Your Priest Will Not Solve the Trolley Problem
Theistic Normative and Meta-Ethics are Shockingly Awful
0
There’s a curious phenomena in philosophy wherein philosophical fields often draw on concepts from other fields. I.E. meta-ethics will bring in concepts from consciousness, epistemology, and philosophy of mathematics—covered shallowly, philosophy of mind will draw on philosophy of science, etc. Nowhere is this more egregious than philosophy of religion.
When it comes to philosophy of religion, the stereotype of them being outdated holds as true as it ever does. Not only is there metaphysics several thousand years out of date (Aristotle and Acquinas are not cutting edge modern thinkers), but their normative and meta-ethics are too. It’s as if they have missed the last 2000 years.
Good philosophy is reductionist—it parses out very complex ideas like morality in terms of much simpler concepts1. However, philosophy of religion has seemed to make it its mission to be non-reductionist—to make simple concepts more complex. So for those philosophers of religion who have been under a rock and ignoring all of the modern developments in normative ethics, let this be a wakeup call.
Let’s take a survey of modern normative ethics and see how it totally razes all of philosophy of religions nonsense that they use to address the problem of evil.
But first, let me ask you a question. It will come up later. Why is making the world better a good thing? Think about the answer. You’ll see when it comes up.
1 Consequentialism
Consequentialism is a very popular view of normative ethics. Most consequentialist views are utilitarian. Utilitarians generally come in three forms, ones who want to maximize desirable experience, ones who want to maximize desire fulfillment, and ones who want to maximize objective list fulfillment.
All of these rule out theism. A desire fulfillment theorist would think God would create infinite people with infinitely strong desire fulfillment. An objective list theorist would think God would create infinite people with all possible things on any objective list constantly fulfilled (infinitely intense relationships with others who choose to enter into a relationship with them, infinite knowledge, infinite joy, etc). A hedonist would think God would create infinite pleasure.
So theists have to reject consequentialism.
2 Deontology
Deontology says that people have rights that shouldn’t be violated. There are two types of deontologists.
A) Absolutists who think you should never violate rights. This would rule out God killing millions of people by disease. Thus, these people can’t believe in God.
B) Moderates who think that rights violations can be outweighed by other things like hedonic value, desire fulfillment, or objective list value. This also rules out God. God would just create what he’d consequentialists must hold he’d create. This wouldn’t violate any rights.
So theists have to reject deontology.
3 Virtue Ethics
Virtue ethics says ethics is about cultivating and acting on virtues. This is also ruled out by God. God could just make infinite people infinitely virtuous and give them infinite opportunities to do virtuous things like gain knowledge, help others, and be brave. You might worry that a perfect world would have no opportunity for virtue. This is demonstrably false
A) Presumably there is virtue exercised in heaven, which is perfect.
B) Virtues could allow people to help others be even better off, even when everyone starts very well off.
C) Infinite virtue fulfillment from things like knowledge would outweigh all other virtues.
D) Each being could be given the opportunity to virtuously make more virtuous beings with infinite utility and virtue at some personal sacrifice.
Additionally, virtue ethics generally says that virtues are supposed to cultivate something deeper. These include
Eudaimonia which means flourishing. Well, God could just make infinite beings with infinite eudaimonia.
Desire fulfillment—see above in the desire fulfillment section.
Maximization of the virtuousness of the person. This is easily done—see above.
Virtue ethics is also proffered less as an account of how to act and more of an account of how to live. Thus, it can’t account for God’s specific acts—those are generally reliant on some other normative system.
Virtue ethics is the only element of normative ethics that gives theists a ghost of a chance of salvaging God’s perfection. Yet they tend to simply ignore arguing for this—in favor of platitudes about souls, free will, and C.S. Lewis quips about straight lines.
4 Theories of well-being
Theories of well-being are intended to determine how well ones life is going for them. Philpapers gives 3 different types—because these are the only ones that are seriously considered. All of these entail God’s non-existence.
Hedonism. On this account God could make us all better off by making every good experience a quadrillion times better—if not infinitely better.
Desire fulfillment. On this account God could make us all better off by giving us total desire fulfillment
Objective List Theory. On this account God could immediately make our objective list totally filled out.
