mackie on neoplatonism's 'replacement for god

Mackie on Neoplatonism's 'Replacement for God'Author(s): John LeslieSource: Religious Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3/4 (Sep. - Dec., 1986), pp. 325-342Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20006292 .

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Rel. Stud. 22, pp. 325-342

JOHN LESLIE University of Guelph

MACKIE ON NEOPLATONISM'S

'REPLACEMENT FOR GOD'

I. NEOPLATONISM AS BELIEF IN CREATIVE ETHICAL

REQUIREMENT S

David Hume's greatness depends in large part on how his writings hint at beautiful and coherent theories which are recognizably Humean despite their divergences from the untidy originals. Now, perhaps the clearest vision of a contradiction-free Platonic Form of Hume was had by J. L. Mackie; he described it in such masterpieces as The Cement of the Universe, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong,1 and The Miracle of Theism.2 How successful is this last in its attack on theism? I shall discuss Mackie's case against theism of a Platonic or Neoplatonic type which replaces 'God as a person or mind or spirit' by a more abstract Creative Force or Principle. Mackie sees in it a 'a formidable rival' to any theism treating of a divine being; 'if you demand an ultimate explanation, then this may well be a better one' (MT, 234-5). But, his chapter thirteen contends, it fares badly in competition with an atheistic, naturalistic approach.

His efforts to prove the point concentrate on a defence of Neoplatonism by my Value and Existence.3 I shall argue that the efforts fail. Yet students of Hume's Abstract will recognize in this paper a distinctly Humean style of reaction to my book.

The book develops the theme, expressed in Plato's Republic,4 that The Good, though world-creating and world-governing, is itself not a being but 'on the far side of being'. Made popular by Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius, this theme has immensely influenced Christian doctrine, particularly among the Greek Orthodox but also among Catholics and Protestants. Such formulas as that God 'is not a being but the Ground of Being' are commonplace. Still, how should we interpret them? Though not a Christian, I suggest that they make excellent sense if they say 'that the universe exists because it ought to', a position I call 'extreme axiarchism '.5 Mackie

1 Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, I977; henceforward Ethics. 2 Henceforward MT (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I982). 3 Oxford: Basil Blackwell, I979; henceforward VE. Mackie also refers to my 'Efforts to Explain All

Existence', Mind LXXXVII, No. 346 (April I978), I8I-94, and 'The World's Necessary Existence', International Journalfor Philosophy of Religion XI, 4 (October 1980), 207-23. 4 Book VI, 509.

5 VE, pp. I and 6. Compare the title of my paper in American Philosophical Quarterly vII, 4 (October I970), 286-98: 'The Theory that the World Exists Because it Should'.



326 JOHN LESLIE

explains: 'This theory plainly presupposes the objectivity of value. It also interprets this value or goodness as ethical requiredness, or ought-to-be-ness.

To say that something is good (in some respect) is to say that it is ethically required that it should be as it is. But, further, this theory proposes that this ethical feature also in another sense requires or necessitates existence, a sense related to that in which a cause requires or necessitates the existence of its effect'. And he comments: 'This notion, that the mere ethical need for something could on its own call that item into existence, without the operation of any person, is, no doubt, initially strange. Yet in it lies also the greatest strength of extreme axiarchism. For Leslie argues that it offers the only possible answer to the question " Why is there anything at all? ".' Any appeal to a deity creating things by acts of will 'invites the reply, "But then why is there a god with this extraordinary power?".' In contrast, 'once we allow the (admittedly difficult) notion that something's value, its ethical requiredness, might both give rise to and explain its existence, we have a possible answer to this ultimate question. The world's being good, its fulfilling of an ethical requirement, might be an ultimate, necessary, fact which does not itself call for any further explanation' (MT, 23I-2). (To go on asking for an explanation would, I maintain, be like wanting to be shown a hidden

magnet or a magic spell or something equally unhelpful. When the existence of a world is required in a way that is absolute, rather than relative to human

caprice, then there remains no clear need to show why it exists. One might equally well ask why it would not exist. To dismiss the requirement as merely ethical only begs the question against Neoplatonism, possibly because of a failure to see that the Neoplatonist too can accept a sense in which ethical

requirements 'as such' certainly are never creative, just as, in a sense, cows

'as such' are female but not brown.1) Mackie makes three concessions to my position. First: ethical requiredness,

far from being a mere Leslian invention, is well entrenched in ordinary

thought. 'In calling something good we do commonly imply that it is

intrinsically and objectively required or marked out for existence, irrespective of whether any person, human or divine, or any group of persons, requires

or demands or prescribes or admires it' (MT, 238). Second: 'I do not believe

that such a concept is incoherent: I can find no actual contradiction implicit

within it. '2 Third: granted that I make 'no claim that we can know with

a priori certainty that ethical requiredness is creatively effective', my

correctness is at least a possibility. 'There is some analogy between an ethical

requirement and a creative requirement - for example, in their like

directedness towards existence - which is enough to give some initial

plausibility to the suggestion that they go together. And certainly it would be a gross error to argue a priori on the opposite side, that merely because

ethical requirement and creative requirement are conceptually or logically

1 VE, pp. 19-20, 57-65, 8o. 2 MT, p. 238; cf. Ethics, pp. 20-5.



NEOPLATONISM S 'REPLACEMENT FOR GOD 327

distinct there cannot be a real, and perhaps necessary, connection between

them'; 'Leslie is right in resisting the prejudice that it can be known a priori to be impossible' (233, 237).

