Closing Pascal’s Box

          Nearly four centuries ago Blasie Pascal laid out his famous wager in an attempt to prove that it was rational to believe in God. The argument seems deceptively simple, either God exists or not, we have to “place a bet,” so to speak, and the only way we “win” the wager is if we bet for God, and God exists. Hidden in this attempt to justify theism is a rather complex use of probability and decision theories, voluntarism, pragmatism, and an often overlooked use of infinity.¹ This argument had implications far beyond the Philosophy of Religion, and set the stage for the continuing debate on epistemic justification, how it is rational for us to form and hold beliefs. In effect, he opened Pandora's box on this topic.

          In this paper I will show that some of the last openings for Pascal's mode of thinking have been closed off in recent years. While it is clear that there is a great number of things that can be said about his argument, I will focus on voluntarism, forming beliefs at will, and pragmatic justifications, basing beliefs on non-epistemic concerns. With these two features alone, we can remove any doubt that rational people can be epistemically justified in being convinced by the wager, and we can close Pascal's box.

Proposed Research Project

The following is a research proposal done as part of a class.  I may never do this project, and while my claims here are supported by the evidence that I found, this is far from a completed project, and so can't be taken as a solid argument.

Discussion of the Topic:

          The topic of this research project is the complex and seemingly contradictory histories of the Constitutionality of religious practices inside the United States Government. While the primary study will be on the federal level, some important state cases, like the 1927 Scopes trial, may also be examined. It may seem that until the latter half of the 20^th Century there is a tendency for government to endorse religious beliefs and practices (Lewis 2002, 78-80). While that is compounded by the ceremonial and patriotic governmental mentions of “God” (Newdow v. Rio Linda 2010, 3877), it is a mistake to believe that the Constitution allowed any level of government to endorse religion, or prefer religion over non-religious beliefs (Schauer 1996, 444).

Moral Pluralism and George's Job Search

          In this paper I will briefly lay out W. D. Ross' ethical theory, Moral Pluralism (MP), and apply it to Bernard Williams' “George the chemist” case in order to demonstrate how such a theory can resolve moral conflicts. Moral Pluralism differs from what could be called “moral monism” in that monism claims that there is a single principle that serves as an explanation of morality,¹ but pluralism claims there is a collection of principles where none of them are more basic or fundamental than the rest.² The major departure between pluralism and monism is that there is no single justification of morality, the parts of morality, or the plurality of the moral rules; the basic moral rules exist together, they cannot be derived from one another, and they are not grounded on some external principle.³

          This may seem less plausible than other theories because determinations in specific cases are usually deduced from a combination of the basic principle and the derived duties. Here, we have only a collection of duties with no principle to make use of in deciding cases. Ross did not find this problematic because he posited “prima facie” duties (PFD), a collection of basic moral duties, and what could be called “all-things-considered” duties (ATCD), the duties that are left after careful reflection on “one's duty proper … [or] one's actual duty.”⁴ Imagine a driver of a car on a snowy freeway. The driver has a large number of legal duties that apply to her at any given moment: the duty to keep the car in working order, to use turn signals before changing lanes, to drive safe speeds, and to keep her vehicle under her control in all weather conditions. Failing at any of one of these might count as being legally blameworthy. If an emergency vehicle should appear behind her with full lights and sirens, all the PFDs of driving are still there, but her ATCD becomes to move out of the way.

A Response to "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World 1890-1940"

          George Chauncey's goal in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World 1890-1940, was to bring into the public consciousness a forgotten segment of American History, the history of a culture that was “not supposed to have existed”.¹ He confronts three widely held misconceptions of the homosexual culture in pre-World War II New York City, which form the modern conception until the latter half of the 20^th Century; homosexuals lived in isolation from one another, were invisible to the public sphere, and that they internalized a self-loathing and other negative attitudes from the mainstream culture.² His task is to show evidence that none of those were universally true.

          The means with which Chauncey sets about this task is to give the reader a glimpse into the “gay world” were modern readers might expect to find “the gay closet”.³ The gay world was a loosely connected web of social networks, each separable and distinct from one another,⁴ creating their own common folklore, unique linguistic style, and establishing their own (long running) cultural festivals.⁵ In drawing the map of the “sexual topography” of NYC, he leaves behind the familiar lines that now separate heterosexual from homosexual, by illustrating the extent, uses, and intermixed character of both the physical and social spaces at the time.⁶