This time, the second and final part of our tale. (Part 1.) It features staggering scientific breakthroughs and moderate fool-pitying, so it should be suitable for all audiences.
Bill went on to serve for several decades at the Central Police Station, and often enjoyed regaling guests or fellow employees with tales of the two most confused polygamists he’d run across. “Probably too much of the firewater,” he’d opine, “or else, too much metaphysics!” He even gussied up the stories a bit, making the first feature identical triplets, and the second, two sets of conjoined twins. (In the improved version, the man insisted that he’d only two wives, but plainly, he had four – just, in pairs).
But the young Bill never expected the amazing advances in science that took place throughout his career, and for the most staggering alleged polygamy case he could imagine. In brief, it’d been discovered that Aristotelian-Thomist dualists were correct.
A human self, it turned out, was the combination of a body and a substantial form, or soul. Both physicalists and Cartesian dualists now receded to the shadows for good, along with phylogiston chemists, ether physicists, and phrenologists. People now laughed at the bad old days when people dismissed souls out of hand as undetectable. Now, souls could easily be detected, and it could now be observed, via instruments, for example, that the soul leaves the body about five minutes and forty seconds after brain waves have ceased. And the rough date of “quickening” was known as well. Early fetuses, it turned out, lacked souls, and so were not human persons, until about mid-way through the third month.
It had been awhile since Bill had seen a polygamy prosecution, but on this particular day, officer Young brought him a distraught young man named Mr. Gill Tea.
“Mr. Tea,” queried Bill, “I see that you’re charged with polygamy.”
“I’m guilty as sin,” bawled the young Mr. Tea.
This is a new one, thought Bill. I guess they don’t all deny it. “Guilty, eh. How many wives do you have?”
“Two, sir. But I didn’t know.”
“What, you couldn’t tell them apart?”
“Yes, well, no. Well, sort of.”
It turned out that Gill had married what he thought was a young woman named Sue. Sometimes, Sue was mellow, slack, almost depressed. And at other times, her life was a manic whirl of activity, and she was the life of the party. At these times, she called herself “Suzie.”
“I thought it was just her style, to use that zippier, more upbeat sounding name when she was ‘up’. And she responded so well to the meds.”
“Medicine?”
“Yes, for manic-depression. When she took that, she was always Sue. Little did I know!”
It turned out that what looked like one woman was in fact two women sharing a body. A human being, everyone now knew, was a soul combined with a body. But thanks to the new soul-detection technology, it was known that this body contained two souls, only one of which could “drive” the body at a time. The medicine in question, it turned out, simply prevented the Suzie-soul from taking the driver’s seat. But it still composed Suzie all along, just as the same body plus a different soul composed Sue.
And the pitiable Mr. Tea had unknowingly married both. After inadvertently courting the both of them, he married Sue is a lovely traditional ceremony. Then, on a trip to Vegas, he was surprised when Suzie insisted on hitting a drive through wedding chapel, and redoing the paperwork and everything with the name “Suzie.” He called this event re-affirming their vows, but he eventually noticed that Suzie simply called it their wedding.
As Bill knew, this was actually a well-known phenomenon. It had turned out that what used to be called “multiple personality disorder” victims (a diagnosis now discarded) fell into two camps: malfunctioning selves, and multiple selves sharing a body. Gill’s wives Sue and Suzie were examples of the latter – their souls two, but with only a body between them.
“I wouldn’t be too worried, Mr. Tea,” said Bill. You’ll just have to divorce one. Society is very tolerant of adultery these days, especially if your spouse has no objection to it.”
“I’m a good Mormon!” blurted Gill.
“I’m sure you are, son. Say, have you ever thought of refuting the charge?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re a polygamist only if Sue and Suzie are not the same wife.”
“Yes.”
“But, what if you argued that they are the same wife?” suggested Bill.
“That’s nonsense. A wife just is a certain woman. And we all know that they’re not the same woman, for a woman is a soul-body compound, and Sue is one such compound, and Suzie’s another.”
“Not so fast. What if you admit that a woman just is a certain soul-body compound, but argue that different women can be the same wife?”
“I don’t understand. A wife just is a certain woman. I pity the fool who relies on that argument.”
“Mr. Tea, stop your fool-pitying. I’ve seen a lot of cases like this. Bear with me.”
“I’m listening.”
“See, you admit that Sue is not Suzie, and Suzie isn’t Sue. But you urge that they should be counted as one.”
“What does that mean, though?”
“It means that they share a single body.”
