John Harris on Chemical Enhancement

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Of all the recent advocates of cognitive and neural enhancement, John Harris must be the most forceful and provocative. A philosopher and lawyer based at the University of Manchester, Harris certainly knows how to push hot buttons, and when it comes to the ethics of enhancement, hot buttons are never in short supply.

There’s a wonderful undercurrent of braggadocio in Harris’s writings on this issue. The structure of his arguments, and the tone in which he conveys them, always gives me the impression that he is practically begging the reader to oppose him, because then he could ask them: Are you so stupid and obtuse as to think that enhancement is a bad thing?

I want to give readers of this blog a flavour of Harris’s arguments in this post. Harris’s main case in favour of enhancement is contained in his 2007 book, Enhancing Evolution , but here I’m going to focus on the shorter version of this case which is presented in Harris’s contribution to the recent Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics . Harris titles his contribution: “Chemical Cognitive Enhancement: Is it Unfair, Unjust, Discriminatory, or Cheating for Healthy Adults to Use Smart Drugs?”, which seems to suggest an ambitious agenda for a ten-page article.


1. Harris’s Central Analogical Argument
Harris begins with a rhetorically well-conceived thought experiment:

Suppose a university, perhaps the famous Ritalin College in Virginia, were to set out deliberately to improve the mental powers and capacities of its students; suppose its stated aims were to ensure that the students developed enhanced executive function, enhanced study skills, and improvement in the focusing of attention and in the manipulation of information. Suppose that a group of educationalists had actually worked out a method of achieving this, in the form, perhaps, of an educational and physical curriculum. What should our reaction be? Should we welcome such a breakthrough? Would we want to send our own children to this famous seat of learning? And if Ritalin College was too expensive would we be anxious for our local college to adopt the same revolutionary methods?

I say this is rhetorically well-conceived because, of course, it's not really a thought experiment at all. Thought experiments are supposed to detach us from reality and force us to journey through our imaginations to fanciful and abstract locations; but places like Ritalin College — apart from the ridiculous name, are very much a feature of our reality. They are the elite universities scattered all over the world. The places where we very much do wish to send our children despite their expensive tuition fees.

But by presenting it as a thought experiment (with its numerous “suppositions”) Harris encourages us to sneak up on our own value systems. By the end of the paragraph quoted, he expects us all to have that “aha!”-moment when we realise that we are, in spite of ourselves, generally in favour of cognitive enhancement.

Once he has made us realise how much we value cognitive enhancement, he springs upon us a series of rhetorical questions: If the goal of enhanced cognitive functioning is something that we might strive to produce through education then why should we not produce these goals, if we can do so safely enough, through enhancement technologies or procedures including chemical cognitive enhancers? And if enhancement is a legitimate aim for educational science, why would it be an illegitmate aim for medical or life science?

Harris’s preferred idiom is that of the rhetorical question; my preferred idiom is that of the formal argument. So I’d like to take Harris’s questions, combine them with his original thought experiment, and craft the following analogical argument in favour of chemical enhancement.

• (1) We do not think the use of educational techniques to enhance cognitive powers — even when such techniques are expensive and unavailable to all — are illegitimate.

• (2) Chemical enhancement technologies are in no important respect different from educational enhancement techniques.

• (3) Therefore (probably), we should not think that the use of chemical technologies to enhance cognitive powers — even when such technologies are expensive and unavailable to all — are illegitimate.

I like to think of this as Harris’s core argument for enhancement. But as it happens, Harris is not particularly wedded to the education example in premise (1). He uses other analogies to support his basic case for chemical enhancement when necessary. We’ll consider these as we move on now to see how Harris fends off the attacks on his core argument.


2. Isn’t that Cheating?
One way in which we can challenge Harris’s core argument is by coming up with a counter-analogy. The counter-analogy will make us think twice about the desirability of chemical enhancement. One such counter-analogy can be found in the use of performance enhancing drugs in competitive sports. There is general agreement that there is something unsavoury about the use of such enhancers. Weren’t we all slightly aggrieved when we found out that Marion Jones took performance enhancers? Wouldn’t we look down Lance Armstrong’s achievements if it turned out he had been blood doping all these years? I know I would. As an Irish person, I distinctly remember the feeling I had when I learned that our Olympic gold-medal winning swimmer, Michelle Smith, had failed a drugs test. Everything she had achieved suddenly became tainted.

But if this is how we feel about performance enhancers in competitive sports, then we have to ask ourselves the question: wouldn’t we feel similar if we learned that the excellent results of our child’s exams were won through the use of chemical enhancers, and not through hard work and perseverance? Wouldn’t we think they had cheated? In other words, don’t we have reason to reject Harris’s putative analogy between traditional educational techniques for enhancement and modern (largely still speculative) chemical enhancement methods?

• (4) Our feelings about the use of chemical enhancers in sport suggest that there are important differences between chemical enhancement technologies and traditional educational enhancement techniques.

Harris has a response. There is, he says, a crucial difference between success in sport and success in education. Success is sport is a relative good: your success in a sporting contest can only be measured in relation to a set of arbitrarily-defined rules. Success in education is an intrinsic good: it is good in and of itself, not relative to some set of rules. Thus we can feel comfortable in not allowing sprinters to use motorbikes to get them from A to B. That after all is not the point of sprinting. But we can’t feel equally comfortable about preventing someone from improving their computational skills with chemical assistance. Arbitrary restrictions of that sort seem out of place when the outcome is intrinsically good.

• (5) There is a crucial disanalogy between success in sport and success in education: success in sport is a relative good; success in education is an intrinsic good.

3. Positional Goods
There is a second challenge to Harris’s core argument. This one claiming that success in education is not an unqualified good because it always comes at the expense of someone else. This is the positional goods argument. A positional good is one that is only valuable if others don’t have it. Once everyone has it, it loses its value. Education can be viewed as a positional good because it is sometimes only valuable to you because other people don’t have it. For example, in the case of a competitive job interview, an education can be valuable if it marks you out from the other interviewees, but it becomes less valuable when everyone has one.

The positional goods argument is effectively a challenge to premise (1) of Harris’s core argument. It is not just an objection to the use of chemical enhancement, it is an objection to the current system of educational enhancement tout court.

• (6) Education is a positional good: it allows one person to gain at another’s expense. So its relentless pursuit is not always legitimate.

The obvious response to this is to argue that education is not a positional good; it is something from which we can all gain (a non-zero sum game, if you like). We all benefit from having a few extremely intelligent people around who can discover antibiotics, sequence the human genome, invent computers and so on. Interestingly, Harris doesn’t opt for this obvious response. He tries to argue that even if educational enhancement has some of the features of a positional good, it is still a legitimate aim.