These are major concessions; they contrast markedly with Mackie's earlier blunt dismissal of any Ontological Argument endeavouring to ground a

divine person's existence on his mere definition. Further, though noting my own reluctant concession to the idea of God-as-a-person, namely, that such

a person might conceivably himself be a product of Creative Value, then creating other things by bare volitions of the kind imagined by R. G. Swinburne, Mackie sees this as involving 'an embarrassingly improbable addition to the theory', a pointless departure from the Grand Simplicity of the suggestion that Value is itself able to create without the aid of any being's 'directly efficacious will' (235). And yet, having said so much in its favour,

Mackie firmly rejects Platonic theism/Neoplatonism/extreme axiarchism/ the Leslian cosmogony. How adequate are his reasons?

II. NO EVIDENCE OF VALUE S CREATIVE POWER?

Let us begin with Mackie's claim that my theory is 'a pure, ungrounded speculation', without any 'empirical basis'. There being no scrap of actual evidence in its favour, it must be 'modelled upon a misunderstanding of certain natural processes' in which biological structures serve purposes or in which organisms strive to fulfil aims. Such matters are 'superficially teleological' but 'can be shown to rest entirely on processes of efficient causation';

compare the case of homing rockets. My explanation of the world is thus

'in the same position as Swinburne's personal explanation' (237). 'We ordinarily have an illusion of the literally immediate fulfilment of our own intentions', for instance when our arms rise in response to our wills; Swinburne develops out of this 'a theory of a god's bare thought and intention first creating matter out of nothing, then instituting causal laws' (I3I-2); and I must be in the same deplorable boat.

But I am seemingly not in that boat. (i) For a start, chapter one of Value

and Existence denies that ordinary cases of teleological explanation can help the extreme axiarchist or Neoplatonist. Looking at 'The plague germs developed this coating in order to foil the body's defenses', I comment that this 'could scarcely suggest the effectiveness of ethical requirements, even if it didn't just do duty for some long neoDarwinian story'. Again, 'Jones put iodine in the stew because he believed iodine to be poisonous' is, I say, far from being 'a clear demonstration of Value's power'; and I further say of 'mechanism's story of how motivation operates' that it is 'a story I think

correct' (VE, 25). (2) Next, Mackie seems to be operating with too crude an idea of what actual evidence would need to be like. As I have since

protested, 'there is actual evidence for a theory when (a) it is not logical nonsense and (b) it is simple and (c) it explains something crying out to be



328 JOHN LESLIE

explained and not explained simply by other theories ' ;1 ' evidencefor something is whatever causes a puzzlement which the existence of that something would reduce or remove.'2 Now, I do try to point to actual evidence (thus understood) of

Value's creative power. I find it in the existence of any world at all, and in how the world obeys any discoverable laws, and in how its laws are such as lead to the existence of life and consciousness. Chapters six, seven and eight

of Value and Existence argue that these three affairs can reasonably be viewed as puzzles. Possibly they do not 'cry out' to be thus viewed, and in that case the claim that they are evidence of something metaphysically dramatic will be somewhat weakened; but it could retain considerable strength. If Existence, Causation, Life, can well seem puzzling, and if extreme axi archism's bid to remove our puzzlement has the Grand Simplicity which

Mackie earlier praised, then to describe me as involved in 'pure ungrounded speculation' without any 'empirical basis' must be severely question begging.

So: has Mackie shown that our world's sheer existence, and its obedience to discoverable causal laws, and the fact that these laws are such as to generate life and consciousness, cannot reasonably be looked on as puzzling?

With respect to the sheer existence, Mackie tells us that we can conceive an uncaused beginning-to-be of any object, even the entire universe; alternatively, the Big Bang may not have been 'an absolute beginning' and the universe may have existed eternally (89, 94). But I would reply that it could at least be reasonable to see a sudden beginning, or even eternal existence, as in need of explanation, even if the need could not be established very firmly;' and Mackie himself often sounds sympathetic towards this.

For he concedes that the principle that there is no uncaused beginning of existence 'has some plausibility, in that it is constantly confirmed in our experience (and also used, reasonably, in interpreting our experience)' (89). And further, he finds extreme axiarchism's 'greatest strength' in its logical ability to account for all existence, even eternal existence; this logical ability

may make it more respectable to ask why there is some world rather than

none (232-3)

Next, has Mackie shown that the world's causal orderlinesss cannot reasonably be looked on as puzzling? He comments that 'it is hard to see how

there could be things at all without their having some regular ways of

working', and that while 'there could have been less regularity and more

sheer randomness than there seems to be' there is still 'no good reason to

take one of these to be, in itself and a priori, more likely than the other' ( I 48).

But fairly strong replies are available here (and fair strength, remember, is

1 78 of'Observership in Cosmology: the Anthropic Principle', Mind XCII, 368 (October I983),

573-9 2 Page I I5 of 'The Scientific Weight of Anthropic and Teleological Principles', pp. i i I-9 of Current

Issues in Teleology, N. Rescher (ed.) (Lanham and London: University Press of America, I986). 3 VE, pp. I32-3, and 'Efforts to Explain All Existence', cited earlier, i86-7.



NEOPLATONISM S REPLACEMENT FOR GOD 329

all one needs for rebutting charges of' pure, ungrounded speculation') . Thus, (i) we can imagine things which exist unchangingly, things having no ways

of working whatever, let alone regular ways of working. (ii) Again, space-time might have been filled by point-events which, precisely because they lacked any causal links with one another, could not be counted as events in the histories of things. To point to Thinghood as what orders point-events into such histories can look like proposing a virtus dormitiva as fons et origo of opium's soporificity. (iii) Again, I could ask whether men, on first discovering that figures bounded by three straight lines had angles totalling one hundred and eighty degrees, could reasonably have commented, 'That's just how these objects, straight lines, regularly do behave when they join in groups

of three to enclose areas.' Any explanations for causal regularities would have to be rather different from explanations of the regularities found in geometry; yet this would not imply that any comparisons between the two kinds of case lacked all force, so that the most basic regularities of physics could comfortably be treated as having no explanations whatever.' Recall the seeming absurdity which that other noted Humean, A. J. Ayer, embraces

