Is praying for the morally impermissible morally permissible?

Abstract

Saul Smilansky has argued that, since acts of petitionary prayer are best understood as requests, not desires, there may be many more impermissible prayer acts than one might expect. I discuss Smilansky’s analysis and argue that his conclusion follows only for those who do not believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly benevolent deity and take advantage of what Smilansky calls the theist’s ‘moral escape clause’. However, I take my argument to lead us to a variant of the problems of evil and petitionary prayer instead of a problem with Smilansky’s reasoning, requirng us to either abandon at least one of three properties commonly assigned to God or else to abandon an intuitive account of prayer that makes it morally impermissible to pray for morally impermissible ends.

Keywords:

• prayer
• problem of evil
• problem of petitionary prayer
• philosophy of religion
• Saul Smilansky

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank David Baker, Sarah Buss, Michael Papazian, Steve Schaus, Joel Schwartz, and several anonymous referees for helpful comments and conversations concerning previous drafts of this article.

Notes

1. I do not want to suggest that this is all there is to the act of prayer or that Smilansky’s model captures the rich phenomenology of prayer; Smilansky’s model aptly depicts only one important component of a variety of prayer acts. It is that component of prayer on which I focus in this article, and as such, a more detailed discussion of the phenomenology of prayer is beyond the scope of this article.

2. This concern is similar to one raised by Velleman (1992).

3. For those who find it hard to consider desires for the death of another morally permissible, it may help to assume, for the sake of this particular argument, that immediate desires (i.e. desires we have not felt for long or had the opportunity to work towards eliminating) are the sorts of things that are outside of our control and that we are speaking of such an immediate desire here.

4. It may still be open as to whether God made it the case that the child recovered because the mother prayed for it; perhaps God was planning to heal the child anyway, or perhaps God granted someone else’s prayer that this child recover.

5. One may object here that, in the case of the bibliophile, even if the bibliophile knows that I will be throwing the party and would like her to be there and even if she knows that I believe that she knows this information, we may still think that my requesting the bibliophile’s attendance conveys some new information that may harm the bibliophile. Perhaps the bibliophile did not know how badly I wanted her to attend the party. In such a case, we’ve now reintroduced the possibility of harming the bibliophile by requesting her attendance: before, our options may have been between ‘staying at home and reading a book while hurting my friend’ and ‘going to the party’, while now the options may be expressed as ‘staying at home and reading a book while really hurting my friend’ and ‘going to the party’. But notice that this case hinges on information conveyed by the request that was not known by the agent beforehand. The way the request harms the bibliophile in this case is that it gives her a better understanding of what the options available to her are, eliminating one of the options she thought she had. But examples like this do not extend to the case at hand where we’re dealing with an omniscient God since there is no information that our request can convey that God is not already aware of. One may further object that there may be some cases where the bibliophile’s preferred option is not, say, to stay at home without hurting a friend’s feelings but to stay at home without anyone making any requests of her, regardless of what she or any other agent knows, and so it is the nature of the speech act itself, not the information that it conveys, that is important here. Such preferences, generally speaking, seem entirely bizarre to me; they would require, for instance, that God telling my friend about the party and that I really want her to be there and God telling me that my friend knows about the party would not harm my friend but that my requesting that she attend the party would. There are some specific cases, however, where such preferences may be supported by the relevant standards of the relationship between the requester and the request-ee, and I will explore such cases towards the end of this article.

6. I assume here that no rational agent would bother trying to deceive an omniscient God.

7. See, for instance, the discussion in Smith and Yip (2010) and Smith (2013).

8. For the purposes of this discussion, I will not draw any moral distinction between instances of action and inaction.

9. See, for instance, Smith (2013).

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Daniel Peterson

Dr Daniel Peterson received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 2013. While most of his research concerns questions in the philosophy of physics and philosophy of science, he has research interests in a variety of fields including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of education, and, of course, philosophy of religion and ethics. He is currently a part-time philosophy instructor at Georgia Highlands College in Douglasville, GA.