Thursday, March 12, 2026

Reply to Lester

This blog post is a reply to a post by JC Lester, which was replying to a post in which I replied to him, because he wrote a post that replied to a post in which I discussed a 2019 paper he wrote. In case that seems hard to follow, here is an ordered list of the sequence of events:

  1. JC Lester, in 2019, wrote this paper.
  2. On 2026-01-28, I read the paper and posted about it on X/Twitter.
  3. On 2026-02-17, JC Lester replied to my post.
  4. On 2026-02-18, I replied preliminarily to JC Lester’s reply, addressing only the contents of the post itself and not the various papers and articles Lester linked from it. I promised to give a fuller reply later.
  5. On 2026-02-20, JC Lester replied to my preliminary reply, in two parts: part 1 and part 2.

This post, then, is the promised fuller reply to JC Lester’s replies. It is structured as an article about his views and my views, however, which I hope makes it more interesting to third-party readers, and is at any rate easier for me to write than a linear point-by-point rebuttal.

Infographic based on JC Lester’s 2023 paper, originally posted here.

Contents

1. Introduction

I think I have much in common with JC Lester. For instance:

  • Lester is a libertarian writer, and I am also a libertarian.
  • Although Lester has published in academic journals, he seems to feel himself to be at the margins of academia, and I have felt similarly as a non-academic.
  • In his last reply to me (part 1), he expressed a wish that there were more criticisms of his theories, and I have had similar wishes before.
  • Some of his writings have been in the style of dictionary entries, which is a style I have sometimes attempted as well, aside from my actual contributions to Wikipedia and Wiktionary.

The main thing that attracted me to his writings was the overall shape of his core theory, which he described, in the title of his 2019 paper, as “an abstract eleutherology plus critical rationalism”. (An “eleutherology” means a theory of liberty; the 2023 paper gives the name of “eleutheric-conjectural libertarianism” to his overall social theory.) As he described it in the 2019 paper:

An adequate philosophical theory of libertarianism needs to make the following distinctions:

  1. An abstract theory of interpersonal-liberty-in-itself that is independent of any type of property (i.e., ownership), or normativity.
  2. The practical and contingent, derived, objective applications of the abstract theory.
  3. The separate moral and value defences of the abstract theory and its objective applications.
  4. At every stage the abandonment of ‘supporting justifications’ in favour of critical rationalism, which explicitly uses conjectures and criticisms.

Regarding the first point, in my first engagement with the paper, I criticized Lester’s insistence (you see it in many of his writings) on the great importance of defending a specific conception of ‘liberty’, which, as he clarified to me, he thinks is a concept as central to libertarianism as the concept of ‘utility’ is central to utilitarianism. If the reader is acquainted with libertarian writings and does not believe that the concept is as central as that, Lester simply sees this possibility as a flaw in the mainstream libertarian writings, which are obfuscating the central concept.

What I found attractive was the move from step 1 to step 2. Lester takes his concept of liberty and derives both the norm of self-ownership and the norm of external private property from it, as required to maintain liberty (though not necessarily yet at that stage, morally required). For whatever reason, I found this derivation reminiscent of section 2 of my ethics, where I took a concept of agency and derived the libertarian property norms from it (already as morally required, due to the prior development leading up to it).

This got me to look at more of his work and to comment on it. Lester replied, here and here and here, and made an X (Twitter) account to notify me. I thought that was pretty cool and a good opportunity to clarify some points. So I am replying to his replies, as well as talking about his work more generally. I will do so, and then explain my own approach a bit more to answer some of his questions.

Infographic based on JC Lester’s 2019 paper, originally posted here.

2. Review of Lester’s libertarian theory

I will review JC Lester’s libertarian theory regarding his defense of external property, punishment and damages, and intellectual property.

2.1. Does absence of impositions imply libertarian private property?

Although I was interested in the derivation of property from liberty that Lester presented, I have lost my confidence in precisely that aspect of his work. I will explain the problems with it. In the 2019 paper, Lester had theorized liberty as “the absence of interpersonal proactively-imposed constraints on want-satisfaction”. (Lester doesn’t like it if you say ‘defined’, preferring ‘theorized’.) In the 2023 paper, he prefers the phrasing “initiated” rather than “proactively-imposed”, which he seems to see as synonyms, with “proactive” standing to “reactive” as “initiated” stands to “responsive”. As alternative phrases, he also refers to “want-satisfaction” as “preference-satisfaction”, to “constraints on want-satisfaction” as “imposed costs” or “impositions”, and sometimes to “costs” as “losses”. I will use these phrases interchangeably as indicated.

Here’s the problem I see with this now. In his 2023 book Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny, Jesse Spafford formulated the following idea, which is very similar to Lester’s idea of liberty:

The Moral Tyranny Constraint – A theory of duties is acceptable only if full compliance with that theory would not allow any person to unilaterally, discretionarily, and foreseeably act in a way that would leave others with less advantage than they would have possessed had the agent made some other choice. (Spafford 2023, p. 69)

Spafford says that the word advantage “should be understood to not have any specific content but, rather, function as a placeholder for whatever one takes to be the relevant currency of distributive justice” (Spafford 2023, p. 71). For compatibility with Lester, we should read “less advantage” as “more constrained want-satisfaction”. Then we can see the problem. Spafford argued, throughout his book, that original acquisition of external private property, since it allows the owner to exclude others from the property, leaves others with less advantage than if the agent had not homesteaded the property. I believe this is true, however advantage is conceived of, including Lester’s preferred preference-utilitarian way. And it is proactive/initiated, not reactive/responsive. How does Lester answer this?

Infographic based on Jesse Spafford’s social-anarchist theory, originally posted here.

Lester seems to consider his 2023 paper “a clearer account” than his 2019 paper, but he spends more space on the derivation of external property in the 2019 paper, and it seems more enlightening on his ideas on that, so I will quote from there. In the 2019 paper, Lester says:

Once we have begun to use a natural resource for some purpose, then it typically proactively imposes a significant cost on us if someone takes that resource from us or uses it in a way that flouts our purposes. By possessing and controlling it we might proactively impose a cost on other people too; but this is mainly to the, usually small and reciprocal, extent of the unmodified resource’s want-satisfaction value to them. For to be denied a benefit that someone else has somehow produced—such as a wooden cabin—is not in itself to be proactively imposed on. Therefore, it appears that the least proactive imposition on people’s preference-satisfactions is usually to allow ultimate control to the initial user, and thereafter control by voluntarily agreed transfer (as mentioned above, these interpersonal comparisons plausibly assume only that people are very broadly similar in their responses to certain fundamental choices). Assuming the theory of liberty, this entails that it usually maximally observes, or instantiates, liberty to have personal ultimate control of external resources where one has initiated a use (or subsequently received them by voluntarily agreed transfer). This factual and contingent consequence is also before needing to assume the legal institution of property (or needing to assume morals). However, in order better to protect liberty, it is efficient to institute property rights in such resources. (Lester 2019, pp. 106–107)

That paragraph includes references to eight footnotes arguing with reviewers about the wording and substance of this argument, which I have omitted, so you should check the paper if you think some obvious criticism was overlooked here. However, I believe my comments on it are not addressed in that back-and-forth, as follows.

  • There is one strain in Lester’s ideas that really wants to call the exclusion of latecomers a “withheld benefit” rather than an “imposed cost”. It does not seem that he can defend this difference in terminology without assuming his conclusion. It is a constraint on want-satisfaction, and it is not done in self-defense, unless you include the defense of your property into self-defense. But then here there is a danger that Lester is building the libertarian theory of property into the requirement for a cost/constraint’s being “imposed”, and hence assuming his conclusion from the outset.
  • There is a different strain in Lester’s ideas, however, that concedes that the exclusion of latecomers is an imposition; “by possessing and controlling it we might proactively impose a cost on other people too”. However, the latecomers’ interference with homesteaded property also imposes a cost. In Lester’s telling, it is inevitable, in a conflict over property, that some costs are imposed on someone. The libertarian property-norm, then, does not achieve the “absence of impositions” but the “minimization of impositions”.

This is similar to his move regarding the “minimization of aggression principle”, where he claims that there are conflicts over property where some aggression is inevitable, and hence the best we can apply is not the libertarian NAP (nonaggression principle) but its more pragmatic cousin, the MAP (minimization of aggression principle). This is an underexplored area; it is unclear whether aggression is ever inevitable in mainstream libertarian theory. But it does seem clear that, given conflicting wants, someone’s want-satisfaction has to be constrained. Lester’s idea, then, is that liberty consists in minimizing the constraints.

Infographic of JC Lester’s view on the minimization of aggression principle (MAP), originally posted here.

2.2. Does minimization of impositions imply libertarian private property?

For Lester, in the above quote from the 2019 paper, minimizing constraints implies respecting libertarian private property, because allowing first-users to exclude further users imposes smaller costs on the further users than disallowing exclusion imposes on the homesteaders. This is a complex claim, so to be clearer (to myself if to no one else), I will write this as a formula. For any given rivalrous resource, let there be a first-user (homesteader) $H$, and a set of later would-be users $L={1,\dots,n}$. Define an institutional regime $E$, where the first-user may exclude others from interference with the resource (exclusive control), and a different institutional regime $N$, where later users may not be excluded (open access / forced sharing / common use). Let $u_j(\cdot)$ be the person $j$’s utility (want-satisfaction) under the regime in question, holding fixed the same physical world and preferences. Then the relevant claim seems to be this:

$$ \forall i\in L:\quad u_i(N)-u_i(E) \;<\; u_H(E)-u_H(N) $$

Notice that we had to use minus signs to write this out. Lester, in the 2019 paper, isn’t just making an interpersonal utility comparison (the different sides of the $<$ are different persons, hence this is interpersonal) but also a comparison between intrapersonal differences in utility between different institutional regimes. This is inevitable to the claim he is making. And very likely, given his comments on cases where “the public” is affected (pollution, etc.), he might sometimes not want to only make the pairwise claim (each latecomer’s loss is smaller than the homesteader’s loss) but also the claim about the loss of the aggregate of latecomers being smaller than the homesteader’s, as follows:

$$ \sum_{i\in L}\bigl(u_i(N)-u_i(E)\bigr) \;<\; u_H(E)-u_H(N) $$

So although he frames his theory as talking about preference-utilitarianism, he is committing himself to utilities being capable of being added and subtracted. This is cardinal utility. It is not preference-utilitarianism anymore. It assumes utilities have strong algebraic properties.

