Taylor-Grey Miller

Christian metaphysics advances a surprising thesis about the nature of fundamental reality: the fundamental level of reality is triune (in some sense). Certain Christian traditions maintain that there is a hierarchical structure within the trinity, and recently it has been proposed that such relations should be explicated in terms of the notion of metaphysical ground. This paper is a systematic exploration of the viability of a ground theoretic account of this conception of fundamental reality. We argue for two claims. First, the only adequate ground theoretic accounts must involve laws of ground and must take them to play distinctive explanatory roles. Second, taking the laws of ground to play these distinctive explanatory roles raises a dilemma: either fundamental reality isn't triune in the way demanded by the Christian account or it makes poor predictions about the modal status of certain facts about the laws of ground.

I present a variety of ways that being deputized to speak on someone’s behalf can produce interesting kinds of illocutionary harm. In particular, I show that being deputized to speak for others can lead to important kinds of inability to speak for oneself (in ways not easily remediated). I then argue that this harm is exacerbated in the case of being deputized to speak on God’s behalf. From an Abrahamic religious perspective, there is a very real threat that so long as the matter about which one speaks is of interest to God, one will not have the ability to guarantee that one fails to thereby speak on God’s behalf. With these results in hand, I draw a modest upshot for the divine hiddenness debate. Certain patterns of divine manifestation which would produce non-resistant non-believers are bound up in interesting ways with divine deputizations. Thus, we have a readily recognizable human good at stake in such manifestations: the ability to speak merely for ourselves.

The point of this paper is to take up a philosophical examination of the Latter-day Saint theological conception of the eternal significance of sex. This project is urgent for the Latter-day Saint because the natural and straightforward way of interpreting their theological claims about the eternal significance of sex appear to be incoherent, as I will show. The main worry for the straightforward treatment of these claims has to do with certain commitments Latter-day Saints take up with respect to the nature of disembodied spirits. Disembodied spirits don’t have bodies. As such the lack the characteristic features of embodied things. And sex is as bodily a feature as any we confront in the course of our lives. I will argue that these conceptual obstacles can be overcome by attending to distinctive aspects of the Latter-day Saint conception of divine creation. Doing so offers an interesting alternative way of conceptualizing the essences of premortal (disembodied) spirits. In particular, it motivates explicating their essences in terms of what Plantinga calls world-indexed properties. With the explication in hand, I show that not only are charges of incoherence avoided, but the new perspective gives a unified account of a variety of apparently disparate and obscure (yet scripturally central) aspects of Latter-day Saint theology

The unity thesis says that epistemic norms and zetetic norms (norms of inquiry) comprise a unified normative domain. We argue against the unity thesis by presenting cases where zetetic norms issue requirements to adopt doxastic attitudes (essential to the inquiry) which are forbidden by nearly platitudinous epistemic norms. We canvas a range of responses unity theorists might offer to resist our conclusion and argue that they either do not dissolve the conflict between the epistemic and zetetic norms or introduce unmotivated restrictions on the space of permissible inquiries.

We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God’s soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day saint theology has the resources to endorse a strong soul-making non-identity theodicy. We then introduce two complications for this account rooted in the problem of horrendous evils. First, horrendous evils threaten to undermine our confidence that God is good to each created person within the context of their life. And second, horrendous evils raise concerns about the value of persons whose existence depends on the occurrence of those evils. We may wonder whether those whose existence depends on the occurrence of horrendous evils are valuable enough to motivate God’s allowance of those evils. We show that by attending to important structural features of a post-mortem, pre-eschatological state called the spirit world, Latter-day Saints can ameliorate these concerns about horrendous evils

Essentialist facts, facts about what is essential to what, are explanatorily distinctive. They can often be appealed to in the course of metaphysically explaining some fact, while themselves serving as explanatory ends. In other words, when one arrives in the course of an explanation at an essentialist fact, it often seems like a legitimate place to stop. In certain contexts, they seem to provide a metaphysical backstop to making further explanatory demands. This paper defends the view that essentialist facts are zero-grounded. Just as we can think of certain logical truths as truths derivable from the empty set of premises, we can think of the zero-grounded facts as the facts that obtain in virtue of the empty set of facts. On this picture, the essentialist facts are grounded, but they are grounded literally in nothing—grounded for free, automatically, and by default. This view has been unpopular for many reasons, including concerns about the obscurity of the notion of zero-grounding. Concerns notwithstanding, I make the case that the zero-grounding view fares better than the alternative ground-theoretic accounts in making sense of certain explanatory roles essences plausibly play. After some preliminary remarks on how we should understand what an essentialist fact is as well as which ones serve as explanation stoppers, I introduce a widespread and attractive picture of what the essentialist facts are; they are domain fixing facts. I then argue that this feature of the essentialist facts well-positions them to serve as explanation stoppers. Afterwards, I argue that the zero-ground view best accommodates the domain-fixing conception of essence.

