The Really Annoying Theodicy (RAT)

In this video, we show that Utilitarianism allows a theist to answer the Problem of Evil, but the answer is really, really annoying.

[christthinker]

This was thought provoking. Considering that a lot of skeptics come at the PoE from a utilitarian view, as you’ve also said, this theodicy works against the very “presupposition”. Great job A2!

[Ap]

Spent the whole video wondering where you were going with all this just to have my mind blown. Awesome job!

[SphericalCowPhysics]

Nice! As a skeptic, I love seeing an apologist challenge issued by working internally to another worldview. Subbed!

[realmless]

3 is actually the perfect answer since it's not the smallest positive number (1) but it emphasizes the fact that there is no answer amazingly.

[chowbow]

I really enjoy learning from your channel because I find it hard to understand when there are no visual presentations and just mere discussions.

[nuthajason]

my theodicy is relational. Here expressed as a poem:
ORTHOTOPIA
In Utopia, the prophet came
to warn of hell and wrath;
to tell the blest ones, in their joy,
they walked a curséd path.
‘You speak of ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’’,
the paradise people said.
‘We do not know your words.
What is ‘dark’, ‘burned’ and ‘dead’?
We cannot believe in your angry god -
his judgement and his iron rod.’

In Dystopia, the prophet came
to promise eternal peace;
to tell the curséd ones in pain
of the coming of blest release.
‘You speak to us of ‘joy’ and ‘love’’,
perdition’s people said.
‘We do not know your words.
What is ‘light’, ‘feast’ and ‘fed’?
We cannot believe in your loving god
for all we know is an iron rod.’

In Orthotopia, the prophets came
to warn and give good news;
to tell of curse and blessing.
Let them with ears now choose.
‘You speak to us of Heaven and hell, ’
said the people who share your fate.
‘We know of pain and pleasure
and so we now in truth relate
to the words of life and death.
Tell us of the One from Nazareth.’

[etincardiaego]

You were using a very raw kind of utilitarianism: hedonistic calculus, the pain and pleasure were totally simetric, the mere addition paradox, you used infinities as a number, etc. Nowadays utilitarianism has an answer for all the problems you raised.
Solution within a utilitarian framework: rejecting using hedonistic calculus with infinities (read some current utilitarians, they don't use that, even less with infinity because it leads to paradoxes as you showed), then rely on a asymetry between pain a pleasure. The best possible world within an (real, current and actually held) utilitarian framework would have no pain at all.
It was a really fun and challenging video hahaha

[whatsinaname]

This is basically the main reason philosophers hate using infinity for good and bad with Util. There’s actually a really big literature talking about infinite bad in regards to existential threats, since they make other factors become trivial.
Still funny video

[yourfutureself]

I'm a utilitarian and I think this was a misrepresentation of utilitarianism. No utilitarian believes that torturing 9 people is ok as long as you also help 10 people out. Utilitarianism is about the minimization of suffering and the maximization of pleasure, not about the maximization of utility (at least not about the maximization of utility you talk about in the vid).
Most utilitarians would reject that the maximizing utility is what should be done. Utilitarian ethics are almost always described as consisting in the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of suffering. Minimizing suffering would consist of reducing suffering to 0 and maximizing pleasure would consist of causing as much pleasure as possible. Therefore, a utilitarian God would reduce suffering to 0 and increase pleasure to infinity. He clearly didn't do this so He's therefore not a utilitarian God. This is the most intuitive form of utilitarianism and probably the one most utilitarians hold. I don't know of any utilitarians who accept this type of morally counter-intuitive utilitarianism. This means utilitarians can still use the problem of evil, as most utilitarians who use it probably don't subscribe to this weird new type of normative utilitarian ethics.

Even if we grant this flawed definition of utilitarianism, I still have some objections to the real world being equal to pleasure world.