Lester downplays the strength of the claim. Even within the 2019 paper itself, Lester tries to make this commitment look like a minimal, rough claim that humans are broadly similar enough in their responses to allow for saying that, generally speaking, this comparison holds as stated. Lester devotes much more space to the issue of utility comparisons in the 2023 paper, as well as in his 2022 paper, “Avoiding Interpersonal Utility Comparisons in Eleutheric-Conjectural Libertarianism”. In those two places, he says that instead of comparing utilities interpersonally, we can do a thought-experiment and imagine ourselves to be in the position of each of the parties involved in the resource clash, as follows:

One can simply imagine oneself successively being on each of the various sides of any posited liberty-clashes (as one may sometimes be in real life). Or, if it seems significantly different and clearer, imagine oneself being in a game whereby one has an equiprobable chance of being in the situation of any of the people whose liberties are clashing. Then the specified task is to choose which remedies, rules, property, or claims (depending on which problem is being addressed) seem likely to minimise any overall, or average, initiated impositions on oneself. (Lester 2022, p. 2)

OK, so let’s account for Lester’s modesty in not claiming any mind-reading powers for himself. Read the same formula above, but instead of reading $u_j(\cdot)$ as the person $j$’s utility, read it as the utility of yourself when imagined in the position of the person $j$. We are still talking, necessarily, about cardinal quantities with strong algebraic properties, not mere ordinal value-scales.

However little knowledge of other people’s minds Lester is claiming, allowing this kind of comparison at all puts him under a lot of pressure from social-democrats, who can now argue that money is a greater utility to the poor than to the rich. That is, where $R$ is a rich person, $P$ a poor person, and $t$ is a transfer, the social-democrat can immediately run the familiar diminishing-marginal-utility argument:

$$ u_P(w_P+t)-u_P(w_P) \;>\; u_R(w_R)-u_R(w_R-t) $$

Arguing from parity, the social-democrat can say that this is roughly and generally true, without making strong claims about his ability to read minds, etc.; he can read $u_P(\cdot)$ and $u_R(\cdot)$ as the utility of himself when imagined in the position of a poor and a rich person, respectively, rather than the utility of the poor and the rich person themselves, respectively. The argument still seems to work. If that move is allowed for homesteading, there’s no reason why it isn’t allowed for redistribution.

In his reply to me, Lester had said that “social-democrats (like all statists) primarily need to understand economics better. That is what mainly explains why private property promotes welfare and forced transfers undermine it. But some philosophy can help too.” But the above comparison is legitimate in mainstream economics, which defends wealth transfers on precisely such claims (by means of a social welfare function). Libertarians typically appeal to Austrian economics to block the social-democratic argument, but Austrian economics blocks this argument, not by proving that the comparison holds in the other direction, but precisely by saying that these utility comparisons are illegitimate, both interpersonally and intrapersonally. The Austrians consistently hold to ordinal utility, without any cardinal comparisons in sight. Hence, libertarians cannot consistently appeal to Austrian economics against the social-democrat and at the same time allow themselves these comparisons in defending their property theory. So it is unclear to me how Lester can possibly defend his derivation of private property, although it had seemed so nice to me at first.

2.3. Does minimization of impositions allow for punishment and damages?

In my initial comment on Lester’s 2019 paper, I had somehow still been focusing on absence of impositions and had not quite noticed the move toward minimization of impositions in Lester’s derivations. This is a significant difference between his theory and mine, since my theory is strictly and absolutely deontological, but I was still charmed by what I saw as a parallel between our theories. Hence, I said that Lester’s theory “faces exactly the same problems” of defending “the practices of punishment, and compensation for damages, in the same way” as it defends property rights.

I now realize that this is not true, and I concede that Lester’s conception of liberty is coherent with a notion of punishment. Liberty, in Lester’s sense, does not by itself imply punishment, but aiming at it can give a good reason for punishment if we consider punishment a reactive imposition which can be helpful in minimizing initiated impositions. The helpfulness of punishment to this purpose is a distinct premise, but it is a ‘cheap’ premise, insofar as it is commonly held.

Lester’s papers on punishment, which he had linked to me, are also helpful:

2.4. Can minimization of impositions allow for both intellectual property and ordinary market competition?

It seems that Lester exposes himself to further objections with his defense of intellectual property, however, which was chiefly in his Against Against Intellectual Property: A Short Refutation of Meme Communism (written 2016).

For a given person S, if I can “constrain S’s want-satisfaction” merely by using my own materials to build an instantiation of S’s idea (presumably because S now has a market competitor in selling instantiations of the idea, and thus finds it more difficult to profit from the idea), it is not clear why ordinary market competitors (who compete in building instantiations of unowned ideas, such as a generic type of ice cream, or whatever) do not similarly impose constraints on each other’s want-satisfaction. That is, unless Lester appeals to the “imposed cost” vs “withheld benefit” distinction again, but this would clearly be building the theory of intellectual property into the liberty theory, and thus assuming his conclusion from the outset.

It is unclear how Lester could possibly defend the claim that competition to produce instantiations of unowned ideas produces a smaller total of impositions than competition to produce instantiations of owned ideas. And he doesn’t even try to develop such an argument: in arguing for intellectual property, Lester suddenly makes arguments from “the incentive to produce valuable ideas”, which has nothing to do with his original idea of minimizing imposed costs, and is hence irrelevant to his eleutherology.

3. Clarification of my own views

Having covered the above, I can now clarify my own views on welfare, rationality, and foundations.

3.1. Welfare nihilism

In my preliminary reply to Lester’s reply to my post about his 2019 paper, I said the following:

Due to my previous bad experiences with finding very unclear concepts at the core of all welfare theories, I have adopted a position of nihilism toward welfare theories, where I will criticize their use to defend policies I disagree with, but will also not use them to defend policies I do agree with. It is possible, in principle, that one of Lester’s linked texts can overcome my pessimism about welfare theories; we will see.

Having now looked at the many texts Lester linked from his post, my pessimism is unabated. Welfare theories are terrible and unhelpful. I must answer Lester’s complaint, however, when he said in part 2 of his later reply:

It is not psychologically possible to do this. We can’t help empathising. There is no way that you can honestly say that you have no idea whether a man screaming as he is being tortured has less welfare than someone sitting on a beach in the sunshine drinking a cocktail and smiling. It is just that your implicit theory of welfare is not formalised and precise.

I have no objection to this judgment! I am a logical behaviorist. I believe that the words “pain” and “agony” refer to exactly the former sorts of behaviors (screaming as you are being tortured) and “happiness” refers to exactly the latter sorts of behaviors (smiling). And it is an analytic truth that “happiness is a better mental state than pain and agony”; someone would not be a competent language-user who did not agree use these words in this way. But when someone applies the words pain or agony or happiness, or the relation better than, to mental states in the absence of indicating behaviors, then this is being unscientific; it may be inevitable to do this to some extent in practical life, but it would be reckless to build an important theoretical conclusion on such a judgment. And this is exactly what is being done in the comparisons of utility mentioned above, regardless whether they are done directly or via a thought-experiment: we are making a generalization about people generally being happier under one kind of institutional regime rather than in another. This cannot be defended.

Again, Lester had said (also in part 2):

A little normal human empathy is all that is required to see that a severely authoritarian society of great scarcity has less welfare than a relatively liberal (in the classical sense) one with great abundance.

Let us separate the claims about authoritarianism and about abundance.

  • Regarding abundance, this has actually been disputed in academic literature, in the theory of the original affluent society, where hunter-gatherers are said to have lower standards of living but also fewer wants, and hence can be considered affluent.
  • Regarding authoritarianism, every authoritarian regime claims that its specific interventions improve social welfare, even if authoritarianism in general doesn’t always do so.

I believe that both of these claims are wrong, but I do not believe that “a little normal human empathy is all that is required to see” this. Besides, Lester seems to believe that anarcho-capitalism has more welfare than every other regime, and while I am sympathetic to that idea (since it is flattering to my political views), still it takes more than “a little normal human empathy” to argue for it, if that can possibly be done. Again, social-democrats will equally claim that “a little normal human empathy is all that is required to see” that a society with a strong social safety net is happier than one without. The only way I can think to answer them is to follow the Austrians in telling these social-democrats that they are being unscientific in making such an utility comparison; it is up to Lester to try to do a better job, if he thinks he can do so.

3.2. Rationality

In my original post, I had said that “I believe welfarism in all its forms is irrational”. In his original reply to that, Lester linked a blog post arguing against the use of “irrational” to deride theories.

In reply to that post, I want to clarify that I did not mean this in the sense that it “reasons unsuccessfully” in some way.

I meant that welfarism is intrinsically opposed to the pursuit of truth in dialogical inquiry, due to how it permits violations of critical discussion norms in some contexts: e.g., a utilitarian believes that it is sometimes permissible to lie, and lying in critical discussions frustrates their goal of truth-seeking.

The welfarist may claim that his permissions are context-bound, i.e., he can only lie if he is not in the context of a critical discussion. But I can’t read his mind to tell whether he still believes himself to be in a critical discussion. Due to how people can’t read each other’s minds to know if the other person is about to believe himself to be in a circumstance where it is permissible to violate critical discussion norms, a moral theory which is compatible with the social possibility of truth-seeking dialogue must contain an absolute, context-free prohibition on all violations of critical discussion norms. This is a key element in my metaethics.

Maybe this sounds like an unusual way to say “irrational”. But I see reason as primarily the faculty of truth-seeking, and the truth ultimately cannot be sought without inquiry in critical discussions, as Agnes Callard argued in Open Socrates, and as Lester’s own critical rationalism requires.

3.3. Foundations

Similarly, my conception of “foundations” or “justifications” for a theory amounts simply to their defense in critical discussions; it is a dialectical conception. In this post, I have consistently talked about “defending” ideas and avoided talk about “ground”, “support”, “justify”, etc., to make that clearer.

In part 1 of his reply to my preliminary reply to his original reply to my original post about his 2019 paper, Lester expressed confusion as to why a natural-law theorist may be dialectically required to provide a metaethics to support his ethics:

I don’t see that they have any implied duty to do the “supporting” metaphysics. And that might imply an infinite regress as well.

