Phil 1 – Winter 2020

Paper Prompt 2

Prompt: Choose exactly one argument/account from the list of options below and

advance an objection to it. Make sure to fully explain the argument/account itself and any

necessary background, then advance your objection to it, then consider and address some

potential responses to your objection. Follow all of the instructions.

List of options: (Remember: choose one)

(1) Against Knowing the Future (Argument) (p. 60)

(2) The Dreaming Argument (p. 66)

(3) The Same Body Account (p. 80)

(4) The Psychological Continuity Account (p. 82)

(5) Against Fearing Death (Argument) (p. 98)

Instructions: (Read these carefully and follow them!)

• Due date: Tuesday 2/25 at 11:59 pm

• Submit: Electronically on Gauchospace (in Week 8 section) as a pdf file

o Make sure to upload the correct file and CLICK “SUBMIT”!

• Late penalty: 3.33% per day starting at midnight (maximum penalty: 50%)

• Word limit: between 900 and 1200 words

• Labeling:

o Put your perm number but NOT YOUR NAME on front (blind grading)

o Include an exact word count on front

• Formatting:

o Double-spaced with one inch margins

o Times New Roman size 12 (or something close)

• References:

o Cite “(Korman p. X)” (where X = page #) when referencing textbook

o Cite “(lecture slides)” when referencing lecture slides

o No need for a bibliography if you reference only textbook and/or slides

o Need a bibliography if you reference anything else (not recommended)

Learning from Arguments
An Introduction to Philosophy

By Daniel Z. Korman
Fall 2019 Edition

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Table of Contents

Preface 3
Introduction 5
1. God Does Not Exist 19
2. You Should Bet on God 29
3. No Freedom 43
4. You Know Nothing 59
5. What Makes You You 76
6. Don’t Fear the Reaper 98
7. Taxation is Immoral 108
8. Abortion is Immoral 119
9. Eating Animals is Immoral 141
10. What Makes Things Right 158
Appendix A: Logic 170
Appendix B: Writing 180

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Preface
I’m going to argue that you have no free will. I’m going to argue for some other surprising things
too, for instance that death isn’t bad for you, taxation is immoral, and you can’t know anything
whatsoever about the world around you. I’m also going to argue for some things you’re probably
not going to like: that abortion is immoral, you shouldn’t eat meat, and God doesn’t exist.
The arguments aren’t my own. I didn’t come up with them. I don’t even accept all of them:
there are two chapters whose conclusions I accept, three I’m undecided about, and five I’m certain
can’t be right. (I’ll let you guess which are which.) This isn’t for the sake of playing devil’s
advocate. Rather, the idea is that the best way to appreciate what’s at stake in philosophical
disagreements is to study and engage with serious arguments against the views you’d like to hold.
Each chapter offers a sustained argument for some controversial thesis, specifically written
for an audience of beginners. The aim is to introduce newcomers to the dynamics of philosophical
argumentation, using some of the standard arguments one would cover in an introductory
philosophy course, but without the additional hurdles one encounters when reading the primary
sources of the arguments: challenging writing, obscure jargon, and references to unfamiliar works
or schools of thought. Since the aim is to introduce readers to the dynamics of argumentation—as
opposed to introducing them to actual philosophers and their philosophies—I don’t always give
the most sophisticated or historically faithful versions of the arguments, opting instead for more
accessible formulations. And since the book is aimed at absolute beginners, I often ignore
objections and nuances that would only ever occur to someone already well-versed in these issues.
The different chapters aren’t all written from the same perspective. This is obvious from a
quick glance at the table of contents: the first chapter argues that you shouldn’t believe in God,
while the second argues that you should. You’ll also find that chapters 5 and 6 contain arguments
pointing to different conclusions about the relationship between people and their bodies, and
chapter 7 contains arguments against the very theory of morality that’s defended in chapter 10. So
readers will be exposed to a variety of different philosophical perspectives, and should be on the
lookout for ways in which the arguments in one chapter provide the resources for resisting
arguments in other chapters.
And while there are chapters arguing both for and against belief in God, that isn’t the case
for other topics we’ll cover. For instance, there’s a chapter arguing that you don’t have free will,
but no chapter arguing that you do have free will. That doesn’t mean that you’ll only get to hear

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one side of the argument. The views I’m defending within each chapter do always gets the last
word, but along the way you will be exposed to the standard objections to the views and arguments
I’m advancing, and you can decide for yourself whether the responses I offer to those objections
are convincing. Those who need help finding the flaws in the reasoning (or ideas for paper topics)
can look to the reflection questions at the end of each chapter for some clues.
As I said, the arguments advanced in the book are not my own, and at the end of each
chapter I acknowledge the sources of the arguments. In some chapters, the central arguments have
a long history, and the formulations I use can’t be credited to any one philosopher in particular.
Other chapters, however, are much more directly indebted to the work of specific contemporary
philosophers, reproducing the contents of their books and articles (with some modifications and
simplifications). In particular, chapter 7 closely follows the opening chapters of Michael Huemer’s
The Problem of Political Authority; chapter 8 reproduces the central arguments of Judith Jarvis
Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” and Don Marquis’s “Why Abortion is Immoral”; and chapter
9 draws heavily from Dan Lowe’s “Common Arguments for the Moral Acceptability of Eating
Meat” and Alastair Norcross’s “Puppies, Pigs, and People”.
I’m grateful to Jeff Bagwell, Matt Davidson, Nikki Evans, Jason Fishbein, Bill Hartmann,
Clayton Littlejohn, Katherine Lowe, David Mokriski, and Neil Sinhababu for helpful suggestions,
and to the Facebook Hivemind for help identifying the further readings for the various chapters.
Special thanks are due to Chad Carmichael, Jonathan Livengood, and Daniel Story for extensive
feedback on a previous draft of the book, and to the students in my 2019 Freshman Seminar: Shreya
Acharya, Maile Buckman, Andrea Chavez, Dylan Choi, Lucas Goefft, Mino Han, PK Kottapalli,
Mollie Kraus, Mia Lombardo, Dean Mantelzak, Sam Min, Vivian Nguyen, Ariana Pacheco Lara,
Kaelen Perrochet, Rijul Singhal, Austin Tam, Jennifer Vargas, Kerry Wang, and Lilly Witonsky.
Finally, thanks to Renée Bolinger for permission to use her portrait of the great 20th century
philosopher and logician Ruth Barcan Marcus on the cover. You can see some more of her portraits
of philosophers here: https://www.reneebolinger.com/portraits.html

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Introduction

1. Detailed Contents
As I said in the preface, each chapter is written “in character”, representing a specific
perspective (not necessarily my own!) on the issue in question. But they are not all written from
the same perspective, and you should not expect the separate chapters to form a coherent whole.
In Chapter 1, “God Does Not Exist”, I advance an argument that God could not allow all
the suffering we find in the world, and therefore must not exist. I address a number of attempts to
explain why God might allow suffering, for instance that it’s necessary for appreciating good
things, for building character, or for having free will. I also address the response that God has
hidden reasons that we cannot expect to understand.
In Chapter 2, “You Should Bet on God”, I advance an argument that you should believe in
God because it is in your best interest: you’re putting yourself in the running for an eternity in
heaven without risking losing anything of comparable value. I defend the argument against a
variety of objections, for instance that it is incredibly unlikely that God exists, that merely believing
in God isn’t enough to gain entry into heaven, and that it’s impossible to change one’s beliefs at
will.
In Chapter 3, “No Freedom”, I advance two arguments that no one ever acts freely. The
first turns on the idea that all of our actions are determined by something that lies outside our
control, namely what we most strongly desire. The second turns on the idea that our actions are all
consequences of exceptionless, “deterministic” laws of nature. I address the concern that the laws
may not be deterministic by arguing that undetermined, random actions wouldn’t be free either,
and I address attempts to show that there can be free will even in a deterministic universe.
In Chapter 4, “You Know Nothing”, I argue for two skeptical conclusions. First, I advance
an argument that we cannot know anything about the future. That’s so, I argue, because all of our
reasoning about the future relies on an assumption that we have no good reason to accept, namely
that the future will resemble the past. Second, I advance an argument that we cannot know anything
about how things presently are in the world around us, since we cannot rule out the possibility that
we are currently dreaming.
In Chapter 5, “What Makes You You”, I criticize a number of attempts to answer the
question of personal identity: under what conditions are a person at one time and a person at

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another time one and the same person? I reject the suggestion that personal identity is a matter of
having the same body, on the basis of an argument from conjoined twins and an argument from
the possibility of two people swapping bodies. I reject the suggestion that personal identity can be
defined in terms of psychological factors on the strength of “fission” cases in which one person’s
mental life is transferred into two separate bodies.
In Chapter 6, “Don’t Fear Death”, I advance an argument that death cannot be bad for you,
since you don’t experience any painful sensations while dead. I argue that you don’t experience
any painful sensations while dead by arguing that physical organisms cease to be conscious when
they die and that you are a physical organism. I also address the suggestion that what makes death
bad for you is that it deprives you of pleasures you would otherwise have had.
In Chapter 7, “Taxation is Immoral”, I argue that it is wrong for governments to tax or
imprison their citizens, on the grounds that these practices are not relevantly different from a
vigilante locking vandals in her basement and robbing her neighbors to pay for her makeshift
prison. I address a variety of potential differences, with special attention to the suggestion that we
have tacitly consented to following the law and paying taxes and thereby entered into a “social
contract” with the government.
In Chapter 8, “Abortion is Immoral”, I examine a number of arguments both for and against
the immorality of abortion. I argue that the question cannot be settled by pointing to the fact that
the embryo isn’t self-sufficient or conscious or rational, nor by pointing to the fact that it has
human DNA, that it is a potential person, or that life begins at conception. I then examine the
argument that abortion is immoral because the embryo has a right to life, and I argue that having
a right to life doesn’t entail having a right to continued use of the mother’s womb. Finally, I
advance an alternative argument for the immorality of abortion, according to which this killing,
like other killings, is wrong because it deprives its victim of a valuable future.
In Chapter 9, “Eating Animals is Immoral”, I defend the view that it is immoral to eat meat
that comes from so-called “factory farms”. I begin by criticizing three common reasons for
thinking that eating meat is morally acceptable: because people have always eaten meat, because
eating meat is necessary, and because eating meat is natural. I then argue that eating factory-farmed
meat is immoral, on the grounds that it would be immoral to raise and slaughter puppies in similar
ways and for similar reasons.

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In Chapter 10, “What Makes Things Right”, I advance a “utilitarian” theory of morality,
according to which the rightness or wrongness of an action is always entirely a matter of the extent
to which it increases or decreases overall levels of happiness in the world. I defend the theory
against the objection that it wrongly permits killing one person to save five. Along the way, I
consider the ways in which morality is and isn’t subjective and variable across cultures, and what
to say about the notorious “trolley cases”.
In Appendix A, “Logic”, I examine one of the features that makes an argument a good
argument, namely validity. I explain what it means for an argument to be valid, and I illustrate the
notion of validity by presenting four examples of valid forms of argument.
In Appendix B, “Writing”, I present a model for writing papers for philosophy courses:
introduce the view or argument you plan to criticize (section 1), advance your objections (section
2), and address likely responses to your objections (section 3). Along the way, I explain the
importance of clear and unpretentious writing that is charitable towards opposing viewpoints; I
offer advice for editing rough drafts; I identify some criteria that philosophy instructors commonly
use when evaluating papers; and I explain the difference between consulting online sources and
plagiarizing them.

2. The Elements of Arguments
Throughout the book, you’ll hear a lot about arguments and premises and conclusions
following from premises. So let’s begin by having a look at what an argument is, and examining
some common argumentative strategies.
An argument is a sequence of claims, consisting of premises, a conclusion, and in some
cases one or more subconclusions. The conclusion is what the argument is ultimately trying to
establish, or what’s ultimately being argued for. The premises are the assumptions that, taken
together, are meant to serve as reasons for accepting the conclusion. A subconclusion is a claim
that is meant to be established by some subset of the premises but that isn’t itself the ultimate
conclusion of the argument.
As an illustration, consider the following argument:

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Against Fearing Death
(FD1) You cease to be conscious when you die
(FD2) If you cease to be conscious when you die, then being dead isn’t bad for you
(FD3) So, being dead isn’t bad for you
(FD4) If being dead isn’t bad for you, then you shouldn’t fear death
(FD5) So, you shouldn’t fear death

The argument has three premises: FD1, FD2, and FD4. FD5 is the conclusion of the argument,
since that’s what the argument is ultimately trying to establish. FD3 is a subconclusion. It isn’t the
conclusion, since the ultimate goal of the argument is to establish that you shouldn’t fear death,
not that being dead isn’t bad for you (which is just a step along the way). Nor is it a premise, since
it isn’t merely being assumed. Rather, it’s been argued for: it is meant to be established by FD1
and FD2.
In this book, you can always tell which claims in the labeled and indented arguments are
premises, conclusions, and subconclusions. The conclusion is always the final claim in the
sequence. The subconclusions are anything other than the final claim that begins with a “So”. Any
claim that doesn’t begin with “So” is a premise. (Those that begin with “If so” are premises. More
on these in a bit.)
However, when it comes to unlabeled arguments—arguments appearing in paragraph
form—all bets are off. For instance, I might say:

Death isn’t bad for you. After all, you cease to be conscious when you die, and something
can’t be bad for you if you’re not even aware of it. And if that’s right, then you shouldn’t
fear death, since it would be irrational to fear something that isn’t bad for you.

The paragraph begins with a subconclusion, the conclusion shows up right in the middle of the
paragraph, and neither of them is preceded by a “So”. Here, you have to use some brain-power
and clues from the context to figure out which bits are the basic assumptions (the premises), which
bit is the conclusion, and which bits are mere subconclusions.
All of the labeled arguments in the book are constructed in such a way that the conclusion
is a logical consequence of the premises—or, as I sometimes put it, the conclusion “follows from”
the premises. You may or may not agree with FD1, and you may or may not agree with FD2. But
what you can’t deny is that FD1 and FD2 together entail FD3. If FD3 is false, then it must be that
either FD1 or FD2 (or both) is false. What that means is that you cannot reject the conclusion of
any of the labeled arguments in the book while agreeing with all of the premises. You must find

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some premise to deny if you do not want to accept the conclusion. (See Appendix A, “Logic”, for
more on how to tell when a conclusion follows from some premises.)

3. Conditionals
Arguments frequently contain premises of the form “if… then…”, like FD2 and FD4. We
call such claims conditionals, and we also have terms for the different parts of a conditional. The
bit that comes between the ‘if’ and the ‘then’ is the antecedent of the conditional, and the bit that
comes after the ‘then’ is the consequent of the conditional. Using FD2 as an illustration, the
antecedent is you cease to be conscious when you die, the consequent is being dead is not bad for
you, and the conditional is the whole claim: if you cease to be conscious when you die then being
dead is not bad for you.
(Strictly speaking, conditionals don’t have to be of the form “if… then…”. They can also
be of the form “… only if…”, as in “You should fear death only if being dead is bad for you”, or
of the form “… if …”, as in “You shouldn’t fear death if being dead isn’t bad for you”.)
Conditionals affirm a link between two claims, and you can agree that the claims are linked
in the way the conditional says they are, even if you don’t agree with the claims themselves. To
see this, consider the following conditional, CD:

(CD) If Corrine is under 21, then it she is not allowed to drink alcohol

You might think that Corrine is 22 and that she is allowed to drink alcohol. Still, you should agree
with CD: you should agree that being under 21 and being allowed to drink are linked in the way
CD says they are. To deny CD, you’d have to think, for instance, that the drinking age was 18. But
you don’t reject a conditional just because you disagree with its antecedent or its consequent (or
both). Likewise, you can agree with FD4 even if you think that being dead is bad for you. To
disagree with FD4, you’d have to think that it’s sometimes rational to fear things that aren’t bad
for you.

4. Common Argumentative Strategies
Arguments can play a variety of different roles in philosophical discussion. Let’s have a
look as some common argumentative strategies that you’ll encounter throughout the book.

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First, one might use one argument to defend a premise in another argument. For instance,
premise FD1 of the Against Fearing Death argument—that you cease to be conscious when you
die—is hardly obvious. So someone who likes the Against Fearing Death argument might try to
produce a further argument in defense of that premise, like the following:

The Brain Death Argument
(BC1) Your brain stops working after you die
(BC2) If your brain stops working after you die, then you cease to be conscious when you
die
(FD1) So, you cease to be conscious when you die

Notice that FD1 is the conclusion of this argument, whereas it is merely a premise of the Against
Fearing Death argument. And whenever one wants to deny a claim that’s a conclusion of an
argument, one must identify some flaw in that argument. That means that anyone who planned to
resist the Against Fearing Death argument by denying FD1 now has to reckon with this Brain
Death Argument.
Second, one might use an argument to challenge another argument. There are two ways of
doing so. One would be to produce an argument for the opposite conclusion. For instance, one
might advance the following argument against FD5:

The Uncertain Fate Argument
(UF1) You don’t know what will happen to you after you die
(UF2) If you don’t know what will happen to you after to die, then you should fear death
(UF3) So, you should fear death

Notice that UF3 is a denial of the conclusion of the Against Fearing Death argument. Thus, if the
Uncertain Fate Argument is successful, then something must go wrong in the Against Fearing
Death argument, though it would still be an open question where exactly it goes wrong.
Another way to challenge an argument is to produce a second argument against a premise
of the first argument. Here, for instance, is an argument against FD1 of the Against Fearing Death
argument:

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The Afterlife Argument
(AF1) You immediately go to heaven or hell after you die
(AF2) If you immediately go to heaven or hell after you die, then you don’t cease to be
conscious after you die
(AF3) So, you don’t cease to be conscious after you die

Unlike the Uncertain Fate argument, The Afterlife Argument challenges a premise of the Against
Fearing Death argument, and does indicate where that argument is supposed to go wrong.
I don’t mean to suggest that these are especially good arguments. Not all arguments are
created equal! People who believe in the afterlife aren’t likely to be convinced by the Brain Death
Argument and people who don’t believe in the afterlife aren’t likely to be convinced by the
Afterlife Argument. As you read on, you’ll discover that a lot of the work in philosophy involves
trying to find arguments that will be convincing even to those who are initially inclined to reject
their conclusions.

5. Necessary Conditions, Sufficient Conditions, and Counterexamples
Let’s continue our discussion of common argumentative strategies by looking at some
specific strategies for constructing arguments. One involves identifying necessary and sufficient
conditions. A sufficient condition for something is something that guarantees that it’s true. A
necessary condition for something is something that’s required in order for it to be true.
To make the idea more concrete, let’s think about some specific examples from the ethics
of abortion. Is it wrong to kill a six-week-old embryo? One way of tackling that question is to think
more generally about when it is and isn’t wrong to kill something.
Some might suggest that it’s wrong to kill something if it has a beating heart. In other
words, when something has a beating heart, that by itself guarantees that it’s wrong to kill it. If
that’s right, then we’ve identified a sufficient condition for a killing to be wrong. And the proposed
sufficient condition can then be put to work in an argument against abortion:

The Beating Heart Argument
(BH1) A six-week-old embryo has a beating heart
(BH2) It’s always immoral to kill something if it has a beating heart
(BH3) So, it’s immoral to kill a six-week-old embryo

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Others might suggest that the only time it’s wrong to kill something is when that thing is
conscious. In other words, a requirement for a killing to be wrong is that the thing being killed is
conscious. If that’s right, then we’ve identified a necessary condition for a killing to be wrong.
This proposed necessary condition can then be put to work in an argument in defense of abortion:

The Consciousness Argument
(CN1) A six-week-old embryo isn’t conscious
(CN2) It’s only wrong to kill something if it’s conscious
(CN3) So, it isn’t wrong to kill a six-week-old embryo

When someone proposes some necessary or sufficient conditions, they’re making a very
strong claim: they’re saying that things are always a certain way, or that they’re never a certain
way. BH2 says that killing things with beating hearts is always wrong; CN2 says that killing
nonconscious things is never wrong. Accordingly, one can try to challenge such proposals by
coming up with counterexamples, examples in which things aren’t the way that the premise says
things always are, or things that are the way that the premise says things never are.
For instance, you might challenge BH2 by pointing out that worms have hearts, and it isn’t
wrong to kill them. And you might challenge CN2 by pointing out that it’s wrong to kill someone
who’s temporarily anaesthetized, even though they’re unconscious. In other words, worms are a
counterexample to BH2 and anaesthetized people are a counterexample to CN2.
These counterexamples can then be put to work in arguments of their own, for instance:

The Worm Argument
(WA1) Worms have beating hearts
(WA2) If worms have beating hearts, then: if BH2 is true, it’s wrong to kill worms
(WA3) It isn’t wrong to kill worms
(WA4) So, BH2 is false

Argument by counterexample is a very common argumentative strategy, and we’ll see numerous
examples in the different chapters of the book.
One last thing. You’ll sometimes see claims that include the phrase “if and only if”. These
claims aim to specify both necessary and sufficient condition, simultaneously. Take the question
of when something is bad for you. Breaking your leg is bad for you, and relaxing in the hot tub

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isn’t bad for you. But those are just some examples; suppose we wanted to give a perfectly general
account of which things are and aren’t bad for you. Here’s a first stab at doing so, which we’ll
encounter in chapter 6:
(HD) Something is bad for you if and only if it’s painful
This account gives the right results in the cases we just considered: it says that breaking your leg
is bad for you, since that’s painful, and that relaxing in the hot tub isn’t bad for you, since that’s
not painful.
HD can be seen as two claims packed into one. First, it’s saying that something is bad for
you if it’s painful. In other words, if something is painful, that’s sufficient for it to be bad for you.
Second, it’s saying that something is bad for you only if it’s painful. In other words, something’s
being painful is necessary for it to be bad for you. So, HD is saying that being painful is a necessary
and sufficient condition for something’s being bad for you.
And because HD is making such a strong claim—specifying both necessary and sufficient
conditions—it can be challenged in multiple ways. First, you might try to show that being painful
isn’t a sufficient condition, by producing examples of things that are painful but aren’t bad for you.
Second, you might ty to show that being painful isn’t a sufficient condition, by producing examples
of things are aren’t painful but that are bad for you. An example of either sort would count as a
counterexample to HD. Can you think of one?

6. Argument by Analogy
Another common argumentative strategy is argument by analogy. We’ll encounter such
arguments repeatedly in this book. Here is a case from Chapter 7, which is meant to show that it’s
wrong for the government to tax and imprison its citizens:

VIGILANTE. Jasmine discovers that Luke and Leo have set up a fake charity and are conning
some people in her neighborhood. She shows up at their door, leads them at gunpoint to
her basement, and plans to keep them there for a year as punishment. Quickly realizing
how expensive it is to take care of them, Jasmine goes to her neighbors and demands $50
from each of them, at gunpoint. She explains that half the money will go towards taking
care of her prisoners and that the rest will go towards a gym she is building to help keep
troubled kids off the street. Those who do not comply are locked up in her basement with
her other prisoners.

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Thinking about this scenario is meant to elicit the intuition that Jasmine is doing something wrong.
But what Jasmine is doing seems entirely analogous to what the government does when it taxes
and imprisons its citizens. If that’s right, then we should think that taxation and imprisonment by
the government are wrong as well.
What really drives an argument by analogy isn’t so much the presence of similarities
between the two cases being compared, but rather the absence of a certain kind of difference. In
VIGILANTE, the idea is that there’s no morally significant difference between what Jasmine does
and what the government does, that is, no difference between the cases that could explain why the
one is wrong while the other is okay. The argument can be framed as follows:

Against Taxation and Imprisonment
(TX1) If there is no morally significant difference between two actions A and B, then: if A
is wrong, then B is wrong
(TX2) It is wrong for Jasmine to extort and kidnap her neighbors
(TX3) There is no morally significant difference between Jasmine extorting and
kidnapping her neighbors and the government taxing and imprisoning its citizens
(TX4) So, it is wrong for the government to tax and imprison its citizens

The idea behind TX1 is that, if one action is immoral and another isn’t, there has got to be
some explanation for that, some difference between them that accounts for the moral difference.
Put another way: it would be arbitrary to hold that one action is right and another is wrong unless
one can point to some difference between the actions to explain why they differ morally. TX2 is
supported by our intuitions about the VIGILANTE case. And the idea behind TX3 is that there are
no differences between what Jasmine does and what the government does that make for a moral
difference between the cases.
The challenge for those who don’t want to accept the conclusion of the argument, TX4, is
to identify some morally significant difference, and defenders of the argument must then either
argue that the indicated differences aren’t morally significant, or else modify the case so that the
indicated differences are no longer present.

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7. Thought Experiments
The VIGILANTE case is what’s called a “thought experiment”, and we’ll see many more
examples of thought experiments throughout the book. A fictional scenario is presented—some
more realistic than others—and then readers are asked for their intuitive reactions to the case.
Thought experiments can be put to work in defending or challenging an argument in a
number of different ways. We just saw how they can play a role in argument by analogy. They
also often play a supporting role in arguments by counterexample. In Chapter 3, for instance, we’ll
encounter the following argument for the conclusion that we sometimes do things of our own free
will:

The Argument for Freedom
(FR1) Sometimes you perform an action after deciding to perform that action
(FR2) If one performs an action after deciding to perform it, then one performs that
action freely
(FR3) So some of your actions are performed freely

The second premise, FR2, purports to give a sufficient condition for free action: so long as
someone does what they decided to do, that guarantees that they did it freely. And I’ll try to cast
doubt on this premise with the following thought experiment:

HYPNOTIC DECISION: Tia is on the run from the law and knows the cops are hot on her trail.
She is also a master hypnotist. As she passes Colton on the street, she hypnotizes him and
plants an irresistible post-hypnotic suggestion: whenever he hears someone shout Freeze!
he will grow very angry with the person, decide to tackle them, and then tackle them. Just
then, Chris the cop arrives on the scene, sees Tia, and shouts Freeze! As a result of the
hypnotic suggestion, Colton gets angry at Chris, consciously decides to tackle him, and
then tackles him.

Colton did do what he decided to do, namely, tackle Chris. But when we think about this case, it
seem to us, intuitively, that Colton did not freely tackle Chris; this isn’t something he did of his
own free will. So HYPNOTIC DECISION looks to be a counterexample to FR2, which is reason to
reject FR2 and think that the Argument for Freedom fails.
After reading a few of the chapters, you might begin to get suspicious of all this reliance
on thought experiments. In particular, you might wonder how purely fictional, unrealistic cases
could be relevant to the sorts of questions we’re trying to answer. If a zoologist says that zebras

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have black and white stripes, it would be no objection to say that you can imagine a zebra with
purple and orange stripes. Why, then, when a philosopher affirms FR2, is it supposed to be an
objection that we can imagine a case in which someone isn’t acting freely despite doing what they
decided to do?
Here’s the difference. When a zoologist says that zebras have black and white stripes, she
only means to be claiming that, normally, zebras are like this. Neither my imaginary purple and
orange zebra, nor even actual albino zebras, are any objection to a claim like that. The philosopher,
by contrast, means to be making a stronger claim. She isn’t just saying that, normally, one is acting
freely when does what one decides to do. Rather, she is saying that doing what one decides to do
is what makes an action free. A claim like that is true only if it is absolutely exceptionless, both in
actual cases and in merely possible cases.
To see this, suppose I wanted to know what makes someone a bachelor. You say: what
makes someone a bachelor is that they are an unmarried man under eighty feet tall. That’s
obviously a terrible account of what it is to be a bachelor. But why? All actual unmarried men
under eighty feet are bachelors, and all actual bachelors are unmarried men under eighty feet tall.
Still, we can see that being under eighty feet tall isn’t required for being a bachelor; height has
nothing to do with what makes someone a bachelor. So the in-principle possibility of a ninety foot
tall bachelor is enough to show that this is an unsatisfactory account of bachelorhood. Likewise,
the mere possibility of doing what one decided to do without acting freely is enough to falsify a
philosophical thesis about what makes actions free.
Why, though, do philosophers make such strong claims—especially if that renders them
susceptible to refutation by imaginary cases? The answer (at least in part) is that philosophers want
the claims they defend to be definitive: they are trying to definitively settle the philosophical
questions at issue. For instance, think about the Beating Heart Argument from section 4, according
to which the fact that something has a beating heart makes it wrong to kill that thing. Suppose,
though, that this were put forward merely as a useful, but not exceptionless, rule of thumb: that
it’s normally wrong to kill things with beating hearts. In that case, even if I could convince you
beyond any doubt that the six-week-old embryo has a heartbeat, that would not yet settle the
question of whether it’s wrong to kill it. After all, maybe embryos are one of the exceptions to the
rule, where it is okay to kill something that has a beating heart.

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Philosophical principles would have no “bite” unless these are meant to be absolutely
exceptionless. So it is for good reason that philosophers are searching for absolutely exceptionless
principles. But this is precisely what opens them up to refutation by thought experiments; one
exception would be enough to show that the principle is false.

8. What is Philosophy?
As you can see, this book is going to cover a wide array of topics, including whether you
should fear death, whether abortion is immoral, whether God exists, and whether we ever do things
of our own free will. So what do these topics all have in common, that makes them philosophy?
Philosophy is sometimes characterized as the study of life’s most fundamental questions.
That does capture some of the topics we’ll cover, like the true nature of morality and the existence
of God. But the question of whether we should have to pay taxes hardly seems like one of “life’s
most fundamental questions”. And other questions that we’d naturally describe as being among
life’s most fundamental questions, like whether we’re alone in the universe or how many
generations the human race has left, aren’t exactly philosophical. So this won’t do as a definition
of philosophy, since there are counterexamples! Being one of life’s ultimate questions is neither
necessary nor sufficient for being a philosophical question.
In all honesty, I’m not sure how to give necessary and sufficient conditions for a topic’s
being philosophical. Philosophers have lots of interesting things to say about biology, physics,
sociology, and psychology, and it’s hard (and probably unnecessary) to say where the science ends
and the philosophy begins. Nor do I think it’s all that that important to find an adequate definition
of philosophy, since there’s no need to definitely settle the question of what does and doesn’t count
as philosophy.
To the extent that we can say what makes some inquiries and not others philosophical, a
more promising approach would be to look, not for what unites the topics studied, but rather at
how they are studied. Philosophers try to answer questions and make sense of things just by
thinking carefully about them, attempting to resolve controversial questions and assess challenges
to commonsense assumptions using rational argumentation alone. (Though this doesn’t mean that
philosophical argumentation can’t be informed by scientific discoveries and other worldly
observations.) Philosophy—at its best—can sometimes seem like thinking in slow motion. Even
when an idea or argument seems clear enough, we like to break it down into its component parts;

18
separate out all of the premises and assess the plausibly of each individually; identify challenges
to the premises and break them down into their component parts; see whether arguments can be
strengthened by small changes to how they are formulated; and so on.
In the words of Professor Delia Graff Fara, “By doing philosophy we can discover eternal
and mind-independent truths about the nature of the world by investigating our own conceptions
of it, and by subjecting our most commonly or firmly held beliefs to what would otherwise be
perversely strict scrutiny.” I would add to this that it’s not just “eternal and mind-independent
truths”, but also truths about more personal matters, like whether it’s okay to eat meat or what sort
of government would be most just. After finishing the book, I think you’ll have a pretty good sense
of what Professor Fara means by “perversely strict scrutiny”. And I don’t think she means this as
a criticism. Some things can only be discovered through close attention to the smallest details.

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CHAPTER 1
God Does Not Exist

Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the
textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments
advanced in other chapters.

1. Introduction
Imagine that you are a tourist, exploring the country of Crepola. You see some wondrous
sights: stunning skyscrapers, beautiful parks, galleries full of masterpieces. You also see extreme
poverty and injustice, poorly designed highways, grossly corrupt and inefficient government
agencies, falsely accused prisoners serving life sentences, and many other terrible things. After
seeing all this, suppose you are told that Crepola is run by a wise and compassionate ruler with
limitless power and who keeps careful track of everything that goes on in his country. You
wouldn’t believe it for a second.
Look around the world. You’ll see some wondrous sights: stunning mountain peaks,
beautiful prairies, staggering artistic and athletic talent. But you will also find poverty and
injustice, a planet afflicted by extreme weather and natural disasters, bodies afflicted by all manner
of diseases and injuries, and many other terrible things. Now, suppose you are told that this is the
work of a maximally powerful, all-knowing, and morally perfect deity. You shouldn’t believe it
for a second.
There is no God, and we can know that there is no God simply by reflecting on the
impressive variety of evils and sufferings we encounter in the world. Or so I shall argue. After
laying out the argument (section 2), I address three attempts to explain why God would allow the
sorts of suffering we endure: because suffering enables us to appreciate the good things we have
(section 3), because suffering is necessary for acquiring valuable character traits (section 4), or
because God must permit suffering in order for us to have free will (section 5). I then consider the
response that God has his reasons for allowing suffering, but that those reasons are hidden from
us (section 6).

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2. The Argument from Suffering
My argument that God doesn’t exist is easy to state and highly intuitive:

The Argument from Suffering
(AS1) God would prevent the suffering that we endure
(AS2) If God would prevent the suffering that we endure, then God does not exist
(AS3) So, God does not exist

By ‘suffering’, here, I mean any pain or discomfort that living beings endure—large or small,
physical or emotional.
To see the idea behind AS1, note that God is supposed to be a perfect being. In particular,
he is supposed to be omnipotent (i.e., maximally powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and
omnibenevolent (morally perfect). Let’s call a being with all three of these qualities an omnibeing.
Now, consider how an omnibeing would react to any suffering that might crop up in the world.
Being omniscient, an omnibeing would instantly be aware of the suffering. Being omnibenevolent,
she would want to prevent it if she could. Being omnipotent, she could prevent it if she wanted to.
So an omnibeing would prevent it. Put another way, the only way for there to be suffering if there
were an omnibeing around is if the omnibeing wanted there to be suffering, couldn’t prevent it, or
doesn’t know it’s happening—none of which seems possible given the definition of ‘omnibeing’.
Premise AS2 is straightforward. Think of it this way. If God would prevent all suffering,
then there wouldn’t be any suffering. And yet there is a tremendous amount of suffering in the
world. Even if your life has gone pretty smoothly, you could still fill a book with the pains and
sufferings—large and small, physical and emotional—that you have experienced. And that’s just
one life. Given that things are happening which God would have prevented, there must not be a
God to prevent it after all.
Some believers may be willing to admit that God is not an omnibeing. You might say that
God isn’t omnipotent: he knows all about your toothache, and he wishes he could do something
about it, but he just isn’t able to. Or you might say that God isn’t omniscient: he would end the
toothache if he knew about it, but he genuinely has no idea that you have a toothache right now.
Or you might say that God isn’t omnibenevolent: he knows about your toothache and could stop
it if he wanted to, but really he couldn’t care less about you and your toothache.

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Admittedly, the argument will be ineffective against someone who believes in an imperfect
God like this, for they will simply deny AS1 of my argument. At the same time, I suspect that
relatively few believers will be willing to say that God is imperfect, which means the argument is
still a problem for them. For simplicity, I’ll take it for granted for the remainder of the chapter that
it’s not in dispute that God (if he exists) is an omnibeing, and I’ll focus on attempts to explain why
an omnibeing would—and how one even could—permit suffering.
What I expect most theists to say in response to the Argument from Suffering is that God
allows suffering because there is some greater good that can be obtained only by those who have
endured certain kinds of suffering. But what is that greater good? I’ll examine three suggestions—
that suffering is necessary for appreciating the good things we have, that suffering is necessary for
building valuable character traits, and that allowing suffering is necessary for free will—and I will
argue that none provides an adequate response of the Argument from Suffering.

3. The Appreciated Goods Defense
Let’s begin with the suggestion that without some suffering in the world, no one would be
able to appreciate good things. This can be framed as an argument against AS1, as follows:

The Appreciated Goods Defense
(AG1) The suffering that we endure is necessary for appreciating good things
(AG2) If so, then God wouldn’t prevent the suffering we endure
(AG3) So, God wouldn’t prevent the suffering we endure

The idea behind AG1 is that good things can be appreciated only by those who have experienced
a certain amount of suffering. After all, if we were in a constant state of pleasure and contentedness,
that would just strike us as a normal, unremarkable baseline. The idea behind AG2 is that it’s better
to appreciate the good things we have than merely to have the good things without in any way
appreciating them. Since God wants the best for us, he would want us to appreciate the good things
we have, and he would therefore permit all of the suffering necessary for attaining that
appreciation.
On closer inspection, however, there is good reason to reject AG1. God could enable beings
who experience nothing but pleasure to appreciate that pleasure by ensuring that their pleasure
increases at every moment. They can always look back to their earlier states of pleasure and feel
appreciative that they are now so much better off. With this sort of possibility in mind, it is hard

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to see why a world would have to contain any suffering in order for its inhabitants to appreciate
good things. One might object that there’s a limit to the amount of pleasure that human beings are
capable of experiencing, perhaps connected to the quantity of serotonin our brains are capable to
generating. But even granting that we actually have these psychological limitations, surely there’s
nothing to prevent God from removing those limitations if he wanted to.
Moreover, even supposing that some suffering is needed in order to appreciate good things,
surely there is no need for all the suffering we endure. A chilly, overcast day now and then can
help one appreciate warm sunny days, but there is surely no need for endless, soul-crushing
Midwest winters. A bit of back pain now and then can help one appreciate a healthy body, but
there is surely no need for debilitating, chronic back pain and other such maladies. The problem,
in short, is that if God’s intention is just to make it possible for us to appreciate good things, then
so much of the suffering we endure is entirely gratuitous, that is, without purpose.
One might try to deny that any of the suffering we experience is gratuitous, insisting that
we really do need this much suffering in order to appreciate the good things we have. I find that
entirely implausible. But even if they were right about this, that would just cast doubt on AG2.
Even supposing it’s good to appreciate good things, surely it’s not so good that it outweighs all the
suffering that’s needed to get it. God’s ends wouldn’t justify God’s means.

4. The Character Building Defense
Let’s try out a different objection to AS1. Here the idea is that there are certain highly
valuable character traits that can be developed only in the face of adversity, failure, temptation,
and other sources of suffering. Take courage, for instance. A world with no suffering is a world
with no danger, and in a world without danger no one has the opportunity to become courageous.
Similar points can be made for empathy, loyalty, perseverance, self-control, forgiveness, and
trustworthiness. In short, building character requires a potential for suffering. And this gives us
the Character Building Defense:

The Character Building Defense
(CB1) The suffering that we endure is necessary for cultivating valuable character traits
(CB2) If so, then God wouldn’t prevent the suffering we endure
(CB3) So, God wouldn’t prevent the suffering we endure

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The idea behind CB1 is that no one can have courage or other such traits if there isn’t a good deal
of suffering in the world and a significant possibility that one will experience such suffering
oneself. The idea behind CB2 is that these character traits are sufficiently valuable to justify
allowing all of the suffering necessary for cultivating them.
What’s nice about the Character Building Defense is that it’s able to account for such a
wide range of bad things, including some extreme forms of suffering. Without profound acts of
betrayal, there could be no profound acts of forgiveness. Without the horrors and hardships of war,
no one could reach the levels of courage and selflessness that soldiers attain. Since these sufferings
are necessary in order to have the best kind of world—one with courageous and forgiving people—
we can see why God would allow them.
Ultimately, I contend, the Character Building Defense falls victim to the same problem as
the Appreciated Goods Defense: the problem of gratuitous suffering. For while some soldiers find
that the horrors of war strengthens their moral character, others are pushed to their breaking point
and return home with debilitating PTSD. Or take someone who is tortured mercilessly and then
killed before the experience can help them build character. These sorts of examples suggest a way
of fortifying the Argument from Suffering against the Character Building Defense:

The Argument from Gratuitous Suffering
(GS1) God would prevent all gratuitous suffering
(GS2) If so, then: if there is gratuitous suffering, then God does not exist
(GS3) There is gratuitous suffering
(GS4) So, God does not exist

GS1 is motivated by the idea that an omnibeing can allow suffering only if there is some good
reason for allowing it. But, by definition (of ‘gratuitous’), there is no good reason for allowing
gratuitous suffering. The idea behind GS2 is that, if there is gratuitous suffering, that can only be
because there is no omnibeing around to prevent it. Finally, GS3 is motivated by the examples just
given of people who don’t benefit in any way from their suffering.
Proponents of the Character Building Defense may respond by rejecting GS3. They may
say that at least the friends and family of the traumatized soldier or torture victim get to develop
valuable character traits as a result their grief and sadness. But it seems deeply at odds with the
omnibenevolence of an omnibeing to allow someone to suffer terribly for someone else’s benefit.
In any event, we can sidestep this response by focusing on cases where the people suffering have

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no friends or family whose moral character is enhanced by the suffering, or cases where the tragedy
pushes the friends and family of the victim beyond their breaking points. All it takes is one such
case to show that GS3 is true.

5. The Free Will Defense
Let’s consider one last version of the appeal to greater goods, which turns on the idea that
allowing suffering is a necessary condition for free will:

The Free Will Defense
(FW1) The suffering that we endure is necessary for free will
(FW2) If so, then God wouldn’t prevent the suffering we endure
(FW3) So, God wouldn’t prevent the suffering we endure

The idea behind FW1 is that a world in which people have free will has to be a world in which
suffering is permitted. God could force us to always do the right thing, but he couldn’t force us to
always do the right thing of our own free will. Being forced to do something is incompatible with
doing it freely. The idea behind FW2 is that free will is a very valuable thing: a world in which
people are able to freely choose to do the right thing is superior to a world in which everyone is an
automaton, performing only kind and wholesome actions but never because they freely choose to
do so. This, the idea goes, is why God decided to give us free will, even though that requires
allowing some suffering.
The Free Will Defense is well equipped to handle the alleged cases of gratuitous suffering
considered above. No one can ever freely make good choices unless God steps back and permits
people to sometimes make bad choices, including warring and torturing. So the Free Will Defense
does look more promising than the Character Building Defense. Even so, we shouldn’t be satisfied
by the Free Will Defense either.
First, the Free Will Defense only accounts for suffering caused by other humans. It goes
no way towards explaining how an omnibeing could allow suffering caused (for instance) by
disease or scarcity or natural disasters or animals. There could still be free will in a world without
earthquakes, droughts, ear infections, and dog bites.
Second, it’s not even clear that the Free Will Defense can account for all the human-caused
suffering in the world. Certainly there could still be plenty of valuable freedom in the world if,

25
now and then, God discreetly intervened to prevent a genocide or a terrorist attack or a third-degree
burn. By analogy, a loving parent can allow their child the freedom to make their own mistakes,
but would still intervene if the kid is about to step off a cliff or fire up a chainsaw. So the Free Will
Defense can’t explain all the human-caused suffering we encounter in this world.
Third, the Free Will Defense presupposes that there even can be free will in a world in
which God exists. But it’s far from clear how that could be so. After all, since God is supposed to
be omniscient, he already knows everything you’re going to do before you do it. To see how this
causes trouble for the Free Will Defense, let’s focus on just one example of an alleged free action.
You see a fifty dollar bill fall out of someone’s pocket. You grab it, and you’re pretty confident
that no one would notice if you kept it for yourself. But you decide to do the right thing and return
it.
Here’s an argument that, given the existence of an omniscient God, this wasn’t something
you freely chose to do:

The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge
(DF1) God knew in advance that you were going to return the money
(DF2) If God knew in advance that you were going to return the money, then you could
not have kept the money
(DF3) If you could not have kept the money, then returning the money was not a free action
(DF4) So, returning the money was not a free action

If God is an omnibeing, then DF1 must be true; for if God didn’t know what you were going to do
with the money, then there’d be something he doesn’t know and he wouldn’t be omniscient. The
idea behind DF2 is that, in order for God to know in advance that you’d return the money, it had
to already have been settled that you were going to return the money. God couldn’t have known
what you were going to do if it was still an open possibility that you were going to keep the money.
But if it was already settled that you were going to return it, then it’s not true that you could have
kept it, just as DF2 says. Finally, the idea behind DF3 is that genuinely being able to choose among
different possibilities is a prerequisite for acting freely. If you couldn’t have done something
different from what you actually decided to do, then what you do isn’t really up to you, and is
therefore unfree.
Of course, there’s nothing special about the example of returning the money. The same
problem arises for any allegedly free action. What that shows is that the Free Will Defense is a

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complete nonstarter. Suffering can’t be explained as something God permits in order to make room
for free will, since any world with an omnibeing—who already knows in advance everything that’s
going to happen—is already a world without free will. FW3 is false.

