Special Issues by Cheryl Chen
Religions 2021, 12(4), 266., 2021
According to the free will defense, God cannot create a world with free creatures, and hence a wo... more According to the free will defense, God cannot create a world with free creatures, and hence a world with moral goodness, without allowing for the possibility of evil. David Lewis points out that any free will defense must address the “playpen problem”: why didn’t God allow creatures the freedom required for moral goodness, while intervening to ensure that all evil-doing is victimless? More recently, James Sterba has revived the playpen problem by arguing that an omnipotent and benevolent God would have intervened to prevent significant and especially horrendous evil. I argue that it is possible, at least, that such divine intervention would have backfired, and that any attempt to create a world that is morally better than this one would have resulted in a world that is morally worse. I conclude that the atheologian should instead attack the free will defense at its roots: either by denying that the predetermination of our actions is incompatible with our freely per-forming them, or by denying that the actual world—a world with both moral good and evil—is more valuable than a world without any freedom at all.
Papers by Cheryl Chen
Religions, 2021
According to the free will defense, God cannot create a world with free creatures, and hence a wo... more According to the free will defense, God cannot create a world with free creatures, and hence a world with moral goodness, without allowing for the possibility of evil. David Lewis points out that any free will defense must address the “playpen problem”: why didn’t God allow creatures the freedom required for moral goodness, while intervening to ensure that all evil-doing is victimless? More recently, James Sterba has revived the playpen problem by arguing that an omnipotent and benevolent God would have intervened to prevent significant and especially horrendous evil. I argue that it is possible, at least, that such divine intervention would have backfired, and that any attempt to create a world that is morally better than this one would have resulted in a world that is morally worse. I conclude that the atheologian should instead attack the free will defense at its roots: either by denying that the predetermination of our actions is incompatible with our freely per-forming them, or...
Larreta’s paper is concerned with what Norman Malcolm calls the “External Argument” concerning th... more Larreta’s paper is concerned with what Norman Malcolm calls the “External Argument” concerning the problem of other minds.1 This argument is extrapolated from sections 302 and 350 of Wittgenstein’s Investigations. The target of the External Argument, as I understand it, is the Argument from Analogy.2 According to the Argument from Analogy, I find correlations in my own case between certain mental states and certain kinds of bodily behavior. Then when I find similar kinds of behavior in other people, I have reason to conclude that their behavior is caused by similar kinds of mental states. For example, I have good reason to believe that other people feel pain because they behave the way I do when I feel pain. The core of the Argument from Analogy is the idea that I first learn what a sensation like pain is from my own case, and then I go on to ascribe pain to other people by supposing that they feel the same thing that I feel. According to the External Argument, if I were to learn wh...
Uploads
Special Issues by Cheryl Chen
Papers by Cheryl Chen