Frances Howard-Snyder

Imagine that there exists a good, essentially omniscient and omnipotent being named Jove, and that there exists nothing else. No possible being is more powerful or knowledgable. Out of his goodness, Jove decides to create. Since he is all-powerful, there is nothing but the bounds of possibility to prevent him from getting what he wants. Unfortunately, as he holds before his mind the host of worlds, Jove sees that for each there is a better one. Although he can create any of them, he can't create the best of them because there is no best. Faced with this predicament, Jove first sorts the worlds according to certain criteria. For example, he puts on his left worlds in which some inhabitants live lives that aren't worth living and on his right worlds in which every inhabitant's life is worth living; he puts on his left worlds in which some horrors fail to serve an outweighing good and on his right worlds in which no horror fails to serve an outweighing good. (We encourage the reader to use her own criteria.) Then he orders the right hand worlds according to their goodness and assigns to each a positive natural number, the worst of the lot receiving '1', the second worst '2', and so on. Next, he creates a very intricate device that, at the push of a button, will randomly select a number and produce the corresponding world. Jove pushes the button; the device hums and whirs and, finally, its digital display reads '777': world no. 777 comes into being.

Martin Peterson argues for two interesting and appealing claims: multi-dimensionalism and degrees of rightness. Multi-dimensionalism is the view that more than one factor determines whether an act is right. According to Peterson’s multi-dimensionalism, these factors are not simply ways of achieving some greater aggregate good. Degrees of rightness is the view that some actions are more wrong or less right than others without being entirely wrong. It is of course, compatible with this, that some actions are right or wrong to a maximal degree, or entirely right or wrong. Multi-dimensionalism and degrees are taken to be intertwined. On Peterson’s view, if there were only one dimension, we wouldn’t need degrees; where only one dimension applies, an act is entirely right or entirely wrong. Peterson claims that degrees of rightness or wrongness arise only because there are multi-dimensions, and that an act cannot be entirely right if it is wrong on some dimension. I shall argue against both of these claims

Satisficing and maximizing versions of consequentialism have both assumed that rightness is an alI-or-nothing property. We argue thal this is inimical to the spirit of consequentialism, and that, from the point of view of the consequentialist, actions should be evaluated purely in terms that admit of degree. We first consider the suggestion that rightness and wrongness are a matter of degree. If so, this raises the question of whether the claim that something is wrong says any more than that it is bad. We consider the possibility that a consequenlialist should simply equate wrongness with badness. We reject this on the grounds that there is not a satsifactory way for a consequentialist to account for the badness of actions, as opposed to states of affairs. We explore two concepts of wrongness: to do something wrong is to be blameworthy; and the fact that something is wrong creates a reason not to do it. We argue that the first of these is not available to the consequentialist because of her views on blame, and that the second is just as much a feature of badness as of wrongness. We conclude that the consequentialist can make no sense of the concept of wrongness.

This volume collects nine essays published by Peter van Inwagen between 1977 and 1995. Part I features, among other things, modal skepticism with respect to ontological arguments and arguments from evil. Part II addresses certain tensions Christians may feel between modern biology, critical studies of the New Testament, and the comparative study of religions, on the one hand, and Christian orthodoxy, on the other. Part III deploys a formal logic of relative identity to model the internal consistency of the orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. In what follows, we summarize and reflect on five essays.

Objective consequentialism is often criticized because it is impossible to know which of our actions will have the best consequences. Why exactly does this undermine objective consequentialism? I offer a new link between the claim that our knowledge of the future is limited and the rejection of objective consequentialism: that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ and we cannot produce the best consequences available to us. I support this apparently paradoxical contention by way of an analogy. I cannot beat Karpov at chess in spite of the fact that I can make each of many series of moves, at least one of which would beat him. I then respond to a series of objections. In the process I develop an account of the ‘can’ of ability. I conclude with some remarks about the bearing this attack has on subjective consequentialism

This paper discusses the Principle of Normative Invariance: ‘An action’s moral status does not depend on whether or not it is performed.’ I show the importance of this principle for arguments regarding actualism and other variations on the person-affecting restriction, discuss and rebut arguments in favor of the principle, and then discuss five counterexamples to it. I conclude that the principle as it stands is false; and that if it is modified to avoid the counterexamples, it is gutted of any interest or power.