The Euthypro Dilemma

Over at ThinkNet, a mailing list of people working in or are interested in reformational philosophy, there is a recent discussion yet again on the well-known problem in philosophy of the Euthypro Dilemma.

A member asked if anyone could explain it in 250 words or less. The philosopher Roy Clouser, one of reformational philosophy’s leading exponents in North America, replied with an alternative position (which rejects the Scholastic conclusion identified with Aquinas). Now I’ve read Clouser’s works before on Divine attributes (example, here) but I don’t recall him explaining his reformational alternative in relation to the famous Socratic dilemma in such clear terms (here reproduced with his permission):

The Xn doctrine of creation beautifully forks the false dilemma posed by Socrates. 

The dilemma is supposed to be that if something is good because God loves it, then it is arbitrary. That is, it is not itself good, but good only because of God’s approval. So for example, if good approved of murder it would be good. If that’s to be avoided, the only other position to take is that good things are intrinsically good and God loves them because they are good. But that makes good (and evil) exist independently of God.

The Xn doctrine of creation, as I understand it, forks this by insisting from the outset that God has created everything that exists other than himself, so it rejects the second tine of Socrates fork. But it does not follow that the command against murder is arbitrary and that it would be equally evil to eat peanuts if God commanded us not to eat peanuts. The reason is that God has created the standards of good and evil as real factors of the created world. So the commandments of God are not arbitrary but reflect the way creation really is. So the standard is neither uncreated nor arbitrary. The commandments are not only imperative, but revelatory of the way God made the world. 

The usual reply i get to this point goes: “So if God had made the world differently He could have made murder good? That still sounds pretty arbitrary!” There are 2 things wrong with that reply, as I see it.

1. The reply asks us to envision the world as it is now, with only that one change – which is impossible. I mean impossible for us to envision. As soon as someone says, “Suppose this law were different…” the consequences are unimaginable because any change in one law would require changes in others. For example, we cannot imagine a reversal of the law forbidding murder and still take the law of love to be the overriding ethical principle. But if it’s not love, what is it? What the reply tries to get away with is not having to say what other consequences its proposal would entail, and which are impossible to know.

2. Scripture tells us that God has, at times, given arbitrary rules to His people. There was no rule against eating peanuts but there was against eating shellfish or trimming your beard. Those were rules just because God said so, which is why they could later be done away with. They didn’t reflect the moral order of creation, but only served to make Israel different from other nations and to make Israelis see and feel that difference every day. 

The view of God’s nature held by the Cappadocian Fathers, Calvin, & Barth (among others) avoids the trap of thinking that any property of God must be uncreated because God is uncreated. Prov. 8 denies this for God’s wisdom, e.g., and there’s no good reason to think what it says doesn’t apply to His goodness as well. Goodness is a real attribute of God, but it is not uncreated. It depends on God sustaining it along with the rest of creation even though God has (from eternity) taken it into Himself – just as He later took into himself the whole created person of Jesus Christ. So even though it’s a property God has, it too is neither uncreated nor arbitrary that God has it.

To the question: “Do you mean God could have willed not to be good?” the answer is: What sense of “could” are you employing? Is it a moral term, a logical term, or what? There’s no good reply to that question because for “could” to have any meaning it must subject God to some aspectual sense of good requiring that sense to be uncreated

In a subsequent exchange, Clouser further explained:

The basic issue is not subjecting God to the laws of creation, including logical laws. Whenever someone asks “Couldn’t God have made things differently” they are asking a Q that can only be answered by subjecting God to what is Logically possible (or physically or morally possible, etc).
It is hard at times not to succumb to the temptation to see prior possibility as a condition for God’s doing something because it’s always a condition for us doing something. We have to remind ourselves that God is the Creator of all the senses of “possibility” as well as the creatures he makes subject to those laws. 

And, yes, murder is wrong because it violates the law of Love.

The usual objection to saying God created the laws of math and logic is the claim that if God created them then He could violate them. So can God really make 2 + 2 = 8? Can God make square circles? If so, can God bring it about that He is infinitely wise but also completely ignorant at the same time? (Plantinga has made this objection in his little book Does God Have A Nature?)

