It's true that standard arithmetic breaks down with infinity. But I still think we can be confident that some rankings hold. For instance, 10 people in heaven and 1 in hell seems much better to me than the opposite.
I also think it's plausible that a world in which every moment utility>>>> disutility is in some way valuable. Does that stop holding if the world lasts forever and some people are in Hell? Seems unlikely to me.
Or imagine a world where one person can save the souls of their family members from being destroyed if they throw themselves into Hell (and their family members are then guaranteed heaven.) Can't we say at some size of their family, some intensity of heaven, some mildness of hell, that it reaches a point where that sacrifice is morally correct?
10 people in heaven and 1 in hell. ...I'm not sure.
This would mean that for every heaven-year, there exists an equivalent hell-year.
If I was the hell person and I wanted to prove that my suffering wasn't worth the other people's happiness I would designate each hell year to a specific heaven year so that they could be in 1-1 corospondence.
hell year 1 = person 1's heaven year 1
hell year 2 = person 2's heaven year 1
hell year 3 = person 3's heaven year 1
...
hell year 10 = person 10's heaven year 1
hell year 11 = person 1's heaven year 2
...
hell year n = Person: "n module 10s" hevean year n/10.
so that way no bodies years in heaven are in excess of any hell years. For any given person's year of heaven there exists some year of my hell which corresponds to it.
This is not a contradiction to the concept of infinite hell or infinite heaven since all it means is that the human utilitarian framework just has to assign finite values to infinite-goodness or infinite-badness to prevent the framework from collapsing.
But all a utilitarian framework is, is a function that assigns numbers to world states. And you can basically assign any numbers you want provided they are finite. So when we say X gets more utility than Y that doesn't really mean anything other than "we should do actions that make X happen rather than Y happen." It does not imply anything about the inherent goodness of X and Y.
But if we are not talking about humans but about God. And not about utility but about goodness, we can't do this trick. Like if we stipulate that the world god creates must have positive goodness, then it's relevant that a world with 1 person in hell forever and 10 people in heaven for ever does not have positive goodness since infinity minus infinity is not a positive number. It may be that in some human utilitarian frameworks we should prefer such a world to one with 7 people in heaven and none in hell. But that says more about our frameworks then about the world itself. Theres a difference between saying God is perfectly good and perfectly utilitarian.
You could have eternal hell without infinite suffering. One year you suffer 1 Hell Unit, the next year 0.5 units, the next year 0.25 units.... then your suffering would be both eternal but finite!
this is true. I agree that in this case eternal hell would result in finite suffering.
It would be weird to call that "eternal hell" though. Cause then the majority of the time you are spending there the suffering is too small to even be noticeable.
I guess the appeal of that finite-suffering but eternal hell move would be to people who are theologically/scripturally committed to eternal Hell but unsure how to square that with the idea of a all-loving God.
But I do think there are some meaningful ways to say a world with an infinite Hell could still be overall good even if you can biject hell-years to heaven-years even if we can't formalize that with standard tools.
I don't think I buy the idea that God must instantiate every possible world that has a net positive utility, because any world with a bad hell seems to have a non optimal utility. Even if we were to grant that the net utility is positive with a bad hell (and I'd say this is hard to argue for, given "narrow gate" passages), for any world with a bad hell, it seems he could optimize it by instead creating the exact same world, with the exception being that the people in the bad hell cease to exist (conditional immortality).
Imagine God creates world with conditional immortality. Maybe he even creates an infinite copies of that world- maybe even the highest cardinality of infinity. Then he still has the choice of making or not making that world with an infinite hell as well, right? And some hell-including worlds should be net positive as long as welfare is commensurable.
Will God not pull the trigger on some worlds with actual Hell? Maybe, but it seems like the answer has to lie in something like Hell being beneath God or some things not being commensurable.
If there is not an alternate factor in play like hell being beneath God, then I would agree that he has the choice of making a net positive world with hell, just not that he should/must. Maybe I just don't know how to think about infinities properly, but it seems like at any point when he is about to make a world with hell, he could do better by making it a CI world. If God wants infinite worlds because he wants to maximize utility, it seems like the best he could do would be to create infinite copies of the worlds tied for the highest utility (none of which are hell worlds). If he also wants a greater diversity of worlds, then every positive utility hell world he might create has an equivalent CI world that increases world diversity just as much. There is no diversity advantage to having a hell counterpart to an equivalent CI world, because the only way they diverge from each other is in a bad way.
Also, if there is such a thing as average utility across infinite worlds, adding hell worlds to the mix brings that down. Not sure if God would care about average utility, but maybe
But I agree that ultimately there is more to consider anyway, like hell potentially being beneath God
So in other words God would create all the worlds where there are more people in heaven than eternal hell?
Then maybe some complicated version of this if we consider different levels/severity of heaven and hell
Yeah, more or less. Although if you think Hell can be good bc of justice or retribution, then that makes a lot more possible worlds net good.
I think this is wrong if he'll is infinitely bad.
Even if more people end up in am infinitly good heaven.