He uses several analogies to make his case (advent of artificial light; kidney transplants; development of a CV). Of these, the CV example seems like the strongest. He points out that while CVs certainly have their competitive uses, the events they record are not solely valued for their competitive uses. A CV records selected highlights from an individual’s life, highlights that were valuable in their own right. So, for example, I didn’t get a PhD simply because having one would be of benefit on the academic job market; I got one because I wanted to learn more about a particular topic and to make a small contribution to the great intellectual commonwealth of human history. Was my getting a PhD illegitimate because it also conferred some positional advantages? Harris would say no.

• (7) Even if education brings has some of the features of a positional good, this does not make it illegitimate because it also has non-positional goods associated with it.

4. Runaway Competitiveness
There is a final worry about enhancement technologies. This worry once again concerns its potential uses in competitive contexts. But this worry is not concerned with competitiveness simpliciter but, rather, with the potential for “runaway competitiveness”. The argument here is that chemical enhancement will cultivate a hugely competitive culture. Everyone will become obsessed with improving themselves, and will have no time to be happy with what they’ve got. What’s more, once the enhancement ethos gets a foothold, we will start to expect — demand? — that others enhance themselves. Do we really want to be the midwives to such a culture?

• (8) To the extent that encouraging enhancement will create a culture of runaway competitiveness, it cannot be deemed legitimate.

Once again, Harris has a story to tell. This time the story concerns a young surgeon who performed the worlds first xenotransplantation of a liver. The patient who received it lived for 72 days. And for every night on those 72 days, the young surgeon slept in the room next to the patient. I’m sure we all think that this dedication to the patient is commendable, above and beyond the call of duty. We wouldn’t like to demand it of everybody. But at the same time, would we like to prevent the young surgeon from being so dedicated? Probably not.

Harris thinks the same reasoning applies to the enhancement context. Just because runaway competitiveness would be unwelcome, it does not follow that all enhancement should be prevented (call this premise 9).

This then brings us to the end of Harris’s basic case for chemical enhancement. I’ll no doubt write more about this topic in the future.

List on Free Will and Determinism (Part Two)

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(Part One)

This is the second part in my series looking at Christian List’s article “Free Will, Determinism and the Possibility to do Otherwise”. The goal of List’s article is to provide a new compatibilist theory of free will. This, he argues, requires a theory of agency that allows for alternative possibilities. In part one, we saw how he dismisses the conditional and dispositional theories of alternative possibilities and opts for the modal theory of alternative possibilities. In this part, we will see how he develops a theory of agency that is compatible with this modal theory of alternative possibilities and with the determinist theory of causation.

List’s article uses a number of technical flourishes to support his basic argument. In many ways, these technical flourishes are what makes his article a unique and significant contribution to the literature. However, I’m going to avoid them in my summary and just share the key elements of the basic argument. If you want the supporting detail, read List’s article.


1. What does List Want to Establish
Before we get down to the main argument, we have to do a little bit of grunt work. To be precise, we have to clarify the main objective of List’s argument. We start by considering a simple argument against the compatibility of free will and determinism:

• (1) Free will requires that (at the time of interest) more than one alternative course of action is possible for the agent.

• (2) Determinism implies that (at the time of interest) only one course of action is possible for the agent.

• (3) Therefore, free will and determinism are incompatible.

Following the discussion in part one, premise (1) is here understood to involve the strong modal sense of alternative possibility. List has no wish to challenge this premise here. His concern lies with premise (2), which, he believes, is misleading. He thinks that determinism is primarily a thesis about possibility at the fundamental physical level of reality, not a thesis about possibility at the agential level of reality.

In other words, he thinks we need a new premise that more accurately describes the determinist thesis:

• (4) Determinism implies that (at any given time) only one future sequence of events is physically possible.

And he thinks we need to see whether (4) actually implies (2). The incompatibilist will, no doubt, assume that determinism at the physical level implies determinism at the agential level, but that is an assumption that List wants us to challenge. He wants to show us how to sever the assumed connection between (4) and (2).


2. List’s Basic Argument
Now that we know what List wants to do, let’s see how he goes about doing it. His argument is relatively straightforward. It relies on several claims that are widely accepted within the philosophy of mind and the sciences of human behviour. These claims have to do with the relationship between agential states and fundamental physical states. He starts by defining an agential state as:

Agential State : The state of an agent and his or her macroscopic environment as specified by a relevant higher level theory of human behaviour.

List gives some idea of what he means by “a relevant higher level theory of human behaviour” later in the article. He reckons our best available theory of human agency is some version of behavioural decision theory. This theory posits the existence of intentional states such as beliefs, desires, preferences, intentions and so forth, and uses these states to explain and predict human behaviour.

Agential states, so defined, have two key features:

Supervenience : agential states are supervenient upon physical states. This means that there cannot be variations in agential states without there also being changes in physical states.

Multiple Realisability : There is typically more than one physical state that gives rise to the same agential state. Which is to say: not every variation in a physical state gives rise to a variation in an agential state.

Both of these features are widely accepted within the philosophy of mind, although some reductionists will deny them (e.g. John Bickle). We’ll say something more about reductionism in a moment, for now we’ll follow List and use these two features of agential states as the basis for the following argument:

• (5) If a state of Type X (call it “X1”) is multiply realisable by states of Type Y (Y1…Yn), then the existence of X1 is consistent with the existence of more than one state of Type Y (i.e. Y1…Yn, where n ≥ 1).

• (6) Agential states are multiply realisable by distinct physical states.

• (7) Therefore, the existence of any particular agential state (e.g. “belief that P”) is consistent with the existence of more than one distinct physical state.

• (8) Determinism is the thesis that for every temporally and spatially identical physical state there is only one possible future and for every temporally and spatially distinct physical state there is more than one possible future.

• (9) Therefore, the existence of any particular agential state is, despite the truth of determinism, consistent with more than one possible future.

• (10) Therefore, from the perspective of the agent, determinism does not imply a lack of alternative possibilities.

This argument is slightly inelegant — a result of my cobbling it together from several pages of List’s article — but I think you get the gist: because of multiply realisability, agential states are, despite the truth of determinism, consistent with more than one possible future.

