From Infinite Ethics to God

I really feel like this argument is cheating

The closest I’ve come to having an existential crisis was when I thought hard about infinite ethics. Ethics, when it gets to be about infinities, becomes, to use the technical term, unimaginably fucked. I wrote about the puzzles of the infinite and the psychological distress they caused me in this article.

Just to give a sense of one such puzzle, one of the smaller and less ferocious of its brethren:

Suppose you discovered an infinite universe, full of infinite galaxies. In the center of every universe was a single happy person. Every other person in the universe was horrifically miserable—all of the time. Call this universe HELL.

Consider another universe called HEAVEN. This universe is the inverse of the other—in the center of every galaxy is one miserable person. The rest of the galaxy is filled with billions of happy people. There are infinite happy people.

The following judgments are plausible:

1. Contra Pink Floyd, we can tell that HEAVEN is better than HELL.

2. Moving people around does not improve things if it changes nothing else.

These judgments conflict, for reasons I describe in the article. Yet they’re both so plausible. I ended up thinking that one should abandon 1. This also required me to abandon:

3. If infinite very bad things happen, that is bad.

In that article, I flirted with rejecting the infinite entirely on the grounds that it breaks ethics, conflicting with ridiculously obvious moral claims.

(Fun fact: the man in the above meme looks a lot like me. Even more surprisingly, the woman looks very similar to the rejection of the possibility of the infinite).

But rejecting the infinite entirely has significant costs of its own. Space, for instance, is probably infinitely divisible. The idea of a smallest unit of space just seems obviously inconceivable. Furthermore, an infinitely big region of space seems conceivable. The following three principles are each plausible:

1. If they are both possible, HEAVEN is better than HELL.

2. Moving people around does not improve things if it changes nothing else.

3. An infinitely large space, or infinitely divisible space, or infinite future is at least possible.

Together these very obvious verdicts entail that HEAVEN or HELL is impossible (note here I’m talking about the infinite ethics scenario, rather than the theological one), but some infinites are possible. What could explain this? To the best of my knowledge, there is no theory of the infinite that would explain why HEAVEN and HELL are impossible but an infinitely big space is possible. (Btw, the thing that convinced me that 3 is true is that anthropics points towards an infinite universe).

But suppose one thinks that God is necessary and that God would necessarily give every person an infinitely good existence. Well then HELL and HEAVEN are both impossible, for a perfect God would make everything go infinitely well. So from these ridiculously plausible axioms, one can deduce a theory of the infinite that is only consistent with theism.

This argument feels like cheating. I sort of feel like I’ve recreated Anselm’s ontological argument—it’s a bit hard to see exactly where it goes wrong, but it definitely goes wrong. Still, let me do my best to defend it.

A first worry you might have, one articulated by Dustin Crummett is that this is the wrong type of solution. The scenarios don’t seem impossible. Infinite ethics is paradoxical because plausible moral principles conflict. Crucially, those principles seem to be about possible scenarios. Thus, the solution sketched out here is a bit like avoiding the repugnant conclusion by declaring that the scenario sketched out is impossible. Even if, for some reason, it turns out to be impossible, it seems like one of those impossible scenarios that theories will have to have something to say about. A theory that said that it would be fine to torture people if the liar sentence turned out neither true nor false would be disqualified on that basis.

There is something plausible about this suggestion. Still, it’s not hard to reject it. You might think that, once we’ve granted the scenario is impossible, it doesn’t seem crazy to think that’s the solution to the puzzle. If two seemingly very obviously true principles conflict, but it’s independently plausible that the scenario in which they conflict is impossible, that might sort out the puzzle. I’m much more confident that, for example, it’s bad when infinity bad things happen and that HEAVEN is better than HELL than I am that the correct view of which impossible scenarios a theory has to say plausible things about will exclude the HEAVEN and HELL scenario. There’s something rather odd about thinking that stating that the scenario is impossible is not a good solution to a paradox, when holding that it’s independently super plausible that the scenario is impossible, and when the paradox points to a conflict between the most obvious ethical truths.

Another worry you might have is that this has weird implications regarding other scenarios that are impossible on theism. Suppose that some view implied that everyone in existence being tortured forever wouldn’t be bad. I think it’s safe to say that would give a strong reason to give up the view. However, if the broad move being made here is correct, then that scenario is metaphysically impossible, and consequently can’t be used in a counterexample.

This inference, however, doesn’t follow. It could be that those scenarios are impossible but that they’re the subset of impossible scenario that a plausible view will have to say reasonable things about. A plausible view of calculating the geometry of things doesn’t have to explain how to calculate the geometry of square circles, but a plausible view of morality should say that the wrongness of torturing babies doesn’t depend on the absence of square circles. Thus, one can consistently think that morality needs to say nothing about the possible comparisons between HEAVEN and HELL, but has to have something to say about whether infinity people being tortured is bad.

Beyond this, I don’t really know how one would object to the argument. Anyone have any ideas? Where, if anywhere, does this argument go wrong?