Here is yet another post inspired by a spirited conversation with the scrappy Lutheran known as John Fraiser. We recently engaged in a philosophical kerfluffle over whether God knows what it’s like to be Napoleon (or a bat, or a pimp, or the present king of France, or Schrödinger’s cat, or anyone God does not happen to be). The debate arose after jointly considering Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument against materialism in the philosophy of mind, but the topic soon led to whether any such arguments could be applied to God’s knowledge.

I affirmed that God did indeed know what it is like to be Napoleon. John gave a negative answer, and the contest commenced. Although this important question is clearly pressing on the hearts of many Americans during these troubled times, the goal of this post is not to give an answer but to clarify what the arguments are and where the disagreement lies. After explaining the arguments, I will address some tentative reasons for why I take the (clearly) correct position.

Here is John’s argument, reconstructed as I understand it:

(1) It is a necessary condition of having a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon that one believe he is Napoleon.
(2) God believes no falsehoods, so God does not believe He is Napoleon.
(3) Therefore God does not have a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon.

The first premise is the hinge on which John’s argument turns. According to this premise, one can reasonably imagine what it is like to have some of Napoleon’s experiences. For example, one can imagine what it is like to stand on a hill in Waterloo and order your cannons to fire on Wellington’s cavalry, or what it is like to be short, or what it is like to keep your hand in your coat while posing for a portrait. Although we are limited in what we can imagine of Napoleon’s experiences and properties, God can imagine what it is like to have all of Napoleon’s experiences and properties. However, this act of imagining (on our part or God’s) does not deliver a complete knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon, for to have that one must also believe that he is Napoleon. In other words, having a first person perspective on what it is like to be Napoleon is a requirement if one wants to truly know what it is fully like to be Napoleon. So in addition to imagining having the various experiences and properties of Napoleon, one must imagine that he believes that he is Napoleon. This is something of a contradiction, since in the very attempt to imagine one is acknowledging that he is not Napoleon at all. Hence only Napoleon knows what it is like to be him, since only he possesses a first person perspective.

This has strange consequences when we apply it to God. God certaintly doesn’t believe He is Napoleon, for He believes no falsehoods. But if premise (1) is true, then God is forever separated from what it is fully like to be any human other than Jesus Christ. This means that, in a very significant sense, God doesn’t know what it’s like to be me. He simply cannot imagine in the most important sense what it is like when I kiss my wife, or wrestle with my children on the living room floor, or even what it is like when I pray to Him or worship Him.

This seemed problematic to me, so I offered two counterarguments. Here is the first:

(4) God’s omniscience entails that He knows all truths that are possibly known.
(5) “What it is like to be Napoleon” is a truth that is possibly known.
(6) Therefore God knows what it is like to be Napoleon.

This seemed a bit ambiguous, so I issued a second argument, adjusted for clarity:

(7) Since God is both omniscient and omnipotent, He can perform any mental task that does not involve a logical contradiction.
(8) “Knowing what it is like to be Napoleon” is a mental task that does not involve a logical contradiction.
(9) Therefore God can know what it is like to be Napoleon.

Implicit in (8) is a rejection of John’s premise (1). I rejected (1) because it seems arbitrarily limited by human experience. Of course you and I can’t imagine what it is like to be Napoleon or what it is like to believe that we are Napoleon, but it doesn’t seem right to say that it would be logically impossible for God. God’s powers of imagination aren’t limited. He possesses unlimited cognitive capacity. Further, He created the cognitive environment in which human beings think, believe, and experience, and thus has privileged access to that cognitive environment and the types of things therein. If I create characters for a novel I am writing, I am in complete control over the mental world in which they live, and I have access to that mental world in ways my characters do not. This way of rejecting premise (1) needs to be worked out in more detail, but I think it is the defender of (1) that bears the burden of proof. It just doesn’t seem intuitively plausible that no mind could ever completely grasp what it is like to be Napoleon without accepting the Napoleon identity.