“Yeah, well… that seems like, I don’t know, an abuse of language. I mean, Sue’s a good wife. Suzie is not such a good wife. So, they just can’t be the same wife. If they were, they’d be equally good or bad at wifing.”
“I see your point,” conceded Bill. He gave up his attempt to coach the pitiable Mr. Tea. In the end, Mr. Tea too was convicted, but only of involuntary polygamy, and the judge suspended his fine.
Bonus internet nonsense here.
James, thanks for this excellent comment. insightful as always.
Here’s the payoff as I see it. The first two polygamist cases are just having fun making the point that you can’t become a mono- something just by redefining “something”. I don’t think those cases are very parallel to the B&R theory, because they are arbitrary, whereas their theory has something to be said for it, that it provides a somewhat plausible metaphysics of material objects. (Well, plausible to some…)
But the Mr. Tea case, I think, is very parallel.
Is the story impossible? Depends on the exact hylomorphic theory, I think. I’m inclined to think it impossible, if the soul-body relation is basically that of statue-shape to mass of metal – but set that aside.
Here’s how I think it is damaging. Mr. Tea has the same concept of a wife as you or I. This implies being a human self. He thinks all human selves are soul-body combos, and he knows there are two souls involved. Ergo, he knows he is Gill Tea of polygamy.
B&R have the same concept of a monotheistic God as you or I – it’s a perfect being, with omnipotence, omnisc., omniben. etc. It implies being a divine self. They think a divine self is a form-quasi-matter combo. They’ve got three of those. They in effect admit this, for they hold f, s and h to be non-=. Ergo, they are committed to polytheism. They get around this be redefining monotheism, and their insistence that non-identical Gods “should be counted as one.” it’s hard to see any good reason for this, though.
No, Mr. Aristotelian. A human person, in your view, just is a certain soul-body composite. To count persons, you ought to count those.
Sorry, this is a non sequitur. Natural associations between concepts are not relevant. They’ve said what a human person is – you count those by finding out how many beings satisfy that concept.
Sure, he’s a monosomatist – a dude with exactly one wife-body.
The rest of what you say here is, I think, an important misunderstanding about their theory, one which I had for a good while. No – the matter doesn’t correspond to God. Rather, it corresponds to the divine nature – in Rea’s view, not at all a God, but rather a property, and a power, which is shared by each of the… Gods. But, he’d say: divine persons.
So the objection here is really the same as what Rea urges against some “social” theories. We have three perfect beings here. They don’t become one God just because they perfectly cooperate, enjoy perfect love, have perfect mental transparency to one another, etc. Right. But there’s no reason to think that three Gods merge into one just because they share a quasi-matter.
To further abuse the language along your lines, onfor all we know, one could be a polytheist even though one is a mono-divine-materiast. Or something. 😉 Keep in mind: that quasi-matter on their view is not a divine agent, not an object of worship – simply, not a God.
Two closely related objections, in the final analysis. (1) their theory isn’t clearly inconsistent with polytheism, and (2) their theory seems to be a case of polytheism. I think both are true. But if only (1) is true, I think the theory fails, given its own aims.
I screwed up one of the </i> tags in that comment, but no big deal.
Kits, cats, sacks, wives. How many were going to St Ives?
So this is a hit on the Brower-Rea model. But is it a possible story? As I understand it, A-T hylomorphism rules out the possibility of two souls sharing one body, simply because a substance is particularized by its matter.
But if that’s the case, so much the worse for the Brower-Rea model, I guess. (I raise a similar objection on p. 54 of my book.)
Still, let’s grant for the sake of argument the coherence of the story (and of the analogous trinitarian model). Couldn’t a trinitarian constitutionalist reply as follows?
“By definition, a polygamist is a person with multiple spouses. Normally souls and bodies occur in a one-to-one relationship, so counting souls and counting bodies come to the same thing and we don’t bother to distinguish the two concepts. But this is a special case. So the question at hand is whether, in counting spouses, we count souls or bodies.”
“Now a spouse must be a person, obviously enough. And personhood is more naturally associated with a soul than with a body. Therefore, the number of spouses must be the number of souls; in this case, two.”
“So Mr. Tea is indeed a polygamist. But he’s also, oddly enough, a monosomatist. Since in the trinitarian analogy souls correspond to divine persons and bodies to divine beings (i.e., gods) there’s no unorthodox or unbiblical implication here. Just as Mr. Tea is a monosomatist, so the Trinitarian is a monotheist.”
“Mr. Tea’s mistake was not that he married someone who shared a body with someone else; his mistake (albeit unintentional) was to marry Suzie after he had already married Sue.”
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