Slavery, forced marriage and unjust laws

Slavery is the ownership of one person by another. Since a person no more owns another than a thief owns the purloined goods, there has never been any slavery. But of course there have been institutions thought to be slavery: institutions in which a person was thought to be the property of another. These were not institutions of slavery in the above strict sense but forms of unjust imprisonment, kidnapping, etc.

This seems to be merely a point about words, and a mistaken one at that. “Of course, Alexander II ended serfdom in Russia while Lincoln ended slavery in the US. Words mean what they are used to mean, and to dispute historical claims like these is to be like the fusty grammarian who claims that ‘It’s me’ is bad English.”

I agree that the question of words is unimportant. But here is what is important. Institutions are defined in large part by their norms. It is a defining feature of the norms of slavery (and, with some differences, of serfdom) that one person has property-style rights over another who has onerous obligations corresponding to these rights. But in fact, nobody has such rights over another, and the supposed obligations do not obtain. The institution that the “masters” saw themselves as a part of did not in fact exist, because the rights and obligations that they took to be integral to the institution did not, and could not, in fact exist.

We can use the term “slavery” (and cognates in other languages) for that non-existent institution, just as we use the term “phlogiston” for the substance that chemists mistakenly believed in before oxygen was discovered.

But we could also use distinguish and use two terms. Maybe slavery_h is the historical form of social organization that actually (and deplorably) existed and slavery_n is the normative institution that the masters_h (and maybe some of the slaves_h, as well) incorrectly thought to exist and thought to be coextensive with slavery_h.

Again, the words don’t matter, but it matters that there was a morally condemnable attempt to create a certain social institution which attempt failed because the norms that were attempted to be instituted were incapable of institution.

This is a pattern we find in many other cases. There is no such thing as a forced marriage, since the norms of love and sexuality that define marriage do not come into existence apart from the free consent of the parties. But of course over the course of history there have been morally condemnable attempts to force people—especially women—into the institution of marriage. These attempts always failed, and what the victims were forced into was a different institution, one subjecting them to such injustices as kidnapping, unjust imprisonment, rape, etc.

Thomas Aquinas, similarly, holds that there are no unjust laws. Of course, legislators may attempt to enact laws that would be unjust (or they may simply be exercising power and not even trying to legislate). But when they do so, they fail to enact laws. What they enact are mere demands masquarading as laws (philosophical anarchists think all “laws” are like that). Again, the question of words is unimportant, but what is important is the pattern: the legislator is deplorably attempting to create a social institution—a law—and failing to do so, but instead creating another institution.

The particular cases of this pattern are interesting, and so is the pattern itself. A central part of the pattern is an attempt to create an institution (or an instance of an institution) that misfires, and instead another institution is created that is widely but mistakenly thought to be the one that was the target of the attempt. But the cases of slavery, forced marriage and unjust laws also share another feature that not all the cases of misfiring do. For instance, suppose due to an honest mistake in the counting of ballots, there is a mistake as to who the mayor of a town is. The false mayor then attempts to legislate something quite just. The attempt fails, because the false mayor lacks the standing to legislate. But there need be nothing morally deplorable here, as there is in the slavery, forced marriage and unjust law cases.

Moreover, the three cases I started with are not just morally deplorable, but there seems to be an important connection between moral evil and performative misfire. Slavery_h is morally horrific, but slavery_n would be even worse, as the slaves_n would be under genuine obligations to do the enforced labor required of them and not to escape. This would, as it were, make morality itself complicit with the master, and the properly formed conscience of the slave into a whip in the master’s hand. And the same holds in the other two cases: morality itself would be a tool of oppression.

There are, alas, times when morality is a tool of oppression. The duties that exist between relatives are frequently exploited by repressive regimes as a means of social control: If you are an Uyghur or Tibetan defecting to a free country and speaking out against the Chinese regime, your relatives back home will suffer, and this restricts your activity because of the duties you have to your relatives. But the kinds of cases where the wicked use morality as a lever against the righteous seem different and less direct from what would be the case if slavery, forced marriage and unjust laws had the normative force that they pretend to. It is a mere coincidental effect of duties to family when these duties make it morally impossible or difficult to stand up to a wicked regime. But it would be of the very nature of the norms induced by slavery, forced marriage and unjust laws—if these norms really came into existence—that they would oppress.