Further, I argued that the vagaries of human experience means that even Napoleon doesn’t know what it is like to be Napoleon, at least in the fullest sense. The human psyche is a deep and mysterious well. We all have questions about who we are and we are often aware that mysterious forces drive our choices and contribute to our own sense of personal identity. God, however, knows everything about Napoleon. He understands the deep reasons for his internal drive to conquer Europe, and so on. There are no deep psychological mysteries to the Ancient of Days.

These are only starting points for a response, but I think I’m on the right track. The key issue is how God’s imagination can overcome the third person perspective that seems to limit one’s ability to fully imagine what it is like to be another person. This challenge is significant, but to say that God can fully imagine what it is like to be Napoleon without believing He is Napoleoon does not seem to be on the same level as saying that God can make 2 and 2 equal 5. He can’t make 2 and 2 equal 5, but this is no limitation on His sovereignty or His power, for it is no true limitation to say that God can’t perform nonsense. It just isn’t clear that having a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon is logically contradictory or nonsensical in the same way.

Here is a continuing rumination on a conversation I had the other day with the erudite John Fraiser about the new atheism. For the most part, I abhor the new atheism. I think it is a cheap, irrational, and culturally unhealthy movement marked by the ironic combination of poor argumentation and philosophical triumphalism. The new atheists pair terrible arguments with preening braggadocio and hateful rhetoric, spawning legions of internet fanboys who mimic their poisonous style. If I want my faith challenged, I’d much rather read Hume or Ayer or Mackie. They actually force me into serious reflection on my faith, and I don’t have to suffer continual Dawkinsian-style insults. The new atheist movement is not a good one, and I think it’s a shame that they’ve been able to wield such cultural influence.

Nevertheless, there are things I like about the movement. Or perhaps I should say that the new atheism may have unintended consequences that I like. Here is a review for a new book that apparently makes the argument that at least one way Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al serve Christendom is by holding believers’ feet to the fire in regard to intellectual honesty. This is true and valuable, because I think many Christians tend to be intellectually lazy. From their perspective, they’re already in possession of “truth with a capital T”, and therefore they don’t think they need to think very much about their faith. When the new atheists point out that religious believers don’t have a solid intellectual foundation for their faith, they are partially correct. There are unfortunately very many Christians who are utterly incapable of giving a coherent reason for why they believe in Christianity (a fact that has no bearing on whether Christianity is true or rationally acceptable, however, a point I made to Uncle Skeptic on my old blog).

When an intellectually shallow Christian encounters the arguments of the new atheists, he must either (1) reevaluate the epistemic foundations of his faith and think critically about Christianity in a way he hasn’t done before, (2) stick his head in the sand and ignore their arguments, or (3) accept their arguments, leading to a crisis of faith and possibly unbelief. The new atheists want the results of their efforts to be (3), but I think they miscalculate that many Christians will take option (1). New atheist arguments, febrile as I find them to be, can have a strengthening effect on the church by driving individual Christians to a stronger and more rational intellectual position.

Likewise, although it’s certainly tragic when someone takes option (3) and apostasizes, it’s probably better for the church. Those who leave the faith because they read Richard Dawkins or develop an obsessive fascination with the mountain of atheist polemics online probably never had a very strong faith to begin with. If I read one more “deconversion” story where someone says they were a believer for 20 years but then started reading infidels.org and “realized” God was just a fantasy drilled into their head by pastors and Sunday School teachers, I just might puke. If your faith is this shallow and your cognitive capacities so susceptible to cheap rhetoric passing for logic, you probably have no business being in a church anyway. That’s not to say that there aren’t intelligent Christians who honestly wrestle with their faith and eventually leave it behind for intellectually respectable reasons (see here for a tragic and heartbreaking example), but there are plenty of gullible churchgoers who accept their newfound atheism for reasons that are probably just as unwarranted as the reasons they accepted Christianity to begin with. Hence the new atheism gives the church a bonus by separating the sheep from the goats.

