Abstract: While there is significant variation in the theist’s description of God, there are nonetheless a set of attributes upon which there is general (but certainly not universal) agreement. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and is capable of interacting in the lives of humans. My purpose in this paper is to provide an account of God’s relation to time given an assumption of these three divine attributes. I will show that the task is unsuccessful for an eternal God (one that exists outside of time), and succeeds in a modified version of an everlasting God that exists with an open future.

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To the believing theist, God has many attributes. Most will agree (although with considerable variation in the details) that God is omnipotent (it is in his power to do anything that can be done) and God is omniscient (he knows everything that can be known). Additionally, many believe that God is a being that acts in the lives of humans. He is not an impassive observer, but rather an active agent who listens to prayer and doles out reward and punishment. Despite God’s considerable strengths, many believe that he is nonetheless limited by human free will. God has given humans the freedom to determine their actions, and therefore for free decisions he cannot cause humans to act in one manner rather than another. These properties of God and man, although all certainly debatable, I will assume as true. This assumption is acceptable in that I believe it is a set that is held by many believers in God.

Given these assumptions, I wish to consider how to formulate a consistent theory of the relationship between God and time. Throughout the history of philosophy, various theories have developed. One school of thought, espoused by thinkers such as Boethius, Augustine and Aquinas argues that God must be eternal. A being that is eternal exists apart from or outside of time. I will begin the paper with a description of the motivation for defining God in this perhaps unnatural manner. Many contemporary philosophers have argued against an eternal God in favor of one that is everlasting – one that is within time, but without beginning or end. I will consider the implications of both conceptions, and ultimately argue for a strain of the everlasting theory as the only consistent theory of God’s relationship to time that allows for all of the divine attributes described above.

The Problem of God’s Omniscience and Human Free Will

For my entire existence, I cannot escape the effects of time. All around me I am struck by the products of temporality – what once was the future soon passes into the present and then rapidly becomes the past. While I have control over my place in space, I am helpless in my passage through time. Indeed, I struggle to imagine myself or anything else existing in a world without time. Therefore, it might seem at first natural to conclude that God too exists in a world defined by the rules of time, and is therefore everlasting.

Nelson Pike argues that if God is everlasting and he is omniscient (as was assumed for this paper), then human free will is impossible.¹ He provides the following example:

“Last Saturday afternoon, Jones mowed his lawn. Assuming that God exists and is (essentially) omniscient, it follows that (let us say) eighty years prior to last Saturday afternoon, God knew (and thus believed) that Jones would mow his lawn at that time. But from this it follows, I think, that at the time of action (last Saturday afternoon) Jones was not able – that is, it was not within Jones’s power – to refrain from mowing his lawn.”²

Before I analyze this example, first I will provide some comments on Pike’s definitions of divine omniscience and human freedom. As stated in the introduction, omniscience is the ability to know anything that can be known. For Pike, God’s knowledge includes complete true belief regarding events of the past, present, and future. He states this in two premises. First: “God existed at t₁” entails “If Jones did X at t₂, God believed at t₁ that Jones would do X at t₂.” Second: “God believes X” entails “‘X’ is true”.

Pike’s notion of human freedom is one of complete spontaneity of action. For all of my conscious actions that I take, I could choose to act differently. I always have the ability or power to do other than that which I actually do. Certainly, many of my behaviors are highly predictable, but nonetheless there is no fundamental restriction (such as God’s omniscience) that prevents me from doing otherwise. I am inclined to agree with this definition, and will argue in favor of it against an alternative later in this section.

Give these two definitions, the contradiction in Pike’s example is readily apparent. God knows eighty years ago that Jones will mow his lawn on Saturday. However, Jones has the freedom to not mow the lawn on Saturday. If he exercises this freedom then God was wrong eighty years ago. This contradicts God’s omniscience as stated above because God’s belief in Jones mowing his lawn on Saturday entails the truth of the proposition. Jones could not have chosen to do other than to mow the lawn on Saturday because God is everlasting (he existed without beginning) and so always believed that Jones would mow the lawn on Saturday. The same limitation on free will would develop if God believed eighty years ago that Jones does not mow the lawn on Saturday, in which case it would not be within Jones’ power to mow the lawn on Saturday.

It can be objected that it was not God’s knowledge that caused (and forced) Jones to mow the lawn, but rather it was Jones’ mowing of the lawn that caused God to know. In other words, God’s knowledge is contingent on Jones’ free will decision. However, this account is unacceptable given the assumption of an everlasting God. This God exists with the rest of the world in the present and progresses with it from the past to the present to the future. For this account to succeed, Jones’ actions in the present must determine beliefs in the past. Pike writes that this is an a priori impossibility – no action performed at a given time can alter the fact that a given person held a certain belief at a time prior to the time in question. Such an occurrence would be an example of retrocausation, and Alan Padgett gives a more thorough argument of why it is impossible, as it results in an arbitrariness of time and a breakdown of the definitions of the past, present and future.³

To resolve the contradiction, we might therefore reconsider the three assumed propositions: humans are free, God is omniscient, and God is everlasting. First, perhaps Pike’s definition of free will is too broad. As stated earlier, many of the decisions one makes are highly predictable. Research in psychology and neuroscience has enabled us to predict many human actions and explain many seemingly free, conscious decisions in terms of subconscious inclinations. Given the success of limited human knowledge to predict with high accuracy many free decisions, certainly God in his complete knowledge can predict with complete accuracy all free will decisions. Free will then is not the ability to act with complete indifference in a given situation, but rather the ability to act according to one’s predominant desire in a given situation.

However, this is not at all in line with the intuitive feel of free will. It is true that human behavior is highly predictable, but this is because of expected goals for human actions, such as survival or positive social interaction. If I choose not to adhere to these goals and take up others, my choice of actions may change entirely. It is entirely within my ability to alter these goals, and furthermore entirely within my ability to alter my actions. Pike’s description of free will survives the objection.

Let us consider his definition of omniscience. This too seems to hold because God ought to have full knowledge of all events. This knowledge would be infringed if it is possible for God to hold false beliefs (false beliefs are by definition not knowledge). The main difficulty arises regarding God’s knowledge of the human future. Later in the paper I will revisit this point, and argue that it is a premise that the future is unknowable that ultimately resolves the contradiction. More must be developed before that conclusion can be reached.