when denying any need to explain regularities as such. Ayer asks whether in card-guessing experiments we should be impressed by any mere fact that someone regularly scored better than chance. He answers, 'The only thing remarkable about the subject who is credited with extrasensory perception is that he is consistently rather better at guessing cards than the ordinary run of people; the fact that he also does "better than chance " in itself proves nothing.' As I commented, 'were men always correct in card guesses then on Ayer's reasoning this would be no cause for surprise' ;2 a quick 'That's just how men are' would cover the case. But would it? (iv) Again, causal necessities concern not only what regularly happens but also what would have happened in other circumstances. The match, for instance, necessarily would have lighted, had it been dry. Now, some have been unpersuaded by Mackie's efforts3 to remove all metaphysical sting from this by translating

'The match would have lighted, if dry' into something like 'The truth, Dry matches regularly light when struck, when combined with the falsehood, The match was dry, yields the further falsehood, The match lighted when struck'; they feel the translation fails precisely because of not capturing the boldness of the original. (v) Again, I need not imagine that causal orderliness is a priori more likely than disorderliness. For, first, a constant need to explain such orderliness is fairly persuasively argued for by Experience (a posteriori).

And second, I argue (of course - but it is easily overlooked) not for the

1 VE, p. I07, and 'Does Causal Regularity Defy Chance?', Idealistic Studies III, 3 (September I973),

277-84. 2 Ayer, Metaphysics and Common Sense (San Francisco: Freeman Cooper, I970), p. Iog; Leslie, VE, p.

I '3. 3 First found in 'Counterfactuals and Causal Laws', in Analytical Philosophy, R. J. Butler (ed.)

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, i962), pp. 66-8o.



330 JOHN LESLIE

unlikelihood of all this smoke, so to speak, but only for that of smoke without fire. I am therefore not using Pure Reason to decide what the universe is likely to contain.

Next: what about the world's life-generating character? We must dis regard Mackie's remark of chapter eight (I 42) that 'if you explain the order in the natural world by a divine plan, you still have to explain the order in

the divine mind', since Neoplatonism is not arguing for God-as-a-supremely intelligent-Designer. (It is not as though creating a highly complex universe

would tax the mind of my very simple God. This God-or replacementfor God if we accept Mackie's strangely confident account of how the history of theology ought to be read - is the creative ethical requiredness of the universe, and there just is no mind here to be taxed.) We are then left with Mackie's quick argument that 'though some small variation from the actual initial materials and constants would, perhaps, eliminate the possibility of life's having developed as it did, we really have no idea of what other interesting possibilities might have been latent within others of the endless realm of possible initial conditions. We are not in a position, therefore, to regard the actual initial materials and constants as a uniquely fruitful set, and as specially calling for further explanation on that account' (I4I). How successful is this against my chapter seven1 which refers, for instance, to the conclusion of Collins and Hawking that only a tiny set of initial conditions would have allowed the life-containing galaxies to form?

The conclusion is in fact more striking than that chapter reveals. It is that a change in the early cosmic expansion rate by as little as one part in a million

million would have led to a universe which recollapsed too quickly or else

flew to bits too fast for life to evolve. In subsequent papers2 I have drawn

attention to many other nearly equally startling claims which now swell the cosmological literature: for instance, that all the richness of chemistry (and hence of biochemistry) depends on the neutron's having a mass exceeding that of the proton by no more than one part in a thousand. A currently

popular attitude is that there must exist billions of universes, i.e., gigantic,

largely or entirely separate causal systems, with expansion speeds, force strengths, particle masses, photon to baryon ratios, and so on, varying from

universe to universe until sometime and somewhere life-generating conditions prevail. But an at least equally attractive explanation could be provided by

the God hypothesis, I suggest, so long as God was not described as an

inexplicably existing, inexplicably powerful and intelligent Person. The believer in God need not tackle the impossible task of showing that our

See also my 'God and Scientific Verifiability', Philosophy LIII, 203 (January I978), 7I-9. 2 'Anthropic Principle, World Ensemble, Design', American Philosophical Quarterly XIX, 2 (April I982),

I41-5 I, with some misprints corrected in XIX, 4;' Observership in Cosmology', cited earlier; 'Cosmology,

Probability and the Need to Explain Life', in Scientific Explanation and Understanding, N. Rescher (ed.)

(Lanham and London: University Press of America, I983), pp. 53-82; 'Modern Cosmology and the

Creation of Life', pp. 9I-I20 of Evolution and Creation, E. McMullin (ed.) (Notre Dame: University of

Notre Dame Press, I985); 'The Scientific Weight of Anthropic and Teleological Principles', cited earlier.



NEOPLATONISM 'S REPLACEMENTFOR GOD 33I

universe's initial conditions were 'uniquely fruitful' among possibilities. He need show only that slight changes in these conditions would (very plausibly) have led to lifelessness. (A cherry painted on a wall is hit by a dart; does

this suggest dart-throwing expertise? Well, suppose the cherry is surrounded by a largish area devoid of cherries and of other equally interesting

objects - and devoid also of other darts. Expertise can then be surmised. The

fact, if it is one, that distant areas of the wall are thick with cherries, is

irrelevant. And similarly it would be irrelevant to observe that though the local area of cosmological possibilities - the area covering universes with slightly different expansion rates, for instance - was seemingly lacking in life-generating characteristics, other areas of the 'endless realm' of possi bilities might be well supplied with them.1)