Sorry theists—these don’t leave room for souls, C.S. Lewis based platitudes, or free will. None of these hold that any of these are relevant to how well ones life goes for them.
5 But What About Free Will?
Theists appeal to free will as the justification for evil. A few things are worth noting.
It’s really hard to give an account of why free will would be impossible in a hedonic utopia. We would have infinitely good lives and the ability to choose between things—they’d just all produce infinite joy!
Free will existing is a pretty fringe view, less than 20% of philosophers believe in it in the libertarian sense. Thus, this would be like arguing for theism based on it being the only way to account for a theory of quantum mechanics that garners less than 20% support from physicists.
It’s also not clear why free will has any value at all. People think it wouldn’t be fun to be a mindless robot. Well, by definition, any world created by a God to max out on utility would be fun. We wouldn’t be mindless—free will just relates to the causal origin of our choices. If our choices were limited to some degree, why the hell would that rob our lives of any value!? When one is on a rollercoaster they lack the free will to get off mid ride. However, a roller coaster that allowed one to experience more joy per millisecond than has been experienced in the history of the world would still obviously be a good experience. Even if free will has some value, why would it have infinite value? This is not held by any of the main theories in philosophy. It’s just a bizarre theistic parochialism.
6 But Mr. Bulldog, What About Souls?
What about them?
1 The soul theory is a very fringe view, being a subset of the further fact view, which is itself a fringe view. The further fact view has less than 15% support from philosophers. And the further fact view doesn’t entail the soul theory! Thus, it’s a subset of a fringe view.
2 Why do souls matter? This is not held by any main theory of normative ethics, well-being, or any other mainstream theory. Even if they do, why do they matter infinitely?
3 Why can’t God just create us with fully robust souls? If our souls become robust in response to certain things, couldn’t God make them robust from the outset?
4 Humans are not optimized for soul building. It seems like the development of our souls are a function of lots of things including memory, empathy, and compassion. So why not make us more compassionate, with more empathy, and with a better memory?
These are all examples of theism latching on to fringe concepts that most people don’t believe in and then claiming erroneously that they have infinite value, while ignoring the entire corpus of literature surrounding the domain on which they speak.
Thus my open challenge to theists is this. Develop a robust theory of well-being and of normative ethics that justifies God creating this world instead of a different one. Then we’ll talk. Until then, theism is bunk parochial bullshit, with no coherent model to replace those established in the fields on which they pontificate2.
7 But C.S. Lewis Told Me You Wouldn’t Understand a Curved Line Absent Understanding a Straight Line, so we Need Evil for Good
1 Couldn’t God give us the concept of good without evil?
2 Experiencing joy is good, even if one has not suffered.
3 Why not just create minimal evil to give us the concept, even if this is true.
8 But God is the Foundation for Objective Moral Values and Duties
Oh and don’t even get me started theistic meta-ethics. Generally there isn’t theistic meta-ethics—beyond facile assertions about God being the standard for morality. If God is the standard of morality what the hell does it mean to say God is good? If I am the standard for being Bentham’s Bulldog esque, then the claim that I am Bentham’s Bulldog esque is trivial. This also means that if I were a rabid deontologist, then being Bentham’s Bulldog esque would mean being rabidly deontological. Thus, if God is the standard for good, then God could be wildly different and good would be wildly different. If God were pro torturing infants for fun that would be morally good.
If goodness just means in accordance with God, then saying God is good is trivial. And yet it doesn’t seem trivial. Saying God is good is informative.
Also, does God have reasons for his commands? If he doesn’t then they’re arbitrary and lack reason giving force. If he does then those reasons are independent of God. This has been argued here.
Can God just make any subjective thing objective? Can he make an objectively funniest joke, or objectively best flavor of Ice-cream? It seems not. So then why can he for morality?