Finally, could it be that God is not temporal in nature? If God is not within time, then perhaps we can escape the difficulty of an action in the present determining a belief in the past by removing the belief from the past entirely. This is the direction taken by many classical philosophers, and will be further considered in the next section.

Boethius, Augustine and an Eternal God

Boethius argues that God must be eternal, where eternality is “the complete possession of an endless life enjoyed as one simultaneous whole.”⁴ God is removed from the passage of time, and therefore observes all events occurring in an “eternal Now”. In this sense, God lives all moments simultaneously, and thereby transcends the temporal life, which is nothing more than a fleeting, transitory moment: “whatever is living in time proceeds in the present from times past to times future; and nothing existing in time is so constituted as to embrace the whole span of its life at once, but it has not yet grasped tomorrow, while it has already lost yesterday.”

Augustine similarly argues that God must be eternal, that a God that is everlasting is limited in his divine fullness. He writes of God:

“Thy years neither go nor come; but ours both go and come in order that all separate moments may come to pass. All thy years stand together as one, since they are abiding. Nor do thy years past exclude the years to come because thy years do not pass away. All these years of ours shall be with thee, when all of them shall have ceased to be. Thy years are but a day, and thy day is not recurrent, but always today. Thy “today” yields not to tomorrow and does not follow yesterday. Thy “today” is eternity.”⁵

An eternal God solves Pike’s problem of omniscience and free will. No longer does God know in the past what I will choose to do in the future. Rather, God knows both simultaneously and so there is no case of backwards causation. This simultaneity renders it impossible for me to ‘change my mind’ after God has formed a belief on my action, because the belief and action occur as one from the perspective of God. Boethius writes, “God is the ever prescient spectator of all things, and the eternity of His vision, which is ever present, runs in unison with the future nature of our acts, dispensing rewards to the good, punishments to the evil.”⁶

While the Boethian eternal God solves one problem, it creates another. How exactly does an eternal God view the events that occur in my temporal life and the temporal life of the universe? For Boethius, the answer is that all parts of the life of the universe are grasped simultaneously. This, I believe, is problematic. An essential part of knowledge of the universe is the ability to grasp the order in which events occur. To understand an object is to know what caused it – to understand what came before the object that led to its existence. A viewpoint of the world that presents cause and effect simultaneously eliminates this important element of knowledge, and this would be an odd limitation on God’s omniscience. If an eternal God is to be viable, the description must be changed, or at least refined. To do this, I will use J. Ellis McTaggart’s two conceptions of time.

McTaggart and the B-Series Conception of Divine Eternality

McTaggart writes that there are two ways in which we distinguish between positions in time.⁷ The first class describes events as past, present or future (where events are equivalent to positions in time). This class is called the A-series and describes time as “the series of positions running from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present to the near future and the far future”. The B-series, on the other hand, is the description of events as occurring earlier than, simultaneous with, or later than other events. Distinctions in the B-series are permanent because an event that is earlier than another event will always be earlier, and an event that is later than another event will always be later. Distinctions in the A-series are never permanent because all events are at one time the past, at another time the present, and at another time the future.

McTaggart argues that real time requires an A-series ordering.⁸ Real time requires change, and even when things do not change they are only perceived in relation to other things that are changing. Because the B-series of events is permanent and thus unchanging it is insufficient to explain time, and so time as change necessitates an A-series. That which is temporal has an A-series ordering of time. An eternal God, however, is atemporal and thus could not be part of an A-series conception of time. This agrees with the Boethian view that God does not perceive events occurring in the past, present and future. The B-series, because it does not involve change, is insufficient for an account of time, and can therefore be attributed to an eternal God.⁹ In doing so, the objection to Boethius presented above can be resolved.

An eternal God who perceives a B-series but not an A-series does not experience events occurring as tensed events in the past, present and future. Rather, events are perceived in a static ordering, observed all at once. While the A-series elevates the present because it is the only point of direct experience (while the past and future are perceived only through memory and prediction, respectively), the B-series views all events equally without a temporal reference point. Events in a B-series nonetheless have a definite order and so, as McTaggart observes, if events are in the order M, N, O, P then they are not in the order M, O, N, P or O, N, M, P or any other possible order.

Given that God observes events in a B-series, it must be refined what is meant when it is said that he observes all events simultaneously. In one sense, it is simultaneous because God can see all of the events at once, just as I see at once all the books lined up on a bookshelf. However, and more importantly, the events are not simultaneous (stretching somewhat the definition of simultaneity) because the events have a defined order. There is a definite order to the books lined up on a shelf. This account allows an eternal God to view the causal chain between events because he views them in their temporal order, but not occurring in their temporal order. In doing so, God’s omniscience is not limited as it was in the Boethian theory. Furthermore, human freedom is still maintained because God views the entire bookshelf of events at once, and included on this shelf are books of choices on human freedom. Omniscience, free will and eternality are reconciled.

The Problem of God’s Eternality and Divine Action

I stated at the outset of this paper that my goal was to provide a consistent account of human free will with divine omniscience and divine action. To this point I have done this with the first two, but can divine action be included in this account of an eternal God? By divine action, I mean a God who serves as an agent of change in the lives of humans. This conception of God explains the primary function of prayer. One prays to God because he believes that God is capable of hearing his prayer and, based on the act of prayer, God will take action. There is not a guarantee of divine action based on prayer, but there is certainly a belief that prayer encourages divine action.

I will consider two examples of divine action. These events need not have actually occurred, only that they might possibly have occurred. First, Moses prays to God as he is leading the Israelites out of Egypt. God hears Moses’ prayer and acts in the form of parting the Red Sea and the Israelites cross to safety. Second, a boy afflicted with cancer prays a month ago to be cured. God hears the boy’s prayer, acts to ensure a successful chemotherapy treatment, and a week later it is found that the cancer is in remission.

Let us assume that for both examples God’s action was what I will call a true divine action, which has two characteristics. First, in a true divine action God does not act unless he receives the proper prayer. If Moses had not prayed to God, then God would not have parted the Red Sea. Second, a true divine action is one in which the actual outcome would not have occurred if God had not acted. If God had not intervened in the chemotherapy treatment, then the boy would not have been cured.

From a human perspective, there is a definite temporal ordering of the two events. Moses’ prayer occurred thousands of years before the boy’s prayer. God’s action in response to Moses’ prayer likewise occurred thousands of years before God’s action in response to the boy’s prayer. Does this require God’s action, from the divine perspective, to be temporal as well?