This can only be clarified by appealing to how natural-law theories of ethics are actually criticized by their critics. Natural-law theories, broadly speaking, begin from a philosophical anthropology, which is a metaphysical account of human nature, and then derive axiology and deontology relative to the ideal standard of that nature. Sometimes there is a “state of nature” construct involved, as in Locke, but not always.

In chapter 6 of his textbook The Fundamentals of Ethics, Russ Shafer-Landau raises several common criticisms to natural-law theories of ethics:

  • That there may be no “human nature” shared by all humans, conceived either as “animal nature”, as “innate human traits”, or as “common human traits”; (pp. 83–85)
  • That the best account of human nature may involve no “natural purposes” (teleology); (pp. 86–90)
  • That arguments relying on natural-law, such as those against abortion or same-sex marriage, often rely on ambiguous definitions of terms like “humanity” or “marriage” that assume the truth of the conclusion they are trying to prove, thereby begging the question rather than solving the moral issue; (pp. 90–92)
  • More broadly, that nature provides no normative standard, since the only scientific natural laws are unbreakable descriptive laws such as those of physics, rather than the breakable prescriptive laws which natural-law theory appeals to. (pp. 92–93)

It is in order to answer such criticisms that a natural-law theorist must provide a defense of his metaphysical theories as being the best philosophical account of human nature, in a way that either motivates the adoption of teleology or defends the normative conclusions without using teleology, and so on for the other objections. Hence there is no regress, at least not simply from the demand for defenses of one’s arguments, which is an ordinary occurrence in philosophy; if it is somehow impossible to satisfy the critics of natural-law, this must be for some other reason.

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Thursday, March 5, 2026

Utilitarianism is the root of all evil

By utilitarianism I shall mean the same thing as hedonism or welfarism, to wit, the idea that there is some concept of welfare (or of ‘wellbeing’, ‘psychological happiness’, ‘pleasure’, ‘feeling good’, ‘valent experience’, etc.), which has ultimate moral importance.

Ultimate, or terminal, moral importance is to be contrasted with instrumental moral importance. As an example of instrumental moral importance, a concept similar to ‘welfare’ can be held to be instrumentally morally important in some theory such as the remainder of this paragraph. Suppose that it is ultimately morally valuable for humans to exercise their faculty of reasoning as much as possible, and suppose further that there is some level of suffering which makes it impossible to reason. Then it is morally important, although only for the sake of reason (and hence instrumentally), that humans should experience that level of suffering as little as possible.

In speaking of ‘moral’ importance, I assume the Highest-Order Norm Thesis.

Utilitarianism, in this broad sense, is closely related to what Agnes Callard, in Open Socrates, referred to as the bodily command.

Contents

Utilitarianism vs. the pursuit of truth

Utilitarianism, at least in the narrow sense of axiological act-utilitarianism, is directly incompatible with the social practice of truth-seeking.

David Lewis has soundly argued that act-utilitarianism is not incompatible with following a linguistic convention of truthfulness, and hence with valuing speaking truthfully in everyday language; but the social practice of truth-seeking, or inquiry in dialogue, requires a truth-norm which is absolutely inviolable in every context, as I have shown.

Such an inviolable rule is something that act-utilitarians themselves admit is not supported by their theory, and indeed, it is often hailed as an advantage of act-utilitarianism, that it can justify officious lies when they will save lives, or whatever.

Hence, axiological act-utilitarians are in open opposition to the social possibility of the pursuit of truth; and I claim that this likely applies to many other forms of welfarism, hedonism, etc., since a rule-utilitarian will plausibly make a (suitably lawlike and universal) exception for officious lies. If welfare has terminal value and is allowed to even sometimes override concern for truth-seeking, we get morally wrong conclusions, as I have shown.

It is no wonder that there are many utilitarians who assign numbers to quantities of welfare, but who are wholly unconcerned with how those number assignments are to be supported (which cannot be done rationally, as Rothbard showed, although he incorrectly tried to rescue a non-numerical concept of welfare); for someone who is unconcerned with cooperative truth-seeking will also be unconcerned with meaningfulness of speech.

Utilitarianism vs. sound philosophy

Commitments very close to utilitarianism also materially imply, more or less, every single wrong opinion that has ever been held in philosophy and economics; the remaining paragraphs in this section will each give one major example of an implication of utilitarianism and link a reference to explain why it is wrong.

Misguided politics

Although there have been utilitarian libertarians such as David Friedman, their rotten foundations makes them structurally devoid of a principled theory of justice in property, and practically incapable of radicalism in strategy.

In fact, a plausible welfarist concern with making it forbidden for “any person to unilaterally, discretionarily, and foreseeably act in a way that would leave others with less advantage than they would have possessed had the agent made some other choice” (with advantage conceived of in welfaristic terms), plausibly implies the rejection of all external private property in moral principle, as Jesse Spafford has shown, so that luck-egalitarian claims to expropriation and redistribution would be justified. But such a rejection of private property in moral principle is also incompatible with the social practice of truth-seeking, as I have shown.

Socialist central planning, usually described with vague meaningless slogans like “according to need”, also tends to be conceived of in hedonistic terms; and it is impossible for socialist central planning to achieve its goals, as Ludwig von Mises showed. (No, computers cannot solve the problem Mises raised.)

Misguided personal choices

Wellbeing-sensitive consequentialism is also at the core of the Effective Altruism movement, which focuses on “efficient” charitable donations. But von Mises’s economic calculation problem, which makes socialist central planning impossible, also makes it impossible for charities to operate efficiently, as Nathan P. Goodman pointed out, although he supports giving to charity nevertheless.

Relatedly, when added to a plausible psychology of animals, utilitarianism implies moral concern for animal welfare, as Peter Singer has shown, to an extent that plausibly requires veganism. (I should note that animal rights activists often try to frame the historical recognition of the shared humanity of fellow humans, such as in the abolition of slavery and the liberation of women, as a “moral circle expansion” which may eventually expand further to include nonhuman animals; and this is because they are dishonest.) But such a concern for animal welfare, to such an extent, is in tension with the social practice of truth-seeking, which provides moral (highest-order) license for eating meat (regardless whether it comes from cruel factory farms), as I have shown. (It is no coincidence that animal-rights activists defend human rights infringements as a means to their cause. I have left open the possibility that a norm requiring veganism may be justified by a cultural, nonmoral, lower-order commitment, as with how violations of etiquette are forbidden but not in themselves immoral; this may happen with some religious forms of veganism.)

David Benatar’s antinatalism, which is bad for more or less the same reasons as animal-welfare-motivated veganism, is also defended from a welfare-sensitive axiology.

Misguided metaphysics

It is tempting to believe that the entities that a theory quantifies over are real entities; this is, in fact, required by neo-Quinean metaontologies. And since utilitarianism ascribes ultimate value to mental states of wellbeing, it quantifies over them, tempting utilitarians to be realists about mental states in a way that allows for them to be ranked in an order. Since it is unclear how human behaviors of happiness and sadness can be so ranked, this utilitarian-realist commitment tends to be a motivation for dualism in the philosophy of mind (so that pleasure and pain are qualia), or for identifying minds with their neural or computational features (so that pleasure and pain are neural or computational configurations). But all such opinions are irrational, since logical behaviorism is true instead and is rationally required, as I have shown.

Welfarist axiologies are also behind most formulations of the so-called “problem of evil” which motivates atheism, since it is much harder to formulate coherently in welfare-insensitive axiologies; and I have also proved atheism to be false.

Uncharitable remarks on utilitarianism

Being fair to utilitarianism is distinct from being charitable to it, as justice is distinct from charity. (I use ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ interchangeably.)

If we are fair to utilitarianism, we shall uncharitably but fairly say that there is nothing at all to be correctly said in its favor; that it can only be motivated by an attitude of intrinsic irrationality which not only does not value truth-seeking, but indeed fiercely hates the pursuit of truth, and hates all truth because it is true, and spends its days seeking to believe falsehoods because they are false, and to forget any truths it may have learned; that to even get utilitarianism off the ground dialectically, you have to assume a whole edifice of lies about how language works, about how logic works, about how history works, etc.; that utilitarianism is, in itself, an edifice of lies, believed in by villains, for the purpose of murder; that the people who defend it are, to the extent that they defend it, a plague upon humanity, whose ideas have no value, and should never be listened to; that to the extent that they defend it, while it is, of course, a moral and economic tragedy when any one of them dies (as it is when any human being dies), still nothing of intellectual value is, to that extent, lost to those deaths, and in fact our theoretical understanding of the world is improved to an extent, as a consequence of their deaths, by no longer being marred with their confusions; that this is all true with absolute certainty beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that there are no exceptions.

These true, and perfectly fair, but nevertheless uncharitable things, are said to emphasize that a fair verdict on utilitarianism (by which, again, I mean the broad idea of a concept of wellbeing which has ultimate moral importance) is uniformly and hyperbolically negative, and that whenever anything good is said about utilitarianism, it comes from charity, not from justice.

We may, of course, in perfect fairness excuse many self-described utilitarians as not being culpable for their adherence to the utilitarian attitude – since they were duped, or confused, or dazed; but the ideal outcome, at any rate, is if every avowed adherent to utilitarianism (or welfarism, hedonism, etc.), renounces his chosen ideals, publicly execrates and condemns them, never looks back at them or considers them again, and censures all his colleagues if they ever again speak favorably of them, nevermind act upon them. It is a tragedy that this will not happen.

Charitably, we may say that utilitarianism at least seems unrelated to the overuse of probability theory in some of the communities where it is popular, although it might not be a coincidence that the same communities are attracted to two kinds of irrationality.

Illustration for this blog post, drawn by Nano Banana.
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Monday, March 2, 2026

Libertarianism and child neglect

This is a blog post on libertarian theory and child neglect. Although I run a newsletter, Children and Rights, which is precisely on issues of libertarianism and children, I consider that newsletter to consist merely in application of Murray Rothbard’s chapter of the same name, and works from other theorists that agreed with it, to contemporary issues. Hence, it is not the place for original theory, or even for talking about my own views on anything. I conceived of it this way in order to make it easier for other contributors to help me with the work, should they desire it; otherwise, they would have to accept all of my ideas, which is a difficult requirement for collaboration.