6. The Hidden Reasons Defense
We have been unable to identify any greater good that could justify an omnibeing in
allowing all the different kinds of suffering people endure. But perhaps, the theist might insist, we
shouldn’t expect to be able to identify that greater good.
Consider the following story from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions:

PHILOSOPHICAL YEAST: Two pieces of yeast were discussing the possible purposes of life
as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited
intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

The suffering they endure (suffocation) is part of a greater good (making champagne) that they
would have no way of knowing about, given their limited perspective. Analogously, we inhabit a
universe unfathomably larger than the small corner of it we’ve seen, with human concerns that are
infinitesimally smaller than those of a deity with an entire universe to look after. Accordingly, the
idea goes, it would be absurd to think that we’d be able to discern or even comprehend God’s
reasons for allowing this or that kind of suffering. In other words, what God sees as good may be
different from what we are able to recognize as good, given our limited perspective.
I find this response deeply unsatisfying. To see why, let’s return to the example from the
beginning of the chapter. You are touring the country of Crepola and observe a mix of wondrous
and terrible sights. Having seen all the poverty, injustice, pollution, road hazards, corruption,
inefficiency, cruelty, etc., you laugh off the suggestion that the ruler of the country has limitless
power, perfect compassion, and complete knowledge of everything that goes on in his country.
Now suppose that your tour guide reminds you that it is a very large country, most of which
you haven’t seen. You are reminded that the ruler is privy to information and has concerns and
projects that you know nothing about. You are reminded that, for all you know, the poverty,
pollution, and so on are all a necessary part of his master plan for creating the best of all possible
countries. Reminded of all this, should you now believe what your tour guide says, that the country
has a ruler with unchecked power, knowledge, and compassion? Of course not. You should
continue laughing.

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This suggests the following argument against appealing to hidden reasons:

The Argument for Disbelief
(DB1) You should not believe that all the suffering in Crepola is necessary for some
unknown greater good that it’s ruler has in mind
(DB2) If so, then you should not believe that all the suffering in the actual world is
necessary for some unknown greater good that God has in mind
(DB3) So, you should not believe that the suffering people endure in the actual world is
necessary for some unknown greater good that God has in mind

DB1 is plausible. You can of course admit that it’s possible that the ruler knowingly allows all the
corruption and cruelty and poverty as an ingenious means to some benevolent end, just as you can
admit that it’s possible that the earth is flat and that all the evidence to the contrary is part of some
elaborate hoax. You can admit that there’s a remote possibility that flat-earthers are telling the
truth, but that obviously doesn’t mean you should believe what they say. Likewise, even if you
admit that there’s a remote possibility that the tour guide is telling the truth, that doesn’t mean you
should believe what he says.
As for DB2, the idea is that we ought to give similar answers to the question of whether
the ruler has good, hidden reasons for the suffering in Crepola and the question of whether God
has good, hidden reasons for all the suffering in the universe. After all, the questions themselves
are so similar. In particular, there is no difference between what we know about Crepola and what
we know about the universe that could make it reasonable to believe in hidden reasons in the one
case but not the other.

7. Conclusion
I have argued that the sorts of suffering we find in the world cannot be reconciled with the
existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. We have examined a number
of attempts to reconcile them, which involved pointing to one or another purpose that might be
served by the suffering, but we found that these attempts cannot make sense of the full range of
sufferings that people endure. Finally, I argued that it is not reasonable to believe that the suffering
is all in service of some unknown greater good that, due to our limited perspective, we have been
unable to identify.

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Reflection Questions
1. Is it possible to escape the objections raised in sections 3, 4 and 5 by combining the Appreciated
Goods Defense, the Character Building Defense, and/or the Free Will Defense?

2. God is widely believed to reward people with eternal happiness in heaven. Could this be turned
into a response to the argument from suffering? Why or why not?

3. One might respond to the Argument from Suffering by insisting that God has to allow bad
things to happen to certain people, because they deserve it and—being perfectly just—God has
to give people what they deserve. Is this an adequate response?

4. Can you think of a response to the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge in section 5? Could some
of the arguments considered in Chapter 3 be used to respond to this argument?

5. Can the Hidden Reasons Defense be defended against the objections raised in section 6? In
particular, what do you think about the claim that “there is no difference between what we
know about Crepola and what we know about the universe that could make it reasonable to
believe in hidden reasons in the one case but not the other”?

Sources
The Argument from Suffering (often called “The Problem of Evil”) traces back at least as far as
the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. A classic discussion can be found in David Hume’s
Dialogues on Natural Religion (parts X and XI). See J. L. Mackie’s “The Problem of Evil” for a
more recent defense of the argument. A version of the Character Building Defense can be found
in John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love, and a version of the Free Will Defense can be found in
Alvin Plantinga’s God, Freedom, and Evil. The problem of divine foreknowledge is advanced in
Nelson Pike’s “Divine Omniscience and Involuntary Action”. Here are some additional resources:

• Marilyn McCord Adams on Evil
https://philosophybites.com/2009/07/marilyn-mccord-adams-on-evil.html
• Marilyn McCord Adams: Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God
• Mohammed Ali Mobini: Earth’s Epistemic Fruits for Harmony with God: An Islamic
Theodicy
• Louise Antony: For the Love of Reason
• Ted Chiang: Hell is the Absence of God
• Beverley Clack: Feminism and the Problem of Evil
• Laura Ekstrom: Suffering as Religious Experience
• Bryan Frances: Gratuitous Suffering and the Problem of Evil
• Sally Haslanger: The Problem of Evil
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/problem-evil
• Franklin Perkins: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy
• John Perry: Dialogue on Good, Evil, and the Existence of God
• William Rowe: The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism
• Eleanore Stump: The Problem of Evil

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CHAPTER 2
You Should Bet on God

Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the
textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments
advanced in other chapters.

1. Introduction
I am going to try to convince you that you should believe in God. But I’m going to do it in
a different way than you might expect. I’m not going to give you an argument that God exists. I
won’t try to convince you, for instance, that there has to be a God in order to serve as a first cause
of the universe (what’s sometimes called “the cosmological argument”), or that we have to posit
an intelligent designer in order to explain all the forms of life and other complex systems we find
in the world (what’s sometimes called “the teleological argument”). Rather, I’m going to argue
that you should believe in God because it’s in your best interest to do so.
Here’s an analogy, to help you understand the argument I’m going to give. Imagine that
you’re at a casino and you’re deciding whether to bet your $10 on red or on black at the roulette
table. But it’s not a regular game of roulette. The way it works is that if you bet on red and win
you walk away with $20, and if you bet on black and win you walk away with a million dollars.
You don’t know whether it will land on red or black. And yet you know exactly what to do: bet on
black. Why? Because you stand to gain so much if it comes up black and stand to lose so little if
it doesn’t. Similarly, you have no way of knowing whether or not God exists. Still, you should
believe in God. Why? Because you stand to gain so much by believing in God and stand to lose so
little. Indeed, only by betting on God do you stand a chance of winning the ultimate jackpot: eternal
afterlife in heaven.
In sections 2-3, I’ll give a more careful and rigorous presentation of this argument. Then,
in section 4, I’ll address some potential objections to the argument, for instance that it’s extremely
unlikely that God exists or that belief alone is not enough to guarantee entrance into heaven.
Finally, in section 5, I address the worry that it’s impossible to just start believing in God through
sheer force of will, no matter how convincing you find the argument.

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2. Practical Reasoning in an Uncertain World
In this section, I will take a big step back from the question of whether you should believe
in God, and look more generally at how we make rational decisions about what to do in situations
of uncertainty. After looking informally at the sorts of considerations we take into account when
making such decisions (section 2.1), I lay out a more rigorous way of thinking about rational
decision-making in situations of uncertainty, in terms of “expected utility calculations” (section
2.2).

2.1 Costs, Benefits, and Likelihoods
Let’s shift from the roulette-wheel example to something more realistic. You’re at a party
and you spot your crush across the room. You’re trying to decide whether to go talk to him (or her,
but let’s go with “him”) and confess your feelings. The night is young and you’ve still got your
wits about you, and you want to make a smart decision. What sorts of considerations should you
take into account?
First, you need to think about your options and the possible outcomes. Your options are
telling him that you’re crushing on him or saying nothing. (What about flirting without blurting?
We’ll get to that; let’s keep it simple for now.) And the possible outcomes are that it turns out he
likes you back or that it turns out he’s not into you.
Second, you need to consider the costs or benefits of each “eventuality”, that is, each way
things might unfold. If you confess your feelings to him and he is into you too, you get to date
your crush and you’ve won big. If you confess your feelings and he’s not into you, you’ll probably
have some mix of embarrassment that he turned you down but maybe also pride that you had the
courage to take a risk. If you don’t confess your feelings but actually he is into you, you’ve missed
a huge opportunity. And finally if you don’t confess your feelings and he isn’t into you, you’ve
dodged a bullet.
Third, you need to think about how good or bad the different costs and benefits are,
relatively speaking. What’s worse: the embarrassment of getting turned down or missing out on
the opportunity? Probably the missed opportunity is worse. Then again, if you’ve got a new crush
every weekend, you’re incredibly sensitive about being rejected, and you have plenty of other
interested suitors, maybe the embarrassment is worse. It’s going to vary from person to person,

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and what you ought to do will depend in part on how good or bad the different eventualities are
for you.
Finally, you need to take into account the likelihood of each of the possible outcomes.
Obviously it makes a difference whether the chances that he likes you back are very good or very
slim. If there’s virtually no chance that he’s into you, then it’s not worth the risk of embarrassment.
If it’s more or less certain he is into you—if he’s been sending you heart emojis all day and keeps
winking at you across the room—then it’s not worth worrying about the insignificant risk of
embarrassment.
Somehow or other, you process all these considerations and make a smart decision about
what to do. In fact, you do this sort of thing all the time: deciding whether to lug around an umbrella
all day when you’re not entirely sure if it’s actually going to rain; deciding whether to turn back
when you remember you forgot to lock the front door and you’re already ten minutes away;
deciding whether to go see a certain movie when you’re not entirely sure if it’s going to be any
good; and so on. And you do it without the help of a calculator and without having to write out a
pro/con list. But there is a more rigorous way of thinking about such decisions, and it will prove
to be a useful tool for thinking about them—and, in particular, for thinking about whether to
believe in God.

2.2 Expected Utility Calculations
We can model the decision about talking to your crush by using a certain sort of decision matrix.
The matrix will represent the options available to you (as rows), the possible outcomes (as
columns), and the likelihood of each outcome. And it will use numerical values to represent your
rankings of the different eventualities (i.e., option/outcome pairs).
To make this a little less abstract, let’s suppose that in the crush case that the eventualities
are ranked from best to worst as follows (where a higher number represents a better eventuality):

4: Confess your feelings and he’s into you
3: Don’t confess your feelings and he’s not into you
2: Confess your feelings and he’s not into you
1: Don’t confess your feelings and he is into you

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And let’s suppose you think there’s about a 75% chance that he likes you back. Then the matrix
would look like this:

Matrix 2.2.1
He’s into you
75%
He’s not into you
25%
Expected
Utility
Confess your feelings 4 2 3.5
Don’t confess your feelings 1 3 1.5

I’ve snuck in an extra column for expected utility. This is the column we’ll use to crunch the
numbers, calculating what the smart choice is for you, given your preferences and the likelihoods
of the different outcomes. Before I explain where exactly these numbers (3.5 and 1.5) are coming
from, let me say something about how to think about these expected utilities.
In effect, the expected utility of an option tells you how well you’d do, on average, if you
kept choosing that option over and over again. Imagine that you’re in an infinite loop. You choose
an option, and then time rewinds and you choose that same option again and again—and 75% of
the time he’s into you and 25% of the time he isn’t. The fact that confessing has an expected utility
of 3.5 and not confessing has an expected utility of 1.5 tells you that on average you’d do a little
over twice as well by repeatedly choosing to confess than by repeatedly choosing not to (since 3.5
is a little over twice as much as 1.5). And what that tells you is that the smart thing to do is confess
your feelings.
But where exactly are these numbers coming from? To calculate the expected utility of a
given option, you multiply the value of each possible outcome of the action by the likelihood of
that outcome, and add together the results. Or put in terms of the rows and columns of Matrix
2.2.1: to calculate the expected utility of the top row, you multiply the value in the top row of the
first column by the likelihood associated with that column, multiply the value in the top row of the
second column by the likelihood associated with that column, and add them together. So we get:

Confessing your feelings = (.75 x 4) + (.25 x 2) = 3.5
Don’t confess your feelings = (.75 x 1) + (.25 x 3) = 1.5

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The specific numbers themselves don’t have much significance. It’s not as if you get 3.5 units of
happiness by confessing your feelings or anything like that. What matters is the relative differences
between the expected utilities for different actions.
This gives us an argument for confessing your feelings:

The Argument for Confessing Feelings
(CF1) One should always choose the option with the greatest expected utility
(CF2) Confessing your feelings has a greater expected utility than not confessing
(CF3) So you should confess your feelings

Premise CF1 is justified by the fact that, in ordinary cases like this, these decision matrices and
expected utility calculations do such a good job of reflecting the rational thing to do in situations
with uncertain outcomes. And premise CF2 is justified to the extent that we have filled in the
matrix correctly, ranking the eventualities and assigning probabilities to the outcomes in a sensible
way.
There are two more things I want to point out about this model of decision-making before
I bring us back around to the question of believing in God. First, although it doesn’t actually make
a difference whether we use 1 and 4 or 10 and 40 for the lowest and highest score, what does make
a difference is how large or small the numbers are relative to one another. Suppose for instance
that you do very badly with humiliation, and that for you a rejection is 100 times worse than a
missed opportunity. We can represent that by using a weighted ranking, giving the eventuality of
confessing and getting rejected a value that’s 100 times lower than the others:

Matrix 2.2.2
He’s into you
75%
He’s not into you
25%
Expected
Utility
Confess your feelings 100 1 75.25
Don’t confess your feelings 98 99 172.75

Now, the expected utility of confessing is less than the expected utility of not confessing, and so
the calculations tell us that you ought to hold your tongue—which is the right result if you really
do take rejection that hard.

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Second, I’ve obviously oversimplified the example by pretending that there are only two
possible outcomes. Really, there are at least three different ways things could turn out: he’s into
you, he’s not into you and he rejects you in front of everyone, or he’s not into you but he discreetly
and privately rejects you. We can get more fine-grained about your options too: confess your
feelings, flirt a little, or completely avoid him. Our model for decision-making can easily
accommodate this simply by adding extra rows and columns to our decision matrix:

Matrix 2.2.3
He’s into
you
–%
He privately
rejects you
–%
He publicly
rejects you
–%
Expected
Utility
Confess your feelings
Flirt with him
Avoid him

All you have to do is figure out a weighted ranking of the different eventualities, estimate the
likelihood of each of the different outcomes, crunch the numbers, see which option has the greatest
expected utility, and—voilà!—now you know what you should do.

3. The Expected Utility of Believing in God
Now let us see how this same sort of reasoning from expected utilities can be put to work
in an argument that you ought to believe in God:

The Argument for Betting on God
(BG1) One should always choose the option with the greatest expected utility
(BG2) Believing in God has a greater expected utility than not believing in God
(BG3) So you should believe in God

Premise BG1—which is exactly the same as CF1 above—is justified by the fact that it is
so sensible to rely on expected utility calculations in the sorts of ordinary examples considered
above. If you thought the option with the greatest expected utility is the smart choice in all other
cases, it would be weird and unprincipled to think it isn’t the smart choice in just this one case of
deciding whether to believe in God.

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To justify BG2, we have to construct the decision matrix. And that’s going to look
something like this:

Matrix 3.0
God exists
50%
God doesn’t exist
50%
Expected
Utility
Believe in God ∞ 2 ∞
Don’t believe in God 1 3 2

Since we don’t know one way or the other whether God exists, I’ve assigned a probability
of 50% to God existing and 50% to God not existing. I’ve given the lowest score (1) to the
eventuality of not believing he exists when he in fact does, since that presumably means you’re
going to hell. The second lowest (2) goes to the eventuality in which you do believe in God but he
doesn’t exist, since in that case you’ve been wasting your time going to church, praying, and living
an upstanding religious life. Slightly better (3) is being an atheist and being right about it, since
then you get all the benefits of an atheist lifestyle (e.g., skipping church) without any punishment
at the end. Top score goes to the eventuality in which you believe in God and God does turn out
to exist, and this gets a value of infinity (∞) rather than 4, since the amount of pleasure and
fulfillment you receive in an eternal afterlife in heaven is infinitely greater than what you get in
any of the other eventualities.
We then calculate the expected utilities in just the way we did in section 2.2. The
calculation in the second row is straightforward arithmetic: (.5 x 1) + (.5 x 3) = 2. As for the second
row, the expected utility of believing in God = (.5 x ∞) + (.5 x 2). What’s (.5 x ∞)? In other words,
how many things do you have left if you take infinitely many things and then remove half of them?
Answer: ∞. (Take all the numbers and remove all the odd ones. You’re still left with infinitely
many even numbers) Now add 1 (i.e., .5 x 2), and you still get ∞. After all, if you add one thing to
infinitely many things, you still have infinitely many.
Finally, we need to compare the expected utilities of the two options. Which is greater: ∞
or 2? Obviously ∞. So the expected utility of believing in God is greater than the expected utility
of not believing in God. And that’s the argument for BG2.

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4. Challenging the Decision Matrix
The argument for BG2 relies on a number of assumptions I made about how to fill in the
decision matrix (Matrix 3.0): the range of possible options and outcomes, the likelihood of the
different outcomes, and the relative goodness or badness of the different eventualities. Thus, one
way of challenging BG2 is to insist that, in one way or another, I’ve set up the decision matrix
incorrectly. So let’s look at a variety of different challenges of this kind.

4.1 Wrong Probabilities
One might complain that I’ve grossly overestimated the probability that God exists, by
assuming that it’s a 50/50 chance that he exists. Perhaps you think it’s extremely unlikely that God
exists. Though surely you’ll admit that it’s at least possible that God exists. If you die and are
ushered into God’s presence, you’ll be surprised, but not in the way that you’d be surprised if
ushered into the presence of something you think is genuinely impossible, like a round square.
So let’s say it’s a 1% chance that God exists (though the response I’m about to give will
work even if you think it’s a .00000001% chance). In that case, we need to update a couple of the
boxes in the original decision matrix:

Matrix 4.1
God exists
1%
God doesn’t exist
99%
Expected
Utility
Believe in God ∞ 2 ∞
Don’t believe in God 1 3 2.98

Changing the probabilities required us to change the expected utility of not believing in God. It
shot up almost a whole point! But the expected utility of believing in God doesn’t change at all.
Why is that? Let’s crunch the numbers. What’s .01 x ∞? In other words, what do you get when
you have infinitely many things, and you take away 99 out of every 100 of them? Answer: ∞. Now
add 1.98 (= .99 x 2) to that, and you get ∞. The expected utility of believing in God doesn’t change
and is still greater than the expected utility of not believing in God. Thus, so long as there is some
chance that God exists, however small it may be, the argument for BG2 still works.

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4.2 Belief Isn’t Enough
You might object that believing in God isn’t all by itself enough to get into heaven. You
might think that you also have meet some further conditions, for instance that you led a good,
moral life and followed God’s commandments. I might ask you how you know that, but then again
you might ask me how I know that badly-behaved believers go to heaven. (Touché.) So let me just
grant the point for the sake of the argument: only well-behaved believers get into heaven. What
that means is that the original decision matrix is inadequate, since it runs together two importantly
different options: being a well-behaved believer and being a badly-behaved believer.
The fix is to expand our matrix so that each of these options has a row of its own.

Matrix 4.2
God exists
50%
God doesn’t exist
50%
Expected Utility
Believe in God and be good ∞ 3 ∞
Believe in God and be bad 2 4 3
Don’t believe in God 1 5 3

The new row introduces new eventualities, which means we have to redo the scores. I gave a 1 to
the eventuality in which you don’t believe in God and yet he does exist, and a 2 to being a badly-
behaved believer, on the assumption that God will punish you for that too but will be a little more
lenient since you at least believed in him. I’ve scored being an atheist in a Godless world (5) higher
than being a badly-behaved believer in a Godless world (4), and I’ve ranked both ahead of the life
of a well-behaved believer in a Godless world (3). Finally, the eventuality in which you’re a well-
behaved believer and God does exist gets ∞, since this is what will get you into heaven, and that’s
infinitely better than any of the other eventualities.
So what does this all mean? What it means is that—assuming that you have to be a well-
behaved believer to get into heaven—being a well-behaved believer has greater expected utility
than both being a badly-behaved believer and not believing in God at all. It’s still true, then, that
the option with the greatest expected utility requires you to believe in God. So we have not yet
found a reason to reject BG2.
It may be that I haven’t gotten all the scores exactly right. Maybe I’m wrong, and God
gives exactly the same punishment to both nonbelievers and badly-behaved believers. In that case,
you could make it a tie and change the 2 in the first column to a 1. Or maybe I’m wrong that the

38
life of an atheist in a Godless world is more rewarding than the life of a believer in a Godless
world. Fine, we can lower the score for “God does not exist” in the bottom row. It doesn’t matter;
the argument still goes through, since the expected utility of being a nonbeliever or a badly-
behaved believer still comes out to be some finite number, whereas the expected utility of being a
well-behaved believer will be infinite.

4.3 Heaven is Finite
The reasoning behind BG2 takes for granted that God rewards believers with something
that’s infinitely valuable, for instance an eternal afterlife filled with an infinite amount of pleasure.
But I haven’t offered any evidence or argument for that. For all we know, God rewards believers
only with some finite amount of pleasure—maybe ten years in heaven. And one might object that
this imperils the argument: if we can’t be sure that believers stand to receive something of infinite
value, then there’s no guarantee that the expected utility of believing will be infinite, and thus no
guarantee that it will come out greater than the expected utility of disbelief.
But that’s the wrong way to look at it. Let’s just acknowledge that we can’t be sure whether
God is generous and rewards believers with something of infinite value or whether God is stingy
and rewards believers with something of finite value. That means that Matrix 3.0 is oversimplified,
and that we need to expand the decision matrix to include three columns: one for the possibility of
a generous God who offers infinite rewards, one for the possibility of a stingy God who offers only
finite rewards, and one for the possibility that there’s no God.

Matrix 4.3
Generous God exists
25%
Stingy God exists
25%
No God
50%
Expected
Utility
Believe in God ∞ 1,000,000 2 ∞
Don’t believe 1 1 3 2

I’ve valued the eventuality in which you’re a believer and God turns out to be stingy at 1,000,000
to reflect the idea that it’s still many orders of magnitude better than the next best eventuality, in
which you’re a nonbeliever and God doesn’t exist. Again, though, the exact values don’t really
matter, nor do the exact probabilities. All that matters is that ∞ on the top left, since that’s going
to ensure an infinite expected utility in believing in God. So, even if we can’t be sure that God

39
rewards anyone with an infinitely valuable afterlife, we still get the result that we ought to believe
in God.

4.4 Many Gods to Choose From
Let’s consider one last objection to BG2. You might worry that getting into heaven isn’t
simply a matter of believing in God. You’ve got to believe in the right God. If the true God is the
Christian God and you believe in Zeus (or vice versa), you’re going to hell. And the decision
matrix can’t tell you which God is the right God to believe in.
I think that’s right. But it’s no objection to BG2. Once again, what this shows us is that
Matrix 3.0 was oversimplified. We need additional rows reflecting the different gods we can
choose to believe in, and additional columns reflecting the different gods that might turn out to
exist. So let’s rectify that:

Matrix 4.4
Christian God exists
25%
Zeus exists
25%
No God
50%
Expected
Utility
Believe in
Jehovah
∞ 1 3 ∞
Believe in Zeus 1 ∞ 3 ∞
Don’t believe 2 2 4 3

Once again, I’ve done my best to assign probabilities and score the non-infinite eventualities, and
once again it doesn’t much matter whether I’ve gotten it exactly right. And we can, of you like,
expand the matrix to include more and more possible gods, but that shouldn’t affect the argument
either.
What we get now is a tie for greatest expected utility. So that means that the objection
under consideration is right as far as it goes: we aren’t told whether to believe in the Christian God
or whether to believe in Zeus. But notice that believing in some God or other continues to have
greater expected utility than not believing at all. So the decision matrix still tells us that the greatest
expected utility is attained by (and only by) believing that there is a God. So there is no successful
challenge to BG2 here.

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5. Is Belief Voluntary?
I have examined a number of ways one might challenge my decision matrix, and in each
case we’ve seen that the matrix can be modified without jeopardizing the Argument for Betting on
God. I can’t claim to have surveyed every possible way of challenging the matrix, but we must
stop somewhere, and I think that our success in handling the four objections discussed above gives
us reason to be optimistic that the argument can withstand further challenges to the matrix. But let
us move on to an importantly different style of objection.
Suppose you find my reasoning entirely convincing. You decide that—despite all of your
many reasons for doubting that God exists—it’s time to start believing in God. You say to yourself:
okay, believe!! Nothing changes, you still don’t believe in God. You clench your fists, furrow your
brow, and try again: believe!!! Nothing changes. You still don’t believe in God.
What you’ve just discovered is that belief is not voluntary. You don’t get to decide what to
believe in the way that you get to decide what to imagine or what to say. And that’s potentially a
problem for the argument for two reasons. First, it threatens to make the argument ineffective: if
the point of the argument is to get you to believe in God, then it can’t get the job done. Second, it
threatens to undermine BG1. BG1 says you should always go with the option that has the greatest
expected utility. But saying that you should do something implies that you can do it. Accordingly,
if you can’t choose the option with the greatest expected utility—in this case, believing in God—
then it’s not true that you should choose it, in which case BG1 is false.
The problem with this objection is that furrowing your brow and trying really hard to
believe something different isn’t the only possible way of changing your beliefs. By way of
comparison, alcoholics can’t change whether they have intense cravings for alcohol merely by
willing themselves to stop craving it. But what they can do is check themselves into rehab, steer
clear of their old haunts and friends who may rekindle their drinking habit, join an AA program,
and so on.
Similarly, changing your beliefs isn’t something you can do directly, on the spot, by merely
willing it to be so. But if you want to change your mind about God, you can do so indirectly. Go
to church, read some scripture and other religious literature, surround yourself with the smartest
and most inspirational believers you can find, steer clear of clever atheists, and so on. It does
sometimes happen that nonbelievers find the Lord. Figure out how they did it, and follow their
lead. Changing what you believe may be difficult, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

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6. Conclusion
I have argued that, faced with a decision between believing in God and not believing in
God, the smart choice—the one with the greatest expected utility—is to believe. I defended the
idea that one should prefer the option with the greatest utility by showing that it yields the right
result in everyday cases (like whether to confess your feelings to your crush). I then showed how
the possibility of attaining something of infinite value ensures that belief in God has the greatest
expected utility. And we saw that the argument is resilient: it still works even if we suppose it’s
very unlikely that God exists, even if we grant that God only rewards well-behaved believers or
may only reward believers with a finitely valuable afterlife, and even once we acknowledge that
entrance into heaven requires betting on the right God.

Reflection Questions

1. For all we know, disbelief in God or belief in the wrong God will result in being sent to hell
and enduring something infinitely bad. How might the introduction of negative infinite values
into the decision matrices affect the argument for BG2?

2. For all we know, God rewards only those who believe in him for wholesome reasons, and
won’t reward those who believe in him purely out of a self-interested desire to get into
heaven. Can this be used to underwrite an effective argument against BG2?

3. For all we know, there is no God but rather an evil deity who punishes believers and rewards
atheists. Can this observation be used to challenge BG2?

4. In section 4.4, we considered the objection that there are many Gods to choose from. Can
that objection be strengthened by arguing that there are infinitely many Gods to choose from?

5. Suppose that you are given the opportunity to enter a lottery to win an infinite amount of
money. The thing is, there’s only a one-in-a-million chance of winning, and the cost of a
lottery ticket is every last dollar you have in your bank account and all of your worldly
possessions. Would it be rational to enter the lottery? If not, is that a problem for BG1?

Sources
The argument advanced here is often referred to as “Pascal’s Wager”, since it originates with the
philosopher Blaise Pascal in his book Pensées. Here are some additional resources:

• Nick Bostrom: Pascal’s Mugging
• Lara Buchak: When is Faith Rational?

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• Tom Donaldson: The Will to Believe
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/will-believe
• Garber: What Happens After Pascal’s Wager? Living Faith and Rational Belief
• Alan Hájek: Pascal’s Ultimate Gamble
• William G. Lycan and George N. Schlesinger: You Bet Your Life: Pascal’s Wager Defended
• Susanna Rinard: Pascal’s Wager
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/pascals-wager
• Michael Rota: Taking Pascal’s Wager: Faith, Evidence and the Abundant Life

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CHAPTER 3
No Freedom

Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the
textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments
advanced in other chapters.

1. Introduction
Do we ever do anything of our own free will? You might think it’s obvious that we do. It
probably seems intuitively obvious that your decision to read this chapter isn’t unfree in the way
that, say, an action performed under hypnosis is. You thought about whether to start reading the
chapter, you made the decision to read it, and then you did that very thing that you decided to do.
What more could be required for your action to count as free?
In what follows, I will argue that more is needed for freedom and, moreover, nothing
anyone ever does has what it takes to count as free. I admit that this is a radical thesis, with radical
implications. For instance, our very practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions
presupposes that those actions were performed freely. (You wouldn’t blame someone for kicking
you when they’re under the control of a hypnotist.) But just because it’s radical, that doesn’t mean
it isn’t true.
I’ll present two arguments for my thesis that no one ever acts freely. The first turns on the
idea that everything we do is a result of our desires, which are not under our control (sections 3-
5). The second turns on the idea that everything we do is the inevitable result of things that
happened long before we were even born (sections 6-9). Those who wish to stand by the intuitive
idea that we do at least some things freely must find some flaw in each of the arguments.

2. Freedom Unmotivated
Before turning to my arguments against free action, let me address—and attempt to
undermine—the powerful intuition that we do often act freely. As indicated above, we tend to
think we act freely because many of our actions seem to have all of the marks of freedom: we
examine our options, we decide what to do, and we do what we decided to do. To better assess this
line of reasoning, let’s frame it as an explicit argument in defense of free action:

44

The Argument for Freedom
(FR1) Sometimes you perform an action after deciding to perform that action
(FR2) If one performs an action after deciding to perform it, then one performs that
action freely
(FR3) So some of your actions are performed freely

Premise FR1 is certainly true: we do make decisions and often our actions line up with our
decisions. And premise FR2 has its merits as well. You decided to read this chapter right now, and
here you are reading this chapter. That seems like a free action, and FR2 correctly predicts that it’s
a free action. But it doesn’t say that all actions are free. To see this, consider the following case
(inspired by a scene from the movie Now You See Me):

HYPNOTIC ACTION: Tia is on the run from the law and knows the cops are hot on her trail.
She is also a master hypnotist. As she passes Jordan on the street, she hypnotizes him and
plants an irresistible post-hypnotic suggestion: whenever he hears someone shout Freeze!
he will fall into a hypnotic trance and tackle the person who said it. Just then, Chris the cop
arrives on the scene, sees Tia, shouts Freeze!, and Jordan tackles him.

Jordan never decided to tackle Chris. He just fell into a trance, and when he emerged from the
trance he found himself on top of Chris pinning him to the ground. Certainly, Jordan’s action isn’t
free: he didn’t freely tackle Chris. FR2 doesn’t say that this action is free, and rightly so.
On closer inspection, though, we can see that FR2 cannot be correct. For consider a variant
of HYPNOTIC ACTION, in which the hypnotist is not only in control of the person’s actions but also
his deliberations.

HYPNOTIC DECISION: Tia is on the run from the law and knows the cops are hot on her trail.
She is also a master hypnotist. As she passes Colton on the street, she hypnotizes him and
plants an irresistible post-hypnotic suggestion: whenever he hears someone shout Freeze!
he will grow very angry with the person, decide to tackle them, and then tackle them. Just
then, Chris the cop arrives on the scene, sees Tia, and shouts Freeze! As a result of the
hypnotic suggestion, Colton gets angry at Chris, consciously decides to tackle him, and
then tackles him.

Clearly, tackling Chris isn’t something Colton did of his own free will. True, it may seem to him,
from the inside, as if he was free to do otherwise. He may even experience regret, feeling that he

45
could have and should have controlled his temper and decided not to tackle Chris. But, whether he
realizes it or not, Tia’s hypnotic hold over him is so powerful that he couldn’t have decided
otherwise. His will was not free nor was the action that sprung from it.
HYPNOTIC DECISION is a counterexample to premise FR2. FR2 says that someone acted
freely so long as they did what they decided to do, but Colton is a clear example of someone who
isn’t acting freely despite doing exactly what they decided to do. Since FR2 is false, our ordinary
reason for thinking that we sometimes act freely is undermined.

3. The Desire Argument Against Free Action
Colton’s action in HYPNOTIC DECISION isn’t free. But why not? The natural answer is that,
although he made a choice and did what he wanted to do, his desires weren’t under his control: he
wasn’t in control of the overwhelming desire to tackle Chris. What this suggests is that freedom
requires more than just making choices and doing what you desire to do. It requires that your
desires be under your control as well. And this is the insight that drives the first of my two
arguments against free action. The argument can be stated as follows:

The Desire Argument
(DS1) What you choose to do is always determined by your desires
(DS2) You can’t control your desires
(DS3) So, what you choose to do is always determined by something you can’t control.
(DS4) If so, then you never act freely
(DS5) So, you never act freely

By “desire”, I mean any kind of wanting, including passionately yearning for something, but also
less dramatic things, like wanting to buy some more socks. Let us examine the idea behind each
of the premises, and then I’ll turn to two ways that one might try to resist the argument.
Here is the idea behind DS1. You made a choice about what to have for lunch yesterday,
and you chose to have Taco Bell rather than Panda Express. Why? Presumably, it’s because you
had a stronger desire for Mexican food than for Chinese. Or perhaps you decided to make a peanut
butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. Why? Because your desire to save money was stronger than
your desire for some delicious fast food. You do what you do because you have the desires you
have. What else could explain your actions?

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To see the idea behind DS2, notice that we do not choose our desires. Perhaps you’re pre-
med because you like helping people. But it’s not as if, at some point, you chose to like helping
people. At some point you realized that this is your passion, and at some point you chose to pursue
that passion, but at no point did you choose to be passionate about it. Nor did you at any point
choose to like Mexican food better than Chinese food, or dogs better than cats. We don’t choose
our likes and passions and desires; they come to us unbidden. So it would seem that which desires
we end up with is not the sort of thing that’s under our control.
The final premise, DS4, is motivated by our intuitions about HYPNOTIC DECISION. Even
though Colton did choose to tackle Chris (no one is denying that people make choices!), he didn’t
choose to do so freely, and the best explanation for this is that his desire to tackle Chris was not
under his control. In other words, because his choices were being controlled by something (his
desire) which was not itself under his control, his action is unfree. Generalizing from that: an action
can’t be free if it’s controlled by something that’s not under one’s control. And that’s exactly what
DS4 is saying.
Now that we have seen why the argument is at least initially plausible, let us address two
important objections to the argument. According to the first, DS1 should be rejected because one’s
strongest desires do not always win out. According to the second, DS2 should be rejected because
there are ways of controlling one’s desires.

4. The Argument from Undesired Actions
A natural reaction to DS1 is to attempt to find cases in which one manages to overcome
one’s strongest desires. Suppose your alarm goes off early in the morning, waking you up for your
8am class. Your bed is so cozy; your hangover, so vicious. There is no part of you that wants to
get out of bed. And yet, somehow, you drag yourself out of bed and get to class. Is this not a
counterexample to DS1?
It isn’t. The argument underlying this objection would have to go something like this:

The Argument from Undesired Action
(UA1) Your desire to stay in bed was stronger than your desire to get out of bed
(UA2) If so, then what you choose to do is not always determined by your desires
(UA3) So, what you choose to do is not always determined by your desires

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UA1 may well be true; it may well be that you have no desire at all to get out of bed. But UA2 is
false. What’s true is that the desire to stay in bed isn’t overpowered by a desire to get out of bed.
But you have other desires that overpower it, for instance the desire to get a good grade in the
class. If not for that desire, you wouldn’t have gotten out of bed. So, in the end, this is just another
case of your actions being determined by your desires.
Other putative counterexamples to DS1 fail for similar reasons. Maybe after reading
section 3, just to (try to!) prove me wrong you’ll make yourself a banana and toothpaste omelet
for lunch, and eat the whole thing despite how disgusting it tastes. Does that show that your actions
aren’t determined by your desires? No, it just shows that your desire to do something absurd and
unpredictable is stronger than your desire to eat something tasty. Or maybe you’ll flip a coin to
decide where to go for lunch: Panda Express if it’s heads, Taco Bell if it’s tails. It comes up heads
and you go to Panda Express despite feeling more like Taco Bell. Does that show that something
other than your desires is determining what you choose to do? No. All it shows is that your desire
to honor the coin flip was stronger than your desire to eat what sounds tastiest.
One might still be worried about DS1. Suppose you’re at a job interview and your arm
suddenly and randomly twitches, causing you to spill a glass of water all over your potential
employer. You surely had no desire motivating you to do that. Doesn’t that show that what you do
isn’t always determined by your desires? Indeed, it does. But that’s no problem for DS1. DS1
doesn’t say that what you do is always determined by your desires. It says that what you choose to
do is always determined by your desires. Since you didn’t choose to spill the water—it’s just
something you did by accident—this is no counterexample to DS1.

5. The Argument from Desire-Defeating Actions
DS2 says that you cannot control your desires, which I motivated by pointing out that you
don’t choose your desires. One might object that, just because you don’t choose your desires, that
doesn’t mean that you have no control over them. I didn’t choose to have dark hair, but I do have
control over whether I have dark hair. I can always dye it or shave my head. Likewise, even if I
didn’t choose my desires, I can take steps to change them.
An example. Suppose that, for ethical reasons, I decide to become a vegetarian. Yet I have
such an overwhelming desire for meat that I can’t stop myself from eating it. What’s a wannabe
vegetarian to do? Here’s one thing I can do. I can force myself to sit through hours of horrific and

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disturbing videos of farm animals being mistreated and slaughtered. In time, I will have
conditioned myself to be nauseated by meat and will lose the desire for it altogether. Or suppose
that I have become addicted to some drug. I can check myself into rehab until the desire subsides.
In other words, even though I never initially chose to desire meat or drugs so strongly, I can change
those desires by taking actions that lead me to have the desires I’d prefer to have.
Let’s call these actions that enable one to overcome one’s desires “desire-defeating
actions”. One could try to argue against DS2 on the grounds that we are able to control our desires
by performing desire-defeating actions:

The Argument from Desire-Defeating Action
(DD1) Your desires can be changed by performing desire-defeating actions
(DD2) If so, then you can control your desires
(DD3) So, you can control your desires

I find this argument unconvincing. In order to perform a desire-defeating action, one has
to want to perform it. Some addicts check themselves into rehab and others don’t. Why the
difference? The answer is obvious: because some have a sufficiently strong desire to check
themselves into rehab and others don’t. More generally, whether you perform a desire-defeating
action is determined by whether you have a strong enough desire to perform a desire-defeating
action.
To see why that’s a problem for the Argument from Desire-Defeating Action, consider the
following analogy. Suppose I’m taking a ferry across the river, and I want to get to the other side
quickly. There are two ferries—one of which is much faster than the other—and an attendant
directing people onto the ferries. Yes, it’s true is that I can get there quickly if I take the faster
ferry. But it’s not up to me which ferry I take. That’s determined by the attendant, who I can’t
control and who has complete control over which ferry I take. Since I have no control over whether
I get on the faster ferry, I have no control over whether I get to the other side quickly.
An exactly parallel point holds for desire-defeating actions. Yes, it’s true is that my desires
can be changed by performing desire-defeating actions. (In other words, DD1 is true.) But it’s not
up to me whether I perform the desire-defeating action. That’s determined by the strength of my
desire to perform a desire-defeating action, which is something I don’t control and which has
complete control over whether I perform it. Since I have no control over whether I perform desire-

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defeating actions, I have no control over the desires I’m trying to change. So DD2 is false, and the
Argument from Desire-Defeating Action fails.
This completes our discussion of my first argument against free action. Now let us turn to
the second.

6. Determinism
The second argument involves the thesis of determinism, and argues from the truth of
determinism to the conclusion that no actions are free. I present the argument from determinism
in section 7, I address some challenges to determinism in section 8, and I address some attempts
to show that free action is compatible with determinism in section 9.
But I’m getting ahead of myself: what is determinism? Roughly put, the idea is that
everything that’s happening now and that will happen in the future was already guaranteed to
happen by things that happened in the distant past. Determinism can be stated more rigorously
using the notion of physical necessitation. To say that one state of the universe physically
necessitates some other state is to say that it is logically impossible for the one to occur without
the other occurring, given what the laws of nature are. Determinism can then be formulated as the
thesis that all present and future states of the universe are physically necessitated by states of the
universe in the distant past (i.e., before any of us were born).
To get a better sense of what determinism is saying, let’s look as an analogy. Consider the
counting rhyme One Potato Two Potato, which can be used as a way of randomly selecting some
person or thing:
One potato two potato
Three potato four
Five potato six potato
Seven potato more

Here’s how it works. You line some people up—let’s say, Blake, Garrett, and Jason, in that order—
and you start the rhyme by pointing at Blake as you say “One”. Then each time you reach a word
in bold, you advance to the next person. So, you move to Garrett on ‘two’, Jason on ‘three’, back
to Blake on ‘four’, and so on until you reach ‘more’. And whichever person you’re pointing at on
‘more’ is the person you’ve randomly selected (it’s Garrett).
But wait: the procedure isn’t really random, is it? Run through it again (without moving
the people around), and once again you end on Garrett. Do it a third time. Again, it’s Garrett. What

50
you’re seeing is that the order of people and the rules of One Potato Two Potato together
necessitate a unique outcome.
Determinism is making an analogous claim: past states of the universe and the laws of
nature together necessitate a unique future. Just as with the counting rhyme, there is only one way
for things to unfold given how things were at the outset and given the rules (the laws) that dictate
how one state of the universe gives rise to the next. It may not always be obvious in advance how
things will unfold (just like with the counting rhyme). Even so, given how things were in the distant
past and given the laws governing how earlier states give rise to later states, there is only one way
for things to end up. Or so says determinism.

