Book Reviews - Review 323

Everything that exists, exists as a thought in a divine mind. There may be more than one divine mind. In fact, there may be an infinite number of them. The structure of the thoughts, and the structure of reality, are identical. If there are many divine minds, they all have infinite knowledge, but their knowledge does not necessarily overlap. Everything thought - that is, created - by a divine mind is intrinsically good, or "ethically required". When apparently bad things happen - earthquakes, murders, etc. - they are merely the unfortunate consequences of competing "ethical necessities".

There are a lot of paradoxes among those statements, but they summarise John Leslie's "philosophical cosmology", that he characterises as "pantheistic". His main influences are Plato and Spinoza, whose optimistic credo he shares that existence is a fundamentally good thing.

The "ethical requiredness" of our world - and possibly of other parallel worlds - is the precept of this short but dense philosophical treatise. Leslie continually restates his claim that ethical requiredness can be assumed from the simple fact of being; this seems an interesting idea as long as one anticipates, at some point, a precise definition of "ethical requiredness". But one is not forthcoming, at least not one that made sense to me. As far as I can discern, Leslie thinks that "to exist rather than not to exist" is what makes something "good". This argues for an absolute identity between the meanings of the words "goodness" and "existence", and if one accepts that, Leslie's argument is as irrefutable as it is arbitrary.

What of the bad things that happen in the world - earthquakes, crimes? Leslie doesn't talk much about those, and when he does, his logic is unclear. If a murder is the unfortunate consequence of "competing ethical requirements", as Leslie claims, that can only imply that the murderer's satisfaction is a better thing than the combination of his victim's survival, and the murderer's frustration. How such a world-view can be termed "ethical" is not obvious to me. It seems, rather, an amoral scheme in its utilitarian assumption that "goodness", in the limited sense of pleasure, can be quantified and distributed among individuals like money. Leslie admits to being a utilitarian, believing in "the greatest good of the greatest number", and he makes no attempt to refute the argument (or indeed mention of the argument) that utilitarianism can be a justification for slavery.

When it comes to the tragedies of life, Leslie does not recant on his thesis that "to be, in any state, is better than not to be". This is known as the Privation Theory of Evil, and common sense would appear to reject it. Leslie admits this, but a breath later simply reneges on any philosophical appeal to common sense:

Well in that case, why trust any experience as a guide to the truth? If unpleasant things might be good for all we know, can one not argue, conversely, that pleasant things might be bad for all we know? At this point, philosophy jettisons both logic and intuition, and, to my mind, simply disappears up its own backside.

As may be evident from all this, Leslie doesn't delve too deep into the moral implications of his tough-minded optimism. In this book whose theme is "ethical necessity", there is not one occurrence of the word "conscience". When his arguments point to morally ambiguous conclusions, Leslie simply taunts the reader who might suggest this:

This says a little about what an ethical requirement isn't, but nothing about what it is. As for the argument about the desire to torture - this is surely a "straw man" position. Leslie can happily deny the suggestion that he might consider a desire to torture a "state of mind most ethically required" (my italics), because he never makes that claim. Yet he does make the unambiguous suggestion that everything that exists is ethically required. (He doesn't, incidentally, address the logical impossibility of "graded necessity". A requirement is something that has to be. Something is either required or not required, and the term "most required" is logically meaningless.)

Philosophers, if they are to have a hope of being understood, must define their terms clearly. Perhaps it's because so few of them do this that so much philosophy is incomprehensible. And Leslie is as vague as any of them. The English word "good" has both a moral and a hedonic meaning. Leslie, without saying as much, mostly restricts his understanding of it to the latter. On balance, I found his arguments confused, morally nebulous, and often self-contradictory.

It's a refreshing change, in our science-dominated culture, to find a philosopher contemplating the big metaphysical questions of what lies beyond the provable. To his credit, in the last chapter Leslie presents some arguments for at least some of his ideas, and it's no coincidence that when condescending to justify his claims, rather than merely implying that the reader is an idiot for arguing against him, he is at his most interesting - in fact, he is well versed in recent scientific developments, which he discusses perceptively.

It's also a refreshing change to read a philosophy book written with panache and humour. Leslie goes to town in imagining what sort of things an infinite mind might know - like the possibility that "the greatest number of ants ever trodden on by a dinosaur during a period of 5.46 minutes was 3,479,992, the fifth smallest of the ants weighing approximately 0.041 grams". But Infinite Minds is a less profound book than its premise makes it sound. For one thing, I'm not sure what Leslie is really adding to the ideas of Plato and Spinoza. And though he concedes his arguments to be speculative, they can still be challenged when they appeal to flawed logic and false analogy. I found this book stimulating and thought-provoking, but mostly for negative reasons: both its moral thesis, and its implicit claim to logical rigour, had me digging for objections frequently.