List uses two devices to further flesh out and defend this basic argument. One of them is a “toy model” of physical reality which illustrates exactly how the same agential state could be realisable by different physical states and could thereby be consistent with multiple possible futures. If you’ve ever read Dennett’s Freedom Evolves you’ll be familiar with toy models of this sort. I think List makes better use of his toy model than Dennett did with his. One important lesson to be drawn from List’s toy model is that an agential state is not always going to be consistent with multiple possible futures, but, rather, that can sometimes be consistent with multiple possible futures.

The second device used by List is his analysis of the special sciences of human behaviour. Appealing to behavioural decision theory as the best available theory of human agency, List argues that this theory presupposes that every agent faces alternative possible futures. Indeed, he argues that the analysis of decision problems or strategic interactions (games) makes little sense without such a presupposition. The suggestion here seems to be that, if such a presupposition operates in these sciences, and if multiple realisability is true, then we can remain confident in the existence of alternative possible futures, at least from the agential perspective.


3. Further Issues
List notes two ways in which his argument could fail to impress. The first would be if there was some one-to-one reductive relationship between agential states and physical states. Such a relationship would mean that multiple realisability was no longer true. And if multiple realisability was no longer true, a single agential state would no longer be consistent with multiple possible futures. As I noted above, some hardcore reductionists like John Bickle make this claim.

The other way in which List thinks his argument could fail is if the sciences of human behaviour reject the presupposition of alternative possible futures. In other words, if they establish that each agential state is actually only consistent with one possible future. This has actually happened at various times throughout the history of the behavioural science (e.g. behaviourism was quite deterministic at the agential level), so we should perhaps be on the lookout for this.

I have a further issue I want to raise. Although he explicitly excludes the issue from his analysis, I’d love know what the implications of his argument are for moral responsibility. My feeling is that it wouldn’t do anything to address the concerns of those who think that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility. Here’s my thinking: List’s argument really only establishes that there a multiple possible futures open to an agent at the time of their decision making. That is to say, it shows that when you are presently in agential state A, you have multiple possible futures open to you. The argument does nothing to show that when you look back at when you were previously in agential state A, you had multiple possible futures open to you.

To explain further, the act of holding someone responsible generally viewed a third-person, backward-looking act. In other words, it is an act in which one agent examines the historical decisions of another agent and asks whether that agent was responsible for that historical decision. But if alternative possibilities at that historical moment are necessary for moral responsibility (a condition I’ll concede for now), then List’s argument does nothing to show that they were available to the agent. List’s argument only shows that multiple possibilities are available to the agent from a first-person, forward-looking perspective.

Am I right about this, or am I being unfair to List’s argument? Tell me what you think.

List on Free Will and Determinism (Part One)

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I recently had the pleasure of reading Christian List’s new paper on free will and determinism (available here). List seems like an interesting guy. I haven’t read much of his previous work on group agency and epistemic democracy, but what little I have read I’ve always enjoyed. He adopts a formal and technical style which I’m finding more and more congenial and to which I now aspire in my own work.

Still, whatever the merits of his previous work, I wasn’t sure that he’d have anything of interest to contribute on the issue of free will. I say this not because I doubt his capacities to contribute to this field, but because I doubt everyone’s capacity to contribute to it. Having read a fair amount of the literature, it often seems like this issue has been so well-worn, and the analytical paths so well-trodden, that there’s no territory left to explore.

And yet, List’s paper does manage to contribute something. With his flair for the formal and technical style of analysis, List manages to render more perspicuous and cogen, an idea that has lurked in the background of the philosophical debate for some time now. What is this idea? Well, in essence, it is a new theory of what it means to say that an agent “could have done otherwise”. I want to share it with you over the next few posts and critically engage with some of its elements as I go along.

In this post, I begin by discussing the traditional conceptions of “could have done otherwise”, and continue by looking at List’s objections to these conceptions. If you’re a complete newcomer to the free will and determinism debate, I suggest reading this post by way of introduction; if you’re not a complete newcomer, then read on.


1. Compatibilism and Alternative Possibilities
The ability to do otherwise seems central to our conception of ourselves as free and responsible agents. Take a simple, everyday decision as an example: When I choose to make myself a cup of tea — as I often do — it certainly feels (from the inside of my decision-making) that I could have chosen to make an alternative beverage. That is to say, it feels, from the inside, like alternative possibilities are open to me.

The problem is that this aspect of my internal self-conception seems incompatible with another popular metaphysical thesis: determinism. Determinism is the view that physical events are causally connected in such a way that, at any particular moment in time, there is one and only one possible future. Since the ability to do otherwise seems to require more than one possible future, the incompatibility should be obvious.

List, like many before him, wants to challenge this apparent incompatibility. He wants to argue, contrary to the above, that it is possible for both determinism to be true and for us (agents) to have the ability to do otherwise. And he wants to argue his case by sticking to the most challenging (for a compatibilist) analysis of the concept of “could have done otherwise”, the modal analysis.

This implies that there are alternative analyses of “could have done otherwise” that are more favourable to the compatibilist. What are they and why does List reject them? We turn to that question now.


2. Conditional and Dispositional Analyses of Alternative Possibilities
There are two interpretations of “could have done otherwise” that have been championed by compatibilists over the years. List calls them the “traditional conditional” analysis and the “new dispositionalist” analysis. The descriptors “traditional” and “new” are used to indicate their relative ages, with conditionalism having been championed since the early part of the twentieth century and with dispositionalism having arisen more recently. I’m going to ignore these descriptors and simply refer to them as the conditional and dispositionalist analyses.

According to the conditional analysis, to say that an agent has the ability to do otherwise, is to say something like the following:

Conditionalism : If the agent had chosen differently, or had tried to do otherwise, then he or she would have succeeded.

In other words, according to conditionalism, an agent’s ability to do otherwise depends on the antecedents of their actions (captured by the “if” portion of the conditional) being different. So to go back to the earlier example concerning my choice of a cup of tea over an alternative beverage, the conditionalist would (hah!) argue that I could have chosen differently had my preferences been different.

This might seem trivial at a first pass (more on this later), but it also seems highly compatible with determinism. After all, although the determinist will argue that the antecedents of my action could never have been different, this doesn’t prevent the counterfactual statement being true. Thus, although it may be that my preference for tea could not have been different at that particular instance, it may still be true to say that if it had been different, I could have have chosen differently.

So much for conditionalism, what about dispositionalism? According to the dispositionalist, the ability to do otherwise can be parsed in the following manner:

Dispositionalism : The agent has the disposition to do otherwise when, in appropriate circumstances (to be spelt out further), he or she tries to do otherwise.