7. The Argument From Determinism
Perhaps you can already see how determinism is going to stand in the way of free action.
But let’s make the argument explicit:

The Argument from Determinism
(DT1) Determinism is true
(DT2) If determinism is true, then you are never able to do otherwise
(DT3) If you are never able to do otherwise, then none of your actions are free
(DT4) So, none of your actions are free

In the previous section, I explained what determinism is, but I haven’t yet given you any
reason to think it’s true. Why accept DT1? Here’s one reason. Suppose that you are taking a
physics exam, which poses a question about a game of pool. The cue ball has just been struck and
is headed towards the eight ball. You’re given complete information about the state of the pool
table immediately following the shot: the masses and positions of the various balls, the velocity of
the cue ball and the direction it’s traveling, the dimensions of the table, the size of the pockets, and
so on. The question is whether the eight ball will go in the pocket.
This is a fair question. With some effort, you can use the laws of physics and information
about the balls and the table to calculate whether the shot is successful. But the question is fair, it
would seem, only if determinism is true. For if the laws of physics together with the initial state of
the table don’t determine whether the ball will go in—if things could go either way, as far as

51
physics is concerned—then there would be no way to tell, even in principle, whether the eight ball
will go in.
DT2 says that if determinism is true, then “you are never able to do otherwise”. What that
means is that, for any given thing that you’ve done, you couldn’t have done anything other than
that very thing. Suppose that yesterday you were choosing between Taco Bell and Panda Express,
and you ended up going to Taco Bell. It might seem like you could have gone to Panda Express;
you just didn’t go there. In other words, it might seem as if you were, in that moment, able to do
something other than what you in fact did. What DT2 is saying is that, if determinism is true, then
that’s not so. In that moment, you couldn’t have done anything other than go to Taco Bell.
Why accept DT2? The idea is that, if determinism is true, then all of your actions are
consequences of things that you are powerless to change—the laws of nature and the distant past—
which in turn means that the actions themselves are things you are powerless to change.
How about DT3? Here, the idea is that acting freely requires having multiple courses of
action available to you and being able to choose among them. Yet if those courses of action you
didn’t take weren’t really available you—if in truth you couldn’t have done anything other than
what you in fact did—then your action wasn’t free after all.
Any one of these premises can be resisted. So let’s consider each of them in turn.

8. The Case Against Determinism
As its name suggests, the Argument from Determinism is premised on the assumption that
determinism is true. Here I’ll consider two things that one might say in order to challenge that
assumption: first that mental events are exempt from determination by the laws and distant past,
and second that there is genuine randomness in the universe.
I can imagine someone insisting that determinism is true only when restricted to its proper
domain: the physical world. What’s true is that physical states of the universe in the distant past
physically necessitate all present and future physical states of the universe. But, the idea goes, they
don’t physically necessitate present and future nonphysical states of the universe, like decisions
and other mental states.
It’s hardly obvious that mental states aren’t physical states, but, for the sake of the
argument, let’s just grant that they aren’t. Still, this is not enough to block the argument from
determinism. For the envisaged objector agrees that determinism still applies to all physical events,

52
which includes everything that happens in and to our physical bodies. However, if everything that
our bodies do is determined, then, by the same reasoning given above, our bodies are never able
to do otherwise than what they in fact do. In that case, nothing we do with our bodies is done
freely. But everything we do (other than thinking) is something we do with our bodies. So we still
get the result that virtually nothing anyone does is done freely, including everyday actions like
going to Taco Bell for lunch or going for a morning run.
A different way of challenging DT1 is to insist that even the physical world isn’t governed
by deterministic laws, because there is genuine randomness in the universe. Indeed, the view that
the physical universe is nondeterministic arguably draws support from one of our best confirmed
physical theories, quantum mechanics, which is standardly interpreted as saying that some things
happen just as a matter of chance and that the laws of nature to some extent leave open what will
happen next. But if there is genuine randomness in the physical universe (not just the apparent
randomness you get with One Potato Two Potato), then determinism is false: the laws of nature
don’t guarantee that a specific future will result from past physical states.
Perhaps one could challenge quantum mechanics, though that seems unwise, especially for
those of us who don’t have a Ph.D. in physics. More modestly, one could challenge the standard,
indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics (the “Copenhagen” interpretation), and argue
for one of the alternative, deterministic interpretations (like the “many-worlds” interpretation). But
I’m not going to do either of those things. In fact, let’s just grant the point. Suppose that there is
genuine randomness in the universe. Suppose DT1 is false. Still, it’s a shallow victory, since it’s
hard to see how randomness is supposed to vindicate free action.
To see why, let’s suppose it was a matter of chance that you decided to read this chapter
right now. Let’s say there was a 30% chance that you’d decide to read the chapter, a 25% chance
you’d decide to go for a walk, and 45% chance that you’d decide to take a nap, and that for no
further reason than that—just as a random fluke—you ended up deciding to read rather than nap
or walk. That doesn’t sound like freedom to me! Think of it this way. If you were to rewind time
to the moment just before you decided to read this chapter, over and over again a hundred times,
then you’d do the reading about 30 times, nap about 45 times, and go for a walk around 25 times.
It’s completely random that, in this actual timeline, you decided to do the reading. But if it was a
random occurrence, then it wasn’t in any sense up to you or under your control whether to read or
nap or walk. And actions that aren’t up to you or under your control aren’t free.

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What this suggests is that, surprisingly, our actions are unfree whether or not they’re
determined. We can use this insight to fortify the argument from determinism, doing away with
the assumption that determinism is in fact true:

The Doomed Regardless Argument
(DM1) If an action is determined to happen, then you couldn’t have done otherwise
(DM2) If you couldn’t have done otherwise, then the action is not free
(DM3) So, if an action is determined, then it is not free
(DM4) If an action happens randomly, then it is not free
(DM5) Every action you perform is either determined to happen or happens randomly
(DM6) So, none of your actions are free

We have already seen the motivation behind most of the premises, so I can be brief. The idea
behind DM1 is that if an action is determined, then you have no control over the factors that are
controlling your action (namely, the laws and distant past). The idea behind DM2 is that freedom
requires a genuine ability to choose among different courses of action. The idea behind DM4 is
that, if it was just a random matter of chance that you did what you did, then it was not up to you
whether you did it. DM5 says that all actions are either random ones or determined ones, and
indeed it is hard to see what middle ground there could be. If something is undetermined then
nothing guarantees that it happens, in which case it must be a matter of chance that it happened.
DM6 follows from these four premises: since there are only the two categories of actions, and
actions belonging to either category are unfree, no actions are free.

9. Compatibilism
What we have seen is that it is no use trying to resist the Argument from Determinism by
denying determinism, since I can always shift to the Doomed Regardless Argument. Indeed, what
we have just seen is that free action might require determinism, since undetermined random
actions can never be free. Thus, one might be tempted by a different strategy, a compatibilist
strategy, which grants the truth of determinism (DT1) but insists that free action is actually entirely
compatible with determinism.
Don’t get too excited. A compatibilist still has to find some premise to deny in the
Argument from Determinism (as well as the Doomed Regardless Argument). Here again is the
argument:

54

The Argument from Determinism
(DT1) Determinism is true
(DT2) If determinism is true, then you are never able to do otherwise
(DT3) If you are never able to do otherwise, then none of your actions are free
(DT4) So, none of your actions are free

The compatibilist does not deny DT1. So she has to reject either DT2 or DT3. Let’s consider the
prospects of each of these options.

9.1 The Consequence Argument
The idea behind DT2, again, is that, if determinism is true, then all of your actions are
consequences of things that you are powerless to change—the laws of nature and the distant past—
which in turn means that the actions themselves are things you are powerless to change. Let’s
break down this line of reasoning.

The Consequence Argument
(CQ1) If determinism is true, then what you do is always a consequence of the laws of
nature and the distant past
(CQ2) You have no control over the laws of nature or the distant past
(CQ3) So, if determinism is true, then what you do is always a consequence of things over
which you have no control
(CQ4) If what you do is always a consequence of things over which you have no control,
then you are never able to do otherwise
(DT2) So, if determinism is true, you are never able to do otherwise

The idea behind CQ1 is that, given determinism, everything that is happening and will
happen is physically necessitated by events in distant past, and what your body and brain do is no
exception. Notice that CQ1 is not saying that determinism is true. Nor is it saying that what you
do is always a consequence of the laws of nature and the distant past. Rather, it’s drawing a
conceptual connection between two things: if everything is determined by the laws and the distant
past then everything you do is determined by the laws and the distant past. By analogy, suppose
that Iggy is on trial for murder. Even if you think that Iggy isn’t guilty and shouldn’t go to jail,
you could still agree that if Iggy is guilty then he should go to jail. Likewise, even if you reject
determinism, you could (and should) still accept CQ1.

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CQ2 is certainly true as well: try as you might, you can’t change the physical laws and you
can’t change what happened before you were born. Perhaps you could if you had a time machine
but, alas, you don’t.
To see why CQ4 is true, imagine that I’ve got you by the wrists, and I’m hitting you with
your own fists and taunting you: “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!” Why is that so
upsetting? Because I have overpowered you, and you can’t stop hitting yourself. You can’t do
otherwise. And why is that? Because you have no control over that which is determining what
you’re doing (namely, me). Generalizing: if you never have control over the things that determine
what you do, then you could never have done otherwise than what you in fact did.

9.2 Freedom without Options
The case for DT2 seems airtight: clearly, you can never do otherwise if everything you do
is a consequence of things that lie outside your control. That means that compatibilists will have
to deny DT3. But how could anyone deny DT3? How could an action be free if you had no choice
but to perform that action?
Here, the compatibilist might invoke a hypnosis case of her own.

HYPNOTIC BACKUP. Tia the master hypnotist is on the run from the law and hires Clay to
tackle any cop who turns up. Concerned that Clay might betray her, Tia gives Clay an
irresistible post-hypnotic suggestion to tackle any cop he sees, but which will kick in only
if she triggers it by shouting Abracadabra! When Chris the cop arrives on the scene, Tia
keeps a watchful eye on Clay to see if he’s going to back out. But Clay comes through:
he decides to tackle Chris all on his own, without Tia having to trigger the post-hypnotic
suggestion that would have forced him to tackle Chris.

Here is how this case is supposed to help the compatibilist. Notice that Clay could not have done
otherwise. He’s either going to decide on his own to tackle Chris, or he’s going to decide not to in
which case Tia will trigger the irresistible post-hypnotic suggestion forcing him to tackle Chris.
Either way he tackles Chris. But the mere fact that he couldn’t have done otherwise doesn’t stop
us from holding him responsible for what he did. That fact by itself doesn’t convince us that
tackling Chris is something he didn’t do freely. After all, as it happens neither his decision nor his
action was the result of hypnosis (although the tackling would have been the result of hypnosis
had he shown signs of backing out). What this suggests is that the mere inability to do otherwise

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isn’t by itself reason to think that an action is unfree. Accordingly, the compatibilist might say, we
have no good reason to accept DT3.
Even I have to admit that this is a clever objection. But ultimately the argument can be
revised so as to sidestep this case. To see how, let me first try to diagnose our reaction to HYPNOTIC
BACKUP. When we think about the tackling, we are inclined to hold Clay responsible and think
that being prevented from doing otherwise didn’t prevent him from acting freely. Why are we so
inclined? Because we think it was at least up to him whether to decide to tackle Chris. Since he
could have decided not to tackle Chris, and since he did decide to tackle Chris, we are open to
thinking of the tackling as something he did freely.
But if determinism is true, then not only your actions but also your (and Clay’s) decisions
are determined. With this in mind, we can revise the Argument from Determinism as follows:

The Argument from Determined Decision
(DT1) Determinism is true
(DT2*) If determinism is true, then you are never able to decide to do otherwise
(DT3*) If you are never able to decide to do otherwise, then none of your actions are free
(DT4) So, none of your actions are free

DT2* is just as plausible as DT2: if determinism is true then everything about you, including what
goes on in your brain, is determined by factors outside your control. And DT3* is no longer
threatened by HYPNOTIC BACKUP. As I said, HYPNOTIC BACKUP gives us reason to reject DT3 only
insofar as we were thinking that Clay could have decided not to tackle Chris. In order to challenge
DT3*, we’d need to change the case so that Clay couldn’t even have decided not to tackle Chris.
But when we revise the case in that way, our sense that he may still have been acting freely
vanishes altogether.

10. Freedom and Responsibility
I have provided two arguments against the seemingly obviously claim that people
sometimes act freely. The first turned on the assumption that our actions are determined by our
desires, and the second turned on the assumption that our actions are determined by the laws of
nature together with events that long preceded our births. Either way, our actions are determined

57
by something over which we have no control, which, I have argued, suffices to show that no one
ever acts freely.
At this point, you may be wondering whether it really even matters whether our actions are
free. Of course it does! If nothing we do is under our control and no one ever does anything freely,
then no one is ever morally responsible for what they do (just as no one is responsible for things
they do when they are in a hypnotic trance). Nor does anyone genuinely deserve praise or blame
for anything they do. Truly understanding and appreciating the arguments of this chapter requires
drastically rethinking our assessments of people and their actions.
If no one is responsible or blameworthy for the things that they do, does it mean that no
one should ever be punished for wrongdoing? Not necessarily. What’s true is that no one should
be punished because they deserve it or because they’re to blame for what they’ve done. But it still
makes good sense to punish people—and to threaten would-be criminals with punishment—to the
extent that this has a positive effect on their behavior. In a world without free will, punishment
must be seen as “forward-looking” as opposed to “backwards-looking”. We should punish people
because punishment (and the threat thereof) has certain desirable consequences, not because it
“sets things right” by addressing some past wrongdoing.

Reflection Questions

1. Can the Argument from Undesired Actions be defended against the sorts of objections I raise
in section 4? Are there better examples of undesired actions that escape my objections?

2. Can the Argument from Desire-Defeating Action be defended against the objections I raised
at the end of section 5?

3. Premise DM5 of the Doomed Regardless Argument (section 8) says that every action is either
determined to happen or random. Is there really no middle-ground?

4. At the end of section 9, I said that the HYPNOTIC BACKUP case cannot be revised to serve as a
counterexample to DT3* of the Argument from Determined Decisions (section 9). Is that true?

Sources
Both the Desire Argument and the Argument from Determinism can be found in Baron
d’Holbach’s “Of the System of Man’s Free Agency”. The consequence argument in section 9.1 is
drawn from Peter van Inwagen’s Essay on Free Will, and the hypnotist example in section 9.2 is a
variation on a well-known example from Harry Frankfurt’s “Alternate Possibilities and Moral

58
Responsibility”. For discussion of whether quantum mechanics is at odds with determinism, see
Tim Maudlin’s “Distilling Metaphysics from Quantum Physics”. Here are some additional
resources:

Maria Alvarez: Actions, Thought Experiments, and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities
A. J. Ayer: Freedom and Necessity
Gregg Caruso: The Dark Side of Free Will

Clarence Darrow: Crime and Criminals (Address to the Prisoners in the Chicago Jail)
John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Manuel Vargas, and Derk Pereboom: Four Views on Free Will
Meghan Griffith: Free Will: The Basics
R.E. Hobart: Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It
David Hume: Of Liberty and Necessity
Kristin M. Mickelson: The Manipulation Argument
Adina Roskies: Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Responsibility
Peter van Inwagen: The Powers of Rational Beings
Susan Wolf: Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility

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CHAPTER 4
You Know Nothing

Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the
textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments
advanced in other chapters.

You probably think you know all sorts of things about the world. You know when your
earliest class starts tomorrow and when you’ll need to set your alarm in order to make it on time.
You know that it will be colder on average in February than in August, and that the sun will rise
and set tomorrow. You know who the president is, you know where your family lives, you know
where you celebrated your last birthday, you know some trivia—like the capital of Alaska—and
you know some immediately obvious things, like that you’re reading a book right now.
I will argue that you don’t know any of these things. My aim will be to show that you don’t
know anything about the world, that is, the external physical world. I won’t try to argue that you
don’t know anything about your own internal states—like thoughts and feelings—nor will I try to
argue that you don’t know anything about nonphysical things like numbers, for instance that
1+1=2. (The title of the chapter admittedly overstates things a bit.) I’ll begin by arguing that you
don’t know what the world will be like in the future, not even one moment from now (sections 1-
4). I will then argue that you don’t even know what the world is like presently, not even what’s
happening right in front of you (sections 5-9).

1. Skepticism about the Future
My first skeptical argument begins with the observation that if we know anything about the
world, it would have to be in one of two ways. The first way is by direct observation. This is just
what it sounds like: using your sense organs to obtain information that’s immediately available to
you. That would be how you know that you’re holding a book (or a laptop) in your hands right
now, that you’re wearing a bracelet, that the room smells like grandma for some reason, and so on.
But not everything we take ourselves to know about the world can be known on the basis
of direct observation. Here’s an example. You wake up in the morning, look out the window, and
see that everything is wet: the trees are dripping, the lawn is soaked, there are puddles in the street,
and so on. You conclude that it rained overnight. But you didn’t directly observe it raining. Rather,
you infer that it rained from things that you’ve directly observed in the past. In the past, you’ve

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observed this kind of distribution of water being caused by rain falling from the sky. So you draw
the seemingly plausible inference that that’s how it happened this time.
This sort of reasoning is what’s called an induction: reasoning from the fact that certain
things you’ve directly observed are always or usually a certain way to the conclusion that certain
things you haven’t directly observed are that way too. Inductive reasoning isn’t foolproof. It’s
possible that a plane dropped all that water to put out a fire, and that’s why everything is soaked.
But the mere fact that induction can sometimes lead us astray doesn’t (by itself) show that it’s
irrational to rely on it.
Our beliefs about how the world will be in the future are likewise based on induction. You
expect the sun to set in the west tomorrow. Why? Because every time you’ve observed the sun set,
it has set in the west. Or maybe you’re some kind of nerd and you believe the sun will set in the
west tomorrow on the basis of laws of planetary motion. But why think those same laws of
planetary motion will be in effect tomorrow? Presumably, it’s because they’ve always been in
effect in the past.
Now that we have a handle on what induction is, let’s get to the argument. The argument
is going to turn on the status of a certain principle, which I’ll call the Future-Like-Past principle,
or FLP for short:

(FLP) Future states of the world will be like past states of the world

The argument, in short, is that we can’t know anything about the future because we’re not justified
in believing FLP, or in other words because we have no good reason to believe that FLP is true.
More precisely:

Against Knowing the Future
(KF1) If you are not justified in believing that FLP is true, then all of your beliefs about
how the world will be in the future are unjustified
(KF2) You are not justified in believing that FLP is true
(KF3) So, all of your beliefs about how the world will be in the future are unjustified
(KF4) If so, then you don’t know anything about how the world will be in the future
(KF5) So, you don’t know anything about how the world will be in the future

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I’ll explain the rationale behind KF1 and KF2 in the following two sections. (Though you
may find it worthwhile to pause for a moment right now and ask yourself: what reason do you
have for believing FLP?) As for KF4, the idea is that being justified in believing something—
having good reason for believing it—is a bare minimum for counting as knowing it. For instance,
if you think that there are sparrows in Australia, but this is just a guess and you don’t actually have
any evidence that there are, then you obviously don’t know that there are sparrows in Australia,
even if you happen to have guessed right.

2. What it Takes to Know the Future
Premise KF1 says that none of your beliefs about how the world will be in the future are
justified unless you have good reason to think that that FLP is true. Here’s the argument for that
premise:

The Faulty Foundation Argument
(FF1) All of your beliefs about how the world will be in the future are based on FLP
(FF2) If a belief is based on something unjustified, then that belief itself is unjustified
(KF1) So, if you are not justified in believing that FLP is true, then all of your beliefs
about how the world will be in the future are unjustified

To see the idea behind FF1, let’s again ask: why do you believe that the sun will set in the
west tomorrow? You infer it from the fact that in the past it has always set in the west. But,
implicitly, the inference relies on FLP. In other words, you’re at least implicitly running through
a line of reasoning something like this:

In the past the sun has always set in the west
Future states of the world will be like past states of the world
So, tomorrow the sun will set in the west

Likewise for your belief that eating that whole McDonalds extra value meal is going to make you
sleepy.

In the past eating an entire extra value meal always made me sleepy
Future states of the world will be like past states of the world
So, eating this entire extra value meal will make me sleepy

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Implicitly or explicitly, you arrive at all your beliefs about future states of the world in this way.
I don’t mean to suggest that we rely on FLP as a hard and fast rule. No one thinks that the
future will be like the past in every respect. We wouldn’t use it to infer that there will never be
flying cars or a cure for cancer. The principle we actually rely on in our reasoning is more nuanced,
perhaps something like this:

(FLP*) Future states of the world will be like past states of the world except in respects in
which we can expect them to differ

These complications needn’t concern us here. All I need for the argument for FF1 is that we always
rely on some such principle in our reasoning about the future, and that much seems indisputable.
You can feel free to replace FLP with FLP*—or whichever other principle of similarity you
prefer—in the arguments below.
How about FF2? The idea there is that a justified belief can’t be built on a faulty foundation:
if your reasons for believing something are no good, then that belief itself is no good. To help see
this, consider the following case:

POWER POSE: Jared is getting ready for a job interview, and thinks it will help his chances
if he spends five minutes “power posing”. When his fiancée Ashley asks him why he thinks
that will help, Jared tells her that scientists have shown that power posing releases
performance-enhancing hormones into your bloodstream. Skeptical, Ashley does some
Googling and shows Jared that the power-posing study has been completely discredited
and is now widely regarded as “pseudo-science”.

When Jared finds out that the study has been discredited, that renders his belief that power posing
releases performance-enhancing hormones unjustified. But if that belief is unjustified, then any
belief based on it is going to be unjustified as well. It would obviously be irrational for Jared to go
on believing that power posing will help him in the interview once he admits that he has no good
reason to believe that power posing releases performance-enhancing hormones. That’s the idea
behind FF2.
What we have just seen is that your beliefs about how the world will be in the future are
justified only if you’re justified in believing FLP, the Future-Like-Past principle. So if I can show

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that you’re not justified in believing this one thing, FLP, I will have shown that none of your beliefs
about what is going to happen—one year from now, one hour from now, or even one second from
now—are justified. So let’s turn now to KF2, which says that you indeed aren’t justified in
believing FLP.

3. Why Believe the Future Will Be like the Past?
The idea behind KF2 is that there are only two possible ways for a belief in FLP to be
justified, and it isn’t justified in either of those ways.

FLP is Unjustified
(UJ1) If your belief in FLP is justified, then it is either justified by direct observation or
by inductive reasoning
(UJ2) Your belief in FLP isn’t justified by direct observation
(UJ3) Your belief in FLP isn’t justified by inductive reasoning
(KF2) So, your belief in FLP is unjustified

I’ll quickly explain why we should accept UJ1 and UJ2, and then in section 4 we’ll turn to UJ3.
Why accept UJ1? You might worry that direct observation and inductive reasoning aren’t
the only possible sources of justification. For instance, your beliefs about your own mental life—
that you’re having certain thoughts and feelings right now—aren’t based on any inference
(inductive or otherwise) and also aren’t based on direct observation (using your sense organs).
Rather, they seem to have some further source of justification, as do beliefs about nonphysical
things like numbers (e.g., that 3+4=7).
I don’t deny that there are other possible sources of justification, for instance introspection
or mathematical intuitions. Still, it is hard to see what other than direct observation and induction
could justify the beliefs I am targeting here, namely beliefs about the external physical world.
Introspection and mathematical intuitions can tell you about internal states like thoughts and
feelings and nonphysical things like numbers, but they don’t (by themselves) tell us anything about
the external physical world. (Of course, they can tell you something about the external world when
combined with direct observation and introspection. For instance, if you see three slices of pizza,
and then hear that two of them have been eaten, mathematical intuition, together with these direct
observations, can tell you that there’s one slice left.) And since FLP is a claim about the external
physical world—it tells us that future physical states of the external world resemble past physical

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states of the external world—a belief in FLP would have to be justified by direct observation or
inductive inference. And that’s UJ1.
To see the idea behind UJ2, notice that FLP is a claim about similarity. It’s claiming that
two things (the past and the future) are similar to one another. Plausibly, in order for direct
observation to justify you in believing that two things are similar, you have to be able to directly
observe both of them. But you can’t directly observe the future. (Maybe you could if you had a
time machine but, drat, you don’t.) So, you can’t be justified in believing that the future will be
like the past on the basis of direct observation. That’s UJ2.

4. No Inductive Argument for FLP
All that remains to be done is to defend UJ3. If I can show that it’s true—that FLP can’t be
justified by inductive inference—then we have a well-motivated argument that your belief in FLP
isn’t justified, and an argument from there to my ultimate conclusion that you know nothing about
the future. The idea behind UJ3 is that any inductive justification for FLP would be circular, and
circularity is bad. Unpacking that a bit:

The Anti-Circularity Argument
(AC1) All inductive reasoning about the future assumes the truth of FLP
(AC2) If so, then any inductive reasoning about FLP is circular
(AC3) No belief can be justified by circular reasoning
(UJ3) So, FLP isn’t justified by inductive reasoning

Let’s take it one premise at a time.
The case for AC1 is the same as the case for premise FF1 of the Faulty Foundation
Argument. All inductive reasoning about what’s going to happen in the future either explicitly or
at least implicitly relies on FLP. In the past the sun has set in the west, and future states of the
world will be like past states of the world, so in the future it’ll set in the west. The laws of planetary
motion have always been this way in the past, and future states of the world will be like past states
of the world, so in the future they’ll be like this. In the past, beer before liquor makes you sicker,
and the future states of the world will be like past states of the world, so… you get the idea. All of
these lines of reasoning rely on FLP. That’s what AC1 says.
AC2 turns on the notion of circularity. A circular line of reasoning is one whose conclusion
also appears as a premise of that reasoning. To see the idea behind AC2, suppose it’s true that

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inductive reasoning about future states of the world always assumes the truth of FLP. Well, FLP
is about future states of the world: it says that future states are going to be like past states. So it
follows that inductive reasoning about FLP assumes the truth of FLP. Specifically, the reasoning
is going to go like this:

In the past, later times have turned out to be like earlier times
Future states of the world will be like past states of the world
So, later times will be like earlier times

The conclusion of this line of reasoning, “Later times will be like earlier times,” is just another
way of saying “Future states of the world will be like past states of the world”, which is the second
premise of the reasoning. That means that you’ve got one and the same claim showing up both as
a premise and as the conclusion of the reasoning. That fits our definition of circularity.
As for AC3, it’s easy to see that circular reasoning is terrible reasoning. As an illustration,
consider the following case, involving a Magic 8-Ball toy (which randomly displays answers like
“Yes”, “No”, and “Maybe” when you shake it up):

MAGIC 8-BALL: Madhu shakes up his Magic 8-Ball, asks whether Smitha has a crush on
him, and it issues its verdict: yes. Madhu’s excitement lasts only for a moment, as he
suddenly realizes that he has no reason to believe that the 8-ball can be trusted. So he
decides to check. He shakes up the 8-Ball, asks it whether it can be trusted, and it issues its
verdict: yes. “That settles it,” Madhu thinks to himself, “the 8-ball can be trusted, and
Smitha does have a crush on me!”

Obviously, Madhu’s reasoning here is deeply problematic. The first time he shakes up the toy, he
reasons from it said she has a crush on me to she does have a crush on me, implicitly relying on
the assumption that the 8-Ball can be trusted—which he has no good reason to assume. The second
time he shakes it up, he reasons from it said it can be trusted to it indeed can be trusted, again
relying on the assumption that he can trust what it says. The first time was bad enough, since the
assumption was unfounded. The second time is even worse, and the natural diagnosis of why that
line of reasoning is so bad is that it’s circular: the 8-ball can be trusted appears both as the
conclusion and as a premise of Madhu’s reasoning, and you can’t be justified in believing anything
on the basis of reasoning like that. And that’s just what AC3 is saying.

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This concludes my argument that you don’t know anything about how the world will be in
the future. If you want to resist KF5, you must reject some premise in the Against Knowing the
Future argument. And since I have argued for every premise of that argument, you mustn’t reject
any premise before revisiting my argument for that premise and assuring yourself that you have a
good response to it.

5. The Dreaming Argument
We saw that you don’t know anything at all about what the world is going to be like in the
future, even one moment from now. Now I want to turn to an even more radical conclusion, namely
that you don’t know anything about what’s going on in the world at this very moment, not even
what is going on right in front of your eyes. You should sit down for this. (Seriously, sit down or
my examples won’t make sense.) My argument will focus on one particular thing you take yourself
to know about the world—that you’re sitting down reading—but it will be obvious how the
argument generalizes to all your other beliefs about the world: the color of your chair, the number
of people in the room with you, and so on.
My argument involves a certain hypothesis, which I’ll call the Dreaming Hypothesis, or
TDH for short:

(TDH) You are currently lying down in bed dreaming about sitting down reading a
philosophy textbook

With TDH in mind, here is how I’ll argue that you don’t know that you’re sitting down reading:

The Dreaming Argument
(DR1) If you have no way of knowing that TDH is false, then you don’t know that you’re
sitting down reading
(DR2) You have no way of knowing that TDH is false
(DR3) So you don’t know that you’re sitting down reading

Notice that TDH is not itself a premise of the argument. Accordingly, I don’t have to try to
convince you that TDH is true, or even that it’s probably true. Indeed, I don’t need to give you any
reason whatsoever for thinking it’s true, and it’s fine with me if you think that it’s incredibly

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unlikely that it’s true. All I need to show concerning TDH is that you have no way of knowing it’s
false. And that I can do.
Let’s turn, then, to the defense of the premises. In section 6, I’ll present an argument for
DR1. Then, in section 7, I’ll give you two arguments for DR2. Finally, in sections 8-9, I’ll conclude
the discussion of the dreaming argument by addressing a likely objection to DR2, namely that you
can tell you’re not dreaming by performing some sort of test—like pinching yourself, or checking
whether light switches work.

6. Why You Have to Rule Out the Dreaming Hypothesis
DR1 in effect says that you must be able to rule out the dreaming hypothesis in order to
know that you’re sitting down reading. Why is that? One way to think about it is that knowing that
you’re sitting down reading entails that you have a way of ruling out the dream hypothesis.
Accordingly, if you aren’t able to rule it out, it must be because you don’t know you’re sitting
down reading after all.
To unpack that reasoning a bit, it will be helpful to focus on a reworded version of DR1:

(DR1*) If you know that you’re sitting down reading, then you have a way of knowing
that TDH is false

This is actually equivalent to DR1; it’s just another way of saying the same thing. “If A is true then
B is true” is another way of saying “if B isn’t true, then A isn’t true”. These are simply two different
ways of saying that you don’t get A without B. So if I can successfully argue that DR1* is true,
then I will thereby have established that the original premise DR1 is true as well.
The argument for DR1* involves the notion of a deduction. A deduction is a certain kind
of reasoning, where the conclusion of the reasoning is logically guaranteed by the premises. In
other words, it would be inconsistent to accepted all the premises and yet deny the conclusion. As
an illustration, if you reason from the coin either landed heads or tails and it did not land heads to
the conclusion it landed tails, that’s a deduction. You deduced that it landed tails from those other
two beliefs. Here, then, is the argument for DR1*:

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The Argument from Deduction
(DE1) If you know you’re sitting down reading, you can deduce that TDH is false from
things you know
(DE2) If you can deduce something from things you know, then you have a way of
knowing that thing
(DR1*) So, if you know you’re sitting down reading, then you have a way of knowing
TDH is false

DE1 says that there’s a certain kind of deduction you’d be able to perform if you really did
know that you were sitting down reading. Specifically, you’d be able to perform the following
deduction:

(i) I’m sitting down reading
(ii) If I’m sitting down reading, then I’m sitting
(iii) If I’m sitting, then I’m not lying down
(iv) If I’m not lying down, then I’m not lying down dreaming
(v) If I’m not lying down dreaming, then TDH is false
(vi) So, TDH is false

This is a way of deducing that TDH is false. Steps (ii), (iii), (iv), and (v) of the reasoning are easily
known conceptual truths. For instance, you know (iii) just by observing that it follows from the
definition of sitting that if you’re sitting you’re not lying down. So, if you know the first step as
well—that you’re sitting down reading—then what we have here is a way of deducing that TDH
is false from things you know. That’s what DE1 says.
The idea behind DE2 is straightforward. Suppose I tell you that I flipped a normal coin and
that it didn’t come up heads. You tell me that it came up tails. How did you know?? Answer: by
deducing it from things you know: that it was either heads or tails, and that it wasn’t heads. Of
course, if you ran through that same deduction, but you didn’t actually know that it wasn’t heads—
you were merely guessing it wasn’t heads, let’s say—we wouldn’t say that you knew it was tails.
But when you deduce something from things you actually do know, then you know the thing you
deduced as well. That’s what DE2 is saying.
So DR1* is true. And, as we saw above, DR1* is equivalent to DR1: if you don’t know
TDH is false, then you have no way of knowing you’re sitting down reading. So DR1 is true.

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7. Why You Can’t Rule Out the Dreaming Hypothesis
Having shown that you have to be able to rule out TDH in order to know that you’re sitting
down reading, I turn now to the second premise, DR2, which says that you can’t rule out TDH.
I’ll give two arguments for this premise.

7.1 Insensitivity
I call the first argument for DR2 “The Insensitivity Argument”, because it has to do with
things you would have believed regardless of whether they were true, in other words, beliefs that
aren’t “sensitive” to what is and isn’t true.

The Insensitivity Argument
(IN1) If you would have believed something even if the opposite were true, then you have
no way of knowing that thing
(IN2) You would have believed that TDH is false even if the opposite were true
(DR2) So, you have no way of knowing that TDH is false

To see the idea behind IN1, consider the following case:

BEAMING JUDGES. Jubilee is competing in a talent show, and noticed that judges all had
huge smiles on their faces through her whole performance. On account of the smiling,
Jubilee is confident that she’s going to win. Unbeknownst to Jubilee, however, the judges
had just as huge smiles on their faces through everyone’s performance.

Intuitively, Jubilee doesn’t know that she was going to win. Why not? Because even if she wasn’t
going to win, the judges still would have smiled and—since she interprets their smiling as a sign
that she’s going to win—she still would have believed she was going to win. In other words, she
doesn’t know she’s going to win because she would have believed she was going to win even if
the opposite were true. Just as IN1 predicts.
As for IN2, notice that we virtually never realize we’re dreaming when we are dreaming.
If right now you were in bed dreaming about sitting down reading, you’d think you really were
sitting down reading and not merely dreaming it. In other words, you’d believe that TDH is false
even if it were true, just as IN2 says. This concludes my defense of the first argument for DR2.

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7.2 No Evidence
My second argument for DR2, simply put, is that you haven’t got any evidence against
TDH, and you can’t know that something’s false if you haven’t got any evidence against it.

The No Evidence Argument
(NE1) If you have no evidence against something, then you have no way of knowing it’s
false
(NE2) You have no evidence against TDH
(DR2) So, you have no way of knowing that TDH is false

We can motivate NE1 by thinking about everyday examples. Suppose we hear some music,
and you say it’s a Nickelback song. I ask how you know that and you say it’s because it’s loud and
not very good. I point out that lots of bands are loud and not very good, like Fall Out Boy, or Blink
182. How do you know that it’s not Fall Out Boy? Maybe you could know it’s not Fall Out Boy if
you had some idea of what Nickelback’s lead singer sounds like, or if you recognize the song from
a Nickelback album. But if literally all you know about Nickelback is that they’re loud and not
very good, then you can’t know it’s not some other loud and not very good band. You have no
way of knowing it’s not Fall Out Boy. And that’s because you have no evidence against the
hypothesis that it’s Fall Out Boy, just as NE1 says.
The idea behind NE2 is that TDH is compatible with all your evidence. After all, what
evidence do you have that you’re sitting down reading? Your evidence is that it looks like your
legs are bent in a sitting position atop a chair (or couch), that it feels like you’re holding a book
(or tablet or laptop), and so on. But that’s entirely compatible with TDH. Indeed, this is exactly
how things would look and feel if you were merely dreaming that you were sitting down reading.
So the fact that it looks and feels like you’re sitting down reading is hardly evidence that you aren’t
merely dreaming that you’re sitting down reading. In other words, it’s not evidence that TDH is
false.
You might suspect at this point that my own argument can be turned against me. After all,
you might insist, we don’t have any evidence for TDH either. So it would seem that we can run a
parallel argument for the conclusion that we can’t know that TDH is true:

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The Flipped Evidence Argument
(FE1) If you have no evidence for something, then you have no way of knowing it’s true
(FE2) You have no evidence for TDH
(FE3) So, you have no way of knowing that TDH is true

But this argument doesn’t worry me at all. It’s not that I have some objection to one of the premises.
Indeed, I agree with both of the premises, and I happily accept the conclusion of the argument. I
completely agree that we have no way of knowing, one way or the other, whether TDH is true.
Is that a problem for my Dreaming Argument? Not at all! As I already explained above (in
section 5), my argument doesn’t require establishing that TDH is true, or even that TDH is
probably true. All I need to establish is that you can’t know it’s false. And I have now done that
twice over, with the No Evidence Argument and the Insensitivity Argument.

8. Can You Tell You’re Not Dreaming?
I can imagine someone objecting that there is a way to know you’re not dreaming: dreams
are different from waking life in all sorts of ways, and you can know whether you’re dreaming by
checking for those differences. For instance, you might point out that your present experiences are
incredibly vivid and coherent, whereas dreams tend to be blurry nonsense. You might claim that
this undermines DR2: you can know that TDH is false by attending to the vividness of your
experiences.
Where, then, do my arguments for DR2 go wrong? You might say that NE2 is false: the
vividness of your experience counts as evidence against TDH. And you might say that IN2 is false
too. If TDH were true—if you really were dreaming about sitting down reading—and if within the
dream you asked yourself whether you were dreaming, you would notice the lack of vividness and
you wouldn’t believe that TDH is false.
The easiest way to see why this objection won’t work is to slightly modify TDH as follows:

(TDH+) You are currently lying down in bed dreaming about sitting down reading a
philosophy textbook, and it’s the most incredibly vivid dream you’ve ever had

You can’t know that TDH+ is false just by attending to the vividness of your experiences. Nor can
the vividness be evidence against TDH+. Having vivid experiences is entirely compatible with

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TDH+, and indeed it’s exactly what TDH+ predicts your experiences will be like. Furthermore, if
you think you’re not dreaming because of the vividness of your experience, then you would think
TDH+ is false even if it were true. What this shows is that we can render DR2 and the arguments
for it immune to this objection from vividness by simply replacing TDH with TDH+ throughout.
Exactly the same point applies to other ways you might try to check whether you’re
dreaming. For instance, you might point out that you’re a complete novice at philosophy, and that
these are brilliant philosophical arguments that you never knew about before. But, you might insist,
you can’t dream about an idea you’ve never heard before.
First of all, don’t sell yourself short: if Paul McCartney can compose the song Yesterday
in a dream, then you can come up with the Dreaming Argument in a dream. (It’s not that brilliant,
really.) Second, we can once again sidestep this concern by simply modifying TDH. For instance,
we can modify it to say that you’re a brilliant philosophy professor, dreaming that you’re a student
reading a philosophy textbook for the first time. Or that you’re dreaming about reading
philosophical arguments that only seem brilliant but actually they’re complete gibberish.
(There’s an old joke about a guy who dreamed that he came up with a single objection that
could refute every philosophical position. One by one, he approached every great philosopher in
history, all of whom admitted defeat after hearing the objection. He woke up in a daze, scribbled
the objection on a piece of paper so he wouldn’t forget it, and went back to sleep. When he awoke
the next morning, he grabbed the piece of paper excitedly, and found that what he had scribbled
down was: “that’s what you say!”)

9. No Useful Tests for Dreaming
It should be fairly clear that, for any test you come up with for checking whether you’re
dreaming, I’ll be able to modify TDH to get around the test. Even better, though, if I can nip this
sort of response in the bud by giving a more direct argument that no test can ever enable you to
know whether you’re dreaming. Not pinching yourself and checking if you feel it, not flipping
light switches and checking if the lighting changes, not—as a student of mine once argued in a
term paper—peeing and checking if you still feel like you have to pee. (If you do, he argued, then
you must have only dreamt that you peed.)

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Let’s call a way of testing whether you’re dreaming a “dreaming test”. A reliable dreaming
test is one that tells you you’re dreaming only when you really are dreaming, and that tells you
you’re awake only when you really are awake. Here’s the argument:

The No Useful Tests Argument
(NU1) If you don’t know that a dreaming test is reliable, then you can’t know whether
you’re dreaming by using it
(NU2) You can never know that a dreaming test is reliable
(NU3) So, you can never know whether you’re dreaming by using a dreaming test

NU1 says that, in order to know whether you’re dreaming by using a certain dreaming test,
you have to know that the test actually works. Suppose I ask you how you know you’re awake and
you say, “because I spun a top and it fell over instead of spinning forever.” Then I ask you how
you know that’s a good test for whether you’re dreaming and you say, “oh, I have no idea if it
works, I just saw it in a movie once.” If you don’t already somehow know that tops always spin
forever in dreams and never spin forever in reality—that is, unless you know it’s a reliable test—
then you can’t know you’re awake by using that test.
What about NU2? Why can’t you ever know that a dreaming test is reliable? Here’s why.
Knowing a test is reliable is a matter of knowing that it’s worked in the past: those times you were
dreaming, the test correctly said you were dreaming, and those times you were awake, it correctly
said you were awake. So, for instance, to assure yourself that the pinching test is reliable, you
might reason as follows: “Yesterday, I pinched myself while I was awake at the gym and I felt it.
Last night, I pinched myself while I was dreaming and I didn’t feel anything. This morning, right
after I woke up, I pinched myself again and I felt it.”
But wait a minute. That line of reasoning presupposes that you really were awake on the
first and third occasion. For all you know, maybe you merely dreamed that you woke up this
morning. Maybe you are still dreaming, and the supposed awakening was merely a dream within
a dream coming to an end. Perhaps for the last fifteen years you’ve been lying in bed in a coma,
moving in and out of dreams in which you feel pinches and dreams-within-dreams in which you
can’t feel them. You have no way of ruling that out. And if you can’t rule that out, then you can’t
know that your rationale for thinking the pinching test is reliable is any good. And if you can’t
know that your rationale for thinking the pinching test is reliable is any good, then you can’t know

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that the pinching test is reliable. And the same goes for all other dreaming tests. Just like NU2
says.

10. Conclusion
I’ve argued that you know nothing about the external world, either how it is or how it will
be. You can’t know anything about future because all of your beliefs about the future are based on
an assumption that you have no good reason to accept: that future states of the world will be like
past states of the world. And you can’t know anything about the present because you have no way
to rule out the possibility that all of your present experiences are part of an unusually vivid dream.