Even if for every moment of the afterlife, souls in Hell experienced more suffering than the pleasure experienced in Heaven, given that it's experienced for an infinite amount of time, it's still infinite suffering. Any number times infinity equals infinity. This means there isn't more pleasure than suffering and the real world is therefore worse than pleasure world. A way to get around this would be to say that the infinite amount of pleasure experienced in Heaven is a bigger infinite than the infinite suffering spent in Hell, if we accept that for every spent moment in Hell, less suffering is experienced than pleasure experienced in Heaven. Therefore, the suffering of Hell is a smaller infinite than the pleasure of Heaven, and there's still more pleasure than suffering, making the utility of the real world good. However, this would mean there's a difference between infinities of different sizes when considering utility. However, if the differences between different infinities are relevant when considering an action's utility, then God should've created pleasure world instead of the real world, because the infinity of pleasure in pleasure world is a bigger infinity than the one in the real world. Therefore, if infinities of different sizes aren't relevant differences when calculating utility then the suffering experienced in Hell is equivalent to the pleasure experienced in Heaven, making the utility of the real world 0, infinitely worse than pleasure world. This would mean God would have created pleasure world. If infinities of different sizes are relevant differences when calculating utility, then God woul've created pleasure world, as the infinite pleasure of pleasure world is a bigger infinity than the one in the real world. This means that the real world can't have the same utility as pleasure world. Universalism and annahilitionism (I don't know how to spell it) would be good ways around this.
Another thing to consider about Hell and Heaven. To calculate the utility of the real world, we should substract the infinite amount of suffering experienced in Hell to the infinite amount of pleasure experienced in Heaven. Infinity-infinity is impossible, so it's impossible to calculate the utility of the real world, wich means that God couldn't have calculated the utility of the real world before creating it. But, if He didn't calculate the utility of the real world, then creating it was an inmoral act, as calculating the utility of an action is how one determines whether an action is moral or not. This means that God, an infinitely inteligent and omnibenevolent rational being, didn't determine whether or not the action He was about to make was moral or not. That would be morally irresponsable. I'm not so sure about this last bit, but what do you think? Universalism and annahilitionism would again be good ways to around this.

I still think this channel is amazing btw. Never stop making vids.

[Joker]

If you use the surreal numbers there actually is a largest number. It's called ON and it's defined as the successor of ON. ON is so big, that adding it to it's negative, OFF, doesn't cancel them out. It shows up in a practical sense in a game where player 1 has infinite moves that don't end the game.

[johns]

Some versions of utilitarianism hold to an asymmetry between pleasure and pain. For example, David Benatar holds to the view that any amount of pain and suffering, no matter how small, outweighs any pleasure we might experience. This leads him to the conclusion that non existence is better than a life filled with lots of pleasure and a small amount of pain and suffering. His reasoning is basically, we don't feel a negative reaction about all the pleasure being missed out on an uninhabited planet because no one there is experiencing any pleasure, because no one existed in the first place to miss out on anything. Yet we do have a negative reaction to even small amounts of pain and pleasure. Therefore there is an asymmetry between pleasure and pain.

[justinsankar]

Is this argument in the academic literature in various forms or is it completely new?

[Finfie]

Excellent demonstration of the problem of multiobjective optimization. You have two objectives: 1) Minimize suffering, 2) Maximize well-being. How much is it worth to increase suffering for an improved well-being? But i disagree with you that the worlds are equivivalent. Even with your accessment of a 1:1 comparison, a world identical to ours without hell would be a clear improvement since you would cut out infinte and importantly needless suffering. Especially once you consider Luke 13:24, the proportions of people in heaven and hell might be a bit lopsided in the wrong direction for your argument. But yes for any theistic worldview without a concept of infinite suffering in hell, but with heaven, this argument holds true, at least it can not be instantly refuted.

[BrainStormTnT]

I know that this is somewhat of an internal critique, but I think there is a lot of baggage associated with this. It seems that at the cost of defeating the problem of evil, you introduce the idea that whatever universe God creates is just as arbitrary. This seems to eliminate the idea of meaning and purpose in the universe. Just a thought I had after initially watching the video.

