Epistemic Status: Not sure if this is a trivial point that is obvious to everyone, but when I thought about it I thought “hmm, this seems pretty profound,” so I concluded it was worth sharing.
Consider any view you have that’s incorrect (or, more specifically, imagine that one view you currently think is correct turned out to be incorrect). That view, being a view, no doubt results in you having the belief that it is correct. Let’s imagine that the view that you have that’s false is that epiphenomenalism is true1. Well, given that you think it’s true, if you had the following choice, you would cause infinite torture.
The choice would be, you guess whether epiphenomenalism is true. If you’re right, infinite torture doesn’t happen. If you’re wrong, it does happen. If you have an incorrect view here, you would cause infinite torture.
Ideas can have high stakes, especially in implausible thought experiments. It’s important that we get things right. Yet the epistemic case is much less interesting than the moral case.
Recently, I came across a clip of Michael Knowles talking about various things. One thing he mentioned was that he would not have oral sex with a man to end world hunger. Presumably then, he wouldn’t have oral sex with a man to prevent infinite child rape. This is another very obvious application of the principle that bad ideas can result in infinite torture.
Another friend of mine is a radical deontologist who wouldn’t steal a penny to prevent infinite torture. It’s crazy to think that, if given the opportunity, in some situations, he would commit the single worst act in history (namely, not stealing the penny).
People sometimes complain about Christian evangelizing. However, if Christians turn out to be right, and I don’t embrace Jesus, I will undergo infinite torture. You can understand the motivations for evangelizing when you imagine how you’d feel if the shoe was on the other foot. If you were very confident that all people who went to their graves believing in Christianity would be infinitely tortured, it would make sense to evangelize a lot.
Even someone as reasonable as Parfit has views that could result in an infinitely undesirable state of affairs. If, as I have argued previously, we have decisive reason to accept the repugnant conclusion, that means that, in a scenario with infinite people with lives barely worth living, Parfit would bring about (comparatively) an infinitely undesirable state of affairs.
So would Huemer. If he could violate infinite rights to produce infinite utility, he wouldn’t (or, if infinity is impossible, an arbitrarily large amount of rights and utility).
I, no doubt, have some views that would result in infinite torture in some scenarios. Fortunately, I’m unlikely to every be in such a scenario. However, the fact that they exist is somewhat worrying. Not sure if there’s a deeper lesson here, just an interesting fact.
Not taking a stance on whether it is true here, for all you rabid epiphenomenalist readers.