Today, Cory Massimino posted a blog post on the occasion of Murray Rothbard’s 100th birthday. I have no comments on Massimino’s blog post. Massimino’s blog post, however, says that “on the legality of neglecting children, Rothbard was horribly wrong – see Roderick Long’s Abortion, Abandonment, and Positive Rights – but not in a way that seems clearly left-wing or right-wing.” This is a comment on the correctness of one of Rothbard’s views in a blog post that otherwise attempted only to classify his views as left-wing or right-wing. This made me curious to check out Roderick Long’s essay which was linked by Massimino, and this blog post is my response to it.

Possible views on children’s and parents’ rights and duties

A word on my general orientation. I consider that there are two consistent views on children and parents’ rights and duties:

  • The classical Aristotelian view, on which there is a natural link between parents and children, and hence there is both a duty of parents to care for children and a duty of children to obey parents, with the corresponding claim-rights on either side;
  • The Rothbardian libertarian view, on which there is not a natural link between parents and children, and hence there is neither a duty of parents to care for children nor a duty of children to obey parents, so that there are no claim-rights on either side deriving merely from the parent-child relationship.

Whenever someone wants to defend an asymmetrical view, I regard that as suspicious, although of course, I will still listen to their arguments for their view. In keeping with the theme of Massimino’s blog post, I might say that asymmetrical views can be classified as left-wing and right-wing, as follows:

  • A left-wing asymmetrical view holds that there is a duty of parents to care for children, but no duty of children to obey parents, so that children have a claim-right to be cared for but parents have no claim-right to obedience;
  • A right-wing asymmetrical view holds that there is a duty of children to obey parents, but no duty of parents to care for children, so that parents have a claim-right to obedience but children have no claim-right to be cared for.

These views are equally bad, since they’re both indefensible. Usually someone who defends either of them is only pretending to actually care about rights: the left-winger is a utilitarian who only uses the language of rights because it’s rhetorically powerful, and the right-winger is a might-makes-right theorist who only uses the language of rights in the empty sense of the “right of the strongest”.

So much, then, for general remarks on possible views on children’s and parents’ rights and duties. Roderick Long’s essay defends a weak version of the left-wing asymmetrical view, applying only to parents who made a voluntary choice to have children; it is the burden of the next section to address Long’s essay.

Roderick Long’s essay

Roderick Long’s essay is long (heh) and intricate, and I do not care about most of it; I will comment only on the parts I care about. For instance, Roderick Long spends a lot of words on deciding how to interpret and accommodate a Kantian phrase, that “every person has a right not to be treated as a mere means to the ends of others”. I assume Long needs to do this in order to frame his views as standing within a mainstream ethical tradition, since he does not (within the essay) endorse any particular foundational approach to ethics, and seems to mostly be guiding himself by his intuitions about hypotheticals. My approach to ethics has a foundation, hence I do not care about that.

Portia’s Principle

Roderick Long rejects what he calls Portia’s Principle, as follows:

Portia’s Principle: [If S violates O’s boundary,] O (or O’s agent) has no right to invade S’s boundary, even if invading S’s boundary is necessary to end S’s violation of O’s boundary.

I hereby endorse Portia’s Principle, which Roderick Long rejects. In a situation where an owner O wishes to remove an invader S from O’s property, O’s action is not to be justified on grounds of any right on the part of O to violate S’s boundary in order to secure O’s own boundary, but rather on the fact that O’s action only intends removing S and merely accepts any violation of S’s boundary as a consequence. The extent to which this acceptance is to be held as morally/legally acceptable is to be left up to individual judges, who can assess the extent to which O really lacked intention to violate S’s boundary and the extent to which this lack-of-intention is exculpatory.

Related to this, as an alternative to Portia’s Principle, Roderick Long endorses an idea of proportionality:

Principle of Proportion: If S violates O’s boundary, O (or O’s agent) has the right to invade S’s boundary in whatever way is necessary to end S’s violation of O’s boundary, so long as O’s (or O’ agent’s) invasion of S’s boundary is not disproportionate to the seriousness of S’s violation of O’s boundary.

While I sympathize with this idea, I believe that it is very vague. I conjecture that most humans’ intuitions about what is “disproportionate” would more or less line up with their intuitions about exculpatory lack-of-intention in my response to the case. So there may not be much of a practical difference, but there is a difference in the fact that I am following my general orientation of not deciding to create rights out of thin air merely to make it easier to justify self-defense, eviction, punishment, etc.

The mid-flight striking pilot

Roderick Long motivates his views on child neglect with the following hypothetical:

Suppose that Stan is a pilot for Clouds-R-Us, a charter airline company. Now ordinarily Stan is under no obligation, enforceable or otherwise, to work as a pilot; he has a right to go on strike at any time. But now suppose that Stan decides to go on strike in mid-flight: he abandons the controls, dons his parachute, leaps out the door, and leaves his planeload of passengers (none of whom can pilot a plane) to fall to their doom. (Clouds-R-Us does not waste money on frills like copilots.) When Stan is accused of murder he is indignant: “What do you mean, murder? I didn’t kill my passengers; I merely let them die. Since there are no basic positive rights, I was not under any enforceable obligation to take positive action on behalf of my passengers’s welfare; I was merely obligated to leave them alone. And that’s precisely what I did: I left them alone. What am I, my passengers’ keeper?”

This response is clearly inadequate; but why? The answer, I think, is that Stan’s relation to his passengers is importantly different from, say, an innocent bystander’s relation to an accident victim. When one is merely a bystander, one’s failure to take positive action counts as letting die, not as killing. But it is a different story when one is not a bystander but the pilot. The fact that all these passengers are traveling at a high speed, thousands of miles above the ground, is not simply an interesting situation to which Stan is a latecomer. The passengers are way up in the air because Stan brought them there. And the passengers consented to being brought there on the understanding that Stan would return them safely to the ground; they would not have consented to be carried upward if they had known that Stan was going to bail out. Thus, if Stan bails out, he has violated the conditions under which the passengers’ ascent was voluntary; and so Stan’s total behavior toward the passengers (carry them upward and then leaving them there) counts as a violation of their negative right not to be killed without their consent. Therefore, once Stan and the passengers are aloft, it would be legitimate to force Stan to return the passengers safely to the ground before resigning his post at Clouds-R-Us. (And this is because Stan carried the passengers aloft voluntarily; if a gun had been held to his head from the beginning, it is not clear that he would have had an enforceable obligation not to bail out.)

The moral we may extract from Stan’s story is this:

(21) If S voluntarily places O in a situation where S’s failure to take positive action on O’s behalf will result in O’s death, then such a failure on S’s part is a killing, not merely a letting-die.

It is interesting that, in his last parenthesized sentence, Roderick Long seemingly agrees with my interpretation of what obligations would hold, under libertarianism, in the case of an enslaved pilot who decided to escape from slavery by parachuting off mid-flight. He seemingly disagrees, however, with my broader approach to ending aircraft-ride agreements mid-flight, which I had given in the same post when addressing a libertarian joke about a helicopter ride. It is very strange to me that Long clearly thinks that the pilot’s voluntary choice is important, and yet it does not occur to him to refer to the terms of the pilot’s contract. To quote what I said about the helicopter ride joke:

The joke about property rights is this: If I’m taking you, consensually, on a ride in my helicopter, it is also true that I remain owner of the helicopter and, as the owner of my property, can freely evict trespassers from it. So suppose that I change my mind about giving you a ride and cancel the contract. You then become a trespasser on my helicopter, and I can evict you, such as by pushing you off of it. Pushing you does no direct damage to your body, which, of course, remains your body via self-ownership, and is generally unharmed by being pushed. This was a minimal, least-harm intervention to quickly evict you, and it does not aggress against anything you legitimately own; you own your body, not anything surrounding it. It is no concern of mine what the ground will do to you once you’re out.

This stuff is funny, but it seems clear that no libertarian judiciary would let me off the hook for pushing you out of my helicopter. There are many things it might do instead, but here’s what it would do in my personal libertarian utopia: If the agreement for the helicopter ride was informal, then they might decide that, as a general unspoken part of such informal ride-agreements, I agreed to reimburse any damage to your body that happened due to me negligently letting you fall off of it, payable either to you if you survive, or to those named in your will if you don’t, or to your relatives if there is no such will, etc. I would then be punished by being saddled with a big debt to pay for the entire estimated value of your life, which is, basically, what would be done to any murderer; the gap between the treatment of my conduct and the treatment of murder is thus closed. If I had asked you to sign a written formal contract explicitly waiving such damages, I wouldn’t have this problem, but then you’d be a fool to sign it.

Similarly, I believe, in the case of a pilot who contracts himself out voluntarily but then decides to go on strike mid-flight, it all depends on what sorts of financial penalty are included in his contract with the airline for this sort of situation. To address this situation, there is really no need, and no justification, for postulating a general principle that “if S voluntarily places O in a situation where S’s failure to take positive action on O’s behalf will result in O’s death, then such a failure on S’s part is a killing, not merely a letting-die.”

That general principle creates many very odd instances of “killing”, besides. Suppose I fire my worker who is very poor, so that he no longer has an income, and hence I have put him in a situation where, if I do not give him an income, he will starve. Although a leftist like Long will likely be sympathetic to the worker, it is very odd to say that, if I fail to give him an income, I have just killed him. Long may argue that the worker is not really in such a situation since he may find employment or food elsewhere, but then again, it may also be said that someone who was left alone in an unmanned flight may technically somehow be rescued by a third party, although it is far-fetched. So such a response would leave it very unclear in what sorts of cases “S puts O in a situation”, etc.

The principle, which Long labeled (21), was his entire argument for enforceable parental obligations against child neglect. Long says that “when a woman voluntarily gives birth – i.e., voluntarily brings a child into the world – she is voluntarily moving it from a situation in which it has an automatic life-support system to a situation in which it does not”, and hence (21) applies. Since his principle was not justified, his case for enforceable parental obligations against child neglect is toppled. Note that, given (my interpretation of) Zark’s theory of easements, which I endorse, parents may not block a third party from rescuing their neglected child.

Abortion

Given my acceptance of Portia’s Principle and my denial of Long’s principle (21), Long’s case for abortion does not work either, in my telling. However, Rothbardian abortion-as-eviction, as in Rothbard’s Children and Rights chapter, is still justified by the libertarian property-norm as I interpret it, in all-and-only cases of abortion that can really be framed as eviction (and do not require, for instance, crushing the fetus before removing it from the mother’s body). It may, however, be overridden by the prohibition on homicide, and I have left that indeterminate; see §3.2.2 of my ethics. So that’s all that needs to be said about abortion here.

