And the ship sails on

Philosophy

r a d i c a L p h i L o s o p h y 1 8 4 ( m a r / a p r 2 0 1 4 ) Davidson suggests, rediscovering his orthodoxy, by a working class that is fully conscious of itself and its mission to make a society free of the exploitation that deined the others. The party-form, he weakly insists, is fundamental to its realization. Despite the obvious Hegelian source of such an idealist story, it appears ironically that in reconstructing it historically in considerable detail, Davidson may have momentarily forgotten the historical 'cunning' of capital so fundamental to his own concept. How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? is a rich and comprehensive work of history and theory. It is one of a set of important but more or less defensive works of Marxism recently published by Haymarket Books, which are marked by times of crisis. On the one hand, and most obviously, they are marked by the ongoing crisis of capitalism; on the other, less obviously, but equally actually, they are marked by a crisis within existing forms of opposition to it, including that of the party to which Davidson belongs (the Socialist Workers Party). Like The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (2009) by Peter D. Thomas and History as Theory: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (2010) by Jairus Banaji, it is characterized not only by a shared critique of the work of Perry Anderson, but also by both a marshalling of existing resources and an attempt at critically generating new ideas out of new versions of old ones – without the conceptual adventure required of a genuine contemporaneity. Thomas convincingly renovates and reconigures Gramsci's idea of 'hegemonic apparatus' – a valuable task, in the manner of Christine Buci-Glucksmann's Gramsci and the State (1975) – whilst, less convincingly, arguing for the contemporary political relevance of Gramsci's philosophy of praxis. Similarly, Banaji's excellent collection of heterodox essays reconigures the historical relations between capital, accumulation and exploitation in inventive and analytically important ways, but in the process also threatens so to extend the geographical and temporal limits of capitalism as a historical epoch into the past as to make it almost impossible to work with. (There the source of the book's weakness is, paradoxically, its theoretical strength.) For his part, Davidson insists on presenting his account of 'bourgeois revolution', both as concept and reality, as an education in historical materialism, engaging over and over again with key debates from its history. This includes, like many before him, being nobbled by Marx's discussion of the relative determining weight of the forces and relations of production in the 1959 'Preface'. Such a methodology provides for both the book's highs (the recovery of Lukács's relections on uneven development and revolution, for example) and lows (an overt Trotskyism which even threatens to consume Walter Benjamin, for example). In this respect, the size of the book – and if the page format were the same as the rest of the series, it would extend to over 1,000 pages – is a relection of the breadth and depth of the crises (social, political, intellectual) that it internalizes in the very structure of its composition. John Kraniauskas And the ship sails on Alain Badiou, Cinema, Polity, Cambridge, 2013. 320 pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 74565 567 3 hb., 978 0 74565 568 0 pb. To call a book simply Cinema is to frame its contents as a contribution to the theorization of cinema, and thus, for a certain readership, to identify it as something other than ilm criticism. It is, in other words, to announce its apparent participation in, or proximity to, ilm theory. In an interview conducted by a former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, Antoine de Baecque, for the original publication in French, Badiou himself seems however, by turns, relatively modest and occasionally self-congratulatory as regards any claim to make a major intervention in the ield. His entertaining and informative account of his largely solitary cinéphilia of the 1950s and 1960s, as a 'young provincial' frequenting the Cinémathèque (a few doors away at that time from the École Normale Supérieure on the rue d'Ulm), through to his work as a 'heathen' iniltrating the Catholic journal Vin nouveau, and on to his engagement with cinema through politics, contains both moments of selfregarding comedy as well as statements which identify several of the key tropes that will recur throughout the volume. Hence, of Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme, in which Badiou plays himself in a scene aboard a cruise ship, he comments: 'in just a few seconds, in the scene where I'm working at the desk, I've never before seen images where I am so much myself. So I'm pleased with the mode of presence attributed to me in that shot'. The observation has its more obviously serious counterpart in a comment made later on in the interview when Badiou states that Godard's invitation to appear in the ilm touched him, '[b]ecause 47r a d i c a L p h i L o s o p h y 1 8 4 ( m a r / a p r 2 0 1 4 ) it seems to mean that I'm part of the present time, in a ilm that incidentally deals with the hubbub of the world'. At face value both comments seem innocuous enough, suggesting a philosopher lattered by a director he has long admired, and who is indeed of central importance to several of the texts collected here. Taken together, however, the two comments