Is Promise-Breaking Lying?

Eric brought this question up to me. I tend to think promise-breaking is lying. Here's the form a promise to someone takes: "I promise that I will do x." In effect, this is a guarantee that you will do x. And since 'I will do x' is equivalent to 'it is true I will do x', it follows 'I promise that I will do x' is equivalent to 'I promise that it is true I will do x'. To intentionally break a promise then is a form of lying; for you are guaranteeing something is true when you know it is not. In fact it may be an even worse form of lying, since you are not only saying intentionally what is false, but by promising it to the other person you are guaranteeing to someone that it is true. This is probably why people are even more disappointed when someone breaks a promise than when they tell a lie without a guarantee of its truth.

Of course, unintentionally, something may hinder you from fulfilling your promise. But then you are not morally culpable for failing to fulfill the promise. This is just a more specific case of telling someone something you believe to be true but, through no fault of your own, you don't know the details and it actually turns out to be false. When you promise something to someone you don't know that, while you are on your way to fulfill your promise, a large set of goons determined to stop people from fulfilling promises will pop up out of the corner. So it's not your fault for not being able to fulfill the promise.

These sorts of cases show that lying should be construed more subtly as intentionally telling a false-hood. And promise-breaking should be construed as intentionally failing to fulfill a promise. With this in mind it is plausible to think of promise-breaking as a more specific form of lying.

Thomistic vs. Molinist Predestination Part II

In my last post I explained that God does not cause1 our free actions, but only cause2's them; hence, there can be no conflict between God's efficaciously willing that one do an action and our doing it libertarianly freely. I'd argue that one's free actions being caused is only inconsistent if we are using 'caused' in the sense of cause1. This is how I understand physical determinism:

(PD) The past state of the world, together with the laws of nature are sufficient to render necessary one unique future.

Clearly then God doesn't determine my next action A in this sense in cause2ing it, since God could have just as well created everything with the laws of nature and the past state up to my current time and yet cause2ed me to do ~A. It's only the case that I must do A under the supposition that God wills I do A, but it's not absolutely speaking necessary that I do A, since God could have willed otherwise.  In other words, libertarian freedom is possible, since even given the laws of nature + the past state of the world I could have done otherwise if God had so willed.

But maybe God's cause2ing me determines me in some morally relevant sense (where a form of determinism is morally relevant just in case if it were true it would preclude moral responsibility and freedom) since his causing is 'logically prior' to my acting. So we can generalize determinism from physical determinism to 'logical determinism' as follows:

(LD) An event E is logically determined by some state S just in case (a) necessarily the proposition expressing E (i.e. the proposition that E is the case) is true if the proposition p expressing S is true and (b) p is true.

Since necessarily if God wills that I do A then I do A, and God wills I do A, by this definition I'm logically determined to do A. So if this is a genuine morally relevant form of determinism, then God's cause2ing determines our actions and removes freedom. The problem with LD however is that it's not clear that it is a morally relevant form of determinism. After all, necessarily, if I do A then God wills I do A, and I in fact do A, but I don't determine God in any relevant sense to will that I do A. But if LD was a morally relevant form of determinism then I would.

I would simply hold to this: necessarily, God wills I do A if and only f I do A. This is true, but this is only meant to secure the efficacy and dependence of everything else for its existence on God's will.  This is similar to supervenience relations, and just like supervenience relations it only implies a necessary covariance; it does not necessarily imply any causal priority either of God's willing or my acting. To come back to the original point, we are working on different "causal plains" so to speak; I cause only in the sense of cause1, and God causes only in the sense of cause2. There is no causal priority of either of God's willing or my acting to the other.

Hence, I'm not sure this form of determinism, viz. logical "determinism", is a genuine form of determinism. I mean we can call it determinism (nomina significat ad placitum) but the question is whether it is a morally relevant kind, i.e. one which removes free will and moral responsibility. In the next and final post I'll come to the point about whether Aquinas's picture of predestination works.

Aquinas' Intellectualism

From Mike Flynn: "The will is determined always to the good, but the intellect does not always know perfectly what is good, and a particular object may not be good from every perspective.  If it were good from every perspective, the will could not freely withhold consent."

Question: What if the intellect did know perfectly what was good? If I'm understanding the Thomistic intellectualist position right, in that case we would make perfectly good choices.

For one, this appears to contradict Christian theology. God is all-good from every perspective. Yet the fallen angels are in their state because of their choice to sin against God. This is inexplicable given the framework where the will would be unable to freely withhold consent.

It also appears to cause problems for our personal responsibility. After all, what we choose depends on what is in our intellect. What is in our intellect is what first comes through our senses (according to Aquinas in De Veritate). So what we choose is dependent on what comes through our senses. This would imply that whether we make good or bad choices and become good or bad people is ultimately dependent on our "sensory history", i.e. whether or not we are fortunate enough to have had the types of sensations which would lead to our apprehending the types of truths which would cause us to act well. And if that's the case, it seems our action is ultimately just a matter of our having this flux of sensory stimuli rather than another. This isn't much better than the materialist picture; we're not the proper source of our actions.

Another problem is that some people have better intellects, if that makes sense. Of course, someone with a good intellect may not have a very congenial sensory history. This would explain why smart people can turn out wicked. But for those who have better intellects and better sensory histories, being directed to the good will come much easier to them insofar as they can apprehend truth and goodness more clearly than others. Thus, by chance, they're at an unfair advantage.

It seems safe to say that this means when we're punishing criminals we're ultimately (a) punishing them for not being gifted with a good intellect or (b) punishing them for not having the right sensory history. However, one should not be punished for external contingencies beyond one's control.