The working description of God is a being that is eternal but views the events of the world in a B-series ordering as though looking at the books arranged on a bookshelf. One such book is Moses praying to God, followed by a book on God parting the Red Sea. Another book further along the shelf is a book on the boy praying to be cured, followed by a book on the successful chemotherapy treatment. However, the acts of prayer were free will decisions by Moses and the boy. Certainly, it was in their interest to pray given the dire circumstances they faced, but it was entirely within their power to opt not to pray if they so chose. To deny this is to deny their meaningful freedom as defined earlier. Additionally, because God’s actions in the two examples were true divine actions, God acted only because the two people prayed.

Because the actions of Moses and the boy were free will actions, God could not have acted until they prayed. His action was contingent on the act of prayer. In other words, God had to wait until Moses prayed before he chose to part the Red Sea. God’s decision could not have been predetermined because he would not have chosen to part the sea if Moses had not chosen freely to pray. But the act of waiting requires temporality because one action cannot occur until a time following another action. Therefore, God’s action in answering prayer is necessarily temporal.

Nicholas Wolterstorff argues this same point in a slightly different fashion.¹⁰ In order to act in the temporal world, God must have a certain kind of knowledge that goes beyond that which would be afforded from a B-series ordering of time. God must be able to know of some temporal events that they are occurring (that they are present), of other temporal events that they were occurring (that they are past), and of still other temporal events that they will be occurring (that they are future). The B-series ordering gives God knowledge only of the order in which events occur, but no knowledge of tenses – those events that have occurred, are occurring, or will occur. A God that acts according to free will decisions learns what happens when they happen, and thus must act according to knowledge of the time in which events occur. In order to allow for divine action, God must exist in an A-series ordering (one that includes tenses of past, present and future) in addition to a B-series ordering. As a result, God cannot be eternal.

God Acting According to Divine Action Conditionals

It can be objected that it is not the case that God waits for humans to make free decisions, and only then does he determine the proper divine action. God, given his omniscience, can surely grasp the full range of all possible free will decisions in all possible situations. Therefore, perhaps God has established a set of conditionals defining his actions given all free decisions. For example, when the wheels of the universe and time were put in motion, God established the conditional “If Moses prays to me while fleeing from the Egyptians, then I will part the Red Sea”. Additionally, he established the conditional “If Moses does not pray to me while fleeing from the Egyptians, then I will not part the Red Sea”.

Given these conditionals, God no longer needs to locate the moment in time when Moses chooses freely to pray for the Red Sea to be parted. He does not wait for prayer and then chooses to act, but rather there is a rule that is automatically applied if a sufficient condition is met. God can remain outside of time as he inspects the many books of time (which now includes some of his actions), but he is still capable of answering prayers in the sense that prayers bring about divine response, while the absence of prayer brings about an absence of response.

I believe that this conception would limit God in a critical way, and for this reason is not acceptable. Throughout this paper, I have assumed that humans posses free will. When presented with a conscious decision, it is within human power to choose the response. The decision is not predetermined and there is never a necessary result given a set of conditions. If humans possess this amount of freedom, surely God should possess it as well. But if he acts according to conditionals, then his actions are predetermined – it is not within his power to act other than how a conditional dictates. It is true that God himself determined the conditionals, and is free in the sense that he determined the rules of his actions. However, I find the existence of rules at all to be fundamentally limiting, and therefore result in a type of freedom less than that of human freedom. Accordingly, the objection fails and we are left with the problem that a God that exhibits divine action cannot be eternal and must be temporal.

Open Theism and a Revised Conception of an Everlasting God

I wrote earlier in the paper that I would consider a possible revision on God’s omniscience to reconcile divine omniscience and free will. Given that the attempt to revise God’s relationship to time (by making him eternal) was unsuccessful, I will now consider this alternate option. In doing so I will preserve the definition of omniscience as knowing everything that can be known, but with a significant limitation on what can be known.

An open theist holds that because the future has not yet occurred, it is entirely open and therefore completely unknowable. In fact, this move is entirely rational. The present as we experience it, and only the present, is completely real, and therefore we can have knowledge of it. The past, because it was once the present, is also real and so we can have knowledge of it as well. The future, however, cannot make this claim to reality. An open future is a future in which no one, including God, can have any knowledge of because there is nothing to be known of that which is not real. Knowledge of the future is akin to knowledge of square circles; both are logical impossibilities that cannot be known. Therefore, a claim that God does not know the future is completely consistent with his omniscience – he knows only that which can be known. Additionally, an open future requires that God be temporal because the future fundamentally differs from the past and present in that the latter two are known completely by God, while God cannot know the former. God can readily distinguish between the past, present and future and so exists in an A-series order of time.

God’s relationship to time for an open theist is better understood by way of analogy, as described by J.R. Lucas¹¹: “Instead of thinking of God’s providence as a sort of blue-print, we should liken it to the Persian rug-maker, who lets his children work at one end while he does the other.” Rather than being predetermined as a blueprint and unknown only to the extent that it cannot be properly read, the future ought to be conceived as an unwoven rug. As the rug is woven the future becomes known as the present and past, in a limited capacity to humans and in its completeness to an everlasting and omniscient God.

An open future also allows for full human free will. Choices are made in the present and determine the future. God does not know what choice I will make until I make it because there is no knowledge of my future. Upon my making a free choice, God, as a temporal being, acts according to what he deems to be proper reward or punishment. Open theism allows for the desired reconciliation of omniscience, free will and divine action.

It might be objected that open theism poses too severe a limitation on God’s omniscience and therefore departs too radically from the general theist’s understanding of omniscience. However, on closer inspection the limitation is not nearly as significant as might first be thought. While God cannot know the future, there are many elements of it that he can be very well justified in believing. For example, given humanity’s finite but extensive scientific knowledge of the past, we have been able to make fantastically accurate predictions about future events. God, as possessor of complete knowledge of the past, will be remarkably better at predicting the future than any human theory. To the extent that physical laws of the past hold in the future, God’s ability to predict the future is limited only by free will decisions, and so his ability to predict the future is quite extensive and successful. A God who possesses complete knowledge of the past is still one that ought to be revered because this knowledge is readily extended into a future that has yet to be realized.