distil several core concerns of Badiou's Cinema as a whole. In particular, what apparently pleases Badiou most is that Godard makes him part of that 'contemporary' which precisely furnishes the material that it is the role of cinema to 'purify'. In the thirty-one texts making up the book, of disparate length, signiicance and occasion (several are lectures or seminars transcribed), cinema is deined in many diferent ways. It is, inter alia, and in no particular order, an art of 'general assembly', an art of 'the end of metaphysics', an art of identiication; it operates via 'subtraction' and 'puriication'; it comprises 'great igures of humanity in action', and, in its efectuation of a 'movement from love to politics', is an art in which one can, Badiou implies, locate a potential forum within which several of his own philosophical concepts might ind themselves relected or refracted. Cinema is an art of general assembly in so far as it is, in Badiou's terms, a mass art; it is a democratic art as opposed to an aristocratic art such as painting or music (although Badiou will absolutely insist on excluding what is referred to as 'the moaning of pop music'). Cinema, he tells us repeatedly, is something one goes to on a Saturday night; not requiring the apprenticeship or connoisseur ship associated with other arts, cinema can be engaged with and understood by everyone. The problem with this normative account of ilm viewing is that it leads Badiou, on the one hand, to propose some pretty dogmatic and indeed somewhat clichéd formulations regarding cinema spectatorship (no popcorn is mentioned, nor could it be, this being Paris), and, on the other, to an insistence on the presence in such mainstream ilms as Titanic or Brassed Of of the sort of 'truth' Badiou believes to be disclosed far more consistently in the work of 'modernist' directors such as Godard, Straub and Huillet, and Antonioni. Even these latter, he asserts, make ilms illed with the trite and the banal. Thus, in what is one of only three references to any other writings on cinema (by anyone), Badiou can airm aspects of Bazin's ontology of the cinematographic image: the trite and the banal are merely the imprint of the real (as opposed to the Lacanian Real, which itself makes a somewhat muted but nonetheless notable appearance, à la Žižek, in Badiou's many references to pornography), and is a feature as much of Titanic as it is of À bout de soule. (In order to shake of some of the banality of the imprinted world on their ilms, Badiou's amusing proposal is that all great ilm artists should try to make ilms without cars, or else, as in some of the ilms of Godard and Kiarostami, employ them in a diferent way.) Linked to this (itself rather trite) claim that cinema is democratic because its banal efets de réel can be recognized (cinema is an art of identiication) – though we will not ind Badiou citing Barthes, or anyone else for that matter – is Badiou's assertion of the presence in ilm of a 'generic humanity' in another form. In the only early text reprinted here, a 1957 essay from Vin nouveau, he refers to how cinema achieves 'the presence of man'. The notion returns later, albeit shorn of its existentialist trappings, in the familiar guise of a humanity courageously persisting in the manner of a character from the world of Beckett. Badiou insists that this inherent aspect of cinema, played out on the screen in the shape of a 'central conlict' between characters and values, through which a 'hero' emerges, is very diicult to read as anything more than a snatch of some conversation one might participate in with any ilmgoer whatsoever (on Badiou's fabled Saturday night perhaps). This is of course partly Badiou's point: the hero may fall or rise on the screen, but the viewer is by deinition 'on the rise' (as he asserts in a text from 2005, originally published in the journal Critique, entitled 'On Cinema as a Democratic Emblem') by virtue of the very possibility of this mass democratic chatter itself. Badiou's idelity to such exchanges both between screen and viewer, and within the conversing masses, is connected, seemingly paradoxically, to the privileged status he accords to Godard – decidedly not a typical staple of the multiplex. There are many references to Godard as exemplar – like cinema itself, Godard is many things – and three texts devoted exclusively to his work. A consideration of the latter afords a way to think more generally about politics and cinema in Badiou's thinking as these are mutually articulated throughout this collection. The most recent of the texts on Godard is about a ilm already almost forty years old by the time Badiou came to write about it in 2005: Tout va bien, made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin in 1972. In Badiou's retrospective account of how 1972 marked the beginning of the ebbing of revolt, the ilm becomes an allegory of gauchisme on the wane, and includes the observation that its ironic title is in fact a version 48 r a d i c a L p h i L o s o p h y 1 8 4 ( m a r / a p r 2 0 1 4 ) of Mao's 'unrest is an excellent thing'. An earlier text, this time written closer to the historical juncture in question, inds much of interest in Godard's 1982 ilm Passion, which in a similar way to the ilm from a decade before, evokes with incisive precision, according to Badiou, both the coming to power of the Left in France and the 'Polish way' ofered by Solidarność. By contrast, in a text from 1998 on Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma, cinema is itself, Badiou writes, 'summoned