My wife and I watched The Insider last night. Michael Mann is one of my favorite directors, but I held off on watching this one for a decade because of what I perceived to be its leftward tilt. That’s unfortunate because it really is a fine film, made all the more interesting for me since much of the story takes place in Louisville. Although Mann is probably best known for orchestrating spectacular action scenes, The Insider is peculiarly action free, unless you count Russell Crowe hitting golf balls or falling down as action scenes. Nevertheless I think it’s one of Mann’s most engaging films, proving he can create high energy tension with lawsuits and gag orders just as well as he can with epic gun battles.

The leftward tilt is certainly present, but it’s more thematic than anything else, and I found myself rooting for Al Pacino’s plucky journalist as he attempted to stick it to the nasty tobacco corporations. The setup is this: Russell Crowe plays real-life tobacco executive turned company whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, and Pacino plays the feisty ‘60 Minutes’ producer who sticks with Wigand through the whole sordid process, culminating in an industry-shaking interview that Wigand grants to Mike Wallace. It’s a true story made all the more compelling because the most dramatic and incredible plot points actually happened. Mann makes quite a spectacle of the inner machinations of big media and the extraordinary legal power that large corporations can bring to bear on their opponents. That tobacco company lawyers from a firm based in Kentucky could bring a media giant like CBS to its knees is almost unthinkable, and Mann plays the bizarre scenario for all the dramatic impact he can get.

The film is unapologetic in portraying Pacino’s character as a left-wing media activist. He tells Wigand he was part of the “New Left” of the sixties and glowingly reminisces about his political mentor Herbert Marcuse. Nevertheless, I think the film is a good illustration of the way in which the excesses of the free market require a free press to keep it honest. Free market conservatives and libertarians often attempt to absolutize the virtues of the free market, claiming that any state interference into the free market is unjust and bound for failure anyway. This may or may not be the case, but the role of government in regulating the free market is not what I want to address here. Here I want to point out that the free market, like any other hegemonic cultural institution, always needs outside influences to hold it morally accountable. Conservatives often argue that the market requires regular injections of moral virtue to keep it honest, but I rarely hear them talk about the power of the media as the minister of such injections. The true story that inspired Mann’s film is a perfect example of how the free press can act as a cultural regulating power for the free market, exposing particular areas of vice and injustice and opening new doors for legal ramifications.

The market, contrary to the grand claims of some free market advocates, isn’t inherently noble. It’s true that free competition will often weed out undesirable elements in the market, but I don’t think this is enough. The power of the market must be subject to outside checks and balances in the same way as the powers of the state and the press. Since I’m convinced that the state should play a minimalist role in regulating the market (except in clear cases such as prohibiting unjust child labor, enforcing a minimum wage, protecting the environment, and so on), I think other, non-legal checks and balances should be brought to bear on the market as well, such as the power of the free press.

It’s also worth pointing out that, like the market, the free press isn’t inherently noble either, and it requires its own system of checks and balances. Ask a political liberal if he is as interested in the state regulating the free press as he is in regulating the free market and you will get an emphatic “No.” The excesses and injustices of the free press often go unchallenged and unchecked. The only real regulating power for the press (outside of certain laws that govern speech not covered by the First Amendment) is the press itself. The rise of conservative media outlets over the last few decades is a good example of how this works. I’ll never understand why liberals spew hatred for the conservative slant of Fox News, when the very existence of conservative outlets like Fox and the Wall Street Journal act as a balancing force to their left-leaning counterparts in the mainstream media, just as those same leftist counterparts provide much-needed accountability for Fox. Interestingly, the rise of the blogosphere has resulted in a new force for holding the press accountable for its moral failures, as witnessed most clearly in the Rathergate controversy.

We always want the guy on the other side of the aisle to be held accountable, but blind allegiance to political ideals often obscures the need for our own side to be held accountable as well. The Insider is a good reminder of that for free market advocates, and I’m glad I finally watched it. It’s no Last of the Mohicans, but it’s still a great film with a valuable message.