In sum, it should be noted that while I believe I have shown that a temporal description of God under open theism reconciles several commonly held divine attributes, I do not claim that it reconciles all of the commonly held divine attributes. For example, many believe that God is a necessary being. If time is contingent and God is a part of time, then it would seem that God too is contingent. This question will require considerably more exploration, with one possible route being Garrett DeWeese’s argument for God existing necessarily in metaphysical time rather than contingently in physical time.¹² Nonetheless, the task accomplished in this paper is considerable and demonstrates how, in addition to considering the challenges of describing any single divine attribute, it is equally if not more challenging to describe how many attributes can coexist in a single being.

Endnotes

I. Introduction

The debate on the role of neuroscience in the context of the law has crucial repercussions for the notion of legal responsibility. Legal responsibility and moral responsibility are not necessarily analogous; however, there is a strong correlation. Moral responsibility often informs our sense of legal responsibility, but the latter is best understood as a subset of the former. Legal responsibility is less demanding than moral responsibility mainly due to the context of its function: the courtroom. In the courtroom, evidence is the focus of judgments, whereas moral responsibility adjudicates in cases that are purely internal to an agent and transcend evidence. For example, when dealing with virtuous actions, a person probably upholds their legal responsibility when she works in a soup kitchen to feed those in need. If she would be doing so, only for personal benefit (e.g. to look virtuous or solely for economic gain) we would mostly only judge this act deplorable on moral grounds. Conversely, if a person shoots and kills another person, both legally and morally we are interested in the internal workings of the agent. Exculpatory factors derived from impairment of mental faculties, specifically in the legal domain, suggest that committing an act alone is not adequate for justifying the attribution of guilt and responsibility. These are some common conceptions of legal and moral responsibility, many of which rely on some conception of an intentional moral agent that has a will. In this paper, I first examine the text of Greene & Cohen and their conclusion that a shift to a consequentialist justification of punishment follows from a new understanding gained by neuroscience. After criticising their conclusion, I look at an article by Joel Feinberg where he outlines the differences between legal and moral responsibility. This will prepare the ground for considering Levy & Bayne as well as Ryan & Deci who argue that the will is an essential part of our understanding of responsibility and self-determination respectively. Finally, I consider Levy & Bayne’s characterological account and the plausibility it gains in direct balance to the implausibility of Greene & Cohen’s conclusion.

Greene & Cohen describe the dialectic that neuroscience encroaches on in the field of philosophy of law. There are two recourses, (1) discoveries and understanding gained through neuroscience will transform our legal attitude or (2) such a new understanding would only provide details that the current legal framework is adequately able to accommodate. They advocate the latter and take the position that neuroscience will have a transformative effect, “not by undermining [the law’s] current assumptions, but by transforming people’s moral intuitions about free will and responsibility” (Greene and Cohen 1775). They further state that our current legal principles owe their veracity to our intuitive sense of justice. It is this sense of justice that they believe will be transformed by neuroscientific discoveries. To this effect, they conclude our intuition of justice should shift from the use of punishment for retribution to punishment for consequentialist reasons. I will reject the claim that a change in our sense of justice as they describe it would not also affect current legal principles. I will attempt to expose a fundamental intuition that underlies both the current law and our intuitions of justice such that they are interdependent. Further, the arguments of Levy & Bayne 2004 about the indispensability of the will and its role within legal responsibility will add on to this discussion. I will also evaluate the potential of characterological accounts of “will” to pose a viable alternative to switching to the consequentialist solution Green & Cohen suggest to be necessary.

The interest in neuroscience for questions of law follows naturally from the dual component for legal conviction in criminal cases. The defendant must not only be proved to have committed an illegal act, but mens rea must also be established. Greene & Cohen suggest mens rea can be understood narrowly and loosely: Narrowly, Intention and on the other hand loosely as “all mental states consistent with moral and/or legal blame,” (Greene and Cohen 1775). An interest in mental states is evidence of a main assumption inherent in our legal system. This crucial connection is where our dialogue of will is most important. However, I will first outline Greene & Cohen’s theory in more detail before illustrating this point.

II. Legal Principles and Moral Intuitions

Amongst others, there are two premises that the arguments of Greene & Cohen rely upon. First, that science, specifically neuroscience will undermine the common libertarian convictions of free will and take with it the retributivist justification that depends on these convictions. This appears to be an assumption because such a move assumes we can eliminate the will. This is something Adina Roskies (2006) believes neuroscience alone is unable to do. The second premise is that a rejection of common-sense free will and retributivism “[ensues] a shift towards a consequentialist approach to punishment’ (Greene and Cohen 1776). Is this the only other option? Could the characterological approach of Levy & Bayne be plausible and thereby still preserve a notion of will? If so this would weaken Greene & Cohen‘s argument.

With these questions in mind, I will now explicate Greene & Cohen’s position. The conceptual playing field takes shape by contrasting consequentialist and retributivist justifications for punishment. Retributivist justifications of punishment according to Greene & Cohen suffer from an internal tension: compatibilism and incompatibilism of free will with determinism. They argue incompatibilist libertarian intuitions underlie the current law. This is evident, say Green & Cohen, because there is often a gap between moral intuitions and what the law deems relevant (Greene and Cohen 1776).

Greene & Cohen provide critiques of both justifications. Consequentialist justifications are forward-looking. Their aim is to insure future societal welfare but they are susceptible to objections as are most other utilitarian type theories. For many it may appear that utilitarian type theories allow the justification of anything as long as there is a greater benefit to the whole. In the case of legal responsibility, Greene & Cohen admit that “consequentialist theories fail to capture something central to common-sense intuitions about legitimate punishment” (Greene and Cohen 1776). Retributivist justifications are backward-looking and are less concerned with the welfare of society as a whole. Retributivist punishment functions more to remedy a debt that has been incurred by a criminal whether to society or another individual. Their critique of the retributivist justifications focuses on the scepticism of free will in a deterministic world.

What of this deterministic world? On the subject of determinism, they reference Peter van Inwagan (1982): “determinism is true if the world is such that its current state is completely determined by (i) the laws of physics and (ii) past states of the world” (Greene and Cohen 1777). They admit free will is often conceived as the ability to do otherwise, but note that Frankfurt (1966) questions this assumption. Later in the paper, we will consider those implications, which I believe Greene & Cohen have neglected to do. In the end, say Greene & Cohen, there are three main solutions to the problem of free will: hard determinism, libertarianism and compatibilism. They argue for a consequentialist justification for punishment since it is plausible with all three options, whereas retributivist justifications necessitate a stance on free will. They continue to expand their argument by assuming punishment can reasonably only be carried out for actions that are freely willed. Since hard determinism would undermine justification for any punishment and, according to a previous claim, libertarian views are “scientifically suspect” (Greene and Cohen 1778) they conclude that retributivism requires a compatibilist view. However, Green & Cohen believe that neuroscience will increase the tension between the “compatibilist legal principles and libertarian moral intuitions” beyond its breaking point (Ibid.), ending with an inability to support retributivist claims.