My reply is that saying God created a law doesn’t mean He can break it but that it doesn’t apply to Him at all. Supposing that it’s a necessary truth that nothing can be healthy that doesn’t have sufficient air, light, water and food, do the rocks in my garden violate that law? Surely not. Rather it’s the case that the law does ’t apply to them at all.
So God can’t break the law of non-contradiction because it doesn’t apply to Him and we can’t break it because it does apply to us.

This is why [Herman Dooyeweerd] said to me “Whatever can be proven would thereby not be God,” and it is why there is an unknowable side to God. God’s unknowable side is not unknowable because his perfections are infinite and overwhelm our capacity to grasp fully (the Thomist view), but because we can’t apply logical laws to Him at all.

For reformational philosophy, this understanding springs from the difference between a limiting idea and a conceptual knowledge of God’s self-existence. We can only know God through the former, and not through the latter. For Clouser’s explanation of this distinction, please zoom in to his Reply to Objection No. 3 (from page 24) in his essay on Pancreation Lost: the Fall of Theology.

Now of course today, there are those who dispute the view that the Cappadocian Fathers thought differently than their Western counterparts. But that would require another blogpost.

But check out also this essay by another reformational philosopher, Jeremy Ive, on the same question, from a covenantal theological approach (with insights from reformational philosophy).

Jonathan Chaplin and H. Dooyeweerd’s Theory of the State

Those familiar with the political philosopher  Dr. Jonathan Chaplin’s writings on the theme of the State will note that the key concerns found in his first two major works as a scholar dealing with an important component of the corpus of the late Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd’s body of thought are for the most part echoed in his most recent book – specifically in the chapters that dealt with the various issues implicated in Dooyeweerd’s theory of the state. In fact, these, all taken together, consist of at least a third of the book’s main body of 317 pages.

Indeed, the two main questions raised by Chaplin on Dooyeweerd’s theory of the state are either restated or further clarified in Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society – without doubt, in the words of a noted American scholar of law and religion, “the go-to book on Dooyeweerd for many years to come.”

It is in this book where he foists what is yet his most radical  if not compelling  challenge to the Dooyeweerdian State – his thesis that while the State decidedly has a leading function,  it has no founding function.

I responded  to his critique of Dooyeweerd yesterday during a panel at the opening of the  2nd Kuyper Seminar at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, to which he graciously listened. In part, I said in my paper on The State in International Law: Reformational Insights:

Chaplin argues that if coercion is written into the structural principle, how can it be consistent with its supposed basis in a good creation? Dooyeweerd, he notes, holds that such coercive power has been incorporated into the world order on account of sin; the state thus is an institution of “common” or “preserving grace” established with a soteriological aim of preserving temporal society in its differentiated condition.

Chaplin suggests that there is an incoherence between Dooyeweerd’s notion that pre-fall, the state’s sword function has been incorporated into creational norms from the very beginning and the latter’s contention that the state was instituted post-fall, on account of sin.

Chaplin thinks coercion cannot be consistently built into structural principles since structural principles are conceived as grounded in the original order of creation that was yet unmarred by sin.

This inconsistency could only arise from Dooyeweerd’s misreading of the state’s positive form (the territorial monopoly of coercive power) into its invariant or in his own words, “enduring” structural principle.

So Chaplin asks,  given that the state needs power of many kinds in order to advance public justice, is historical power so evidently more important than the state’s other functions such as the maintenance of territory and the collection of taxes?

He understands that for Dooyeweerd coercive power is indispensable to giving the state its unique identity, to distinguishing it from other institutions in society. But this, according to him, seems a questionable approach, as that it can still be argued that while the state does have a leading function, it does not necessarily imply that this function is “uniquely related to the possession of historical power.”

Still, for Chaplin it is not quite the case that we need to have an historical function to give the state its unique identity. It’s enough that we know it’s purpose is to ensure public justice. After all, while it can be said that the founding function is related to the leading function, but it is also related to other functions of the state; while it is true that coercive power seems to have been a feature of all known states, so has economic or other forms of power. Thus, Chaplin says that Dooyeweerd’s argument that coercive power is unique and so foundational does not compel and the attempt to single out one function as having a privileged link to the leading function seems artificial.  

Thus, he concludes that the state has no founding function.

