1) Version that’s been in my head: suppose at t=1 God creates a mortal creature that lives for one time period in misery (subjective value = -1) then dies and goes on to heaven forever (subjective value = 1 for each time period thereafter.) He then expands the population of the mortal world by doubling it every time period, so there’s always one more person on earth than in heaven and the net value of the universe is at -1 for each time period. It seems like the total situation is infinitely bad but the situation for any one person is infinitely good.
2) I think it’s infinity that’s doing the work (of making everything baffling) and the theism and ethics aspects are more superfluous. You mention anthropic considerations leading to an infinite universe, which is straightforward on SIA, but then consider what happens to anthropic reasoning in that case! Of course you could fairly say anthropic reasoning is full of crazytown results regardless of starting assumptions.
3) I wonder if the solution is to think anthropically over, like, a density function? This might reduce to SSA, idk
I think my intuition is that we probably don't have to worry about infinity? As in, you could divide numbers into smaller fractions forever, but you probably won't?
And infinite X seems to preclude the possibility of not-X occurring, so while it seems possible to describe, it's not clear to me there's anything we could do to affect something actually infinite?
Infinity confuses me. Maybe I should have just wrote, "something something simplicity prior".
Intuition is, of course heaven is better than hell if we have the option to change things, but if we have that, was something really infinite in the first place?
Now that 'a plausible view of morality should say that the wrongness of torturing babies doesn’t depend on the absence of square circles', one might claim that 'a plausible view of morality should say that the wrongness of infinite suffering doesn’t depend on the presence of God'.
If the claim is true, then we're quite back where we started. Thus we need to deny it.
Is there a reason to think that the cardinality of the infinities in the first example is identical? I'm trying to think of what bijection could assign every happy individual in one galaxy to some suffering individual in the center of another galaxy, and it at least seems at first glance to be structurally similar to a diagonalization problem. And of course, if that's true, then our intuitions would be restored. I'm sure people who work on these problems have thought about that, but do you know if any do the explicit work of establishing equivalent cardinalities?
Otherwise, I'm sure you would not find it convincing overall in light of your other commitments, but this seems like an area where Judith Jarvis Thomson's argument against the concept of better or worse worlds fits perfectly! She never wrote anything (as far as I know) on the particular concept of infinite ethics but her arguments in Normativity seem almost intentionally designed to defuse these issues. I have sometimes felt as though infinite ethics arguments function as reductio arguments against utilitarianism/consequentialism/non-naturalism in general.
1) Version that’s been in my head: suppose at t=1 God creates a mortal creature that lives for one time period in misery (subjective value = -1) then dies and goes on to heaven forever (subjective value = 1 for each time period thereafter.) He then expands the population of the mortal world by doubling it every time period, so there’s always one more person on earth than in heaven and the net value of the universe is at -1 for each time period. It seems like the total situation is infinitely bad but the situation for any one person is infinitely good.
2) I think it’s infinity that’s doing the work (of making everything baffling) and the theism and ethics aspects are more superfluous. You mention anthropic considerations leading to an infinite universe, which is straightforward on SIA, but then consider what happens to anthropic reasoning in that case! Of course you could fairly say anthropic reasoning is full of crazytown results regardless of starting assumptions.
3) I wonder if the solution is to think anthropically over, like, a density function? This might reduce to SSA, idk
I think my intuition is that we probably don't have to worry about infinity? As in, you could divide numbers into smaller fractions forever, but you probably won't?
And infinite X seems to preclude the possibility of not-X occurring, so while it seems possible to describe, it's not clear to me there's anything we could do to affect something actually infinite?
Lol, what?
Infinity confuses me. Maybe I should have just wrote, "something something simplicity prior".
Intuition is, of course heaven is better than hell if we have the option to change things, but if we have that, was something really infinite in the first place?
Now that 'a plausible view of morality should say that the wrongness of torturing babies doesn’t depend on the absence of square circles', one might claim that 'a plausible view of morality should say that the wrongness of infinite suffering doesn’t depend on the presence of God'.
If the claim is true, then we're quite back where we started. Thus we need to deny it.
Is divine command theory the answer?😋
Is there a reason to think that the cardinality of the infinities in the first example is identical? I'm trying to think of what bijection could assign every happy individual in one galaxy to some suffering individual in the center of another galaxy, and it at least seems at first glance to be structurally similar to a diagonalization problem. And of course, if that's true, then our intuitions would be restored. I'm sure people who work on these problems have thought about that, but do you know if any do the explicit work of establishing equivalent cardinalities?
Otherwise, I'm sure you would not find it convincing overall in light of your other commitments, but this seems like an area where Judith Jarvis Thomson's argument against the concept of better or worse worlds fits perfectly! She never wrote anything (as far as I know) on the particular concept of infinite ethics but her arguments in Normativity seem almost intentionally designed to defuse these issues. I have sometimes felt as though infinite ethics arguments function as reductio arguments against utilitarianism/consequentialism/non-naturalism in general.