Regarding the stated reasons to accept an actual infinite:
- I am not sure whether our best physics actually tells us that space is continuous, many QM researchers seem to think otherwise. But obviously I have no clue about QM, so there's probably no point discussing this
- Regarding the infinite future I basically agree with what Craig has said on this - roughly: There *are* no future events and for any time t in the future it will not be the case that at t there has been an infinite amount of events. So we have no counterexample.
Obviously you disagree that there are no future events, given that you lean towards B-theory, but if we have independent reasons to think infinities in conrete reality are impossible (as I think we do), then this seems to give us very good reason to reject any theory of time on which an infinite amount of events would be possible. So, if I were you, I would basically just Moorean shift this (If B-theory is right, then infinities may exist in concrete reality. But infinities can't exist in concrete reality. Therefore, B-theory is not right).
Thinking, instead, that the future HAS to be finite seems totally untenable to me - if I had to accept THAT, then I would just accept that infinities are possible. Surely we have more reason to think that the future can be infinite than to think that A-theory is false?!
You mentioned this but all of these seem like a problem for math and the philosophy of math, not ethics. We shouldn't reject Heaven>Hell OR the possibility of infinity, just because we couldn't use finite concepts on infinite sets on our first try. It honestly surprises me that milking paradoxes from the paradox machine is a somewhat-active research field. They don't tell us anything new! We gotta think harder about the nature of infinity and mathematical operations instead.
Nice article.
Regarding the stated reasons to accept an actual infinite:
- I am not sure whether our best physics actually tells us that space is continuous, many QM researchers seem to think otherwise. But obviously I have no clue about QM, so there's probably no point discussing this
- Regarding the infinite future I basically agree with what Craig has said on this - roughly: There *are* no future events and for any time t in the future it will not be the case that at t there has been an infinite amount of events. So we have no counterexample.
Obviously you disagree that there are no future events, given that you lean towards B-theory, but if we have independent reasons to think infinities in conrete reality are impossible (as I think we do), then this seems to give us very good reason to reject any theory of time on which an infinite amount of events would be possible. So, if I were you, I would basically just Moorean shift this (If B-theory is right, then infinities may exist in concrete reality. But infinities can't exist in concrete reality. Therefore, B-theory is not right).
Thinking, instead, that the future HAS to be finite seems totally untenable to me - if I had to accept THAT, then I would just accept that infinities are possible. Surely we have more reason to think that the future can be infinite than to think that A-theory is false?!
You mentioned this but all of these seem like a problem for math and the philosophy of math, not ethics. We shouldn't reject Heaven>Hell OR the possibility of infinity, just because we couldn't use finite concepts on infinite sets on our first try. It honestly surprises me that milking paradoxes from the paradox machine is a somewhat-active research field. They don't tell us anything new! We gotta think harder about the nature of infinity and mathematical operations instead.
Have you written about temporal discounting anywhere? While it’s not going to solve every problem in infinite ethics, it might help with some.