It is worth adding that if Mackie's words about 'other interesting possibilities' invite the reading that possibilities other than that of life might be equally interesting, then this is merely unfortunate. For what makes our universe's life-generating nature not just interesting, but relevantly interest ing for people asking whether they should believe in God, as its association

with explicability. We can supposedly see a possible reason why the universe is life-containing, if we reflect that only life-containing universes could be ethically required. Winning a lottery can be exciting to the winner, but the excuse for treating it as specially calling for explanation arrives only when some simple explanation heaves in sight: for example, that his betrothed

works at lottery company headquarters. One should add also that explanations for the three affairs I find puzzling

are not as common as beetles. Were there a thousand theories all able to explain in a simple way why there exists any universe at all, why events fall into orderly sequences, and why those sequences are of kinds able to generate life, then certainly Neoplatonism would be wildest speculation. But in fact it is far from clear that there are any non-Neoplatonist ways in which the combination of these three affairs could be explained at all, let alone explained simply. It might turn out that the only viable alternative to some position such as mine was the one Mackie adopts, viz. of saying that these affairs are brute facts, entirely without explanation.

III. INTRINSIC ETHICAL REQUIREDNESS: TOO QUEER?

Mackie also attacks 'the assumption that there are objectively prescriptive values', alias 'objective ought-to-be-ness'. 'This assumption,' he says flatly, 'is false' - not because it is incoherent ('I can find no actual contradiction') but because the concept concerned 'is a very strange concept'. 'We should hesitate to postulate that this strange concept has any real instantiations' since our inclination to use it can be explained 'in a manner that Hume has

1 Cf. page 143 of 'Anthropic Principle, World Ensemble, Design'.



332 JOHN LESLIE

indicated'. Evaluative thinking 'involves systems of attitudes developed particularly by interactions between people in societies, and the concept of intrinsic requiredness results from ... an abstraction of the requiring from the persons ... that really do the requiring'. This is 'much more acceptable than the rival view that things or states of affairs actually have such objective requiredness', a requiredness 'that we are in some unexplained way able to detect'. Hence 'we must reject both the concept of objectively prescriptive value and, afortiori, the suggestion that such value is creative' (237-9) .

I could start my counterattack by observing that though I believe in value which is 'objective' in the sense that it really is there in the world, I maintain that it is not straightforwardly detectable (and in that sense 'objective'); our so-called detection of value is simply detection of qualities believed by us to confer value. It may be our good fortune to be correct in our beliefs, in which case, of course, we correctly identify where value lies; but talk of our detecting value can give a very wrong impression. But how, then, do we come to believe as we do? My answer is virtually identical to Mackie's. Thus, chapter two of Value and Existence asks (40), 'Why do I believe that pleasures and other such verifiables have [ethical] importance?'. The answer, I say, 'lies in instincts, parental training, friends and so on'. I join Mackie in thinking that social pressures requiring certain behaviour are often internalized so that acts

which parents, friends, etc., require of one, come to be performed with feelings of virtue. We develop firm convictions that various kinds of deeds are in themselves worth doing. But I think it wrong to postulate some moral searchlight, God-given or otherwise, in which we can place firm trust. I look on G. E. Moore and H. Sidgwick as confusing a sensible belief, that various

things really do have ought-to-be-ness and ought-not-to-be-ness, with an incorrect notion that we can know for sure which those things are. I reject the supposed division of all ethical systems into the 'cognitivist' ones holding that goodness is straightforwardly knowable and those 'non-cognitivist' ones

which classify ethical judgements as expressions of emotion or universalizable commands or prescriptions. Believing firmly that it really is in itself wrong to burn babies alive for fun, I think it monstrous to imagine that I would have a right to believe it only if some dictionary definition, some scientific experiment, some divinely granted faculty, could make it knowable that burning them was wrong. If people want to burn them I will not accept their

argument that inability to prove any oughts itselfproves that I ought to tolerate such behaviour.'

All this suggests that talk of 'knowing' right and wrong could well be abandoned unless intended simply as a sign that one was firmly convinced after full inquiry into the empirical facts, that is, into precisely what it was which was being classified as right or wrong. (On that interpretation, even

y VE, p. 37: 'That ethical certainty is never possible - A fine reason, would you say, for calling it

ethically certain that you had no right to interfere?'



NEOPLATONISM 'S 'REPLACEMENT FOR GOD 333

I 'know' the moral awfulness of baby-burning. Compare 'knowing' that Induction will be a useful guide to the future.)

Perhaps, though, one should not protest much about Mackie's effort to thrust me into the Intuitionist mausoleum of Moore and Sidgwick; for

Mackie's grounds for rejecting objective value concern more than any 'unexplained way' in which we are 'able to detect' it. His Ethics expounds

an 'argument from queerness', saying it has a 'metaphysical' aspect in addition to its 'epistemological' one; 'objective values would be utterly different from anything else in the universe' (38). Intrinsic goodness would, as Moore insisted, not be part of the constitution of whatever had it; it

would instead be consequential or supervenient on natural qualities, the supervenience being not one of' entailment, a logical or semantic necessity,' but something utterly mysterious. The goodness would be, perhaps, a property belonging to other properties; 'but,' asks Mackie, 'what is this belonging?' (41). And my answer fails to satisfy him. 'Leslie's ontology,' he explains, is that 'some relations are fully secondary to the related terms. That one box is able to fit inside another does not depend upon anything beyond the intrinsic characteristics of the two boxes, and the same is true of relations of comparative similarity between, for example, colours.' And ethical requiredness, on my account of it, also involves this kind of relation; its presence is thus 'fully secondary to the characteristics of whatever has it'.

When a state of mind is worth experiencing for its own sake, it is self-justifying, ethically self-requiring. The relation of ethical requirement is here present 'synthetically but necessarily', as I suppose to be the case also with other secondarily real relations. But to Mackie this is 'not very persuasive.

Objective value seems very different from the other examples of secondary relations, which are less obviously synthetic' (MT, 238-9).