Reflection Questions

1. The argument in section 3 turns on the claim that induction and direct observation are the only
ways of knowing about the world. Is that true? When a detective solves a crime unlike any
crime she’s ever seen before, is she using resources other than induction and direct
observation? If so, how might that help with resisting the argument?

2. Are you convinced by the No Evidence argument in section 7.2? Can you sometimes dismiss
a hypothesis out of hand, without any evidence against it? Which ones and why?

3. Do you have any evidence that the dreaming hypothesis is false? If so, what is it? If the
evidence takes the form of a test, how would you respond to the No Useful Tests argument in
section 9?

4. Can you think of a way of adapting some of the arguments from this chapter to produce an
argument that we can’t know anything about the past?

5. I argued that no one knows anything about the world. Are my arguments self-defeating? Can
they also be used to show that I don’t know that no one knows anything about the world? If
so, is that a problem? If not, why not?

Sources
The problem of induction can be found in David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding. The dreaming argument for skepticism is drawn from René Descartes’s
Meditations on First Philosophy, and also has roots in Chuang Tzu’s “Discussion on Making All
Things Equal”. See Fred Dretske’s “Is Knowledge Closed Under Known Entailment?” for
discussion of the Argument from Deduction. The joke about the philosopher’s dream in section 8
is from Raymond Smullyan’s 5000 BC and Other Philosophical Fantasies. Here are some
additional resources:

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• Daniel Greco: Hume’s Skepticism
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/humes-skepticism-part-1
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/humes-skepticism-part-2
• Michael Huemer: The Problem of Memory Knowledge
• Ned Markosian: Do You Know That You Are Not a Brain in a Vat?
• Jennifer Nagel: Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction
• Jennifer Nagel: wi-phi videos on external-world skepticism
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/problem-skepticism
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/three-responses-skepticism
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/new-responses-skepticism
• Susanna Rinard: Reasoning One’s Way Out of Skepticism
• Wesley Salmon: An Encounter with David Hume
• Gail Stine: Skepticism, Relevant Alternatives, and Deductive Closure
• Ruth Weintraub: Skepticism about Induction
• Catherine Wilson: Descartes’s Meditations: An Introduction (ch.2)

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CHAPTER 5
What Makes You You

Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the
textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments
advanced in other chapters.

1. Introduction
In this chapter, I address the question of what makes you the person that you are. In
particular, is it your physical aspects or, rather, your psychological aspects that makes you the
person that you are? I will argue that neither facts about your body, nor facts about your mental
life, nor any combination of the two can answer the question of what makes you you, and that this
remains an open and challenging—and perhaps unanswerable—question.
In section 2, I clarify the question that I mean to be asking, and I explain what a satisfactory
answer would have to look like. In section 3, I present a variety of potential answers to the question,
some more promising than others. In section 4, I closely examine an account according to which
it is having the body that you do that makes you the person that you are, and I advance two
arguments against this same-body account: an argument from conjoined twins and an argument
from the possibility of body swaps. In section 5, I show that psychological accounts of personal
identity face problems of their own—problems involving abrupt changes to one’s mental life and
problems handling cases in which one person’s mental life is “transferred” into two different
bodies. In section 6, I consider the suggestion that your soul is what makes you the person that you
are. Finally, in section 7, I consider and reject the idea that the bodily and psychological accounts
can somehow be combined to yield a satisfactory answer to the question of personal identity.

2. Clarifying the Question of Personal Identity
Let me clarify what I am asking, and what I am not asking, in asking what makes you the
person that you are. What I am looking for is a theory that will tell us who’s who at different times.
Suppose we’re looking at a picture from a five-year-old’s birthday party. You point to one of the
kids in the picture and tell me that it’s you. My question is: what makes that one you? There’s
some resemblance, but on the whole you’re physically very different from that little kid. You’re
also quite different psychologically from the kid, who (judging from the picture) thinks crayons

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are the most interesting thing on the face of the earth. You probably have more in common with
the adults in the picture than with that kid. So what is it about that kid that makes him (or her) you?
More precisely, an answer to the question I’m asking will provide a way to fill in the blank
in the following sentence:

Person A is the same person as person B if and only if ______

In other words, when we’re looking at or thinking about a person at one time, under what
conditions is that person the same person as some person who exists at another time? In section 3,
we’ll consider a number of possible ways of filling in the blank, which will further clarify what it
is I’m after. But before we get there, let me head off two potential confusions.
First, the word ‘same’ is ambiguous, and if you don’t keep an eye on the ambiguity you
are liable to get very confused. To see the ambiguity, let’s think about a couple examples. Suppose
that Jade and Tanner each have a 2015 Honda Civic. Is it true that Jade and Tanner drive the same
car? There are multiple ways of taking that question. I could be asking whether the car that Jade
drives and the car that Tanner drives are the same make and model, in which case the answer is
yes. Alternatively, I could be asking whether there’s a single car that Jade and Tanner share and
take turns driving, in which case the answer is no. Another example: Suppose you saw some shirt
at the GAP, and you liked it so much that you bought two of them. You wore one yesterday, and
the other today. I see you today and say: ‘isn’t that the same shirt you were wearing yesterday?’
In one sense, yes: they’re exactly the same design. In another sense, no: you have changed your
shirt since I last saw you.
To put a label on it, I’ll say that A and B are qualitatively the same when A and B are
exactly alike. I call this sort of sameness ‘qualitative’ because the idea is that A and B share all
their qualities. A and B are numerically the same when A is B. I call this sort of sameness
‘numerical’ because it’s saying that A is the same as B in the way that numbers are sometimes said
to be the same number. ‘22 = 4’ isn’t just saying that 22 and 4 are incredibly similar; it’s saying
that ‘22’ and ‘4’ are two names for one and the same number. The cars Jade and Tanner drive are
qualitatively the same, but not numerically the same. The shirts you bought are qualitatively the
same, but not numerically the same.

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The same ambiguity arises when talking about whether two people are the same. When
we’re looking at identical twins and say they’re the same, what we mean is that they’re
qualitatively the same, not that they’re one and the same person. But when we say that Marilyn
Monroe is the same person as Norma Jean Baker, or that Muhammad Ali is the same person as
Cassius Clay, we are saying that they are one and the same person; they’re numerically the same.
The question I am asking in this chapter is meant to be a question about numerical
sameness, not qualitative sameness. So whenever I say “A is the same person as B,” that means
that A and B are numerically the same. When I do want to talk about qualitative sameness, I’ll say
that things are “exactly alike” or “indistinguishable”.
Here’s how failing to track the distinction between numerical and qualitative sameness is
going to get you in trouble. You might think: “Wait a minute! I’m not the same as that kid in the
photo. We’re different in all sorts of ways. In fact, I’m changing every second, so I’m not even the
same from one moment to the next. I’m not even the same person as the person who was sitting
here one second ago!!” The problem with this line of reasoning is that it runs together qualitative
and numerical sameness. Yes, the way you are now isn’t the way the kid in the picture was, and
isn’t even exactly the way you were a moment ago. You are not (qualitatively) the same as you
were before. But it’s you that was one way then and is a different way now. There’s numerical
sameness despite the lack of qualitative sameness from one time to the next.
Second, I’m looking for an answer that’s more than just a mere rule of thumb for telling
who’s who from one time to the next. If that were all that I wanted, then answering the question
of personal identity is easy: A is the same person as B when A’s fingerprints and B’s fingerprints
are exactly alike. But since I want something absolutely exceptionless, this Fingerprints Account
won’t do. To see why that is, consider the following case:

LEAVE NO TRACE. After robbing the mansion, Bekah realizes that she may have left some
fingerprints behind. To help ensure that the police can’t prove that she was the burglar, she
soaks her fingers in acid, completely searing off her fingerprints. The police track her down
and, just as she hoped, they are unable to prove that she committed the burglary.

It’s the same person, Bekah, both before and after the fingerprints are seared off. But the
Fingerprints Account gets it wrong: it says that the fingerprintless person with the seared fingertips
is not the same person as the person who burglarized the mansion.

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Moreover, because I’m after an account of what makes people at different times the same
person, it’s not enough for an account of personal identity just to get the right result in all actually
existing cases. Here’s an analogy to help see why that is. Suppose I wanted to know what makes
someone a bachelor, and you say: Person A is a bachelor if and only if person A is an unmarried
man under eighty feet tall. That would not be an appropriate account of what a bachelor is. And
yet it’s true that every actually existing unmarried man under eighty feet is a bachelor, and every
actually existing bachelor is an unmarried man under eighty feet tall. So what’s wrong with your
account? The problem is that being under eighty feet tall clearly isn’t required for being a bachelor;
height has nothing to do with what makes someone a bachelor. The in-principle possibility of a
ninety-foot-tall bachelor is enough to show that this is not a satisfactory account of bachelorhood.
Likewise, even if no one has actually ever successfully burned off their fingerprints, the
mere possibility of a case like LEAVE NO TRACE is enough to show that the Fingerprints Account
is no good. That’s because what we’re looking for is an account of personal identity which has no
exceptions even in principle.

3. Some Promising and Unpromising Answers
3.1 Physicalistic Answers
We have already seen one possible answer to the question of personal identity, the
Fingerprints Account:

The Fingerprints Account
A is the same person as B if and only if A and B have indistinguishable fingerprints

And we have already seen one good reason to reject the Fingerprints Account: someone with
fingerprints can be the same person as someone (at a later time) with no fingerprints at all. That
shows that having indistinguishable fingerprints isn’t necessary for being the same person, which
makes this a counterexample to the Same Fingerprints Account.
Another reason for rejecting the Same Fingerprints Account is that, at least in principle,
two different people could have indistinguishable fingerprints—by sheer coincidence or, more
gruesomely, because one person grafts another person’s fingerprints onto their hands for some
nefarious purpose. That shows that having indistinguishable fingerprints isn’t even sufficient for
being the same person.

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What if we focused on DNA instead of fingerprints? In other words, let’s consider the DNA
Account:

The DNA Account
A is the same person as B if and only if A and B have indistinguishable DNA

The DNA Account does get around some of the problems that arise for the Fingerprints Account.
Bekah’s DNA doesn’t change at all before and after searing off her fingerprints, so the DNA
Account delivers the correct verdict that pre-searing Bekah is the same person as post-searing
Bekah. But the DNA Account has problems of its own. Identical twins have indistinguishable
DNA, but this doesn’t make them the same person. (Any identical twins reading this are now
nodding along vigorously. In unison.) So having indistinguishable DNA isn’t sufficient for being
the same person. Nor is it necessary. There could, at least in principle, be a medication or
performance-enhancing drug you can take that would make some small change to the DNA in
every cell of your body. But it would still be you after you took the medication, even though your
DNA would be somewhat different.
Still, these answers may be on the right track by focusing on some physical aspect of you.
Perhaps, instead of focusing on some small part of your body, like your fingerprints or DNA, we
would do better to focus on the body as a whole:

The Same Body Account
A is the same person as B if and only if A has the same body as B

‘Body’ is sometimes used to mean just the torso, not including the head and limbs. That’s not how
I’m using it. When I say ‘body’, I mean the whole body, including the head and all the other body
parts. And when I say that A and B have the same body, I mean that they have numerically the
same body. Obviously bodies can change over time—indeed, your body was composed of entirely
different cells seven years ago—but that’s not to deny that the body you have now is numerically
the same as the body you had seven years ago. It’s not as if you used to have different arms and
legs and now you have entirely new ones!
The Same Body Account is going to avoid all the other problems we mentioned, since you
have the same body even if your fingerprints or DNA change, and separate people with

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indistinguishable DNA or fingerprints don’t have numerically the same body. It’s true that your
body won’t be qualitatively the same after your DNA changes, but what’s required by the Same
Body Account is numerical sameness, not qualitative sameness. The body is numerically the same
after the DNA changes.

3.2 Psychological Answers
We’ll see in the next section that the Same Body Account has problems of its own. But
before getting there, we should also consider a different sort of account, one framed in terms of
people’s psychological features as opposed to their physical features. As a first stab, we might
consider something like the Matching Psychology Account:

The Matching Psychology Account
A is the same person as B if and only if A and B’s overall mental states are indistinguishable

The problem with this account is that it’s far too demanding. You and that kid in the photo are the
same person, but your mental states aren’t the same (either qualitatively or numerically). You have
completely different tastes, beliefs, memories, aspirations, and so on. There’s some overlap, but
not much. So the Matching Psychology Account delivers the wrong results even in the simplest
cases, since it says that you are not the same person as the kid in the photo. Indeed, even as you
move your head from right to left, your visual experience changes. Accordingly, The Matching
Psychology Account is going to say (absurdly) that the person who is looking to the left and the
person who was looking to the right are two different people.
What we need is something more flexible, something that can accommodate the fact that a
person’s mental states change gradually over time. The key will be to introduce the notion of a
person at one time being “psychologically continuous” with a person at another time. To get the
intuitive idea, have a look at FIGURE 1:

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FIGURE 1

My overall mental state now—the “snapshot” of all the beliefs, emotions, memories,
sensations, and other mental states I have at the moment—is extremely similar to my overall
mental state one second prior. The overall mental states aren’t exactly alike: among other things,
my auditory experiences of birds chirping in the distance have changed ever so slightly. But tiny
differences notwithstanding, the overall mental states are extremely similar. We can also compare
my overall mental state at this moment with the overall mental state of the five-year-old Danny
Korman. Those overall mental states are extremely different. And yet, they are both part of a very
long, second-by-second sequence of overall mental states, leading from my present overall mental
state to the five year old’s, each of which is extremely similar to the state in the sequence that
precedes it.
When there is such a sequence connecting people existing at different times, we can say
that the one person is psychologically continuous with the other. We can define the notion of
psychological continuity a bit more rigorously as follows:

A is psychologically continuous with B if and only if A’s overall mental state and B’s
overall mental state are each stages in a sequence of overall mental states, where each stage
is extremely similar to the preceding stage.

And with this notion of psychological continuity in hand, we can formulate a more promising
psychological account of personal identity, the Psychological Continuity Account:

The Psychological Continuity Account
A is the same person as B if and only if A is psychologically continuous with B

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This again gives us the right results in all of the cases we have been considering. You are
psychologically continuous with the child in the photo, despite having a very different overall
mental state; Bekah pre-searing is psychologically continuous with Bekah post-searing; and so on.
We now have two different, initially promising answers to the question of personal identity:
the Same Body Account and the Psychological Continuity Account. It may seem like an
embarrassment of riches. They both look great, so how are we supposed to choose between them?
As we are about to see, however, both answers are deeply flawed, and we should not accept either
of them.

4. Against The Same Body Account
According to the Same Body Account, having the same body is sufficient for being the
same person. In other words, it is impossible for two different people to have the same body—at
the same time, or at different times. The account also entails that having the same body is necessary
for being the same person. In other words, it is impossible for the same person to have different
bodies at different times. In what follows, I develop two arguments against the Same Body
Account: an argument from the actual case of conjoined twins and an argument from the
hypothetical case of swapping bodies.
Some may be tempted by a different kind of argument against the Same Body Account, an
argument from dissociative identity disorder, a.k.a. “multiple personality disorder”. Isn’t this a
case of more than one person having numerically the same body? Perhaps. But it’s not entirely
clear to me that that’s right way to understand multiple personalities. Another way of thinking
about such cases is that there is a single person with a highly disunified mind, a single person who
feels and behaves dramatically differently at different times. In any event, I would want to know
a lot more about what it is like “from the inside” for those suffering from this disorder before I
was prepared to say that such cases involve multiple people inhabiting a single body. For that
reason, I will set such cases aside and focus on cases that much more clearly pose a problem for
the Same Body Account.

4.1 Conjoined Twins
The first objection I’ll raise against the Same Body Account involves conjoined twins.
Abby and Brittany Hensel are dicephalic parapagus twins, which means there are two heads on a

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single torso. They are alive and well and are currently 28 years old. They are also a counterexample
to the Same Body Account. Here’s the argument:

The Conjoined Twins Argument
(CT1) Abby and Brittany have the same body
(CT2) If so, then: if the Same Body Account is true, then Abby and Brittany are the same
person
(CT3) Abby and Brittany are not the same person
(CT4) So, the Same Body Account is false

CT1 seems true: what we have here is a single, two-headed body. CT2 is merely reporting an
implication of the Same Body Account, which says that whenever one person has the same body
as another, they are one and the same person. Finally, CT3 seems right as well. Abby and Brittany
are different people: among other things, they have different preferences in food and they excelled
in different subjects in school. I bet you didn’t even flinch when I said ‘they’ as opposed to ‘she’.
I can imagine someone denying CT1 and insisting that, actually, there are two overlapping
bodies there: one consisting of Abby’s head and the arms, legs, and torso, and the other consisting
of Brittany’s head and those same arms, legs, and torso. But that seems implausible. Upon
encountering a two-headed snake or a two-headed turtle, you would never say that there were two
bodies there. There’s just a single animal with two heads; it’s a single, two-headed body. Since
that’s what we’d say about nonhuman animals, we should say the same about human animals. To
be clear, I am not saying there is only one person there; indeed, I say just the opposite in CT3.
Rather, the claim is that there’s a single, two-headed body inhabited by both Abby and Brittany.
What about denying CT3 and saying that Abby and Brittany are the same person? Maybe
what I said above about multiple personalities applies equally to the case of conjoined twins: there
is just one person there, but her mind is disunified and as a result she behaves in unusual ways, for
instance saying (out of one of her mouths) “I’m good at math” and then saying (out of her other
mouth) “I’m terrible at math”.
But this seems entirely implausible when applied to Abby and Brittany. To see this,
consider the following case:

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CONJOINED DRAMA. Abby is dating Arie. Abby’s conjoined twin Brittany is secretly in
love with Arie and has always been jealous of their relationship. One night, while Abby is
sleeping, Brittany confesses her feelings to Arie, and Arie kisses her. Later, when Abby
finds out, she strangles Brittany.

Here’s how we’d naturally describe what happened: Arie cheated on Abby and then Abby killed
Brittany. Yet someone who denies CT3, and therefore says that Abby and Brittany are the same
person, would have to say that this description is completely inaccurate. Arie didn’t cheat on
anyone, since the person he was kissing that night was his own girlfriend Abby (a.k.a. Brittany).
Furthermore, the CT3-denier would have to say that Abby didn’t kill anyone, because no one was
killed: she strangled herself and she survived (albeit with one fewer functioning head). But surely
that’s not the right way to describe what happened.

4.2 Body Swaps
Here’s a second argument against the Same Body Account. This one involves an imaginary
case, one which may seem familiar if you’ve read John Locke’s chapter on Identity and Diversity
in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Or if you’ve seen Freaky Friday on the Disney
Channel. The case is far-flung, but the fact that nothing like it has ever actually happened and
perhaps never will (though I wouldn’t be so sure) is neither here nor there. For, as I explained in
section 2, an account of personal identity cannot admit of any exceptions, even in principle.
Now for the case:

A DAY IN THE LIFE. Rachel is a neurotechnologist. Using an fMRI, a supercomputer, and
advanced laser technology, she has devised a way to get a complete neuron-for-neuron scan
of one person’s brain, and then rewire a second person’s brain to be an exact duplicate of
it. She recruits a pair of volunteers to have their wiring “swapped” for a day: a man named
Kenny and a woman named Annaliese. Rachel’s team performs the procedure on Tuesday
night, and the volunteers are awakened on Wednesday. Both stare down at their bodies in
disbelief. The person with the male body says ‘my name is Annaliese’ and can recount all
of Annaliese’s memories but knows nothing at all about Kenny’s past. The person with the
female body says ‘my name is Kenny’ and can tell you all about Kenny’s past but nothing
about Annaliese’s. The team declares the procedure a success.

I think we can all agree on how we ought to describe what is happening on Wednesday. Annaliese
is now walking around with a male body, and Kenny is walking around with a female body. The

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alternative would be to say that Annaliese is still the person with the female body but that she has
gone crazy: she wrongly thinks her name is ‘Kenny’, and recalls doing all sorts of things that she
has never actually done (but all of which Kenny has done). But that’s not what happened. No one
has gone crazy. Rather, two people have switched bodies.
If that’s right, then the Same Body Account is wrong. Before stating the argument, against
the Same Body Account, it will be helpful to introduce some terminology to help us talk and think
clearly about the case. I’ll use “MaleT” to refer to the person with the male body on Tuesday;
“FemaleT” for the person with the female body on Tuesday; “MaleW” for the person with the male
body on Wednesday, and “FemaleW” for the person with the female body on Wednesday. Here,
then, is the argument:

The Body Swap Argument
(BS1) MaleT and MaleW have the same body
(BS2) If so, then: if the Same Body Account is true, then MaleT and MaleW are the same
person
(BS3) MaleT and MaleW are not the same person
(BS4) So, the Same Body Account is false

BS1 is true: it’s the same male body that enters the lab on Tuesday and leaves the lab on
Wednesday. No doubt, rewiring its brain to resemble a woman’s brain is going to affect the
chemistry of that body in all sorts of ways. But that doesn’t make it a numerically different body,
any more than medically modifying all your DNA gives you a numerically different body (see
section 3). BS2 is just reporting an implication of the Same Body Account: having the same body
suffices for being the same person. And BS3 is reporting what we all find perfectly obvious when
we think about this case or when we watch a movie like Freaky Friday.
The Same Body Account yields the wrong verdict about who’s who in A DAY IN THE LIFE.
It wrongly entails that MaleT is the same person as MaleW. It also wrongly entails that MaleT (i.e.,
the one who was calling himself ‘Kenny’ on Tuesday) and FemaleW (i.e., the one insisting “I’m
Kenny” on Wednesday) are different people. The Psychological Continuity Account, by contrast,
gets the right answers in this case. MaleT is psychologically continuous with FemaleW: the overall
mental state of the person who walked out with a female body on Wednesday is extremely similar
to that of the person who walked in with a male body on Tuesday. Additionally, MaleT is not
psychologically continuous with MaleW: MaleT has virtually nothing in common psychologically

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with MaleW, nor is there a gradually changing succession of overall mental states leading from
MaleT’s overall mental state to MaleW’s. So the Psychological Continuity Account again gives us
the right result, that MaleT is not MaleW.
Getting one wrong result is enough to show that the Same Body Account is false. But
getting a couple correct results is not enough to show that the Psychological Continuity Account
is true. So let us turn now to see whether the Psychological Continuity Account has some untoward
consequences of its own. (Spoiler: it does.)

5. Against the Psychological Continuity Account
5.1 Arguments from Discontinuity
According to the Psychological Continuity Account, A is the same person as B only if A
is psychologically continuous with B. So one way to put pressure on this account is to look at cases
involving dramatic psychological discontinuities. I’ll look at two such cases: one that I don’t think
is conclusive against the Psychological Continuity Account, and then a second case that does seem
to be conclusive.
Our first case involves dramatic memory loss:

TOTAL AMNESIA. Kelsey is stranded on a deserted island. Adding injury to insult, a coconut
fell on Kelsey’s head at noon today, instantly resulting in total amnesia. She can’t
remember how she got on the island or anything else about her past. She can’t even
remember her own name.

To see why this case poses a problem for the Psychological Continuity Account, notice that the
non-amnesiac on the island before noon has a very different overall mental state from the amnesiac
on the island after noon. This would seem to imply that the non-amnesiac is not psychologically
continuous with the amnesiac, in which case the Psychological Continuity Account implies that
the non-amnesiac isn’t the same person as the amnesiac. But the non-amnesiac clearly is the same
person as the amnesiac. After all, the coconut doesn’t kill Kelsey. But if she’s still around after
noon, that means someone on the island after noon must be the same person as her. And the only
person on the island after noon is the amnesiac. Kelsey is the amnesiac.
I’ve just argued TOTAL AMNESIA is a counterexample to the Psychological Continuity
Account. But I can imagine a plausible reply from a defender of the Psychological Continuity

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Account. Such a defender might say that the amnesiac and non-amnesiac are psychologically
continuous. Psychological continuity, the idea goes, requires only that their overall mental states
be “extremely similar” before and after the coconut strikes. But, differences in memory
notwithstanding, there is still a great deal of similarity between their mental states. The amnesiac
and the non-amnesiac both love making sandcastles, both are afraid of sharks, both have slightly
blurry vision (since both are near-sighted), both have an easygoing temperament and enjoy long
walks on the beach, and so on. All this similarity in their other mental states, the idea goes, is
enough to count as “extreme” similarity.
I don’t really know how to challenge (or even assess) the claim that there is enough
similarity in TOTAL AMNESIA to count as “extreme” similarity. Instead, I’ll shift to a new case, one
in which there is no similarity in overall mental states, thus rendering this response unavailable.
Here is the new case:

TOTAL BLACKOUT. Robby is stranded on a deserted island. Adding injury to insult, a
coconut fell on Robby’s head at noon today, temporarily knocking him unconscious. While
unconscious, he is not dreaming, nor does he have any thoughts or experiences or any
physical sensations whatsoever. He is completely blacked out. When he finally awakens
hours later, it will feel as if no time has passed.

Here is how to turn the case into an argument against the Psychological Continuity
Account:

The Blackout Argument
(BL1) The conscious man is not psychologically continuous with the unconscious man
(BL2) If so, then: if the Psychological Continuity Account is true, then the conscious man
is not the same person as the unconscious man
(BL3) The conscious man is the same person as the unconscious man
(BL4) So, the Psychological Continuity Account is false

The idea behind BL1 is that the conscious man has a rich overall mental state, whereas the
unconscious man has no mental states at all. So there is no similarity whatsoever between their
overall mental states, let alone “extreme” similarity. BL2 is reporting an implication of the
Psychological Continuity Account: if they’re not psychologically continuous, then they aren’t the
same person. And BL3 again seems obviously true. Intuitively, one would be right to point to the

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unconscious man lying on the island and say: that’s Robby, the very person who was wandering
the island earlier today.

5.2 The Argument from Fission
I turn now to a second argument against the Psychological Continuity Account, for which
I will once again recruit the help of our neurotechnologist from section 4.2:

DOUBLE TROUBLE. Rachel’s rewiring program has been tremendously successful, and she
is now performing dozens of body swaps a day. And she’s starting to get a little sloppy.
Today, after rewiring Chad’s brain to duplicate JoJo’s, Rachel then accidentally rewires
Alex’s brain to duplicate JoJo’s as well. As a result, both the person with Chad’s original
body and the person with Alex’s original body wake up and say ‘my name is JoJo’. Both
can tell you all about JoJo’s past; neither can tell you anything about Chad or Alex’s past.
Rachel’s team also accidently obliterates JoJo’s original body.

Figuratively speaking, JoJo’s mind has “fissioned” like an amoeba, into two separate bodies. But
strictly speaking, how are we supposed to describe what’s happened? In particular, who’s who,
and which person (if any) is JoJo?
I’m honestly not sure what to think about the case. But one thing I am sure of is that the
Psychological Continuity Account provides us with an incoherent account of what’s happened,
and therefore must be incorrect. The problem, in short, is that JoJo is psychologically continuous
with both of the people who wake up after the procedure. If the Psychological Continuity Account
is right, then that means that both of them are JoJo. But that, I contend, is impossible.
Before we state the argument more explicitly, it will again be helpful to introduce some
abbreviations. Let’s use “ChadRW” to refer to the person with the rewired brain in Chad’s original
body and “AlexRW” for the person with the rewired brain in Alex’s original body. Now we can
state the argument against the Psychological Continuity Account as follows:

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The Fission Argument
(FS1) If the Psychological Continuity Account is true, then JoJo is the same person as
ChadRW and is the same person as AlexRW
(FS2) If JoJo is the same person as ChadRW and the same person as AlexRW, then ChadRW
is the same person as AlexRW
(FS3) So, if the Psychological Continuity Account is true, then ChadRW is the same
person as AlexRW
(FS4) ChadRW is not the same person as AlexRW
(FS5) So the Psychological Continuity Account is false

Let’s take the premises one at a time.
FS1 is indisputable. The overall mental states of ChadRW and AlexRW when they first wake
up are virtually indistinguishable from those of JoJo, that is, the woman calling herself ‘JoJo’ just
prior to the rewiring. In the minutes and hours that follow, ChadRW and AlexRW will of course
begin to diverge mentally from one another. But they will remain psychologically continuous with
JoJo, linked by an ever-growing, continuous chain of overall mental states. If the Psychological
Continuity Account is right, that means that each of them is the same person as her.
FS2 follows from a highly plausible logical principle: the transitivity of identity. According
to this principle, if a = b and b = c, then it follows that a = c. (Here, the ‘=’ symbol signifies
numerical sameness.) That’s true no matter what you plug in for ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’. Suppose you find
out that Wells is the guy serving drinks, and you also find out that the guy serving drinks is the
same guy who’s dating Sarah Hyland. You wouldn’t (and couldn’t) then wonder whether Wells is
the same person as the guy who’s dating Sarah Hyland. That’s because you already have all the
information you need in order to deduce that it’s the same guy: if Wells = the guy serving drinks,
and the guy serving drinks = the guy who’s dating Sarah Hyland, then (by the transitivity of
identity) Wells = the guy who’s dating Sarah Hyland. By that same indisputable logic, if ChadRW
= JoJo and JoJo = AlexRW, then ChadRW = AlexRW. That’s what gives us FS2.
Premise FS4 is motivated by a different logical principle: the indiscernibility of identicals.
According to this principle, if a and b are numerically the same, then a and b must be
indiscernible—that is, they must have all the same properties. Put another way: if one thing has a
certain property, and one thing lacks that property, then they can’t be the same thing. After all, if
they were the same thing, then there would only be one thing there to either have or lack that
property.

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To illustrate the principle, suppose that Jonathan is the Tickle Monster. Accordingly, the
indiscernibility of identicals tells us that if Jonathan is out partying right now, then the Tickle
Monster can’t be at home in bed. That’s because Jonathan is the Tickle Monster; they’re one and
the same person. If you’re wondering whether Emily and Haley are the same person, just notice
that Emily is a skydiver and Haley isn’t, and that settles it: no one person can both be and not be a
skydiver. Likewise, if you’re wondering whether ChadRW and AlexRW are the same person, just
notice that ChadRW is currently walking down the street and AlexRW isn’t currently walking down
the street. (AlexRW is still in the lab, staring at the ceiling.) That settles it: no one person can both
be and not be walking down the street. So ChadRW isn’t the same person as AlexRW, just as FS4
says.
I can imagine a couple different ways that someone might try to resist premise FS4. First,
one might object that this principle of the indiscernibility of identicals must be false, since it
absurdly entails that nothing can change over time. To see why it might seem to have that
implication, suppose, again, we’re looking at the photo of you as a small child. You might suggest
that we could use our principle of indiscernibility of identicals to establish that you aren’t the
person in the photo, as follows:

The Absurd Implication Argument
(AB1) The person in the photo has the property of being under four feet tall
(AB2) You don’t have the property of being under four feet tall
(AB3) If there is some property that the person in the photo has but you lack, then the
person in the photo is not the same person as you
(AB4) So, the person in the photo is not the same person as you

The conclusion AB4 is absurd, so something must go wrong in the argument. But AB1 and AB2
seem indisputable: the person in the photo is a short little kid and you (I presume) are well over
four feet tall. And AB3 is a straightforward consequence of our principle: whenever things don’t
share all their properties, they must be two different things. Thus, the idea goes, the problem must
be the principle of indiscernibility of identicals that underwrites AB3.
I agree that there’s a problem with this argument, but it’s not AB3. It’s AB1. The person
in the photo doesn’t have the property of being under four feet tall. After all, the person in the
photo is you, and that person is well over four feet tall. What’s true is that the person in the photo
had the property of being under four feet tall, many years ago when the photo was taken. But you

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also had that property many years ago when the photo was taken. So we haven’t identified any
difference between you and the person in that photo. The lesson of the Absurd Implication
Argument isn’t that there’s something wrong with the principle of indiscernibility of identicals.
Rather, it’s that one must exercise some caution when deploying it, and not confuse the properties
a person has with the properties that a person had.
Let’s look at a different way of resisting FS4. Here the idea is that, after the rewiring, JoJo
is a single person with two bodies. If that were true, that would mean that she has four eyes, two
of which are looking down at the sidewalk and two of which are looking up at the ceiling. If you
ask her “are you walking down the street right now?” she might say yes or she might say no,
depending on which of her two bodies you ask. But when Alex’s original body (which is in the
lab) answers “no”, that’s a mistake according to the view in question. For on this view, AlexRW is
walking down the street, since AlexRW—the person with Alex’s original body—is a person who
has two bodies, one of whose bodies—the one that used to belong to Chad—is walking down the
street. So we don’t have a case of a single thing with conflicting properties after all, thus clearing
the way to denying FS4 and insisting that ChadRW and AlexRW are the same person, namely JoJo.
This is an incredibly weird way of thinking about the DOUBLE TROUBLE case. And it can’t
be right, for the very same reasons that it can’t be right to say that conjoined twins Abby and
Brittany are the same person (see section 4.1). Suppose that ChadRW’s husband Jordan kisses
AlexRW (without ChadRW’s consent), and then kills ChadRW so he can be with AlexRW. If ChadRW
and AlexRW were the same person, then Jordan isn’t cheating on ChadRW, since Jordan was kissing
ChadRW (a.k.a. AlexRW); and Jordan didn’t kill anyone, since ChadRW is AlexRW, and ChadRW is
still alive (all Jordan did is destroy one of ChadRW’s two bodies). But surely that’s wrong. Jordan
did cheat on ChadRW, and the district attorney would be right to charge him with homicide—all of
which presupposes that FS4 is right, and that ChadRW and AlexRW are two different people.

6. Souls
I suspect that some readers will think that I have overlooked an obvious answer to the
question of personal identity, namely that it’s your soul that makes you the person that you are. In
other words, one might embrace the Same Soul Account of personal identity:

The Same Soul Account
A is the same person as B if and only if A has the same soul as B

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The Same Soul Account could then be put to work in addressing the various problematic cases we
have been discussing. Abby and Brittany, one might say, are different people because they have
two different souls. The conscious and unconscious man on the island are the same person because
they have the same soul. MaleT and MaleW in the BODY SWAP case are different people because
Kenny’s soul left the male body and entered the female body.
But what exactly is “a soul”? I think that when people talk about their souls, this is just a
roundabout way of talking about themselves. For instance, if you’re talking about souls in the first
place, you probably think that your soul is something that will eventually come apart from your
body and that will (hopefully) go to heaven when you die. But certainly you don’t think it’s
something other than you that goes to heaven after you die. It’s you yourself who will go to heaven.
In that case, saying “my soul will go to heaven” is just another way of saying “I will go to heaven”,
and maybe calling yourself “a soul” is just a way of calling attention to the fact that you are a
ghostly thing that merely inhabits—but isn’t identical to—your physical body.
Let’s suppose that’s what you mean: you are your soul. But then the Same Soul Account
doesn’t actually answer the question the personal identity. For suppose that “A’s soul” is just a
fancy way of referring to A herself, and “B’s soul” is just a fancy way of referring to B herself. In
that case, all that the Same Soul Account is saying is: A is the same person as B if and only if A is
the same person as B. And, well, that’s true. But it’s also completely trivial and uninformative. It’s
like trying to answering the question of what makes someone a bachelor by saying that A is
bachelor if and only if A is a bachelor. That’s true, but it’s trivial, and it certainly doesn’t tell us
anything about what makes someone a bachelor.
Nor does the Same Soul Account actually shed light on the problem cases. You say that
Abby and Brittany are different people because they have different souls. But that’s just a fancy
way of saying that Abby and Brittany are different people because they’re different people, which
isn’t much of an explanation at all. The same goes for TOTAL BLACKOUT: saying that the conscious
and unconscious man are the same person because they have the same soul is just a roundabout
way of making the utterly uninformative claim that they are the same person because they’re the
same person.
Finally, the Same Soul Account is particularly unhelpful in DOUBLE TROUBLE. The Same
Soul Account says that whether JoJo is ChadRW or AlexRW depends on which of those two people

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has JoJo’s soul. But that just means that whether JoJo is ChadRW or AlexRW depends on which of
them is JoJo—which is exactly what we’re trying to figure out! Indeed, this case is a problem no
matter what you think a soul is. Even if you think JoJo and her soul are two different things, what
could possibly determine whether JoJo’s soul went into ChadRW’s body or AlexRW’s body? Both
of them think and act just like JoJo, so there would seem to be nothing at all to settle the question
of which one acquired her soul. (And how would you ever know if you have the same soul from
one moment to the next?)
For these reasons, I don’t think that the Same Soul account is any improvement on the
physicalistic and psychological accounts we have already considered and dismissed.

7. Combining The Psychological and Bodily Accounts
I argued in sections 4 and 5 that neither the physicalistic Same Body Account nor the
mentalistic Psychological Continuity Account can serve as an adequate theory of personal identity.
One might suspect that we ran into all this trouble because we were focusing too narrowly on just
physical aspects or just mental aspects. Perhaps the problems can all be avoided if we had
considered hybrid theories of personal identity that involve a combination of physical and
psychological factors. To quiet these concerns, let me conclude this chapter by considering two
possible ways of escaping the objections raised above by incorporating physical and psychological
considerations into a single account, a Body-And-Mind Account and a Body-Or-Mind Account:

The Body-And-Mind Account
A is the same person as B if and only if A has the same body as B and A is psychologically
continuous with B

The Body-Or-Mind Account
A is the same person as B if and only if A has the same body as B or A is psychologically
continuous with B

Let’s begin with the Body-And-Mind Account. This account does have certain advantages
over the other accounts. For instance, whereas the Same Body Account wrongly entails that
conjoined twins Abby and Brittany are the same person, the Body-And-Mind Account rightly
entails that they’re two different people, since Abby isn’t psychologically continuous with
Brittany. And whereas the Psychological Continuity Account gets into trouble with DOUBLE

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TROUBLE on account of having to say that JoJo is identical to two separate people, the Body-And-
Mind Account is able to avoid the problem by denying that JoJo is identical to either of the people
with the male bodies (since neither has the same body as JoJo).
But the Body-And-Mind Account does fall prey to some of the other objections we
considered. For instance, it gets the wrong result in TOTAL BLACKOUT. The conscious man on the
island at the earlier time isn’t psychologically continuous with the unconscious man on the island
at the later time. So trivially, it’s not true that the conscious man both has the same body and is
psychologically continuous with the unconscious man. So, the Body-And-Mind Account wrongly
says that he isn’t the same person as the unconscious man. Or take BODY SWAP. The person with
the male body before the rewiring is the same person as the person with the female body after the
rewiring. But they don’t have the same body, and thus the Body-And-Mind Account wrongly
implies that they aren’t the same person.
How about the Body-Or-Mind Account? Here we get exactly the opposite results: the
Body-Or-Mind Account escapes the problems that plagued the Body-And-Mind Account but is
plagued by the problems that the Body-And-Mind Account does escape. The Body-Or-Mind
Account correctly says that the conscious man is numerically the same as the unconscious man,
since they do at least have the same body, and it correctly says that in BODY SWAP the person with
male body on Tuesday is numerically the same as the person with the female body on Wednesday,
since they are at least psychologically continuous. But now we get the wrong results in DOUBLE
TROUBLE. The Body-Or-Mind Account says that psychological continuity is enough for personal
identity, which is all we need to get the problematic result that JoJo comes to be identical with two
separate people. And it says that having the same body is enough for personal identity, which is
all we need to get the problematic result that Abby and Brittany are the same person.
In a way, it’s no surprise that neither of these hybrid accounts work. The Body-And-Mind
Account says that both sameness of body and psychological continuity are necessary for personal
identity, but we already knew (from BODY SWAP and TOTAL BLACKOUT) that neither is necessary.
The Body-Or-Mind Account says that sameness of body and psychological continuity are each
sufficient for personal identity, but we already knew (from CONJOINED TWINS and DOUBLE
TROUBLE) that neither is sufficient. It’s no wonder that these hybrid accounts inherit the problems
of the “pure” accounts they’re meant to replace.

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8. Conclusion
We have seen that neither physical factors, nor psychological factors, nor appeals to souls
can yield a satisfactory answer to the question of personal identity. And that’s puzzling, since it is
hard to see what else could be involved in making a person the person that they are.
Not only is it puzzling; it’s also troubling. For there are pressing ethical and life-and-death
issues that seem to turn on the question of what makes you you. Is it true that a person’s life begins
at conception? In other words, was that fertilized egg cell in your mother’s womb you? If you are
in a horrific accident, is that brain-dead person on life support in the hospital bed you? And let’s
not kid ourselves: we will get to a point, possibly even in your own lifetime, where we have the
technology to replicate a person’s mind in a computer simulation. Would that simulated person—
with all of your memories, preferences, and personality traits—be you? Would uploading your
consciousness into such a simulation be a way of surviving the death of your body, or would that
be a numerically different person—very much like you, but not actually you? It is hard to see how
to answer any of these questions without an answer to the question of personal identity.

Reflection Questions
1. Can you defend the Same Body Account against the Conjoined Twins argument from section
4.1?

2. Would a Same Brain Account be any improvement on a Same Body Account? Why or why
not?

3. Can the Psychological Continuity Account be defended against the TOTAL BLACKOUT case
(section 5.1)? If so, how?

4. In section 6, I argued that the Same Soul Account is inadequate if we suppose that a person is
the same thing as her soul. Can the account be salvaged if we think of a person and her soul as
two different things?

5. In section 7, I considered two different hybrid accounts of personal identity and raised
problems for both. Can you articulate a superior hybrid account that avoids some of these
problems?

Sources
The debate over personal identity largely traces back to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, which advances a psychological account of personal identity and presents a
version of the body swap argument. See Tim Campbell and Jeff McMahan’s “Animalism and the
Varieties of Conjoined Twinning” and Alexandria Boyle’s “Conjoined Twinning and Biological

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Individuation” for discussion of conjoined twins. See Derek Parfit’s “Personal Identity” for a
classic discussion of fission cases, and see Heather Demarest’s “Fission May Kill You” for an
exploration of the “one person, two bodies” strategy. Here are some additional resources:

• Elizabeth Camp: Personal Identity (The Narrative Self):
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/personal-identity-narrative-self
• Robert Casati and Achille Varzi: Insurmountable simplicities (pp.17-23)
• Michael Della Rocca: Locke on Personal Identity
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/locke-personal-identity-part-1
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/locke-personal-identity-part-2
• Daniel Dennett: Where Am I?
• Amy Kind: Persons and Personal Identity
• Ifeanyi A. Menketi: Person and Community in African Traditional Thought
• John Perry: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality
• Marya Schechtman: Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of
the Life
• Nina Strohminger: Personal Identity (The Essential Self)
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/personal-identity-essential-moral-self
• Edna Ullman-Margalit: Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting

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CHAPTER 6
Don’t Fear the Reaper

Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the
textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments
advanced in other chapters.

