Follow up: All Possible Persons Theodicy

One objection to the all possible persons theodicy is that once a person has been created, there is no reason to allow them to experience horrendous evils, unless their experiencing horrendous evils somehow gives rise to the existence of other persons.

But the systems, mechanisms, events, and so on needed to bring you (and others) about also happen to bring about all the bad things that will happen to you.

Someone might wonder why doesn't God just appear to reassure us that the horrendous evils we witness and/or experience are necessary for our existence, and eventually we will enjoy living a fundamentally good life.

The idea is that God does appear and reassures you, just not in this universe. The entire spectrum of divine hiddenness is implemented across all possible worlds. There are worlds where not a single person believes in God, and there are worlds where every single person believes in God, and there are worlds in between covering every shade of God revealing himself.

Our world is roughly in the middle, which makes sense because the large majority of worlds will be moderate, and so it's no surprise that we find ourselves in the most probable kind of world. (Though maybe that's wrong; because there are an infinite number of possible worlds, there isn't a bell curve; it's just flat. There are an infinite number of variations of a near-heaven world, just as there are an infinite number of variations of a near-hell world, just as there are an infinite number of variations of a moderate world. But if we allow infinities of different sizes, and if the infinities in the middle are greater than the ones at the extremes because the number of moderate permutations is exponentially greater, then maybe it's coherent to say that the world distribution has a bell curve.)

That means there is a nearby possible world that is an actual world in which a person arbitrarily similar to you, but not exactly you, exists, and in that world this person lives a life identical to yours except God does reveal himself to that person and reassures him.

This multiverse picture of the world is undignifying to the individual, because for every individual there are endless clones of this person. These clones are not exactly like you—they are, after all, their own person—but they are so similar to you that any other human would easily mistake you for them.

Call this the 'cloning problem.'

On one hand, God may wish to (or even be obligated to) create all possible persons as a way to maximize goodness and to minimize worst possible depriving evils (assuming that non-existent-but-possible persons are truly deprived of goods if they are not created).

On the other hand, it might be unloving to reduce someone's uniqueness to zero by creating an endless number of clones of them.

But that's not fair; each "clone" is in fact unique; they have their own unique soul / self / first-person subject. It is this uniqueness that makes the happiness of one person incommensurable with the happiness of another person, and it is in this sense that we are all equal (though in another real sense, some people are more valuable than others because they generate more happiness in both quantity and quality).

So I don't see how the cloning problem is a real problem for the theodicy. Maybe it's creepy that there are an endless number of clones of you out there, but what's the alternative? The alternative would be all those people missing out on (eventually) living a fundamentally good life.

A much worse problem is the following:

There are possible worlds that involve horrendous evils that take unimaginable amounts of time. So someone might suffer for trillions of years just so that they, or someone else, are born.

The promise of an infinite good of heaven is not enough to justify just any evil, even when heaven depends on that evil.

But is there a non-arbitrary stopping point between when an existence is too horrible for too long before it's not worth the eventual benefit of living a fundamentally good life?

A variation on this problem is that we could imagine that there are certain persons who could not be born without the very specific input of God himself performing heinous actions. But God cannot perform these actions, and so God is constrained when creating all possible persons (rather, those persons are not possible after all).

Another problem is that we could imagine there being an infinite number of people who could be created by people who are already living a fundamentally good life. So why not just opt for those infinities? We might say it's impossible for an actual infinity of persons to be created, so the next best thing is to create a potential infinite of persons. As long as there are more and more persons being created, ad infinitum, then the best possible world has been created. There are other best possible worlds with other sets of potentially infinite persons, but given that intrinsic values are incommensurably good across unique persons, one potential infinite is not better, or worse, than another. When choosing between which set of potentially infinite persons to create, you might as well start with the set where everyone begins and retains, at all times, a fundamentally good existence; that is, to start with the set that does not include unbearable suffering. The set of potentially infinite persons that doesn't include unbearable suffering is the least arbitrary set.

But there's an even more fundamental problem: if it's true that my ensoulment depends on this exact sequence of physical events leading to the exact brain that gives rise to my soul or that enables my ensoulment, then how could God recreate me after my death?