The trailer for the next Chronicles of Narnia movie is up:

 

I’m hopeful but wary about this one. Prince Caspian was big and loud but I thought it missed the heart of Lewis’ novel. Walden Media is producing again, but this time Fox is financing and distributing the film since Disney gave up on the franchise after the mediocre domestic success of Caspian. The capable Michael Apted is the new director, and I can only hope he and his creative team have captured the spirit of one of my favorite Lewis novels. The ending with Reepicheep is a particularly powerful moment in the series, but the rest of the narrative is a bit untraditional for a fantasy story. It may be hard to pull off, so I’m approaching this one with cautious optimism.

For those interested, I’ve uploaded my Ph.D. dissertation to the Writings page. You can find it here. My friend John Fraiser is reading it, and I’d love some feedback from other philosophers and philosophy students. Here’s the abstract:

GOD AND MORAL FACTS:
A TRINITARIAN REALIST
MODEL OF CHRISTIAN METAETHICS

Michael Brian Trapp, Ph.D.
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010
Chairperson: Dr. Mark Coppenger

This dissertation is a model of Christian metaethics based on God’s Triune nature.

Chapter 1 discusses overall issues and problems in metaethics and how they relate to Christian theology, with emphasis on problems for Christian metaethics.

Chapter 2 examines contemporary secular versions of moral realism in the academy. It also inquires into the various ways God may be related to moral obligations.

Chapter 3 includes a broad survey of traditional Christian metaethics. Christian thinkers from both natural law and divine command traditions are examined.

Chapter 4 surveys metaethical models of writers from the revival of Christian metaethics in the twentieth century.

Chapter 5 includes the dissertation’s main argument for Trinitarian moral realism. God’s Triune existence is posited as a fruitful way of founding moral obligations that dodges familiar conceptual difficulties.

Chapter 6 seeks to show how Trinitarian realism can move from theory to practice. It first compares Trinitarian realism with Islamic metaethics. It then shows how the model can be applied to a particular moral case and, finally, to Christian apologetics.

Therefore, those who have no experience of reason or virtue, but are always occupied with feasts and the like, are brought down and then back up to the middle, as it seems, and wander in this way throughout their lives, never reaching beyond this to what is truly higher up, never looking up at it or being brought up to it, and so they aren’t filled with that which really is and never taste any stable or pure pleasure. Instead, they always look down at the ground like cattle, and, with their heads bent over the dinner table, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. To outdo others in these things, they kick and butt them with iron horns and hooves, killing each other, because their desires are insatiable. For the part that they’re trying to fill is like a vessel full of holes, and neither it nor the things they are trying to fill it with are among the things that are.
                   
            – Socrates, in Plato, The Republic, Book IX, translated by G. M. A. Grube

In other words, it’s better to spend your life seeking the true, the beautiful, and the good, than wasting it by merely indulging the flesh. Here’s a pictorial representation:

Any questions?

Note to the new atheists: what we need isn’t less religion, but better theology.

[This post originally appeared at my old blog on April 27, 2006. The original is here.]

“Christianity is a myth,” declared the professor in my college folklore class. “However,” he continued, “that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true.” The word “myth” as it has come to be used in the common vernacular simply means “something that isn’t true.” So in this sense the idea that President Bush was behind the attacks of 9/11 is clearly a myth.

But let’s distinguish for a moment between this common definition of myth and the somewhat different notion of mythology. What is a myth in this second sense? According to the Encyclopedia Mythica, a myth is

a story of forgotten or vague origin, basically religious or supernatural in nature, which seeks to explain or rationalize one or more aspects of the world or a society … Broadly speaking myths and mythologies seek to rationalize and explain the universe and all that is in it. Thus, they have a similar function to science, theology, religion and history in modern societies.

Mythology, then, serves the same function as a worldview, but in narrative form. It is a way in which people understand themselves in relation to reality, what there actually is, and thus it is a way in which people understand their own meaning.