This still leaves an interesting puzzle, which different moral theories will answer differently: Why is it the case that morality does not innately oppress?

Objection: Maybe slavery_h does create norms, but not moral norms.

Response: I myself don’t think there are any non-moral norms. But in any case slavery_h does not create any kind of obligation on the slave to obey the master, whether moral or not, except in some, but not all, cases a prudential one.

"Even if" clauses in promises

If I promise to visit you for dinner, but then it turns out that I have a nasty case of the flu, I don't need to come, and indeed shouldn't come. But I could also promise to meet you for dinner even if I have a nasty case of the flu, then if the promise is valid, I need to come even if I have the flu. I suspect, however, that typically such a promise would be immoral: I should not spread disease. But one can imagine cases where it would be valid, maybe say if you really would like to get the flu for a serious medical experiment on yourself.

In my previous post, I gave a case where it would be beneficial to have a promise that binds even when fulfilling it costs multiple lives. Thus, there is some reason to think that one could have promises with pretty drastic "even if" clauses such as "even if a terrorist kills ten people as a result of this." But clearly not every "even if" clause is valid. For instance, if I say I promise to visit you for dinner even if I have to endanger many lives by driving unsafely fast, my "only if" clause is not valid under normal circumstances (if we know that my coming to dinner would save lives, though, then it might be).

One can try to handle the question of distinguishing valid from invalid "only if" clauses by saying that the invalid case is where it is impermissible to do the promised thing under the indicated conditions. The difficulty, however, is that whether doing the promised thing is or is not permissible can depend on whether one has promised it. Again, the example from my previous post could apply, but there are more humdrum cases where one would have an on balance moral reason to spend the evening with one's family had one not promised to visit a friend.

Maybe this is akin to laws. In order to be valid, a law has to have a minimal rationality considered as an ordinance for the common good. In order to be valid, maybe a promise has to have a minimal rationality considered as an ordinance for the common human good with a special focus on the promisee? To promise to come to an ordinary dinner even if it costs lives does not have satisfy that condition, while to promise to bring someone out of general anesthesia even if a terrorist kills people as a result could satisfy it under some circumstances. It would be nice to be able to say more, but maybe that can't be done.

Symmetries in laws

Theists have often noticed that theism provides a nice aesthetically-based explanation for why we have simple laws, namely that such laws are beautiful and this gave God reason to enact them. (One can run this in two ways: (1) such laws are objectively beautiful, and God made them because of their objective beauty; (2) such laws are beautiful to us, and God created a world where the laws are beautiful to the intelligent creatures therein.)

Another interesting question about the fundamental laws is why they exhibit such nice symmetries. This question on its face seems independent of the question of why the laws are simple. You can have simple but asymmetric laws, and complex but symmetric ones. Again, an aesthetic theistic explanation seems to work well here (and again, it comes in two forms: either the symmetries are objectively beautiful or God made a world where the aesthetic properties of the laws fit with the aesthetic sensibilities of the intelligent creatures).

One might hope that symmetry considerations would thus allow one to run a teleological argument for the existence of God that escapes from the difficulty of making the notion of simplicity precise. However, while I think there is hope of a symmetry-based theistic argument, I don't think it escapes from the difficulties of theoretical simplicity. Any set of laws of nature that has an infinite space of solutions has an infinite number of symmetries: any bijection of the space of solutions onto itself is a symmetry. When we are excited by a potential symmetry like charge-parity-time invariance, we are excited by the fact that the symmetry can be specified in a simple way with respect to physically natural quantities. And if we can make sense of these twin notions (simplicity and physical naturalness), then we can likewise make sense of the notion of the simplicity of laws. So while a symmetry-based argument may provide additional evidence for the existence of God, it is subject to the same main difficulty as the simplicity of laws argument. (That said, I think this difficulty is not fatal.)

Preemption of laws of nature

I've been thinking about cases of preemption of laws of nature. Normally, an instance of a law is explained by the law. Let's say some dose of cyanide is lethal to chickens within minutes. Then it seems it's a law that a chicken is dead ten minutes after ingesting that dose (take "that dose" to be an abbreviation for the actual dose) of cyanide. Normally, then, if a chicken ingested the cyanide more than ten minutes ago and now is dead, that's because of the law.