If I can't trust God to create me de novo with the exact specifications of my brain needed for my ensoulment without all the physical events leading up to my existence, then how could I trust God to create me with the exact specifications of my brain needed for my ensoulment in the afterlife?

If God can create me in heaven, then by that same power God should be able to create me without horrendous evils.

What is it about the actual events of our world that makes them necessary to create us? And if there is an answer, then how could I be recreated after my death without those events taking place all over again?

A theodicy even better than the Grand Story Theodicy? The All Possible Persons theodicy

I had thought that the Grand Story theodicy was the best theodicy available. But maybe something along the following lines is even better:

• God is obligated to prevent worst possible depriving evils.
• So God is obligated to create all possible persons and to give them all fundamentally good lives. (Lives that are totally consciousness-affirming, meaning that every person loves being alive to the point of strongly preferring being alive to not, this preference is fixed and never wavers, and they always get what they want, namely, to live.)
• It would be such a shame to miss out on living a fundamentally good life. In fact, it would be a worst possible depriving evil. God knows this about you, and me, and about every possible person. So God has no choice but to create every possible person and give them a best possible life, which really is any life in which the person wants to live and gets to live. (Thus, a person on this view is minimally something that has the ability to prefer living to not living.)
• Here's the problem. The only possible way for certain persons to be created is through really complex, messy systems like our universe. In fact, all possible universes must be created across all possible levels of complexity, so that the entire range of all possible persons, from the most to the least complex, will eventually be created.
• This requires an infinite amount of time, and there will never be a time such that an infinite amount of time has passed, so there will never be a time at which all possible persons have been created, and so God has no choice but to create a potentially infinite number of persons in an unfolding manner requiring space and time. (Maybe some possible persons do not require space and time to exist.)
• But you couldn't exist without evolution being exactly the way it is, and without all the evils of the world being exactly the way they are.
• We are but one of a potentially infinite number of universes carving out person-space out of the infinite ocean of possible persons. Think of a child scooping up a cup of seawater. Our universe's job is to be that cup and scoop up its share of possible persons.
  
• So evils, even horrendous evils, are necessary to create all possible persons. Then, either all at once at some later time in a mass resurrection, or immediately after death, each person's fundamentally good life starts. God explains to that person that the reason why all the evils they faced (and/or witnessed other people face) were necessary to create them and others.
• You could even have a temporary hell where some individuals don't have their fundamentally good life starting immediately upon resurrection, but only after they've been through a rehabilitation process (or, in the case that we have free will, retributive punishment).
• For any evil whatsoever, the answer to "Why did God allow that?" is "Because if God didn't, a possible person wouldn't have been born, and that possible person would have been deprived of eventually getting to live a fundamentally good life."

This combines the "metaphysical necessity" theodicy with the "heaven" theodicy. In short, God is obligated to prevent all worst possible depriving evils, which means preventing any possible person from being deprived of the best possible good of living a fundamentally good life. But creating all possible persons requires allowing, temporarily, even horrendous evils, as you can only exist if certain physical events happen to generate the complex neurobiological system that gives rise to your exact subjective consciousness. So God is forced (by obligation) to force us a trade: experience horrendous evils in a temporary life so that we can be created (and so that other possible persons can be created), so that you can then eventually live a fundamentally good life. Being deprived of the fundamentally good life is infinitely worse than suffering finite horrendous evils. So, it's a good trade.

A few problems:

1) Usually theists want to say that before creation, reality is already perfect and maximally good, because God is maximally good. So to say that God is obligated to create to maximize value would seem to imply that God alone is not maximally good.

My response to this is that it seems self-evident that a world with more happiness is a better world than a world with less, and that a world with my happiness in it (or your happiness in it) is a world with greater happiness than a world without my happiness (or without yours), ceteris paribus. So basically, I don't understand why people say a world with only God is maximally good; that just seems self-evidently false. 

However, God himself is maximally good in the sense that God himself is the greatest possible extrinsic good, because God gives rise to all fundamentally good lives.

This is a bit tricky because I also want to say that a fundamentally good life is a best possible extrinsic good with respect to an individual.