In reply, I could begin by admitting that ethical requiredness might seem rather queer; however, isn't the universe rather a queer affair? As I write in chapter thirteen of Value and Existence (205), 'It could be gratifying to imagine that some of our acts have a requiredness neither logical nor causal, nor just a matter of what custom demands,' yet 'guaranteeing the dignity of our decision-making can seem no part of the world's plan' - at least, not until we see 'that ethical requirements may be behind the very fact that there is a world'. Intrinsic requiredness can then appear to fit into the scheme of things 'like the centre of a crossword'. Yet I add that I doubt whether the reality which is at stake is 'exotic enough to necessitate such manoeuvres', for I look on it as really quite simple. The mental state of a happy child, for instance, just is (or else just is not) self-justifying, ethically self-requiring; its intrinsic character either simply does or simply doesn't make such a state's existence ethically demanded. There is no complex mechanism which renders it demanded or otherwise, over and above the complex way in which its parts make it the whole which it is. Now, Mackie himself sees it as at least



334 JOHN LESLIE

logically possible for various mental states to have intrinsic ethical requiredness. Does he then hold that they merely chance never to have it? Possible support for this reading of him comes from his suggestion that 'a god whose power was limited only by logical, linguistic constraints' could 'make there to be, or not to be, such and such relations of supervenience'; 'creation of supervenient value' could proceed arbitrarily. Yet surely this is

as preposterous as a god creating obligations by mere decree, which Mackie says 'has been rejected, with good reason, by Plato'.1 A far more attractive tale would be that supervenient value, though describable without logical contradiction, was no more able to appear in the world than, say, a relation of close colour similarity linking red and yellow. It woulcd be absent not by chance but because it had to be. Things would be such that they were not self-justifying, ethically self-requiring. But this tale would involve synthetic necessities quite as much (or as little) mysterious as the ones in which I believe.

A principle which here makes itself felt is that believing in something's presence may be little or no more daring than believing in its absence, when the something is very simple. Only the fool believes in an arbitrarily imagined animal with seven tufted tails with lots of lovely pink and purple spots; but to suppose that the mental state of a happy child just is in itself good, appears no more bold than supposing, with Mackie, that it just is not. (And similarly, I argue, in the case of creation: 'Creative power or, for that matter, creative inefectiveness, would be a single dye added to the thread of ethical require

ment' (VE, 74). If such power were absent, it would not merely chance to be absent. Its absence would be just as much a matter of synthetic necessity

as would its presence; the affair would be absolutely and eternally fixed in the one way or in the other. And since neither way in which we might suppose

it to be fixed would be any more complex than the other, each would be as

acceptable a priori.) Mackie's comment that 'objective value seems very different from the

other examples of secondary relations, which are less obviously synthetic,' is unpersuasive. For the issue is not whether it is obvious that, say, colour similarities are synthetically necessary - necessary in an absolute way, but

one not dependent on the meanings of words. It is instead whether

synthetically necessary is what they actually are. Now, there are powerful

grounds for thinking them so. If three colours are appropriately named red' reddish-yellow', 'yellow', it certainly follows that the first is more like

the second than like the third; but I argue (3I-2) that it is the differing

degrees of similarity which really come first, making appropriate the

descriptions on which logic can then get to work. The more-near-to-red-ness

of a colour, when compared with yellow, is unlike the more-marriedness of

wives compared with spinsters. It is what makes orange rightly describable as 1 Quotations all from MT, p. II5.




'reddish-yellow'. Similarly, the fact that one box is half as long as another is what makes it possible to find some unit of length x such that the one can be described as measuring x and the other 2X.

It may however be a mistake to present all this as a fight over syntheticity. As Mackie notes, any Argument from Queerness could be 'given an unfair start' if considered in technical ways, with references to supervenient qualities and the like. 'Is it equally forceful,' he asks, 'if applied to... "'unjust ", "'rotten'", "'disgraceful ", "'mean "?' He answers that considering the issue in these more ordinary terms obscures it because 'the objective prescriptivity, the element a claim for whose authority is embedded in ordinary language,' can then 'pass unnoticed' as our feelings become aroused, or our sense of what are accepted standards, etcetera (Ethics, 4I-2). But I could retort that describing concrete cases with ordinary words is just what is needed to bring matters into sharp focus. Discussing synthetic necessities and supervenience, one is apt to overlook the vigour of Mackie's claim that there really is nothing in itself wrong in burning a baby alive. For that, as Mackie has the honesty to recognize, is the sort of thing involved in saying that there is nothing 'in the fabric of the world' that 'backs up and validates the subjective concern which people have' about such affairs as baby-burning (22), or again, in maintaining that whereas conscience, taken at its face value, asserts that 'there is a to-be-done-ness or a not-to be-done-ness' involved in some action, 'in that kind of action in itself,' it is none the less 'overwhelmingly plausible' to view this as resulting from 'mere introjection into each individual of demands that come from other

people' (MT, 104-5). Mackie is of course far too strong a philosopher to make the bald assertion

that no act is ever right or wrong. Yet he says that statements about what is to be done or refrained from 'are not capable of being simply true' (MT,

206); he rejects all notion that 'a situation would have a demand for such and such an action somehow built into it'; he holds 'that although most people in making moral judgements implicitly claim to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false'; 'notions of

what is intrinsically fitting or required by the nature of things' are merely 'very natural errors'.' Neither does he pretend to be declaring merely that likes and dislikes are ethically important; for the believer in objective value could of course declare this too, perhaps even going on to say that the only thing having such value in a positive form was the satisfaction of a desire,

while the only thing of negative value was a dissatisfaction. Rather, the firmest basis Mackie can find for morality is that without it things will often 'go very badly' in 'the natural, non-moral sense that human wants, needs and interests are likely to be frustrated' ;2 'the inventing of moral values' is 'reasonable' in that only thereby can we 'live together without destroying

1 Quotations from Ethics, pp. 40, 35, 82. 2 Ethics, pp. 107-8; my italics.



336 JOHN LESLIE

one another' (MT, 247). But his talk of wants and needs is not itself ethically loaded, as when we label 'really wanted or needed' only something we consider genuinely good. It is instead straightforwardly descriptive of what

men happen to desire or of what they will need if they are to escape a destruction which would not in itself be bad. They may be subjectively concerned to avoid it, but there is, remember, nothing to 'back up and validate' their concern.