In other words, according to dispositionalism, an agent’s ability to do otherwise is dependent upon the set of dispositions they happen to have. If this set of dispositions is such that, when circumstances shift or change, they perform different kinds of actions, then it is meaningful to say that they have the ability to do otherwise. Thus, to use the tea example yet again, if my set of character traits and dispositions are such that, when circumstances shift or change, I choose a beverage other than tea, I can be meaningfully said to have been able to do otherwise.

Again, this seems to be compatible with determinism. Although the determinist will argue that circumstances were such that my other character dispositions could not have been exercised at the relevant time, it would nonetheless be possible to say that I have unexercised character dispositions that could be exercised in different situations.


3. Objections to Conditionalism and Dispositionalism
List identifies two sorts of objections to the conditional and dispositional analyses of the capacity to do otherwise. The first sort of objection focuses on intuitively compelling counterexamples. The second sort of objection focuses on a substitution principle. I’ll discuss both, although I’m much less comfortable with the second than I am with the first.

Looking at the counterexamples first, consider the following. Most of us will agree that if a person suffers from a psychological or neurological impairment like tourette’s syndrome, volitional insanity or severe addiction, they will not always have the ability to do otherwise. On some occasions, their condition will compel them to do something. Yet oddly, under a conditional analysis, such individuals — even on the occasions when their impairment is most active — can still be said to have the ability to do otherwise. After all, if their compulsions were different, they would act differently. This seems counterintuitive, and so the conditional analysis seems flawed.

Here’s another counterexample, this time targetting the dispositionalist. Imagine someone trying to act under the most severe possible external constraints. For instance, someone being asked to unlock a bank safe while a group of bank robbers have guns pointing at his head, or someone driving a car and suddenly and unexpectedly experiencing temporary paralysis. In neither case (although the bank robber case seems debatable) would it seem right to say that the person had the ability to do otherwise. And yet, under the dispositional analysis, unexercised dispositions to do otherwise could still have existed. Again, this seems counterintuitive and so the dispositional analysis seems flawed.

Turning to the substitution argument, List first proposes the following test of the adequacy of an interpretation of something:

The Substitution Test : A good test of the adequacy of an interpretation of some concept is to substitute the interpretation for its target and see whether ordinary meaning is preserved.

I won’t comment on whether this is actually a good test of the adequacy of an interpretation since I don’t know. I’ll take it for granted that it is. My beef really lies with List’s application of this test, which begins with the following argument:

• (1) If the agent does not try to do X, then he or she cannot do X.

• (2) The agent does not try to do X.

• (3) Therefore, the agent cannot do X.

Which is the direct negation of…

• (4) The agent can do X.

To put it more pithily, if (1) and (2) are true, (4) cannot be true. And, according to List, this is where the problem arises. Since (4) is just stating what the agent can do, it would seem fair to replace it with the compatibilist analyses of the ability to otherwise since they are also statements about what an agent could do. One would think that such a substitution would preserve the overall logic of the argument. But as it turns out this is incorrect because the conditional or dispositional versions of (4) would go like this:

• (4*) If the agent were to try to do X, he or she would would succeed in doing X.

• (4**) The agent has the disposition to do X when, in appropriate circumstances, he or she tries to do X.

And neither of these statements are inconsistent with (1) and (2). Hence they fail the substitution test.

I have problems with the line of reasoning. Mainly because I’m not sure I follow it entirely and I think the source of my discomfort comes from premise (1). As I read it, this premise is a principle stating a necessary constraint on the abilities on an agent. But for the life of me, I can’t see why I should accept that principle as fairly capturing what it is that constrains the abilities of an agent. Surely, the truth of a principle like (1) is something that is at issue in the free will debate? That is to say, surely (1) begs the question against conditionalist and the dispositionalist?


4. The Modal Analysis
I may well be wrong about this, and to a large extent it doesn’t matter. What’s most important about List’s article is not his dismissal of these old compatibilist theories, but rather his attempt to develop a novel one. And this novel theory is one that accepts the modal anaylsis of “could have done otherwise”. As follows:

Modalism : It is possible for the agent to do otherwise.

The modal analysis depends upon the agent having the outright possibility of doing otherwise when they act. That is to say, at the time of their acting, it is genuinely open to them — irrespective of counterfactual conditionals and hidden dispositions — to perform multiple kinds of act.

This modal analysis is the most challenging for the compatibilist because it seems to require more than one possible future. This, of course, is in direct opposition to the definition of determinism offered earlier in this post.

So List is setting the bar pretty damn high for his compatibilist theory. Can he rise to the challenge? We will find out in subsequent posts.

Morriston on Ethical Criticism of the Bible (Part Four)

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(Part One, Part Two, Part Three)

Hello there and welcome to this, the final part, in my series on Wes Morriston’s article “Ethical Criticism of the Bible: The Case of Divinely Mandated Genocide”. Morriston’s article takes issue with the responses offered by several Christian philosophers to the morally troubling passages of the bible.

In part one, we considered Richard Swinburne’s attempt to find a divine justification for the Canaanite genocide; in part two, we looked at Eleonore Stump’s attempt to read between the lines of the bible to find a justification for the Amalekite massacre; and in part three we considered reasons why these massacres should not have been commanded. In this final part, we’ll consider the skeptical theist’s response to these passages.

Regular readers will know that skeptical theism is something I’ve discussed at length before and if you’re interested I’d direct your attention to those posts. Still, I’ll try to make the discussion here as self-contained as possible.


1. What is the Skeptical Theist Response?
The skeptical theist response to the atrocities commanded by God is one of epistemic modesty. They point to our cognitive limitations and force us to admit that we may not always know what is for the best in this world. It could be, for all we know, that the genocide of the Canaanites, or the massacre of the Amalekites, served some greater good.

To make this a little more precise, Morriston points to the work of Michael Bergmann. Bergmann argues that the skeptical theist is committed to a number of key theses about our knowledge of morality, three of which will be mentioned here. First, they are committed to the view that the class of possible goods may include goods of which we are unaware. Second, they are committed to the view that we are unaware of all the possible entailment relations between possible goods and possible evils. And third, they are committed to the view that we may often be incapable of assessing the total moral value of complex states of affairs. By way of contrast, God’s knowledge of all three of these things must be complete. He is omniscient after all.

How can this type of reasoning be recruited in support the relevant biblical passages? At this point, Morriston points to a crucial distinction between the problem of evil and the problem of biblical genocide: it is open to the committed theist to reject the truth of the bible; it is not open to them to deny the existence of evil. Thus, the pressures to resort to the skeptical theist line are much less compelling in the case of biblical genocide than they are in the case of evil more generally.