We might distinguish between degrees of extrinsicality. A best possible extrinsic good (degree 1) is a fundamentally good life, and God is a best possible extrinsic good (degree 2). Being "deprived of God" doesn't exactly make sense, but being deprived of a fundamentally good life does. We might also say that degrees are tied to individuals versus groups. A degree 1 best possible extrinsic good is a best possible extrinsic good with respect to an individual. A degree 2 best possible good is a best possible extrinsic good with respect to a group of people.

We might think of it this way: When we ask what is the best possible thing that could happen to a person, it would be strange to say, "The best possible thing that could happen to you is God," because that demands an immediate question, why is God the best possible thing that could happen to you? The obvious answer: because God will give you a fundamentally good life. So while technically God is the ultimate greatest possible extrinsic good, that's only because of how value is ultimately cashed out, which is through maximizing intrinsically positive states (both in quality and quantity). And so we can trace God's value, just as we can trace our own value (or the value of anything), to the phenomenal value that that thing produces.

In fact, due to considerations of eudaimonia, what counts as a fundamentally good life for an individual might not allow for the best possible life for a group of people. So we might say that there are further and further degrees of best possible goods as we zoom out to cover larger and larger groups of individuals. This brings us to problem 2 below:

2) There are possible individuals for whom living a fundamentally good life (you always prefer to live and you always do) entails living a profoundly evil (or mediocre) life. It stands to reason that God would not want to sustain these lives despite the fact that they are fundamentally good. Consider a person who lives all by themselves, and their psychology is such that they are happy to live alone and do nothing but watch obscene images and videos (fill in the blank). No one else exists in this world but them, so it's not like they are hurting anyone. But it seems clear that this is a massively impoverished life, and one with no virtue. It's hardly a good life despite this individual strongly preferring to live over not living and getting to live forever. In fact, the fact that their disturbing existence goes on forever seems to just add to the problem. So it cannot be the case that consciousness-affirmation is the only meaningful consideration.

Here's a potential solution to this problem: There is a distinction to be made between someone's subjectivity and the quality of their consciousness. The example I like to give is the math genius who sustains a brain injury and loses their math skills. They remain the same person after the injury; they have the same first-person subjective experience. But the quality of that experience, what it is like to be them, has changed. So when we go to heaven, we retain our subjectivity, and thus our personhood, but the quality of that subjectivity is significantly enhanced.

This might require a stint in hell or purgatory for rehabilitation purposes. The renewal of one's mind needn't be an instantaneous, pain-free experience. In fact, the increasing of the quality of one's consciousness could take place over an infinite amount of time; we are always improving the quality of our consciousness.

What matters is not only what we affirm, but what we would affirm were our consciousness to be of high quality. The man who is happy to live alone doing nothing but watching obscene material would not be happy for long. Once his mind had been renewed to an extent, he would be profoundly unhappy with his existence, in which case God would again be obligated to move him to a better world. (And so God would perhaps move him to heaven from the beginning, anticipating this change of heart and mind. Or we might say that these bad worlds that include solitary disturbed individuals (or whatever disturbing features) are the exact hells and purgatories people exist in until their minds have been renewed to the point that they can now fit in heaven.)

This also provides an important resource when it comes to disability theology. It seems cruel of God to keep someone's severe mental disability forever in heaven. And yet, at the same time, it seems cruel to just annihilate these persons out of existence. The solution is to keep their souls, but improve them over time (or all at once; or to improve them to a degree all at once (an initial boost) and then improve them thereafter slowly over time).

So we must modify our understanding of a fundamentally good life. Consciousness-affirmation alone is not enough; it's something more like: consciousness-affirmation when the quality of your consciousness is high (or ever-improving). This makes sense, because if happiness is how value is cashed out, then the quality of that happiness matters greatly. Greater quality of happiness is a greater degree of happiness. So God could never settle for creatures living lives of diminished quality of happiness, as that would fail to maximize happiness.

So if someone could experience eternal consciousness-affirmation without living a fundamentally good life, does this imply that someone could experience eternal consciousness-denial without living a fundamentally bad life?