Following this reformulation, there is a need therefore to transfer the coercive element into the variable side of human positivation. The better account, Chaplin says, is that the state’s coercive power is an historical development developed or positivized in response to sin, but is not part of its typical structure or its inner structural principle.

In this way then, he says, we can look at the state and the UN, or all bodies organized as public legal communities, as having the same typical structure, but with variegated positive forms.

From there it now becomes easy for Chaplin to suggest that based on Dooyeweerd’s notion of the “internal opening process” of societal structures,  the UN can perhaps be identified as an “international ‘state’ at the very early stage;” it is analogous to emerging nation-states prior to their development as an authority over a defined territory enforced by coercion, or an “ ‘immature’ international state” that needs further positivation so as to help realize the “pressing normative historical mission facing humankind in the sphere of public justice.”

This is an advantageous approach, he says, because it is more sensitive to the dynamics of the evolution of structures whose task is to establish public justice and avoids the danger of regarding the nation-state as sacrosanct, historically finalized structure

 The normative peculiarity of the state

…..the apparent contradiction between a good creation and the state’s monopoly of the sword written into its structural principle is Chaplin’s strongest argument for revising Dooyeweerd’s original conception.

Why should the state’s founding function based on a monopoly of coercion be inconsistent with an originally good creation? My argument is that it is good because God has put in place every possible support for human flourishing, whether in their obedience or disobedience. This is a necessary implication of the gift of free will to humanity – the capacity to choose between good and evil.

It also resonates with the idea, at least of human ways of living, of having been endowed with the capacity for good or for evil – the classic Kuyperian sense of the anti-thesis, where each human community or inter-relationship may either be directed towards God or towards some aspect of creation that it has turned into an idol.

Such a capacity cannot but clearly imply a divine anticipation of negative and positive consequences.  In Scripture, when God gave the first humans a choice between the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God also laid down what the consequences were of opting for one or the other (Gen. 2:8; 3:1-4) .

This also implies that God, at the very least, knew what the consequences were of human choosing between life and death. Certainly, God’s sovereignty is severely limited by a view that He only conceived of the state after humanity sinned, as an ex post facto imposition.  It can well be argued that God’s sovereignty has seen it best to institute creational ordinances that would address any possible negative consequences of human choosing.

Hence the state is not a divine afterthought; to say that it was instituted as a response to the fall is only to stress the historical nature of its establishment. This is the better way of understanding or re-reading Dooyeweerd’s suggestion that the state has been incorporated into the world-order after the fall.

A new, post-fall, structural principle did not appear and slide without friction into the original order, as Chaplin suggests. Rather, as a principle set in place to response to a contingency, it was activated when the condition for which it was devised arose.  

His proposal seemingly paints divine sovereignty into a rather awkward picture where having been caught unprepared, God finds himself instituting after the fact of human sin the state with a monopoly of sword power to curtail human capacity for abuse. In this way, Chaplin can argue that Dooyeweerd seems to have suggested a situation where new creational ordinance slide seamlessly into the created order after the fact of the fall, despite his own contention that no new such ordinances can arise in history. 

A sensible alternative to Chaplin’s view is that from before human history, from before creation itself, God had already set in place ordinances that would govern the unfolding of the state in whatever context there maybe, giving allowance for the consequences of human freedom.

The founding function of the state in the form that it has now is consistent with a good creation in the sense that even at the point of creation, a good Creator, knowing all the possible consequences of the gift of free will to humanity, has in his sovereign will, set in place creational ordinances adequate to address such consequences.

In a world without sin – a Christian account of the state can perhaps say that all that the state needs is public trust to sustain itself, as Chaplin himself has suggested in another context.

This is just another way of saying that public trust may well be  the structural principle God has designed for a state unveiled in a pre-fall context. The other side of the coin is that the same divine providence has, at the point of creation, established an ordinance – a structural principle – that would apply in the event of human disobedience. Hence we have two sides of the same coin of creation that, in the beginning, was in fact “very good.”

The simultaneous realization of norms as a task of the state

To recall, Chaplin finds to be questionable Dooyeweerd’s view connecting the leading function specifically to the possession of historical power as the state’s founding function. Indeed he wonders why – given that the state needs power of many kinds in order to advance public justice – historical power is so evidently more important than the state’s other functions such as the maintenance of territory and the collection of taxes.

