“Who Am I?” Project 8 - Moderate Divine Creation: Part II

In this post, I want to consider the ethical problems that come with the idea of essences (at least with non-minimalist versions of essences).  The most general problem has to do with the normative dimension of essences which define what something should be.

The normative side of essences has traditionally been used to introduce the ideas of perfection and imperfection.  However, there are strong reasons to think that the idea of perfection when applied to anything other than God makes no sense (my thinking on this topic is influenced by the writings of the philosopher Charles Hartshorne).  In short, perfection speaks to the so-called “omni” characteristics of God (some of which require significant adjustment from traditional understandings).  Imperfection would then mean less than any of these omni qualities (imperfect knowledge, imperfect presence, etc).  When speaking of the omni qualities, one can clearly explain the difference between perfect and imperfect, but this ability vanishes when we start to talk about a perfect horse, or a perfect person, or a perfect Joe Pettit.

If the idea of the perfection of non-divine essences is incoherent, then so is the idea of any better and worse realization of an essence.  This is an extraordinarily important insight.  If the idea of a perfect Joe Pettit makes no sense, then the idea of a better Joe Pettit, qua Joe Pettit, makes no sense either.  I can always do better than I currently am, I can better live in accordance with moral truth, but not in such a way that I somehow better realize what it means to be Joe Pettit.  This means that I can neither succeed nor fail at being Joe Pettit.  I can do better and worse things, but those actions say nothing about being Joe Pettit.

When trying to answer the question “Who Am I?” reaching the conclusion that the traditional ways of defining one’s identity in terms of essences cannot be normatively coherent is transformative when thinking about ourselves.  Suddenly, I am the creator of my identity.  I have not been preformed in the mind of God.

The idea that we all have essential identities has other ethical problems.  No doubt the most historically significant problem is the insistence on a hierarchy of essences, a great normative “chain of being” that identifies more important things and less important things.  Yet, there can be no hierarchy if there are no essences to which different values can be given.  The idea of a hierarchy of essences, however, has been crucial to cultures throughout history in their efforts to justify social hierarchies.  Thus, men are ranked higher than women, lighter skinned people are ranked higher than darker skinned people, etc.  A commitment to the idea of essences allows cultures to read their normative biases back into the fabric of reality.  That is a powerful rhetorical move, but the move is taken away if essences do not exist.

I know many people who think God has a plan for them; not a general plan for all people, but a specific plan just for them.  I find this idea depressing and terrifying.  It is depressing because it constrains the ways a person should enjoy being alive.  It’s like giving someone in a restaurant a menu but then telling them what they should order.  Isn’t the whole point of a menu the ability to decide for oneself what to order?  If God thinks I am supposed to be a lawyer, then I cannot be a stay-at-home parent, or a full-time musician, or a fly-fishing guide.  Doing anything other than being a lawyer would go against God’s will for me and so would in some important way be wrong.

The notion that God has a plan just for me is terrifying because I would constantly worry whether or not I am currently on the path that God intends for me.  Some suggest that I would know if I am on the right path if things are working out and I am on the wrong path if they are not.  However, this position downplays the influence my own actions, especially my failures, can have on my ability to pursue a path in life, as well as the influence of others who may unjustly block my ability to follow a path.  Success and failure by themselves cannot reveal what I am supposed to be.  I am then left constantly to wonder whether I have chosen the right path with no real ability to know the answer.  The solution that is neither depressing nor terrifying is to deny that there is any path that I should follow in the first place.

I sometimes hear people insist that God does not allow us to stray far from the path we are supposed to be on and so we can be relatively confident that we are always at least somewhere close to the right path.  This gets us back to maximalist thinking in two ways.  First, our freedom seems to be more like that of a dog on a leash.  We can sniff here and there, but we cannot go very far.  That does not seem like freedom to me.  Second, this position is fatalistic, both in the sense that wherever I end up in life is somehow where I was supposed to be all along and in the sense that there can be neither real failure nor true injustice in such a world.  Somehow, everything ends up being more or less what God wants it to be.  If the world as it is today bears any resemblance to what God wants it to be, then I want to have nothing to do with God.  There is just too much injustice.  Happily, I do not think this way, either about the world or about God.

I want to close with one important implication of the denial of individual essences.  If there is no essence of Joe Pettit, then Joe Pettit could not have been terminated, eliminated, murdered, or whatever verb you choose to make me the object of if my mother had decided to have an abortion rather than carry me to term.  I cannot be the object of any verb if I do not exist.  As I will discuss much later when I get to the topic of consciousness, I do not think I exist uniquely as an I, as a person, until I am conscious.  Thus, I do not think abortions terminate a person and should not be characterized as such for legal purposes.  However, I do think the mother is a person and she should be able to decide whether to continue carrying the developing life inside her.  I realized that this is a complicated issue, but I wanted to point out this important implication here because of its connection to the ideas of moderate divine creation and personal essences.