1. Introduction
My aim in this chapter is to argue for the surprising conclusion that you shouldn’t fear
death. In short, the idea is that the only things that can be bad for you, ultimately speaking, are
pains and other such unpleasant sensations. Accordingly, since you won’t be experiencing any
unpleasant sensations once you’re dead, being dead isn’t bad for you, and you shouldn’t fear things
that aren’t bad for you. In other words:

Against Fearing Death
(FD1) You cease to be conscious when you die
(FD2) If so, then being dead is not bad for you
(FD3) So, being dead is not bad for you
(FD4) If being dead is not bad for you, then you should not fear it
(FD5) So, you should not fear being dead

I defend the first premise in sections 2-3, on the strength of an argument that you are a human
organism that ceases to be conscious when you die. I defend the second premise in sections 4-5,
on the strength of a principle according to which nothing can be bad for you other than painful
sensations and things that lead to painful sensations. Finally, in section 6, I defend FD4 on the
grounds that it is irrational to fear things that aren’t bad for you.
I should emphasize that I am not denying that dying is bad. The process of dying can of
course be quite painful—both physically and emotionally—and, thus, bad for you. If you know
that you will be torn apart by piranhas tomorrow, that’s certainly bad for you and something to be
afraid of. But you should fear it because the dying will be painful, not because you will be dead at
the end of it. On the other hand, if you are about to be anaesthetized for some surgery and you
know that there is a very good chance that you will die painlessly while under anesthesia, this is
not bad for you and there is nothing to fear.

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2. Against Post-Mortem Consciousness
I’ll begin by arguing for the first premise, FD1. Some readers likely already accept it: when
you die, you cease to exist and your consciousness is snuffed out completely. After all, your brain
stops working and that’s the source of all conscious experience. Others, however, may need some
convincing. They may think that, after death, we continue to have conscious experiences in some
sort of afterlife, perhaps in heaven or hell. Or they may be agnostic: we can’t know what happens
after we die, and we just have to wait and see.
I say we don’t have to wait and see. We can settle the matter right now. Notice that, right
where you are, there is a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood human animal. For simplicity, I’ll refer
to it as “Animal”. Here, then, is the argument that you will permanently cease to be conscious once
you die:

Against Post-Mortem Consciousness
(PC1) If Animal ceases to be conscious when you die and you are Animal, then you cease
to be conscious when you die
(PC2) Animal ceases to be conscious when you die
(PC3) You are Animal
(FD1) So, you cease to be conscious when you die

First I’ll explain the idea behind PC1 and PC2, which are both straightforward. Then I’ll argue for
PC3, which admittedly is more controversial.
PC1 is extremely plausible once you wrap your mind around what it’s saying. PC1 is not
saying that you are Animal, nor is it saying that Animal ceases to be conscious when you die.
Rather, it’s saying that if both of these things are true, then you (yourself) cease to be conscious
when you die. Why is that? Suppose that you are literally the same thing as Animal. In that case,
you and Animal are one thing, not two; ‘you’ and ‘Animal’ are just ways of referring to one and
the same thing. If you and Animal truly are one and the same thing, then anything that’s true about
Animal is also true of you. It can’t be that Puff Daddy goes to heaven and Sean Combs doesn’t,
since Puff Daddy is Sean Combs. There is only one individual there to go or not go to heaven. By
the same reasoning, if Animal ceases to be conscious when you die, then—supposing you are
Animal—you must also cease to be conscious when you die. That’s PC1.
Now for PC2. Set aside for a moment whether you cease to be conscious when you die,
and just focus on Animal. Why think that Animal isn’t conscious after you die? When you die,

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Animal will still be here on earth, as a dead animal, waiting to be buried or cremated. It will have
no brain function whatsoever. We can poke and prod it, and it won’t feel anything. Even if you
think there might be a conscious afterlife, you certainly don’t think that it’s the rotting human
animals in the cemetery (a.k.a. corpses) that are having the conscious experiences. In other words,
even if you think there will be or might be a conscious afterlife, you should still accept PC2: you
shouldn’t think that Animal itself will be conscious after you die.

3. The Too Many Thinkers Argument
If you think that you will (or might) go on to enjoy a conscious afterlife, what you’ll
probably want to say is that you and Animal part ways after death: Animal ceases to be conscious
at the point, but you go on having conscious experiences in the afterlife. But, as I have already
argued, you and Animal can part ways only if you and Animal are two different things.
Accordingly, you’ll have to deny PC3, which says that you and Animal are one and the same.
And yet there is a simple and powerful argument for this premise. You’ll want to sit down
for this. (Seriously, sit down. And sit by yourself—if you’ve got a cat in your lap, shoo it away.)
Here is the argument:

The Too Many Thinkers Argument
(TT1) Animal is in your chair and is thinking
(TT2) You are the only thing in your chair that is thinking
(PC3) So you are Animal

Let’s take the premises one at a time. If both TT1 and TT2 can be successfully defended, then I
will in turn have defended PC3, the crucial premise of the argument that you will cease to be
conscious when you die.
At least on the face of it, TT1 is incredibly plausible. Your head is part of Animal and so
is your brain. And this brain of yours is a fully functioning brain. Of course, it won’t be a fully
functioning brain after you die. But that’s irrelevant, because TT1 doesn’t say that Animal will be
thinking after you die. It says that that Animal is thinking right now. And that seems undeniable,
given that it now has a fully functioning brain as a part.
You may be tempted to object that it’s not Animal itself that’s thinking. Animal, you’ll
say, is a mere vessel, and it’s you—a distinct, perhaps ghostly “soul” that inhabits the animal—

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that’s doing all the thinking. Here’s why you should resist the temptation. Certainly you’ll admit
that other animals, like squirrels or dogs, are capable of thinking. (If you don’t admit that, you’d
have to say that squirrels and dogs have no intelligence whatsoever; after all, something can’t very
well be intelligent if it doesn’t think.) But once you admit that these animals have thoughts, it
would be absurd to deny that human animals, with their far more advanced brains, have thoughts.
How about TT2? TT2 says that you are the only thinking thing in your chair. To see the
idea behind this premise, just think about what would be involved in denying it. You’d have to say
that something other than you is in your chair right now with you, and it’s thinking. But that seems
absurd.
You might try to lessen the absurdity by saying that, yes, you and Animal are two different
things, both in your chair, both thinking, but you’re thinking about different things. You’re
thinking about abstract philosophical matters, and it’s thinking about bodily concerns like eating
lunch or taking a nap. But that can’t be right. It’s got the same brain as you, which means that it’s
thinking exactly the same thoughts as you. For instance, if you’re thinking to yourself right now,
“I’m a person, not a mere animal”, it’s because your brain is in a certain specific state. But
Animal’s brain is in exactly that same state—it’s got the same brain as you!—so it must be thinking
exactly the same thing, “I’m a person, not a mere animal”. The same goes for absolutely anything
you and Animal are thinking. And that’s completely absurd: certainly there aren’t two different
things in your chair, simultaneously thinking all the same thoughts.
TT1 and TT2 together entail PC3. What that means is that if you don’t want to accept PC3,
you must reject one of these two premises. But, as we just saw, the premises are hard to deny, and
in any case PC3 is already highly plausible. So you should accept PC3.

4. Hedonism
In section 1, I gave a three-premise argument that it’s irrational to fear death. The first
premise, FD1, is that you cease to be conscious when you die, and I have just finished defending
that. The second premise, FD2, says that if it’s true that you cease to be conscious when you die
then being dead is not bad for you. Let’s turn now to the argument for this second premise.
My argument for FD2 turns on the idea—sometimes known as “hedonism”—that,
ultimately speaking, experiencing pleasant sensations is the only thing that’s good for you, and
experiencing painful sensations is the only thing that’s bad for you. And when I say ‘painful’, that

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should be understood in broad sense, to include psychological and emotional pain, in addition to
physical pain and discomfort.
It’s easy to see the appeal of hedonism. Why is it bad for you if someone kicks you?
Because it’s painful. Why it is bad for you not to brush your teeth? Because you might get plaque.
Why is that bad for you? Because plaque leads to cavities. Why is that bad for you? Because
cavities are painful.
Still, we must be careful in how exactly we formulate our hedonistic account of what’s bad
for you. For instance, suppose we tried to following:

(HD) Something is bad for you if and only if it’s painful

There are multiple problems with HD. First, there are all sorts of things that are bad for you that
aren’t themselves painful. For instance, eating a whole extra-large pizza in one sitting isn’t painful,
but it is bad for you. Second, there are all sorts of painful things that aren’t bad for you. For
instance, a deep-tissue massage isn’t bad for you, but it can be pretty unpleasant while it’s
happening.
Thinking a bit more about these examples can help us see what’s missing from HD. Why
is eating the whole pizza bad for you? Because, later in the day, you’ll have a painful stomach
ache. Why isn’t the deep-tissue massage bad for you? Because working out the knots in your
muscles results in your having less discomfort later on. What we’re seeing is that what makes
something bad for you isn’t just whether it’s painful for you but also its connection to the presence
or absence of future pains. With this in mind, we can restate the principle as follows:

(HD*) Something is bad for you if and only if it results in more pain than you would
otherwise have had

This is still true to the core hedonist insight stated above. Eating the whole pizza in one sitting is
bad for you because it results in a painful stomach ache than you wouldn’t otherwise have had.
Massages aren’t bad for you because, even if they’re painful in the moment, they eliminate future
pains that you would otherwise have had. Ultimately speaking, what is or isn’t bad for you is still
just a matter of what is or isn’t painful for you.

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5. The Argument from Hedonism
With HD* in hand, we can now run an argument for FD2 of the Against Fearing Death
argument.

The Argument from Hedonism
(AH1) If you cease to be conscious when you die, then being dead doesn’t result in more
pain than you would otherwise have had
(AH2) Something is bad for you if and only if it results in more pain than you would
otherwise have had
(FD2) So, if you cease to be conscious when you die, then being dead isn’t bad for you.

Premise AH1 is trivial. Pain is a conscious state, so if you aren’t conscious while you’re dead, then
you don’t have any pain while you’re dead. And the second premise is just our modified hedonist
principle, HD*. Accordingly, one might try to resist the argument by attacking HD*. I’ll consider
three sorts of attacks.
First, one might point to people who suffer from what’s called “congenital analgesia”, a
rare condition which involves an inability to experience pain. While this may at first seem like a
good thing, it’s easy to see on reflection why this is actually very bad for those who have it. They
might, for instance, place their hand on a fire and not realize it before their hand is irreparably
damaged. But (the idea goes) HD* seems to entail that this condition can’t be bad for those who
have it, nor for that matter can anything bad ever befall them, since nothing can be painful for
them.
In response, I deny that HD* entails any such thing. Remember that ‘pain’ isn’t restricted
to unpleasant physical sensations. It also includes the sort of emotional distress that one would
have from irreparably damaging one’s hand, and those suffering from this condition are entirely
capable of experiencing these sorts of psychological pains.
Second, one might object to HD* on the grounds that something can be entirely pleasurable
and yet still be a bad thing to do. Consider the following case:

STOLEN CRUISE. Vinny is about to go on a week-long cruise, and his girlfriend Izzy serves
him undercooked chicken, in hopes that he’ll get food poisoning and will let her go in his
place. Izzy’s plan succeeds, and she has a great time on the cruise. She comes back
refreshed, relaxed, and feeling no remorse whatsoever.

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What Izzy did is bad, and yet it didn’t lead to her having any unpleasant sensations.
Is that a problem for HD*? No. One must be careful to distinguish between something
being bad for you and something being a bad thing to do. HD* is only about the former and has
nothing to say about the latter. If giving Vinny food poisoning doesn’t end up being unpleasant for
Izzy, then it isn’t bad for Izzy that he got food poisoning. But that’s not at all to deny that giving
him food poisoning was a bad thing to do (which of course it was).
Now for the third objection to HD*. Here the idea is that hedonism is basically right, but
to insist upon further changes to its formulation. Specifically, one might suggest that something
can be bad for you not just by giving you painful sensations but also by depriving you of pleasant
sensations:

(HD**) Something is bad for you if and only if it results in more pain or less pleasure than
you would otherwise have had

In short, the idea is that what’s bad for you is what—in one way or another—makes you worse off
in terms of pleasure and pain. If HD** is right, then we won’t be able to get the argument from
hedonism off the ground. After all, it’s true (for most people) that they would have had more
pleasure had they not died when they did, in which case HD** entails that being dead is bad for
them.
The problem with HD** is that it is open to counterexamples like the following:

UNREAD MAIL. Carly meets Evan, and they immediately fall in love. Because things are
going so well with Evan, she stops checking her online dating app. They have a long and
entirely happy life together. It so happens that Jami had sent her a message shortly after
she met Evan. If she hadn’t met Evan, she would have seen Jami’s message, fallen in love
with her, and she and Jami would have had a long and happy life together. As a matter of
fact, she would have been a little tiny bit happier with Jami than with Evan.

Carly would have been a tiny bit better off if she hadn’t met Evan. Does that mean that it was bad
for her that she met Evan? Of course not. Yet HD** wrongly implies that it is bad for her that she
met Evan. After all, she would have had more pleasure in her life had she not met him.
This gives us a compelling argument against HD**:

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The Unread Mail Argument
(UM1) Carly would have had more pleasure had she not met Evan
(UM2) If so, then if HD** is true, then meeting Evan was bad for her
(UM3) Meeting Evan was not bad for her
(UM4) So, HD** is false

Thus, one shouldn’t prefer HD** to my formulation of the principle of hedonism, HD*, and we
have not found any good reason to reject HD*, the second premise of the Argument from
Hedonism.

6. Irrational Fears
I have thus far argued that being dead is not bad for you. The first premise, FD1, was that
you cease to be conscious when you die, and I argued for this premise on the grounds that the
human animal that’s where you are ceases to be be conscious when you die, which in turn means
that you cease to be conscious when you die (since you are that animal). The second premise, FD2,
was that death is bad for you only if you continue to be conscious after you die; after all, the only
things that are bad for you, ultimately speaking, are pains and things that lead to pain. But the
claim that being dead is not bad for you (FD3) is merely a subconclusion of the argument. The
ultimate conclusion (FD5) is that you shouldn’t fear death, and for that we need one more premise.
The final premise of the Against Fearing Death argument, FD4, says that if being dead isn’t
bad for you, then you shouldn’t fear death. To see why we should accept that, we need to think
more generally about what makes a fear rational or irrational. Suppose a tarantula crawls onto your
hand. Really, it’s not all that dangerous. It’s pretty unlikely to bite you, and even if it does it won’t
any more painful or harmful than an ordinary bee sting. But even knowing how harmless they are,
you might still be utterly terrified of a tarantula crawling onto you. And that would be irrational.
Why? Because that amount of fear is disproportionate to the likelihood of something bad
happening to you and how bad it would be if it did.
Still, it could bite you, so it’s rational to be a little bit afraid of the tarantula, just like it’s
rational to be a little bit afraid of honeybees. But there are other things that it is irrational to fear
to any degree. Take ablutophobia, the fear of bathing. Ablutophobia is completely irrational
because bathing is not bad for you, not even a little bit. Or take lepidopterophobia, the fear of

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butterflies. This is irrational too, and it’s irrational because having an encounter with a butterfly is
not in any way bad for you. Or take podophobia, the fear of feet (including one’s own). What
makes all of these irrational fears so irrational is precisely that the object of the fear isn’t in any
way bad for the person who fears it. You shouldn’t fear things that aren’t bad for you. So, if indeed
being dead isn’t bad for you, you shouldn’t fear it at all, just as FD4 says.
One might object that it’s unnatural to fear all these other things, whereas it’s completely
natural to fear death. But I’m not denying that fearing death is natural. I’m denying that fearing
death is rational. Just because it comes naturally to us to act or react in a certain way, that doesn’t
mean it’s rational. (Google “cognitive biases”, and you’ll see what I mean.) And in any case, it
just isn’t true that all of those other fears are unnatural. It’s entirely normal for people to experience
excessive fear of spiders and other creepy crawlies. And we can all recognize, on reflection, that
this degree of fear is excessive and irrational, despite being our natural reaction.
Thus, I conclude that death isn’t bad for you and you shouldn’t fear it. This is a surprising
result, but not necessarily a bad one. After all, fearfulness is emotionally painful, and if this
argument helps you do without that pain, that’s good for you!

Reflection Questions
1. Are you convinced by the Against Post-Mortem Consciousness argument in section 2? In
particular, are you convinced by the argument in section 3 for the premise that you and your
body are one and the same thing?

2. Can you think of any counterexamples to the hedonist principle HD*? For instance, can you
think of any examples in which something that isn’t a painful sensation and doesn’t lead to any
painful sensation is still, nevertheless, bad for you?

3. In the final section, I suggested that it can never be rational to fear something that is not bad
for you. Is that true? Can it be rational to fear something because it’s bad for others?

Sources
The argument advanced here originates with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, in his “Letter
to Menoeceus”. See Fred Feldman’s Confrontations with the Reaper for a more in-depth
discussion of philosophical questions about death, and in particular chapter 8 for a defense of the
idea that death is bad because it deprives one of good things. The Too Many Thinkers argument
in section 3 is drawn from Eric Olson’s “An Argument for Animalism”. Here are some additional
resources:

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Jorge Luis Borges: The Immortal
Ben Bradley: Existential Terror
Dorothy Grover: Posthumous Harm
Lori Gruen: Death as a Social Harm
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley: The Hellenistic Philosophers vol 1 (sec 24)
Shelley Kagan: Death (https://oyc.yale.edu/death/phil-176)
Thomas Nagel: Death
Richard Rowland: Hedonism and the Experience Machine
Lynne Rudder Baker: Death and the Afterlife
Travis Timmerman: The Symmetry Argument Against the Badness of Death

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CHAPTER 7
Taxation is Immoral

Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the
textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments
advanced in other chapters.

Governments sometimes do things that are morally questionable, for instance instituting
drug laws that disproportionately punish low income and minority groups, or distributing tax
dollars to controversial organizations. What I aim to show here is that even some of the most basic
and seemingly uncontroversial functions of government are morally questionable. Specifically, I
will argue that it is morally wrong for governments to tax or imprison their citizens at all.
In section 1, I advance my argument against taxation and imprisonment, which turns on
the idea that there is no relevant difference between taxation and extortion, or between imprisoning
and kidnapping. In section 2, I consider and dismiss some preliminary attempts to justify taxes and
prison. In sections 3-4, I critically assess the most promising attempt to resist the argument,
according to which we consent to this treatment by entering into a “social contract” with their
government. Finally, in section 5, I show how the main argument of the chapter can be adapted to
establish the impermissibility of restrictions on immigration.

1. Taxation and Extortion
Maybe it seems obvious to you that the government has every moral right to imprison and
tax its citizens. To begin to see why it’s not so obvious, notice how morally problematic it would
be for an ordinary citizen to do more or less the same thing.

VIGILANTE. Jasmine discovers that Luke and Leo have set up a fake charity and are conning
some people in her neighborhood. She shows up at their door, leads them at gunpoint to
her basement, and plans to keep them there for a year as punishment. Quickly realizing
how expensive it is to take care of them, Jasmine goes to her neighbors and demands $50
from each of them, at gunpoint. She explains that half the money will go towards taking
care of her prisoners and that the rest will go towards a gym she is building to help keep
troubled kids off the street. Those who do not comply are locked up in her basement with
her other prisoners.

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that what Jasmine is doing is wrong. What she does to
Luke and Leo is called kidnapping, and what she does to her neighbors is called extortion. It is
wrong to kidnap people, and it is wrong to extort people, even when it’s for a good cause.
My argument against taxation and imprisonment is going to turn on the idea that there’s no
morally significant difference between what Jasmine does and what the government does. So let
me say something about what that means. Suppose I walk into my house, raid my fridge, sit down
on my couch, and flip on my TV. There’s nothing wrong with that. Now suppose that I walk into
your house (without permission), raid your fridge, sit down on your couch, and start watching TV.
That isn’t morally okay. Why is it morally okay in the one case but not in the other? Here’s the
obvious difference: my house belongs to me, and your house doesn’t belong to me. In other words,
the fact that my house and fridge belong to me and yours don’t is a difference between the actions
that explains the moral difference between them, why the one is morally okay and the other isn’t.
The difference in ownership is an example of what I’m calling a morally significant difference.
More precisely, a morally significant difference between two things is a difference between them
that can explain why they differ morally.
Not just any difference will count as a morally significant difference. To see this, supposing
I’m in my car and I run over a person who’s jogging past, and compare this to a case in which I
run over a cockroach that’s crawling past. What I did in the first case is immoral and what I did in
the second isn’t. And indeed the cases are different: in the one case, the thing I ran over was jogging
and in the other case the thing I ran over was crawling. But that’s not what explains the moral
difference between the two actions. Rather, the morally significant difference is that in the first
case it’s a person I ran over and in the second case it’s a cockroach. What this shows is that just
because you’ve identified a difference between two cases, it still may not be a morally significant
difference. Indeed, it may be that two cases differ in all sorts of ways, and yet none of the
differences are morally significant.
Now that I have explained the notion of a morally significant difference, we are ready to
see the argument:

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Against Taxation and Imprisonment
(TX1) If there is no morally significant difference between two actions A and B, then: if A
is wrong, then B is wrong
(TX2) It is wrong for Jasmine to extort and kidnap her neighbors
(TX3) There is no morally significant difference between Jasmine extorting and
kidnapping her neighbors and the government taxing and imprisoning its citizens
(TX4) So, it is wrong for the government to tax and imprison its citizens

The idea behind TX1 is that, whenever there is some moral difference between two cases,
there must always be some further difference between them to explain why they differ morally.
Absent some such difference, it would be arbitrary to say that the one action is wrong and the other
isn’t—just as it would be arbitrary for me to bump some students who earn an 86% in the class up
to a B+ but not others. As for TX2, my hope is that it will strike you as obvious. I’m not sure what
more I could say to convince you that extortion and kidnapping are wrong.
TX3, by contrast, probably doesn’t strike you as obvious. Indeed, you’ve probably already
thought of multiple differences between what Jasmine does and what the government does that
could potentially explain why what she does is wrong but what the government does isn’t. The
remainder of the chapter will be devoted to defending the argument by addressing such putative
differences.

2. Identifying Morally Significant Differences
In this section, I’ll consider six putative morally significant differences between what
Jasmine does and what the government does, and I’ll show that they do not undermine the
argument—either because they are not morally significant after all, or because we can revise the
VIGILANTE case in ways that make the differences go away.
First, one might suggest that the morally significant difference is that what Jasmine does is
illegal, whereas what the government does is not illegal. It’s true that it’s not illegal when the
government does it, and since it’s the government that makes the laws it should come as no surprise
that it permits itself to tax and imprison people. Yet plenty of immoral things aren’t illegal, for
instance cheating on your partner or cheating on a midterm exam. And plenty of illegal things
aren’t immoral, for instance underage drinking, or driving without a seatbelt. So it’s far from clear
why this difference in legal permissibility would be a morally significant difference.

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Second, one might observe that, unlike Jasmine, the government doesn’t come to your door
and demand money at gunpoint when taxes are due. That’s true. Though let’s not forget that they
will eventually come to your door with guns to take you to jail if you continually neglect to pay
your taxes. With that in mind, let’s revise the Jasmine case to tighten the analogy:

BUREAUCRATIC VIGILANTE. Jasmine sends an email to all of her neighbors, informing them
that they must each send her $50 by April 15; that if they don’t, they’ll be charged a late
fee and the cost will rise to $60; and that if they don’t pay the $60 either, she will come to
their door with guns, escort them to her home, and lock them in the basement with her other
prisoners. Some don’t pay, and she escorts them to her home at gunpoint and locks them
in her basement.

By revising the story so that Jasmine also doesn’t take their money at gunpoint—but instead leads
them to her basement at gunpoint when they consistently fail to pay—we have eliminated the
alleged morally significant difference between the two stories. We no longer have an objection to
TX3. Of course, now that we have changed the details of the case, we need to make sure that
TX2—which says that Jasmine is doing something wrong—is still plausible. And surely it is, even
when we modify the way in which she extorts and kidnaps her neighbors.
Third, one might point out that government officials have been elected to serve as
representatives of our interests, whereas Jasmine was not elected. This may indeed be a morally
significant difference, but we can again revise the case so as to circumvent it.

ELECTED VIGILANTE. Jasmine plans to start taking prisoners and demanding $50 at
gunpoint from each of her neighbors to pay for the prisoners and a gym. Josh thinks it
would be better to demand $75, with the additional $25 going towards hiring a nurse to
provide free medical care and advice to anyone in the neighborhood. Jasmine and Josh let
their neighbors vote on which of them should get to set the policies for kidnapping and
extortion. Jasmine wins the election, and she begins kidnapping and extorting her
neighbors.

It still seems as if Jasmine is doing something wrong. So TX2 remains true. And since the cases
no longer differ with respect to whether elections are held, the envisaged objection to TX3 fails.
Nor should it be any surprise that holding an election doesn’t make a difference. Suppose I order
pizza for the whole class, and when it arrives we vote on who pays the bill. The majority of the

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students vote that you should pay, and so I point a gun at you and demand that you pay. That would
be wrong, even though we voted on it.
Fourth, one might insist that it’s okay for the government to imprison criminals because
it’s public knowledge what the laws are and what the penalties are for violating them, whereas
Jasmine just starts kidnapping and extorting people out of nowhere. There’s an easy fix here as
well. We simply build it into the story that, before she starts kidnapping people and demanding
money at gunpoint, she posts a large, laminated poster in the center of town, titled “Jasmine’s
Rules”, and once everyone has had a chance to read it, she begins locking up violators in her
basement and demanding money from her neighbors at gunpoint.
Fifth, one might insist that taxation and imprisonment are morally justified because we
would all be so much worse off without them. That’s almost certainly true, but it’s irrelevant. For
one thing, Jasmine’s kidnapping and extortion are also making things better in her neighborhood.
There are fewer con men, and the gym really is helping keep troubled kids off the street. So, this
isn’t even a difference between the cases, let alone a morally significant one. Furthermore, just
because something would make the world a better place, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s morally
permissible for someone to bring it about. To see this, consider the following case:

SAINT AND SINNER. A saint and a sinner both need a kidney transplant, but there is only
one kidney available. The saint refuses it and insists that it be given to the sinner. The
doctor, knowing that the world will be better off if the saint survives than if the sinner
survives, anaesthetizes the saint and gives her the kidney against her wishes and without
her consent. The saint (who would otherwise have died) goes on to live a long life and does
many saintly things.

Clearly, what the doctor did was morally impermissible, even though the doctor’s actions made
the world a better place on the whole. Likewise, even if the world would be a worse place without
someone locking up criminals and forcing the rest of us to help pay for it, that doesn’t mean it’s
morally okay for anyone to actually do it.
Sixth, one might insist that the country belongs to the government, whereas the
neighborhood does not belong to Jasmine, and that this is why the government but not Jasmine is
allowed to do these things. But I see no more reason to think that the country literally belongs to
the government than that some corner literally belongs to the drug dealers that have claimed it. It’s
true that the government acts like they own the place, and that they have enough power to cow

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people into letting them do what they want. But there’s no good reason to think that some patch of
the surface of the earth is literally owned by the government. So it’s just not plausible that the
country and the neighborhood differ in this way.

3. The Social Contract
What we have just seen is that, while there are plenty of differences between what Jasmine
does in VIGILANTE and what the government does in taxing and imprisoning its citizens, many of
those differences don’t have what it takes to undermine TX3 of the argument. I turn now to a
somewhat more promising proposal, but we will see that it fails as well.
Here, the idea is that we have entered into a sort of contract with the government. They
provide us with things like roads, fire departments, national parks, and protection from criminals
and hostile governments. In return, we agree to pay taxes and obey the laws of the land. And
contracts can make a moral difference. It would be wrong for me to let myself into your house…
but not if you are subletting it to me, since in that case we have a contract permitting me to enter.
Accordingly, this could potentially be the morally significant difference we’ve been looking for.
Have we entered into such a contract with our government? Unlike a typical contract, you
never explicitly agreed to this arrangement, either verbally or in writing. But that doesn’t
necessarily mean you haven’t consented to the arrangement. After all, there is such a thing as tacit
(or implicit) consent, where one consents through one’s conduct, without any stated agreement.
How does that sort of thing happen?
It can happen in all sorts of ways. I’ll mention three. First, one can sometimes tacitly
consent to something by accepting certain kinds of benefits. When you get into a taxi and give the
driver an address, you thereby consent to paying the fare when you arrive. When you order food
at a restaurant, you thereby consent to paying the bill; when the bill arrives, you don’t get to say
“hey wait, I never said I was going to pay for any of this!” Second, you can tacitly consent to
something by sticking around. If I make it clear that anyone who is still at the party after midnight
has to help clean up, and you stay past midnight, you’ve consented to helping clean up. That’s so
even if you never explicitly said you were willing to help. Third, it’s possible to tacitly consent to
something by passively going along with it without objection. For instance, if your professor says
“I’m planning to move the exam to 9am, is that a problem?”, and no one says anything, you’ve all
tacitly consented to the exam being held at 9am. (If something seems very wrong with this idea of

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equating passively going along with something and giving consent, you’re right to worry about it.
We’ll get there.)
Notice that every one of these sources of tacit consent is present in our relationship with
the government. First, we accept all sorts of services that the government provides. We use the
roads and public parks, for instance, and benefit from the (relative) lack of crime provided by
police departments. Second, we choose to stick around in the country, knowing full well that we’ll
be expected to follow the laws and pay some taxes. Third, we passively accept the laws and taxes
without objection. We may gripe about them, but we don’t explicitly refuse to obey the laws or
pay our taxes.

4. No Social Contract
We have just seen reason to think that we have entered into an unspoken contract with the
government. We also saw that the existence of a contract can make a moral difference, as in the
case of subletting. So is this, finally, the morally significant difference we need in order to resist
TX3? No, it’s not.
To see why not, notice that we haven’t actually identified a difference between our
relationship with the government and Jasmine’s relationship with her neighbors. First, even if they
didn’t ask for it, they too are enjoying the benefits of having fewer con men and other criminals
running around. Second, they too choose to stay in the neighborhood even though they know that
Jasmine is going to demand money from them. Who could blame them? They’ve lived their whole
lives in that neighborhood. That’s where all their family and friends are, that’s where their job is,
and they couldn’t afford to up and move to a new neighborhood even if they wanted to. Third, they
don’t vocally object to what Jasmine is doing. After all, it’s unlikely to make any difference, and
she’s clearly a very dangerous person.
What this all shows, I think, is that—despite receiving benefits, sticking around, and being
passive—her neighbors have not consented to living by Jasmine’s rules. But then, by parity of
reason, we haven’t tacitly consented to living by the government’s rules just by virtue of receiving
benefits, sticking around, and being passive. (Similar remarks apply to sexual consent. Just because
someone comes home with you after accepting the benefits of being taken out for dinner, doesn’t
try to leave, and doesn’t vocally object to your advances, that doesn’t mean that they have
consented to having sex with you.) And if we haven’t thereby tacitly consented to living by their

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rules, then there’s no good reason to think we have entered into any “social contract” with the
government.
We are, however, still left with the question of why these behaviors don’t constitute tacit
consent in the case of Jasmine and the government and yet do constitute tacit consent in the other
cases: getting into a taxi, sticking around the party, and not objecting to the time change. The
answer is that there are certain conditions that have to be met in order for these types of behaviors
to constitute tacit consent. I’ll mention two.
The first condition is that there has to be a reasonable way of opting out of the arrangement.
In those other cases, there is a reasonable way of opting out: you could just pass on the taxi and
walk home, leave the party before midnight, or speak up and say that the time change doesn’t work
for you. By contrast, there’s no reasonable way to opt out of the services the government provides.
For instance, you can’t get anywhere without using their roads. Additionally, you’d have to leave
the country to stop benefitting from the protection that the government provides, and most people
can’t afford to leave the country. And even if they could afford to leave, it would require
completely uprooting their lives. And even if they did that, it wouldn’t do any good, because
there’s virtually nowhere on the planet for them to go that doesn’t have taxes and prisons. There
is no reasonable way to opt out.
The second condition that has to be met in order for those behaviors to constitute tacit
consent is that explicit refusal to opt in has to be recognized. Suppose you go to a restaurant and
they bring you food and charge you for it even though you explicitly said you didn’t want any. Or
suppose that the professor was clearly going to move the exam to 9am even if you and others did
object to the time change. In that case, you haven’t tacitly consented, because explicit refusal to
opt in is not recognized. The same is true of our arrangement with the government. Here is what
happens when people try to live “off the grid” and explicitly refuse to pay taxes: government agents
show up with guns and take them to prison. Explicit refusal to opt in is not recognized.
We can turn these observations into an argument that we have not tacitly consented to
paying taxes and following the laws:

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No Consent
(NC1) Someone tacitly consents to an arrangement only if (i) there is a reasonable way to
opt out and (ii) explicit refusal to opt in is recognized
(NC2) There is no reasonable way to opt out of paying taxes and following the laws, and
explicit refusal to opt in is not recognized
(NC3) So, we have not tacitly consented to paying taxes and following the laws

Since we have not tacitly consented to following the laws or being subjected to taxation and
imprisonment, there is no reason to think that we have entered into an unspoken contract with the
government. But that was supposed to be the morally significant difference between what Jasmine
does and what the government does. Thus, we are back where we started, with no morally
significant difference to wield against TX3 of the Against Taxation and Imprisonment argument.

5. Immigration
We have seen that governmental practices of taxation and imprisonment are immoral. It
would be wrong for an ordinary citizen to do these sorts of things—even for a good cause—and
the government isn’t different from an ordinary citizen in any way that makes for a moral
difference between the two. This same style of argument can be put to work to undermine other
governmental practices as well. Let’s look at just one example: immigration.
Once again, we’ll start with a Jasmine case, and argue from there to a conclusion about
immigration policy. Here is the case:

UNWANTED VISITORS. Jasmine and her friends arrive at their neighborhood park for their
weekly soccer game, only to find a large group from another neighborhood already using
the park for a game of their own. Guns drawn, she directs them into her van, drives them
back to their own neighborhood, and threatens to lock them in her basement if they ever
return without first getting her permission. Many do ask for her permission, and most of
the time she refuses. Some return without her permission, and she locks them in her
basement.

And here is the argument:

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The Argument for Open Borders
(OB1) If there is no morally significant difference between two actions A and B, then: if
A is wrong, then B is wrong
(OB2) It is wrong for Jasmine to restrict access to the park
(OB3) There is no morally significant difference between Jasmine restricting access to
the park and the government restricting access to the country
(OB4) So, it is wrong for the government to restrict access to the country

OB1 is the same as TX1, so no further defense is needed. OB2, I hope, is obvious. So, as before,
the main question is whether we should accept OB3. Is there a morally significant difference
between Jasmine closing off the park and the government closing off its borders?
The difference can’t be that the park doesn’t belong to her, since (as argued in section 2)
it’s equally true that this portion of the earth’s surface doesn’t belong to the government. Nor is
the difference that people who come into the country without permission reap the benefits of tax
dollars without paying any taxes themselves. For the same is true in Jasmine’s case. The visitors
are enjoying the benefits of a crime-free park, and the lack of crime is subsidized by Jasmine’s
extorted neighbors. Indeed, it’s precisely because it’s crime-free that the visitors have come to her
park rather than using the one in their own neighborhood.

6. What is the Government Permitted to Do?
We have seen that ordinary governmental practices of taxing citizens, imprisoning
criminals, and restricting immigration are all morally problematic. Is there anything the
government can do that isn’t wrong? The arguments in this chapter suggest the following answer:
it is morally acceptable for a government to do a certain thing only if it would be morally
acceptable for Jasmine to do the same sort of thing.
With that in mind, here is one thing the government is permitted to do: use weapons and
threat of imprisonment to prevent imminent threats from foreign countries. This passes the
“Jasmine Test” since it also wouldn’t be wrong for Jasmine to use guns and threat of imprisonment
to deter someone who is actively trying to kill her neighbors. I am skeptical, however, the Jasmine
Test can be used to justify much else that the government does. For instance, it wouldn’t be okay
for Jasmine to extort her neighbors in order to stockpile weapons in preparation for a purely
hypothetical future threat to her neighborhood. Accordingly, the Jasmine Test can’t be used to

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justify governmental practices of taxing people in order to build up the military in preparation for
hypothetical attacks from other countries.
Let me close by once again emphasizing that the conclusion of this chapter is not that the
world would be better off without taxation and imprisonment. It almost certainly wouldn’t be. The
point, rather, is that these practices are immoral. Sometimes, as in the SAINT AND SINNER case
above, no one is morally permitted to do what needs to be done in order to create a better world.

Reflection Questions
1. It was claimed in section 2 that the government doesn’t own the country. But how does anyone
come to own anything? Try to think of a plausible general account of how people come to own
things, and see what it implies about whether the government owns the country.

2. Is it possible to justify taxation on the grounds that much of the wealth that people enjoy is
wealth that they are not really entitled to, for instance because they acquired it unjustly?

3. At the end of the chapter, we used the “Jasmine Test” to show that some functions of the
government could still be legitimate. What does this test say about other government functions
that we haven’t considered here? Is this the right test for evaluating whether governmental
practices are right or wrong?

Sources
The arguments against political authority and the social contract are drawn from Michael Huemer’s
The Problem of Political Authority, chapters 1-2. For classic defenses of the social contract theory,
see Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s The Social Contract. For a more contemporary defense of a social contract theory, see
John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. I learned the SAINT AND SINNER example from David Boonin.
Here are some additional resources:

• Luvell Anderson: The Original Position

• David Boonin: The Problem of Punishment
• Cahn: Political Philosophy: The Essential Texts
• Margaret Gilbert: A Theory of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment and the Bonds
of Society
• Jean Hampton: The Moral Education Theory of Punishment
• Jean Hampton: Political Philosophy
• Michael Huemer: Is Taxation Theft?
https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/is-taxation-theft?
• Cynthia Stark: Hypothetical Consent and Justification
• Christopher Heath Wellman and A. John Simmons: Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? For and
Against

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CHAPTER 8
Abortion is Immoral

Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the
textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments
advanced in other chapters.

1. Preliminaries
My ultimate aim in this chapter is to argue that abortion is immoral, at least in typical cases.
But my broader aim is to show that those looking to defend the immorality of abortion need to be
discerning. Not every argument against abortion is a good argument. With this end in mind, I begin
by considering a number of common arguments and showing that they all fall short. I then consider
a more promising line of argument for the immorality of abortion—turning on the claim that the
embryo has a right to life—and I argue that it too is ultimately unsatisfactory. Finally, I advance a
more resilient argument against abortion, which turns on the claim that killing an embryo is
immoral because the embryo is thereby deprived of a future full of valuable experiences, projects,
and activities.
Some preliminary points before we proceed. Let’s begin by noting that one can think that
abortion is immoral in some cases but not others. For instance, one might think it’s permissible to
abort a pregnancy after six weeks but not after six months. Or one might think it’s immoral to abort
a healthy pregnancy but permissible to abort a pregnancy that is very likely to kill the mother. To
help anchor our discussion, it will be useful to focus on a specific case.

UNWANTED PREGNANCY: Taylor just discovered that she is pregnant with Emm, a six-
week-old embryo. The pregnancy resulted from consensual, casual sex. Taylor didn’t want
to get pregnant, and her partner wore a condom, but they were aware that condoms
sometimes break, which is what happened in this case. Both Taylor and Emm are healthy,
and carrying out the pregnancy will not pose any threat to Taylor’s life. Even so, Taylor
knows that going through with the pregnancy will be a huge burden—physically,
emotionally, and financially. So Taylor decides to have an abortion, killing Emm.

Here is what Emm looks like:

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I focus on the case of Emm because it is both a typical case—most abortions occur around
the sixth week and involve failed contraception—as well as being a case that parties to the debates
typically disagree about. So if we can resolve the question of whether it was immoral to kill Emm,
we will have made great progress on the morality of abortion.
I will use the usual labels of “pro-life” and “pro-choice” to characterize the different sides
of the debate. A pro-lifer holds that it was immoral to abort Emm at six weeks. A pro-choicer
holds that it was morally permissible to abort Emm at six weeks. But one must be cautious not to
read too much into these labels. As I use the labels here, they’re specifically about Emm. One
cannot infer that someone thinks that aborting a life-threatening pregnancy is immoral just because
they are pro-life (in my sense), nor that someone thinks it is permissible to abort a planned
pregnancy just because they are a pro-choice (in my sense).
Additionally, I want to separate the question of whether abortion is immoral from the
question of whether abortion should be illegal. One can think that abortion is immoral without
thinking that it should be against the law, just as one can think that adultery is immoral without
thinking that it should be against the law. So one should not assume that those who are pro-life (in
my sense) think that women should be legally prohibited from having an abortion; one can think
that abortion is immoral without opposing a woman’s legal right to choose.
Finally, notice that very minor transgressions are sometimes immoral, for instance
shoplifting a pack of gum. Even pro-choicers may agree that aborting Emm is at least somewhat
immoral, perhaps to a relatively minor degree. To sharpen the debate between pro-lifers and pro-
choicers, then, I’ll focus on the question of whether aborting Emm is “seriously immoral”, by
which I mean: approximately as immoral as killing a typical human adult.

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2. Identifying Wrong-Making Features
A useful strategy for trying to make headway on the ethics of abortion is to try to identify
some feature that embryos have or lack that seems relevant to the permissibility of abortion. The
pro-lifer, for instance, tries to find some feature to fill in for X in this argument schema:

Emm is (or has) X
So, it’s seriously immoral to kill Emm

The pro-choicer, by contrast, tries to find some feature to fill in for Y in this argument schema:

Emm isn’t Y
So, it isn’t seriously immoral to kill Emm

Here are some examples of features that one might fill in for X and Y:

Pro-Life Pro-Choice
is alive isn’t rational
has human DNA isn’t self-sufficient
has a beating heart isn’t wanted
is a potential person isn’t attached
has a right to life isn’t conscious

We’ll need to evaluate each of these entries separately. But first notice that the argument
schemas above aren’t yet complete. What’s needed is some moral principle that can take us from
the observation that Emm has or lacks a certain property to the conclusion that it is or isn’t seriously
immoral to abort her. What’s needed is a principle that tells us that being or having X makes killing
wrong or that lacking Y makes killing permissible. In other words, the complete schema for the
pro-life arguments will look like this:

(X1) Emm is X
(X2) It’s always seriously immoral to kill something that’s X
(X3) So it’s seriously immoral to kill Emm

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And the complete schema for the pro-choice arguments will look like this:

(Y1) Emm isn’t Y
(Y2) It’s seriously immoral to kill something only if it is Y
(Y3) So it’s not seriously immoral to kill Emm

Let us see, then, whether any of the entries in our table yield a satisfying argument for or against
the permissibility of killing Emm.

