Note that consequences alone don’t ground knowledge. Rather I listed a common way which undeniably people know moral truths by and which you are explicitly denying they could know moral truths. This was supposed to be a fairly common sense common set of reasonings people engage in. I even picked an example that I felt so self-evident that you couldn’t deny it. But you do, so I’m just not sure what more I can say.

Uhh, not they don’t. They talk about knowing in the heart and through the spirit. So I agree that regular people come to moral conclusions, but not by looking at consequences. They do so by the intuitive sense of right and wrong, good and evil which they already have. In fact, if I cast about to see what the best outcome for me will be, I will often engage in immoral conduct because I am merely being opportunistic. If I look around to determine what I should do based on likely consequences for the greatest number, I come up with a good social theory or legal theory, but I don’t come up with moral obligation.

Look, just knowing what consequences are doesn’t tell you whether the consequences are good or bad. You don’t know what you should do just by knowing what has occurred and what may result. To be able to assess the consequences, you have to have some prior standard of judgment about right and wrong to even know what to look for. So consequences are already placed in a world-view where you have a prior assessment of right and wrong. You don’t derive right and wrong, or moral obligation, from looking at consequences.

Now I’m not saying that moral people don’t assess the consequences of their acts. However, the mere consequences aren’t the guide for what is right and wrong, though it may guide the practical judgment of what to do.

Note what your argument would entail. All the scriptures that talk about our knowledge by consequences are somehow invalid because you feel they entail a consequentialist ontology. Are you sure you want to make this claim?

But of course the claim is just logically wrong. I needn’t have a commitment to any particular ontology of physics to note that I can learn some things by their consequences. This whole line of reasoning you are taking just seems quite odd. I’m afraid you’re going to have to spell out the details.

Right you are. Hoartshorne doesn’t have much use for Whithead’s Platonism. The lure for Hartshorne is much more interpersonal. God determines the data that he will lend to the actual occasions to lure and persuade them to act as he wishes. In Whithead’s thought, impersonal Platonic Ideas do the work of creating the lure of behavior that the actual occasions respond to.

Clark: No I’m not conflating anything. The issue as to what in fact moral responsibility is consists in an ontological issue. How we come to know is of course epistemology. However, any account of moral responsibility must explain how the two match up for us. That is, we must have some reliable way of knowing what moral duties are because if we don’t it follows that we’re not morally responsible even if there were some moral universals. The problem with universals is always how we come to know them. I see absolutely nothing in your account that can give us anything approaching the kind of knowledge necessary for moral accountability. We have to be scientists to be morally responsible on your account — and even then you cannot (at least you clearly have not) tell me what to look for in the world to see what I should do.

Now you say that we should learn from circumstances what leads to happiness and joy. That is consequentialism. Moreover, your view of what is good and evil isn’t based on some universal that teaches you what good and evil is, because you’ve decided before you go looking that good consists in happiness and joy and evil in lack of such goods. So how did you come to the belief that these are good things to look for? Not by looking at what is since the judgment of what to look for in the universe is already guided by the commitment that happiness and joy as consequences of our acts are the basis of right and wrong.

John: “but which would also involve something of Clark’s criterion of discernible difference.” By my lights I’ve given a contrastive explanation that is ontologically grounded. It is true that we don’t have enough information to definitively say that we have LFW — but that just happens to accurately reflect the issue’s status in philosophy. One of the reasons that it is interminably debated is precisely that we lack this kind of information when we don’t trust our experiences and adopt an error theory or some kind of eliminativism.

Briefly, (since I’ve promised to leave off), the “necessary presupposition to make sense of our deliberations” is precisely a large part of Kant’s transcendental account. Our pragmatic experience of our own agency is, I think, precisely contradictory, (not in a bad or avoidable sense), and conflicted, which is part of the struggles involved in it. Whether we always have alternatives for choice is something at issue, but, of course, is also something conditioned by our choices. However, our choices, whether we are fully aware of them or their range or not, must be limited: too large a choice-set is inimical to choosing and some decisions are more important than others. I take it you understand that I am not denying agency and its possible freedom, which I think is a real phenomenon that is important and must needs be taken account of, but which would also involve something of Clark’s criterion of discernible difference. I just don’t know or understand precisely what would be involved or required for it to count as LFW, since, clearly I construct my account much differently than you, and I think there are decided limits to our agency and its possible freedom. You know I pass the “problem” through language/meaning as entailing a relation to the other as sine qua non. I know, (since I have perused you site, trying to understand what I could find of your position), that you make reference to Buber, though I would appeal to Levinas’ somewhat different account. And I think “responsibility”, to be a coherent “concept”, must entail more than what we have specifically intended or willed, contrary to your intuitions, (regardless of what that might entail about God’s justice or mercy, which, as an empirical claim, is sometimes hard to “stomach”, as I’m sure you’ve “experienced”). I can accept your account as a permissible act of faith, but again I can’t make out from it precisely what LFW would be, as a set of logical conditions/phenomenal descriptions that would be required for it, rather than how LFW might be required for a set of desirable or optimal conditions. Finally, I’m aware that you reject in your account divine fore-knowledge, but I’m also aware, (again from having perused your site and read some portion of what I could find), that the issue is disputed among Mormons. Obviously, the question is considerably more intense in Augustinian terms, but I was simply suggesting why or how the issue might arise from our phenomenal experience, (while also mentioning as a possible resource Whitehead’s “lures”, though I’d guess his account of “eternal objects” might be something Hartshorne rejects).

Clark, that’s just good old fashioned consequentialist ethics — greatest good for the greatest number and all that.