Illustration of Roderick Long’s example of the pilot Stan of Clouds-R-Us, made with Nano Banana.

More words on left-wing asymmetry (2026-03-08)

Some of my readers who looked at this blog post remained drawn to a left-wing asymmetrical view, that parents have a duty of care toward children. I give them some advice and some clarifications.

Advice to left-wingers

My advice is that if you’d like to hold the left-wing asymmetrical view, it is better to support it by claiming that parenthood creates an implicit agreement/contract between parent and child, rather than using Roderick Long’s defense, which relies on his principle (21). Long’s principle (21), as argued above, is not sufficiently motivated by the thought experiment that was claimed to motivate it, and it overgenerates instances of “killing”. If you must be a left-winger about child neglect, it is better to believe in some sort of metaphysical parenthood contract, as follows.

Left-wing implicit-contract view of parenthood (LWIC): Whenever a person S voluntarily takes action to have a child, and successfully has a child C as a result, then S implicitly makes an agreement/contract with C whereby S is obligated to provide C with childcare (at least enough to prevent C’s death by starvation or other deprivation), but C has no obligations to obey S, or any obligations toward S at all merely as a result of the implicit contract.

I do not believe that parenthood creates an implicit contract, regardless what terms you write into it. It is simply a very odd view, and it just doesn’t make sense to me. But it’s way better than Roderick Long’s view, which had involved his principle (21). After all, the existence, in general, of implicit contracts is independently motivated, as in the case of the informal helicopter ride that I described above.

One issue with LWIC is the standard of childcare. Is “prevent C’s death by starvation or other deprivation” really all there is to it? Why? Many people may think that giving a certain kind of education is also part of a rightful upbringing. In general, it seems many parents may view other parents’ choices as being neglect when compared with the choices that they’d rather make, leading to endless disputes about “upbringings I dislike” being framed as “neglect” for the sake of stealing other people’s children. Maybe someone does not see this outcome as undesirable, although I do; and maybe someone sees a clear and obvious way to prevent it, although I don’t. It is something that I see as a problem, but it is not my problem, since I do not hold to LWIC; for me, the child’s runaway-freedom, as in Children and Rights, is quite sufficient to libertarian theory. I maintain, however, that LWIC is more workable than Roderick Long’s principle (21).

It is possible that free associations in a hypothetical libertarian-anarchist society could pressure parents to make explicit childcare agreements (specifying the standard of care), and then there would be no ambiguity anyway and everyone would be happy. But this is speculation.

Comparison of views in a specific hypothetical case

Given my views on punishment, the fact that Long’s essay was framed in terms of “enforceable obligation” may make it unclear what difference it even makes to me, anyway.

I believe this can be made clearer by noting that it makes a difference as to which actions are considered theft in the following hypothetical scenario. Let us assume that a mother M owns a supply of food F but does not give F to her son S (which M had voluntarily chosen to have), and we claim, for the sake of argument, that S is being neglected by M (that is, we do not here dispute whether this constitutes neglect, or what exactly constitutes it).

Then the application of different views works as follows:

  1. Under LWIC, since a contract is a title-transfer (under both my ethics and Rothbard’s), we may say S is the true owner of F, so that someone who intervenes to give F to S does not commit theft.
  2. Under a view that accepts Roderick Long’s principle (21), it is unclear whether S owns F, but M is currently in the process of killing S by not giving F (or an equivalent) to S, and giving F to S is to be thought of as self-defense, or homicide prevention.
  3. Under a classical Aristotelian symmetrical view that accepts a natural parent-child link, M is failing her duty to care for S, and someone who gives F to S may be seen as forcing M to do her duty, which may be rightfully done only by someone with authority – classically, the state, and in the Lockean state-of-nature, just about anybody. This natural link also implies a duty of S to obey M, however, since M is S’s mother.
  4. Under a Rothbardian symmetrical view, which accepts none of the above—that is, neither an implicit contract, nor a natural link, nor Long’s principle (21)—a third party who gives F to S commits theft, since F is owned by M. But just the same as in LWIC and in Long’s view, as well as in the Lockean state-of-nature case of the Aristotelian view, a third party may intervene to rescue S from M and take S to a different home, leaving F to M’s own management.

I advocate the Rothbardian symmetrical view, at least as the best interpretation of the libertarian property-norm, although I cannot rule out in principle (although I doubt in practice) the possibility of an Aristotelian metaphysician-scientist giving a sound proof of a version of the Aristotelian view grounded in child development data (as Aristotle would have wanted it to be supported) as something that should override the libertarian property-norm.

I sympathize with the person who intervenes to give F to S, but that’s mostly because S is a starving child, not because M voluntarily made the decision to get pregnant with S, nor because M has duties of motherhood to S. I may advocate for leniency for the intervener, but I would advocate much the same leniency if F were stolen and given to an unrelated starving child SC, who had not entered the story yet, and who has nothing to do with M or her choice to have a child.

A repair of Long’s principle (2026-03-09)

In conversation with Teerqz, it was offhandedly suggested adding “without O’s consent” to Long’s principle (21). I then had the thought that this addition would make it plausible to interpret S’s action as aggression, that is, a quite standard violation of the nonaggression principle, and then not have to think so much about killing/homicide in particular, so that we can broaden the principle to talk about harm to body or property, more generally.

That is, we would have the following principle:

(21′) If S voluntarily places O, without O’s consent, in a situation where S’s failure to take positive action on O’s behalf will result in harm to O’s body or property, then such a failure on S’s part constitutes aggression against O.

Unlike Long’s (21), this does not overgenerate: my hypothetical worker consented to his work contract, and hence plausibly to the possibility of its termination by me at any time. Similarly, the passengers voluntarily boarded the plane, so Stan of Clouds-R-Us also does not trigger (21′). But someone may defend that neglectful parents trigger (21′).

Some issues

Two questions are raised by the claim that neglectful parents trigger (21′), which I will call the preexistence issue and the maturity issue.

The preexistence issue

It seems like S can only “place O in a situation without O’s consent” if O existed before being in that situation, since otherwise O was simply always in the situation and was not placed into it.

After all, if a danger to O is to be thought of as a violation of the NAP, then it is a wrongful damage to O’s property in O’s own body. But if O’s body did not exist before, and was created in the dangerous situation, then O never owned an unendangered body which was then placed into danger; S could be culpable for the danger only if S created the danger, not if S merely created O in a situation exposed to the danger.

For instance, suppose S owns the area B, and a person O absentmindedly walks into area B, and S doesn’t want O on S’s property (which S is about to clean, or something) so S pushes O into the unowned area A, but area A is a warzone which is about to be bombed. It seems that S has (knowingly or not) placed O in danger, since before S’s action, O existed and was in safety. But suppose O is instead brought, by S, into existence in the area A. Then O was never in safety, and it is odd to say O was wronged by S. However, the person who bombs the warzone A may be, to whatever extent, culpable for creating the danger to O which was created by their act of bombing.

As an analogy using only land gifts and no bodies being brought into existence, suppose S owns two properties, A and B, which are both warzones, but S protects both A and B with S’s own bomb-defense gear. Then S gifts A to O, but does not gift the use of S’s bomb-defense gear in A, and hence gives O new property which is endangered by bombs. It does not seem that S wrongs O, especially if O is too young to consent anyway; and this seems closely parallel to S creating O, i.e., giving O a body (since a new human O is initially made out of matter which was part of S’s own self-owned body, and is in this way analogous to a gift) but not giving O the further protection from harm which S ordinarily applies to S’s self-owned property (food, shelter, bomb-defense, etc).

Roderick Long had said that “when a woman voluntarily gives birth – i.e., voluntarily brings a child into the world – she is voluntarily moving it from a situation in which it has an automatic life-support system to a situation in which it does not.” Technically, I think a fetus is, long before birth, already in a situation where the mother’s failure to take positive action in its behalf will result in its death. And besides, it’s not biologically possible to never give birth so as to keep a child in “automatic life-support”; clearly the relevant voluntary decision (for a voluntary parent) is conception, not birth. But a child does not exist before conception (regardless whether it exists immediately at conception or only later).

Without relying on the preexistence of souls (in some sort of safe aethereal realm), we could maybe interpret the consent violation as happening only shortly after the child is born, and only in cases where there is the option of the mother notifying someone else who may rescue the child. The mother’s voluntary choice is then not conception, but the choice of placing the child, after birth, in some physical location where it is in danger if not helped by her. It can then be defended that this is the point at which the child is put into a new situation, rather than pregnancy or birth, because this is the point at which the mother has an actual choice: she can either place the child somewhere where the child continues to be in danger if not helped by her, or she can place the child somewhere where the child is not in danger even without her help. During pregnancy, there is no way for the child to not be in danger without the mother, but after pregnancy, if the mother decides to keep the child in some location where it is in danger without the mother, that is the mother’s choice, to which she had alternatives.

Other repairs are possible; some libertarians may also simply accept the preexistence of souls, or deny that the preexistence issue is a relevant problem at all, although I don’t do either.

The maturity issue

It seems like it can only be aggression for S to “place O in a situation without O’s consent” if it is possible for O to consent. But it seems that newborn babies cannot consent to being placed in a situation either way.

Someone can deny this by appealing to a modular autonomy framework, which is independently motivated, and then claiming that “being placed in a situation” is, conveniently, one of the first things to which children gain the ability to consent. Maybe this is not plausible, but it seems that applying (21′) to neglectful parents requires it.

A comment on Desyllas

Teerqz linked me to this piece by Jake Desyllas, which Teerqz does not endorse, but sees as nevertheless an interesting source in libertarian theory. I had not seen Desyllas’s piece before, and find it worth commenting on in this connection.

After reviewing other theories, Desyllas ultimately defends a “theory of causal parental responsibility” which starts from something like (21′) and ends up deriving very similar consequences to the Aristotelian “natural link” view. This is done as follows.

  • Desyllas more or less assumes that (21′) applies to all parents and that the preexistence and maturity issues covered above simply aren’t issues; “children cannot consent to being born”, hence they never consent, and hence there is always aggression unless they are helped.
  • Desyllas furthermore derives that “parents have a positive obligation to do whatever is necessary to remove the child from a state of peril”, and hence “there is a clear basis for parental authority provided by the theory. To remove a child from peril, a parent must act paternalistically toward the child; therefore, the parent is justified in assuming authority over the child.”

