This is really exciting! I'm sorry not to be able to financially support your endeavors here, but I'll be following along and praying for you, for sure!
Request: (and this may be a stretch) but I'd love to pick your brain over a few things. I wonder if your idea is similar to something I've been trying to work through for myself. Thanks!
I don’t know… I think “all desires are for good objects” is just self-evidently not true, or at least depends on a very creative definition of the word “good.”
For example, take the common human experience of desiring revenge. Say someone insults me and I want to punch him because of that. At this level, it could be argued that this is not revenge, but the good thing “justice.” But what about when the revenge desired is highly disproportionate to the initial offense? Let’s take something we have probably all come across as an example: women who have been cheated on or abused by men fantasizing about tearing the bodies of the men in question limb from limb. Although the death penalty is allowed by Scripture and nature as justice for some offenses, torture is not. Therefore, this desire could never be said to be for a “good” object, because there are no conditions under which this object would be allowed. The only way your formulation makes sense is as an acknowledgment that all sinful desires result from the corruption of good ones, like revenge does from justice. However, this is not controversial at all and does not distinguish your position from that of almost any other Christian.
Thanks for this reflection! "All desires for good objects" is a rather far-reaching thesis and has invited objection since Socrates first proposed it.
I do think the desire for justice goes a long way in providing a "good object" of vengeful desire. God does not say that the object of "vengeance" is the source of its prohibition; he says the *subject* is: "Vengeance is *mine*, saith the Lord."
Many who live deserve to die, some of them by being torn limb from limb while still living. But who are you to give it to them? To misquote some Gandalf.
(At least this is one possible strategy for getting to the Christian Platonist result. :) )
I should have been more clear. I meant revenge in excess of the just penalty, not in the sense of the justice that God executes and to which (I believe) he refers in that Scripture. However, you are right that there is a sense that we do not know what appropriate cosmic justice might be, only what human justice is allowed to perform, and so we cannot say whether a given person’s desire for revenge is in excess of that. Therefore, I suppose in this area we can never completely eliminate the possibility that a person’s desire is good but misplaced (by wanting human justice to give what only divine justice can, for instance).
The other example that came to my mind initially was sexuality. There are so many instances where people’s desires just seem to have bad objects that can’t be gotten around. (I’ll refrain from mentioning the most obvious examples.) After thinking about it more, it seems that the only way to square that circle is by saying the desire is not for sex with _____, but either 1) for intimacy with that person (or intimacy simpliciter), 2) for sex simpliciter, or 3) for pleasure more generally. All of these seem problematic for different reasons. 1) doesn’t always work because desires for sex may include a desire for intimacy, but they also entail things that a desire for intimacy on its own doesn’t, and besides, the object of sexual desire isn’t always a person with whom intimacy can be shared! 3) doesn’t seem to work because we experience different kinds of pleasure so differently, and we often feel deprived when we have some types but not others, so reducing all of them to just pleasure feels like it ignores experience. 2) works in a way, in that people do experience a sort of free-floating sexual desire at times, but I think this still runs into problems experientially. Saying that the object of the desire is “sex” would seem to imply that one could tell a male homosexual, “alright, since you want sex, and your only licit way to get sex is to get married, then just find a woman and get married! Problem solved!” As you well know, the response would be, “but I don’t want to have sex with a woman, I want to have sex with a man.” The fact that this can be said seems to point in the direction of sexual desire being not just for sex, but for a more specific type of sex or sex with a specific person.
I know this is your test case for this “all desires are for good objects” thesis, so I’m sure you have an answer for this. How do you solve this problem?
INTR - Love it! even if it does sound like a meyers briggs personality type. Haha
"I argue, all desire is for good objects, yet sin presents the temptation to have these good objects under conditions that are proscribed by God." - Really like this comment.
This maps unto something I have recently been thinking about in regards to our definition of sin. Usually the word is used for " the act of willing something into existence (It can be an action, thought, or desire etc.) that deserves divine punishment." But this definition doesn't fully encapsulate all the potential ways that a person may not be fit for eternal relationship with the ultimate source of love. For example, Cluster B types can cause all kinds of problems in relationships without ever "doing" anything explicitly bad. Often the problems come because the Cluster B type ~sees~ the relationship in a problematic way, which is not the same as a choice, action, or "something that is willed into being". Vision precedes the moral culpability of desire, will, and action. So much so, that if a criminal is declared insane (aka doesn't see reality), we do not hold them morally accountable for their crime. Now, just because they are not morally accountable for their actions, it does not mean that they are allowed to participate freely in society either. Quite the contrary.
But after getting this far, I realize that I should probably just write an essay on this, instead of trying to fit an essay into your comment section.
Haha, I imagine it as pronounced “Inter,” for interdisciplinary.
Yes, to your mini-essay! How we perceive the world is not directly under our control. I think the Zwingli idea about original sin as defect applies to so much, all the non-voluntary dimensions of sin.
