Colin,

Hate

We are constantly hearing about how bad it is to hate. This is a complete misconception. The OED defines hate as “feel intense dislike for or a strong aversion towards”. The concept has nothing intrinsically to do with prejudice or violence or persecution. Hate is not somehow unethical or irrational; nor is it psychologically damaging and hence imprudent. You can hate the taste of gooseberries and be guilty of no sin. You can hate modern art or lounge music or ballroom dancing and not be a bad person. There is no virtue in loving these things, if that’s the way you feel. Moreover, it is correct to hate some things (and love others): cruelty, racial prejudice, murder, indifference to suffering, injustice, etc. These are bad things, so you have every right to hate them. By all means hate hatred if it is bad and unjust. What else should you feel? Not love, to be sure, and not indifference (no one ever says “All you need is indifference”). What about the people guilty of hateful things (attitudes, actions)—can you hate them? I don’t see why not, remembering that people are complex and may be good in some ways and bad in others (is anyone ever all bad?). You can hate them in so far as they are hateful—despicable, detestable, vile. You can hate people “under a description”. You can hate X for being F but not for being G. You feel intense dislike of X for being F (you might quite like X in other ways). How can you like or love a person for being a certain way without simultaneously disliking or hating someone for being the opposite (e.g., kind versus cruel)? There are plenty of people I hate for what they have done—justifiably, rationally, fairly (me not them). You can even have general hatreds, as long as the group concerned has really done hateful things. Of course, you can stop hating people if they have made amends or seen the error of their ways; hatred my not be, like diamonds, forever—though it may be and often is. Certainly, you must be careful with your hatreds (you can be more profligate with your loves); you mustn’t hate unfairly or indiscriminately or too much. But hatred as such is perfectly normal and even desirable. If you don’t hate certain politicians, there is something wrong with you. I grant that many people hate without sense or reason, and that there is far too much of it around (and always has been), but I don’t think it should be banned or discouraged tout court. There used to be love-ins; I don’t see why hate-ins should not also be organized. Let’s not knock hate, just keep it in its proper place. A sound moral psychology will include both love and hate, each with appropriate objects. And let’s not condemn love-hate relationships; they too can have their uses and justifications.

Causal Necessity

Are causal laws necessary? Are particular causal relations necessary? It has been supposed not: either they are thoroughly contingent or at most weakly necessary (less so than logical necessity). I will put the case for the necessity view. First, they are clearly not epistemically necessary: it could have turned out that causes have different effects from their actual effects (lightning might have turned out to cause shingles). If necessary, they are metaphysically necessary, not epistemically necessary. They are necessary a posteriori not a priori. So, the question is whether they are like water being H2O or like water being plentiful on Earth. I will dismiss the idea that causal relations are totally contingent with not even a hint of necessity in them; it isn’t just an accident that heating water makes it boil or hitting a nail makes it go in. The question is whether there are two types of metaphysical necessity, strong and weak—are there degrees of metaphysical necessity? This is commonly believed, but not usually defended. What would we think if someone maintained that the necessity of origin, say, is weaker than the necessity of identity? No one has ever claimed that to my knowledge, and with good reason: all the recognized examples of metaphysical necessity are equally necessary, and thought to be so. It never crossed Kripke’s mind that some of his examples of metaphysical necessity are stronger than others; they are all totally necessary. So, why suppose that causal necessity is not similarly total? Is it intuition? Let the present causal condition of the universe be repeated at a later time: isn’t it inevitable that the same effect will be produced? You won’t get some massively different effect, or even a slightly different effect. Of course, there might be an epistemic counterpart to the actual condition that gives rise to a different effect, but that is irrelevant, being a proof only of a lack of epistemic necessity. If the world is in the same state through and through, it will give rise to the same effect, as a matter of necessity.[1] And isn’t it very strange to suppose that metaphysical necessity might vary in degree—that some cases of it are only very weakly necessary? How can necessity be weak? It could hardly be that 2 is necessarily even in the strong sense while 3 is necessarily odd in the weak sense. What sense of “necessary” is that? It’s either necessary or it’s not. Are some propositions strongly contingent and some only weakly so? What does that even mean? Isn’t it simpler and more intuitive to suppose that all necessity is equally strong? How many degrees of necessity might there be—three, a thousand? We certainly don’t talk that way.

Suppose we adopt Shoemaker’s view that properties (kinds) are individuated by their causal powers; then it will be a necessary truth that a given property has the effects it has. For example, the shape square will have characteristic causal powers different from the color red—there is no possible world in which red has the causal powers of square. In general, the causal laws of a kind of thing follow from its nature; or rather, the laws constitute the nature.[2] Kinds and causal powers are necessarily joined. A natural kind has a real essence in its composition and structure, but it also has a real essence its causal powers, these being connected to composition and structure. Hume (and Locke) had essentially the same view: causal necessity is real necessity in the objects, whatever our ideas of it might be (nominal essence). It may be opaque to us, but that doesn’t compromise its robustness as necessity. The force of gravity, for example, necessarily obeys the law of gravity; that force would not exist without that law. It doesn’t just happen to obey the inverse square law. Similarly, the laws of psychology are not adventitiously linked to the natural kinds of psychology: it isn’t an accident that impressions of red produce beliefs about being red instead of beliefs about being blue or square. Just as everything is necessarily self-identical, so everything has the causal profile it does as a matter of necessity. The location of an object isn’t an essential property of it, but its causal profile is. So, we can add causal profile to the list of other metaphysical necessities.

In fact, I think that causal necessity is likely the most fundamental of our modal concepts: we grasp it before to get to logical necessity and Kripke-type necessities. It is tied to perception and our primitive grasp of how things work. Indeed, I suspect that our conception of logical necessity is an outgrowth of our concept of causal necessity (the premises make it the case that the conclusion is true).[3] People have only denied causal necessity because they confuse metaphysical necessity with epistemic necessity. There is just no good reason to deny that causal necessity is genuine honest-to-goodness necessity.

[1] I am putting aside objective randomness, but even here a certain probability of a particular effect will be necessary.

[2] See my Principia Metaphysica.

[3] See my “A New Metaphysics”, “Causal and Logical Relations”, and “A Causal World”.