before the court of its historical responsibility and artistic destiny', leading him to ask: 'Is this really fair to it?' Godard's ilm, he suggests, acts as a counterweight to that 'revisionist malady' of European cinema, which he castigates on several occasions, including, notably, Lacombe Lucien by Louis Malle and The Night Porter by Liliana Cavani (Badiou does not cite Foucault, who discussed both of these ilms in a 1974 interview with Cahiers du cinema, translated as 'Film and Popular Memory' in RP 11, Summer 1975). Yet it is, consequently, more than a little harsh, Badiou argues, in judging what he insists is still a mass art. Why? The reason lies in Badiou's insistence that in post-1972 cinema one inds 'a collection of precious victories', ofering hope for the orphans of the revolution, for those who became weary, disenchanted or disengaged from the revolutionary path, or who (in this decidedly francocentric narrative) quickly realized that the coming to power of Mittérrand would not for long be the source of much hope. In a collection of such diversity it is tempting to ind unifying threads. One such is ofered when the opening interview refers explicitly to the Badiouian concept of 'inaesthetics', and to the notion of cinema as the 'seventh art'. A central text, the longest in the book, serves to outline in what ways cinema might be construed as a distinctive form of 'philosophical experimentation'. The text was not written for publication but is transcribed from a seminar in Buenos Aires in 2005. It ofers an account of all of the major concerns articulated elsewhere in the collection, and among its notable features is a clear (and largely uncontroversial) account of Deleuze's books on cinema. What Badiou describes, however, as ive ways of 'thinking cinema' take as their own founding presupposition the (always unquestioned) claim that cinema is a mass art. In what is a rather comical slippage, Badiou makes no diferentiation between what he thus proposes are ive ways in which cinema has been thought (implicitly in the work of others, such as Bazin and Deleuze, as well as a great unnamed cast of ilm theorists) and the ive ways in which he thinks cinema. Thus we return to cinema as semblance of the real (Bazin), cinema as making time visible (Deleuze), but then also cinema as the democratization of the other arts, cinema as on the border between art and non-art, and inally cinema as afording what Badiou calls 'ethical genres, genres that are addressed to humanity so as to ofer it a moral mythology'. What follows in the text is, inally, Badiou's own alternative to Deleuze's cinematic image, an array of provocations which, frustratingly, are not subsequently reconsidered in the light of Deleuze's concepts of movementand time-images. Badiou ranges far and wide, both explicitly in ilm history and implicitly (without acknowledgment) in some of the terrain upon which traditional ilm theory treads. In his discussion of how genre works as a democratizing force, for example, Orson Welles is of central importance. As Deleuze does in another context, Badiou gravitates towards Welles's The Lady from Shanghai and argues that montage is the 'destruction of metaphysics' whereas the still image is 'metaphysical'. Welles, he argues, is able to employ both. It is certainly true that Welles combines montage and a realism of the type airmed by Bazin (the famed exploitation of depth of ield, long takes, etc.). But, considered from the point of view of subsequent ilm history, he is hardly unique in this respect. More to the point: is metaphysics really what is at stake in The Lady from Shanghai? By Badiou's own account, is it not rather a matter of the worker-hero battling it out against the capitalist boss and the bored wife (played by Rita Hayworth)? It might, in this context, be suggested that Badiou's interpretation only rather arbitrarily focuses on the theoretical construction imposed upon the ilm. And even if this is perhaps not intended to be taken entirely seriously, the decision draws attention to the often rather thin nature of the material collected here when considered across the book as a whole. That so much of it is made up of interviews, transcriptions of unpublished work, some unpublished short pieces on individual ilms, and quite a considerable amount of repetition, does not of course necessarily diminish this book's worth. In particular, those interested in gaining an appreciation of how cinema is located within Badiouian inaesthetics (and part of the book of that title is republished here), as well as of the notion of cinema as an 'impure' art, will doubtless ind much to appreciate. Film scholars, however, may have to resign themselves to the fact that Badiou probably does not care too much about their objections. Instead, he is content to echo, as 49r a d i c a L p h i L o s o p h y 1 8 4 ( m a r / a p r 2 0 1 4 ) he often does, inadvertently, the words uttered by Samuel Fuller (playing himself) in Godard's Pierrot le fou: 'The ilm is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death.' Above all, and to judge from the introductory interview, Badiou appears simply to be pleased with the fact that the compiler of these diverse texts, Antoine de Baecque, has made him so much more visibly present, as Godard did in Film Socialisme, in contemporary discourse in and about cinema. Garin Dowd Hunger games George Henderson, Value in Marx: The Persistence of Value in a More-than-Capitalist World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2013. xxv + 171 pp., £50.50 