Cuneo who is a theist, moral realist, and is actually qualified famously rebuked the nonsense that passes for robust meta-ethics in theistic circles, writing, “When I read the most sophisticated discussions of God and morality in the work of thinkers such as Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, C. Stephen Layman, Mark Murphy, Linda Zagzebski, and John Hare, I find that none of them maintains that there could (in the relevant epistemic sense of "could") be no meaningful lives, value, obligations, or reasons to be moral if God were not to exist.[1] Rather, they claim that theistic views have some advantages over non-theistic views because they can better accommodate and explain certain data than these non-theistic views. I found myself, then, puzzled by Wielenberg's choice to engage extensively and almost exclusively with a very radical theistic view that states that there could be no meaningful lives, value, obligations, or reasons to be moral if God were not to exist. (Admittedly, this radical view is often voiced by lay people and defended in works of Christian apologetics. But, as best I can tell, these are not the audiences to which Robust Ethics is addressed.) Moreover, when Wielenberg does discuss some of the crucial issues that divide non-theistic from plausible theistic views, the discussion is very brief.”
Goodness then can’t be grounded in God. It has to have independent obligations for the claim that God is good to be informative. If it would be wrong to torture infants for fun apart from God, then God can’t get off the hook when he tortures infants for fun. It’s similarly wrong for God to do it.
In virtue of what are God’s moral obligations different. If morality is outside of God—as people like Swinburne agree—then how the heck can God ignore morality? Theists need to flesh out a coherent account of this.
9 Theism has to accept radical incommensurability
Generally, good things are commensurable. Friendship is good, learning is good, so trading off learning for for friendship is somewhat worthwhile. If one had to forget all they knew in order to make one new friend that wouldn’t be worthwhile. Similarly, if one had to lose all of their friends to learn one new fact, that wouldn’t be worth it.
God can create good things in infinite quantities. Thus, theism has to hold that the allegedly great things about our world are worth tradeoffs of infinite other good things. This radical incommensurability is usually rejected. And theists tend to not defend it at all!! They just throw out platitudes about souls and then act like their job is done. It’s maddening.
10 Is God Bad at Building Houses?
Imagine I told you that the best possible home designer had build a house just for you. You go into the house and find it falling apart, crawling with bugs, termites digging into the wood, a stack of dead children because one of the rooms collapsed—leading to 19,000 dead children in just one day, fire hazards galore, hazardous substances, etc. You say you don’t believe me that it’s made by the best possible home designer. My response is to assert the following.
If it were perfect you’d lack home design related free will.
It builds your souls.
But how else would you do improvements?
You can’t have the concept of a bad house absent a concept of a good house, and a good house requires an objectively perfect home designer. C.S. Lewis told me so.
Maybe the designer had a morally sufficient reason for making such a seemingly terrible house.
In a century the house will have cosmic renovation so if you really truly hold that the house is great, then it will be literally perfect for all of eternity, so ignore the pile of corpses and fire hazards, leading to lots of little old ladies burning to death in fires.
There’s also a janitor who cleans the house. He has a curious habit of torturing and raping people. However, that’s his free will. So while your child is being raped and having their fingers cut off with pliars—just remember it was his free will. This is of course, the best possible house!
But this house is just a test!!
Would it be reasonable to think that it’s the best possible house? How is God any different?
11 But If 5 Year Olds Didn’t Get Cancer, How’d we cure cancer?
Let’s go back to the earlier question: why is improving the world good? It’s good because it makes the world better. Much like it would be foolish to pay people to dig holes to make jobs, it’s foolish to make the world worse so people can spend time making it better! If its goodness has nothing to do with making the world better, why is it morally better to make the world better than to make it worse?
Also, the world could start out amazing, but it could be made even better by our actions!
Finally, what theory of well-being or normative ethics holds that having a world be worse in ways that involve children getting roasted to death actually make the world better, by letting us take actions to make the children stop getting slowly roasted to death?
If we accept
A) That you should take actions which make the world better.
B) That a world with more bad things is better because it gives more chance for improvement.
Then you’d have to accept
C) That you should take actions that bring about a world with more bad things.
Conclusion
Earlier I said that theism is anti-reductionist, unlike good philosophy. I have attempted to substantiate that conclusion in this article. Good philosophy would explain simply what a soul is and why it’s valuable. Theism argues for some amorphous ill defined soul, free will, and other things. It borrows wide concepts from conventional morality, which are abandoned upon philosophical reflection, and then just copy and pastes them into its account—without deeper analysis. This is bad philosophy—largely why non philosophers of religion tend to ignore their musings.
Ideally utilitarian ones.
Pardon the polemicism—I find it makes writing more fun.