I find both of these moves way too fast. Desyllas quotes from Blackstone and Kant and Locke, seemingly without noticing that these authors wrote in the natural law tradition, where the Aristotelian “natural link” view was a commonplace. Although Kant does say “it is a quite correct and even necessary idea to regard the act of procreation as one by which we have brought a person into the world without his consent and on our own initiative”, I do not think that (21′) was in Kant’s mind as a justification for parental obligation; I think more likely he thought of it as merely a helpful frame of mind to have about the obligation, whereas the obligation is justified simply by natural fact of parenthood.

The applicability of (21′) to parents is simply not all that obvious given the issues I just raised, and the derivation of parental authority from it is questionable to say the least. In other cases where a person S puts a person O in danger without O’s consent, it does not seem that S is permitted to take any further action in O’s defense unless O gives consent to that further action; two wrongs don’t make a right. Why may a parent “act paternalistically”, if the parent’s right is derived merely from (21′)? Desyllas is sliding into Aristotelianism without noticing it.

Conclusion on the repair

Overall, while I accept that (21′) is clearly true as stated, I do not believe that it can apply to all child neglect, although maybe it applies to some of it. It is an interesting avenue of research. Libertarians looking for a left-wing asymmetrical theory that can forbid all “intuitive” cases of child neglect are still advised to accept LWIC. Libertarians who are willing to accept parental authority, such as Desyllas, should simply accept classical Aristotelianism (at least regarding the parent-child link) rather than making convoluted detours through accusing parents of aggression. I continue to “advocate the Rothbardian symmetrical view, at least as the best interpretation of the libertarian property-norm”, etc.

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Saturday, February 28, 2026

Ontology and religion

In this blog post, I prove that God exists and defend my acceptance of Catholicism. The accepted proof-of-God is ontological, while the case for Catholicism stands only on faith. My argument bridges metaontology, the analytic necessity of theism, and the rational permissibility of revealed religion.

I begin with a tripartite taxonomy of metaontological approaches: keeping natural language to account for ordinary discourse, adding to it to explain cognitive limits, and subtracting from it to isolate fundamental scientific realities. Aligning specifically with a deflationary, non-subtractive stance, I argue that taking established linguistic practices and historical traditions at face value logically necessitates the analytic truth of theism; I assert that competent, historically informed definitions of God and existence make the statement “God exists” inherently true, thereby characterizing atheism as a failure of linguistic competence.

Building upon this theistic foundation, I subsequently defend my personal adherence to Roman Catholicism by strictly delineating faith—defined as trust in a living, external authority—from natural reason and empirical history. Ultimately, by framing Catholic dogmas and miracles as theological assertions about the past rather than empirically verifiable historical events subject to modern secular historiography, I construct a worldview where institutional religious truths remain logically insulated from, and thus never in direct contradiction with, the discoveries of natural science.

Illustration for this blog post, drawn by Nano Banana.

1. Review of metaontologies

This section reviews approaches to metaontology, as background and preamble for the next section, where I explain my oapproach.

Ontology is often introduced as a debate about what there is. But that framing can hide a prior question: what are we doing when we use existential language at all?

If ontology is “the inventory,” metaontology is the method (and sometimes the therapy) that tells us how to read the inventory: whether to take ordinary talk at face value, to revise it, to supplement it, or to treat it as a mere starting point for something else.

Once the metaontological question is put that way, three broad approaches stand out—approaches that differ not primarily in which entities they list, but in how they treat the authority of natural language and its role in inquiry.

1.1. Keeping natural language as it is

The first approach takes ordinary discourse as basically in good standing and aims to account for it, not to correct it. The animating picture is that the job of philosophy is not to redesign the language we already competently use, but to explain how that language works—its logic, its pragmatics, its embedding in life.

A canonical slogan for this attitude is Wittgenstein’s: “All propositions of our everyday language are in fact, just as they are, in perfect logical order.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.5563) Read metaontologically, the thought is that, even if many natural-language sentences cannot be easily regimented into a perspicuous language such as first-order logic, still, the competence underlying everyday talk is not an ontological mess in need of rescue. If we seem to speak easily and systematically about tables, numbers, properties, holes, shadows, reasons, possibly even “sakes” and “behalves” and “dints”, then a metaontological approach of this first kind tries to explain that systematic ease rather than treat it as an embarrassment.

Logical behaviorism, as I understand it, fits here because it interprets the meaning of our discourse in terms of the life-situations in which it is used: linguistic behavior is part of a broader pattern of action, expectation, and social practice. If a natural-language ontological commitment fits into sentences that are interpreted as true within a human form of life, then there is nothing more that could be wanted from an existence claim, and no metaphysician is needed to separate out the truly existent things from the merely linguistic commitments. Minds, emotions, and perceptions exist, but there is nothing more to the words than their role in the sentences in which they are used in actual practice.

Amie Thomasson’s “easy ontology” is an explicit case of the “keep-language” approach. The central idea is deflationary: if a fragment of ordinary language is consistently and intelligibly used, and its existential claims can be settled by uncontroversial conceptual or analytic standards, then we are entitled—in that deflated sense—to say that the relevant entities exist. Numbers, properties, holes, etc., count as existing because they are the values of variables in well-behaved, established linguistic practices. (In a footnote to page 265 of Ontology Made Easy, Thomasson says she isn’t sure “sakes” are used consistently enough in our language, but she admits their existence conditional on that.)

The payoff of this approach is continuity: ontology becomes, to a significant extent, an account of our conceptual scheme and its place in human life. For critics, an approach admitting everything from average persons to fictional detectives to moral properties seems somehow too permissive, as though anything goes; “keep-language” theorists reply, however, that it only seems that way if you are importing a thick metaphysical standard into a domain where the practice itself already determines the relevant standards of application.

1.2. Adding to natural language to explain cognition

A second metaontological approach begins by granting that natural language is an instrument designed primarily for communication, coordination, and action—not necessarily for revealing the full structure of thought or reality. On this picture, ordinary talk may be too thin, too contingent, or too parochial to capture what cognition can represent. The metaontological move is therefore expansionary: we add to natural language (or systematically extend it) to account not merely for what we do say, but for what we can think, conceive, or entertain as possible.

Here the treatment of universals is telling. Ordinary language contains common nouns and predicates, but it may not explicitly mark every conceivable universal. An expansionary approach takes the fact that something can be conceived of as “predicable of many” as itself a reason to treat it as a candidate universal, even if no community in fact speaks as though it exists. The goal is to go beyond existing linguistic habits toward a more powerful representational scheme.

Meinongianism exemplifies this strategy by allowing nonexistent objects to serve as the intentional correlates of thought: we can think about the golden mountain or the round square, so our cognitive architecture seems to range beyond what exists in the ordinary, extensional way. Meinongians treat ontology as including not just what we ordinarily talk about, but anything we can intend or represent.

Platonism is a more familiar, and related, expansionary program. (Ed Zalta, for instance, started out as a Meinongian and became a platonist, all the while keeping more or less the same views on abstract objects.) It suggests that mathematics, modality, or properties are not just useful linguistic posits but reflect a domain of abstracta that can be grasped by reason. Where the “keep-language” approach often treats talk of numbers or properties as a harmless, practice-governed manner of speaking, the “add-language” approach treats such talk as a clue to deeper cognitive and metaphysical structure. Ordinary language may underdescribe that structure, so we extend it with a theoretically motivated ontology.

The attraction here is explanatory ambition: cognition appears to outstrip ordinary description, so we enrich the ontological story accordingly. Expansionists believe other accounts of ontological commitment cannot account for the expressive power of human representations without smuggling the expansionary machinery back in; rival theorists, of course, see this as too permissive or extravagant.

1.3. Removing from natural language to reach what “really” exists

Instead of treating ordinary language as basically in order or as merely incomplete, this third approach treats ordinary language as ontologically indiscriminate. Everyday discourse is full of conveniences, idealizations, and surface grammar that may mislead us about what is fundamental. So we subtract from natural language: we revise, regiment, or replace ordinary existential talk in order to track a thicker, restricted sense of what exists—what is genuinely “in the world” rather than merely in discourse.

Neo-Quinean metaontology is the most popular version of this. On that view, existence questions are to be answered by looking to our best overall scientific theories: to exist is (roughly) to be a value of a bound variable in the regimentation of the theory we have most reason to accept. Ordinary language is not the tribunal; theory choice is. (Famously, for Quine, mathematical objects exist because they are indispensable to the formulation of our best physical theories.) The neo-Quinean can be relaxed about folk ontology yet strict about scientific ontology: everyday talk is a starting point, but ontological commitment is ultimately a matter of what our best theories must quantify over.

Neopositivist, empiricist approaches are subtractive in a different way; instead of caring so much about what our theories quantify over, the neopositivist leans on observation (and verification, or something like it): what exists is whatever is licensed by experience, measurement, or observational warrant. Here too, ordinary language is trimmed back. We may speak about abstract objects, possibilities, or unobservables, but the thick “exists” is reserved for what can be tied to observational justification. (My favorite revival of logical positivism is Minimal Verificationism by Gordian Haas, although it does not address ontological commitment.)

“Hard-road” nominalism, like Hartry Field’s project of rewriting science without abstract objects, is perhaps the most dramatic instance of subtraction. Field aimed to show that abstracta are dispensable, by rewriting the relevant scientific theories so that they no longer quantify over numbers or sets.

Defenders of this approach see it as treating deep questions of existence with a desired level of seriousness that the earlier approaches lack, by no longer letting them be settled by the surface grammar of ordinary language. There is a risk, however, of revisionary overreach: we may end up with an ontology so austere that it fails to respect the success of ordinary and scientific practices. The approach may seem unmotivated, since given that it is clearly not the ordinary sense of existence, it is unclear why restrictionists decide to speak about existence in this way, and what they think they gain by it.

1.4. Apparent exceptions and why they still fit

Two families of views can look like they do not fit this threefold taxonomy, but they can be integrated once we focus more closely on the metaontological stance rather than the ontology.

1.4.1. Neither particulars nor universals are fundamental

States-of-affairs ontologies (as in Armstrong) and trope theories (such as John Bacon’s) appear to reject the basic natural-language division between proper names (particulars) and common names (universals). They instead treat something else—states of affairs, or tropes—as metaphysically basic, and treat particulars and universals as derivative or constructed.

But this does not constitute a fourth metaontological approach; it is a choice of primitives that can be pursued in any of the three stances.