It is tempting to reject this ethical theory as too horridly unable to help discourage baby-burners. But this could be too quick. J. L. Mackie was thoroughly humane, strongly subjectively concerned to follow the social code he had internalized. It might seem ludicrously question-begging to condemn his position on the grounds of its not allowing for the kinds of good and bad allowed for by a competing position. He has quite a forceful point when he remarks that though 'the main tradition of European moral philosophy' has favoured objective values, and though they have also 'a firm basis in ordinary thought' and even in 'the basic, conventional meanings of moral terms', so that talk of supervenient, non-natural qualities is only 'a philosopher's reconstruction' of what is ordinarily believed, it might yet be that the universe failed to contain any such reality as that some act would be 'wrong in itself' (Ethics, 30-5).

Any success he could score by pointing out all this would, however, be limited. J. Harrison is right in arguing' that Mackie, when denying that it is simply true that baby-burning is wrong, retains little right to say that

baby-burning is wrong. You may have grounds for denying what seem to you outrageously mysterious whatnots whose existence is assumed by Ordinary Language; you may run your life to your own and other people's satisfaction even if not believing in those whatnots; but this does not add up to an excuse for continuing to use the ordinary words which on your own admission assume those whatnots to be real. (If thinking that Charles the Bald's so-called baldness was really something else then stop talking about his baldness.) The plain fact is that Mackie doesn't accept the reality of honest-to-goodness goodness. His theory may be correct, but unless it is in error there can be no genuine good (in the ordinary sense of the word) in accepting any theories about anything. And this is quite a point in my favour.

But in any case there is, as remarked earlier, no reason to concede that genuine goodness is outrageously mysterious. And in this connection be it said that my tactics when I introduced my picture of goodness as ethical requiredness2 were psychologically unfortunate. For I did so against the background of a further picture showing the universe's ethical requiredness as perhaps responsible for its existence; now, my insistence that it also might

'Mackie's Moral "Scepticism"', Philosophy LVII, 220 (April I982), 173-9I. 2 In 'The Theory that the World Exists Because it Should', cited earlier, and at the start of

'Ethically Required Existence', American Philosophical Quarterly Ix, 3 (July I972), 2I5-24.



NEOPLATONISM S REPLACEMENT FOR GOD' 337

be not responsible for its existence, since the concepts of ethical and of creatively effective requiredness are two concepts and not one, failed to remove from many a mind the impression that realities of ethical required ness would have to be weird and wonderful. My argument that even creative ethical requiredness would not be a desperately complex affair, with 'clockwork whirring, magnets pulling, magicians exerting will-power' (VE,

62), is understood by Mackie; as noted, it is what makes Mackie classify Platonic theism as 'formidable' to its non-Platonic rival; yet others persisted in asking what gave ethical requirements their alleged creative power. One of my central points - that this would amount to clamouring for 'yet further requirements which are what really supply the power', but that to speculate that these other requirements met with success rather than non-success would only raise the question, Then why might not ethical requirements themselves be successful? (6i) - was here apparently missed. But at least when discussing Ethics, I would do well to keep quiet about my sorrow at such seeming blindness to what Neoplatonism is all about, and to regret the day I dared mention that some ethical requirements might themselves act creatively. I should instead point out that the notion I think basic to Ethics, that there exist requirements which are authoritative over us but which we often disregard (as even I can acknowledge, since mine is not the bizarre theory that absolutely all ethical requirements are causally or creatively active), is also met with outside Ethics. Thus, arguments in deductive logic require in an authoritative way that certain conclusions be drawn and yet, notoriously, people often fail to draw them. And the same seems true of inductive logic.

IV. VALUE S CREATIVE POWER CONFLICTS WITH KNOWN FACTS?

Let us next examine Mackie's claim that Value has in actual fact turned out to be creatively powerless. Here he has two weak arguments, and a third

which is powerful but not overwhelming. (A) The first weak argument is that any plausible evaluative principles

would treat many features of the actual world as changeable with neither loss nor gain of value; 'creative value, it seems, would be faced with innumerable equally embarrassing choices between alternatives of which neither was better than the other' (MT, 236). It would thus be a Buridan's Ass, unable to move towards one hay bundle when another exactly as delicious was in view.

The quick answer to this is that Buridan's Ass is an ass indeed. Suppose, for argument's sake, that two alternatives had values precisely

equal. Creative Value's selection of the one instead of the other might then proceed randomly, rather in the way often thought to characterize Nature's selection among quantum-mechanical alternatives. After all, the ass which chooses starvation is not avoiding the problem of what to choose by choosing



338 JOHN LESLIE

nothing. (Note, however, my point that 'there is no logical absurdity in there existing more than a single cosmos, if "a cosmos" means a set of entities forming a complete causal system; there could be no shred of evidence against this; and axiarchism becomes an erratic fairy-tale when it fails to demand the existence of as much good as is possible' (VE, I82). This suggests that

my answer to 'Which hay bundle would be created?' could be 'Both'.) (B) Mackie's second weak argument is that I have difficulty in accounting

for 'vast tracts of space-time and material existents' since I maintain 'that only experiences, conscious states, could have intrinsic value'. To escape from the difficulty, I argued for phenomenalism, the doctrine that only conscious states have very straightforwardly real existence; but, says Mackie, pheno

menalism is unsatisfactory. 'Experiences, taken on their own, are frag mentary and disorderly; it is only by supplementing their contents that we can reach any approximation to a coherent, orderly world';1 and the sole plausible way of supplementing them is to suppose that there very straightforwardly does exist an entire universe of which the experiences are fragments.

