one from one’s misfortunes. There would be no absolute disaster to be faced with cheerfulness and patience
Why is self sacrifice good? It seems obvious that it’s good because of what one is sacrificed for. Sacrificing ones life to save their family is good, but it would be even better if they didn’t die. If one saves their family, they shouldn’t sacrifice their life on top of that just for the heck of it. This is because sacrifice is bad intrinsically, it’s only good overall if it achieves some grander purpose.
If we consider two worlds, one in which you can sacrifice your life to save your family, and one in which your family isn’t in danger, world two is obviously better. If this were not true then it would be good to throw grenades at families, just so that one member could have the opportunity to engage in self sacrifice.
Thirdly, a world with natural death would be a world in which an agent’s own contribution would have a seriousness about it because it would be irreversible by the agent. If I spend all my seventy years doing harm, there is no time left for me to undo it. But, if I live for ever, then, whatever harm I do, I can always undo it. It is good that what people do should matter, and their actions matter more if they have only a limited time in which to reverse them.
This isn’t true at all. Bad actions can set you back for centuries or decades. Actions don’t need eternal consequences to be serious. If I knew I’d live forever, I wouldn’t go out and do frivolous things—I still would want my life to be as good as possible, as well as the lives of others.
Also, agents being perfectly well off would make it irrelevant if their actions were eternally significant. The reason actions being significant is important is because it makes people better off. Taking significant actions that don’t improve the world wouldn’t be good. There’s no plausible theory of well-being or normative ethics that says that doing things that are irreversible is intrinsically good merely by virtue of irreversibility.
Fourthly, a world with birth but without natural death would be a world in which the young would never have a free hand. They would always be inhibited by the experience and influence of the aged
Seriously? People have to die so that the young don’t endure lectures from their grandparents—ones that they’re notorious for ignoring. Young people don’t adhere to advice by old people across the board.
There are also super easy ways around this. Just make old people go to a different place after they’ve been around 200 years or something. Or make it taboo to yap too much to young people.
The greatest value of death, however, seems to me to lie in a fifth consideration, which is in a way opposite to my second one. I wrote earlier of the great value that lies in agents having the power to harm each other. Only agents who can do this have significant power. Yet, for the sake of the potential sufferer, there must be a limit to the suffering that one agent can inflict on another. It would, I believe that we would all judge, be morally wrong for a very powerful being to give limitless power to one agent to hurt another. Giving to agents the power to kill is giving vast power of a qualitatively different kind from other power. It is very different from a power to produce endless suffering. Clearly the parent analogy suggests that it would The Argument from Providence 229 be morally wrong to give limitless power to cause suffering. A parent, believing that an elder son ought to have responsibility, may give him power for good or ill over the younger son. But a good parent will intervene eventually if the younger son suffers too much—for the sake of the younger son. A God who did not put a limit to the amount of suffering that a creature can suffer (for any good cause, including that of the responsibility of agents) would not be a good God. There need to be limits to the intensity of suffering and to the period of suffering. A natural death after a certain small finite number of years provides the limit to the period of suffering. It is a boundary to the power of an agent over another agent. For death removes agents from that society of interdependent agents in which it is good that they should play their part. True, a God could make a temporal limit to the harm that agents could do to each other without removing them from each other’s society. But that would involve agents being in mutual relation with each other while being immunized from responsibility for each other, as well as depriving them of the possibility to make the choices of great seriousness described above.
My remarks in response to the second point apply here. His worry that making people unable to continually harm people would immunize responsibility isn’t much of an argument. Why is it bad for responsibility to be immunized after a certain point. Indeed, death is effectively immunization from others.
Additionally, limited ability to harm doesn’t make people worse off. I can’t destroy the world, but that doesn’t make me worse off.
Overall, none of this explains natural suffering or death.
So far, this chapter has been concerned with the nature and circumstances that a God would have reason to give to humanly free agents. However, I suggested in Chapter 6 that God would have reason also to create conscious beings unburdened with the mixed blessing of moral awareness and free will—that is, the higher animals. I suggested that it was good that there should be beings who learn what is to their good and harm and seek the good and avoid the harm, and through doing so enjoy the world and have pleasurable sensations
But then why are most of their experiences suffering? Swinburne explains why they lack responsibility and immense power, but he doesn’t explain why they suffer so much.