hb., £17.00 pb., 978 0 81668 095 5 hb., 978 0 81668 096 2 pb. Henderson's intention in this book is 'to explore what can be thought of as the lives of value in Marx's work, lives that are caught up in the capitalist moment but also take up residence beyond it'. To this end, the book focuses on the irreducibility of the concept of value to capital in Marx. It is therefore not an attempt to establish the deinition of value as a speciic determination internal to the concept of capital – distinguished, for instance, from 'exchange value', 'surplus value' or 'self-valorizing value' – but rather to establish a concept of value external to capital. As such, he takes issue with a powerful tradition of commentators who maintain that Marx's concept of value only applies to capital, and would not apply beyond it. In fact, Henderson does not oppose this tradition except in so far as it claims that there is only one theory of value in Marx. Marx's texts on value display ruptures and incoherencies, according to Henderson, and should therefore be read as the scenes of a tension between more than one theory of value. However, the textual evidence for Henderson's reading is scant. Repeatedly he projects the concept of value onto passages where there is no mention of the word. Presumably it is in order to render all these absences as clues that we have to wait until the last chapter of the book before the primal scene of the investigation is disclosed in Marx's Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann of 11 July 1868. Here, irritated by his critics' demands that he prove the law of value, Marx describes it as an elementary and trans historical or 'natural' law that 'the amounts of products corresponding to the difering amounts of needs [in a society] demand difering and quantitatively determined amounts of society's aggregate labour'. Curiously, Henderson's quotation breaks of at the pivotal moment where Marx writes: Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically difering conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products. Where science comes in is to show how the law of value asserts itself. In other words, Marx attempts to show how, not whether, the law of value asserts itself. This claim appears to contradict his treatment of the law of value elsewhere, especially in Capital, where it is ostensibly subsumed by the analysis of forms speciic to capital, particularly exchange value and its bearers, such as commodities and money. But the Letter to Kugelmann suggests that Marx's deinition of the law of value in Capital as the magnitude of socially necessary labour-time is not speciic to capital, but rather a transhistorical law, which assumes the historical form of exchange value in capitalist societies. Communist societies would therefore also be subject to a calculation of socially necessary labour time, in so far as the cooperative production for social needs would still require a quantitative allocation of the total social labour to produce for diferent needs. This could no more be abandoned than could the production for needs in general. What could be abandoned is the organization of this total social labour according to exchange value or private property. Hence, communism is conceived as the social organization of the relation of a society's productive abilities to its needs. This is consistent with Marx's critique of various forms of 'crude communism' that maintain the presuppositions of political economy – for instance, his critique of 'the fair distribution of the proceeds of labour' proclaimed by the 'Gotha Programme', in so far as it ostensibly condemns those who cannot work to poverty, thereby revealing that it still treats labour as a form of private property. Hence we have a coherent theory of the law of value in Marx's Letter to Kugelmann, as a trans-historical


On Rescher on Pascal's Wager

Philosophy

On Rescher On Pascal's Wager by Graham Oppy In Pascal's Wager: A Study Of Practical Reasoning In Philosophical Theology (University Of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1985), Nicholas Rescher aims to show that, contrary to received philosophical opinion, Pascal's Wager argument is "the vehicle of a fruitful and valuable insight -one which not only represents a milestone in the development of an historically important tradition of thought but can still be seen as making an instructive contribution to philosophical theology" (p.x). In particular, Rescher argues that one only needs to adopt a correct perspective in order to see that Pascal's Wager argument is a good argument. Moreover, there seems to be a certain amount of contemporary support for Rescher's claim that Pascal's Wager argument can be seen to be a good argument when properly construed. (Cf. Kay, C.D. "Review Of N. Rescher's Pascal's Wager" IJPR, 1987, Vol.22, pp.112-113; and Brown, G. "A Defence Of Pascal's Wager" RS, 1985, Vol.20, pp.465-479.) However, despite this recent trend to adopt a more sympathetic stance towards Pascal's Wager argument, I propose to defend the traditional view that Pascal's Wager argument is almost entirely worthless -at least from the theological standpoint. (No doubt, it has historical significance from the standpoint of decision theory; but that's a separate matter.) This paper is divided into two sections. I begin, in section I, by outlining the defence of Pascal's Wager argument which is given by Rescher in Pascal's Wager. Then, in section II, I explain why this defence fails. I As Rescher emphasises, Pascal's Wager argument unfolds against a