What is required for God to be distributively just? Not very much, according to Thomas Aquinas. It is sufficient that God create a world that makes sense, that obeys reasonable laws, containing things that are well-designed, although never perfectly designed: “Hence Dionysius says (Div. Nom. viii, 4): ‘We must needs see that God is trulyContinue reading “God is Just, and Life Still Isn’t Fair”
Author Archives: robkoons
“Body, blood, soul, and divinity”
This is the second in a series on the doctrine of transubstantiation. Here I want to focus on further theological reasons for preferring Aristotelian hylomorphism to any kind of substance dualism (like Cartesianism). Here is what the Council of Trent taught about the Eucharist: “In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist ‘the body andContinue reading ““Body, blood, soul, and divinity””
Staunch Hylomorphism and Transubstantiation
Aristotelian natural philosophy, also known as “hylomorphism,” has the capacity to treat middle-sized things, like human beings, wafers of bread, and goblet-filling bits of wine, as first-class citizens of our ontology, that is, as substances. Substances, on this view, are unified wholes composed of matter and form, whose substantial forms impose certain powers and potentialitiesContinue reading “Staunch Hylomorphism and Transubstantiation”
Social Choice and Defeasible Reasoning
I’m the author of the article on “Defeasible Reasoning” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In revising my entry this month, I came across a fascinating idea proposed in 1991 by Sten Lindström (in an article first published in Theoria in 2022). As I argue in my article, the best approach to formalizing a defeasibleContinue reading “Social Choice and Defeasible Reasoning”
Strategic and Insincere Voting
Real-World Examples of Voting Paradoxes William H. Riker, Liberalism against Populism (Waveland Press, 1982). 1912 US Presidential race Popular vote: 42% Wilson 27% Roosevelt 24% Taft Thanks to the plurality rule, Wilson won (the Electoral College didn’t make a significant difference in this case. Let’s suppose that the voters formed three blocs with the followingContinue reading “Strategic and Insincere Voting”
Voting and Epistemology
Voting and Epistemology Voting to Track the Truth (Wisdom of Crowds) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Voting Methods,” Eric Pacuit, 2019 The most well-known analysis comes from the writings of Condorcet (1785). The following theorem, which is attributed to Condorcet and was first proved formally by Laplace, shows that if there are only two options, thenContinue reading “Voting and Epistemology”
Arrow’s Theorem and Democracy
Importance of Arrow’s Theorem Does Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem (Kenneth Arrow 1960) challenge the value of democracy? First, we have to ask: Is democracy an end in itself or a means to an end? For Locke: “For when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby madeContinue reading “Arrow’s Theorem and Democracy”
Against the New Natural Law: Incommensurability
Let me turn next to proposition 3, the incommensurability of basic goods. As I mentioned at the beginning, I will distinguish between weak and strong incommensurability. Weak incommensurability refers to the incommensurability of different goods in the short term, in a single moment (synchronic incommensurability). Strong incommensurability would entail that there can be no rationalContinue reading “Against the New Natural Law: Incommensurability”
Against the New Natural Law: Theoretical Knowledge of the Good
If my account of normative normality is roughly correct, then we can see that the human good is something that belongs, both semantically and metaphysically, to the domain of the objects of theoretical knowledge (in contradiction to proposition 5 of the NNL). It is possible for God or an angel to know the human goodContinue reading “Against the New Natural Law: Theoretical Knowledge of the Good”
Normative Normality: An Aristotelian Account
Happiness consists, for Aristotelians, in the actualization of all of our unconditional and essential causal potentialities. But none of our powers are absolutely unconditional. They all depend on two things: on our internal constitution being in a healthy and intact state, and on our being located in a normal environment (that is, an environment thatContinue reading “Normative Normality: An Aristotelian Account”