This is really exciting! I'm sorry not to be able to financially support your endeavors here, but I'll be following along and praying for you, for sure!
Request: (and this may be a stretch) but I'd love to pick your brain over a few things. I wonder if your idea is similar to something I've been trying to work through for myself. Thanks!
I don’t know… I think “all desires are for good objects” is just self-evidently not true, or at least depends on a very creative definition of the word “good.”
For example, take the common human experience of desiring revenge. Say someone insults me and I want to punch him because of that. At this level, it could be argued that this is not revenge, but the good thing “justice.” But what about when the revenge desired is highly disproportionate to the initial offense? Let’s take something we have probably all come across as an example: women who have been cheated on or abused by men fantasizing about tearing the bodies of the men in question limb from limb. Although the death penalty is allowed by Scripture and nature as justice for some offenses, torture is not. Therefore, this desire could never be said to be for a “good” object, because there are no conditions under which this object would be allowed. The only way your formulation makes sense is as an acknowledgment that all sinful desires result from the corruption of good ones, like revenge does from justice. However, this is not controversial at all and does not distinguish your position from that of almost any other Christian.
Thanks for this reflection! "All desires for good objects" is a rather far-reaching thesis and has invited objection since Socrates first proposed it.
I do think the desire for justice goes a long way in providing a "good object" of vengeful desire. God does not say that the object of "vengeance" is the source of its prohibition; he says the *subject* is: "Vengeance is *mine*, saith the Lord."
Many who live deserve to die, some of them by being torn limb from limb while still living. But who are you to give it to them? To misquote some Gandalf.
(At least this is one possible strategy for getting to the Christian Platonist result. :) )
I should have been more clear. I meant revenge in excess of the just penalty, not in the sense of the justice that God executes and to which (I believe) he refers in that Scripture. However, you are right that there is a sense that we do not know what appropriate cosmic justice might be, only what human justice is allowed to perform, and so we cannot say whether a given person’s desire for revenge is in excess of that. Therefore, I suppose in this area we can never completely eliminate the possibility that a person’s desire is good but misplaced (by wanting human justice to give what only divine justice can, for instance).
The other example that came to my mind initially was sexuality. There are so many instances where people’s desires just seem to have bad objects that can’t be gotten around. (I’ll refrain from mentioning the most obvious examples.) After thinking about it more, it seems that the only way to square that circle is by saying the desire is not for sex with _____, but either 1) for intimacy with that person (or intimacy simpliciter), 2) for sex simpliciter, or 3) for pleasure more generally. All of these seem problematic for different reasons. 1) doesn’t always work because desires for sex may include a desire for intimacy, but they also entail things that a desire for intimacy on its own doesn’t, and besides, the object of sexual desire isn’t always a person with whom intimacy can be shared! 3) doesn’t seem to work because we experience different kinds of pleasure so differently, and we often feel deprived when we have some types but not others, so reducing all of them to just pleasure feels like it ignores experience. 2) works in a way, in that people do experience a sort of free-floating sexual desire at times, but I think this still runs into problems experientially. Saying that the object of the desire is “sex” would seem to imply that one could tell a male homosexual, “alright, since you want sex, and your only licit way to get sex is to get married, then just find a woman and get married! Problem solved!” As you well know, the response would be, “but I don’t want to have sex with a woman, I want to have sex with a man.” The fact that this can be said seems to point in the direction of sexual desire being not just for sex, but for a more specific type of sex or sex with a specific person.
I know this is your test case for this “all desires are for good objects” thesis, so I’m sure you have an answer for this. How do you solve this problem?
INTR - Love it! even if it does sound like a meyers briggs personality type. Haha
"I argue, all desire is for good objects, yet sin presents the temptation to have these good objects under conditions that are proscribed by God." - Really like this comment.
This maps unto something I have recently been thinking about in regards to our definition of sin. Usually the word is used for " the act of willing something into existence (It can be an action, thought, or desire etc.) that deserves divine punishment." But this definition doesn't fully encapsulate all the potential ways that a person may not be fit for eternal relationship with the ultimate source of love. For example, Cluster B types can cause all kinds of problems in relationships without ever "doing" anything explicitly bad. Often the problems come because the Cluster B type ~sees~ the relationship in a problematic way, which is not the same as a choice, action, or "something that is willed into being". Vision precedes the moral culpability of desire, will, and action. So much so, that if a criminal is declared insane (aka doesn't see reality), we do not hold them morally accountable for their crime. Now, just because they are not morally accountable for their actions, it does not mean that they are allowed to participate freely in society either. Quite the contrary.
But after getting this far, I realize that I should probably just write an essay on this, instead of trying to fit an essay into your comment section.
Haha, I imagine it as pronounced “Inter,” for interdisciplinary.
Yes, to your mini-essay! How we perceive the world is not directly under our control. I think the Zwingli idea about original sin as defect applies to so much, all the non-voluntary dimensions of sin.