John: I don’t believe that God has foreknowledge. Further, I believe that only God has knowledge of the relation of chaotic data to the prior moments in the life of an organism, the way that the organism acts freely to organize the data and the outcome. However, I maintain that we have immediate pragmatic knowledge of our free will. First, we experience ourselves making free choices and we cannot fail to do so. We cannot make sense of our experience without the assumption that we are acting freely. We deliberate in a way that presupposes LFW (and yes I’m aware that is controversial, but I maintain that deliberation to decide the undecided requires LFW). We know our LFW because we know at some level that we are morally responsible and I maintain that we can be morally responsible in the sense of actually deserving to be treated as moral agents only if we have LFW. Finally, every thought we have is creative. We could have thought of something else. We could have refrained from thinking. We are responsible. Not the universe and not our parents.

Could we be wrong about our experience of free will? Yeah we could, but then everything we experience in the world is called into question and nothing can be trusted and there is no basis for trusting anything at all. Life requires a bit more trust than that just to get up in the morning.

Finally, I appreciate your concern about free will in terms of origins, but I maintain it is the only plausible way to think about free will and moral responsibility. Our acts must be up to us in order for us to be responsible. To be free and responsible, Our acts must belong to us in a way that what we do really is our act rather than something merely acting upon us or merely through us. Agent causation is the only thing that delivers the kind of ownership and control necessary for such responsibility and freedom as far as I can see.

Just one last comment on this kerfluffle, before I leave it alone. It’s, of course, alright to be doing theology rather than philosophy, so long as one recognizes and delimits the difference between the two enterprises or projects. And, yes, there is a certain apples-and-oranges confusion that is liable to arise in making “things” out across the two kinds of discourses. But, leaving aside the small “technical” objection and its micro-logical contradictions, I don’t think the metaphysical “picture” you offer quite suffices to make out LFW in any criterial sense. I can well understand the attraction of a “process” account, both for your purposes and mine, but I don’t think it suffices per se, to make out any specific account of agency and its possible freedom. (But, in Whitehead’s account, at any rate, God “functions” through sorting of “eternal objects” as providing “lures” for the conscresences of actual occasions of organic experience, which would seem to provide some opening, at least, for linking selective agency to God’s knowledge or will). But, as far as I can tell, your account of LFW simply entailed that a completely free act would have a distinct, numerically unique causal “signature” in its “creative synthesis”, in contrast to an unfree act and its synthesis/signature, which actually amounts to saying, tautologically, that a free act would be free. But further, such a discernment is only attributed to the mind or knowledge of God. Leaving aside the problem of what might be stipulated in attributing to the mind or knowledge of God and what would regulate such a stipulation, and leaving aside that such a sense of “knowledge” would be different form the use/sense of the term in our ordinary cognitive practices in raising and attributing cognitive validity-claims, (which poses something of a “reverse ontological” problem with respect to terms), LFW would be known only to God, and your account amounts to an act of faith, which may be permissible, if clearly delimited as such, but it would not be an account of our own knowledge, experience, or understanding of LFW per se. (Again, I don’t know what other doctrinal entailments you are working with and can only infer or guess something of them from your account, though obviously you are primarily addressing other Mormons, not just Clark, and other possible constructions of Mormon tenets). I don’t quite get a sense of a phenomenal description or specification of logical conditions for LFW from your account, since the causal processes underlying our agency are partly opaque to us, if not to God, and I’m inclined to agree with Clark that an internalist account appealing to our first-person intuitions or introspective experience as agents is inadequate, since I think those intuitions and experiences of our own agency, let alone that of others, are contradictory, and that we struggle to reconcile those contradictory intuitions both in our actual agency and our accounts of it. So, at least as far as “reason alone” or the rational elements of your construction is concerned, the “skeptical” problem of agency has not been eliminated. (And I’ll add that I’d doubt that Clark would simply be a naturalistic moral skeptic in the manner of Hume, who denied any rational accounting to or for ethical ends or norms. I’ve understood this dispute here or its stakes more in line with Kantian moral “skepticism”, whose extreme or “heroic” moral rigorism is partly a compensation for his phenomenal determinism,- and I might add, his first-order utilitarian tendencies,- and makes out the moral law as the only, if noumenal, “proof” of our freedom, though also linking LFW to the possiblity of morality, indeed identifying the two).

As one last point or remark, as I’ve said, I don’t think a conception of agency can be made out in punctual, (nor purely causal), terms and requires a temporally distended, “longitudinal” account, in terms of which the agent’s acts are inter-related, and involving the development/choice of ends and the struggle to render our desires conformable to the choice of our better ends. But that would entail an historical, (auto-)biographical perspective, and, in accordance with Kierkegaard’s dictum that life is lived forward, but understood backward, something of the structure of inter-relations I outlined above with respect to the work of historians, which involves a “future anterior” perspective. (Indeed, ever since Augustine, autobiography has involved a “conversion” structure, whereby the eponymous author represents the error of his past ways from the standpoint of their future “redemption”, though the agent-author can not remove or sever himself from the relation to the past which lives on in him, else he would render his account/self incoherent.) Any history involves a relation between continuity and discontinuity, whereby any “free” disposal over the present through its opening to the anticipated horizon of the future transforms (the memory or meaning of) the past. (That would be part of why a “process” rather than “substance” account of agency holds more appeal). But that also involves the peculiar implication that our “free” acts are never quite self-identical, nor continuous through time, though neither can their connections with our pasts be honestly disavowed. Which goes to why there is a peculiar intrication between “fate” and “fore-knowledge” in our experience of “free” agency. And that, in turn, might go to why the question of God’s fore-knowledge would arise. But then, I think the effort to construe or account for agency in terms of its “origins” rather than “works” is hopelessly problematic and fairly futile, (not to mention inferring back from intentions to motives, in which case there is no end of murkiness and gloom, not to mention ad hominem reductions and polemics). There might even be some scriptural warrants for that.