In my previous post—the first in a series on criminal adjudication in the age of (possible) artificial general intelligence—I mentioned Blaise Pascal’s perspective on natural law. Pascal believed there might be a natural law, but that we humans would be incompetent at knowing it. Which is interesting, because he said some strangely opposite things when it came to his Christianity.
I’m always up for some moral philosophy, so let’s dive in…
Pascal’s Pensées comes with an interesting caveat: it is merely a collection of thoughts he left behind at his death, and in discombobulated fashion. Some may know the work as the genesis of “Pascal’s wager,” a rather dumb argument that Homer amply defeats.
No, not that Homer—the Springfield one, in Season 4, Episode 3, Homer the Heretic:
[Marge] I can’t believe you’re giving up church, Homer.
[Homer] Hey, what’s the big deal about going to some building every Sunday? I mean, isn’t God everywhere?
[Bart] Amen, brother.
[Homer] And don’t you think that the Almighty has better things to worry about than where one little guy spends one measly hour of his week?
[Bart] Tell it, Daddy.
[Homer] And what if we pick the wrong religion? Every week we’re just making God madder and madder.
[Bart] Testify!
[Marge’s signature groan.]
That ‘argument from inconsistent revelations’ is of course not novel to Homer, but he nails it. Still, he’s ultimately back in church on Sunday… as always, one should watch the tv!
Okay… back to Pascal’s Pensées. As I was saying before the Simpsons interrupted, it consists of fragmentary collections of Pascal’s thoughts published posthumously. It was Pascal’s habit to work by jotting thoughts on long sheets of paper, and separating them with short horizontal lines—and then later cutting along those lines and gathering like-content slips together. Pensées publishes those gathered slips. So, one probably ought not be too hard on anything therein, as it wasn’t ready for prime time. And that might explain aspects on religion that just don’t work for me (or for thinkers like Nietzsche), such as this bit on Pascal’s faith:
Those we see to be Christians without knowledge of the prophesies and proofs judge as well as those who have that knowledge. They judge with the heart as others judge with the mind. God himself inclines them to believe, and thus they are most effectively convinced.
Someone might reply that unbelievers would say the same thing. But my answer to that is that we have proofs that God truly inclines those he loves to believe the Christian religion, and that unbelievers have no proof at all of what they say. And so, although our propositions are similar as to their terms, they differ in that the one lacks proof and the other is very soundly proved.
Um, no. So it is, I think, that many readers will be annoyed by much of Pensées ‘text.’ (For that text, as I did above, I will use Roger Ariew’s translation; that was from Sellier-numbered fragment 414/Lafuma fragment 382. And Pascal crossed out that second paragraph. Good call.)
Still, I’m happy to be a picker and a chooser. Like Nietzsche (who always made his own rules, and who likewise enjoyed some non-religious aspects of Pascal’s fragments), and like Huey Lewis and Lita Ford, I know what I like. And I quite like some of what Pascal’s fragments say.
Like this bit: “I blame equally those who decide to praise man, those who blame him, and those who amuse themselves; and I can approve only of those who search in anguish.” (Sellier 24/Lafuma 405)
And this: “If we look at our work immediately after completing it, we are still altogether possessed with it; if we delay too long, we can no longer get involved with it.” (Sellier 55/Lafuma 21) What scholar has not experienced both? Don’t we all have those projects that saw print too soon? And others begun in earnest, but now too-long-neglected to ever be completed?
“It is the same with pictures seen from too far or too near. … [T]here is only one indivisible point, which is the right place. The others are too near, too far, too high, or too low. Perspective determines that point in the art of painting. But in truth and in morality, who will determine it?” (Sellier 56/Lafuma 22) Great question.
“What astonishes me most is to see that everyone is not astonished by his own weakness. … But it is good for the reputation of skepticism that there are so many people in the world who are not skeptics … . This sect is strengthened by its enemies more than by its friends, for [human] weakness is much more apparent in those who do not recognize it than in those who do.” (Sellier 67–68/Lafuma 33–34) Nice.
And how about this on mindfulness?
We never keep to the present time. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, almost to hurry it up, or we remember the past, to stop it as having gone too fast. So imprudent are we that we wander about in times that are not ours and do not think of the one that belongs to us, and so vain are we that we dream of those that are nothing and let slip away without reflection the one that exists. It is that the present is usually painful. We hide it from our sight because it distresses us; and, if it is agreeable, we regret seeing it slip away. We try to support it with the future and think of arranging things we cannot control, for a time we have no certainty of reaching.
Examine your thoughts, and you will find them wholly occupied with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do so, it is only to shed light on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; only the future is our end. So, we never live, but hope to live, and, as we are always planning to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so. (Sellier 80/Lafuma 47)
So, we never live, but hope to live. Precious.
But I digress. I promised Pascal on natural law; here it is:
On what will [a ruler] base the organization of the world he wants to govern? On the whim of each individual? What confusion! On justice? He does not know what it is. Certainly, if he did know, he would not have laid down this maxim, the most general of all human maxims, that each should follow the customs of his own country. True equity would have swayed all people by its brilliance and legislators would not have taken as their model the fancies and whims of Persians and Germans, instead of this steady justice. We would have seen it planted in all the states of the world, at all times; whereas we see nothing, whether just or unjust, that does not change its quality with a change in climate. Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides what is true. Fundamental laws change after being kept for a few years; rights have their terms. The entry of Saturn into Leo marks the origin of a given crime. Odd kind of justice that is bounded by a river! Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other.
They admit that justice does not reside in these customs, but in natural laws common to every country. They would certainly maintain this stubbornly if reckless chance, which has distributed human laws, had found at least one that was universal; but the joke is that human whim has so many varieties that there is no such general law.
…
Doubtless there are natural laws, but … reason having been corrupted, it corrupted everything. …
The result of this confusion is that one says the essence of justice is the authority of the legislator, another the interest of the sovereign, another present custom. And the last is the surest. Nothing, according to reason alone, is just in itself; everything shifts with time. Custom constitutes the whole of equity for the sole reason that it is accepted. This is the hidden basis of its authority; whoever tries to reduce it to its first principles destroys it. Nothing is so faulty as the laws that correct faults. Whoever obeys them because they are just obeys an imaginary justice, and not the essence of the law. It is altogether self-contained; it is the law and nothing more. (Sellier 94/Lafuma 60)
I like pondering first principles. Still, this seems right to me—natural laws there may be, and hopefully are, but we humans have very little hope of personally finding them, and no hope of collectively agreeing on them. Witness the recent very significant normative changes in American law, largely triggered by a single presidential election. Nothing is so faulty as the laws that correct faults. Words to remember for those of us in the criminal law.
As always, those who want more on Pascal might turn to the tutored entries of the Stanford encyclopedia.
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