EDIT: I also think a utilitarian would just reject the idea that you can just add pleasure to pain to get a value to compare possible worlds together. They would probably say that you can split the pleasure and pain metrics. For example, they might say that there are two loosely connected goals of minimizing pain to the greatest extent possible and maximizing pleasure to the greatest extent possible.

Looking up the definition of utilitarianism, it would seem that increasing the amount of pain above 0 would only be justified if it increases the maximum amount of pleasure giving a greater outcome overall. However, given the premise you laid out in the video that "there isn't a maximum amount of pleasure", it would seem that there still isn't a good reason to increase the amount of pain from 0.

EDIT 2: In other words at 8:50, there would have to be a connection between the two events in order for the ouchie to be justified

Utilitarianism is the doctrine that actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority. In our case, a possible world with the existence of evil would only be justified if the evil directly increases maximum utility otherwise we are at the same spot as before, still looking for justification for the existence of evil. And once again, with the premise you gave, that there isn't this maximum utility, there is never a justification for evil. Since it is possible to minimize evil, the arbitrariness problem would only fall on maximizing the good of the universe.


Hopefully that made sense

[tbcop]

This seems like it can work with that would make it even more annoying, lol.good work.

[Boundless_Border]

Few issues.

Firstly, the Problem of Evil doesn't necessarily rely upon utilitarianism. It relies on a proposed contradiction with the omnis of a god with the existence of something that can be called "evil" accurately. It works equally well if we consider divine command theory.

The problem of suffering, which I'll admit, is tied very strongly to the problem of evil does rest a bit on utilitarianism. But we can table this note for now.

Now, I find it a bit interesting that you propose that the god can only choose which worlds to actualize and you don't consider any actions in the conventional sense. It would seem that it can do both and depending on how you consider this god entering into the world.

Like the god could make the world as it is now except it constantly acts like a superman in that world. You can say this is the actualization of a different world but it is also the more typical conception of performing an actions.

Now. When you try to make the two worlds equal you run into a few issues. First infinity minus a finite amount is a smaller infinity. Or at least under some conceptions if infinity that would be true. On the other hand you didn't actually talk about how the negative infinity of hell factors in. And an issue does crop up when you consider that more are supposed to end up in hell rather than in heaven. So it seems like the hell infinity will be larger than the heaven one.

As for best world considerations. If we can consider the reality of infinity then it seems the god could make a best world. One with an infinite number of people receiving infinite pleasure and no pain. Even if you would like to say that there is no best world, your response with arbitrary choices between any is completely incorrect. It would simply be logically impossible to create any world since it is impossible to make a world without a better world. If you ask the god to square a circle it wouldn’t just make any shape because it couldn't do the original task.

If we accepted your proposition about arbitraryness as correct then it can make only a "hell" and still be considered "good".

Anyway, I know this is old and you're thoughts may have changed. But it really doesn't do what you want it to do.

[vladdziuba]

Thanks for the video. I've learned about this idea from your other comments and good to see it expanded upon in the video!
I have 2 thoughts: 1) Didn't understand how jump (10:02) was made from non-utilitarianism to MUST open the door to some form of Christian values. 2) I think that some arguments and the conclusion (9:40) in particular don't work with Negative utilitarianism

1) Isn't that the black and white fallacy? There might be non-utilitarianism theories not opening the door to some form of Christian values, right?
2) Agree that any amount of pleasure is justified because there can always be more pleasure. But there can't be less than 0 suffering. So it seems to me that "no suffering" is a reasonable condition when choosing a world under Negative utilitarianism framework

[jochemschaab]

Wait how exactly can you subtract pain from happiness. There isn't a clear unit for it

[mistermkultra]

Great video Apologetics, What Do You Think about The modern Quantum Physics and the concept "Ex Nihilo " ( Anything came From Nothing ) and his relation with The existance Of God ??
I'm Sorry for my English, isn't my first language

[Nithin_sp]

But how could you say that that Pleasure > Pain in this world? Pain is so much inherent in our world that we barely notice it. For example : We eat to avoid the suffering of hunger, We cloth to avoid the suffering of humiliation, etc. 🤔