But assuming the theist does not wish to abandon the bible, how then can the skeptical theist response be helpful? Morriston suggests the following. The skeptical theist can say something like this about the relevant biblical passages:

It is no doubt true that we perceive a lot of disvalue in the divinely mandated genocides, and that we continue to do so even when the divine purposes as revealed in the OT are taken into account. But who are we to say that the apparent failure of God’s commands to achieve all the purposes for the sake of which he is said to have issued them is not explained by something known to God alone…we are not in a position to say whether more or less value overall was realized… (Morriston, p. 15)

2. Responding to the Skeptical Theist
There are well-worn, and I think compelling, responses to skeptical theism. The majority of these argue that the skeptical theses endorsed by the likes of Bergmann can grow legs and wander without welcome into several areas of our epistemic lives. Thus, for example, there are those who argue that skeptical theists must become moral skeptics, or that they must abandon the argument from design, since both moral reasoning and the design argument depend on our ability to reliably recognise what is good and what is bad.

Morriston offers a similar line of response. He argues that if the skepticism embedded in the above-quoted response to divinely mandated genocide in the bible is acceptable, then Christians are forced to accept the possibility that similar commands will be issued again. To make his point, Morriston discusses a news story from 2008. The story told of a government raid on a Mormon (I’m assuming since Morriston subsequently talks about Mormons) polygamist ranch in Texas. The story involved accusations of child abuse and forced marriage. He then asks us to imagine that the governor of Texas calls a subsequent press conference telling us that he has received a message from God telling him that Mormons need to wiped out.

Morriston reckons that most people — most Christians — would think the governor had lost his mind. But now imagine a skeptical theist entering the scene, one that knows the governor well and is confident in his ability to discern God’s will. He could tell us that, true, the plan to wipe out the Mormons may not seem wise to us, but we are not capable of making such a global value-judgment. God knows best, and since the governor has shown himself to know God’s will, we must trust him on this occasion.

Again, Morriston thinks this is absurd. What's more he thinks that most skeptical theists would reject it, possibly pointing out in the process that we’d be wrong to think we can know that the governor has access to God’s will. But then it’s difficult to see why they don’t adopt a similar attitude towards the bible. That is to say, it is difficult to see why they don’t simply think that, in light of the command for genocide, the biblical passages in question are an inaccurate reflection of God’s will.

Morriston closes with a discussion of the proper role of the bible in moral reflection, noting along the way the competing moral messages it contains. Indeed, he notes that some biblical authors seem to be criticising the moral views of other biblical authors. He suggests that modern readers should continue this practice.

I take it that this is Morriston’s attempt to cling to the better parts of religious tradition since he does, despite his criticisms, still self-identify as a Christian. And I can certainly appreciate his call for ongoing ethical reflection on and criticism of important historical texts. However, I simply do not see in this call anything that is particularly religious or, indeed, particularly Christian.

The Ethics of Torture (Part Two)

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(Part One)

This post is the second in my series on the ethics of torture. In part one, I looked at an article by Catherine McDonald entitled “Deconstructing Ticking Bomb Arguments”. No prizes for guessing the content of that one. In this part, I begin to consider the arguments of Uwe Steinhoff, which are more favourably disposed toward the (extremely limited) use of torture. I’ll be looking at the arguments contained in the following article “Defusing the Ticking Social Bomb Argument: The Right to Self-Defensive Torture”, which, as it happens, appeared in the same journal as Catherine McDonald’s article.



1. The Right to Self-Defensive Torture
In part one, I presented a formal version of the — classic? — ticking bomb argument. Without restating that argument here, the basic thrust of it is as follows: in a situation in which morally unpleasant outcomes are going to arise no matter what you do, you ought to do whatever minimises those unpleasant outcomes; in the ticking bomb scenario, torturing one person in order to save many, is less unpleasant than allowing many to die; ergo, in the ticking bomb scenario, one ought to torture one person.

As popular as this line of argument is, a notable aspect of Uwe Steinhoff’s work is his attempt to offer an alternative pro-torture argument. His argument is based on an analogy between situations in which one has the right to use lethal force in self-defence and circumstances in which torture is used to prevent harm to self and others. The argument can be put as follows:

• (1) We have a right to use lethal force against aggressors in situations in which these aggressors put our lives (and the lives of others) under threat.

• (2) In all important respects, the use of non-lethal torture against an aggressor is less morally bad than the use of lethal force against an aggressor.

• (3) Therefore (probably) we have a right to use non-lethal torture against aggressors in situations in which these aggressors put our lives (and the lives of others) at risk.

How are the premises supported here? Well, premise (1) seems like a widely-accepted moral belief. And premise (2) is supported by the observation that people would generally prefer to live and experience short-term harm, than to die.

As you can see, this is an argument from analogy. It says that A (the right to lethal self-defence) is true in one case; that a second case is similar (in all important respects) to this first case; and so A (or something close to A) must be true in this second case as well. Such arguments are, in the words of argumentation theorist Douglas Walton, defeasible and presumptive. That is to say, their conclusions do not follow with the certainty provided by logical deduction; instead, they follow in a probabilistic and defeasible manner.

What’s interesting about this argument is that its conclusion confers a right on individuals to use torture in self-defence. This is very different from the conclusion of the ticking bomb argument which can be phrased in terms of a limited exception to a widely-recognised negative right (i.e. the right not to be tortured). In other words, Steinhoff’s argument is an inversion of the typical pro-torture argument: it argues from a threshold deontological position, as opposed to consequentialist position. This clever inversion allows him to construct an equally clever inversion of the ticking bomb argument. He calls this the ticking social bomb argument. Let’s see what this is.


2. The Ticking Social Bomb Argument
The ticking social bomb argument is derived from an objection to the standard ticking bomb argument. We encountered this objection in part one. To recap, recall how the ticking bomb argument relies on a consequentialist calculation of the respective merits of torturing one person to save many versus allowing the many to die. Now recall how McDonald, as part of her deconstruction of the standard argument, challenged this calculation on grounds of short-termism. She argued that allowing torture in extreme circumstances would lead to the legitimisation of torture in the long-term, which would in turn lead to the corruption of important social institutions and the dissolution of trust across society.

This is the ticking social bomb to which Steinhoff alludes. He believes its alleged existence results in the following challenge to his self-defensive justification of torture:

• (4) It is justifiable to prevent a person from exercising their rights if in doing so we will prevent some great harm (or, maybe, achieve some great good).

