Julien Beillard

Over the last decade, Guy Kahane and others have argued for Narrow Personal Anti-Theism (NPA): Some world where God does not exist is significantly better for some people, in some respects, than any world where God exists. Their arguments depend on the assumption that the values of states such as privacy are invariant across worlds. Against this assumption, I claim that the ontological status of God partly determines the values of these states: There are worlds where we have a valuable kind of privacy, because God does not exist, and worlds where our privacy is not (equally) valuable, because God exists. I propose a kind of anti-theism appealing to values of values—the value of privacy being valuable, for example. Paradoxically, this kind of anti-theism may be coherent only if God exists: The omniscience of God may be necessary for anti-theism to be a value judgment.

The principle of human moral equality is poorly understood. I criticize standard accounts and propose a mildly subversive alternative based in a certain view of the phenomenology of conceptual thought. First, a formulation of the principle: (E) Every person has a basic moral worth equal to that of any other. E is vague, as it should be. It is neutral regarding rival theories of the nature of the equalizing property or its value, or how we recognize either. But I impose two constraints on the principle that seem to reflect a universal consensus among its proponents: E asserts a kind of worth (or status or value) that (i) is indifferent to ordinary moral judgments of character, merit, or desert and (ii) forbids political arrangements we intuitively judge to be at odds with the spirit of basic equality. The first constraint protects against absurdity or nihilism, the second against vacuity.

In his 2009 paper Conceptual Schemes Revisited, Timothy Nulty argues that Davidson’s philosophy affords an argument for metaphysical pluralism, the theory that there are many actual worlds. In my (2010) reply, I charge that the argument depends on an unacceptable conflation of worlds and world-views: at most, we may infer from some of Davidson’s views that inhabitants of a shared world may conceive of it in radically different ways. In his most recent (2015) discussion of these issues, Nulty offers a fuller version of his argument for the conclusion that (if Davidson is right) their worlds might differ, and not merely their world-views, resting on the formerly suppressed premise that “to be is to be a possible intentional object”. He reckons that, if thinkers triangulate in very different ways, the intentional objects possible for one thinker or group may not be possible for some others; it may then follow that their worlds are different too. Against this fuller version of the argument, I here present two objections: first, Nulty’s ontological principle is incompatible with all kinds of causal truths about different kinds of actual thinkers; second, if it were true, we could not coherently explain the kind of situation that Nulty and I both take to generate interesting differences in world-view.

Nulty proposes a Davidsonian argument for metaphysical pluralism, the thesis that there are many actual worlds, which appeals to the possibility of alien forms of triangulation. I dispute Nulty’s reading of Davidson on two important points: Davidson’s attack on the notion of a conceptual scheme is not, as Nulty thinks, directed at pluralism, and his understanding of the notions of objective truth and reality is at odds with the conception needed for Nulty’s argument. I also show that the pluralist argument fails on its own terms as it requires an assimilation of worlds to worldviews. But there is much of value in Nulty’s paper despite these important flaws. When the confusions are cleared up, we are left with an intriguing and novel line of argument for conceptual relativism.