The question, I believe, can be properly answered by a careful analysis of the Dooyeweerd’s theory of modal aspects, in which in the process of disclosure, anticipatory and retrocipatory aspects interact, where the lower aspects serve as substratum to the higher aspects, and where the higher aspects reach back to deepen the workings of the lower aspects.

In the counter-examples given by Chaplin, from the point of view of disclosure, the maintenance of the territory and the collection of taxes are not even possible without the priority of the state being able to establish itself with the exclusive display of sovereign powers within its territory.

The fundamental and definitive nature of the founding function of the state will require the historical opening up of the substratum supporting it  (retrocipatory aspects) as well as the disclosure of the complex of its superstructure — the anticipatory aspects — that contribute to the disclosure and deepening of the meaning of the state’s task as an institution.

Bob Goudzwaard has underscored this as the task of the state to ensure the “simultaneous realization of norms.” Yet it must be stressed that the simultaneous realization of norms is not possible without the undergirding of the state’s historical power.

The reverse of a positive simultaneous realization of norms is a situation where a state experiences a simultaneous breakdown in key functions as seen in several contemporary examples of the so-called “failed states.”; all too often, this does not happen all at once but is a gradual process that eventually leads to a severe stress to the state in many fronts; It takes a complex of factors –and not just the loss of public trust – for the state to fall apart.

The state’s founding function is at the heart of the state-formation project; it is what grants the state its “normative peculiarity” –to borrow a phrase from political philosopher Matthias Risse – or what distinguishes states from other institutions in society.

Risse argues that this normative peculiarity is characterized by an “immediacy” in the state’s coercive function not otherwise displayed by other institutions in the international legal order.  There are two dimensions in which such immediacy is expressed: in law enforcement and in politics, according to Rise.  The first pertains to the fact that “living in a state means living in an environment where enforcement agencies pervasively have such access, and where it is up to internal political processes to regulate what specific shape such access takes and what constraints it is subject to.”

The second deals with the fact that “ it is the state that provides the environment in which individuals’ basic rights are, or fail to be, realized.”

While international organizations may be interested as well in both questions – in the proper enforcement of rules and in the protection and the promotion of the basic rights of citizens and other entities within a state’s territory– at the most basic level, it is the state that provides both the environment and the structures that make these twin concerns possible:

Legal and political immediacy, then, characterize what is peculiar about the state’s coerciveness. Citizenship is membership in an association for which these two features are distinctive, and those two aspects of the immediacy of the relationship between the states and its citizens provide reasons for associative duties restricted to people who share a citizenship.

Questions of ontology aside, the immediacy of the state’s legal and political structures to citizens within its territory  also undercuts  the practicability of Chaplin’s  argument – a necessary implication of his assertion that the state has no founding function – that we may treat the UN as an  immature “international ‘state’ at the very early stage” that needs further positivization so as to help realize the “pressing normative historical mission facing humankind in the sphere of public justice.”

Quite the contrary, the state is a necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, normatively peculiar institution performing such an historical mission.  Stated another way, the task of public justice still rests primarily on the shoulders of the state.

Indeed, as Skillen has noted a long time ago, human rights “are tied in with the very meaning of justice and injustice in states and thus cannot be protected or enhanced in abstraction from actual state and interstate structures.”  In other words, if the very character of the sovereign state is part of the problem, every effort to advance human rights without changing the function and identity of states will lead to failure.

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Later over dinner at De Latie, we had a most pleasant conversation, discussing in detail our respective interpretations of the problem of the state.  He said my position echoes in some ways Dr. Jim Skillen‘s response to his theory; having listened to my talk on the connection or the lack of it between the state’s coercive powers and creation, he said he could see it’s plausibility and is in fact convinced by it, adding that it may constitute a “third interpretation” because according to him, Dooyeweerd actually said that the state is a post-fall institution established by God through a special ordinance. On the other hand, my view holds that the state’s sword power was a potentiality in the creation ordinance established by God to respond to human contingency.

He also said he might have used the rather infelicitous phrase “immature state” to describe the UN but maintained his critique of Dooyeweerd’s formulation of the state as if it were a final and fixed structural principle. He still doesn’t see why its historical founding function should be a defining element of the state.  I said that Dooyeweerd’s “transcendental empirical” method actually will show that what international law calls “effectiveness” is a well-established historical fact as far as the formation of states is concerned.