  • A stick-to-language version will say: ordinary language talks as if there are particulars and universals, and our job is to interpret that talk in terms of tropes or states of affairs without declaring ordinary discourse mistaken.
  • An add-to-language version will argue: ordinary talk is not enough to reveal what cognition or metaphysics demands; we must introduce tropes/states-of-affairs as theoretical posits that better capture what can be thought or conceived.
  • A subtract-from-language version will say: the ordinary distinction misleads; once we regiment our best theory properly, we should replace talk of particulars/universals with the more fundamental categories.

The crucial point is that trope theory and states-of-affairs theory do not by themselves answer how ordinary language relates to ontology; they propose a metaphysical base. Their metaontological orientation depends on whether they treat ordinary discourse as authoritative, incomplete, or misleading.

1.4.2. Ted Sider’s structural realism

Ted Sider’s emphasis on “joint-carving” structure and naturalness can also look like a distinct metaontological position. But I believe that it is better understood as not offering a metaontology at all, at least not in the sense of a systematic account of how existential discourse should be interpreted.

The reason is that “joint-carvingness” functions as a label for the desired outcome—carve nature at the joints—without giving a general method for reading, revising, or extending our existential language. If one says, “include all-and-only the joint-carving categories,” then the pressing question is: by what procedure do we determine which categories are joint-carving? If the answer is not given in a principled way—by appeal to linguistic practice, cognitive explanation, theory choice, or observation—then “naturalness” risks becoming an honorific attached to whichever categories one already favors.

If one were to operationalize the notion of “joint-carving”, it could in principle be implemented in any of the three ways (keep, add, subtract). But as a standalone slogan, (which is how it is presented by Ted Sider,) the notion can only function as an ad hoc filter: we decide case by case what is “natural,” and call the sum of our ad-hoc judgments the criterion. Nature may in some sense have “joints” or important fundamental structure, but without a disciplined account of how we are entitled to assert naturalness claims, structural realism is more of a posture than a method.

1.5. Recap

In metaontology, the central divide is not between realists and anti-realists, or between nominalists and Platonists, but between three stances toward natural language and its authority:

  1. Keep ordinary discourse and explain it.
  2. Add to ordinary discourse to capture cognition or metaphysical possibility.
  3. Subtract from ordinary discourse to isolate a thicker sense of what really exists.

Even if your theory’s primitives are such as tropes and states-of-affairs, which have no straightforward connection to natural language, still you must choose how much of natural language and cognition you want to account for in terms of your primitives; and positions that rely on evaluative vocabulary like “joint-carving” without supplying a principled account of how such evaluations are warranted risk failing to be metaontologies at all, functioning instead as an undeclared case-by-case selection procedure.

Fundamentally, a metaontology is an explicit strategy connecting language, thought, theory, and world. Without choosing and defending such a strategy, your ontology is little more than a list backed by taste.

2. Ontology and theism

This section explains my approach to metaontology and ontology. I believe that accepting the existence of God follows from my choice of metaontology, and hence this section is an “ontological argument” for the existence of God, though not in the usual way. I defend why choosing a metaontological approach that accepts theism as a matter of course is the most reasonable thing to do.

2.1. Non-subtractive, anti-structuralist, deflationary metaontology

I will state my metaontological beliefs and briefly explain why I hold each one; I do not address counterarguments because I do not know of any, and I believe there are none.

Metaontologically, I adopt a non-subtractive approach. This is to say that I reject the approach reviewed in §1.3. I believe that the philosopher has no authority to tell the layman that he is using language wrong. When Democritus allowed that “by convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space”, he distinguished ‘conventional existence’ from ‘real existence’, but he did not attempt the contemporary imposture which amounts to denying the success of ordinary linguistic practice. When your theorizing is over and you have finished writing your list of what things exist, it had better contain every noun in the dictionary, at minimum.

I also adopt an anti-structuralist approach. In the present sense of that term, this means, for one thing, that I reject Ted Sider’s emphasis on structure and naturalness, which I had already criticized in §1.4.2 as not constituting a metaontology at all. More precisely, not only do I reject Sider’s approach to naturalness as ad hoc, but I also do not believe in David Lewis’s or any other approach to naturalness, since I believe all of them are devices for adhockery in ontology. Since I do not believe in joint-carvingness or naturalness, I see no reason to privilege any particular way to use the word “exists” over any other way as long as both ways are defined explicitly and used consistently. Since the approaches reviewed in §1.1 and §1.2 are all careful about this, I am neutral between them.

Hence, I adopt a deflationary approach, which means that there is nothing more to the word “existence” than whatever meaning in which you explicitly define it and use it. Existence does not mean, for instance, anything about being an object of physical theory, or perceivable, or having causal power, or anything like that. You may grant such thick extended meanings to adjectival phrases such as “physical existence”, but not to existence simpliciter.

2.2. Theism should be easy

“God” can be defined in different ways.

Usually, atheist polemicists define it in whatever way is easiest to attack; for instance, the first chapter of Dawkins’s The God Delusion brackets out “Einsteinian religion” and clarifies that he will spend the rest of the book refuting “the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language.” This is because atheist polemicists are not only dishonest, but philistines, caring nothing for the great philosophers of the Western tradition that led up to the world they live in. As Edward Feser said in The Last Superstition:

The irony is that to anyone who actually knows something about the history and theology of the Western religious tradition for which Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens show so much contempt, their books stand out for their manifest ignorance of that tradition and for the breathtaking shallowness of their philosophical analysis of religious matters. Indeed, as we will see, these authors do not even so much as understand what the word “faith” itself has actually meant, historically, within the mainstream of that tradition. One gets the impression that the bulk of their education in Christian theology consisted of reading Elmer Gantry while in college, supplemented with a viewing of Inherit the Wind and a Sunday morning spent channel-surfing televangelists. Nor do they evince the slightest awareness of the historical centrality of ideas deriving from classical philosophy – the tradition of thought deriving from Plato and Aristotle and whose greatest representatives within Christianity are Augustine and Thomas Aquinas – to the content and self-understanding of the mainstream Western religious tradition. This is perhaps not surprising in the case of either Dawkins – a writer of pop science books who evidently wouldn’t know metaphysics from Metamucil – or Vanity Fair boy Hitchens, who probably thinks metaphysics is the sort of thing people like Shirley MacLaine start babbling about when they’ve lost their box office cachet. But such ignorance is simply disgraceful in the case of Dennett and Harris, who are trained philosophers. One would never guess from reading any of the “New Atheists” (not to mention the works of countless other secularist intellectuals) that the vast majority of the greatest philosophers and scientists in the history of Western civilization – not only the thinkers just mentioned but also many modern thinkers outside the classical tradition, including Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Boyle, Newton, and on and on – have firmly believed in the existence of God, and on the basis of entirely rational arguments. And, needless to say, they offer their readers no account of the grave philosophical challenges to which the naturalism they are committed to – the view that the natural, material world is all that exists and that empirical science is the only rational source of knowledge – has consistently been subjected throughout the history of philosophy, and which many influential and sophisticated contemporary philosophers continue to press upon it. Yet the fact is that, contrary to the standard caricature of philosophers as inveterate skeptics who have no truck with religion, among philosophers the view that the existence of God can be rationally demonstrated “enjoyed wide currency, if not hegemony . . . from classical antiquity until well after the dawn of modernity” (to quote the philosopher David Conway, writing in a book that had a major influence on Flew’s conversion to philosophical theism)9; and the suggestion that human reason can be accounted for in purely materialistic terms has, historically speaking, been regarded by most philosophers as a logical absurdity, a demonstrable falsehood. Within the classical Western philosophical tradition, belief in the existence of God and the falsity of materialism has generally been thought to rest firmly and squarely on reason, not “faith.”

I will also quote Feser’s footnote 9, which clarifies the quotation he used:

Conway, The Rediscovery of Wisdom, p. 79. The rational demonstrability of theism is in Conway’s view the core of what he calls the “classical conception” of philosophy, a conception he attributes to Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Plotinus and the other Neo-Platonists, Augustine, Boethius, Maimonides, Aquinas, Renaissance thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and Erasmus, and even (despite their rejection of certain key ancient and medieval philosophical ideas) modern thinkers like Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Benjamin Whichcote and other Cambridge Platonists, Newton, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. To this list of philosophical theists could be added, of course, Anselm, Duns Scotus, and many other medieval Scholastic writers; Islamic philosophers like Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and Averroes; modern philosophers like Locke, Berkeley, Samuel Clarke, and William Paley; Suarez and other Late Scholastic philosophers; Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, Gilson, and other Neo-Scholastics and Neo-Thomists of the 19th and 20th centuries; A.E. Taylor, F.R. Tennant, and other 20th-century Anglican philosophers; and, among contemporary analytic philosophers, David Braine, William Lane Craig, Brian Davies, John Haldane, Robert Koons, Barry Miller, David Oderberg, Alvin Plantinga, Alexander Pruss, James Ross, Richard Swinburne, Charles Taliaferro, and William Vallicella – to name just a few.

Look at all those names. Those were smart people. They are better than you and me. Indeed, if a reader is about to comment on this post, I am absolutely certain with no doubt in my mind that I consider that reader, holistically considered as a human being, a worse person than each and every one of these philosophers, taken individually; they were simply better at thinking, which is the central component of the value of a person. (And hence it does not matter if they supported slavery, or whatever.) We must consider, as Felipe Miguel’s thesis warned, “The Epistemic Significance of Agreement with Exceptional Theistic Philosophers”.

Infographic of Felipe Miguel’s The Epistemic Significance of Agreement with Exceptional Theistic Philosophers, made by Nano Banana.

I claim that, in order to honor the great thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition, we should define “God” and “exists” in whatever sense makes it plausible to say that it is true that “God exists”. It is insensitive, and culture-hating, to define it any other way, in light of the above. There are many such plausible senses available, such as the property of “Platonic Being” of Ed Zalta’s Abstract Objects, p. 43; I am not particular about it. Due to my anti-structuralism on metaontology, I believe many different definitions of “God” and “exists” can be acceptable; and due to my deflationist, anti-subtractive view on metaontology, I believe most of the acceptable definitions will turn out to make the sentence “God exists” come out true.

