contra the Dostoevskian argument…

Throughout the Brothers Karamazov the dictum “there is no virtue if there is no immortality” or “if there is no immortality then all things are permitted” is repeated. In fact the dictum is indispensable to understanding the character development of Ivan Karamazov, which is a crucial subplot to the novel. The purpose of this post is to dissect various interpretations of the dictum and show that they’re all unsound.

Alas, this is pretty difficult move for me to make. Dostoevsky has been a major spiritual and philosophical mentor for me in the last seven years or so. His novels and short stories, specifically the Brothers K and Crime and Punishment, as well as The Dream of a Ridiculous Man have all been pivotal works that help me make sense of the Universe. So disagreeing with him on a central theme of his literary Summa Theologica is definitely no pain free enterprise. But I must side with Aristotle and Jesus here, that the Truth must be honored above my friends…

So what are we to make of the dictum “if there is no immortality then all things are permitted”? The most common reading of it comes with an implied premise that fleshes things out, which would go something like this:

(IP1) If all mankind were not immortal, then at some point in time, say the heat death of the universe, there would be no humanity, in which case how well or how horribly men lived their lives when they existed would not make a difference.

Well, what are we to make of (IP1)? I feel comfortable conceding that at such a point in the universe, when all the energy has depleted and life can no longer be sustained, there won’t be any humanity, and if that’s the case what humans did at one time won’t seem to matter any longer. But how does this fact, a fact about events after the existence of mankind, have any bearing on the facts of earlier time when different facts did obtain? Even if my soul isn’t immortal, and when I die I return to the dust from which I came, how does that change the fact that right now what I do and how I live my life does make a difference? Even if I’m not immortal not all things are permitted simply because certain things can be extremely detrimental to my life in the here and now. For instance, I wouldn’t permit myself to drive recklessly because I don’t want to kill myself or anyone else, simply because doing so will lower the quality of my own life or someone else’s or both, and I just so happen to want my life to be fulfilling, so I won’t drive recklessly. How does a fact about the future, a fact like “I will exist in the future” or “I will no longer exist at some point in the future”, add a variable to my reasoning about whether I should drive recklessly today? So (IP1) seems to be false, and patently so.

So what’s another way or reading “if there’s no immortality then all things are permitted”? One could posit a causal reading, where immortality itself bears (necessary) causal relations to the existence of morality, such that if there is no immortality then morality is impossible. But what in the world could such a premise look like? Immanuel Kant, the notorious atheologian actually came up with one. It went something like this:

(IP2) Immortality is necessary in this way: We are commanded by the moral law to be morally perfect. Since ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ we must be able to reach moral perfection. But we cannot attain perfection in this life, for the task is an infinite one. So there must be an afterlife in which we continue to make a progress toward the ideal.*

There are two steps in the premise; step 1 is that moral perfection cannot be attained in this life, and step 2 is that the task is an infinite one. I think both steps are false. Step 1 says that moral perfection is impossible in this life, which I think is false.
**amendment**
L pointed out my equivocation on my last argument against step one, so I’ll try again. Step one is a supporting premise for the necessary causal connection between immortality and morality, and thus it needs to show not that immortality might be required for moral perfection for just some circumstances, but that it’s required in all possible worlds. But clearly, if God had so chosen, it could have been the case that certain men would be glorified (and hence become morally perfect) in this life and not the one to come, in which case immortality would not be necessary for moral perfection. If someone were to say that moral perfection is impossible in this life they would need to do more than just say that no man has, because merely insisting on that fact (if it is one) only provides grounds to say that it’s not the case that men reach moral perfection in this life, but rather that it’s necessarily impossible (in the sense that God couldn’t have made it possible) that men could attain moral perfection in this life, since that’s what (IP2) is trying to show.

The second step was to say that the task of attaining moral perfection is in an infinite one so an afterlife is needed to progress towards the ideal. This is certainly a vexed stipulation; if ‘ought’ does imply ‘can,’ then at some finite point moral perfection can or will be obtained, in which case the infinite time line just became a finite subset, in which case an infinite amount of time is not required. And if an infinite amount of time is not required, there is no reason to think that immortality is required for the attainment of moral perfection, in which case step two is also false.


Is there possibly a third reading of Dostoevsky’s dictum? Another causal reading might go something like this:

(IP3): God’s existence is necessary for the existence of morality, and if God exists then immortality is also true, therefore without immortality all things are permitted (there is no morality).

It could be argued that God’s existence is necessary for morality, but one would be hard pressed to distinguish morality’s connection to God’s existence from the existence of everything else in the universe, simply because if God does exist then His existence is necessary to all other things. In other words, one would have to show the salient differences between morality and say, the existence of grapes, for God’s existence would be necessary for grapes just as much as it would be for the existence of morality. I’ve yet to figure out what this nexus might like look like, and until I see it the argument “morality, therefore God” seems no more enlightening than “grapes, therefore God”.

Furthermore, if it was the case that God’s existence was necessary for the existence of morality, what in the world does that fact have to do with the supposed connection between immortality and morality, and how would the existence of morality have any more connection to immortality than it would to God’s omniscience of omnipresence, etc.? So even if there is a successful moral argument Dostoevsky’s dictum still fails the relevancy test.
____________­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­____________
Notes

* This summary of Kant’s argument can be found in Louis Pojman, Ethical Theory, pg. 602.