But what if the law is preempted? Suppose that a few seconds after taking the cyanide, the chicken is eaten by an unfortunate fox. Then the case is still an instance of the law, but is not explained by the law. (This is a tweak of an improvement by Brad Rettler of a case I used in class today.) The law is true, but preempted by the fox, and hence it is not explanatory.

So it seems that for an event to happen because of a law is something more than for it to fall under the law.

Consider a way of getting out of this. Perhaps it's not a law that

1. a chicken is dead ten minutes after ingesting that dose of cyanide.

Maybe instead it's a law that

2. if meanwhile there are no other causes of death and it's not the case that the chicken dies causelessly, then a chicken is dead from the cyanide ten minutes after ingesting this dose of cyanide.

If so, then we have to suppose lawhood not to be both closed under conjunction and relevant entailment, since (1) follows from the conjunction of (2) with the law that dead chickens stay dead. That's an interesting result. Moreover, we have to deny that laws are universal generalizations that support counterfactuals, since (1) supports counterfactuals every bit as well as (2) does.

All this can be done. Still, (1) looks much more like a law than (2) does, and it seems to me that rather than fooling with something like this, it's better to allow that laws can be preempted. An instance of a law need not be true because of that law.

There might even be laws where in fact typically instances of the law are not true because of the law. Maybe, because of biological clocks in our cells, it's a law that nobody survives to be 130 years of age. But most people don't die because of this law. They die of heart attacks, car accidents, cancer, etc.

Fine-tuning and best-systems accounts of laws

According to best-systems accounts of laws, the laws are the theorems of the best system correctly describing our world. The best system, roughly, is one that optimizes for informativeness (telling us as much as possible about our world) and brevity of expression.

Now, suppose that there is some dimensionless constant α, say the fine-structure constant, which needs to be in some narrowish range to have a universe looking like ours in terms of whether stars form, etc. Simplify to suppose that there is only one such constant (in our world, there are probably more). Suppose also, as might well be the case, that this constant is a typical real number in that it is not capable of a finite description (in the way that e, π, 1, −8489/91907^4/7 are)—to express it needs something an infinite decimal expansion. The best system will then not contain a statement of the exact value for α. An exact value would require an infinitely long statement, and that would destroy the brevity of the best system. But specifying no value at all would militate against informativeness. By specifying a value to sufficient precision to ensure fine-tuning, the best system thereby also specifies that there are stars, etc.

Suppose the correct value of α is 0.0029735.... That's too much precision to include in the best system—it goes against brevity. But including in the best system that 0.0029<α<0.0030 might be very informative—suppose, for instance, that it implies fine-tuning for stars, for instance.

But then on the best-systems account of laws, it would be a required by law that the first four digits of α after the decimal point be 0029, but there would be no law for the further digits. But surely that is wrong. Surely either all the digits of α are law-required or none of them are.

Do we need the concept of laws of nature?

Laws of nature do two things for us. They delineate what is fixed beyond the power of physical beings and they are universal generalizations that explain their instances.

But there is no need for these two functions of laws to be united in a single concept. There are explanatory universal generalizations that do not limit powers. For instance all life on earth is based on DNA or RNA. This is an explanatory generalization, but it is not limiting of powers: there is nothing physically or biologically impossible about producing life with neither DNA nor RNA as far as we know.

One might link the two functions by using the power-limiting aspect to ground the explanatory aspect. Why does this particle not move faster than at the speed of light? Because no physical being can make it so that (and no non-physical being did).

But it is difficult to explain the power-limiting aspect of laws. Humeans basically just give up on it. A main alternative is to take it as primitive.

But why not just give up on the concept of laws and keep separate the ideas of limitations on powers and of explanatory generalizations?

The limitations on powers are just that: physical things not having the power to do such-and-such.

And what makes the explanatory generalizations explanatory on this view isn't some sui generis nomic explanation, but simply one of the other accepted forms of explanation. Why does the platypus and the gecko have DNA? Because they evolved from a common ancestor that did. Once we fill out a causal story we have a perfectly fine explanation here.