An argument that states neuroscience will not change the law (Green & Cohen refer to Morse 2004), maintains the law only requires “a general capacity for rational behaviour” to deem people legally responsible. This means a neurological explanation may well provide better and more detailed evidence of rationality, but it will not fundamentally change the law “unless it shows that people in general fail to meet the law’s very minimal requirements for rationality” (Greene and Cohen 1778). This point will be instrumental in undermining Greene & Cohen’s argument. Proponents of the fact that neuroscience will change the law, says Morse, are often committing the fundamental psycholegal error. If neuroscience provides us with a neuronal explanation of acts committed then one who commits this fallacy would argue that this fact is exculpatory for legal responsibility. However, under the assumption of physicalism, every action is caused in some way by the brain. Thus, establishing a causal relation between brain states and action is not sufficient to bring into play any legal ramifications except perhaps in the case where some brain state sufficiently impairs minimal rationality.

For this reason, Morse believes neuroscience does not pose a challenge to the law, as we currently know it. Greene & Cohen agree in principle with the subtle notion the psycholegal error elucidates but add a distinctive appeal to the moral intuitions and commitments of society. According to Greene & Cohen, “The legitimacy of the law itself depends on its adequately reflecting the moral intuitions and commitments of society. If neuroscience can change those intuitions, then neuroscience can change the law” (Greene and Cohen 1778). To circumscribe these intuitions they say what really matters for responsibility for most people is evidenced by the kinds of disjunctive questions they ask in these situations. Questions such as “was it him, or was it his genes? … Was it him, or was it his brain?” (Greene and Cohen 1778-9)

The example of Mr. Puppet highlights these intuitions. The example also accentuates the disparity between what the law’s interests are and what we intuitively hold to be true about responsibility. The law is interested in establishing minimal rationality as a prerequisite for legal responsibility, but since we can construct hypothetical situations such as Mr. Puppet, where outside control does not come at the cost of impairing rationality it appears that in the face of a deterministic worldview, which precisely postulates outside control, the law seems inadequate in separating these cases. Greene & Cohen put it this way, “rationality is just a presumed correlate of what most people really care about” (Greene and Cohen 1780). This is what underlies the fundamental psycholegal error. We are intuitively opposed to any outside forces that exert control over us, that we are quick to exculpate in any situation where that is the case. Greene & Cohen conclude that we are all similar to Mr. Puppet since determinism is true at least to some degree because of physical laws. Further, free will seems to require actions that are independent of external forces and thus requires us to reject determinism. Since determinism is true to some degree a libertarian free will is a misunderstanding and incompatible with determinism. In principle, I agree with Greene & Cohen that Mr. Puppet brings forth some vital questions about our intuitions, but I believe they have not gone deep enough in investigating a fundamental assumption that both the law and the case of Mr. Puppet share.

They believe that as we discover more about the mechanistic processes about the brain the plausibility of “dualist and libertarian intuitions” will decrease. In this respect, they compare the brain to a bottleneck through which every influence on our behaviour must flow. Neuroscience will provide us with the tools to discover what is going through this bottleneck. In a reflection on how this may play out in the future Greene & Cohen see a time where the dichotomy between the questions of being truly guilty and simply a victim of neuronal and external forces will become obsolete. For this to happen there must be an intermediate step. We need first accept that being a victim of neuronal and external forces is still sufficient for legal responsibility of any kind. Is it possible to preserve a notion of will (whatever its status) and is this perhaps required to justify any sense of being responsible for ones actions? Greene & Cohen themselves sate that “it is possible that we will never be able to fully talk ourselves out of [our intuitive sense of free will]”. (Greene and Cohen 1781). It seems plausible to say that neuroscience may inform and fine-tune our intuitions to some degree in this area. However, the central question for this paper investigates whether its elimination altogether would leave sufficient grounds for the law’s current assumptions.

III. The Case for the Law’s Dependence on Intuitions About Justice

At this point I present an intermittent argument to challenge Greene & Cohen’s conclusion that neuroscience will change our moral intuition but not change the law’s current assumptions. We pick up on the idea of rationality in a setting such as Mr. Puppet. I believe just because neuroscience may show a one-to-one correlation between brain states and actions this does not mean that our actions can be sufficiently explained at the level of a deterministic world. If the functioning within the brain does adhere to some physical laws and even if the outside world has the same physical laws this is not in principle sufficient to conclude that our environment determines our actions. This detail is putatively dismissed by Green & Cohen with the example of Mr. Puppet, and means that their conclusion makes certain implicit assumptions about the phenomenon of will.

Let us be more concrete with some examples. There are two options both in respect to the world and to our brain/mind. Either the world is (1a) determined (knowing the beginning state and all the physical laws that regulate movement to future states) or (1b) it is indetermined. On the other hand, the will could be (2a) libertarian in nature (the possibility of doing otherwise) or (2b) the will could be an illusion (where we at least appear to have the possibility of choosing otherwise) or (2c) there is no will (no moral responsibility). Greene & Cohen believe a determined world eliminates both 2a and 2b. I believe 2b is still a viable option.

To consider this, let us look at external versus internal factors. Feinberg mentions that an external factor (e.g. dust in the eye) can interfere with internal workings such as intentions, but I propose this “interference” only makes sense if the internal processes are viewed as self-contained and not just an extension of the external (determined or indetermined) world.

Thus, if neuroscience were to reveal that our will can be reduced to determined brain states we would still be interested in one person’s specific brain state for questions of moral or legal responsibility. It would not make sense to ask what the state of the world is in our attempt to discover what this person’s particular role was in the deterministic world and from this make an inference about responsibility. This illuminates a fundamental assumption, precisely, that looking at a particular part of the causal network (e.g. the individual’s brain) has more moral significance than the world at large. I believe this is a fundamental assumption the law makes. However, the kind of justice that Greene & Cohen support when they suggest that consequentialist justifications for punishment are the only plausible ones in face of a deterministic worldview undermines this assumption. Thus, they are presupposing that we would accept such a view of justice to argue that neuroscience will lead us to change our intuitions in precisely that direction. It is also possible that our intuitions about justice and more specifically our intuitions about individuality prevent us from conceiving of ourselves as simply a physical extension of the world, even if this world were to be physically determined.