• (5) Allowing people to exercise their right to non-lethal self-defensive torture will lead to great social harm (by creating a ticking social bomb).

• (6) Therefore, we are justified in prevent people from exercising their right to non-lethal self-defensive torture.

Steinhoff identifies (5) as the key to this argument. His goal in the remainder of his article is to suggest that opponents of torture have no good arguments to offer in support of that key premise. He uses the writings of Henry Shue as his main scratching post.


3. If the Shue Fits
Surprisingly for an article of this nature, Steinhoff’s discussion of Shue’s work is remarkably ill-tempered. Now maybe Shue deserves it; and maybe I’d feel the same if I had been trading blows with him on this issue over a number of years (as Steinhoff has), but still I found the whole thing slightly unnerving. Luckily, there is some quality analysis beneath the vituperative language and I’m going to focus my attention on that.

Steinhoff identifies the following passages from Shue’s article “Torture in Dreamland” as containing his most persuasive argument in favour of premise (5), above:

[I]t is simply dreamy to think that all of a sudden we are simply going to stumble upon someone who happens to have the skills to make a man who planted a ticking bomb reverse the direction of his life and assist us in defusing the bomb….Either “torturers” are just thugs who have no clue what they are doing, in which case we need not allow for exceptional cases in which they rapidly and effectively extract invaluable catastrophe-preventing information, or some can have genuine expertise…If we want [such expertise] ready, we need to maintain, even nourish, organizations and networks in which the expertise resides.

Steinhoff provides a formal reconstruction of the argument contained in these passages. But I’m not going to follow his version exactly because I want the reconstruction to clearly support premise (5). So here’s my version of the argument Shue is making:

• (7) In order to torture someone in a way that will actually retrieve vital information that can prevent harm, the torturer has to be skilled and experienced.

• (8) Skilled and experienced torturers are available if and only if torture is institutionalised.

• (9) Institutionalising torture will mean that torture will metastasise instead of being limited to one-off cases.

Ergo, allowing torture for self-defensive purposes creates a ticking social bomb.

What does Steinhoff have to say in response to this argument? Well, he’s quite happy to concede that the institutionalisation of torture — which could involve a system of torture warrants, and professional torturers — would be a very bad thing indeed. Hence, if it were true that effective self-defensive torture required institutionalisation, then Steinhoff would reject it. He just doesn’t think this is true. In other words, he rejects premises (7) and (8).

He rejects premise (7) on the grounds that real-life examples show that a torturer need not be skilled in order to prevent harm. He uses the example of Magnus Gafgen, the German child-kidnapper, to support this thesis. We mentioned this case in part one. As noted there, Gafgen disclosed vital information upon merely being threatened with torture. Now threatening torture has its own problems (as pointed out by Alexander in the comments section to part one) so a more interesting example, also used by Steinhoff, concerns the 1988 kidnapping of Denis Mook in Bremen, Germany. In that case, the police actually did beat the kidnapper and managed to get him to disclose the location of the child. The child was subsequently retrieved alive. Steinhoff argues that in both these cases, torture (or the threat of torture) was effectively used without the need for expert torturers. Furthermore, the German policeforce has not resorted to the widespread use of torture in the wake of these cases. To summarise this as a premise which defeats (7), we can say:

• (10) Successful real-life uses of torture to retrieve vital information did not require skilled and experienced torturers, nor did they lead to the widespread use of torture.

As against (8), Steinhoff points out that having access to skilled torturers need not require the existence of a torture bureaucracy; it would be enough if such a bureaucracy existed in the past and one had access to its officials. To put it another way, there are probably enough secret police officials out there in the world who, due to the unpleasant histories of the countries in which they lived, were skilled torturers. (I’ve put this point in the argument map below as premise 11).

This then brings us to the end of Steinhoff’s main critique of the ticking social bomb argument. He goes on in the final section of his article to make the point that the child-kidnapping case is a more persuasive instance of the justifiable use of torture than the ticking bomb case, but I won’t get into that here.

The Ethics of Torture (Part One)

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Several years ago — several more than I care to remember — I had to write an assignment on the legality of torture. It was for a class in international human rights law. As a result, it focused largely on the legal side of things, but even back then I was trending towards the dark side and so I included some discussion of the philosophical arguments as well. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, or what my precise conclusion was, but I think it was down-the-line absolutely anti-torture, rejecting the legitimacy of torture even in ticking bomb style scenarios.

I wrote that essay at a time when my political and philosophical views were decidedly more naive and ideologically driven than they are now, and at a time when the torture debates were to the forefront of the public consciousness. As a result, I had a tendency to rush toward the conclusion that other members of my ideological clique seemed to adopt. Sad, but true.

Anyway, since I feel more philosophically mature these days (whether I actually am is a separate question), and since I have to teach a class about arguments in law and ethics pretty soon, I thought I might try to revisit the whole torture debate. As is typical on this blog, I’ll use some articles to guide my analysis, feeling free to speculate and expand upon their contents when I see fit.

First-up for consideration is an article by Catherine McDonald entitled “Deconstructing Ticking Bomb Arguments”, which seemed about as good a place as any to start.


1. The Structure of the Ticking Bomb Argument
Torture is the inhuman and degrading infliction of severe pain and suffering on another human being. It is for many the epitome of the morally bad act. This is a proposition which can apparently be justified on any number of grounds, e.g. “pain is intrinsically bad” “it is contrary to human dignity” and so forth. But is it always and everywhere morally wrong? This is what the ticking-bomb scenario tries to disprove.

The ticking bomb scenario will, no doubt, be familiar to many readers of this blog. Its essential details are as follows:

Suppose there is a large bomb that has been planted in a highly-populated location. Suppose this bomb is due to go off in the near future. Suppose you have in your custody someone who knows where the bomb is planted, but who will not share this information. Suppose there is no other source for this information. Suppose receiving this information could help you prevent the bomb from going off. Now ask yourself, would it be legitimate to torture the person?

The suggestion is that it would be. The reasoning here is based on two key ideas: (i) the quasi-dilemmatic nature of the decision problem posed by the ticking bomb scenario; and (ii) the correctness of moral consequentialism, i.e. the view that one ought to act so at to achieve the best possible consequences. The ticking-bomb scenario is dilemmatic because no matter what one does (torture, or not-torture) there is a morally undesirable outcome. (Illustrated below)

But it is only quasi-dilemmatic because in a true dilemma both outcomes would carry equal moral weight; in the ticking bomb scenario the whole point that one outcome is less bad (the torture) than the other (the deaths of the bomb victims).