Now back to my question: is Christianity mythology? Well, not in the first sense of being a story that isn’t factually true. But do mythic stories have to be false? To put it another way, does the concept of myth entail falsehood? C. S. Lewis certainly didn’t think so. In his excellent essay, “Myth Became Fact,” he defends the idea that Christianity is the one, true, factual myth. He sees the function of myth as that of taking abstract truths and completing them, and thus completing human knowledge:

In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to the experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction … When we translate we get abstraction – or rather, dozens of abstractions. What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis ["In this valley of separation"]. Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.

For Lewis then, mythology may help us better understand those ultimate, metaphysical, and sometimes mysterious truths about the world in which we live. However, Lewis sees the Christian story as the myth, the one that teaches us the ultimate truth about reality itself. But unlike the other mythologies, the Christian story is factually true, and that is what makes it so important:

Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other …

Those who do not know that this great myth became Fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied … We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there – it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic — and is not the sky itself a myth — shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.

In a world of where rationalism and materialism act as usurpers to the epistemological throne, the declaration of the true myth of Christianity – the story of the world above reaching down to the world below – is essential. The fact is that many people do believe in various mythologies: they literally idolize their favorite sports teams, or musicians, or pop singers, or political theories, and yet none of these can do the job, for they are all unfortunately tied to the finite and temporary realm in which we live. The myth of the dying, atoning God, of eternity’s Messiah who saves mankind, is also fact. It is the one true mythology, the one true story by which faltering humanity may chart its course to eternity.

[Note: "Myth Became Fact" can be found in the excellent anthology of Lewis' essays and articles, God in the Dock.]

[This post originally appeared at my old blog on September 12, 2008. The original is here.]

Here is Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion:

If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam is false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Before we take this quote too seriously, we should consider the fact that this is the same Richard Dawkins who claimed that raising a child Catholic is worse than sexually abusing him. Credibility issues aside, what can we make of statements like the one above? This sort of reasoning is very prevalent in the writings of the new atheism of Dawkins, Harris, et al. But this is a typical Dawkinsian non-argument. There is no there there. What is the point of such statements other than to offer intellectual kudos to those who already disbelieve in any particular religion? Consider the following variation on the above quote:

If you were born in Arkansas and you think representative democracy is the best form of government and that Islamic theocracy is the worst, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Or how about this one:

If you were born in 1980 and you think the world is round instead of flat, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in 1089, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

If you can understand the silliness of the two latter statements, you should be able to understand the silliness of the first. You don’t necessarily judge an individual’s justification for her beliefs by the cultural soup from which those beliefs arise. Consider the following three facts:

(1) I live in a culture where a majority of the people believe Christianity is true.
(2) My parents taught me to believe that Christianity is true.
(3) I believe that Christianity is true.

And these:

(4) Aziz lives in a culture where a majority of the people believe that Islam is true.
(5) Aziz’ parents taught him to believe that Islam is true.
(6) Aziz believes that Islam is true.

Now, it’s obvious that facts (1)-(3) have no bearing on whether Christianity is true or not, just as (4)-(6) have no bearing on whether Islam is true or not. Let’s add one more fact to our list:

(7) If I had been born in Aziz’ family, I would have believed that Islam was true instead of Christianity.

Dawkins’ contention is that if I am aware that facts (1)-(7) are true, then I should conclude that I am a victim of “childhood indoctrination.”

But why? The circumstances under which I form a belief are different animals from the reasons I have for holding that belief. I suppose that by Dawkins using this sort of reasoning he means to hold up a simple truism: we shouldn’t believe something just because it is widely believed in our own culture. This is obvious, but trivial. Dawkins is attempting to twist this simple truism into some sort of cudgel against religious belief. But just because it is true that some religious people hold their beliefs because they were raised in a religious culture, and because they themselves have not done enough reflection to have good reasons for their beliefs, does not mean that all of them do. And just because some parents indoctrinate and propagandize their children into religious belief does not mean that all of them do. I think most religious parents attempt, to the best of their ability, to give their children good reasons for why they think their religious views are right and others are wrong. That some parents fail miserably at this task is probably a contributor to the apostasy rate of children of religious believers, but that too is a different discussion altogether.