Now it's going to be harder to use one of the non-nomic forms of explanation in the case of something more fundamental like the conservation of mass-energy. But not for the theist who can say that God had as such willed that mass-energy be conserved, since then explanation by subsumption under the conservation law gets its explanatory oomph from a standard mode of explanation, namely the agential one.

It is tempting to try to combine the notions of power-limitation and explanatory generalization into the concept of a law. I doubt this will work. The universal generalization that all who die with their will full of charity will see God is power-limiting--no one can stop it--and explanatory. But it's not a law of nature.

My suggestion is to keep the notions separate as separate as their tasks.

An account of laws

According to the Lewisian best system analysis of laws, a proposition p is a fundamental law if and only if it is an axiom in the best system. There is room for variation in the concept of a best system, but a standard version in deterministic settings is that the best system comprises only truths and optimizes the brevity of its axioms and the informativeness of its theorems about the world. The biggest problem for me with the best system account is that the fact that something is an axiom in the best system simply does not make it be explanatory.

I think this is a better account. A proposition p is a fundamental law of nature provided that:

1. p is an axiom in the best system, and
2. God wills p, as such.

(I am not sure if the will in (2) should be taken to be antecedent or consequent. If miracles are counterinstances to laws, it must be antecedent. But a lot of people think that's a bad account of miracles, and that allows it to be consequent.)

The "as such" in (2) rules out a case where God instead of willing p, wills something that entails p.

This account solves the explanatory problem with Lewis's account by making the fundamental laws be explanatory. They are not explanatory directly because they are axioms in the best system, but rather because God wills them.

Interestingly, I think (1) may imply (2) in the actual world, by divine omnirationality. For that p has the kind of simplicity and fecundity that axioms in the best system are going to have gives God a reason to will p. And since p in fact holds, presumably God willed p. The only exception is going to be if p reports the sort of thing that God has reason to distance himself from. Suppose, for instance, that everyone who is tempted a certain way sins. Then that universal generalization might be a best system axiom, but God has reason not to will it. But in fact it does not seem that any axioms in our world's best system are going to be like that—such regularities don't seem to be far-reaching enough. All the candidates we hear about from physics are propositions that God does not seem to have reason to distance his will from.

If this is right, then in the actual world, all the axioms in the best system are fundamental laws, and Lewis is contingently right. Moreover, this line of thought shows that the fact that p is an axiom in the best system makes it likely that God wills it. Consequently, as long as we know that God exists, we get to keep the epistemological benefits of Lewis's system.

Of chocolates and laws

According to David Lewis, the fundamental laws of nature are those propositions that collectively optimize a balance of the twin desiderata of informativeness and simplicity. (You can get maximal informativeness by listing all the facts about the world, at the expense of maximal complexity of description, and you can get maximal simplicity by saying nothing, at the expense of minimal informativeness.) And laws are what follows from the fundamental laws.

But laws are explanatory. While Lewis's laws aren't.

Imagine a finite world w₁ which contains a powerful contingent magical being who creates a very large number N of golden boxes, and places a chocolate in each one, to fulfill some aesthetic goal—chocolate goes well with gold. No other explanation of the chocolate content of the boxes exists at w₁.

We can ask at w₁ why the third golden box contains a chocolate. And the answer is that the magical being put a chocolate in every golden box.

Now imagine a world w₂ just like w₁ but where the magical being doesn't exist and the boxes and chocolates come into existence ex nihilo. Nothing gets added to w₂ that wasn't there in w₁. Plainly at w₂ there just is no explanation of why the third golden box contains a chocolate.

If the number of boxes N is large enough, the proposition that every box contains a chocolate will be informative enough that it'll be included in the system that maximizes informativeness and simplicity (as N increases, the informativeness of the proposition increases but its simplicity stays constant).

But then if Lewis's account of laws is correct, then at w₂ it will be a law that all golden boxes contain chocolates. But laws are explanatory. So at w₂ we'll be able to explain why the third golden box contains a chocolate. But we said that at w₂ there is no explanation of this!

So the Lewisian account of laws is wrong.

Options: (1) Deny that laws are explanatory. (2) Abandon the Lewisian account of laws. (3) Deny that it is possible to have uncaused chocolates.

I think that (3) by itself won't do, because we can run the argument on a counterpossible. And (1) is unattractive. That leaves (2).

