171. RISHI SUNAK'S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT - Rwanda and the Greatest Fallacy of Which We Can Conceive
I’ve been thinking about the ontological argument this week. I’ve been thinking about it because of Rishi Sunak.
For those that don’t know, the ontological argument, as stated by St Anselm, goes something like this: because we know what the meaning of the word ‘God’ is, and what it means is ‘the greatest being we can conceive of’, then from this definition alone we can prove God’s necessary existence. This is because it is greater to exist in reality than in the mind alone, and greater still to exist necessarily rather than simply possibly existing. Therefore, as God is ‘the greatest being we can conceive of’, and it would be greater for God to necessarily exist than to either possibly exist or exist merely as a thought, then God, by definition, necessarily exists.
The argument is rather beautiful. One of my favourites in philosophy. But it’s apparent beauty is a sign of its fallaciousness, because while the argument seems logical enough and the conclusion sound, I still don’t believe in God after hearing it. So it doesn’t work: what it concludes, and claims to prove, has not actually been proven.
The monk, Gaunilo, demonstrated this problem with his idea of an island: the greatest island we can conceive of. As such an island would also have to exist in reality than in the mind alone, yet no such island does exist, we can see there is some disconnect between what the argument promises and reality itself. You can apply Gaunilo’s logic to anything - the greatest curry you can conceive of, the greatest partner you can conceive of - but try as you might, no matter how logical the argument is that it would be greater to exist in reality than in the mind alone, no amount of conception seems to magic such conceived things into actual existence.
Kant famously summed up what is wrong with the ontological argument when he said that ‘existence is not a predicate’. The problem with Anselm’s (and Descartes, who used this kind of argument too) logic is that while we can define a subject by its properties, existence is a different sort of property than information-adding predicates. I can describe my perfect pizza - the greatest pizza I can conceive of - in all kinds of interesting ways (the toppings, the ratio of cheese to tomato sauce, the thickness of bread and crust, etc.), but whether or not such a pizza actually exists is not a question of description, it is a question of fact. A property of a different order than all those other descriptive features. We have to look to the world itself to see if such a thing exists, not merely the thing’s description.
Which is why I think it’s important to expose Rishi Sunak’s attempt to use this same kind of thinking in his response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Rwanda.
On November 15th, the Supreme Court deemed the UK’s plan to send asylum seekers to the country of Rwanda for processing to be unlawful. Their reasoning was that there are ‘substantial grounds for believing that the removal of the claimants to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment’. In essence they cannot trust fair processing in Rwanda given our current evidenced understanding of the country’s questionable commitment to human rights. Our own existing legal bodies, based on the available evidence, have deemed the country to be unsafe.
Sunak’s solution to the court’s blocking this piece of legislation has been to try to bring a state of affairs into existence through description alone. Without fundamentally changing any of the realities of actual safety or unsafety in Rwanda, Sunak has proposed passing emergency legislation which will simply declare Rwanda to be safe in UK law. A treaty will be made between the two governments declaring the country’s safety and thus, by describing it so, it will legislatively become so.
But this legal sleight of hand is the same move Gaunilo tried to expose in Anselm: one can’t simply will a reality into being by re-describing it. The safety or unsafety of Rwanda is a matter of fact, and the facts of existence do not meaningfully change simply through legal re-description. Consider, for example, that an administrative error causes an accidental registration of your death. According to the records, you are now legally dead. Despite the changed legal description, however, you are very much alive in reality. The fact of your existence or non-existence is not down to description, and a clever description cannot magically change the reality.
Which is not to say that reality cannot be changed! It can. But not through re-description. Unlike the question of a deity’s existence or non-existence, which either is or is not true, Rwanda’s safety or unsafety can be changed by ensuring the country is legitimately safe. With actual changes, rather than merely descriptive changes, Rwanda could genuinely become a safer place for asylum seekers to be processed, just as the world itself could transform into a kinder, better world where no seeking of asylum is needed. But that is not the current world we live in, and simply declaring the world that is to be different than the evidence allows for is the empty sophistry of someone trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
Rishi Sunak, of course, has done this to us before. By asking us to ‘eat out to help out’ during a global pandemic of an airborne respiratory virus he was personally responsible for a massive increase in COVID infections and deaths of people working in the hospitality sector. It turned out, despite the description, that eating out didn’t help out at all. Sunak’s latest descriptive wish of a ‘safe’ Rwanda is just another modern day Gaunilo’s island: a stark example of the demonstrable failings of the ontological argument’s logic and, perhaps, of the UK Prime Minister’s troubling commitment to perpetuating damaging linguistic fantasies instead of solving actual problems in the real world.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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