Consider again my above variations on Dawkins’ statement. Suppose someone were to use my first hypothetical statement to mock Dawkins for believing that representative democracy is superior to Islamic theocracy. What would his response be? I think he would simply point out that representative democracy is the best form of government for Reason A, Reason B, Reason C, and so forth. If he is justified in doing this, why is the religious believer not justified in doing the same thing? Facts about what someone would believe in a possible world in which they were raised in a different culture are irrelevant to the justification for the beliefs they hold in this, the real world. If we were to adopt this sort of skepticism, then it wouldn’t just be religious beliefs that we would have to be skeptical about, but our moral beliefs, our political beliefs, and any other beliefs that fall short of being justified by naked logic or direct experience. Once again, for all his blustering and cuteness, the darling of the new atheists poses no convincing argument against the justification of religious belief. Dawkins always disappoints.

[This post originally appeared at my old blog on August 14, 2007. The original is here.]

On theories of ethical subjectivism (there are various stripes: emotivism and prescriptivism are two prominent varieties), moral facts are not facts about human actions or states of affairs but about the people who view those actions or states of affairs. Thus when the subjectivist says, “Slapping unsuspecting pedestrians for fun is bad,” the predicate “bad” refers not to the slapping-act but to something in the speaker’s attitude toward the slapping-act.

In my own thinking on metaethics I prefer to think of metaethical questions in the terms of moral properties. Are moral properties real? If so, where do they reside? When we think of the question in this way it clarifies the problem that many people have with ethical subjectivism. If I say, “This tire is round,” I am saying that the tire possesses the property of roundness and that this property is not in me but in the tire itself. It exists outside of me. I neither create nor facilitate the property’s existence. It exists whether I am there to perceive its existence or not. The tire just has this property, and my own opinions on the matter are thoroughly irrelevant.

Now consider the ethical subjectivist who says, “Slapping unsuspecting pedestrians for fun is bad.” The substance of her ethical theory is that the property “bad” is possessed not by the act itself but by something in the mental state of the agent considering or viewing the act. So it turns out that the subjectivist is not saying something about slapping people at all; she’s just saying something about herself.

It’s easy to see why people find the sundry forms of ethical subjectivism to be sorry excuses for moral theories: they seem to be no more than pseudo-sophisticated games of pretend. This has two undesirable consequences. First, if we were to do this in other areas of life we would be castigated as irrational or strange. Say that my mailman is not rich, but for some reason I predicate of him the property “being rich.” Suppose I did this because of some factor related not to the mailman but to me: I really like the guy, it makes me feel better, I get my mail on time, etc. That would be stupid.

Second, these pretend-games fail to do justice to how we ordinarily use language. When I say, “that dog is a three-legged dog,” I am obviously referring not to some attitude of mine toward the dog but to the fact that the dog has only three legs. However, when I say, “Playing Halo is fun,” I am using the word “is” in a slightly different way. In the first case the predicate “three-legged” is clearly meant to convey a property of the dog that is external to myself. Since it is simply there, all rational viewers must agree. In the second case, the predicate “fun,” when used with “is,” is clearly meant to convey something different. I’m simply saying that I like to play Halo. We might say that it’s properly subjective. It’s a statement more about myself than about Halo, because I know that most of the members of the human race have never played Halo and thus probably don’t think it’s fun. Now, the question is this: if I say, “kicking the three-legged dog over the shed is wicked,” in which one of these senses is the predicate “wicked” used? I think we would have to answer that its use in customary language is closer to the first example than the second. It is something that is supposed to be in the act of dog-kicking itself. Thus ethical subjectivism is inconsistent with the meanings of moral terms. Moral realism is a better option, and I think theism provides the best account of objective moral properties. I’ll save that discussion for later posts, however, or perhaps for my dissertation.