The fact that the current law is interested in the internal as exemplified in the individual brain precludes such a conception of justice. Specifically, on Greene & Cohen’s account, the law’s assumptions center on the question of rationality. Recall, Morse’s statement about minimal rationality. I propose that this rationality is a question of the internal and individual brain state as opposed to a question about the world at large. Therefore, if Greene & Cohen were to suggest that our sense of justice were to change in the way they propose then this would mean “we all lack minimal rationality.” On the other hand, if we would like to argue that the law’s current assumptions are unaffected, then we must be able to maintain individuality, which has the correlate of will despite an externally determined world.

Rationality in the abstract is behaviour or reasoning that is precisely not just based on external influences. Can nature be rational? Would an earthquake be morally responsible for the deaths it caused? These two questions alone illustrate the intuitions we have about justice. If the law establishes a difference between nature at large and us as people (moral agents, who are rational) this distinction itself is witness that at least in principle there is a separate standard that we apply in the case of assumed intentional agents in both the areas of moral and legal responsibility. Using this terminology, I believe Greene & Cohen wish to say that neuroscience will demonstrate that there are no moral agents therefore we need consequentialist justifications for punishment. Does this then not change the fundamental assumptions underlying current law?

It may be possible that neuroscience reveals that we are just an extension of a determined environment. We can then either continue with an illusion to maintain our intuitions (N.J. Block (1971) makes an argument for the compatibility of mechanistic and teleological explanations of behaviour), or we can change our intuitions, but then we will also affect the law’s current assumptions. More so, because of the interconnectedness of rationality, individuality and moral agency it appears implausible to change our notion of justice without also fundamentally challenging the law’s current assumptions.

IV. Eliminating the Will

To bring forth the complexity that underlies our intuitive sense of free will Greene & Cohen delve into a psychological analysis of our perceptions of inanimate objects versus those that appear to move around at will. To make sense of the behaviour of different objects in the world our minds, say Greene & Cohen have developed two distinct cognitive systems. In this fundamental folk psychological intuition, we find the grounds for the psycholegal error. A moral agent must necessarily be seen as having a mind that acts as its own cause. Determinism would clearly undermine our attribution of such minds and thus challenge our attribution of responsibility. Greene & Cohen themselves on the topic of eliminating the will include this passage:

“many compatibilists sceptically ask what would it mean to give up on free will. Were we to give it up, wouldn’t we have to immediately reinvent it? Does not every decision involve an implicit commitment to the idea of free will? And how else would we distinguish between ordinary rational adults and other individuals, such as young children and the mentally ill, whose will – or whatever you want to call it – is clearly compromised? Free will, compatibilists argue, is here to stay, and the challenge for science is to figure out how exactly it works and not to peddle silly arguments that deny the undeniable (Dennett 2003)” (Greene and Cohen 1777)

For Greene & Cohen, the compromise that allows responsibility despite a lack of free will is exemplified with a consequentialist justification for punishment. They conclude that neuroscience will not change the law, because the law’s concerns lay elsewhere, but that the underlying intuitions or moral responsibility will change by what neuroscience can bring to the table. Free will is an illusion and our intuitions will ultimately have to change from retributivist to consequentialist justifications for punishment.

I have already made a case for a dependency of the law on our moral intuitions. Now that we have analyzed Greene & Cohen’s argument in depth, and argued against a change of intuitions that still preserves the current law, we can address the claims they have made with regard to the will. The heart of their argument depends on challenging the conception of free will. At this point, it is helpful to consider the difference between free will and will proper. Greene & Cohen’s dialectic focuses on free will since they wish to pin this against a deterministic worldview. Do they also mean to eliminate a psychological understanding of action in terms of will? Are free will and will proper synonymous, or can we derive an explanation of action in terms of will that is compatible with determinism? These questions force us to ask what it is about will that is so important in our conception of moral agency. A firm stand on this issue will help us gage the extent of influence neuroscientific discoveries may have. To help in elucidating this issue we must certainly consider the contribution of Harry Frankfurt. I believe it is plausible to take the view of Frankfurt with respect to free will combined with neurological explanations to preserve a sense of will. We shall also consider the option of replacing will with a characterological account.

First, we delineate moral responsibility by considering Feinberg; in Problematic Responsibility in Law and Morals, he provides a detailed discussion. The greatest factor separating legal and moral responsibility according to Feinberg is that “judgments of legal responsibility are strongly influenced by ulterior practical purposes” (Feinberg 341). These practical concerns deal with the inherent vagueness in judging “how … losses can best be distributed and whether certain kinds of risk-taking are to be encouraged or deterred” (Feinberg 343). Punishment and compensation are further practical concerns that a legal system must deal with (Feinberg 343). Moral responsibility according to Feinberg has many unique aspects. At large, it is “liability to charges and credits on some ideal record” (Feinberg 345). The exactness that legal questions demand such as the year and a day rule (to determine if an act contributed to a death) is inappropriate when considering moral responsibility. However moral responsibility is in principal precisely decidable as it must be read off facts and deduced from them. Further, moral judgments are “absolute” in contrast to legal judgments. Legal judgments are not as strong, since they only say the agent had an “‘important’ contribution for the purpose of the law” (Feinberg 345). Finally, moral responsibility must deliver regular and predictable judgments that are not subject to luck (Feinberg 346).

Feinberg asserts that in many situations it may be impossible to make moral judgments, since actions are not the only contributor to the outcome. Being “at fault” and moral responsibility are not identical. “A person can well be morally at fault in what he does without being morally responsible for some given harm” (Feinberg 347). Our intuition about morality is that “moral responsibility for external harm makes no sense, … moral responsibility is therefore restricted to the inner world of the mind, where the agent rules supreme and luck has no place” (Ibid.). He further mentions that this is where volition is undertaken and intentions formed where an agent “govern[s] those inner thoughts and volitions which are completely subject to [her] control” (Ibid.)