3. Some Bad Pro-Choice Arguments
We’ll begin with the pro-choice arguments that can be generated by the entries in the right
column of the list, starting with the observation that Emm isn’t rational. In other words, she isn’t
capable of conscious self-reflection or using reason and logic. The argument would go like this:

The Argument from Rationality
(YR1) Emm isn’t rational
(YR2) It’s seriously immoral to kill something only if it is rational
(YR3) So it’s not seriously immoral to kill Emm

YR1 is clearly true: Emm is a very simple creature indeed. But, just as clearly, YR2 is false. After
all, a healthy newborn infant also lacks rationality in this sense. So YR2 entails that it isn’t
seriously immoral to kill such an infant. But obviously it is. So YR2 is false, and the argument
fails.
Other arguments drawn from the table above fail for the same reason. You might think that
it isn’t seriously immoral to kill Emm because Emm isn’t self-sufficient: she is entirely dependent
on Taylor and wouldn’t be able to survive on her own. This yields the following argument:

The Argument from Self-Sufficiency
(YS1) Emm isn’t self-sufficient
(YS2) It’s seriously immoral to kill something only if it is self-sufficient
(YS3) So it’s not seriously immoral to kill Emm

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But YS2 is open to the same counterexample as YR2: healthy newborn infants also aren’t self-
sufficient, and yet it clearly is seriously immoral to kill them. The same goes for some elderly and
severely disabled people. YS2 is false.
Nor is the fact that Taylor doesn’t want to have a child sufficient to show that it isn’t
seriously immoral to kill Emm. Here’s what that argument would look like:

The Argument from Unwantedness
(YU1) Emm isn’t wanted
(YU2) It’s seriously immoral to kill something only if it is wanted
(YU3) So it’s not seriously immoral to kill Emm

This one fares a little better than the previous arguments. YU2 doesn’t entail that it’s okay to kill
any old healthy newborn infant. But consider a healthy newborn infant who isn’t wanted by her
parents, and let’s suppose no one else even knows about her. In that case, no one in the whole
world wants her. YU2 entails that it wouldn’t be seriously immoral to kill that infant. But it would
be seriously immoral. Counterexample. (YU2 also has the absurd consequence that it wouldn’t be
seriously immoral to kill a friendless adult who everyone hates having around.)
What pro-choicers need is some wrong-making feature that licenses killing Emm without
also licensing killing healthy newborn infants. Accordingly, they need to find some difference
between Emm and an infant, and exploit that in their defense of aborting Emm. One difference
that immediately spring to mind is that, unlike an infant, Emm is physically attached to someone
(namely, Taylor). Putting that to work in the argument:

The Argument from Attachment
(YA1) Emm is attached to another human
(YA2) It’s seriously immoral to kill something only if it isn’t attached to any other
human
(YA3) So it’s not seriously immoral to kill Emm

YA2 says that it can’t ever be seriously immoral to kill something when it’s attached to
another human. To get a counterexample to that, we need an example of something that it is
seriously immoral to kill and that is physically attached to some human. Healthy newborn
infants—even unwanted ones—aren’t physically attached to other humans, so they are no

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counterexample to YA2. Well… except for the ones being carried around in a baby wrap. That’s
a way of attaching an infant to your body. So YA2 implies (absurdly) that it is okay to kill infants
in baby wraps.
Perhaps one will object that I’ve been unfair here. The difference between Emm and the
infant in the baby wrap is that there’s a body part connecting Emm to Taylor, namely an umbilical
cord. They are, you might say, “corporeally attached”. The idea then would be to revise the
Argument from Attachment as follows:

The Argument from Corporeal Attachment
(YA1*) Emm is corporeally attached to another human
(YA2*) It’s seriously immoral to kill something only if it isn’t corporeally attached to any
other human
(YA3) So it’s not seriously immoral to kill Emm

The infant in the wrap isn’t a counterexample to YA2*, since that’s the wrong kind of attachment.
But one needn’t look far for other counterexamples. Take a healthy newborn who has just entered
the world and whose cord still hasn’t been cut. Certainly, it would be seriously immoral to kill that
newborn. Or take conjoined twins. Since they’re attached to one another, YA2* says that it isn’t
seriously immoral to kill one of them. But certainly that would be seriously immoral.
Finally, the pro-choicer might try a different tactic, pointing to the fact that Emm is not
conscious. That’s true: Emm won’t become conscious until five months into the pregnancy at the
earliest. Moreover, this avoids all the counterexamples we have seen thus far. After all, even
normal, healthy, unwanted conjoined twins in baby wraps are conscious. So we get what might
seem to be a more promising argument:

The Argument from Consciousness
(YC1) Emm is not conscious
(YC2) It’s seriously immoral to kill something only if it’s conscious
(YC3) So it’s not seriously immoral to kill Emm

Alas, there are counterexamples to YC2 as well. Normal humans adults in deep, dreamless sleep
or who are heavily sedated aren’t conscious. But it is seriously immoral to kill such people. So
YC2 is false.

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We have examined a number of pro-choice arguments and found them all to be inadequate.
Let us turn now to some of the usual pro-life arguments and see whether they fare any better.
(Spoiler: they don’t.)

4. Some Bad Pro-Life Arguments
Turning now to the first column of the table in section 2, let’s look at the pro-life arguments
that can be generated from that list. We’ll start with the proposal that killing Emm is seriously
immoral because Emm is alive:

The Argument from Life
(XL1) Emm is alive
(XL2) It’s always seriously immoral to kill something that’s alive
(XL3) So it’s seriously immoral to kill Emm

This perhaps captures the common pro-life slogan, “life begins at conception”, which is meant to
serve as a reason to think that aborting an embryo like Emm is seriously immoral. Is this a good
argument?
No doubt XL1 is true: Emm is a living organism. But what about XL2? To show that it’s
false, one would only need to identify some one case in which it’s permissible to kill a living thing.
Pro-choicers might be tempted to reach for cases in which it’s morally okay to kill a person, like
the death penalty or physician-assisted suicide. But, in fact, we can see that XL2 is false without
even touching such controversial cases. The fact that it’s not seriously immoral to kill a living
blade of grass is already enough to show that XL2 is (hopelessly) mistaken. Thus, the pro-choicer
can resist the Argument from Life without having to deny that life begins at conception. She can
grant that it does, but then deny XL2.
Continuing down the list:

The Argument from Human DNA
(XD1) Emm has human DNA
(XD2) It’s always seriously immoral to kill something that has human DNA
(XD3) So it’s seriously immoral to kill Emm

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XD2 is immune to the previous counterexamples: blades of grass don’t have human DNA. Human
skin cells do, though, as do human cancer cells. So, if XD2 is true, then it’s seriously immoral to
kill those things. But it obviously isn’t seriously immoral to kill human cancer cells and skin cells.
So XD2 is false.
Next, one might point to the fact that Emm has a beating heart. This suggests another line
of argument:

The Argument from Hearts
(XH1) Emm has a beating heart
(XH2) It’s always seriously immoral to kill something that has a beating heart
(XH3) So it’s seriously immoral to kill Emm

XH1 is true: like most embryos at six weeks, Emm does have a beating heart. And XH2 avoids the
previous counterexamples. Neither blades of grass nor human cells have beating hearts, so XH2
won’t wrongly entail that it is seriously immoral to kill them. But you know what does have a
beating heart? A worm. In fact, worms have five hearts! So XH2 implies that it is seriously immoral
to kill worms. And surely it isn’t seriously immoral to kill worms. So XH2 is false.
Finally, let’s consider the suggestion that it’s seriously immoral to kill Emm because she
has the potential to become a person:

The Argument from Potentiality
(XP1) Emm is a potential person
(XP2) It’s always seriously immoral to kill a potential person
(XP3) So it’s seriously immoral to kill Emm

XP1 is true. It’s a healthy pregnancy and, if brought to term, Emm will be a full-fledged person.
Additionally, since neither worms nor skin cells nor blades of grass have the potential to become
people, XP2 is immune to all the previous counterexamples. Indeed, it is hard to think of any
uncontroversial counterexample to XP2.
Still, it is hard to see why we should accept XP2. Even supposing that it’s always seriously
immoral to kill a person because (say) they have a right to life, it’s hardly obvious that something
that merely has the potential to become a person has those same rights. I have the potential to
become a US president, but that doesn’t mean that I now have all the rights of a president (the right

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to pardon criminals, veto legislation, etc.). Likewise, there is no reason to think that Emm has all
the rights of a person simply by virtue of potentially being a person.
None of these arguments for the immorality of abortion is successful, and no one—pro-
lifers included—should be convinced by them. One must look elsewhere for a satisfying argument
against abortion.

5. The Right to Life Argument
Let’s turn now to a somewhat different pro-life argument. Here the idea is that it’s seriously
immoral to kill Emm because she’s a person with a right to life. We can frame the argument like
this:

The Right To Life Argument
(RL1) Emm has a right to life
(RL2) If Emm has a right to life, then it is seriously immoral to deprive Emm of Taylor’s
womb
(RL3) So, it’s seriously immoral to deprive Emm of Taylor’s womb

Since abortion deprives Emm of Taylor’s womb, it follows trivially from RL3 that aborting Emm
is seriously immoral.
What’s nice about the appeal to a right to life is that it avoids the problems that plagued the
arguments from sections 3-4. Worms, skin cells, and blades of grass clearly don’t have a right to
life, while infants, conjoined twins, and the heavily sedated do all have a right to life. Plus, at least
on the face of it, it seems immediately obvious why something’s having a right to life makes it
wrong to kill that thing, while it is somewhat obscure why merely having a beating heart or a
certain kind of DNA makes it wrong to kill something.
Still, there are two major problems with the argument. The first (which I won’t pursue here)
is that pro-choicers are likely just to reject RL1 out of hand. “Sure,” they’ll say, “Emm potentially
has a right to life, but why think she has one already?” More would need to be said in defense of
RL1 if the argument is to have any hope of persuading pro-choicers. The second problem is that
even if the pro-lifer is right that Emm has a right to life—and even if she can somehow convince
the pro-choicer of this—the argument still doesn’t work. Or so I shall argue. And if I’m right about
this, then the pro-lifer must again look elsewhere for a viable argument against abortion.

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6. The Violinist Argument
To see what the problem is for RL2, let’s take a closer look at why we are supposed to
accept that premise in the first place. Here is how one might try to argue for RL2:

The Requirements of Life Argument
(RQ1) If something (or someone) has a right to life, and it needs a certain something in
order to survive, then it is seriously immoral to deprive it of that thing
(RQ2) Emm needs Taylor’s womb in order to survive
(RL2) So, if Emm has a right to life, then it is seriously immoral to deprive Emm of
Taylor’s womb

RQ2 is uncontroversial. For a six-week old embryo like Emm, remaining in the womb is a basic
necessity of life. RQ1 seems pretty plausible as well: having a right to life would seem to entail
having a right to such basic necessities of life.
Surprisingly, though, RQ1 is demonstrably false. To see why, consider the following two
cases:

THE VIOLINIST: During his morning jog, Ben is drugged and kidnapped. When he comes
to, he finds himself lying in a hospital bed, connected by some blood-filled tubes to a
woman in a separate bed. His kidnappers explain that the woman is Shushanna, a world-
famous violinist. She was found unconscious, and they are trying to save her life.
Shushanna is in need of a complete blood transfusion—already underway, using Ben’s
blood—which will take nine months. Ben is told that if he unplugs himself from Shushanna
at any time in the next nine months, she will die immediately. When the kidnappers leave
the room, Ben sees his chance to escape. He unplugs himself, sneaks away, and Shushanna
dies as expected.

THE ROCK: You have become completely obsessed with People Magazine’s 2016 Sexiest
Man of the Year, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. So obsessed, in fact, that the thought of
living without him makes you physically ill. Deathly ill. At this point, the only thing that
can save your life is the touch of The Rock’s cool hand on your fevered brow. The Rock is
notified, and told that you will die if he does not come visit you in next few days. But The
Rock is a busy man and he sends his regrets. You die, as expected.

No doubt, it would have been morally praiseworthy of Ben to remain plugged in to Shushanna, or
for The Rock to drop what he was doing and come visit you in your sickbed. And place his cool

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hand on your fevered brow. But do either of them have a moral obligation to make these sacrifices?
By refusing the help, have they done something seriously immoral? Surely not.
These cases are therefore counterexamples to RQ1. You have a right to life and The Rock
is depriving you of something that (strange but true) you need in order to survive, but he does not
thereby do anything seriously immoral. Shushanna has a right to life, and Ben is depriving her of
something she needs in order to survive (his blood), but Ben does not thereby do anything seriously
immoral. We can make the latter argument against RQ1 explicit, as follows:

The Violinist Argument
(VA1) Shushanna has a right to life and needs Ben’s blood in order to survive
(VA2) It is not seriously immoral for Ben to deprive Shushanna of his blood
(VA3) So, it is not always seriously immoral to deprive someone with a right to life of
something they need in order to survive

One might point out that there are disanalogies between these cases and the UNWANTED
PREGNANCY case. Ben’s predicament, for instance, resulted from being kidnapped against his will,
whereas Taylor’s resulted from consensual sex. We’ll see later how that might be relevant. But,
analogous or not, THE VIOLINIST and THE ROCK are enough to show that RQ1 is false, and without
RQ1 we are left without any argument for RL2, a crucial premise of The Right to Life Argument.

7. The Entitled Requirements Argument
You may be thinking that, even if RQ1 is false, something in the vicinity must be right. If
you die because I steal your parka in the middle of an Antarctic expedition, or because I take away
your inhaler when you’re in the middle of an asthma attack, I’ve done something seriously
immoral. Sometimes it’s seriously immoral to deprive someone of something they need in order to
survive. Why is it seriously immoral in these cases but not in the case of THE VIOLINIST and THE
ROCK?
Here’s a natural explanation. The difference is that it’s your parka and your inhaler. In
addition to needing them in order to survive, they’re your property and you have a right to them.
By contrast, Shushanna doesn’t have any right to Ben’s blood. It doesn’t belong to her and she
isn’t entitled to it. Likewise for you and The Rock’s hand. This suggests a way of revising the
Requirements of Life argument to sidestep the counterexamples:

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The Entitled Requirements Argument
(RQ1*) If something (or someone) has a right to life, and it needs a certain something in
order to survive, and it has a right to that thing, then it is seriously immoral to
deprive it of that thing
(RQ2) Emm needs Taylor’s womb in order to survive
(RQ3) Emm has a right to Taylor’s womb
(RL2) So, if Emm has a right to life, then it is seriously immoral to deprive Emm of
Taylor’s womb

With the revised premise, RQ1*, two conditions must be met in order for us to conclude
that it’s seriously immoral to deprive someone with a right a life of something: first that they need
that thing for survival and second that they have a right to that thing. Since you and Shushanna
don’t have a right to The Rock’s hand and Ben’s blood (respectively), THE ROCK and THE
VIOLINIST are not counterexamples to this more cautious premise RQ1*. However, the argument
now needs an additional premise, RQ3, stating that Emm meets the second condition. And, as we
will see, the new premise is indefensible.

8. The Right to the Womb
Let’s turn, then, to this new premise that Emm has a right to Taylor’s womb. Why think
that? A natural answer suggests itself: because, by engaging in consensual sex, Taylor thereby
consented to Emm being in there. If I offer to let you use my spare sleeping bag, I can’t then
demand it back from you when we reach the campsite. When I consent to you using it, you acquire
a right to it. Or suppose Ben had voluntarily plugged himself into Shushanna, knowing that
prematurely unplugging himself would kill her. In that case, it would arguably be seriously
immoral for him to unplug himself, because he consented to her using his blood and she thereby
acquired a right to it.
So, if the pro-lifer can establish that Taylor consented to Emm using her womb, then we
can use that to establish that Emm has a right to use her womb. That said, Taylor didn’t exactly
volunteer to have Emm in her womb. Quite the opposite: she took deliberate steps to avoid it by
having protected sex. So what reason could there be to think that Taylor consented to Emm using
her womb?

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One might suggest that Taylor consents to it by freely choosing to have sex, which is
something she knows might lead to pregnancy (even with the precaution of a condom). Even
though she didn’t want to get pregnant, she knew the risk she was taking. Putting the pieces
together, the envisaged argument for RQ3 would go something like this:

The Known Risk Argument
(KR1) Taylor freely chose to have sex and knew this could lead to Emm using her womb
(KR2) Whenever someone freely does something and knows that it might lead to certain
consequences, one consents to those consequences
(KR3) So, Taylor consented to Emm using her womb
(KR4) If so, then Emm has a right to Taylor’s womb
(RQ3) So, Emm has a right to Taylor’s womb

You might worry a bit about KR4. Just because Taylor at one point consented to Emm being in
her womb, perhaps she can later withdraw consent, thereby depriving Emm of the right to her
womb. (Certainly one can withdraw consent in other cases, for instance consenting to have sex.)
But whatever one thinks of KR4, there is an even more glaring problem with the argument.
The problem is that KR2 is a ludicrous theory of consent. To see this, consider the
following case:

OPEN WINDOW: Astrid lives in a dangerous neighborhood with lots of hooligans. She has
bars on her windows and keeps the window closed and latched as an extra precaution. One
hot summer day, she opens the windows to get some cool air, trusting that the bars will
keep the hooligans out (though knowing that they are not 100% reliable). Unfortunately,
the bars are defective. Some hooligans pull them off, climb through the window, plant
themselves on her couch, and start playing her PlayStation.

Astrid freely chose to open the windows and knew this could lead to hooligans entering her house.
Certainly they don’t have any right to be in there and certainly she did not consent to them being
in there just by opening her windows. But KR2 absurdly implies that she did consent to them being
in there.
Consent requires something more robust than simply taking actions that open one up to the
risk of some unwanted consequences. Accordingly, there would seem to be no way of getting
anything like the present argument for RQ3 off the ground. It would be a different story if Taylor
had “invited” Emm into her womb, for instance if she hadn’t used protection and had been trying

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to get pregnant. Perhaps in that case the Right to Life Argument—supplemented with an argument
from consent—could be made to work. But it seems hopeless in the more typical case where the
pregnancy is the unwanted consequence of protected sex.

9. The Future Like Ours Argument
Not all pro-life arguments are created equal, and we have seen that a number of common
arguments are fatally flawed, including the Right to Life argument. Let us turn now, finally, to
what I take to be a successful argument for the pro-life position.
This superior argument turns on the idea that, if the pregnancy were carried to term, Emm
would have had a future filled with valuable experiences, including valuable activities,
relationships, projects, achievements, and pleasurable sensations. In short, she has a future like
ours, or “FLO” for short. That doesn’t necessarily mean exactly like ours, but like ours in that it’s
filled with valuable experiences.
Aborting Emm deprives her of FLO and this, I contend, is what makes the abortion
seriously immoral:

The Simple FLO Argument
(SF1) It is seriously immoral to kill something (or someone) if killing it deprives it of a
future like ours
(SF2) Killing Emm deprives Emm of a future like ours
(SF3) So, it is seriously immoral to kill Emm

I call it “The Simple FLO Argument” because, as we’ll see in section 11, we will need to
complicate it a bit in order to handle a certain range of objections. But for the moment, it will be
useful to focus on this somewhat oversimplified version of the argument.
SF1 is initially quite plausible. To see this, ask yourself why it is wrong to kill a normal,
healthy human adult. Why is killing someone one of the worst things (if not the worst thing) one
can do to a person? The natural answer is that it’s because one thereby deprives them of all the
things that make life so valuable. That’s why it seems even more horrific to kill an infant, for one
thereby deprives them of a whole life’s worth of valuable things. SF1 seems to put its finger on
precisely the thing that makes these other killings seriously immoral.

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How about SF2? Even supposing that her life gets off to a rocky start—as a result of being
put up for adoption or being raised by an overworked single mom—Emm still would have had a
full lifetime of achievements, friendships, romance, and other such valuable experiences.
You might wonder how I know that Emm would have had FLO, and won’t for instance be
born with some terrible birth defect and die before she’s a year old. The short answer is that it’s
my example: I can fill in details however I like, and I’m telling you that she would have had a
happy, fulfilling life had she not been aborted. Of course, for any actual pregnancy, we can’t be
entirely sure that the embryo has FLO, even if medical tests suggest that it’s a healthy pregnancy.
Still—with some exceptions, which we’ll discuss in section 12—you can usually be reasonably
confident that the embryo will have FLO. That, together with SF1, tells us that you can be
reasonably confident you’d be doing something seriously immoral by aborting the pregnancy. And
if you can be reasonably confident that an action is seriously immoral, you shouldn’t do it—even
if there’s some small chance that what you’re doing isn’t immoral.
(I’m reminded of a scene in a movie you’ve never heard of called Adam’s Apples. One
character shoots another in the head. Not only does the gunshot victim survive, the bullet also
obliterates his brain tumor and saves his life. This could in principle happen in real life too. That
doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to go around shooting people in the head. Why not? Because, even
though there’s some small chance you’ll actually be helping them, you can be reasonably confident
that in fact you’d be killing them and doing something seriously immoral.)
For these reasons, it’s no use challenging SF2, and critics of the argument should focus
instead on SF1. So let’s turn to four objections one might raise against SF1: three that won’t work
at all (section 10) and one that does work but that can be avoided by revising the argument (section
11).

10. Bad Arguments Against The FLO-Account
First, one might think the following sort of case is a problem for SF1:
HOPEFUL GONER: Lucas has accidentally ingested a deadly poison and is in horrible,
debilitating pain. He thinks he’ll get better, but he’s wrong: the poison is quickly spreading
through his body and will kill him within a few hours. Blake, who hates Lucas and would
like to see him dead as soon as possible, is trying to inject Lucas with a substance that will
kill him instantly and painlessly. Lucas resists and pleads for Blake to stop. But Blake gives
Lucas the injection, despite his protests, and Lucas dies mere hours before the poison would
have killed him anyway.

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What Blake did seems to be seriously immoral, and yet he didn’t deprive Lucas of FLO. Lucas’s
future would have contained only a few hours of horrible pain and no valuable experiences.
Here is why this is not a problem for SF1. SF1 says that depriving someone of FLO always
makes it seriously immoral to kill them. In order words, depriving someone of FLO is a sufficient
condition for a killing to be seriously immoral. SF1 doesn’t say that depriving someone of FLO is
the only way for a killing to be seriously immoral. That is, it doesn’t say that depriving someone
of FLO is a necessary condition for a killing to be seriously immoral. Since SF1 leaves it open that
there are other ways for a killing to be seriously immoral—perhaps by failing to respect the
victim’s desire to stay alive—HOPEFUL GONER is no counterexample to SF1.
Second, one might object that SF1 absurdly implies that ordinary contraception is seriously
immoral. After all, the ideas goes, when one uses condoms or spermicide, one is depriving millions
of sperm cells of a future like ours. The argument would go like this:

The Contraception Argument
(CC1) Killing sperm deprives them of a future like ours
(CC2) If so, then: if SF1 is true, then it is seriously immoral to kill sperm
(CC3) It isn’t seriously immoral to kill sperm
(CC4) So, SF1 is false

The problem with this argument is CC1. No sperm cell has FLO, not even a sperm cell that
successfully fertilizes an egg. It is not as if the sperm cell enters the egg and then grows into a
zygote and later an embryo. Rather, it enters the egg, releases a tiny amount of genetic material,
and then the sperm cell dissolves and ceases to exist altogether, never to have any valuable
experiences. (How about the egg? It’s an interesting question whether it has FLO, but it is not a
question we need to answer. After all, SF1 only prohibits killing things with FLO, and using a
spermicide-coated condom doesn’t kill the egg.)
Even if sperm cells don’t have FLO, what is true is that the spermicide prevents a being
with FLO from coming into existence. Is that enough to cause trouble for SF1? The argument
would have to go like this:

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The Revised Contraception Argument
(CC1*) Killing sperm prevents the creation of a being with FLO
(CC2*) If so, then: if SF1 is true, then it is seriously immoral to kill sperm
(CC3) It isn’t seriously immoral to kill sperm
(CC4) So, SF1 is false

We have only moved the bump in the rug, for now the problem is the second premise. SF1 doesn’t
say that it’s seriously immoral to prevent things with FLO from coming into existence. It only says
that it’s immoral to take an already-existing thing with FLO and deprive it of FLO by killing it. So
CC2* misrepresents what is implied by SF1.
Let’s look at one more unsuccessful objection to SF1. Recall that SF1 was motivated by
the idea that it provides the best explanation of what makes seriously immoral killings—like killing
a normal human adult—seriously immoral. So one way of challenging SF1 is to reject the proposed
explanation of the serious immorality of killing an adult. But one would then need to provide some
alternative explanation of why it is seriously immoral to kill an adult.
Here’s an initially attractive proposal: what makes it seriously immoral to kill normal
human adults is that they desire a future full of valuable experiences. If that’s right, then all that is
supported by the proper explanation of the immorality of killing is the weaker premise SF1*:

(SF1*) It is seriously immoral to kill something (or someone) if killing it deprives it of a
future like ours that it desires

But unlike SF1, SF1* does not imply that it is seriously immoral to kill Emm. Emm is a very
simple creature, which does not even have a brain, let alone desires. Killing her does deprive her
of FLO, but it does not deprive her of anything she desires.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that the proposed alternative explanation of the
wrongness of killing human adults is deeply flawed. Consider a heavily sedated adult, who (like
Emm) has no desires, or any other conscious mental states for that matter. Or consider a
overwhelmed teenager experiencing his first heartbreak: he genuinely doesn’t want to go on living,
but these feelings will pass in a week or so. It is seriously immoral to kill these people, and the
original future-like-ours account has no trouble explaining why: because they have FLO. By
contrast, the competing account that we are now considering fails to explain why it is seriously
immoral to kill them. After all, they do not desire a future like ours. The desire account of what

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makes killing wrong that underwrites SF1* is therefore inferior to the FLO-account that
underwrites SF1. Accordingly, we should reject SF1* and stick with SF1.

11. FLO-Overriding Factors
There is, however, a more serious style of objection to SF1, one that will require us to
revise the argument. Suppose that someone is trying to kill you and you can save your own life
only by killing him first. One can imagine having qualms about killing him, but certainly it’s not
seriously immoral to do so. Or take the following case.

CRUEL GAME: Jack is preparing to detonate an atomic bomb in the heart of São Paolo. He
has kidnapped two innocent people, Vanessa and Wills, and he commands Vanessa to kill
Wills. If she complies, he will release Vanessa and won’t detonate the bomb. If she refuses,
he will release both of them and detonate the bomb, killing hundreds of thousands of
people. Vanessa tries to find a way to stop the detonation without killing Wills, but Jack
has thought of everything. So, with a heavy heart, Vanessa kills Wills.

Given the circumstances, what Vanessa did isn’t seriously immoral, despite the fact that Wills has
FLO. Unlike HOPEFUL GONER, this is a genuine counterexample to SF1. So the Simple FLO
Argument must go.
What cases like CRUEL GAME demonstrate is that, in certain cases, there are factors in play
that can justify killing normal adults—even innocent adults—who have FLO. Let’s call these
“FLO-overriding factors”, which I’ll define as follows: a killing involves a FLO-overriding factor
if and only if that killing involves the sort of factors that could justify killing a normal human adult
with FLO. So a FLO-overriding factor is a special kind of mitigating factor.
Here is one example of a FLO-overriding factor: that killing a person is necessary for
preventing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. That’s a FLO-overriding factor because,
as reflection on CRUEL GAME reveals, it’s the sort of factor that can justify killing Wills, a normal
human adult with FLO. But the following would not be a FLO-overriding factor: that a person is
incredibly annoying. If I want to kill someone with FLO, the fact that he is incredibly annoying is
not reason enough to kill him. Being incredibly annoying is not the sort of factor that could justify
killing a normal human adult.
Using the notion of the a FLO-overriding factor, we can patch up the Simple FLO
Argument as follows:

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The Modified FLO Argument
(MF1) It is seriously immoral to kill something (or someone) if killing it deprives it of a
future like ours and the killing does not involve any FLO-overriding factors
(MF2) Killing Emm deprives Emm of a future like ours
(MF3) Killing Emm does not involve any FLO-overriding factors
(MF4) So, it is seriously immoral to kill Emm

MF1 has all of the plausibility of SF1, without being open to counterexamples like CRUEL GAME.
And MF2 is the same as SF2. But now that we have included an additional condition for a killing
to be classified as seriously immoral, we need to include an additional premise, MF3, affirming
that killing Emm meets that condition.
To evaluate MF3, we have to consider various candidate FLO-overriding factors that might
be present in the case of Emm. To check whether a factor is FLO-overriding, remember, we have
to check whether it’s the sort of factor whose presence could justify killing a normal human adult.
So let’s look at some possible candidates.
One might point to the fact that seven or eight more months of pregnancy places a major
burden on Taylor—financially, physically, and emotionally. That’s true. But is it a FLO-overriding
factor? To answer that, we need to ask whether such burdens would justify killing a normal human
adult. And certainly they wouldn’t. Some parents who would rather not continue to care for their
broke, freeloading adult son can’t just kill him, regardless of the financial, physical, or emotional
toll it takes on their life. This is not to say that that case is entirely analogous to the case of Emm.
It’s not. The point is just that such burdens do not meet the conditions for being FLO-overriding
factors.
Relatedly, one might point to the way in which keeping the pregnancy would have seriously
disrupted Taylor’s life plans, perhaps forcing her to quit her job or drop out of school. But this too
is no FLO-overriding factor. To see this, consider the following case.

RUNNER-UP: Krystal has struggled for years to make it as an actress, and finally got her
big audition. If she gets the role, it will catapult her into fame and fortune. As it turns out,
Jacqueline gets the role. But Krystal is the runner-up and is told that if anything should
happen to Jacqueline, the role will go to her. So Krystal discreetly kills Jacqueline and gets
the role.

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Having Jacqueline around was severely disruptive to Krystal’s life plans and was depriving her of
significant opportunities. Still, that was not enough to justify killing Jacqueline—even supposing
that Jacqueline’s presence completely derails and ruins Krystal’s life. So the disruption to Taylor’s
life plans, substantial as it is, is no FLO-overriding factor and no reason to reject MF3.

12. Can Pro-Lifers Make Exceptions?
I have argued that in typical cases, involving killing an unwanted but healthy embryo early
on in the pregnancy, abortion is seriously immoral. I also argued that a pro-lifer must be discerning:
some pro-life arguments are utterly unconvincing, including those that turn on the idea that life
begins at conception, that the embryo or fetus has a right to life, or that the mother is responsible
for the pregnancy by choosing to have sex in the first place.
What about less typical cases of abortion? Can pro-lifers allow that, in certain cases,
abortion isn’t seriously immoral? Yes, but they must do so in a principled way. We have only been
able to find one good argument for the immorality of abortion. Those who oppose abortion in
typical cases on the strength of the FLO argument—let’s call them “FLO-lifers”—will have to
check which exceptions the FLO-account permits them to make. So let’s see what the FLO-account
says about three potential exceptions: unhealthy embryos, life-threatening pregnancies, and
pregnancies resulting from rape.
Can the FLO-lifer make an exception for an unhealthy embryo? That depends entirely on
how unhealthy the embryo is and, in particular, whether it has FLO. An embryo that is certain to
die in the womb or to die within a year after being born has no FLO, and the FLO-lifer can allow
abortion in such cases compatibly with the FLO-account. What it won’t allow is the abortion of an
embryo which is known to have some serious disability, like blindness or Down syndrome. For
such embryos certainly do have FLO: perhaps not a future exactly like ours but still a future full
of valuable experiences.
Can the FLO-lifer make an exception if it is known that keeping the pregnancy will kill the
mother? Certainly she can make an exception if the unborn child will die as well, for in that case
the child has no FLO. But suppose the mother is expected to die during childbirth but that the baby
can be saved. In that case, the embryo does have FLO. So, by MF1, the abortion is permissible
only if the threat to the mother’s life is a FLO-overriding factor, the sort of factor that would justify
killing a normal human adult.

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And indeed there is reason to think it is FLO-overriding. Consider the following case:

QUICKSAND. Lee is drowning in quicksand. He has gotten ahold of Josiah’s pantleg, and is
frantically trying to pull himself out. But in doing so he is pulling Josiah into the quicksand.
Lee is in such a panicked state that he doesn’t realize what he is doing, and Josiah’s pleas
fall on deaf ears. Unless Josiah stops him by pushing him under, Lee will pull him in and
scramble out over Josiah’s subsumed body, killing him. So, in order to save his own life,
Josiah kills Lee by pushing him under.

What Josiah had to do may be horrifying, but it is not seriously immoral. The fact that Lee’s
continued existence is a threat to Josiah’s life justified him in killing Lee. Accordingly, the fact
that a certain embryo’s continued existence is a threat to the mother’s life is a FLO-overriding
factor, and the FLO-lifer can consistently grant that abortion is permissible in such cases.
Can a FLO-lifer grant that abortion is permissible in the case of a healthy pregnancy that
results from rape? In such cases, the embryo does have FLO, so the FLO-lifer can and should make
this concession so long as such cases involve a FLO-overriding factor. What might that FLO-
overriding factor be? Here, the FLO-overriding factor is that the embryo’s dependence on the
mother was a consequence of violent actions or events that she was not able to control. To see that
this is a FLO-overriding factor, one need only recall THE VIOLINIST from section 6. In that case,
we judged that it was permissible to kill a normal adult (Shushanna). And one plausible explanation
of why it was permissible for Ben to kill her is that her dependence on him was a consequence of
violent actions (by the kidnappers) that he was not able to control.
What we have just seen is that the best argument against abortion cannot be used to show
that pregnancies resulting from rape or pregnancies that threaten the life of the mother are seriously
immoral. Those pro-lifers who do not want to make an exception even in these special cases must
look elsewhere for an argument to support this position. And it is hard to see what such an
argument would look like, since the obvious candidates—for instance that such embryos have a
right to life or are potential people—were shown above to be deeply inadequate.

Reflection Questions
1. Can you find a way to rescue the Right to Life argument in sections 5-8 from my objections?
For instance, can you find a more promising way to argue that the embryo has a right to
womb?

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2. Can the violinist case from section 6 be used to resist MF3 of the modified FLO argument in
section 11?

3. In section 10, I considered a competing account of what makes killing wrong. Can that
account be defended against my objections?

4. We saw that the FLO-argument cannot be used to show that abortion is immoral in the case
of rape or life-threatening pregnancies. Can you think of an argument that does cover these
cases, and that does not fall victim to the objections raised in sections 4-8?

Sources
The Violinist case and the critique of the Right to Life argument are drawn from Judith Jarvis
Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion”. The FLO-argument is drawn from Don Marquis’s “Why
Abortion is Immoral”, as are many of the criticisms of bad pro-life and pro-choice arguments
discussed in sections 3 and 4. See David Boonin’s A Defense of Abortion for a more detailed
discussion of Marquis and Thomson’s arguments, and a defense of a version of the Desire
Account of the wrongness of killing discussed in section 10. Here are some additional resources:

• David Boonin: Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should Be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person
• Sidney Callahan: “Abortion and the Sexual Agenda: A Case for Pro-Life Feminism”
• Ann E. Cudd: “Enforced Pregnancy, Rape, and the Image of a Woman”
• Jane English: “Abortion and the Concept of a Person”
• Elizabeth Harman: “Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of
Abortion”
• Elizabeth Harman: “The Potentiality Problem”
• George W. Harris “Fathers and Fetuses”
• Margaret Olivia Little: “Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate”
• Alastair Norcross: “Killing, Abortion, and Contraception: A Reply to Marquis”
• Michael Tooley: “Abortion and Infanticide”
• Mary Anne Warren: “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”

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CHAPTER 9
Eating Animals is Immoral

Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the
textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments
advanced in other chapters.

1. Introduction
In what follows, I will defend the claim that, in most cases, buying and eating meat is
morally impermissible. First, I will argue that there is no good reason to think that eating meat is
morally permissible. In particular, I address three common reasons for thinking that it’s not wrong
to eat meat: that it is natural to eat meat, that it is necessary to eat meat, and that people have
always eaten meat. Second, I argue directly for the immorality of buying and eating meat, by
developing an analogy in which puppies are subjected to much the same treatment as farm animals
(sections 5-6). I then defend my argument from analogy against various objections (sections 7-8).
In defending the claim that it is morally impermissible for you to eat meat, I will be making
some assumptions about you. First, I am assuming that you know that the meat you eat is the flesh
of slaughtered animals. A friend of mine once had the following conversation with her children at
the dinner table:
Them [eating chicken]: “Mom, where does chicken come from?”
Her: “Well… it comes from chickens. You’re eating a chicken.”
Them: “C’mon, mom!! Seriously, where does chicken come from?”
Perhaps you didn’t know. Now you know.
Second, I am assuming that the meat you eat was killed in order to be eaten. Perhaps you
eat only dead animals you find in the road. In that case, go for it; my arguments do not apply to
you.
Third, I am assuming that you do not live in some faraway land, where you have to eat
meat because there is no way to get your hands on tofu, broccoli, oatmeal, avocados, almonds,
beans, pumpkin seeds, hummus, lentils, quinoa, tempeh, peanut butter, veggie burgers, or other
such alternative sources of protein. Among other things, I am assuming that you are not stranded
on a deserted island with nothing to eat but wild boar. Perhaps I’m wrong. If you are currently
stranded on a deserted island, go ahead and eat the boar.

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More generally, just because you can imagine some possible situation in which it’s morally
okay to do a certain thing, that doesn’t mean it’s morally okay to do that thing in all situations. If
a hiker gets caught in a blizzard and will freeze to death if he don’t break into someone’s empty
cabin for the night, it’s morally okay for him to break in. That obviously doesn’t mean that it’s
morally okay for you, right now, to break into a random person’s home. If the Nazis are at the
good Samaritan’s door, it’s morally okay to for her to lie to them to save the Jews hiding in her
attic. That obviously doesn’t mean that it’s morally okay for you, right now, to lie to whomever
you want, whenever you want. And just because it’s okay for certain people to eat certain types
of meat in certain situations, that doesn’t mean that it’s okay for you—in the situation you
currently find yourself in—to eat whatever meat you want whenever you want.

2. The Argument from Precedent
In the United States, we consume somewhere around ten billion farm animals per year.
Eating lots of animals involves killing lots of conscious creatures, creatures that are capable of
experiencing pain, discomfort, fear, and distress. Is there some good reason to think that eating
meat is morally permissible, despite all the killing and suffering that is involved in getting the meat
off of those animals and onto our plates? Sure, meat is delicious, and bacon is especially delicious.
But, if we’re being honest, the pleasure you get from eating bacon is no reason to think that eating
meat is morally acceptable, any more than the pleasure a sadist gets from kicking puppies is a
reason to thinking that kicking puppies is morally acceptable. So let us see if we can do better.
The first argument we’ll consider for the moral permissibility of meat-eating is that there
is such a strong precedent for eating meat. People have eaten meat all throughout human history.
By eating meat, we aren’t doing anything different from from what our ancestors have done.
The argument evidently runs as follows:

The Argument from Precedent
(PR1) There have been people who eat meat throughout human history
(PR2) If there have been people doing a certain thing throughout human history, then it is
morally permissible for you to do it
(PR3) So, it is morally permissible for you to eat meat

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PR1 is indisputable. But PR2 is obviously false. People have murdered other people throughout
human history as well. If PR2 were true, then that would mean that it’s morally acceptable for you
to murder people. But, of course, it isn’t morally acceptable for you to murder people.
We can reconstruct this as an argument against PR2 as follows:

The Argument from Murder
(MR1) There have been people who murdered other people throughout human history
(MR2) If so, then: if PR2 is true then it is morally permissible for you to murder other
people
(MR3) It is not morally permissible for you to murder other people
(MR4) So, PR2 is false

MR1 is obviously true, as is MR3. And MR2 is simply making a conceptual point about what PR2
entails: according to PR2, if you are always morally permitted to do things that people have done
throughout history, then that goes for murder as well. So the Argument from Murder shows that
PR2 is false, and if PR2 is false, then the Argument from Precedent fails.
You may object that while it’s true that there have always been murderers, it’s not true that
most people have been murderers throughout human history. This suggests a way of reinstating
the Argument from Precedent, without the overly strong premise PR2:

The Argument from Majority Precedent
(PR1*) Most people have eaten meat throughout human history
(PR2*) If most people have done a certain thing throughout human history, then it is
morally permissible for you to do it
(PR3) So, it is morally permissible for you to eat meat

This new argument sidesteps the Argument from Murder. After all, since it isn’t true that most
people throughout human history have been murderers, PR2* doesn’t have absurd consequence
that you are permitted to murder people. But other counterexamples are easy to find. For instance,
there has been a widespread practice of people beating their children throughout human history.
That certainly does not mean that it is morally okay for people now (or even back then) to beat
their children.
Perhaps you doubt that child abuse was so prevalent through human history. But let me ask
you this: in order to figure out whether it’s morally acceptable for people to beat their children, do

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you first have to sort out how common it’s been in human history? Of course not. You already
know it’s wrong, regardless of how many people have done in the past. Humans have a long history
of all sorts of immoral practices: slavery, torture, persecution, and discrimination. What’s right or
wrong has nothing to do with what sorts of practices our ancestors did or didn’t approve of, or how
many of them engaged in those practices. There is no reason to accept anything like PR2*.
I should emphasize that my objection to these appeals to precedent does not rest on the
assumption that killing animals for meat is morally equivalent to these other objectionable
practices. Everything I have said is compatible with thinking that child abuse is far worse than
killing animals for meat. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. My point is just that, as with these other
practices, the long history of meat-eating doesn’t by itself give us any reason to think that meat-
eating is morally acceptable.

3. The Argument from Naturalness
Let’s turn to a second possible defense of meat-eating. Here, the idea is that eating meat is
natural. This could mean a couple of different things, so we’ll need to look at different ways of
clarifying this appeal to naturalness.
First, the idea might be that it’s part of the natural order of things for animals to eat other
animals. Cheetahs eat gazelles. Sharks eat seals. We eat chickens and pigs and cows. This is just
part of nature. The argument evidently runs as follows:

The Natural Order Argument
(NO1) Other animals eat meat
(NO2) If other animals do something, then it’s morally permissible for you to do it
(NO3) So, it’s morally permissible for you to eat meat

There is no denying NO1. But just like PR2 above, NO2 is open to endless counterexamples. Other
animals engage in cannibalism, force themselves sexually upon unwilling partners, kill the weakest
members of their groups, chew off the heads of their partners during intercourse, and kill innocent
humans. Needless to say, these are not things that it would be morally acceptable for you to do.
And yet, if NO2 is true, then it follows straightaway that they are morally acceptable. So NO2
must be false. Yet without NO2, it is unclear how to get from the indisputable truth of NO1 to any
interesting conclusion about the moral acceptability of eating meat.

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(Does this mean that it’s immoral for cheetahs to eat gazelles? Of course not. Because
they’re incapable of moral thinking, and thus incapable of recognizing actions as moral or
immoral, cheetahs aren’t morally accountable for their actions. But since we are capable of
recognizing actions as right wrong, we can be held morally accountable when we perform those
same actions.)
A theme is emerging. Defenses of meat-eating cite some uncontroversial fact about eating
meat, for instance that humans or nonhuman animals regularly eat meat. A conclusion is then
drawn about the morally permissibility of eating meat. To get from the uncontroversial premise to
the moral conclusion, however, we need to assume that we have identified some right-making
feature: that, in general, the fact that our ancestors or nonhuman animals have done something
makes it okay for us to do it. And that underlying assumption ends up being grossly implausible.
Let’s see how this same problem arises for a second way of developing the idea that eating
meat is natural. Here the idea is that we have a natural capacity for eating meat. Other animals
have mouths and guts and taste buds specially made for a vegetarian diet. Not us. We have just the
right kinds of teeth and digestive systems for getting nutrition from meat, and we naturally enjoy
eating it. Therefore, the idea goes, it’s morally permissible for us to eat meat.
What is the argument here? It seems to be the following:

The Natural Capacity Argument
(CP1) You are naturally capable of eating meat
(CP2) If you are naturally capable of doing a certain thing, then it is morally permissible
for you to do that thing
(CP3) So, it is morally permissible for you to eat meat

CP1 is of course true. But CP2 is obviously false. After all, there are plenty of things that you are
naturally capable of doing that are not morally permissible: lying, stealing, enslaving other human
beings, torturing puppies, and so on. Just because nature has endowed you with the ability to do
something—and even if you find that doing that thing comes naturally to you—that hardly entails
that it isn’t wrong for you to do it. Indeed, morality is more often than not a matter of overcoming
our natural impulses.