According to many contemporary metaphysicians, we ought to theorize in terms of grounding because of its promise to explicate the idea of reality having a layered structure. However, a tension emerges when one combines the layered structure view with the view that higher-level facts are not reducible to lower-level facts. This tension emerges from two problems. The first problem arises from the fact that grounding explanations entail true universal generalizations. In order to satisfy this constraint, we will face serious pressure to make sure the entities involved in the grounded facts are appropriately connected to the entities involved in the grounding facts, otherwise the generalizations associated with those grounding claims will come out false. However, ensuring the appropriate connections seemingly leaves no way for the non-reductivist to fully squeeze out reference to higher-level entities as we descend the levels of ground. This threatens the result that some higher-level facts must be taken as fundamental, which the non-reductivist cannot accept. I argue that we can resolve the tension by taking the connections at issue to be essentially true. We can call this view essentialist non-reductivism. One significant upshot of the argument is that we can see not only that essentialist non-reductivism successfully resolves the tension, but that in principle no better solution could be offered.

Fine has introduced an important distinction between constitutive and consequential essence. The constitutive essence of an object comprises truths directly definitive of the object whereas the consequential essence comprises the class of truths following logically from the directly definitive truths (subject to certain constraints). Essence theorists then face a challenge: how shall we draw the line between the truths directly definitive of an object and those that are mere consequences of them? Fine offers an answer. We start with the object’s consequential essence and then filter out from its consequential essence the propositions that are there on account of being partly grounded in others. The object’s constitutive essence comprises what’s left. I argue against this account by presenting a range of cases where it is clear that certain truths ought to count as constitutively essential for certain objects but where Fine’s account rules them out.

In her paper, “True Faith: Against Doxastic Partiality about Faith (in God and Religious Communities) and in Defense of Evidentialism,” Katherine Dormandy argues against the view that there is a partiality norm on faith. Dormandy establishes this by showing that partiality views can’t give the right responses to encounters with stubborn counter evidence. Either they (anti-epistemic-partiality views) recommend flouting the evidence altogether in order hold on to positive beliefs about the object of faith or they (epistemic-partiality views) lower the epistemic standards in objectionable ways to alleviate the epistemic pressure imposed by the counterevidence. However, one cannot have praiseworthy faith when one refuses to really grapple with the evidence against the goodness of the faith’s object. So, partiality norms, far from constituting what makes for great faith, importantly stand in its way. Thus, we should reject any partiality norms on faith. We argue that cases of praiseworthy faith involve dispositions to confront the object of faith when presented with stubborn counter evidence against their goodness. Recognizing this enables us to endorse a partiality norm while avoiding Dormandy’s worries. We argue that dispositions to confront the object of faith presuppose positive beliefs about it, thus vindicating partiality. We further argue that the confrontation makes an epistemic demand of the object of faith: produce high confidence in whether it is still worth having faith in, thus carving out a central role for evidentialist norms.

There is a puzzle about divine justice stemming from the fact that God seems required to judge on the basis of criteria that are vague. Justice is proportional, however, it seems God violates proportionality by sending those on the borderline of heaven to an eternity in hell. This is Ted Sider’s problem of Hell and Vagueness. On the face of things, this poses a challenge only to a narrow class of classical Christians, those that hold a retributive theory of divine punishment. We show that this puzzle can be extended to the picture of divine judgement and the afterlife found in Mormon theology. This is significant because at first glance, the Mormon picture of the afterlife looks like it fails to co-operate with Sider’s puzzle. In Mormon theology, there are not two afterlife states, but three: a low, a middle, and a high kingdom. There is no afterlife state quite like Hell, and the states that function similarly to Hell aren’t places of eternal suffering. We argue that appearances are misleading. While it may be true that no place in the Mormon afterlife is bad in the sense that its inhabitants suffer eternal bodily harm, it is true that many of the places in the Mormon afterlife are bad in the sense that their inhabitants lack access to significant goods. This allows Sider’s puzzle to re-engage as a puzzle about distributive Justice. After setting out this alternative version of the puzzle, we argue that Mormon theology has sufficient resources to reject proportionality as a constraint on divine judgment by adopting a nuanced version of universalism called escapism.