A large number times infinity minus a small number times infinity does not equal a positive number.
It's true that standard arithmetic breaks down with infinity. But I still think we can be confident that some rankings hold. For instance, 10 people in heaven and 1 in hell seems much better to me than the opposite.
I also think it's plausible that a world in which every moment utility>>>> disutility is in some way valuable. Does that stop holding if the world lasts forever and some people are in Hell? Seems unlikely to me.
Or imagine a world where one person can save the souls of their family members from being destroyed if they throw themselves into Hell (and their family members are then guaranteed heaven.) Can't we say at some size of their family, some intensity of heaven, some mildness of hell, that it reaches a point where that sacrifice is morally correct?
10 people in heaven and 1 in hell. ...I'm not sure.
This would mean that for every heaven-year, there exists an equivalent hell-year.
If I was the hell person and I wanted to prove that my suffering wasn't worth the other people's happiness I would designate each hell year to a specific heaven year so that they could be in 1-1 corospondence.
hell year 1 = person 1's heaven year 1
hell year 2 = person 2's heaven year 1
hell year 3 = person 3's heaven year 1
...
hell year 10 = person 10's heaven year 1
hell year 11 = person 1's heaven year 2
...
hell year n = Person: "n module 10s" hevean year n/10.
so that way no bodies years in heaven are in excess of any hell years. For any given person's year of heaven there exists some year of my hell which corresponds to it.
As to your other points about human morality and throwing yourself into hell. Sure. Maybe.
My position on Utilitarian frameworks of ethics is that they can't handle infinities (as I elaborate here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-173890104)
This is not a contradiction to the concept of infinite hell or infinite heaven since all it means is that the human utilitarian framework just has to assign finite values to infinite-goodness or infinite-badness to prevent the framework from collapsing.
But all a utilitarian framework is, is a function that assigns numbers to world states. And you can basically assign any numbers you want provided they are finite. So when we say X gets more utility than Y that doesn't really mean anything other than "we should do actions that make X happen rather than Y happen." It does not imply anything about the inherent goodness of X and Y.
But if we are not talking about humans but about God. And not about utility but about goodness, we can't do this trick. Like if we stipulate that the world god creates must have positive goodness, then it's relevant that a world with 1 person in hell forever and 10 people in heaven for ever does not have positive goodness since infinity minus infinity is not a positive number. It may be that in some human utilitarian frameworks we should prefer such a world to one with 7 people in heaven and none in hell. But that says more about our frameworks then about the world itself. Theres a difference between saying God is perfectly good and perfectly utilitarian.
You could have eternal hell without infinite suffering. One year you suffer 1 Hell Unit, the next year 0.5 units, the next year 0.25 units.... then your suffering would be both eternal but finite!
this is true. I agree that in this case eternal hell would result in finite suffering.
It would be weird to call that "eternal hell" though. Cause then the majority of the time you are spending there the suffering is too small to even be noticeable.
I guess the appeal of that finite-suffering but eternal hell move would be to people who are theologically/scripturally committed to eternal Hell but unsure how to square that with the idea of a all-loving God.
But I do think there are some meaningful ways to say a world with an infinite Hell could still be overall good even if you can biject hell-years to heaven-years even if we can't formalize that with standard tools.
I don't think I buy the idea that God must instantiate every possible world that has a net positive utility, because any world with a bad hell seems to have a non optimal utility. Even if we were to grant that the net utility is positive with a bad hell (and I'd say this is hard to argue for, given "narrow gate" passages), for any world with a bad hell, it seems he could optimize it by instead creating the exact same world, with the exception being that the people in the bad hell cease to exist (conditional immortality).
Imagine God creates world with conditional immortality. Maybe he even creates an infinite copies of that world- maybe even the highest cardinality of infinity. Then he still has the choice of making or not making that world with an infinite hell as well, right? And some hell-including worlds should be net positive as long as welfare is commensurable.
Will God not pull the trigger on some worlds with actual Hell? Maybe, but it seems like the answer has to lie in something like Hell being beneath God or some things not being commensurable.
I guess when it comes down to it what I am disagreeing with is kraays conclusion. I should just read that paper and maybe I will learn something.
If there is not an alternate factor in play like hell being beneath God, then I would agree that he has the choice of making a net positive world with hell, just not that he should/must. Maybe I just don't know how to think about infinities properly, but it seems like at any point when he is about to make a world with hell, he could do better by making it a CI world. If God wants infinite worlds because he wants to maximize utility, it seems like the best he could do would be to create infinite copies of the worlds tied for the highest utility (none of which are hell worlds). If he also wants a greater diversity of worlds, then every positive utility hell world he might create has an equivalent CI world that increases world diversity just as much. There is no diversity advantage to having a hell counterpart to an equivalent CI world, because the only way they diverge from each other is in a bad way.
Also, if there is such a thing as average utility across infinite worlds, adding hell worlds to the mix brings that down. Not sure if God would care about average utility, but maybe
But I agree that ultimately there is more to consider anyway, like hell potentially being beneath God