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4. The Argument from Necessity
Perhaps the most common defense of the moral permissibility of meat-eating is that eating
meat is necessary. Necessary for what, though? Obviously it isn’t necessary for survival. You
probably know some vegetarians, and you can check their pulse for yourself.
Maybe the idea is that, even if you can survive without eating meat, you can’t be healthy
without eating meat. For instance, it is sometimes suggested that you can’t get the necessary
amounts of protein without eating meat. If that’s right, then perhaps the following argument can
be used to establish the permissibility of eating meat:

The Necessity of Protein Argument
(NP1) Eating meat is necessary for getting enough protein
(NP2) If doing something is necessary for getting enough protein, then it is morally
permissible for you to do it
(NP3) So, it is morally permissible for you to eat meat

We already saw, however, that NP1 is false. I listed a number of alternative sources of
protein in section 1—broccoli, peanut butter, and so on—and it is well known that getting your
protein from these sources is healthier than getting it from meat. There is no truth to claim that
eating meat is necessary for getting enough protein. Indeed, a number of top athletes—some of the
healthiest people on the planet—are vegetarians, including tennis pro Venus Williams, Olympic
medalist Carl Lewis, and UFC fighters Nate Diaz and Colleen Schneider. So it undoubtedly is
possible to have a healthy diet without meat.
Moreover, even if meat-eating were necessary for getting enough protein, there would still
be a question of whether meat-eating is permissible. Suppose you are a prisoner of war, and—
while you are in absolutely no danger of dying—you are not as healthy as you could be because
your captors aren’t giving you enough protein. Would it then be morally permissible for you to
steal your fellow prisoners’ rations? Of course not. Morality doesn’t permit doing whatever it takes
to get the FDA-recommended amount of protein. So NP2 is demonstrably false as well.

5. Meet Your Meat
Thus far, all we have seen is that standard arguments in defense of meat-eating all fail. In
other words, we have no good reason to think that meat-eating is morally acceptable. That’s not

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yet to say that eating meat isn’t morally acceptable. But I do want to draw this stronger conclusion.
So let me turn now to an argument that eating meat is immoral.
Once again, though, I want to narrow the scope of my argument somewhat. I will not try
to argue that eating meat is immoral in all cases, or even that it is immoral in all cases in which
alternative sources of protein are readily available. Rather, I want to restrict my argument to cases
in which the animals being eaten endured certain common sorts of suffering before ending up on
your plate. If you frequent the pricier “pasture raised” portion of the meat aisle, there is some
possibility that these animals were raised on a small family farm and treated kindly, that they
goofed around with the children of the household, curled up at night with their animal families in
a warm barn, and were treated to a painless death. I won’t try to argue that it is immoral to eat such
animals.
Most of the meat consumed in the US, however, comes from what are called concentrated
animal feeding operations (CAFOs), also known as “factory farms”. This includes pretty much all
the chicken, beef, and pork products you’re buying if you’re not making a serious effort to seek
out humanely raised meat. Animals in CAFOs spend much of their lives in cages or otherwise
cramped conditions. They are regularly mutilated: chickens are have portions of their beaks sliced
off, cattle are dehorned and castrated, and pigs are castrated and have their tails cut off, typically
without anesthesia. The slaughter, as you can imagine, is no picnic either. Animals typically aren’t
slaughtered on site, but are instead transported (in all kinds of weather) to slaughterhouses, and
the slaughter is (let us say) an imperfect process, given the sheer number of scared and squirming
animals coming through the slaughterhouse each day.
Needless to say, this is not cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Conditions in the farming industry
have made it all but impossible to turn a profit from a small, idyllic farm, and farmers are forced
to scale up in order to make ends meet. Confining the animals to small spaces is necessary for
keeping costs low, and the mutilations help curb the distraught animals’ tendency and ability to
attack one another. Farmers are not trying to harm the animals; they care about their animals’ well-
being and some even install “happy cow back scratchers” for their cattle. The suffering involved
in CAFOs, by their lights, is a regrettable but foreseeable consequence of the industry. But this is
their livelihood, and as long as you keep buying, they will keep supplying.
I should add that I am no expert on the meat industry, and it is difficult to find good
information on the treatment of animals in CAFOs, due in part to “ag gag” laws and other efforts

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by agribusiness lobbyists to restrict access to these sites. One can find footage online of animals
in CAFOs being treated horrifically, but of course animal welfare groups are going to highlight
the most egregious cases of mistreatment they can find. One can also find footage of animals being
treated humanely in CAFOs, but of course farmers are going to put their best foot forward. So we
can’t expect videos from these sources to give us a representative look at the treatment of animals
in CAFOs. My advice (as a non-expert) for getting at least some reliable sense of the realities of
animal farming is to browse online “how-to” guides for beak trimming, dehorning, castrating, and
tail-docking, as well as online catalogs selling farmers equipment for performing these mutilations.

6. Fred and His Puppies
I will assume in what follows that when you eat meat, you are buying meat that came from
a CAFO—which, as I said above, is almost certainly the case if you are not making a special effort
and financial sacrifice to buy only humanely raised meat. (If you are making this effort, the
argument does not apply to you.) I will argue that it is immoral for you to buy and eat that meat
by presenting you with a fictional case involving the horrific treatment of puppies, and arguing
that there is no morally significant difference between what is done in this fictional case and what
you are doing when you eat meat.
Here is the case:

COCOAMONE FARM. As a result of a head injury, Fred’s brain stops naturally producing
cocoamone, the hormone that enables humans to taste chocolate. Fred discovers that the
only way to obtain useable cocoamone is to distill it from the brains of puppies. (The
science behind this is very complicated and you wouldn’t understand it.) So Fred buys
twenty Labrador puppies from a local breeder. He slices off their tails, yanks out their
canine teeth, and castrates the males, all without anesthesia. He keeps them locked in small
cages in his spare bedroom, slaughters them, grinds up their brains, and distills a month’s
supply of cocoamone. He sips some cocoamone and—voilà—it works! So he buys twenty
more puppies for the next month’s supply, mutilates them, and locks them up.

And here is the argument:

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The Argument from Fred’s Puppies
(FP1) If there is no morally significant difference between two actions A and B, then: if
A is immoral, then B is immoral
(FP2) What Fred does is immoral
(FP3) There is no morally significant difference between what Fred does and you buying
and eating meat
(FP4) So, it is immoral for you to buy and eat meat

The idea behind FP1 is that, whenever there is some moral difference between two
actions—for instance that one is immoral and the other isn’t—there must always be some
explanation of why they differ morally. Absent some such an explanation, it would be arbitrary to
say that the one action is immoral and the other isn’t.
FP2 should strike you as obvious. Some, despite finding it obvious, may still wring their
hands, remembering that in some cultures dogs are routinely killed and eaten for food. If you are
wringing your hands, you should remind yourself that there are also cultures in which they
routinely mutilate the genitals of young girls, permanently depriving them of the possibility of
sexual pleasure. Next, you should re-read section 2 above and remind yourself that the fact that
lots of people engage in some practice has little if anything to do with whether it is morally
permissible. The fact that some people mutilate their daughters’ genitals, raise dogs for food, or
(for that matter) confine, mutilate, and slaughter farm animals, does not by itself settle the question
of whether any of these practices are morally acceptable. Finally, with all this in mind, I invite you
to re-read COCOAMONE FARM with fresh eyes, ask yourself whether Fred’s actions seem immoral,
find your moral compass, and admit that FP2 is something that you agree with.
How about FP3? I don’t expect this premise to strike you as obvious. Indeed, you’ve
probably already thought of several differences between what Fred is doing and what you do when
you buy and eat meat. So let us turn now to some of the putative differences.

7. Morally Significant Differences
To be sure, there are plenty of differences between the case of Fred and his puppies and
the case of you and the farm animals whose flesh you are buying and eating. Labrador puppies are
cute and cuddly, for instance, whereas chickens and pigs are ugly and smelly. That’s a difference.
But it isn’t a morally significant difference. How cute or ugly something or someone is doesn’t
make any difference to what we are morally permitted to do to them.

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So what might be a morally significant difference between the cases, that is, a difference
that could potentially make for a moral difference? I’ll consider five possibilities: that puppies
aren’t bred to be consumed, that Fred’s cruelty is unnecessary, that meat (unlike chocolate) has
actual health benefits, that Fred (unlike you) is directly harming the animals, and that Fred giving
up cocoamone would have an actual impact on the amount of animal suffering whereas you giving
up meat would have no impact.
First, one might point to a difference in what puppies and livestock are bred for. Puppies,
the idea goes, are bred to serve as human companions, whereas chickens and pigs are bred for
human consumption. But there is reason to doubt that this is a morally significant difference. If
someone were breeding human children specifically so they could be put to work as slaves,
enslaving those children would be just as immoral as enslaving any other child.
Furthermore, we can simply revise the COCOAMONE FARM case so that this difference
disappears.

BRED FOR COCOAMONE. Fred goes to a breeder and buys some dogs, some male and some
female. Recognizing that these dogs were bred to be human companions, he treats them
well. But he breeds the dogs, intending to use their puppies for cocoamone. Once they have
their puppies—which weren’t bred for human companionship—he takes the puppies, locks
them in cages, mutilates them, slaughters them, and distills their cocoamone.

By revising the case in this way, we eliminate the difference that was supposed to be morally
significant. Yet what Fred does to these puppies still seems wrong, even though they were bred for
the sole purpose of being slaughtered for their cocoamone. So FP2 remains true—despite the
changes in the details of what Fred does—and the envisaged objection to FP3 fails.
Second, one might contend that, whereas the farm animals’ suffering is unavoidable,
Fred’s cruel treatment of the puppies is entirely unnecessary. If all he needs is the cocoamone, why
extract their teeth and cut off their tails and keep them in small cages? Well, here’s the thing. Fred
lives in a small two-bedroom apartment, and it would be complete chaos if he gave those twenty
dogs the run of the house. There’s no reasonable alternative to locking them in the cages. Of course,
being all cooped up like this makes them crazy and aggressive, and castrating them curbs their
aggression, while removing their teeth and tails diminishes their ability to harm one another. Why
not get a bigger apartment? And why no anesthesia? He can’t afford it! Why not extract the
cocoamone from their brains without slaughtering them? One does not simply “extract the

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cocoamone”. It’s not as if there’s a little pouch in there filling up with the stuff. There’s no way to
get at it without grinding up the brain and straining it out. So we have failed to identify a difference
between the cases, let alone a morally significant difference. In both cases, the suffering is a
foreseeable but unavoidable consequence of the only feasible and financially sound way of
obtaining the relevant resource (be it meat or cocoamone).
Third, one might contend that the morally significant difference is a nutritional difference:
meat, but not cocoamone, makes a positive contribution to one’s health. Not so fast. Cocoamone
does make a positive contribution to Fred’s psychological health. He loves the taste of chocolate,
and the thought of never tasting it again is very depressing for him. Perhaps you’ll object that meat
doesn’t merely make a positive contribution to one’s health; meat (unlike cocoamone) is necessary
for a healthy diet. But as we saw in section 4, that’s just false. There is nothing, protein included,
that’s needed for survival or health and that can only be gotten from meat.
Fourth, one might say that Fred directly harms the puppies in COCOAMONE FARM, whereas
you do not directly harm any farm animals. They have already been confined, mutilated, and
slaughtered by the time you buy and eat the meat. (Notice, by the way, that this is the opposite of
the common refrain that it’s okay to eat meat as long as you’re willing to kill it yourself. Here, the
idea is that it’s okay precisely because you’re not killing it yourself.)
In response: the absence of direct harm doesn’t typically absolve someone of moral
responsibility. If I hire a hitman to kill someone, intuitively what I have done is no less wrong than
if I had committed the murder myself. In any case, we can revise the Fred story once more to
eliminate the putative difference.

HIRED HELP. Too squeamish to mutilate and slaughter the dogs himself, Fred hires Nysha
to do it for him. She buys twenty dogs, mutilates them, keeps them confined in small cages,
slaughters them, and provides Fred with one vial of cocoamone each month. He pays her
for her services.

Now, Fred is not directly harming the puppies. But his hands are not clean; it is immoral for him
to hire Nysha to set up a cocoamone farm. So FP2 remains true even when we revise the story to
incorporate something more like the indirect harm of buying meat. The putative morally significant
difference between the cases disappears and can no longer serve as an objection to FP3.

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8. The No Impact Objection
Let’s consider one last attempt to identify a morally significant difference between you and
Fred, this one somewhat more promising than the others. Here, the idea is that if Fred stops what
he’s doing—whether that’s running a cocoamone farm himself or paying Nysha to do it for him—
there will be a substantial decrease in the number of puppies confined, mutilated, and slaughtered
for their cocoamone. That number will drop to zero. By contrast, if you stopped buying and eating
meat, in all likelihood it would make no difference whatsoever to the number of farm animals
confined, mutilated, and slaughtered for their meat.
Why think that your decision to stop buying meat will have no impact on animal suffering?
The average meat-eater consumes the equivalent of twenty-five chickens per year. So suppose you
give up meat for a whole year, and twenty-five chickens’ worth of meat goes unpurchased as a
result. It is not as if the barons of the meat industry are going to take notice and say: “Egads! Last
year we sold eight billion chickens, and this year we only sold 7,999,999,975. We’d better confine,
mutilate, and slaughter twenty-five fewer chickens next year.” The markets are too insensitive.
Demand is going to have to shrink by thousands of animals per year before anyone takes notice,
and that’s not something you yourself can make happen just by giving up meat.
This does look like it has what it takes to be a morally significant difference. If one action
actually has an impact on the amount of suffering in the world, and another has no impact
whatsoever, then that very plausibly makes for a moral difference between the two actions.
That said, this ultimately is not a convincing objection to FP3. For once again, we can
revise the case to make the difference disappear:

SECOND DESSERT: Fred decides not to start his own cocoamone farm, and has now gone
months now without tasting chocolate. Out to dinner, he orders a chocolate mousse for
dessert. To his surprise, he is able to taste the chocolate. Elated, he calls the waiter over to
order a second mousse and asks if there’s something special about it. The waiter explains
that, yes, the mousse is infused with cocoamone from the brains of slaughtered, mutilated
puppies that they keep caged up in the back. They go through twenty puppies a day, he
says. Fred is horrified. But he does not cancel his order, and he enjoys a second cocoamone-
infused mousse.

It’s wrong for Fred to order a second mousse, now that he knows about the puppy suffering
involved in making it. And yet canceling the order would have had no impact on the amount of
puppy suffering. They slaughter all the puppies before dinner service even begins, and they’ll

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slaughter twenty more tomorrow even if they end up with some leftover cocoamone tonight. So
there is no morally significant difference between what Fred does in SECOND DESSERT and what
you do when buying and eating meat. The objection to FP3 has been defused.
How, though, can Fred’s actions in SECOND DESSERT be immoral if they have no impact?
The answer is that he is part of a group whose actions collectively do make an impact, namely the
restaurant’s customers. The restaurant keeps mistreating the puppies only because customers keep
ordering the mousse. The customers are doing something immoral, and Fred’s actions are immoral
by virtue of contributing to the impact that the group as a whole has on puppy suffering. This is
exactly why it’s wrong to throw your plastic bottles in the garbage rather than recycling them, even
though the results will almost certainly be the same even without your small contribution. And this
is the same reason why it’s wrong to buy meat, even if your personal meat consumption doesn’t
by itself make a difference. (Of course, the meat that you and others purchase today is from animals
that are already dead, so you’re not contributing to the suffering of those animals. But you are
affecting the next generation of farm animals, by encouraging farmers to continue raising and
mistreating them.)
I’ll close by considering a variation on the no-impact objection. It is sometimes objected
that even if everyone switched to a vegetarian diet, that wouldn’t make any difference to the
amount of animal suffering. After all, farming crops results in the death of countless mice and
other field animals that get caught up in farm machinery. Cutting out meat would lead to less
killing of livestock, but this would just be replaced with more crop farming and thus more mouse
killing. Since we have to eat something (the idea goes), and since animals are going to be dying
either way, we may as well eat meat.
I find this unconvincing for several reasons. First, one must take into account not just the
quantity of the deaths but also the quality of the lives. The mice killed in crop farming live normal
lives up until they are killed by the farming equipment, whereas livestock in CAFOs are subjected
to a lifetime of confinement with mutilated bodies. Second, it’s far from obvious that a worldwide
switch to vegetarianism would result in any increase in the number of field animals killed. In the
U.S., only about a quarter of farmed crops are directly consumed by humans, and more than half
are grown and farmed to serve as animal feed. Replacing the latter with crops meant for human
consumption would likely lead to an overall decrease in crop farming and mouse killings, as well
as reducing the number of mice killed in laboratories while developing and testing antibiotics for

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farm animals. Third, there are feasible, nonlethal methods of driving mice from the fields before
farming them, whereas there are no nonlethal methods of slaughtering animals for their meat.

9. Beyond Factory Farming
I have argued that eating meat cannot be justified on the grounds that people have been
eating meat for all of recorded history, or on the grounds that eating meat is necessary, or on the
grounds that eating meat is “natural”. I also argued that it is immoral for you to buy and eat meat
produced in CAFOs, which is pretty much all the meat you’ve been buying assuming that you
haven’t been going out of your way to buy humanely raised meat. If I’m right about this, then my
arguments are highly relevant to most people’s eating habits. If you have been casually buying
meat at supermarkets, restaurants, and fast food establishments, then you are doing something
immoral and ought to change your dietary practices.
Is it ever morally permissible to eat meat or other animal products? The Argument from
Fred’s Puppies only establishes that eating meat from CAFOs is immoral, and not all meat comes
from CAFOs. That said, the Argument from Fred’s Puppies can be adapted to shed light on other
sorts of cases.
First, consider eggs and dairy products like cheese and milk. Just like the meat you buy,
pretty much all of the eggs and dairy that you buy comes from CAFOs. Dairy cows and egg-laying
chickens endure the same sorts of confinement and mutilations as the cows and chickens raised
for meat. In light of that, we can revise Fred’s case to show that it is immoral to buy and consume
eggs and dairy that come from CAFOs.

SWEATY PUPPIES. Fred’s brain stops producing cocoamone, and the only way to obtain
useable cocoamone is to distill it from the sweat of puppies. He asks his friends if he can
collect sweat off of their puppies, but they think that’s creepy and won’t let him do it. So
he buys twenty puppies, locks them in cages, mutilates them, collects their sweat, and
distills a month’s supply of cocoamone.

What Fred does is immoral. But there’s no morally significant difference between him caging and
mutilating the puppies for their cocoamone, and you buying and consuming eggs and dairy from
CAFOs. (See section 7 for a reminder about why he has to cage and mutilate the puppies.)
How about meat from humanely raised animals? Here, again, we can look to Fred for
guidance.

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PAINLESS DEATH. Fred’s brain stops producing cocoamone, and the only way to obtain
useable cocoamone is to distill it from the brains of puppies. So he buys twenty puppies,
lets them run around free in his apartment, takes them for walks, buys them toys, and treats
them well. Then, once they’re a year old, he sneaks up on them one by one, slits their
throats, grinds up their brains, and distills a month’s supply of cocoamone.

Is Fred doing something immoral? I would say so, though I’ll admit that what he does in PAINLESS
DEATH isn’t nearly as bad as what he does in the original COCOAMONE FARM case. If you agree
that it’s wrong for Fred is slaughter puppies for their cocoamone even if he otherwise treats them
well, then you should agree that it’s wrong for you to buy meat even from humanely-raised farm
animals.
How about eggs and dairy from humanely raised animals? For instance, supposed that
someone keeps chickens and cows as pets, treats them well, never slaughters them, and sells their
milk and (unfertilized) eggs. Would it be wrong to buy and consume their milk and eggs? To see
this, let’s consider what would be the analogous case for Fred:

HAPPY PUPPY SWEAT. Fred’s brain stops producing cocoamone, and the only way to obtain
useable cocoamone is to distill it from the sweat of puppies. So he buys twenty puppies,
lets them run around free in his apartment, takes them for walks, buys them toys, and treats
them well. He collects their sweat—without killing them or harming them in anyway—and
distills a month’s supply of cocoamone.

This case seems to combine all the best features of the previous two cases with none of their
problematic features. Certainly Fred isn’t doing anything immoral. So, by parity of reason, there’s
nothing immoral about buying eggs and dairy from humanely raised animals on a no-kill farm.
Finally, what about lab-grown meat? We currently have the technology to “grow” beef in
a laboratory—just the meat, with no animal attached—without any living animals being harmed
in the process. Someday soon, you may be able to buy this lab-grown meat in stores and
restaurants. Would that be immoral? Once again, we can answer that question by imagining Fred
getting his cocoamone in an analogous way:

COCOAMONE LAB. Fred’s brain stops producing cocoamone. So he buys a hundred small
clusters of brain cells that were painlessly extracted from living puppies without harming
those puppies in any way. He keeps the cells alive in a chemical solution, and collects the
cocoamone that they produce.

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When we drastically change the details of the case in this way, it no longer seems like Fred is
doing anything immoral. No animals have to die or suffer in order for him to get his cocoamone.
Since there is no morally significant difference between what Fred does in COCOAMONE LAB and
buying lab-grown meat, and since Fred isn’t doing anything immoral in COCOAMONE LAB, there’s
nothing immoral about buying and eating lab-grown meat.
What we’ve just seen is that the arguments of this chapter don’t support a full-fledged
veganism on which it’s never permissible to buy or consume meat or other animal products.
Actually, I doubt that many actual vegans would accept such an extreme veganism. But even
though I haven’t shown that eating meat is always immoral, I have shown that it’s immoral to buy
any of the meat (and most of the eggs and dairy) that’s presently for sale in stores and restaurants.
Suppose you are convinced that you ought to stop buying and eating meat. But you can’t
bring yourself to cut out meat completely—perhaps because you love Taco Bell too much or
because grandma will be crushed if you refuse to eat her Christmas roast. What’s a wannabe
vegetarian to do? What I would say is that morality comes in degrees. It’s wrong to eat meat, but
it’s far worse to eat meat at every meal than to eat meat just on holidays and a Taco Bell Double
Decker Taco now and again. So my advice is to make a good faith effort to decrease your meat
consumption—to once a day or once a week—and then transition to a 100% (or 99%) vegetarian
diet when you’re ready.

Reflection Questions
1. Can the argument from precedent or naturalness be defended against my objections? Or can
you think of a superior line of argument in defense of eating meat?

2. Can you think of a plausible way of arguing against premise FP2, that what Fred does is
immoral? Make sure that your argument in defense of slaughtering puppies won’t double as a
defense of slaughtering human infants.

3. Can you defend one of the putative morally significant differences discussed in sections 7
and 8 against my objections, or can you think of a morally significant difference that was not
discussed?

4. If not for the meat industry, the billions of animals raised and slaughtered annually for food
would never have existed. Could this fact be used as the basis for an argument in defense of
eating meat? Why or why not?

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Sources
The discussion of the Arguments from Precedent, Naturalness, and Necessity draws heavily from
Dan Lowe’s “Common Arguments for the Moral Acceptability of Eating Meat”. The Argument
from Fred’s Puppies and subsequent discussion is drawn from Alastair Norcross’s “Puppies,
Pigs, and People”. The argument from killing mice in section 8 is drawn from Mike Archer’s
“Ordering the Vegetarian Meal? There’s More Animal Blood on Your Hands”, and the response
to that argument is drawn from the All Animals Australia blog’s “Debunking ‘Ordering the
Vegetarian Meal?’” The statistics in section 8 about the proportion of crops grown to feed
animals is drawn from Brad Plumer’s “How Much of the World’s Cropland is Actually Used to
Grow Food?” Here are some additional resources:

• Elizabeth Anderson: Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life
• Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo, and Matthew C. Halteman: Philosophy Comes to Dinner
• Cora Diamond: Eating Meat and Eating People
• Tyler Doggett: Killing Animals for Food
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/killing-animals-food
• Lori Gruen: Ethics and Animals: An Introduction
• Elizabeth Harman: The Moral Significance of Animal Pain and Animal Death
• Bojack Horseman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4xytsouUYo
• Michael Huemer: Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism
• Anja Jauernig: Speaking Up for Animals
• Christine Korsgaard: A Kantian Case for Animal Rights
• Loren Lomasky: Is it Wrong to Eat Animals?
• Jeff McMahan: The Meat Eaters
• Peter Singer: All Animals are Equal
• David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster

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CHAPTER 10
What Makes Things Right

Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the
textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments
advanced in other chapters.

1. Utilitarianism
We’re constantly confronted with questions about which things are right and which things
are wrong. Some arise in our daily lives: is it wrong to download pirated movies, run a red light
on an empty road, tell on a friend who you know cheated on an exam? Some arise in political
discussion: is to wrong for the government to ban assault rifles and/or abortions? Some arise in
stories and movies: is it wrong for Thanos to kill off half the population if the survivors all benefit
from the abundance of resources?
We’d like to know which of these things are right and which are wrong. What would be
even better is a perfectly general answer to the question of which things are right and wrong—an
answer that identifies what makes right actions right and wrong actions wrong. My aim here is to
answer that question. In particular, I will defend a utilitarian answer, according to which the
rightness or wrongness of an action is entirely a function of how it contributes (positively or
negatively) to people’s well-being. Since a person’s well-being is ultimately a matter of how happy
they are, what this means is that an action’s rightness or wrongness comes down to how much an
action increases or decreases levels of happiness.
Here, then, is the utilitarian theory of morality that I plan to defend, which I call “act
utilitarianism”.

Act Utilitarianism
Performing a certain action is the right thing to do if and only if it will have a more positive
effect on overall levels of happiness than any other available action.

By “happiness” I mean any sort of pleasurable mental state, including both physical and emotional
pleasures. And I’m thinking of “levels of happiness” as including degrees of unhappiness. Two
situations in which everyone is completely unhappy may still differ in their level of happiness if
they are more unhappy in one than in the other.

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In section 2, I’ll explain why act utilitarianism is an appealing theory of morality. Then, in
section 3, I’ll consider an important objection to the view, namely that it implies that killing an
innocent person and distributing his organs to save five lives is the right thing to do. In section 4,
I consider, but ultimately reject, an alternative utilitarian view—“rule utilitarianism”—which
seems to avoid this undesirable consequence. Finally, in section 5, I argue that act utilitarianism is
correct to say that killing one person to save five is the right thing to do, as becomes clear when
we consider other sorts of cases (involving runaway trolleys).
Before proceeding, let me clarify a couple things. First, act utilitarianism does not say that
the right thing for a person to do is whatever makes that person the happiest. To help see this,
consider the following case:

TERRORIST ATTACK. Clint discovers that his boyfriend J.J. is planning a terrorist attack.
Clint knows that if he calls the cops on J.J., it will end their relationship, J.J. will never
forgive him, and he’ll feel incredibly guilty about turning J.J. in. Clint also knows that if
he doesn’t tell the cops, countless people will lose their lives or their loved ones. Clint
decides not to tell the cops, and J.J. carries out the devastating attack. J.J. is never caught.
Clint puts it out of his mind and feels no guilt or remorse about not preventing the attack.

Keeping the information to himself clearly has a greater positive effect on Clint’s overall level of
happiness than ratting out J.J. would have. Still, act utilitarianism says that the right thing for Clint
to do was to tell the cops. Why? Because act utilitarianism requires us to take into account the
happiness of everyone affected by the action, not just the person who performed the action. The
effects of withholding the information include not just Clint and J.J.’s happiness but also the grief
experienced by the victims’ families and friends. The effects of telling the cops would include not
just Clint and J.J.’s unhappiness but also all the happy experiences that the victims and their
families and friends would otherwise have enjoyed. Telling the cops clearly would have had a
greater positive effect on overall levels of happiness in the world. So, according to act
utilitarianism, Clint should have turned J.J. in.
Second, I say that I am defending a utilitarian theory. What makes a view utilitarian is that
it considers rightness and wrongness to be a function of how actions affect overall well-being, that
is, a function of the things that make people better or worse off. I am assuming that people’s well-
being is entirely a matter of how happy or unhappy they are, though one could in principle defend
a utilitarian theory on which well-being consists in something other than happiness (for instance,

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people getting what they want, even when it doesn’t make them happy). Additionally, act
utilitarianism describes one way in which morality might be a function of happiness, but there are
other possible ways of saying what the function is. For instance, as we’ll see in section 4, one could
say that it’s a function not simply of how one’s specific actions affect people’s happiness but rather
of how the rules that one is following generally tend to affect people’s happiness.

2. Why Accept Act Utilitarianism?
I’m not sure how to argue definitively for the truth of act utilitarianism. Still, I can give
several reasons for taking it seriously as a theory of morality.
First, act utilitarianism delivers the right verdicts about which actions are right and wrong
in a wide range of cases. Cheating on your romantic partner is wrong because it leads to so much
emotional pain, in exchange for a comparably small and short-lived amount of sexual gratification.
If I promise to drive you to the airport early in the morning and then I don’t bother to show up
because I don’t feel like getting out of bed, I’ve done something wrong because the emotional and
financial distress of missing your flight has a bigger negative effect on overall happiness (taking
into account both yours and mine) than does dragging myself out of bed and getting you to the
airport. On the other hand, suppose I promise to drive you to the airport and I don’t show up
because, on the way out the door, I happen upon someone in desperate need of medical attention,
and I drive him to the hospital. In that case, I did the right thing, even though I broke my promise.
Why? Because leaving him to die would have had a greater negative effect on the overall level of
happiness of all involved (including yours, mine, his, and his family and friends’) than you missing
your flight.
We’ll consider some cases later where act utilitarianism may seem to get the wrong result.
In the meantime, I would encourage you to think of cases from your own life where you judged
that someone did the morally right or morally wrong thing, and see whether act utilitarianism
renders the same verdict about whether it was right or wrong. I bet it does.
Second, it’s extremely plausible that morality is about making people better off and making
the world a better place. If some action I perform increases the overall levels of happiness in the
world more than any other action I could have performed, then I’ve done the best I can to make
the world a better place. And surely, if I’ve done the best I can to make the world a better place,
I’ve done the right thing. Or put it another way. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that act

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utilitarianism is false. That means that there could be some action that, on the whole, makes people
better off and makes the world a better place—more so than any other action I could have
performed—and yet it’s the wrong thing to do. And I could sometimes be doing the right thing by
choosing the action that generates more unhappiness. Both of these things would be possible if act
utilitarianism were false: it could be wrong to make the world a better place, and right to make the
world a worse place. But that’s absurd. So act utilitarianism must be true.
Third, act utilitarianism is egalitarian. Act utilitarians are against sexist laws and practices.
Since these practices have a dramatic negative effect on levels of happiness—by profoundly
decreasing the levels of happiness for women—act utilitarianism rules them to be immoral. Act
utilitarians oppose racist laws and practices for the same reason. They are against persecuting and
discriminating against LGBT people for the same reason. These kinds of oppression are wrong,
and act utilitarianism agrees that they’re wrong. For, even though there are always those who
benefit from the oppression, what they gain in happiness is far outweighed by the unhappiness
experienced by the victims of the oppression. Act utilitarians have all along been saying that
everyone’s happiness has to be given equal weight, regardless of race, gender, or sexual
orientation—even back when these were radical things to say.
Fourth, act utilitarianism makes good sense of the respects in which morality is, and isn’t,
a subjective matter. Morality is subjective insofar as the same action might affect one person’s
happiness differently from how it affects another’s. For instance, suppose I tell you to close your
eyes, and I feed you a bite of pepperoni pizza. Have I done something wrong? It depends. If you
love pepperoni pizza and it makes you happy, then no. If you’re a vegetarian and what I did makes
you furious and nauseous, then yes. Act utilitarianism easily explains why what I did is right in
the one case and wrong in the other.
The same goes for cultural differences. In countries like the U.S., tipping your waiter is
customary, whereas in countries like Japan it’s often considered offensive. Accordingly, tipping is
the right thing to do in the U.S. and the wrong thing to do in Japan. Act utilitarianism explains why
the same action can be right in once place and wrong in another: because in the one place it makes
people happy and in the other it upsets them and makes them unhappy.
That’s not to say that morality is entirely a subjective matter. We cannot change what’s
right or wrong just by changing our minds about what’s right or wrong. To see this, consider the
following case:

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CONDONED LOBOTOMIES. The leaders of a certain oppressive country instituted a law that
all newborn girls are to be lobotomized. Dissenters were lobotomized as well. After a few
generations, there are no more dissenters. The men are all happy with the arrangement, and
the women are all lobotomized and have no opinion on the matter.

No one in this country thinks that it is wrong to lobotomize newborn girls. And yet obviously the
leaders are doing something deeply immoral. Act utilitarianism explains why: the women of this
country are deprived of the full range of intellectual and emotional enjoyments that they would
otherwise have had. The fact that no one in the country believes that the practice is wrong is neither
here nor there. What matters is how the practice effects the well-being of all involved, and (unlike
tipping) the effects of lobotomies don’t vary from one country to the next.

3. Killing One to Save Five
We saw that act utilitarianism tends to give the right answers to moral questions. But one
might object that it at least sometimes gives the wrong answer, misidentifying a wrong action as
the right thing to do. In other words, the objection is that there are counterexamples to act
utilitarianism, examples in which one action does more than another to increase overall levels of
happiness and yet is not the right thing to do. So it is incumbent upon me—as a defender of act
utilitarianism—to address all such cases and show that they are not genuine counterexamples.
One might wonder, though, why any such defense is needed. If act utilitarianism generally
gives the correct verdicts, why does it matter if it doesn’t get the answer right in every single case?
It matters because I am trying to do more than just give a useful rule of thumb for answering moral
questions. For suppose act utilitarianism were just a useful, but not exceptionless, rule of thumb.
In that case, even if I could convince you beyond any doubt that legalizing polyamorous marriages
would increase overall levels of happiness, that would not yet settle the question of whether
legalizing them is the right thing to do. After all, maybe polyamorous marriage is one of the
exceptions to the rule, where increasing overall levels of happiness isn’t the right thing to do.
A useful rule of thumb for investigating moral questions ends up being useless for settling
moral questions. For that reason, I want to defend the view that act utilitarianism provides the
complete story of what makes actions right or wrong. I want to defend a theory on which showing
that one action is better than any alternative at improving happiness levels definitively settles the

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question of whether it is the right thing to do. Accordingly, even one case in which my theory
misclassifies the wrong thing to do as the right thing to do, or vice versa, would be enough to
falsify the theory.
Here, then, is the case I want to discuss, which is meant to be a counterexample to act
utilitarianism.

ORGAN DISTRIBUTION. Jonathan is a doctor, and his patient Nick is coming in for a routine
physical. Looking over his past bloodwork, Jonathan realizes that Nick is an exact match
for five young patients in critical condition upstairs in the Intensive Care Unit. When Nick
arrives, Jonathan kills him (painlessly), and makes it look like an accident. Since Nick is
an organ donor, his body is rushed upstairs, and his heart, lungs, liver, and each of his
kidneys are successfully transplanted into the five patients upstairs, saving their lives. No
other organs arrived that day, and the five patients would have died had Jonathan not killed
Nick for his organs. The five patients all go on to lead long, happy lives. No one ever finds
out that Nick’s death was not an accident.

Some will say that what Jonathan did is immoral. And yet, killing Nick and saving the five patients
results in higher overall levels of happiness than letting him live and allowing the five patients to
die. After all, killing Nick results in the loss of one life’s worth of happiness and one group of
mourners, whereas letting the five patients die would have resulted in the loss of five lives’ worth
of happiness and five times as many mourners.
If all that is right, then act utilitarianism false. The argument can be reconstructed as
follows:

The Organ Distribution Argument
(OD1) Killing Nick has a greater positive effect on overall levels of happiness than letting
him live
(OD2) If so, then: if act utilitarianism is true, then killing Nick was the right thing to do
(OD3) Killing Nick was not the right thing to do
(OD4) So, act utilitarianism is false

OD1 is true. There would have been more mourning and fewer happy lives if Jonathan hadn’t
killed Nick. OD2 is true as well: act utilitarianism says that, without exception, the action with the
greatest positive effect on happiness levels is the right thing to do. And OD3 is supposed to simply
be obvious. Even I agree that killing Nick seems to be morally wrong.

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4. Rule Utilitarianism
One option for a utilitarian—which is worth exploring, but which I do not myself
endorse—is to grant that the argument works and that act utilitarianism is false. The idea would
then be to provide an alternative utilitarian view, one that won’t deliver the result that Jonathan
did the right thing in killing Nick. What would such an alternative view look like?
One idea would be to insist that doing the right thing isn’t so much a matter of how a single
action affects happiness levels, but rather a matter of how the rules one is following tend to affect
happiness levels. Consider the following rules that one try choose to follow:
• Do not kill innocent people
• Do not steal
• Do not lie
• Keep your promises
• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

Even if following these rules doesn’t always maximize happiness, it usually does, which is what
makes them good rules.
With this in mind, one possibility for avoiding the implication that Jonathan did the right
thing in killing Nick would be to reject act utilitarianism in favor of rule utilitarianism:

Rule Utilitarianism
Performing a certain action is the right thing to do if and only if it is prescribed by the
collection of rules that, if adopted, would have the greatest positive effect on overall levels
of happiness

Even though following the rules listed above won’t have the greatest positive effect on overall
levels of happiness in every single case, following them does more often than not have the greatest
positive effect on happiness. If so, they may well belong to the collection of rules that, if adopted,
would have the greatest positive effect on overall levels of happiness—or, in short, “the best
collection of rules”.
Here is how rule utilitarianism helps with ORGAN DISTRIBUTION. According to rule
utilitarianism, the right thing to do is to follow the best collection of rules. So let us compare two
rules: don’t kill an innocent person unless doing so saves multiple lives and don’t kill any innocent
people. While it’s true that following the first rule sometimes has a better effect on happiness levels
(as in ORGAN DISTRIBUTION), typically it doesn’t. If doctors were constantly killing healthy

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patients to distribute their organs, word would get out. People would be terrified to go to the
hospital, and there would be widespread panic and untreated illness (from people avoiding
hospitals). So, even though five people would be saved for every one person killed, thousands of
others would be sick, scared, and miserable.
Following the first rule tends, on the whole, to have a negative effect on happiness levels.
Following the second rule, by contrast, tends on the whole to have a positive effect on happiness
levels—even though in some rare cases is has a negative effect. Accordingly, the best collection
of rules is going to include the second rule, not the first. Rule utilitarianism therefore tells us that
the right thing for Jonathan to do is to let Nick live, since that’s what’s dictated by the better rule:
don’t kill any innocent people. Rule utilitarianism, unlike act utilitarianism, delivers what
intuitively seems to be the right result in ORGAN DISTRIBUTION.
The problem with rule utilitarianism is that it faces counterexamples of its own—
counterexamples that, to my mind, are even more damning than the alleged counterexample to act
utilitarianism. For instance, recall the case mentioned above where I break my promise to take you
to the airport because, on my way to get you, I find someone desperately in need of medical
attention and decide to drive them to the hospital instead. Clearly, I am doing the right thing in that
case. But rule utilitarianism says that I’ve done the wrong thing. After all, the rule I am following,
keep your promises unless something more important comes up, tends on the whole to have a
negative effect on overall happiness. If everyone broke their promises every time something more
important came up, no one would trust anyone to keep their promises, and being able to trust one
another makes a huge contribution to our emotional well-being.
By contrast, following the simpler rule keep all your promises tends on the whole to have
a positive effect on happiness levels, even though in some rare cases is has a negative effect. So,
by the same logic as above, rule utilitarianism says that the right thing to do is to keep my promise
and leave the needy person to die on my doorstep. But that clearly is not the right thing to do. So
rule utilitarianism is false.
Perhaps the rule utilitarian will respond that there’s a rule I’m overlooking: keep your
promises unless you need to break them in order to drive a dying person to the hospital. Following
that rule will tend on the whole to have a positive effect on happiness levels, since it only allows
promise-breaking in rare cases where promise-breaking really is the right thing to do. So, the rule

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utilitarian might say, it’s this rule—and neither of the others rules about promises just considered—
that belongs to the best collection of rules.
But if the “rules” at issue in the statement of rule utilitarianism can be that specific, then
we need to reassess what rule utilitarianism says about ORGAN DISTRIBUTION. After all, Jonathan
is following the rule don’t kill innocent people unless you’re absolutely certain you can do it
secretly and you’ll save five people with the organs. Following that rule will tend to have the
greatest positive effect on the whole, since it only allows killing innocent people in rare cases
where the killings save lives and don’t lead to widespread panic (because they’re done in secret).
So, by rule utilitarianism, Jonathan is doing the right thing by killing Nick—exactly the
consequence the rule utilitarian wanted to avoid!
The point here is that the rule utilitarian faces a dilemma. Either her rules are understood
to be relatively general things, in which case rule utilitarianism has the absurd implication that I’m
never allowed to break my promises, even in extreme cases. Or her rules can be highly specific, in
which both rule utilitarianism and act utilitarianism imply that killing Nick was the right thing to
do, and switching to rule utilitarianism is no help in escaping that consequence. Since rule
utilitarianism is either false or unhelpful, let’s set it aside, return to act utilitarianism, and reassess
whether act utilitarianism can be defended against the Organ Distribution Argument.

5. The Trolley Argument
Premise OD3 of the Organ Distribution Argument says that killing Nick was not the right
thing to do. I admitted above that this premise seems true: it seems morally wrong for Jonathan to
kill Nick. But things are not always as they seem. I will now argue that, despite appearances, OD3
is false.
My argument against OD3 involves considering a different case, one in which it isn’t
wrong to kill one to save five. Here is the case:

TROLLEY DRIVER. Corrine is driving a trolley, which is hurtling down the tracks, faster
than it should. Five pledges from a local fraternity have been tied to the tracks as part of an
initiation ritual. By the time she sees them, it’s too late to slow down. The only way to
avoid killing them is to swerve the trolley onto a side track at an upcoming junction. But
the pledge master, who is asleep on the side track, will be killed if she does. Corrine decides
to steer the trolley onto the side track anyway, killing the pledge master. She then stops the
trolley, unties the pledges, and they all go on to lead long, happy lives.