This is where the consequentialist principle kicks-in: if one outcome is less bad than the other, then one ought to pick the lesser of the two evils. This leads naturally to the conclusion that torture is justified in this kind of scenario. But we need to be careful about this. Probability estimates need to taken into consideration: only if we think that torturing the person has a reasonable chance of leading us to the required information, would it really be justified.

To put all this in argumentative terms:

• (1) For any moral decision problem with possible choices C1…Cn, one ought to pick the C that achieves the maximum balance of good over evil.

• (2) In the ticking bomb scenario one has two possible choices, either one: (a) tortures the person in custody or (b) one does not torture the person in custody.

• (3) If one tortures the person in custody, one has a reasonable chance of obtaining information that could prevent a large number of deaths; if one does not torture the person in custody, a large number of people will die.

• (4) Preventing a large number of deaths while torturing one person is less evil than allowing a large number of people to die.

• (5) Therefore, in the ticking bomb scenario, one ought to torture the person in custody.

No doubt hardcore non-consequentialists will reject premise (1). They will balk at the notion that you should perform a prima facie immoral act merely because it leads to better consequences. Some of them will stick with the absolute prohibition on torture as a result. But because of the quasi-dilemmatic structure of the scenario, these individuals must make their peace with the other morally undesirable outcome. Whether they can really do so is debatable.

Value pluralists are likely to reject premise (4) by arguing that such a comparative exercise cannot be carried out. While I have some sympathy for this position, I don’t think it carries much weight in the present context: if the outcomes can’t be compared in the manner suggested by the argument, then surely we are faced with a tragic choice, i.e. one in which either outcome is morally permissible?

Others will reject premises (2) and (3) of the argument, the ones setting out the factual conditions of the ticking bomb scenario. And it is with these others that McDonald makes her stand.


2. False Assumptions
McDonald’s attempt to “deconstruct” the ticking bomb argument is based largely on the empirical naivety of its proponents. Such proponents recklessly presume that, in the real world, the assumptions of the ticking bomb argument could hold true. McDonald thinks that the real world tells a different tale. Consider the following real-world incidents:

The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes : The ticking bomb scenario presumes that we can reliably identify those who know where the bomb is, in advance of the bomb going off. In reality, in preemptive operations of this sort, law enforcement officials c err in the judgment of who is and is not a threat. For example, the London police shot Jean Charles de Menezes multiple times in the back of the head as he was boarding an underground train. They did so because they were convinced he was involved in a terrorist plot (this was soon after the 7/7 bombings). As it turns out, he was innocent. If we were to allow torture, similar errors would take place. Are these errors an acceptable price to pay?

The German Kidnapping Case : This case is often cited by proponents of interrogative torture. It involved a kidnapper named Magnus Gafgen who disclosed the location of a child he had kidnapped after being threatened with torture by the German police. Unfortunately, the child was already dead, but this hasn’t deterred those who wish to argue that torture may occasionally provide important information. The problem with those people, as McDonald points out, is that the example does nothing to prove the informational utility of torture: torture was never actually used in this case, it was merely threatened.

The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Case: It is claimed that many months of torture in Guantanamo bay led Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to confess to involvement in numerous bomb plots. This again suggests the informational utility of torture, right? Wrong says McDonald. For one thing, the confessions were of dubious veracity (she cites no source for this but I have no reason to disbelieve her), and for another the torture took place over many months. This is not the kind of scenario envisaged by proponents of the ticking bomb argument.

Other cases are discussed by McDonald, but I’m going to cut things short here. What do cases like these really prove? How do they help to undermine the ticking bomb argument? The answer comes in three parts.

The first part is that, contrary to the ticking bomb argument, torture is not an effective means of obtaining information. Thus, premise (3), which claims that torture has a reasonable chance of providing you with the relevant information, is false. So:

• (6) The information obtained through torture is often dubious, thus torture would not provide you with a reasonable chance of obtaining information that could help prevent a large number of deaths.

There are serious questions to be asked about this challenge to premise (3). For starters, in a situation like the ticking bomb scenario, it’s not clear that you really need to have even a reasonable chance of success: any chance at all may be enough to justify the use of torture. I’m going to leave these kinds of criticisms to the side for now since I hope to cover them in more detail in a future lecture.

The second part is that, contrary to the ticking bomb argument, you are unlikely to face a simple choice between torture and no-torture. Other, arguably more effective options, will be present. This is proved by the German kidnapping case — in which threats were enough — and by other analyses which suggest that traditional interrogation methods are just as effective (if not more so) than torture. This gives us the following direct challenge to premise (2):

• (7) In any real-world ticking bomb scenario, one will have more than two choices. Indeed, one will likely have ways of obtaining the requisite information that would be more effective than (and at least no worse than) torture.

The third part is that the consequentialist calculation — stated in premise (4) — is flawed. It focuses on the short term benefits of torture; it neglects the long term costs. If torture is ever thought to be morally justifiable, and this thought gets a foothold amongst those in authority, the long-term costs could be great. In every society in which it has been practiced, torture has led to a breakdown in trust, and an increase in fear and intimidation. Thus:

• (8) The long-term costs of torturing the one person outweigh the short-term benefits of preventing deaths.

Proponents of the ticking bomb argument will respond by saying that it’s ridiculous to assume that their argument would lead to the widespread use of torture: they are only talking about torture in very limited circumstances. McDonald describes this response as being “risible”. She says that “once instituted in one circumstance, the practice of torture invariably expands.

McDonald goes on to ask why, despite it obvious flaws, the ticking bomb argument has proved so seductive. Although this is an interesting topic, I’m not going to cover it here. Instead, I’m going to move on in the next part to consider alternative “pro”-torture arguments. In particular, the arguments of Uwe Steinhoff. Stay tuned.

Morriston on Ethical Criticism of the Bible (Part Three)

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What's up with the moral character of the God of Abraham?

(Part One, Part Two)

Welcome to this the third part in my brief series looking at Wes Morriston’s recent paper “Ethical Criticism of the Bible: The Case of Divinely Mandated Genocide”. In this paper, Morriston takes issue with three sets of Christian responses to the more morally troubling passages of the Old Testament.

To recap on the story so far: in part one, we looked at Richard Swinburne’s attempt to justify the genocide of the Canaanites on the grounds that it was necessary in order for God to prevent their spiritual infection from spreading to the Israelites. This justification was found wanting. In part two, we considered Eleonore Stump’s attempt to read between the lines of the Amalekite massacre in order to find a justification for it. Morriston argued that this reading contradicted other aspects of the biblical text.