Even though moral responsibility primarily looks towards the inner workings Feinberg continues and shows how even moral responsibility can be susceptible to an outside influence (e.g. luck) such as a speck of dust in one’s eye that interrupts someone’s rage from progressing (Feinberg 349). Feinberg notices it is odd to speak of responsibility for one’s intentions, but: “having a character of a certain sort is often a necessary condition for the forming of any particular intention” (Ibid.). By hypothesizing two agents with similar character but different intentions formed (due to external influence), Feinberg concludes that responsibility is not derived from character alone, but rather from how important of a contributor the character was in the particular situation (Feinberg 350). By making a list of possible contributors towards forming a certain intention despite character Feinberg points out that some of these contributing factors are external in nature (ie. Upset stomach, rude remarks, hyperactive adrenal gland). In this sense, we arrive at the same problem as with legal responsibility; (Feinberg 350-1) the problem of exactness and balancing factors that have contributed to the intention. Feinberg’s final and central claim is that it is a “mistake to think that by restricting responsibility to an inner jurisdiction we can thereby make precise its vaguenesses [sic]and eliminate its contingencies [sic]” (Feinberg 351). This illustrates some of the similarities between legal and moral responsibility.

What of the balance between internal and external factors? What Morse calls the fundamental psycholegal error is summed up by “regard[ing] actions only as fully free when those actions are seen as robust against determination by external forces” (Greene and Cohen 1780). This is evidence to their anti-compatibilist tendencies. Most of their discussion looks at the role of free will. They believe libertarian conceptions of free will are in contradiction with neuroscience. (Ibid.) Ryan & Deci hash out what kind of understanding of will can stand in the face of neuroscience. They agree that the understanding of Descartes postulating a force that tilts the mechanical processes in the brain is such a version of the will that cannot stand up to neuroscience (Ryan and Deci 1571). In their discussion on autonomy, Ryan & Deci explore several philosophical notions to define autonomy. Both from a phenomenological perspective and modern analytical approaches we see that independence from external influences or constraints is not necessary to have autonomy. In both cases, assent or consent to these influences is sufficient for autonomy (Ryan and Deci 1560-2). The self-determination theory (SDT) of autonomy is used in discussions of psychological aspects relevant to autonomy. In this context the opposite of autonomy, heteronomy, is defined as “regulation…by forces experienced as alien or pressuring, be they inner impulses or demands, or external contingencies” (Ryan and Deci 1562). Ryan & Deci bring further depth to an understanding of autonomy. Instead of an all or nothing autonomy, they propose that “within SDT, autonomy for any given action is a matter of degree” (Ryan and Deci 1563). If this is the case, it makes the dispute between proponents of will-talk and those that maintain it to be an illusion more complex.

Both the notions that Feinberg and Ryan & Deci bring forth show that despite external influences (even inner workings of the brain) our intuitions still support an investigation of intention. Even though Feinberg admits our character can be influenced by alien forces it is a determination of the degree of influence that has a bearing on responsibility. The term “will” can thus be understood as an overarching term, a mental place holder, that bears testimony to a fundamental assumption underlying our intuitions about responsibility.

V. The Charaterological Account

Levy & Bayne bring to the table examples of pathologies of the will. Since it is our purpose to argue for behaviour with the aid of the notion of will it would be begging the question to speak of pathologies of the “will”. Thus, we will consider the example of Levy & Bayne as pathologies of the common notion of agency. If we succeed in showing that these pathologies indispensably require the notion of will to make them intelligible then we would succeeded in opening the way for the indispensability of the will. Evaluating this claim, however, is not within the scope of this paper, rather, if we can show that the characterological account of the will, which Levy & Bayne provide is sufficient for maintaining a retributivist justification of punishment we have still weakened the claim of Greene & Cohen.

We begin by looking at the argument of Levy & Bayne. A very helpful distinction they make is to separate the notion of will into three senses of the notion: genesis of action, phenomenology of agency and degree of effort. For responsibility Levy & Bayne maintain that an agent must “exercise a certain form (or degree) of control” (Levy and Bayne 465). They then discuss the situation of loss of control. If rational control is required for responsibility there can be two “disorders of control” namely failures of authority and failures of inhibition. Failures of authority: “call[s] into question the ascription of the action to the agent” (Ibid.). Failures of inhibition: the action is ascribed to the agent, but the agent “has lost rational control over their actions” (Ibid.). They also note that there is a parallel between the depletion of rationality in delusional persons and the impaired agency at the root of pathologies of the will.

Since much rests on the ability of control Levy & Bayne, strongly link this capacity with responsibility. They then continue to offer another possibility in the form of a characterological account that maintains a notion of responsibility despite a lack of traditional control over one’s actions. Frankfurt is instrumental in providing an example where this would be desired. Levy & Bayne summarize this contribution of Frankfurt by saying “rather than identify an agent’s character with the mechanisms that underlie the normal control of their actions….agents are fully responsible for their actions only if they are the product of desires that they endorse” (Levy and Bayne 467). On this account, the notion of will could simply correspond to an endorsement of actions. This would be similar to Ryan & Deci’s self-determination theory. Hereby we rescue retributivist justifications by appeal to character. This only leaves the problem of adjudicating between a lack of the capacities of self-control and the degree to which they have been exercised to determine whether an agent endorses an action (Levy and Bayne 468).

VI. Conclusion

I thus conclude that elimination of will may not prevent a model of legal/moral responsibility, but doing so would change the current intuitions about moral responsibility quite extremely. The discoveries of neuroscience will not be sufficient to change our moral intuitions to such a degree, especially because we have other alternative ways of conceiving will that preserve the underlying libertarian intuitions. Even in the case where alien influences on our will challenge our libertarian intuitions, Frankfurt and Levy & Bayne offer responsibility grounded in character. Inclusion of will is a prima facie requirement for legal responsibility, but even if a libertarian will cannot be supported it is not necessary to adopt a consequentialist justification for punishment. Finally, if this strong conclusion is unconvincing I propose that the will is at minimum a critical notion that functions as a mental placeholder to make discussions of legal/moral responsibility intelligible, since moral responsibility conceptually requires an intentional agent. Thus, even in a consequentialist justification we would need to acknowledge moral agents if we want to have a conception of what is best for a society of intentional agents.

References

Feinberg, Joel. “Problematic Responsibility in Law and Morals.” The Philosophical Review July 1962: 340-351.

Frankfurt, Harry G. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” The Journal of Philosophy (1969): 829-839.

Golding, Martin P. “Responsibility.” The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory. Ed. M. Golding and W. Edmunson. 2006. 236-247.