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Corrine did the right thing: it was morally better to steer onto the side track than to continue
forward and kill the five pledges. And yet there would seem to be no morally significant difference
between what Corrine did and what Jonathan did. Both killed one person to save five. So if it was
right for Corrine to do what had to be done to save five people, how could it be wrong for Jonathan
to do what had to be done to save five people?
Here, more explicitly, is the argument:

The Trolley Argument
(TR1) If there is no morally significant difference between two actions A and B, then: if
A is the right thing to do, then B is the right thing to do
(TR2) Diverting the trolley was the right thing to do
(TR3) There is no morally significant difference between diverting the trolley and killing
Nick
(TR4) So, killing Nick was the right thing to do

The idea behind TR1 is that, whenever there is some moral difference between two cases, there
must always be some explanation of why they differ morally. Absent some such explanation, it
would be arbitrary to say that the one action is wrong and the other isn’t. TR2 is hopefully obvious;
I’m not sure what more I could do to argue for it. And TR3 seems true as well: the cases are
structurally identical, both being cases in which one person is sacrificed to save five. Thus, even
though the act utilitarian conclusion that Jonathan did the right thing may strike you as
counterintuitive, we nevertheless have excellent reason to think it’s correct. Those who wish to
say that it was wrong to kill Nick must find some flaw in the Trolley Argument.
I can imagine someone objecting to TR3, insisting that there is an important difference
between the cases. Here’s the idea. If Corrine hadn’t swerved onto the other track, she would have
killed those five pledges. By contrast, if Jonathan hadn’t killed Nick, we wouldn’t say that he killed
the five needy patients. He merely let them die, and allowing people to die and actually killing
them are not morally equivalent. Killing is worse, one might say, and that’s why Jonathan’s actions
are worse than Corrine’s: Corrine but not Jonathan had to do what she did in order to avoid killing
five people.

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I have my doubts about whether there is any morally significant difference between killing
and letting die. But let’s suppose that there is. Even so, we can revise the trolley case so that it too
involves a choice between killing and letting die.

TROLLEY LEVER. A runaway trolley with no driver is hurtling down the tracks towards five
pledges. Corrine is an onlooker, standing beside the tracks. Next to her is a lever which can
divert the trolley onto a side track. If she pulls the lever and diverts the trolley, it will kill
the pledge master, who is asleep on the side track. Corrine decides to pull the lever, killing
the pledge master and saving the pledges. She then unties the pledges, and they all go on
to lead long, happy lives.

Again, Corrine intuitively did the right thing by pulling the lever and killing one person to save
five. But the earlier objection no longer holds. For if she hadn’t pulled the lever, she wouldn’t
thereby be killing anyone. She would merely be letting five people die. Just like Jonathan. So the
alleged morally significant difference disappears, and the objection to TR3 disappears along with
it. Additionally, TR2 remains true even once the case is revised: faced with a decision between
killing one and letting five die, killing the one is the right thing to do.

6. Conclusion
I have defended a utilitarian theory of morality, according to which the right thing to do is
always whatever will have the greatest positive effect on overall levels of happiness. We saw that
there are powerful motivations for accepting utilitarianism, for instance that it is intuitive, that it
is egalitarian, and that it respects the subjectivity and culture-relativity of morality without
entailing an extreme subjectivism according to which what’s right or wrong can be changed at
whim. Finally, we saw some ways of defending utilitarianism against the objection that it wrongly
condones killing one person to save five.

Reflection Questions
1. In section 2, I said that utilitarianism is admirably egalitarian, opposing mistreatment of
women and minorities. But might it be egalitarian but for the wrong reasons? Is the problem
with oppression really that the oppressed group’s suffering outweighs the happiness the
oppressors derive from the oppression?

2. Can you defend rule utilitarianism against the objections raised in section 4?

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3. Were you convinced by the argument in section 5 that killing one to save five in ORGAN
DISTRIBUTION is no different from killing one to save five in the trolley case?

4. Suppose act utilitarianism is true. In that case, in order to know whether something is the
right thing to do, one would evidently have to know all of the different ways that the action
might affect people’s happiness (now and long into the future). Is that a problem for act
utilitarianism? How might a utilitarian respond?

5. What should a utilitarian say about the morality of eating meat and other animal products?

Sources
Classic defenses of utilitarianism can be found in Jeremy Bentham’s Principles of Morals and
Legislation and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. See Philippa Foot’s “The Problem of Abortion
and the Doctrine of Double Effect” and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “The Trolley Problem” for
discussion of the organ donation and trolley cases. See Russ Shafer-Landau’s The Fundamentals
of Ethics for a broader overview of theories of well-being and morality. Here are some additional
resources:

• E.F. Carritt: Criticisms of Utilitarianism
• Julia Markovitz: Utilitarianism
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/utilitarianism-part-1
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/utilitarianism-part-2
http://www.wi-phi.com/video/utilitarianism-part-3
• Mozi: Universal Love
• Nicholas: A Nonstandard Solution to the Trolley Problem

• Alastair Norcross: Consequences Make Actions Right
• J.C.C. Smart and Bernard Williams: Utilitarianism: For and Against
• Bernard Williams: Utilitarianism and Integrity

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APPENDIX A
Logic

Throughout this book, I present arguments, defend their premises, and then claim that the
conclusions of those arguments follow from the premises. In this appendix, I’ll explain what it
means for a conclusion to follow from some premises and how you’re supposed to tell whether a
conclusion follows from some premises. In section 1, I introduce the notion of validity, a feature
that arguments have when their conclusion follows from their premises. Then, in section 2, I
introduce four types of valid arguments. Finally, in section 3—because nothing is sacred in
philosophy—I show how even claims about which types of arguments are valid can be called into
question.

1. Valid Arguments
Suppose I want to convince you that it’s morally wrong to eat chickens, and I give you the
following two arguments:

The Cuteness Argument
(CA1) Chickens are cute
(CA2) It’s wrong to eat cute things
(CA3) So, it’s wrong to eat chickens

The Feathers Argument
(FA1) Chickens have feathers
(FA2) Feathers are soft
(FA3) So, it’s wrong to eat chickens

You probably aren’t convinced by either argument. Why not?
It’s easy to say what goes wrong with the Cuteness Argument. You might say the first
premise is false, because chickens are ugly. Or you might deny the second premise, saying that
just because something is cute doesn’t mean it’s wrong to eat it. Or maybe you’ll deny both. Either
way, the problem with the argument is that the premises aren’t true.
But what about the Feathers Argument? You probably don’t find it any more convincing
than the Cuteness Argument. But both of its premises are true. So what is the problem with the

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Feathers Argument? The problem is that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. Or, as
we philosophers like to say, the argument is not valid.
A valid argument is an argument whose conclusion is a logical consequence of the
premises. When an argument is valid, the premises guarantee the truth of the conclusion; it’s
impossible for the premises to be true without the conclusion being true, and it would be
inconsistent to accept all the premises and yet deny the conclusion.
The problem with the Feathers Argument is that it’s invalid: it doesn’t follow from
chickens being soft and having feathers that it’s wrong to eat them. There’s no contradiction in
accepting the premises of that argument while denying its conclusion. The Cuteness Argument, by
contrast, is valid: the claim that it’s wrong to eat chickens is a logical consequence of the claim
that chickens are cute and the claim that it’s wrong to eat cute things. Anyone who accepts the
premises of the Cuteness Argument is logically required to accept the conclusion as well, on pain
of contradicting themselves.
You might be surprised that I just called the Cuteness Argument ‘valid’. But look again at
how I characterized validity just above. That characterization doesn’t require the premises of a
valid argument to be true, or even plausible. All that’s required is that if the premises are true, then
the conclusion is guaranteed to be true as well. An argument can be valid and still be a pretty bad
argument, like the Cuteness Argument, because its premises are implausible.
A valid argument isn’t necessarily a good argument. ‘Valid’ has a technical use in
philosophy, and in saying that an argument is valid you aren’t thereby saying that it’s a convincing
argument or that you accept all of its premises. (We have a different word for arguments that are
valid and all of whose premises are true: we call them sound arguments.) Also, as defined above,
validity can only ever be a feature of arguments. So, at least in philosophical discussions, it’s best
to avoid calling premises or points “valid”. Only arguments should be characterized as valid.
One more word of warning: don’t confuse following and following from. To see what I
have in mind, consider the following argument from chapter 6:

Against Fearing Death
(FD1) You cease to be conscious when you die
(FD2) If you cease to be conscious when you die, then being dead isn’t bad for you
(FD3) So, being dead isn’t bad for you
(FD4) If being dead isn’t bad for you, then you shouldn’t fear death
(FD5) So, you shouldn’t fear death

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It’s true that FD2 follows FD1. That is, it comes immediately after FD1. But FD2 does not follow
from FD1. To say that it follows from FD1 is to say that there’s a valid argument whose conclusion
is FD2 and whole only premise is FD1. That, in turn, implies that you would be contradicting
yourself if you accepted FD1 while at the same time denying FD2. But notice that this isn’t at all
contradictory. You can agree that you cease to be conscious when you die (FD1), and yet reject
FD2 on the grounds that you don’t have to consciously be aware of bad things in order for them to
be bad for you. What is true is that FD3 follows from FD1 and FD2. But FD2 doesn’t follow from
FD1.

2. How to Check for Validity
Many of the arguments in the book will have conclusions you don’t like. If the arguments
were invalid then, as with the Feathers Argument, you could just reject the conclusion without
having to find a premise to resist. But since the arguments are all valid—I made sure of it!—
rejecting the conclusion of any one of them always requires finding some premise to deny.
But what did I do to ensure that the arguments were all valid? How can you tell if an
argument is valid? One way is to eyeball it: look at the premises, and check whether it seems like
the conclusion follows from them. But we can do better. We can identify certain recurring forms
or patterns whose presence guarantees that an argument is valid, regardless of what the argument
is about. So another way to check for validity is to see if the argument has one of these forms. If it
does, then it’s valid. I’ll give four examples.

2.1 Modus Ponens
To see what I have in mind by a “form” of argument, compare these two arguments:

The Drinking Age Argument
(DK1) Kristina is twenty-four
(DK2) If Kristina is twenty-four, then Kristina is allowed to drink
(DK3) So, Kristina is allowed to drink

The Moral Argument
(MA1) There are objective moral values
(MA2) If there are objective moral values, then God exists
(MA3) So, God exists

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In some ways, the arguments are pretty different: one is about Kristina and drinking, the other is
about God and morality. But there’s also something they have in common, something structural.
To see what they have in common, let’s recall some vocabulary that we learned in the
introduction. Claims of the form “if… then…”, like DK2 and MA2, are called conditionals. The
bit that comes between the ‘if’ and the ‘then’ is the antecedent of the conditional, and the bit that
comes after the ‘then’ is the consequent of the conditional.
What the Drinking Age Argument and the Moral Argument share in common is that each
contains one premise that’s a conditional, another premise that’s the same as the antecedent of that
conditional, and a conclusion that’s the same as the consequent of that conditional. In other words,
they both have the following form:

Modus Ponens
P
If P, then Q
So, Q

Arguments with this form are called modus ponens arguments. (‘Modus ponens’ is Latin for
method of affirming: you reach the conclusion by taking a conditional premise and affirming its
antecedent.) Every modus ponens argument is a valid argument.
Here are two things to note about modus ponens arguments. First, it doesn’t matter whether
the conditional premise comes first or second. For example, this is also a modus ponens argument:

The Rearranged Drinking Age Argument
(RD1) If Kristina is twenty-four, then Kristina is allowed to drink
(RD2) Kristina is twenty-four
(RD3) So, Kristina is allowed to drink

That said, you do have to “mind your Ps and Qs” and how they’re distributed in the argument.
This, for instance, is not a modus ponens argument:
The Mangled Drinking Age Argument
(MD1) Jean Blanc is allowed to drink
(MD2) If Jean Blanc is twenty-four, then Jean Blanc is allowed to drink
(MD3) So, Jean Blanc is twenty-four

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This one doesn’t have the form “P, if P then Q, so Q” but rather “P, if Q then P, so Q”. The latter
argument form is called “affirming the consequent”, and is clearly invalid. Think about it. You can
consistently accept MD1 and MD2 while denying MD3, for instance if you thought Jean-Blanc
was thirty years old. (You’d still accept MD2, that if he’s twenty-four, then he’s allowed to drink.)
By contrast, you can’t consistently accept RD1 and RD2 while denying RD3. That’s because the
argument for RD3 is valid, whereas the argument for MD3 is invalid.

2.2 Modus Tollens
Another form that guarantees the validity of an argument is what’s called modus tollens,
Latin for method of denying. A modus tollens argument is an argument with one premise that’s a
conditional, another premise that’s a denial of the consequent of that conditional, and whose
conclusion is the denial of the conditional’s antecedent. Using the ‘~’ symbol to express denial or
negation, we can display the form of modus tollens arguments as follows:

Modus Tollens
If P then Q
~Q
So, ~P

Here are some examples of modus tollens arguments:

Whales Aren’t Fish
(WF1) If whales are fish, then whales use gills to breathe
(WF2) Whales don’t use gills to breathe
(WF3) So whales aren’t fish

The Flipped Moral Argument
(FM1) If God does not exist, then there are no objective moral values
(FM2) There are objective moral values
(FM3) So, God exists

Again, the arguments are about entirely different topics but share a common structure. Also, as
with modus ponens arguments, the order of the premises doesn’t matter: it would still be a modus
tollens argument if WF2 came first and WF1 came second. But the order within the premises does

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matter. You’ve got to have the denial of the conditional’s consequent as a premise and a denial of
its antecedent as the conclusion, not vice versa.
One other thing to notice here is that the same basic line of thought can be presented either
as a modus ponens or as a modus tollens argument. The Moral Argument (from section 2.1) and
the Flipped Moral Argument (just above) are really just two ways of packaging one and the same
idea: that God must exist because objective morality presupposes the existence of God.
With these two types of valid arguments in hand, one can also construct more complicated
arguments that involve both. For instance:

The Foreknowledge Argument
(FK1) God knew before you were born that you were going to read this book
(FK2) If God knew before you were born that you were going to read this book, then you
couldn’t have chosen not to read this book
(FK3) So, you couldn’t have chosen not to read this book
(FK4) If you did freely choose to read this book, then you could have chosen not to read it
(FK5) So, you didn’t freely choose to read this book

This argument combines a modus ponens argument and a modus tollens argument. The
subconclusion FK3 follows, by modus ponens, from FK1 and FK2. And the conclusion FK5
follows, by modus tollens, from FK3 and FK4. Looking back at the Against Fearing Death
Argument in section 1, you can see that that argument combines two instances of modus ponens:
a modus ponens argument from FD1 and FD2 to FD3, and another modus ponens argument from
FD3 and FD4 to FD5.

2.3 Chained Conditionals
Here is a third type of valid argument, which I’ll call a chained conditional, since the conclusion
chains together the antecedent of one conditional premise with the consequent of another premise.

Chained Conditional
If P then Q
If Q then R
So, if P then R

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This form of argument is especially useful when you want to argue for a conditional claim, that is,
when you want to give an argument that has a whole conditional as its conclusion.
Here are two examples of arguments with this form:

Against Fearing Non-Existence
(FN1) If you stop existing when you die, then being dead is not bad for you
(FN2) If being dead is not bad for you, then you shouldn’t fear death
(FN3) So, if you stop existing when you die, then you shouldn’t fear death

The Right to the Womb Argument
(RW1) If an embryo has a right to life, then an embryo has a right to use the mother’s
womb
(RW2) If an embryo has a right to use the mother’s womb, then abortion is immoral
(RW3) So, if an embryo has a right to life, then abortion is immoral

2.4 Universal Instantiation
I’ll mention one more form that a valid argument can have. This one is called universal
instantiation, since it involves a “universal” premise claiming that everything belonging to one
category also belongs to some second category. Together with an additional premise that one or
more particular things belong to the first category, what follows is that those particular things also
belong to the second category. Here it is schematically:

Universal Instantiation
All Fs are Gs
o is F
So, o is G

To get an valid argument of this form, you plug in some category for “F”, some second category
for “G”, and one or more people or objects for “o”. (This makes it unlike the previous three types
of valid arguments, where you plug in whole sentences for the variables “P”, “Q”, and/or “R”.)
Here’s an example of an argument by universal instantiation:

The Philosophical Genius Argument
(PG1) All philosophers are geniuses
(PG2) Korman is a philosopher
(PG3) So, Korman is a genius

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The argument is valid, and what makes the argument valid is not the truth or the plausibility of the
premises, but rather that the conclusion is a logical consequence of the premises. If you affirm the
premises and yet deny the conclusion, you’ve contradicted yourself.
Universal instantiation arguments don’t always wear their form right on their sleeve. Take
the Cuteness Argument:

Cuteness Argument
(CA1) Chickens are cute
(CA2) It’s wrong to eat cute things
(CA3) So, it’s wrong to eat chickens

Superficially, this doesn’t match the form of a universal instantiation argument, specified above.
But with just a bit of rewording and rearranging, we can see that it’s a universal instantiation in
disguise:

(CA2*) All things that are cute are things that it is wrong to eat
(CA1*) Chickens are things that are cute
(CA3*) So, chickens are things that it is wrong to eat

3. Counterexamples to Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens
We have now seen four types of valid arguments: modus ponens arguments, modus tollens
arguments, chained conditionals, and universal instantiations. These are not the only types of valid
argument, and there’s a good deal of controversy (in the philosophy of logic) about what would
go on a complete list of valid forms of argument. But when you’re constructing arguments of your
own, so long as they have one of these four forms—or combine together arguments of these forms
in the way suggested in section 2.2—you can be confident that your own argument is valid.
That said, because I apparently cannot go ten pages without arguing for some outrageous
conclusion, I’m now going to argue—contrary to what virtually every philosopher will tell you—
that modus ponens and modus tollens are not valid.
Let’s start with modus tollens. Suppose I know that Olivia is due to fly from New York to
Chicago, but I can’t remember if her flight got in this morning, or if she’s flying tomorrow. So I

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know she’s either in Chicago or New York right now, but I don’t know which. Now, consider the
following argument, which looks to be a counterexample to the thesis that all modus tollens
arguments are valid:

The Defective Tollens
(DT1) If Olivia is in Chicago, then Olivia must be in Illinois
(DT2) It’s not the case that Olivia must be in Illinois
(DT3) So, Olivia isn’t in Chicago

This is a modus tollens argument: the first premise is a conditional, the second is a denial
of its consequent, and the conclusion is a denial of its antecedent. Moreover, the premises are both
true. DT1 is true because Chicago is in Illinois, so Olivia can’t very well be in Chicago without
being in Illinois. DT2 is true too: we can’t say she must be in Illinois, because she might be in New
York, and therefore might not be in Illinois.
But surely the argument is not valid. If it were, then DT3 would follow from those
premises, and I would be able to use this argument to figure out where she is: she isn’t in Chicago,
so she must be in New York. Clearly, though, I can’t know that Olivia is not in Chicago by using
this argument. So the argument must not be valid. In other words, this looks to be a counterexample
to the claim that all modus tollens arguments are valid.
Now for modus ponens. Consider the following case:

TALENT SHOW. Celeste, Grant, and Esmée are the three finalists in a talent show. Celeste’s
performance was a complete disaster; Grant did a pretty good job; and Esmée gave the
performance of a lifetime, receiving a standing ovation from the audience as well as all the
judges. The judges are about to announce the winner.

Now consider the following argument, which looks to be a counterexample to the thesis that all
modus ponens arguments are valid.

The Defective Ponens
(DP1) A woman is going to win
(DP2) If a woman is going to win, then: if Esmée loses, then Celeste will win
(DP3) So, if Esmée loses, then Celeste will win

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This is a modus ponens argument. One premise is a conditional (albeit one that has a whole
conditional as its consequent); another premise affirms the antecedent of that conditional; and the
conclusion is the consequent of the conditional. Moreover, the premises are both true. Esmée does
end up winning, as expected, and she is a woman. So DP1 is true. DP2 is true as well. If a woman
wins and it isn’t Esmée then it has to have been Celeste, since she is the only other woman still in
the running. But DP3 is false: if Esmée loses, then surely it’s Grant who’s going to win. Celeste’s
performance was a disaster, so if Esmée lost, it would certainly be because a majority of the judges
voted for Grant, not because they voted for Celeste.
If the argument were valid, then the truth of the premises would guarantee the truth of the
conclusion. But since the premises are true and the conclusion is false, the premises clearly don’t
guarantee the truth of the conclusion. So the argument isn’t valid. Thus, not all modus ponens
arguments are valid.
I’ll leave it to you to figure out what (if anything) goes wrong in these arguments against
the validity of modus ponens and modus tollens.

Sources
The argument against modus tollens is drawn from Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane’s “Ifs and
Oughts”. The argument against modus ponens is drawn from Vann McGee’s “A Counterexample
to Modus Ponens”. For more on logic, see Susan Haack’s Philosophy of Logics or Mark
Sainsbury’s Logical Forms.

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APPENDIX B
Writing

This appendix provides some advice for writing papers for philosophy courses. The advice
primarily concerns assignments requiring you to critically assess some view or argument, though
a good deal of what I say applies equally to assignments only requiring you to explain some view,
argument, or debate in your own words (without weighing in with your own view on the matter).
Of course, you should follow all instructions you receive from your instructors and disregard
anything I say here that conflicts with those instructions. Absent explicit conflicts, however, it’s
likely that your instructor is looking for the sort of paper I describe here.
If you follow the advice I offer below, the final result will be a paper with three numbered
and labeled sections, with each section broken up into multiple paragraphs, just as I have done in
the chapters of this book. The first section introduces the view or argument you’re criticizing, the
second advances your objections to that view or argument, and the third addresses possible
responses to your objections.
To be clear, there is nothing sacred about this three-section model. Depending on the
content of your paper, it may be useful to organize it differently. For instance, if your plan is to
advance two very different objections to some premise, then perhaps a better structure for you
would be to introduce the argument you’re criticizing in section 1; in section 2, advance your first
objection and address possible responses to it; and in section 3, advance your second objection and
address possible responses to it. Or perhaps you plan to defend some argument against a particular
objection. In that case, you might opt for a four-section model: introduce the argument in section
1, introduce the objection you’ll defend it against in section 2, respond to the objection in section
3, and defend your response against potential challenges in section 4. The main thing is just that
your paper be clearly organized, and that you take the time not just to advance your own
perspective but also to demonstrate an appreciation of your opponent’s perspective.
For purposes of illustration, I’ll imagine that your assignment asks you to criticize the
Argument from Suffering from chapter 1.
The Argument from Suffering
(AS1) God would prevent the suffering that we endure
(AS2) If God would prevent the suffering that we endure, then God does not exist
(AS3) So, God does not exist

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Your plan, let’s suppose, is to reject AS1 by arguing that God allows suffering in order to test our
devotion.

1. Introducing Your Target
The point of Section 1 of your paper is to introduce your target—the view or argument you
plan to criticize—and indicate what you plan to do in the paper. There are five main elements
you’ll want to make sure to include in this section, though not necessarily in this order.
First, you’ll identify the topic of the paper. In this case, that’s the Argument from Suffering.
So you’ll want to begin the paper by saying something like this: “My aim in this paper is to assess
a certain argument against the existence of God.” Beginning your paper with a straightforward
sentence like that is preferable to a flowery opening sentence like, “For centuries upon centuries,
men have debated the existence of God.”
Second, you’ll state the view or argument that you’re targeting. In the case at hand, you
can simply copy and paste my formulation of the Argument from Suffering into your paper, of
course citing the book and the page where you found it. (Ask your instructor for their preferred
method of citation.)
Third, motivate the target. That means explaining the idea behind each of the premises of
the argument you plan to assess, one by one. This will likely be the lengthiest part of Section 1,
and it’s important to do the best job you can explaining, on your opponents’ behalf, how their
argument is supposed to work. You’ll have your chance to criticize the argument in Section 2. For
now, your goal should be the make the argument look as good as possible. Ideally, you want your
opponents to think “I couldn’t have said it better myself!” and the rest of your readers to think,
“how is anyone ever going to find a flaw in that argument?!” Keep in mind that part of what you’ll
be graded on is the extent to which you understand and appreciate your opponent’s perspective.
Failing to present your target in its best light may convey to your instructor that you don’t truly
understand the argument or position you’re criticizing.
Fourth, state your thesis, that is, the conclusion that you are ultimately arguing for. In the
case at hand, you’ll want to say something like this: “My main thesis is that the argument fails
because AS1 is false: even an all-good God would want to allow suffering so that we could have
the opportunity to prove our devotion.” Here, you are only stating your thesis, not yet defending

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it (that’s what Section 2 is for). Also, here and throughout the paper, it is perfectly appropriate to
use first-person pronouns like ‘I’ and ‘my’.
Fifth, you’ll give an outline of your paper. If you’re using the three-section model, you’ll
say something like this: “In section 2, I will present my objection to AS1 of the Argument from
Suffering. Then, in section 3, I will address two possible responses to my objection.”

2. Advancing Your Argument
Section 2 is where you offer your own criticism of your target. In other words, this is where
you present your argument for the thesis of your paper. We’re imagining that your thesis is that
God allows suffering in order to test our devotion. What you need to do now is offer some reasons
for thinking that God (even if he exists) would allow this. For instance, you would need to explain
why there would have to be suffering in order for our devotion to be tested, and why being able to
test our devotion is sufficiently important that a good God would want to do it despite having to
make us suffer.
Here are some further tips for Section 2.
First, it’s crucial that you deny a premise of the argument you want to resist, and not just
the conclusion. If your aim is to criticize the Argument from Suffering, you shouldn’t be arguing
directly against AS3, that God doesn’t exist (e.g., by arguing that God must exist because there
has to be a First Cause of the universe). Rather, your goal is to show where the Argument from
Suffering goes wrong, and you do that by challenging one of its premises. Additionally, make sure
it’s 100% clear which premise your objections are meant to be targeting.
Second, you need to do more than simply express your opinion that the premise in question
is false. It’s not enough just to say (repeatedly, but in five different ways) that you don’t think that
suffering is incompatible with God’s existence. Rather, you need to be presenting reasons for
thinking this. You’re trying to persuade another person—your reader—to change their mind about
something, not just recording your own personal views and opinions about the issue.
Third, in a short philosophy paper (under 3000 words), “less is more”. It’s generally better
to raise a single, well-developed objection to a single premise, than to raise multiple objections to
that premise, or to raise objections to multiple premises.
When you present your arguments against your target, should you present them in the same
labeled and indented premise/conclusion format that I’ve used throughout the book? It depends. If

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you have read Appendix A on Logic and feel confident in your ability to tell the difference between
valid and invalid arguments, then yes: explicitly presenting your arguments in this way can add a
good deal of clarity to the paper and demonstrate an advanced understanding of the dynamics of
argumentation. If you don’t feel that you have a firm grasp on how to ensure that your arguments
are valid, then trying to frame your arguments as I have is likely to do more harm than good. In
that case, it’s better just to state your reasons plainly, in paragraph form.
What if you’re having trouble coming up with an objection to use in Section 2? My advice
would be to read and re-read and re-re-read the chapter that you plan to criticize. (The chapters
aren’t that long.) If you have your choice of chapters to criticize, choose the one whose conclusion
you are most inclined to disagree with. On the first reading, let it all wash over you. On the second
reading, keep an eye out for claims that seem especially fishy. On the third reading, skim through
the parts you agree with but slow down and very carefully read the parts that seemed fishy, trying
to pinpoint the exact sentence where the reasoning go wrong. Having pinpointed where it goes
wrong, try to articulate why you think it goes wrong, and use that for the basis of Section 2.

3. Anticipating Possible Responses
The point of Section 3 of your paper is to address possible responses to the things you said
in Section 2. To understand what you’re doing in this section, consider an analogy. A governor is
giving a televised speech, trying to convince his constituents to vote in favor of a proposition
abolishing the death penalty. His argument is that it should be abolished because the death penalty
isn’t actually effective in deterring people from committing violent crimes. He knows that some
people will be skeptical of his argument, but he also knows he can’t talk to them all one on one.
So he tries to anticipate and address the most likely objections people will have. For instance, he
says: “Look, a lot of people are going to say: what about Oklahoma? When they reinstated the
death penalty, violent crime dropped by ten percent. But those statistics are misleading. It was
actually the new gun laws they passed, not the reinstatement of the death penalty, that accounts for
the drop in violent crime.”
This is the sort of thing you’ll be doing in Section 3. Put yourself in the shoes of your
readers, and try to identify one or two ways that they are likely to push back against the argument
you gave in Section 2. For instance, if you claimed in Section 2 that God allows suffering in order
to test our devotion, you might imagine someone objecting that God is supposed to be all-knowing,

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in which case he should already know how devoted people are without having to test their
devotion. And then you should respond to that objection, for instance by explaining why it’s
important for God to test our devotion despite already knowing how devoted we are.
A few additional tips about Section 3 of your paper.
First, make sure to carefully and charitably lay out the objections you’re anticipating before
going on to address them. Ideally, you’ll devote a whole paragraph, not just a single sentence, to
explaining the anticipated objection and how it’s supposed to be a problem for what you said in
Section 2. What I said about Section 1 applies equally here: when your opponent sees your
presentation of the anticipated objection, you want her to think “exactly, I couldn’t have said it
better myself!”
Second, make sure that the objections you anticipate actually advance the discussion. In
particular, don’t imagine your opponent simply reiterating the argument from Section 1 in defense
of the targeted premise. In the case at hand, that would look something like this: “One might
respond to my objection to AS2 by insisting that God is supposed to be all-powerful and all-good
and such a being cannot allow any suffering.” But if one were to say that, one would just be
ignoring your argument from Section 2. Contrast this with the anticipated objection I suggested
just above: that God doesn’t need to test us to know whether we’re devoted. That isn’t merely a
defense of AS2. Rather, it challenges your stated reasons for rejecting AS2, and that’s what makes
it a good objection to address in Section 3.
Third, one way for your opponents to respond to your objections from Section 2 is to try
to show that those objections fail. But that’s not the only way. Another possibility is for them to
concede that your objections work, but then try to revise their own argument in a way that makes
it immune to your objections, perhaps by revising some of the premises. In Section 3, you could
consider some way that they might try to do that, and then respond by raising a new objection to
their revised argument.

4. Editing
Make sure to leave yourself plenty of time to revise your paper after completing the initial
draft. First drafts tend to be pretty messy and full of small mistakes, and cleaning up the mess and
catching all these small mistakes will go a long way towards improving your grade on the paper.

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Here is the procedure I would recommend for editing your paper. Go through the rough
draft of your paper very slowly, at a snail’s pace, lingering on every sentence. Read each sentence
out loud, and ask yourself the following four questions about it.
1. Is this exactly what I meant to say?
2. How might someone challenge this?
3. Can I make the sentence clearer?
4. Can I make the sentence shorter?
Let me say a bit about each of these questions.
Is this exactly what I meant to say? Philosophers—including your instructor—care a great
deal about getting the small details right, and you will be amazed by their laser-like focus on the
exact wording of your sentences. You might write something like “Killing is always wrong”, and
they’ll leave the following comment: “Even killing blades of grass?” Presumably what you meant
was that killing people is always wrong. But it’s not their job to read your mind; it’s your job to
say exactly what you mean. Getting the details right is especially important when you’re explaining
the views and arguments you plan to criticize. One or two small errors in your description of those
views and arguments will often be enough to convince your instructor that you don’t really
understand them.
How might someone challenge this? This question is especially important in Section 2,
when you’re advancing your own argument or objection. Thinking hard about every possible way
someone might try to deny something you’ve said is a great strategy for identifying good responses
to address in Section 3. But you should also be on the lookout for “cheap” ways that someone
might challenge the sentence, which can be addressed by simply rewording it. For instance, you
might close off the “what about blades of grass?” objection above by changing “killing is always
wrong” to “killing people is always wrong”. But then of course you should be thinking about other
challenges, for instance that killing in self-defense isn’t wrong.
Can I make the sentence clearer? This is where reading the sentence out loud will be
especially helpful. If it sounds like something no one would ever say in a normal conversation—
and more like something a pretentious old geezer would say with his nose in the air—then you
need to find a simpler way of saying it. You might find that the sentence is so complicated that
you have trouble even reading it off the page. If so, simplify the wording, simplify the grammar,
and consider breaking it into two smaller sentences. You might find that the sentence includes
“vocabulary words” that you would never use in ordinary conversation. Replace them with

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ordinary words that mean the same thing. Don’t let the point you’re trying to make get obscured
by needlessly complicated ways of saying it.
Can I make the sentence shorter? A philosophy paper should be a lean, mean, arguing
machine. If a word or phrase isn’t serving some clear purpose, cut it out. You might find that
you’ve written “I will argue that God doesn’t exists and that anyone who believes in God is
mistaken.” If so, you’ve said the same thing twice; you should delete the second half of the
sentence. In some cases, the right way to make a sentence shorter is to delete all the words in it,
getting rid of the sentence altogether. For instance, you might find that some sentence is just
repeating the very same point you made earlier in the paragraph. In that case, choose the sentence
you like best and delete the other one. Or you might find that the sentence is making a point that,
although interesting, is actually just a digression that’s irrelevant to your argument. Delete it.
Finally, when editing, make sure to give special attention to sentences starting with words
like ‘So’ or ‘Therefore’ or ‘Thus’. When your laser-focused instructor sees any of these words, her
head is going to whip back to the previous sentence to see whether the current sentence really does
follow from the previous one, or if it’s just a separate point (in which case you shouldn’t have said
‘Therefore’). Likewise for ‘That is’ or ‘In other words’. Suppose you say: “We weren’t created by
God. In other words, humans did not have an intelligent designer.” The ‘in other words’ suggests
that the sentences are saying the same thing. But they don’t: saying that God didn’t create us still
leaves open that we had an intelligent designer other than God (maybe aliens). Since the two
sentences don’t say exactly the same thing, you shouldn’t have said ‘in other words’.

5. Likely Criteria for Grading
Even if your instructors do not have an explicit rubric for the assignment, it’s likely that
your grade will be largely determined by four criteria: comprehension, critical development, use
of philosophical vocabulary, and quality of writing.

Comprehension
Your grade will likely be determined primarily by how well you demonstrate
understanding of the philosophical concepts, views, and arguments you’re discussing in your
paper. Because you’re being evaluated on whether you’ve demonstrated understanding the
material, you should try to explain things in such a way that any intelligent person would be able

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to understand your paper, particularly someone who is not in the class and has never encountered
the argument or chapter you’re talking about.
Among other things, this means you have to define any technical jargon you’re using. For
instance, if the argument includes words like ‘expected utility’ or ‘omnibeing’, you have to explain
what these mean. Even though your instructor of course already knows what they mean, she wants
to see whether you know what they mean well enough to explain them in your own words. There
typically is no need to define perfectly ordinary terms like ‘suffering’ or ‘wrong’—unless, of
course, the question of how to define wrongness is central to the paper.
To see if you’ve pitched the paper at the right level, show a draft to your smartest friends,
and see what they do and don’t understand.

Critical Development
Assuming that your assignment is to critically assess some view or argument, and not
simply to explain it in your own words, your instructor will want to see you developing an
interesting objection or response. As I emphasized in connection with Section 2, it’s important to
do more than simply express your opinion. You need to give reasons for adopting the position you
do. And as I emphasized in connection with Section 3, it’s important to be thinking about, and
explicitly addressing, concerns that an imagined opponent might have about the way you’ve
defended your position.
Additionally, remember that you’re being evaluated for comprehension even in the critical
development portion of your paper. If you “straw man” your opponents by downplaying or
ignoring sensible things they might say in response to your objections, your instructor may take
that as evidence that you haven’t entirely understood their position. If you rush too quickly to
developing your own position without first carefully laying out the view or argument that you’re
criticizing, your instructor may feel that you haven’t demonstrated an understanding of the views
under discussion. So take the time to explain the views or arguments you’re targeting before trying
to respond to them.

Philosophical Terminology
Your instructor will be paying careful attention to how you use philosophical terminology
like ‘argument’, ‘conclusion’, ‘premise’, ‘counterexample’, ‘valid’, and so on. Here are three

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things to be especially careful about. First, as I explain in Appendix A, ‘valid’ has a special
meaning in philosophy. Arguments are the only things that should be called ‘valid’, and an
argument does not necessarily count as invalid just because it has false or implausible premises.
Second, the conclusion and subconclusions of an argument are not premises. In the Argument from
Suffering above, only AS1 and AS2 are premises, not AS3. Third, the view that someone is
defending isn’t itself an argument. If someone is advancing the Argument from Suffering, you
shouldn’t say “her argument is that God doesn’t exist.” Rather, her view is that God doesn’t exist,
she argues that God doesn’t exist, and her argument is the whole sequence of claims consisting of
AS1, AS2, and AS3.

Quality of Writing
Your instructor likely won’t be too fussy about whether your use of commas or semicolons
is exactly right. Still, they will be unlikely to give you a good grade if your writing is full of typos
and blatantly ungrammatical sentences, or if your writing is unclear or poorly organized. After all,
this is a humanities class, and an “A” in such a class indicates, among other things, that you are a
competent writer.

6. Citation and Plagiarism
When discussing this book in class assignments, you are welcome to treat the arguments
advanced in the chapters as if they were my own (“According to Korman…”) and citing the page
numbers. However, if you plan to distribute or publish your paper, it’s best to find a genuine
advocate of the views and arguments to cite.
You may also wish to consult outside sources when writing your essays, for instance the
sources listed at the end of each chapter or other things floating around online. But this is not
something your instructor will typically expect you to do. Indeed, in my experience (especially in
one’s first philosophy course), fishing around on blogs and online encyclopedias—and trying to
reproduce the advanced ideas you find in there—often does more harm than good. Your time is
better spent closely reading and re-reading the assigned texts.
Most importantly, you must make sure to acknowledge any sources you’re drawing from
by citing them in your paper. Otherwise, you may be charged with plagiarism, that is, presenting
someone else’s work as your own. This includes not only directly copying and pasting sentences

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from outside sources without putting them in quotation marks and citing the source, but also
copying sentences from outside sources and changing around some of the words. Here are some
examples of plagiarism that I’ve encountered in my own classes:

Student: In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume explores the basic
fundamentals of religious belief, and whether they can be rational.
Website: In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume explores whether religious belief
can be rational.

Student: He excels in using the reference of FLO (future like ours) because it is reasonable to
use emotional attachment in comparing the life of a fetus to that of the life that we
experience and live out.
Website: Marquis is highly persuasive using this FLO method because he uses emotional
attachment comparing the life of a fetus to a life that we may experience.

Student: It is meaningless to assume an analogy between one part of the universe and the
whole universe.
Website: It makes no sense to assume that one part of the universe is analogous to the whole
of the universe.

Even one such sentence is often enough to warrant a failing grade on the assignment.
You may be charged with plagiarism even if you had no intention to plagiarize, even if the
plagiarism appears only in the opening section of the paper where you’re explaining the views or
arguments you plan to criticize, and even if the plagiarism was the result of accidentally submitting
the “wrong version” of the paper or “accidentally” memorizing and reproducing the wording from
a website. Being charged with plagiarism or other academic infractions may seriously jeopardize
your applications to law schools, business schools, and graduate schools, in addition to severely
affecting your grade in the course and possibly resulting in suspension or expulsion from your
college or university. So you should be very careful when working with outside sources.

6871479

Kerry Zhao

Philosophy 1

Feb 4, 2020

From the argument in Korma’s book “Learning from Argument,” for the non-existence of

God, the author lays down an argument that there is no God. The rationale behind his argument

is based on the proof of the encounters of evil and the suffering the world undergoes. The author

asserts, “If God is omnipotent, he can put off the suffering faced by human beings. The

argument further elucidates that when one tours the world, they get to see wondrous stunning

creations, such as beautiful mountain peaks and prairies, staggering skyscrapers, galleries,

athletic talents, among others. At the same time, one can experience excess suffering and pain.

Then, the question arises how such negative experiences such as extreme lack of basic

necessities of life, social,-economic inequalities, and misdemeanor, and a lot of injustice

(Korman, p. 20).

All these extremes are permitted by God on account of his weakness and limitation of

power and knowledge. Therefore this cannot be the God believers would have and accept as

omnipotence, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Hence, God does not exist. In this way, we put

into disrepute the premises of omnipotence, God is omniscient, and God is omnibenovelence. In

order for the paper to achieve its desired goal, it will approach the three-fold methodological

ways-“ 1. Lay down the claim that God is non-existence, 2. It will give my own contribution to

this problem, 3. It will visualize possible objections that other authors may find in my argument.

In this way, a more persuasive argument for the non-existence of God would be presented as

follows.

AS1- The existence of suffering in the world.

AS2- This is the claim that if God existed, then there would be no suffering

AS3- Therefore, AS1, contradicts AS2.

Under AS1, we observe suffering in the world. This is experienced from everyday issues

of life such as hunger, poverty, conflict among others, and the magnitude of emotional pains.

Claim AS2 says if there is a caring God, there would be no suffering because God is supposed to

be perfect and caring that is omniscience, Omnibenevolence, and omniscience (All-knowing,

limitless in power and automatically aware of the suffering). Therefore, the reason why there is

suffering in the world is that there is no omniscient being to prevent it. That means that premises

AS3 is dependent on the argument that since there is suffering in the world (according to AS1,

there is suffering in the world). Therefore there is no God because if God existed, there would

be no suffering.

An objection to this conclusion/argument is the assertion by other scholars that if God did

not exist, everything would conflict with one another. For instance, the original meaning of

human existence is conflict. This was put so by the French Philosopher, J.P. Sartre. As it was

put in modern times by the English philosopher: man is a wolf and a fellowman (p. 32). In other

words, if God did not exist, everything would be permissible (Thomas Hobbes, p 212). And so

the question of the existence of God is an inevitable existential problem of the human being.

Evaluation of the criticism of the argument from suffering.

The aim of this criticism is to reconcile the argument for the existence of evil in the world

with the contention that God allows the occurrence of evil. The argument to this end is as

follows.

1. This is the premise that the best world in spite, of the problem of evil, is one containing

among other elements the kinds of suffering we can endure as a human beings.

2. That being the case, the best possible world is one containing the kinds of suffering we

can endure

3. The conclusion is then that God would convenience permit the kinds of suffering we can

endure, and so the problem of evil is solved

I concur that the first premise (that there is suffering in the world) is compatible with the other

claims) that if God existed, there would be no suffering, which is in part of our human

experience. This is because there is an experience of beauty and goodness. The existence of

good and evil is allowed by God for us to appreciate creations as a whole. Korman’s arguments

are mainly negative in the evaluation of human existence. For instance, the A2 premises claims

to argue that God is responsible for our actin. In this way, he ignores the important view of

human self-causation and ethical motivation of moral autonomy. In this way, Korman would

have us bracket the whole important issue of human responsibility in action. For instance,

Korman disputes the conventional view that murder should be made answerable of his

action of killing an innocent victim. The moral argument behind this excuse is that external

causes, culminating in God himself on the ultimate immovable mover/cause of everything in the

universe, would be accountable for the murderous action. The murderer is exonerated on the

grounds that he had no original intention to kill. It is the context of the ethically relevant

background leading to the miscible hand of God that led to the act of murder. In my view, the

divine intervention in the self-causation of human action is exaggerated in Korman’s account of

the moral process of ethical behavior.

In conclusion, the whole argument leads us to admit that God can create a world that has

elements of evil, such as suffering and pain that are necessary for recognizing the inestimable

value of good things. Therefore, the existence of suffering is not a convincing reason to prove

God’s insistence.

Works Cited

Korma, Daniel Z. “Learning from Arguments.” An introduction to Philosophy, 2019, pp. 1-89.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions. Open Road Media, 2012.

Wright, George, and Thomas Hobbes. Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes. Taylor &

Francis, 2006.