Now, let us agree that phenomenalism is to all appearances crazy. I myself compare it to the absurd theory that the world came into existence in about 4,OOOB.C., complete with fossils (VE, I52). But why then do I defend it? It is because I see the apparent problem with phenomenalism precisely where

Mackie sees it; it concerns how the patterns of consciousness are generated. The story of sturdy common sense is that they are generated by entities which have at best only instrumental worth, worth in helping to generate worthwhile conscious states. But, I argue, it would be far tidier for Creative Value to generate those conscious states directly instead of giving straight forwardly real existence to non-conscious entities and then ensuring that they acted in such ways as to do the job. No doubt a Mackian universe, existing for no reason either of Value or of anything else, becomes more tidy when it is packed with intrinsically worthless objects which very straightforwardly exist; but my universe isn't a Mackian one.

Admittedly I still must explain why there exist patterns which are to all appearances only fragments of a greater pattern. But this I can do, I think. For a start, I believe that the patterns most worth experiencing would be ones characteristic not of disorderly dreams but of orderly universes. But further, I suggest that experiences of the entirety of any such universe pattern - ones like those of a Laplacean demon who, understanding all events at the level of atomic physics, had no need of such concepts as 'forests', men and animals', 'human curiosity', 'paintings', 'symphonies', 'love, courage and excitement' - would be of no great worth. I think that it is more

limited experiences which are specially worth having: experiences vibrant not withjust any patterns of material activity but with the patterns of activity

1 Quotations from MT, p. 236.




in brains, and presenting these latter patterns not in the kind of physiological and atomic detail which is never available to human introspection, but only in the vague outlines which made them the mental states which they were, states such as might in principle be transferred from dying brains to computers or other such non-physiological substrates. And if so, then a universe created by Value might well be one in which only such experiences had a very

straightforward reality. Now, I insist that my ethical hunches could easily be mistaken. But at least my wrongness would not simply be that of someone

who has failed to notice how odd phenomenalism's story would be, in the absence of the supporting theory of Creative Value.

(C) Paradoxically, the third, genuinely powerful argument is the one Mackie describes as quite probably less forceful than the two just considered. It is based on the Problem of Evil. Here he relies on the conclusion of his chapter nine that 'there is no plausible theodicy on offer' (MT, I76). He now says in a single sentence that, to use the terminology introduced in this earlier chapter, my argument is that there may well be no 'unabsorbed' evils when we take account of the value of lives 'that involve real choices against a background of discoverable causal regularities - whether those choices are causally determined or not, for Leslie allows for a compatibilist view of freedom' (234). Mackie regards No Unabsorbed Evils as necessary for the consistency of my position, but as only very dubiously plausible.

The single sentence is far too brief, however. (i) Thus, talk of evils as 'absorbed' suggests that I picture our world not as an often harsh compromise

hammered out by conflicting ethical requirements, but as utterly perfect, evils being dismissed as mere appearance. Yet in actual fact I condemn such

Hegelians as Bradley and Bosanquet, Taylor and McTaggart, for picturing matters in this way (VE, 97-9); their theory, I argue, allows us to 'rape and

rob and ruin, confident of doing no real harm'. To speak of the evil of a

murder as 'absorbed' by the good of having a world in which men can decide things for themselves, including whether to murder, can lead people to forget, first, that the good of free decision-making can enter into very severe conflict

with the good of having a world free of crimes, and second, that such conflict can arise only when individuals do freely decide to commit crimes, for which they then ought to be punished. (2) Again, the quick talk of choices made 'against a background of discoverable causal regularities' speeds over something crucial. Mackie had reasoned (MT, I52-3) that for a theodicist to portray pain as having a warning function 'is totally irrelevant' since it draws attention only to how something might be 'causally necessary as a means to a greater, counterbalancing, good'; now, Omnipotence would need no causal means to attain its ends. But my attitude is that ' the long progress

of causes makes the difference between life and the pettiness of hallucinatory splendours' (VE, 92), and that if we could hook up brains to computers which interacted with them in ways giving them the impression that they inhabited



340 JOHN LESLIE

a world not governed by causal laws, one in which new whims constantly suggested themselves and were just as constantly gratified, then it would be

wrong for us to do so, substituting a 'trivial', 'milk-and-water' paradise for the actual world with all its dangers.' Mackie may thus be wrong in thinking that 'the only solution to the problem of evil that has any chance of succeeding' is to attribute evils 'entirely to bad free choices' - this solution then in fact failing through not accounting for earthquakes (MT, I55, I62). For he may be overlooking the possibly great value of our experiencing a scheme of things ruled by causality, and the seeming inevitability of earthquakes or other comparable ills in any such scheme of things.

Is seeming inevitability enough, though? In the vast realm of the logically possible, might there not be at least one causally ordered cosmos in which free beings never suffered anything comparable to being scratched by thorns, having rocks fall on them, dying through old age or earthquake? As a start towards answering this, consider Mackie's position (which is mine also) that human freedom is fully compatible with determinism; any indeterminism entering the world at the quantum level slightly hinders a brain's decision

making machinery instead of helping it, and it is having such machinery that makes us free. Mackie suggests that, given Compatibilism's correctness,

'there can be no difficulty' in making men 'such that they always freely choose the good' (i66). But I disagree, introducing a comparison with what one

might call the Compatibilist theory of random events such as coin falls. 'Would some laws, allied to some initial arrangement of particles, result in billions of people who never behaved badly? May I be forgiven for taking this little more seriously than a world whose particles started off so cleverly arranged that its coins always land Heads!' (VE, 90-I). Though coin tossing

might be seen as fully deterministic by a Laplacean demon, it is a process so sensitive to the influences of myriad largely separate causal chains that the notion of making a world such that its billion coins would never, never land Tails, is fantastic. And so, one could well think, is the notion of a causally intricate world in which complex beings are (thanks to their deterministic inner workings) such that they will always choose in ethically ideal ways. And so, too, with a world such that its rocks, for instance, will never chance to fall so that they injure people.

