Richard Swinburne

This chapter distinguishes various kinds of moral goodness. Actions may be objectively good and/or subjectively good; and they may be supererogatory or obligatory. Actions may be objectively or subjectively bad, and wrong or merely infrarvetatory. There is goodness either in good actions being done naturally, or in their being done contrary to inclination. There are three kinds of goodness of character: agents may be naturally inclined to do actions that are in fact good, they may have correct moral beliefs, and they may be naturally inclined to do actions that they believe to be good.

This chapter is concerned with the fates in the afterlife that a good God would allocate to different humans. The totally corrupt have freely chosen to become so, and it would be an unwarranted imposition for God to give them any other character; hence, if God keeps them alive, their happiness can consist only in low‐level enjoyment. God will give to the sanctified the Beatific Vision of himself; and good pagans are to be included in this group. God may award intermediate fates to those with characters not fully formed.

In doing a wrong action, an agent acquires guilt, subjective, or objective; guilt is to be distinguished from shame. A wrongdoer must deal with his guilt by making atonement—i.e. by repentance and apology to the victim, and by making reparation and penance. It is good for the victim to forgive a wrongdoer who has made some atonement, and that removes his guilt; but if the victim refuses to forgive despite substantial atonement, the wrongdoer's guilt disappears anyway. We have some responsibility to help others of our community to deal with their guilt—by encouraging them to apologize, and by helping them to make reparation—but we are not guilty for the wrong acts of anyone else.

Desires are natural inclinations, hard to change, to do certain actions or allow certain events to occur. Enjoyment consists in the believed satisfaction of present desire. We always act on our strongest desires, unless we have good reason for not doing so and then we have to choose between reason and desire. Weakness of will consists in yielding to desire when reason suggests that we should not do so. Modification of desire is distinguished from forming an intention for the future, which in turn is distinguished from having an intention in one's present actions.

The chapter begins by summarizing how the structure of an argument from the fine-tuning of a single universe to the existence of God can be expressed in terms of Bayes’ theorem. There could however be scientific evidence in favour of the existence of a multiverse. Insofar as the theory of such a multiverse is simpler than that of a single universe, and that theory makes good predictions, it would make it more probable that there will be a fine-tuned universe, and so — it might seem — would diminish the force of an argument from fine-tuning to God. But it would not diminish it greatly, because God has reason to create such a multiverse, and the supposition that he has done so is a very simple explanation of the existence of such a multiverse, whereas the existence of an uncaused multiverse would be a very complex supposition.

This paper consists of my responses to the comments by nine commentators on my book Are we Bodies or Souls? It makes twelve separate points, each one relevant to the comments of one or more of the commentators, as follows: I defend my understanding of “knowing the essence” of an object as knowing a set of logically necessary and sufficient conditions for an object to be that object; I claim that there cannot be thoughts without a thinker; I argue that my distinction of “mental” from “physical” events in terms of whether anyone has privileged access to whether or not they occur, is a clear one; and I defend my account of metaphysical modality and its role in defending my account of personal identity; I defend my view that Descartes’s argument in favor of the view that humans are essentially souls fails, but that my amended version of that argument succeeds; I claim that my theory acknowledges the closeness of the connection in an earthly life between a human soul and its body; I argue that my Cartesian theory of the soul-body relation is preferable to Aquinas’s theory of that; I argue that a material thing cannot have mental properties; I argue that any set of logically necessary conditions for an object to be the object it is, which together form a logically sufficient condition for this, mutually entails any other such set; I deny that a dualist needs to provide an explanation of how the soul has the capacities that it has; and finally I defend my view that souls have thisness, and claim that that is not a difficulty for the view that God determines which persons will exist.