We also talked about Dooyeweerd’s reading of Aquinas and according to him, through Robert Sweetman’s work, he became convinced that Dooyeweerd has gotten Aquinas wrong in some ways.  According to him, it appears that Dooyeweerd, while he read Aquinas, was influenced a great deal by commentaries from the 19th century that carried the dualist line identified with  the Spanish Suarez school. Today, he said, there has been a recovery of Aquinas as a more integral thinker, and cited the works of Jean Porter as an important  influence in the rethinking of Thomism as a movement of thought. “Jim Skilen, however, does not agree with me,” he said with a wink, motioning to the direction of Dr. Skillen, who was seated at the next table with an American  friend of mine, Courtney Kane, who is doing her master’s on Dooyeweerd’s philosophy, also at the Vrije Universiteit.

His attitude, according to him, is to work with Thomists on common grounds. “The opposition to the Christian tradition is very strong,” he said. “I’d rather that I get as much help as I can from people who, while I may disagree with them on other points, share the same  moral convictions as I have.” He noted that in the context of where he is right now– the UK– most evangelicals hardly care about intellectual dialogue with other Christian traditions while among Catholics, the intellectuals read Catholic social teaching from standard social democratic lens. “I often have to tell them that they need to look faithfully and closely at the deep resources found in their own tradition.”

Disclosure in the global economic crunch

While we were away, stock markets the world over crashed. And the story is greed getting the best of them writ large. The trouble is, when the high and the mighty are humbled, the rest of the world suffers. It seemed only a matter of time, following the collapse of the American sub-prime mortgage market, for the domino-like effect to finally make its presence felt in the world market. The integration of many economies into a multi-layered world market only made an economic catastrophe so much easier to happen. Now it seems inevitable that we’re headed for a frightening global recession.

Once again, the private is no longer so private. Deregulation in the name of the primordial interest of private capital is exposed as untenable. Thus we see the private becoming a legitimate public interest as well. Or, as the Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd would put it, the private sphere has enkaptic interlacements with the public sphere. The market activities of huge transnational corporations left to their own devices have public ramifications. Governments ought to respect the internal integrity of the market; that is, give it space to function as it should. But it doesn’t mean that governments give everything up in the name of deregulation. In other words, it is not deregulation for its own sake. Some oversight is still needed, to make sure that the market does not overstep public legal bounds.

The current global economic crunch somehow demonstrates that the realms of both the transnational and the international have an integrated public sphere on which private transactions rest. It cannot be otherwise. States and transnational corporations cannot be allowed to run like Hobbesian monads with no other consideration but their own interests. This process of “disclosure” — of the differentiation and integration of the world into a global economy, highlights the fact of such things as the global commons, of public goods that are a concern of everyone in the place, precisely because what happens to them affects everyone else, as well as of an inevitable interdependence that cannot be founded on the interest of only one state.

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Two books just off the press!

The annual book fair came and went with a nary a comment on this page. In fact, I should have, because I have two important reasons for it. But first, a disclosure that in more than one way, I have a personal stake in these two important reasons. In the case of the first, Dr. Jonathan V. Exiomo’s book Interpreting the Text: Towards a Filipino Biblical Hermeneutics from a Ricouerian Perspective, I served as an editor. In the case of the second, Roderick G. Galam’s The Promise of the Nation: Gender, History and Nationalism in Contemporary Ilocano Literature, I was a conspirator in some way (well, when I was an editor of the Philippine Law Journal, I published in the journal in article form what is now a chapter in the book. I was also the author’s sounding board when he was completing the book). Both works break new ground in their respective author’s chosen fields. The first book is published under the auspices of the Alliance Graduate School, the second, of the Ateneo University Press. And both authors are friends of mine. Mr. Galam and I go a long way; we had been friends since our college days and in fact, were residents of that infamous and late lamented Narra Residence Hall at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and fellow members of the now defunct Narra Christian Fellowship (NCF). Dr. Exiomo, president of the Alliance Graduate School, is a fellow founding member of the Alliance Book Club, a small group of like-minded friends who like to discuss ideas and their relevance to the contemporary world.

I promise to post an extended review of the two books soon.