Greene, Joshua and Jonathan Cohen. “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything.” The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (2004): 1775-1785.

Levy, Neil and Tim Bayne. “A will of one’s own: Consciousness, control, and character.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry (2004): 459-470.

Morse, Stephen J. “Moral and legal responsibility and the new neuroscience.” Neuroethics. Defining the issues in theory, practice and policy. Oxford University Press, 2006. 33-49.

Roskies, Adina. “Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Responsibility.” TRENDS in Cognitive Science 10.9 (2006): 419-423.

Ryan, Richard M. and Edward L. Deci. “Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will?” Journal of Personality (2006): 1557-1585.

Markus Prinz (’09) is a Philosophy Major at McGill University.

What is a Good Life?

When asked, ‘What do you want from life?’, or ‘What is a good life?’, many respond with the slogan, ‘All that really matters is that you’re happy’. Does this slogan capture all that is relevant to a good life?

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Imagine that in the future, scientists and engineers develop an ‘experience machine’. People can program into the machine whatever experiences they want to undergo, and hook themselves up to this machine such that once inside, the experiences are indistinguishable from reality. Subjects can choose to live out their entire lives in the machine, experiencing whatever joys and achievements their hearts desire just like it were really happening.  Once in the machine the person is ignorant of the fact that they are really just lying in a vat or on a table having their brains manipulated according to the plan they had previously invented.

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A machine like this seems sufficient to ensure a person’s happiness, but would a life in the experience machine be a good life?  Assuming that the machine is without flaws, would you agree to be hooked up to the machine and live out your dreams? Why or why not?

Prometheus welcomes the opportunity to publish Garrett’s essay in this issue’s online journal. Enjoy.

By Garrett Lasnier

In this paper I will first and foremost answer the question as it is stated: given the opportunity, would I allow myself to be hooked up to a machine that makes me feel as though I am authentically living out my wildest dreams? If it were actually the case that I were given this choice, considering that I would be basing my decision on personal and psychological factors (essentially telling them that this life was not good enough, how would my family and friends feel if I entered the experience machine? Even if they would be brainwashed after I did it, I could not bring myself to do this in the first place), I would not go into the machine. I am too attached to this life to follow through with this decision, even if I were to coldly reason out that it was in my best interest, even with the knowledge that my decision would be irrelevant once in the machine. However, while my philosophical reasoning would be largely irrelevant in my actual decision-making process, I will argue that, philosophically, based on my conception of the ‘good life’, I would still not enter the machine.

From a solely hedonistic position, it is highly unlikely that one would even be happier in this experience machine. The psychological research overwhelmingly shows, as is the thesis of Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness, that human beings are largely ignorant of what will make them happy in the future. As a 19-year old, the “wildest dreams” that I program into the machine are vastly different from what will make me happy when I am 40, 50, or even 75. I may program the machine so that I find the cure for Aids, I become President, and am the first person to travel to Mars but, as hard as it might be for me to imagine now, perhaps my values will change. Perhaps after the first great achievement I may be more inclined to live a life outside of the spotlight, perhaps I would rather live a simple life with my family. I have no idea what will make me happy in the future; I can only extrapolate from the present state of my 19-year old existence. While in this life I will not be able to control other variables so that I can live out all of my wildest dreams (although I do have a high level of self-efficacy), at least I will be able to make choices that are relevant to my constantly changing attitudes and values. Thus, making me happier in the long-run.

Moreover, happiness is a completely subjective state. Assume that our current relative life satisfaction rating, on a 1-10 scale, is a 7. We are fairly happy. Now, if we were to lose the ability to use our hands and feet, we would assume that our life satisfaction rating would go down to a 2-we imagine that our lives would be miserable by comparison. But, if a quadriplegic claims that his life satisfaction is a 7 out of 10, who are we to claim that what he is experiencing is actually a 2 out of 10? We have this dogma that happiness is directly related to the circumstances of our life. “If I could just accomplish this or do that I would be happy.” The truth is, a person’s relative happiness scale is generally stable over time. If one person were to win the lottery and another person were to lose a loved one, the common knowledge is that the lottery winner would be significantly more happy while the other would be significantly less happy. And while this common knowledge may be true in the short term, the psychological evidence suggests that as early as 2 years after both events, both individuals would revert, with almost no discrepancy, back to their base life satisfaction rating. Therefore, as it relates to the experience machine, there is evidence that living out my wildest dreams would not even make me significantly happier. So, if I were to consider a virtual experience machine from a solely hedonistic perspective, it would be more appropriate to have a machine that would make me a person who would feel happy in any situation in the simulator.

While hedonistic calculations certainly are a factor in deciding whether to enter the experience machine, there are more factors that need to be considered-the good life consists of far more than pleasure and pain. I think that the good life is strongly tied to making authentic choices. I do not understand how I could possibly have a sense of free will in the experience machine if all my life was predetermined beforehand. But, more interestingly, I do not know how I have this sense of free will right now. Neurologically, or even philosophically, there may be no way to prove that we are free agents. After all, can you point to the neuron that constitutes the you that is choosing to do x or not to do x? We are just a compilation of independently acting cells, which are just a bunch of atoms, which are just a bunch of subatomic particles. That we are free agents is an absurd notion. Still, I feel that I have free will and I would not give that up for all the pleasure in the world. So what if there is no way to prove (considering it is ‘indistinguishable from reality’) that I am not in this machine right now? Even if I only think I have free will, I would rather hold on to this sense of authenticity than go into another machine, even if in that machine I would feel the same authenticity. So, considering that this sense of authenticity is at the core of my being, I would be unwilling to part with it, even if it were to be restored once in the machine.

So, if I am currently in an experience machine that is indistinguishable from reality, I have a few things to say to my former self. First and foremost, you must be a heartless jerk for abandoning your previous family and friends. Even if they were to be brainwashed of your existence, how could you ever follow through with such a decision and not feel too much guilt? Second, you must have had a really lame life if you consider this to be your wildest dreams. I am very happy with my life, fortunately enough, but so far the evidence shows that you are a very uncreative person. Thirdly, you must have quite the naïve conception of how human beings account for pleasure; pleasure is a relative phenomenon and is largely irrelevant to life circumstances. And finally, I am utterly disappointed that you gave up your fundamental sense of agency, perhaps you did not deserve it in the first place.

Garrett Lasnier (’12) is a Philosophy and Psychology major at Johns Hopkins University.