Besides which, even if the realm of possibilities contained one or two causally ordered worlds of life of the crime-free, injury-free kind needed by

Mackie's argument, it by no means would follow that they were the only worlds worth creating. Now, the vision of Reality towards which I feel driven, once I have embarked on explaining existence by reference to its value, shows it as composed of infinitely many centres of experience each having a monistic unity something like that which F. H. Bradley had in mind when he

1 Pages 57-8 of 'The Best World Possible', in The Challenge of Religion Today, J. King-Farlow (ed.) (New York: Neale Watson, I976), pp. 43-72 (with many misprints).



NEOPLATONISM S REPLACEMENT FOR GOD 341

described the Absolutely Real as 'a single Experience', yet each patterned with the conscious lives of countless beings in countless different worlds. (I reason that this could not conflict with our actual experiences since a monistic unification would not lead straight to William James' 'large sea-side boarding house with no private bedroom in which I might take refuge from the society of the place'.')

Still, all this could seem very inadequate for countering the Problem of Evil. Many a philosopher who reads monists such as Spinoza and Bradley with enjoyment is none the less repelled by the idea that anyone could defend our world's general structure, classifying its evils as genuine evils but treating them as the kinds of thing which are bound to arrive when ethical requirements enter into harsh conflict. For such conflict could seem obviously unnecessary. Obviously better than our actual experiences, it could seem, would be experiences not of living, of selecting roads through dangerous environments governed by causal laws, but of something else: namely, the contents of godlike minds. Instead of having a consciousness which casts a flickering and evanescent light on only a tiny part of the world's structure,

would it not be far finer to be a Laplacean demon surveying all space and time? And then, would it not be still better to be aware of all conceivable

world-structures, and even of all facts about possibilities? To perceive all logically possible paintings, poems, symphonies, games of chess, mathe

matical truths, jokes, etcetera, through the omniscience traditionally ascribed to God-as-a-Person?

I would answer No, quoting such lines as 'If I held Truth captive I should let it fly, that I might again pursue it'. I feel that living is better than knowing.

But suppose that I would be clearly wrong in this. Would not my Neoplatonic system then be refuted by Experience?

Apparently not, and for a reason suggested in Mackie's own chapter four. Attacking any phenomenalism of Berkeley's kind, Mackie there declares that God could not have a mind that grasped all the detailed world-structure, electrons, quarks and so on, which would be needed to complete the fragments of structure which appear in human consciousness, since 'such detail is not at home in an essentially mental world'. Now, why declare this? Divine omniscience is traditionally taken to cover absolutely all facts, and that includes facts about all the details of all possible physical worlds. Yet

Mackie, not content with ascribing ignorance of physics to God in order to demolish Berkeley, goes on to suggest still other kinds of ignorance in that quarter. Thus, perhaps a divine person would not know what it feels like to experience the colours of a painting, the sounds of a symphony. Or perhaps he could know this only after actually creating men; 'an ingenious theist

might offer this as a reason for God's otherwise puzzling decision to create 1 VE, chapter II. Temporal aspects of the affair are discussed on page i8i and in 'The Value of Time',

American Philosophical Quarterly XiII, 2 (April I976), 109-2I.



342 JOHN LESLIE

the human race. '1 But this suggestion of Mackie's, that an eternal, omniscient mind could know what it would be like to be a man only after having actually created men, is hard to take seriously as it stands. Such a mind, contemplating a possible physical world, would know it in all its details, as would a

Laplacean demon; yet it would also know exactly how that world, if created, would look to beings inside it, beings seeing forests and animals and paintings, listening to symphonies, and experiencing curiosity about many things outside their experience. However, this means that Mackie is at least on the right track. Even Eternal Omniscience would have to include areas of ignorance in one important sense. For to know just what it feels like to be in pain, one has to be or to have been in pain to some extent; and likewise, to know just how it feels to be ignorant of things outside one's experience one must, in some area, part, aspect or mode of one's mind, actually be or have been ignorant. It is impossible to have, in one and the same region of one's mental being, both an awareness of having always known everything and an experience of precisely what it feels like to be curious about things. And so, as Spinoza saw, no appeal to Experience could easily establish that the actual scheme of things was even different from, let alone inferior to, one in which all experiences were divine ones. For how could a divine mind know quite

what it would be like to be, say, that undeniably great philosopher, J. L. Mackie, if there never had been in any part of that mind any feeling of actually being J. L. Mackie?

Anyone who accepted the Neoplatonic way of explaining all existence might perhaps therefore reach a picture very different from mine. God might be viewed not just as an abstract force of creative ethical requirement but as an all-encompassing mind which owed its existence to its ethical requiredness. And even I might not be totally opposed to this. For I insist that I would have little confidence in the details of my world-picture even

were I sure (which I am not) that Hume was wrong and Neoplatonism's creation story2 right.

I Quotations from MT, p. 8o. 2 Though Mackie's chapter on Neoplatonism in MT is headed 'Replacements for God', it gives no

evidence against my view that the actual history of theological writings makes this run the risk of

resembling talk about Bonaparte as a replacement for Napoleon.



mackie on neoplatonism's 'replacement for god

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