It was suggested in comments to part two that the situation is more complex than Morriston (or, rather, my summary of Morriston) lets on since other parts of the biblical text contradict what he says and because the commands for genocide may not have been carried through. This may be so, but I think such facts would not necessarily undermine the ultimate point Morriston is trying to make, which is: the ethical authority of the bible, and the character of the deity portrayed therein, need to be challenged.

This point is underscored when Morriston discusses why genocide should not have been commanded by Yahweh. We will go through these reasons now.


1. God’s use of the Israelites as Moral Agents
For starters, let’s concede a lot of ground to the defender of the bible. In fact, let’s concede (contrary to what was argued in the previous two posts) that there were good ethical reasons for Yahweh to seek the eradication of certain national identities from the ancient near east. Even then, a question remains: was God justified in using the Israelites as the agents of this eradication? Wouldn’t doing so lead to the moral corruption of the Israelites? Why not use a natural disaster to wipe out the Canaanites and the Amalekites instead?

These questions have troubled the minds of leading Christian philosophers before. William Lane Craig, for example, in his remarkable defence of the Canaanite genocide, considered these, and not the genocide itself, to be the most important moral issues raised by these biblical passages. Craig is not the focus of Morriston’s attention in this article, but luckily for him Eleonore Stump and Richard Swinburne are also troubled by this issue. And, interestingly enough, they’ve both come up with rather similar solutions (which are, if I recall correctly, also similar to Craig’s solution to the problem). Consider the following comments from Swinburne:

God surely also had a reason for using the Israelites rather than natural measures such as disease to kill the Canaanites, which was to bring home to the Israelites the enormous importance of worshiping and teaching their children to worship the God who had revealed himself to them.

In a similar vein, Stump speaks of the need to bring home to the Israelites the importance of their relationship to God and the importance of God’s moral authority and judgment.



2. Uncovering the Apologist’s Reasoning
There seems to a discernible pattern of reasoning underlining these responses. Let’s try to recover that pattern here. First, consider the formal structure of Morriston’s challenge:

• (1) For any morally justifiable goal G, an agent ought (“is morally obliged”) to choose the most morally justifiable means M to achieve that goal (premise).

• (2) The genocide of the Canaanites (or Amalekites) was a morally justifiable goal (premise, granted for sake of argument).

• (3) Yahweh’s use of the Israelites as the agents of genocide was not the most morally justifiable means to the achieve the goal of genocide.

• (4) Therefore, Yahweh did not do as he was morally obliged to do (from 1, 2 and 3).

I think this is pretty straightforward. The key point to note is the principle of moral rationality embedded in premise 1. This seems to me like a sound principle of moral rationality, but I couldn’t offer any deeper justification for it here. Premise 2 is probably ridiculous, but we’re charitably assuming it for sake of argument. And premise (3) is justified on the grounds that a natural disaster (or maybe a direct supernatural intervention) could have been used instead. As was the case in previous posts, this conclusion could be used as the basis for further arguments against the bible, but we won’t get into those arguments here.

Now, consider how Stump and Swinburne try to undermine this argument. One could interpret their claims in two different ways. First, one could view them as attacks on premise (3). This seems initially sensible since both are trying to deny that the use of the Israelites was morally unjustified, but on reflection it seems wrong to me. It seems more likely that Swinburne and Stump are challenging premise (1) by offering an alternative principle of moral rationality. As follows:

• (1*) For any set of morally justifiable goals G1…Gn, and any set of means to those ends (M1…Mn), an agent ought to choose the means to those goals that are either (a) the most morally justified means to those goals or (b) the means that allow them to achieve more than one morally justified goal at a time.

We could call this the “two-birds-one-stone”-principle, although that might be misleading since the principle is broad enough to cover more than one stone and more than two birds. How does it relate to what Swinburne and Stump have to say? Very simply, they are both saying that Yahweh was justified in using the Israelites as the means to achieve genocide because doing so allowed Yahweh to achieve another morally justifiable goal.

In response to Stump and Swinburne, I’d say it’s very much an open question as to whether (1*) is a sound principle of moral rationality. After all, it effectively introduces an expediency exception to (1) and expediency is typically frowned upon in the assessment of moral action. Still, being charitable, I can imagine some expediency exception playing a role in our moral assessment of physical, time-bound agents like ourselves. I cannot, however, see how a similar exception would be open to an omnipotent, omnipresent being like God.


3. Morriston’s Counterargument
Morriston doesn’t engage in the kind of formal reconstruction that I just attempted here. Instead, he opts for a different attack on Swinburne and Stump: he argues that even if the genocidal warfare conveyed to the Israelites the seriousness of God’s purpose and authority, it would still have had further morally disturbing consequences, ones which would outweigh the value of the purposes just mentioned. It would simply reinforce the cruelty and barbarity that was already common among the cultures of that era; it would leave the Israelites desensitised to their violence and lacking in empathy for their fellow human beings.

Stump, ironically, turns this point on its head. She says that because cruelty and barbarism were common at the time, Yahweh’s use of it could not have made the Israelites morally worse than they already were. Thus, there was no moral corruption. But this seems weird. For one thing, it calls into question Stump’s original justification: if genocide is just “business as usual” for the Israelites, how could God hope to convey the seriousness of his authority to them through its use? For another thing, it calls into question our expectations of the divine: surely we would expect those with God on their side to be morally superior in their behaviour?

Stump responds by saying that God is trying to make the Israelites morally superior: he is trying to unite them with himself. He does so partly by giving them a divinely ordained mission and partly by giving their actions a divine mandate. But, as Stump notes, the moral progress is bumpy, to say the least. Even after the genocides, the Israelites fall into the patterns of behaviour for which the Amalekites and Canaanites were condemned. This is understandable, Stump argues: it allows the Israelites to learn from their own failings, to learn what will not work when trying to make a just society.

Morriston summarises Stump’s argument as follows:

Israel needed to practice extreme violence in order to learn that such violence will not make it a ‘good and just and loving people’ fit for union with God

Morriston thinks this does nothing to justify God’s command of genocide. All it says is that the Israelites needed to engage in violence in order to learn from their mistakes. But why did God need to command such violence? It’s not as though the Israelites were particularly squeamish about using violence anyway (as Stump herself acknowledges when she cites many examples of violence on the part of the Israelites that came without divine backing).

Once again we are left looking for a morally justifiable basis for the command for genocide.

There’s one more strategy open to the Christian who is eager to respond to these biblical passages. We’ll consider that the next day.