background of scepticism about the powers of theoretical reason. "Pascal holds, with the Renaissance skeptics, that our human resources for securing knowledge by inquiring reason are wholly inadequate to the demands of apologetics" (p.5). Indeed -and this is a point which will be important later on -Rescher is at pains to note that Pascal insists that theoretical reason is "utterly impotent" in the context of the assessment of the question of God's existence. Consequently, the Wager argument is forced to appeal to a further species of "reasons", viz: practical reasons. According to Rescher, the core of Pascal's Wager argument -at least from a logical point of view -lies in decision theory (i.e. in the theory of decision-making in situations of uncertainty about outcomes). We can illuminate this basic argument by referring to the following table: Options Returns to the chooser God Exists God does not exist (Prob=p) (Prob=1-p) Bet on God ¥ (-B) -B Bet against God little or nothing 0 (perhap negative) The idea is that, in deciding whether or not to bet on God -i.e. in deciding whether or not to believe in God -what we do is to consider the expected return for each of these options. Moreover, we suppose: (i) that the cost of making the bet is B; (ii) that the subjective probability which we assign to the claim that God exists is p; and (iii) that the returns on our decision are as outlined in the above table. (Note that, if we bet on God, and it turns out that God exists, then our return is infinite -for the value of ¥-B is just ¥ .) But now we note that: (a) the expected return of a bet on God is ¥.p + (B).(1-p) which is ¥ provided that p is finite; and (b) that the expected return of a bet against God is (little or nothing).p + 0.(1p) which is little or nothing (and quite likely negative). So -according to Pascal's Wager argument -it is reasonable to conclude that our expected return is infinite in the case that we bet on God, and little or nothing in the case that we do not bet on God; and hence it is reasonable to conclude that one ought to bet on God. Now, of course, there are a number of assumptions which are required by this argument. It is immediately apparent that, in order to reach the conclusion that one ought to bet on God, one needs to defend the following claims: 1. It is reasonable to suppose that the value of a bet on God, in the case in which God exists, is ¥. 2. It is reasonable to assign a finite value to p (i.e. to the probability that God exists). 3. It is reasonable to suppose that there are only two options between which one is to choose, viz: (i) a universe which includes the traditional Christian God; and (ii) a universe without deities (or transcendent beings) of any sort. 4. It is reasonable always to act so as to maximise expected utility. 5. It is reasonable to suppose that there are no theoretical considerations which can decide the question whether God exists. Consequently, it is plain that there are a number of types of persons who will be untouched by this argument. Among these -as Rescher notes -are the following: (i) convinced atheists, who set the value of p to zero; (ii) those, such as out-and-out hedonists who live for the pleasure of the moment alone, who set the value of future benefits to zero; (iii) those, such as all-trusting disbelievers who hold that if God did exist He would be bound to be all-forgiving, who maintain that one would get the future benefits whether or not one believed; (iv) radical sceptics who hold that both knowledge and reasonable conviction are impossible; (v) non-calculating sceptics who, for one reason or another, are not prepared to perform the sort of selfinterested calculation which the argument requires; and (vi) nonChristian theists (e.g. Zoroastrians) who have very different ideas about the rewards of belief. (Cf. Pascal's Wager, pp.24-25) However, Rescher does not suppose that the fact that the argument will not touch some people points to a defect in the argument. Indeed, it is one of the main themes of Rescher's book that Pascal's Wager has been persistently misunderstood by philosophers who (he claims) have supposed that the argument is meant to provide reasons which would persuade any rational person that s/he ought to believe in God. Not so, according to Rescher. Rather, what the argument is intended to do -in Rescher's view -is to persuade any person who thinks that there is a finite probability that the Christian God exists, who holds "standard views" about the nature of that God, and who is always prepared to make decisions on the basis of considerations of maximum expected utility: "Pascal's discussion is directed at l'homme moyen sensuel, the ordinary, self-centred, "man of the world" preoccupied with his own well-being and his own prudential interests. Pascal does not address the already converted, but the glib worldly cynic -the free-thinking libertin of his day, the sort of persons who populated the social circle in which Pascal himself moved prior to his conversion." (Pascal's Wager, pp.26-27) So, Rescher's assessment of the worth of Pascal's Wager argument is this: The argument is intended to be directed towards people who already hold certain assumptions, and to convince these people that they ought to believe in God. Moreover, given this intention, it is clear that the argument is a good one -i.e. it is clear that people who hold the assumptions in question ought to be persuaded by the argument to believe in God. II There is a logical (or perhaps mathematical) error in Rescher's version of Pascal's