[REPOST] Is Santa Claus on the Naughty or Nice List?
How does Santa relate, if at all, to the problem of evil?
With Christmas around the corner, it is fitting to think about the holiday from a philosophical perspective. One thing that always struck me about the Christmas holiday is how relatively little attention philosophers pay it, especially given how many people around the world celebrate it various ways. For this week, we focus on whether there are better and worse reasons to doubt the existence of Santa Claus. This is a chance to both do some philosophy, but also to have some lighthearted holiday fun!
Although it is obvious that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, the reasons often given for this disbeliefs are less sound than is often appreciated. Here we should explore a strong, but neglected argument against the existence of Santa that has various similarities to the problem of evil—if there is a loving, maximally powerful and knowledgeable God, there wouldn’t be so much apparently pointless suffering— that has long troubled theologians. As we shall see, this argument is a powerful reason to doubt the existence of Santa Claus that both lacks the vulnerabilities of the usual reasons, and can help us better understand how to think about the problem of evil.
Bad Arguments Against Santa
Let’s survey some of the usual reasons people have for doubt Santa’s existence.
First, some say that disproving the Santa belief is just a matter of visiting the North Pole and looking for him. There would be no Santa to be found. However, it could be that Santa’s workshop is disguised to avoid detection, even by the most sophisticated methods; after all, Santa is supposedly capable of doing all sorts of other extraordinary things. So, even if Santa resided there, he may not be easily detected.
Second, others say that it would be impossible for Santa to deliver gifts to children around the globe within the space of a single night. This is only a difficulty if we think that Santa is human. But that can’t be. Santa cannot be merely human. He relies on flying reindeer for transportation! If Santa had extraordinary powers, he may be able deliver gifts, the world over, in such a short time. We might for example suppose that Santa has the ability to slow down time.
Lastly, others may object that clearly, guardians and family members provide the gifts come Christmas time. Unfortunately, while they’re often responsible for buying the gifts, this is insufficient to prove that all gifts come from them. The claim is not that Santa is the only source of gifts at Christmas, but that Santa is merely the source of some gifts.
So, while we know there is no Santa, it is less obvious how we know it. Not knowing how one knows something is quite common. For example, you might know that it’s going to rain in the morning, but without having any idea why it’s going to rain. We can, though, point to a robust reason for thinking there is no Santa Claus: a reason mirroring a reason some people give for thinking God doesn’t exist. First, we should survey the problem of evil, and then we can apply that lesson to Santa Claus.
The Problem of Evil
Philosophers stretching back the Ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), have grappled with the problem of whether it’s possible to reconcile the existence of widespread and horrendous evil (plagues, torture, genocide…) with the existence of a perfectly benevolent, maximally powerful and knowledgeable God.
Many atheists hold that needless suffering is good reason to doubt that God exists. However, theists have a number of responses to the problem of evil. Some argue that suffering is the product of people exercising their free will: if humans have the ability to choose between good and evil actions, some of them will choose evil. And because the ability to choose, even if the choice is evil, is supremely valuable, God wouldn’t interfere; if He did, then it would undermine the value of freely making good choices. For example, we think that people who are compelled to do the right thing are not morally praiseworthy; they are only praiseworthy if they could have chosen to do evil, but chose the good instead.
The main thrust of the problem involves there being many instances of suffering that don’t seem to do a bit of good for anyone. The philosopher William Rowe famously gave this example: suppose that in a forest somewhere, there is a fawn that has been struck by lightning. She lies on the forest floor for a couple of days in agony, until death relieves her suffering. If there is a perfectly good God, then it would be in His nature to prevent needless suffering; and if He is all-powerful, then He would be able to prevent it. So why doesn’t He?
The problem of evil is only a problem, however, if there really is such a person as God. The problem we explore in the next section has a similar structure: it is only a mystery why so many good child who receive any present whatsoever if Santa actually exists.
Santa and the Problem of Moral Desert
We should begin with the essential nature of Santa: the properties that an individual must have if they are to qualify as Santa. One plausible essential property is that Santa distributes gifts based on what someone deserves. For example, it is plausible that someone who robs a bank deserves to be punished: there is a sense in which they’ve earned their punishment. So it is also plausible that an essential property of Santa is that he rewards good children with gifts, but doesn’t bad naughty children. There’s some evidence for this from the song ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’:
‘He sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake.
‘He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.’
So Santa is essentially someone who delivers gifts to children based on whether they deserve them. Thus we should expect that the distribution of gifts come Christmas morning would respect the moral desert of the recipient if there were a Santa. Suppose then that only bad children received gifts. This unfair pattern of gift distribution would then itself be good reason to suppose that there was no Santa.
However, there’s a catch. If you recall, I said that part of our conception of Santa is that he’s responsible only for some of the gifts that children receive. Children on the naughty list don’t receive gifts from him; and yet many of them receive gifts anyway. So, with respect to the distribution of gifts among children, there is a confounding factor: parents who give their give their children gifts even if they are naughty.