To be clear: I am saying that you have to contort the definitions until you’re willing to say the words “God exists”, no matter what you mean by them, and if you’re unwilling to do so then you’re insensitive and you hate culture. Some readers may be concerned whether a plausible definition may not turn out to be deistic rather than theistic. Such readers are trying to draw a sharp line between deism and theism, which cannot be done historically; see Atheism and Deism Revalued on the issue. From a historically informed perspective, the definition of “deism” is as indeterminate as the definition of “God”.

2.3. Analyticity of theism

If the components of the proposition “God exists” are defined in some way that makes the proposition true, then it is an analytically true proposition. This seems to have two consequences:

  1. It seems to put me on one historical camp, which favored a priori or ontological proofs-of-God, against a different historical camp, which favored a posteriori or empirical proofs-of-God.
  2. It seems to commit me to the claim that atheists are not competent language users, since they use the word “God” without attributing existence to him.

Regarding the first, I will clarify that actually, both camps gave a priori arguments; regarding the second, I will accept the consequence and explain how it might be true.

2.3.1. Historical arguments were not truly a posteriori

There are two senses in which an argument can be a posteriori, or empirical:

  • An argument is a posteriori in a thorough sense when it is possible for a competent language user to deny the putatively observational premise, if he lacks some relevant nonlinguistic knowledge.
  • An argument is a posteriori in a limited sense when it is conceivable for a human being to deny the putatively observational premise, although such a human being would not be a competent language user.

While many historical arguments for the existence of God have been described as “a posteriori”, I claim that they were only a posteriori in a limited sense, but not in a thorough sense. In the modern, broad sense of analyticity, it is analytic, hence a priori, to say “some things move” (argument from motion) or “some things have the appearance of design” (argument from design), in the relevant technical senses of “motion” and “appearance of design”; if someone denied that any things move, he would not be a competent language user regarding the verb “to move” and the noun “motion”. Due to the difficulty in giving up competent language use regarding these words, even atheists do not generally respond to these arguments by denying their putatively observational premise, and instead they respond by denying the consequence.

2.3.2. Atheists are not competent language users

If the components of the proposition “God exists” are defined in some way that makes the proposition true, then it is an analytically true proposition, which means atheists are not competent language users with respect to these words. I claim that this is the case; for instance, atheism often falls out of a restrictive metaontology which, as noted before, leads systematically to incompetent language use.

Since we can find studies saying autistic people are more likely to be atheists, and also have difficulties with figurative language, I have been tempted to speculate that atheism is connected to difficulties with polysemous language, finding it hard to say something “exists” if it’s not connected to sense-perception (as most things that exist are). However, a study comparing religion and verbal ability does not support this view.

Aside from ordinary confusion owing to poor education, we cannot rule out dishonesty; after all, one purpose of identification as an atheist is to signal your membership in atheist culture, and hence the fact that you consider the bulk of humanity to be your outgroup, i.e., that you hate most humans. This motivation is clearly not tied to truth-value. Such, then, are the mechanisms for incompetent language use by atheists.

3. Religion

“Natural religion” is when you try to honor God based on what you know about him from nature, without claiming that any particular event constitutes a divine revelation. If you somehow felt inspired by the divine being whose existence was proved above, you could attempt to honor him based only on your natural knowledge; I do not care much about attempts to do this, although it is theologically important that this is possible.

“Revealed religion” is when you accept some particular event as a divine revelation, such as the miracle at Mount Sinai, or the miracle of Jesus’s resurrection, or some other miracle. This also often involves a holy book, and so on.

Either one may be simply called “religion”, depending on context.

I am a Roman Catholic. This section of this blog post will clarify my views on revealed religion, but only in order to avoid confusion with my belief in theism, which was explained above.

3.1. Motivation of revealed religion, generally: matters of faith

My approach to revealed religion is defined by the following conceptions.

  1. If something can be found outside revealed religion, then it is not a correct motivation for revealed religion. Hence, the following are not correct motivations for revealed religion: aesthetic appeal, a sense of belonging to a community, moral values. (Although impious philosophers such as Spinoza and Kant have believed that revealed religion is for the sake of moral values, I side with Christian philosophers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in believing that revealed religion has nothing to do with moral values, since moral values can be demonstrated with absolute clarity beyond a shadow of a doubt by the unaided power of human natural reason, and hence do not require revealed religion.)
  2. Revealed religion is believed on faith, and it is characteristic of faith that one cannot be irrational for failing to have it. Hence, I reject views where religious belief is to be supported by reason, such as evidentialist approaches where the resurrection of Jesus is argued to have happened historically; and I reject views where reason is to be supported by religious belief, such as in presuppositionalist apologetics.
  3. Faith is trust in an external authority. Hence, religious belief is not properly basic as Alvin Plantinga says, nor does it require any special faculty besides our senses, our will, and our reason; in particular, it does not require a faculty of intellectual intuition, or “sensus divinitatis”, or any belief-producing “inner witness of the Holy Ghost” except insofar as it may be said that the Holy Ghost works on humans by means of their ordinary faculties.

In my opinion, revealed religion is when you trust an external authority about “matters of faith” related to honoring God, such as what names he should be called, what rituals may be rightly performed in his honor, afterlife-related beliefs, etc. In my opinion, these are questions on which nature does not determine an answer, and hence unaided human natural reason will not arrive at an answer. But you may still want an answer, since it is common to want to have rituals performed surrounding your birth, death, marriage, etc. But then again, you are not rationally required to want these answers, and you may be perfectly rational if you decide to have no answers to these questions which are matters of faith.

3.2. Motivation for Catholicism: one, holy, catholic, apostolic

The Catholic Church has traditionally claimed that its “motives of credibility” are its unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. There are many documents in which it claims this, and the most prominent one nowadays is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 811–870. The catechism also cites other sources in its footnotes for your perusal.

Notice how this works perfectly with my conception of faith: you certainly are not irrational if you fail to believe in Catholicism due to these motivations, hence faith is kept distinct and separate from reason, such that they cannot be confused. However, these are pretty appealing motivations anyway, and not in a merely aesthetic sense:

  • Unity is pretty cool if you care about saying “I believe in this religion” in a way that has any truth-conditions at all. I have shown that it is impossible for Protestantism to have any fixed meaning, and similarly with Judaism and other religions, because there is no central living authority. Catholicism, on the other hand, is whatever the Pope says it is, hence it means something.
  • Holiness can refer to whatever senses of holiness you may think of. Certainly the doctrines of Catholicism contain no error, as will be explained in the next section.
  • Catholicity, or worldwideness, is nice if you care about being part of something which is spread across the whole world, and hence serves as a symbol of cosmopolitan aspirations.
  • Apostolicity might not seem obviously cool by itself – after all, if you already love the apostles, you’re already interested in Christianity. But actually, it has a similar relationship to time as catholicity has to space. Christianity claims continuity with ancient Judaism, which is one of the world’s oldest religions, all the way in the bronze age. And in particular, Catholicism claims a continuity of institutional hierarchy: the first Pope picked up where the last Jewish High Priest had left off. Even if Hinduism is older than ancient Judaism by some measures, certainly it cannot claim this kind of institutional continuity. Given the previous remarks on unity, this means Hinduism cannot claim to really be the same religion that it was in antiquity, unlike Catholicism.

3.3. Faith vs. reason

The burden of this section is to show that Catholicism does not contradict reason, which is easy to do.

3.3.1. History vs the past

I believe various claims about the past made by Catholicism, such as that Jesus rose from the dead, performed miracles, etc etc. I do so without any irrationality, for you may notice that I did not call these historical claims.

Although many official Church documents may call these historical claims, they are not historical claims in the sense I mean it: in this sense, something is part of history if-and-only-if we can determine that it is part of the past from current evidence, by current methods. Since current university-accepted historiographical methods do not permit accepting that miracles happened, no miracles are part of history in this sense.

The Catholic Church does not claim that miracles are part of history in this sense, either: the Church instead asserts that these events happened in the past, and does not furthermore make the claim that there is evidence, acceptable by current methods, to show that they happened. Hence, in the sense at hand, the Catholic Church makes claims about the past, not about history.

The Church’s claims about the past are to be accepted on faith, entirely unrelated to any claims about history. The historian is free to determine the content of history without any worries that he may be debunking some claim made by the Catholic Church.

3.3.2. Other propositions

Maybe you think the Catholic Church makes some claim which is not about the past, but which is nevertheless erroneous. You shouldn’t think so, since the following is a dogma proclaimed by the First Vatican Council:

  1. Even though faith is above reason, there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals the mysteries and infuses faith, and who has endowed the human mind with the light of reason.

  2. God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth. The appearance of this kind of specious contradiction is chiefly due to the fact that either the dogmas of faith are not understood and explained in accordance with the mind of the Church, or unsound views are mistaken for the conclusions of reason.

  3. Therefore we define that every assertion contrary to the truth of enlightened faith is totally false.

  4. Furthermore the Church which, together with its apostolic office of teaching, has received the charge of preserving the deposit of faith, has by divine appointment the right and duty of condemning what wrongly passes for knowledge, lest anyone be led astray by philosophy and empty deceit.

  5. Hence all faithful Christians are forbidden to defend as the legitimate conclusions of science those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith, particularly if they have been condemned by the Church; and furthermore they are absolutely bound to hold them to be errors which wear the deceptive appearance of truth.

This dogma is very important, since you may use it to assure yourself that any supposed falsehood proclaimed by the Catholic Church is only your misunderstanding. After all, suppose you know by your own reason that some proposition P is true. Then if the Catholic Church seems to proclaim that not-P is true, there is a contradiction between faith and reason, which contradicts the Vatican I dogma. Hence, charitably interpreted, the Catholic Church does not proclaim that not-P is true, no matter how it may appear to the contrary.

This may seem weird if you’ve never thought about it. But Catholicism is not like Protestantism, where it is your job to figure out how to interpret the revealed words defensibly. This is very much not your job. If the proposition P seems to you, by the power of your natural human reason, to be a legitimate conclusion of science, then all you have to do is to simply teach it as such, as you normally would; and if the Catholic Church disagrees, then you will be notified of your excommunication by your bishop, or by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, or by the Pope himself, as the case may be. This actual enforcement by a living authority is what determines that, after all, you had in that case turned out to really have been “forbidden to defend as the legitimate conclusions of science” the proposition P. Of course, if it really is proven that the proposition P is true without doubt, such that it is irrational to deny it, then in such a circumstance Catholicism would have falsified itself. This hasn’t happened, and by God’s protection, it won’t.

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