I don't think so, and here's why. In the former case, you need higher degrees of consciousness in order to maximize happiness. God is disturbed by the happy evil individual (which, incidentally, makes God unable to maximize his own happiness) because God knows how this person would feel about their own choices were the quality of their consciousness leveled up. God knows that this person would be horrified and ashamed, exactly because a deeper understanding of things comes with a recognition of what is good and what is bad. Only a fully recognition of what is good and bad can result in a full appreciation of good and bad, right and wrong, and thus a full instantiation of phenomenal value.

This does suggest that the feeling of ought-to-be-ness that comes with phenomenal value is highly misleading; we might never know whether our happiness is the kind of happiness we would approve of were our consciousness of a higher quality (unless God tells us).

But in the case of living a fundamentally bad life, quality of consciousness doesn't seem relevant. Someone could experience unbearable suffering for a time, as long as it's required for this person to eventually live a fundamentally good life (either due to necessity or rehabilitation). But no one could ever experience consciousness-denial forever without that person's existence being unjustified. So while living a fundamentally good life requires high (or ever-increasing) quality of consciousness, living a fundamentally bad life remains a worst possible evil regardless of the quality of your consciousness. 

This is a categorical worst possible evil; we can imagine God increasing one's capacity for pain, thus causing their torture to be ever-increasing. This high-fidelity fundamentally bad life would be far worse than a low-fidelity fundamentally bad life. So we might be tempted to say it's really the high (or ever-increasing) fidelity bad life that is the worst possible extrinsic evil, but any fundamentally bad life is a categorically worst possible extrinsic evil.

An analogy would be this: Imagine being overdrafted is a worst possible evil. In that case, it makes no difference if someone overdrafts by a dollar or by a thousand dollars; either way, a worst possible evil has occurred, and the fact that one is a greater degree doesn't make a relevant difference to the permissibility of the lesser degree worst possible evil. (It does sound strange to speak of degrees of worst possible evils. But again, if we allow 'worst possible evil' to be categorical, then degrees shouldn't be problematic.)

If consciousness-denial is what makes life not worth living, then maximal consciousness-denial is what makes life maximally not worth living. Not-worth-living-ness is thus the measure of badness that can befall an individual. Once that measure has crossed a threshold where life is officially not worth living for the individual, then it's not relevant (as far as justification is concerned) to what degree beyond that threshold that life is not worth living.

If maximizing phenomenal value depends on quality of consciousness, then the maximizing of phenomenal disvalue depends on the quality of consciousness. But when it comes to whether evils are justifiable or not, there is an asymmetry between living a fundamentally good life, which requires consciousness-affirmation of a high or ever-increasing degree, and living a fundamentally bad life, which requires eternal unbearable suffering regardless of the quality of that suffering.

So perhaps more simply we could just say that a life not worth living in the long run is a categorical worst possible evil (regardless of the details of its not-worth-living-ness), which generates a categorical best possible saving good with respect to that evil, and so God cannot allow for anyone to live a life not worth living in the long run, as that would be to allow an unjustifiable evil (an evil which cannot possibly generate outweighing good). The best possible good grounded by such an evil would be to be fully saved from that evil, either by annihilation, by being sent to a fundamentally good life, or by being sent to a fundamentally neutral life.

But because God is obligated to give us fundamentally good lives anyway, it follows that God could not allow worst possible evils anyway.

3) Another problem is a matter of power. Why would God be limited to creating us only by specific physical inputs? Why couldn't God create us wholecloth out of nothing? The question of how God could create a person at all, or how a person could possibly exist in the first place, is one of the deepest questions in philosophy. It may be that God does in fact create all possible persons he can ex-nihilo or de novo. Presumably, in Christianity the angels are like this. But if God is obligated to create all possible persons, then again it's hard for us to wrap our minds around the fact that this involves God creating trillions upon trillions upon trillions (really, approaching infinity) of persons. It's all possible persons, after all. This would involve any coherent account of person-generation, and that just so happens to include persons that are created through a DNA, RNA, evolution, biological process brought about by the laws of chemistry and physics we observe in our universe. Maybe there are countless persons God can create that don't require all these things, but that doesn't change the fact that we require these things to exist, and God must create us lest we are deprived of a best possible good, which would indict God on charges of allowing worst possible depriving evils.