To correct for this, we have to focus on whether there are good children who don’t receive any gifts whatsoever. We would predict that if Santa exists, then good children would at least receive gifts from him. But instead we find that there are millions of good children around the world who receive nothing.
We can formulate the argument like,
A. If there is such a person as Santa, then all deserving children would receive something for Christmas.
B. But many deserving children receive nothing for Christmas.
Therefore:
C. There is no such person as Santa.
The pattern of gifts distributed among good children is a serious evidential challenge to Santa’s existence.
Problems with the Problem
Around the holiday season it is common to find in a shopping mall a Santa asking children what they want for Christmas, without regard for whether they have been bad or good. This could imply that delivering gifts to children because they’re children may instead be essential to our conception of Santa. If so, this would be a difficulty for the argument against Santa from moral desert. If part of our conception of Santa is that he delivers gifts indiscriminately, the fact that Santa isn’t responsive to moral desert does not count against his existence.
However, another feature of our shared conception of Santa is that, in the mall case, he inquires of every child what they want for Christmas. Santa gives each child a chance to feel that they’ve been heard, and perhaps it is also an opportunity to remind them that they should be good if they are to expect any gifts from him. But notice that asking children what they want, and actually delivering it, are very different.
Perhaps someone may object that there’s so much about Santa we don’t understand, and he might have compelling reasons for not delivering gifts to some good children. That is, although he usually delivers gifts to good children, there are other mitigating reasons that might override him doing so; however, because Santa is so mysterious, we would be unable to comprehend those reasons (some theists say similar things about God in response to the problem of evil).
There are a couple of problems with this objection.
First, while aspects of our modern conception of Santa allow that he is mysterious and magical, this doesn’t seem relevant to evaluating the problem of moral desert.
That problem is comprised of two components:
(1) The prediction we would make if Santa were real: the pattern of Christmas gift distribution among good children based on Santa’s desert-respecting nature.
(2) The empirical evidence from our everyday experience that such a prediction is false.
The appeal to mystery and magic, even if correct, shouldn’t do much to shake our confidence in either (1) or (2).
Second, if the appeal to mystery and magic were compelling enough to overcome our evidence for (1) and (2), then it would also be compelling enough to defeat nearly any claim we could make about Santa. That is, if he is so mysterious that his reasons are beyond comprehension, then nearly all Santa-talk would be unfounded: in other words, if we don’t understand Santa’s motivations at all, then it’s difficult to say anything about him without the possibility that it be contradicted by something we don’t know. But we seem to say all kinds of things about Santa. So there isn’t much reason to take this kind of objection seriously.
Santa is Fake, But Krampus is Real?
Earlier we discussed the problem of evil: the difficulty reconciling the existence of apparently pointless suffering with the existence of a perfectly loving, and maximally powerful and knowledgeable God. Some philosophers have recently argued that we have as much reason to believe in God as we do in Evil God: most reasons for believing in God, e.g., the apparent design of the universe, could equally apply to Evil God—a being that has the non-moral properties of God, like maximal knowledge and power, but who is perfectly evil. It would explain the apparently pointless suffering in the world.
Perhaps Evil God created the world and allows for the existence of goodness only to accentuate suffering: when Evil God allows goodness in the world, it is merely for the purposes of producing some greater evil, or preventing some greater good. For example, when something good happens to you, it may make you happy and fill you with hope. And that hope makes the next round of your suffering that much worse. Of course, the argument continues, we lie to ourselves that we lead happy and goods lives, by and large, to cope. In a world created by an Evil God, we have no other choice if we are to carry on.
We could take this challenge and apply it to The Krampus: the half-goat, half-demon who punishes naughty children around Christmas time, rather than rewarding the good children—the latter being the job of Santa Claus. To quote the Wikipedia article:
The Krampus is a horned, anthropomorphic figure in Central and Eastern Alpine folklore who, during the Christmas season, scares children who have misbehaved. Assisting Saint Nicholas, the pair visit children on the night of the 5th December, with Saint Nicholas rewarding the well-behaved children with modest gifts such as oranges, dried fruit, walnuts and chocolate, whilst the badly behaved ones only receive punishment from Krampus with birch rods.
Perhaps the fact that many good children get nothing for Christmas isn’t just robust evidence against the existence of Santa Claus, but also evidence for The Krampus: he gives some children gifts, but only to the extent that it will somehow produce either a greater evil, e.g., giving selfish children elaborate toys to further corrupt their moral character, or preventing a greater good, e.g., not giving deserving children toys to make them suffer even more.
Is Santa on the Naughty List Sometimes?
Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle: Santa Claus is only intermittently good, with many character flaws. He sometimes gives gifts to deserving children, and other times not, depending on his mood—perhaps it isn’t essential to Santa Claus that he gives gifts based on moral desert. This may be unfair, but Santa Claus may have mixed moral character. To put in holiday appropriate terms: perhaps Santa is sometimes on the nice list, and other times on the naughty list.
Decide for yourself, dear reader.