In summary, I think "Lewisian laws" aren't explanatory, and hence aren't laws.

A modification to the Deductive-Nomological account of explanation

there is a deficiency in the standard formulation of the deductive-nomological (D-N) model of explanation. On the standard model, one explains by citing laws and initial conditions that jointly explain the explanandum. But in fact the explanans not only should state the laws but also that they are laws or at least consequences of laws. For suppose I wish to explain why Mappy liked one of my buttons. I cite three facts: Mappy is a magpie, all my buttons are shiny and all magpies like shiny things, and on the D-N model I am done. But knowing these three facts and justifiably believing that they explain why Mappy liked one of my buttons is not sufficient for my knowing why Mappy liked one of my buttons. For to know why Mappy liked one of my buttons, I need to know that it is a law or a consequence of a law that magpies like shiny things. Unless I know this, I do not know why Mappy liked one of my buttons. Imagine, after all, someone who knows all the three facts cited but who incorrectly justifiably believes that (a) it is a mere accidental generalization that magpies like shiny things and (b) it is a law of nature that all my buttons are shiny. Such a person knows each of the three facts, but does not know why Mappy liked one of my buttons. Therefore, we should take it as part of the explanans that it is a law that magpies like shiny things.

Laws and theodicy: Some steps in the dialectic

The following steps are quite standard in the problem of evil dialectics:

1. Atheist: The world contains many instances of suffering, all of which could easily be averted if there were a God, simply by modifying the laws of nature. For instance, there could be a law of nature saying that knives turn to water before they penetrate hearts, etc.
2. Theist: Such laws of nature would be unduly complex. For instance, they would have to specify exactly when knives turn to water, in what way (does the process happen all at once, starting at the tip, etc.), how close they need to be to the heart for the process to start, etc. Simplicity of law is intrinsically valuable—a world all of whose laws are as elegant as General Relativity is a world of great value, in its diversity reflecting God's infinity in its and in its simplicity God's unity.
3. Atheist: Any value of such simplicity is far outweighed by the disvalue of suffering for persons.

At this point, we have a serious clash of intuitions and it may not be efficient for the theist to try to bridge it. Instead, the theist might try to argue that humans couldn't coexist with the more complex laws. I am inclined to think that that isn't the best answer.[note 1] Instead I want to consider the following dialectical moves:

4. Theist: It is valuable for us to be able to figure out the laws, both for the sake of the understanding itself and to enable us to exercise more meaningful agency. But laws complex enough to stop every kind of suffering would be too complex for us to figure out.
5. Atheist: But God could give us more powerful intellects.

It is at this dialectical point that I want to jump into the fray. Three moves are open to the theist. The first is that there is a value in having a range of beings in the world, ranging through completely mindless electrons, unconscious plants, barely conscious lower animals, moderately smart higher animals, moderately smart human beings, perhaps even smarter non-human persons somewhere else, and in any case a whole range of superhuman intelligences (angels). This great chain of being is of significant value. It is valuable that the chain not have significant gaps in it, as there would be if God refrained from creating agents—us—with intellects that are not all that impressive compared to what is higher up. (And, O how great the glory of God, God then became one of these lower agents, and raised another to be the queen of heaven.)

The second move is to note that there is something odd about complaining that God did not create in our place a smarter species. Whom did God wrong or behave less than perfectly lovingly towards by not creating a smarter species in our place? That smarter species? But you cannot wrong or behave less than perfectly lovingly towards someone who never exists. Or us? But I think our existence is overall worthwhile.

The third and most challenging move is to note that there is a value in having enmattered intellects which do a significant part—if the materialists are right (they're not), all—of their thinking by use of a physical organ (the brain), an organ whose morphology arose through natural physical processes of not too small probability. Now, a more complex set of laws given such conditions might require a more complex brain. But it could well be that the energy usage and evolution of such a more complex brain would require further complexification of the laws. I do not know that this is so, but neither do I know that this is not so, and I doubt that anyone is in a position to claim that it is not so. But the further complexification of the laws may require a further complexification of the brain. And so on. There might be a fixed point to this sequence—a brain that can understand the laws of nature that it is governed by. But we do not know that there is such a fixed point. It's fun and humbling to note how easily our thinking hits up against things that none of us know.