Wager argument which -on the face of it -completely invalidates the argument. This error stems from the fact that Rescher throughout supposes that there are only two types of values which the probability of the proposition God exists can take: zero, or finite. (To see that Rescher does repeatedly make this assumption, consider the following extracts from his book: All that matters for [Pascal's] reasoning is that [the probability of God's existence] is non-zero. As long as there is a finite chance of God's existence -no matter how small -the expectation of the "betand-believe" alternative outweighs that of its rival. (p.15) Pascal's reasoning is only in a position to persuade someone who believes that God may exist. (p.16) A gamble is advantageous on the basis of [the] expected-value standard whenever: chance of winning cost of stake potential loss ---------------------- > --------------- = ---------------- chance of losing size of prize potential gain And if the potential gain is infinite, this standard favours the gamble as long as the chance of winning is non-zero. (p.16-17) [The argument] will certainly fail to touch the convinced atheist. Someone who sets the probability of God's existence at zero will obviously not arrive at the argument's conclusion. (p.24) Pascal's argument is simply addressed to those who see the existence of the Christian God as a real possibility to which they are prepared to accord a nonzero probability (however "imponderable" they may deem this quantity to be in other regards). Apart from this the numerical status of this probability -even its having a definite and stable value -is quite irrelevant. (p.35) Everything turns on what we are (responsibly) prepared to deem to be real possibilities, those having probabilities at any rate greater than zero (no matter how low we may think them to be). (p.93) It is obvious from these remarks that Rescher supposes that either the probability that God exists is zero (in which case it is impossible that God exists), or else that the probability that God exists is finite.) However, it is incorrect to suppose that "non-zero" and "finite" are co-extensive; for it is epistemically possible that the probability that God exists is infinitesimal. Moreover, when this is recognised, it is also immediately apparent that the calculation of the expected return of a bet on God is no longer as straightforward as the initial argument suggested. For, of course, the value of ¥.p + (-B).(1-p) can take any value greater than (-B).(1-p) depending upon the exact values of ¥ and p. (I have mentioned the "value of ¥" here, because -as Cantor first noted -there are actual many different infinities, of differing magnitudes. I shan't worry about the complications to which this distinction gives rise in this paper.) And so, plainly, the argument from expected utility does not go through in all cases; it depends upon the particular values of ¥ and p which are involved. (Note, by the way, that it is no objection to observe that infinitesimals are somewhat dubious entities. The same point could be made in the language of measure theory -i.e. in the mathematical theory which is appropriate for dealing with probabilities in the case in which there are infinitely many options. The set of worlds in which the Christian God exists may have measure zero, and yet be non-empty.) Now, to this, it may be objected that the essence of Rescher's version of Pascal's Wager argument is untouched. True, Rescher does overlook the fact that "non-zero" and "finite" are not coextensive -but all this shows is that the class of people who will be untouched by the argument must be extended to include: (vii) cautious sceptics who are not prepared to assign a finite value to the probability that the Christian God exists. That is, can't Rescher reply that -although his own presentation of the argument is slightly flawed -it is nonetheless true that the argument can still succeed in achieving its Apologetic aim? After all, if we grant that the piece of reasoning which we presented initially is cogent, then it is still true that we must grant that anyone who accepts the assumptions 1.-5. listed above is required to accept the conclusion that God exists. This reply will not do. The claim that Pascal's motives are entirely Apologetic -i.e. that he only seeks to address people who already hold certain views -is plainly not as significant as Rescher supposes. For, while it might be true that "Pascal's Wager" is best interpreted as a sort of consistency argument ("if you believe those things, then you must believe in God, on pain of inconsistency"), it is clear that what one of Pascal's targets ought to do, on learning of his/her (apparent) inconsistency, is to examine all of the beliefs which s/he has which are relevant to the generation of the inconsistency. But then s/he will be faced with the question of whether s/he ought to accept the (apparently) dubitable assumptions which are central to the argument. Perhaps we can grant that anyone who accepts the assumptions 1.