Deontic logic concerns itself with duties not facts. It is my duty, even if it is not a fact, to attribute to Carl Kordig the following proof that God exists but only as a smelly old child molester
My Kordig type argument goes as follows-
1) If we ought to believe that deontics isn't empty, or wholly ontologically dysphoric, it must be the case that we ought to believe that a deontically perfect being ought to exist. Why? Well, suppose the reverse. Then, either deontics is well founded (i.e. there is always a minimal duty and thus deontics is non empty) but not upwardly so or it can't be well ordered and ought to be junked straight away. What if it is not upwardly well founded? Then it cashes out as a Dialethia or Polyalethia or Anything Goes or faces a Halting problem- again, a good reason we ought to junk deontics coz it can never give us a substantive answer to even the simplest question unless, obviously, it happens to be Kleene-Brouwer well ordered (no infinite trees) in which case it could be utterly apophatic and intuitionistic and so suddenly everybody's either got a long beard, like Brouwer, or crazy eyes, like Wittgenstein, and is starting to get smelly and it abruptly becomes (coz now Maths, i.e. Logic, i.e. Reason, is wholly outside Language) 'common knowledge' impossible to discriminate the brain dead child molester from the tortured genius who just likes beating kids coz that's proper Aryan Paideia or some other such shite.
Thus, if we really ought to believe deontics isn't wholly useless- i.e. empty- and provided we aren't, most of us, living in the wrong Universe- then we ought to believe
2) If a deontically perfect being ought to exist, then such a being can exist. Moore's paradox gives us two choices- either we can say 'we ought to believe that a deontically perfect being can exist while simultaneously knowing that nothing of the sort is the case' or else we can say 'we ought to believe that a deontically perfect being can exist and also know that this is the case'. Suppose, we choose Moore and affirm the latter.
3) Then something we know can exist is a deontically perfect being. What? Well, a deontically perfect being cannot be a contingent being. Therefore, a deontically perfect being must necessarily exist.
4) We know smelly old child molesters exist. We ought to beat them to death so they cease to exist. If they continue to exist, then their existence is deontically necessary not contingent. Since a lot of smelly old child molesters claim either to be God or his Holy Vessel or Vassal or Vaseline or whatever, pragmatics tells us 'smelly old child molester' is a rigid designator for God since words like smelly and old and child molester are merely contingent and not descriptive at all.
Q.E.D
No comments:
Post a Comment