The Problem of Salient Suffering: Saving vs preventing

In this post (https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-argument-from-salient-suffering.html) I argue from salient suffering to the non-existence of God.

 

When a person is in fact suffering from a max salient evil, then the best thing for them – a max salient good – is to save them. This faces the following objection:

 

How does salience transfer from intrinsic goods to depriving evils, or from intrinsic evils to saving goods? If saving / depriving means preventing, then unborn creatures suffer a max evil by being deprived of max goods. But intuitively, unborn creatures cannot suffer at all, and certainly not maximally. Maximal suffering is salient, and salient suffering depends on consciousness.

 

(I guess you could try to cash things out in terms of the consciousness of God. God is consciously aware of how much better it would be for non-existent creatures to become conscious and enjoy max goods. Indeed, wouldn't that be the basis for God's motivation to create other creatures? But intuitively to suffer (in the worst way) is to suffer consciously. So if the unborn are suffering (in the worst way) from deprivation, then they are suffering consciously. But non-existent persons cannot suffer consciously. Whether salience transfers may depend on whether there are modal facts and whether God, being omniscient, is aware of all the creatures that would exist and what goods they would enjoy were God to create them. If there are no modal facts, then God is off the hook. If there are modal facts, then perhaps facts of would-be consciousness provides the conscious facts needed for salience.)

 

Certainly there is a self-evident conscious difference between suffering consciously and not. So does God need to allow someone to suffer from a max salient evil for a moment to transfer salience from the intrinsic suffering to the saving good? That seems silly. Surely it's even better to not suffer maximally for even one moment.

 

It's not that God is ever rescuing people from worst possible fates, it's that he's preventing these fates from occurring, because even the one moment is unjustified. But then how does salience transfer? If there is no actual suffering, only "modal" suffering, then does that commit one to modal facts? This person would suffer a maximal evil if God doesn't intervene, so God has to intervene? I don't want to commit myself to modal facts, in case the grounding objection, and other objections, prove too powerful.

 

If a single person suffers a single moment of max evil, then it will have been the case that God is not perfect. Obviously, God cannot allow this. So it can never have been the case that God is not perfect. So it can never be the case that someone will suffer a max evil.

 

So it's not modal facts, but future facts (facts of the closed future) that allow salience to transfer from intrinsic goods/evils to preventative goods/evils. It cannot be the case that intrinsic evils are salient without it being the case that future intrinsic evils are salient.

 

But maybe even open future facts can do this too. If there is a 10% chance for a person to experience unbearable suffering, then there's a 10% chance for God to not exist. Obviously, that's absurd. So open future facts about unbearable suffering are impossible; it's always 0%.

 

If someone is enjoying a max good, it can never be the case that this person will cease to enjoy this max good, as this would be a max depriving evil, with salience transferring from the max good to the depriving evil by way of direct comparison. So it can never be the case that someone will enjoy a max good only to cease enjoying it. Max depriving evils enable max saving goods – being saved from the depriving evil. So once someone is in heaven, God cannot possibly take them out.

 

Of the non-existent persons who will never come to be, there are no future facts for them. Because future facts are what carry salience, and because there are no future facts for the non-existent persons that never come to be, non-existent persons that never come to be never suffer maximal salient depriving evils.

 

Or, we can scratch all that and say there are max modal depriving evils and a perfect being is obligated to create an infinite number of creatures who each enjoy max goods. Which, there's probably reason to believe this anyway – a perfect being must create the best possible state of affairs, and what else could be the best possible state of affairs except the maximum possible number of creatures living fundamentally good lives?

 

This also nicely explains away the brute fact of your existence. Why do you exist rather than some other person in your place? Because you literally have to exist – everyone does. Only impossible persons do not exist.

 

Of course, we are not living fundamentally good lives, which are lives where a person never rejects consciousness (i.e., never prefers non-existence to existence) and always lives. Some of us do reject consciousness, which entails unbearable suffering. So, this cannot be the best possible state of affairs, and there cannot be a best possible being.