-5. is required to accept the conclusion that God exists -but ought anyone to accept all of these assumptions? (Here is a parallel case: Suppose that I know someone who (somewhat confusedly) believes (i) that if there is no God, then morality has no objective foundation; (ii) that morality has an objective foundation; and (iii) that it is quite unclear whether or not there is a God. I can point out to this person that it follows logically from (i) and (ii) that there is a God -but, of course, it doesn't follow from this that they have good reason to believe that there is a God! For it might be that they have very good independent reasons for believing (iii), and very weak reasons for believing (i) or (ii) (or both). The most that a consistency argument can do is to show that I need to revise some of my beliefs -but it alone cannot tell me which beliefs need to be adjusted.) The point which I have just made can be summarised in the claim that it is important to distinguish two senses in which Rescher could be taken to be saying that Pascal's Wager is successful. (i) On the one hand, it could be that Rescher is saying that the argument is successful because it shows that any persons who accept 1.-5. ought to believe in the Christian God, on pain of logical contradiction. But, on this construal, there is the underlying assumption that persons who accept 1.-5., and who learn that they are thus committed to belief in the existence of God, won't then choose to modify themselves in such a way that they no longer accept one (or more) of 1.-5. (ii) On the other hand, it could be that Rescher is saying that the argument is successful because it shows that any persons who accept 1.-5. ought to believe in the Christian God, because that is overall the most rational thing for them to do. And, on this construal, it would no longer be true that there is an underlying assumption that persons who accept 1.-5. won't choose to modify themselves in such a way that they no longer accept one (or more) of 1.-5. Perhaps is can be granted that the Wager argument is a successful piece of Apologetic argumentation in sense (i). (Of course, it is crucial to this concession that the people to whom it is directed assign a finite probability to the claim that God exists.) However, it is important to note how weak this claim is -for it says nothing about the overall rationality of the situation in which these people are placed. Surely l'homme moyen sensual ought, upon being informed of Pascal's argument and the nature of his own beliefs, to ask whether it is reasonable to continue to accept each of 1.-5. But if it is quite clear that it is not at all rational to subscribe to all of 1.-5., then it is hard to see that there is any great merit in the argument, even as an instrument of Apologetics. (What's so great about getting very stupid people to believe in God? It's probably easier to do that by telling them stories about hellfire and damnation.) What would be an achievement would be to produce an argument which was successful in sense (ii) -but it remains to be argued that Pascal's Wager argument even comes close to achieving this. So far, then, I have suggested that Rescher's appeal to the nature of the Apologetic task for which Pascal's Wager argument is designed does not manage to evade the question of the soundness of that argument. What Rescher suggests is that the validity of the argument suffices to show that it is a good argument when directed to people who accept all of the premises of that argument. However, it is important to note that, from this perspective, any valid argument which has the conclusion that one ought to believe that God exists will be just as good as Pascal's Wager argument. In order to determine whether there is a more substantial sense in which Pascal's Wager argument is a good argument, we need to consider the question whether it is reasonable to accept all of the premises of the argument. So let's see. We have already noted that it is a crucial assumption of the argument that there are really only two alternatives between which reason is impotent to decide, viz: (a) that there is a God who rewards all those who believe in Him with eternal and infinite happiness; and (b) that life ends with death. But it seems to me that there are many other alternatives between which reason is equally impotent to decide. Among these possibilities are: (c) that there is a God who has predetermined our final destiny, so that what we do in this life has no consequences for our fortune in the next life -in which case it seems that we ought to do all that we can to make this life as pleasant as possible; (d) that there is a God who looks with great favour on agnostics and atheists because they have proportioned their belief to the evidence, and have not engaged in a mercenary manipulation of their own understanding ; (e) that there is a God who is not satisfied by mere belief in his existence, and who only rewards those who subscribe to the principles of the one true faith (be it Catholicism, Methodism, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Greek Orthodoxy, Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Jim-And-Tammy-Bakkerism, Judaeism, Islam, Hinduism, or the worship of Kali or Odin); (f) that there is a committee of gods who have different desiderata for permission to enter the next life, and who alternate in making decisions (so that there is no consistent basis upon which decisions are made); and so on. (Cf. J. L. Mackie The Miracle Of Theism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982, p.203) Now, perhaps it will be objected that this argument does not serve to establish that there is really an infinite set of possible deities. No matter; we can establish this quite directly. For consider the following: 1. For each natural number n there is the deity Sn who is much like the traditional Christian God, except that s/he rewards all and only those people who live for exactly n years (rounded down to the nearest whole year). 2. For each natural number n there is the deity Tn who is much like the traditional Christian God, except that s/he rewards all and only those who are among the first n people to die. 3. For each natural number n there is the deity Un who is much like the traditional Christian God, except that s/he rewards all and only those who are not among the first n people to die. Apart from these rather arbitrary (not to say whimsical) deities, there are also some other deities (in other worlds) who are guided by slightly more substantial considerations, e.g.: 4. For each natural number n, there is a world Wn in which there are n deities (all much like the Christian God) who reward all and only those people who believe that there are n deities who are much like the Christian God. And so on. (It doesn't require much imagination to multiply these examples. The way in which these possible deities differ from the traditional Christian God -by which I mean, at a minimum, a being who satisfies the description "the unique omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, and wholly good creator of the world ex nihilo" -is in their moral qualities. But, while these beings are not wholly good, I do not see that this fact provides any reason to suppose that the existence of these beings is somehow more improbable than the existence of the more traditional Christian God.) I would be prepared to argue that the available evidence does not support the existence of any one of the deities which I have mentioned in the two preceding paragraphs to a greater extent than each of the other deities mentioned there. Moreover, I would also be prepared to argue that anyone who is even moderately sceptical about the abilities of theoretical reason to reach conclusions about the nature and existence of transcendent entities will agree in this judgement. However, for the purposes of the present argument it is sufficient to point out that one who holds that theoretical reason is utterly impotent when it comes to transcendental questions can hardly have good reason to suppose that some of these hypotheses are more likely than others. In other words: Pascal's l'homme moyen sensual ought to hold that there is an infinite range of possible deities between whose existence he acknowledges that his reason is impotent to decide. But, if this is so, then surely l'homme moyen sensual ought to assign no more than an infinitesimal value to the subjective probability that any one of these deities exists. And so it seems that there is good reason for l'homme moyen sensual to claim that a thorough scepticism about the ability of theoretical reason to decide the question of the existence of God will lead to the conclusion that it is not reasonable to assign a finite value to the probability that the standard Christian God exists -and also that it is not reasonable to suppose that there are only two alternatives between which one must choose. To sum up the argument: Rescher's version of Pascal's Wager argument has a very peculiar status. For, on the one hand, it is supposed to be directed towards people who are very sceptical about the ability of theoretical reason to establish the existence of "transcendent entities". Yet, on the other hand, it also presupposes that the people to whom it is directed will concede that there are only two live options (either the Christian God exists, or no transcendent beings exist), and that these people will assign a finite probability to the claim that the Christian God exists. But these people -if there are any such people -are in a very uncomfortable epistemic situation; for their alleged scepticism about the abilities of theoretical reason seems to be in considerable tension with the further claims which they wish to make. But, given this fact, what these people need to do is to examine the beliefs which they already have in order to modify (or perhaps discard) some of the discordant beliefs. Moreover, it is certainly not the case that these people can reasonably use the whole set of these discordant beliefs in order to arrive at further beliefs. Finally, it should be noted that it could be argued that there is something repugnant about the idea that one might make use of Rescher's version of Pascal's Wager argument in the service of apologetics. The reason for this claim is that, in order to use the argument as a tool of apologetics, we do not need to suppose that it is a good argument in the second of the two senses distinguished earlier in this paper. If the point is just to get people to believe in God, then it doesn't matter whether it is overall most reasonable for there people to believe in God -and so we could, quite cynically, make full use of the Wager argument against not terribly bright people in full knowledge of the fact that the argument is defective (i.e. in full knowledge of the fact that it is not reasonable to accept all of the premises of the argument). However, if we care about what it is most rational for people to believe (in the light of the evidence which they currently possess, and in light of the cognitive abilities which they enjoy), then it would be irresponsible (and indeed immoral) for us to use the Wager argument on the sorts of people whom it could reasonably be expected to bring about belief. (If we think that there are independent means of showing that God exists, then we should appeal to those means. If we think there are no such independent arguments, then perhaps we should question our own belief that God exists.) Research School of the Social Sciences Australian National University Canberra ACT 2601 June 19,