Thanks for your argument, I'm going to present an objection and draw out some of the poincts of contention where some further argument might be needed.
It seems to me that there's an obvious extension of Objection 3 that I'm not sure your consent-based model can handle. Is it enough to say "you previously consented, bad luck old chap you'll have to suck it up", when at a later time, someone actively withdraws consent?
I think this is often the situation that we're dealing with in the Problem of Evil. Dear God, many prayers start, I'm suffering, others are suffering, please make it stop!
In your analogy of a medical procedure, if the patient wakes up and says the pain is interminable, I don't care about finishing the procedure, make it stop, then assuming it is safe to do so, the doctor should stop the procedure.
In fact, as I write I'm sat in a hospital gown awaiting a procedure, and it's just been emphasised that if I ask for them to stop, they'll end it there. That's also my excuse for rambling and any lack of clarity!
And similarly for your prison cannibalism example. It strikes me that if, once the eating started and the victim has the full experiential knowledge of the horror and pain of the situation, and therefore rescinds their earlier consent, the case for letting things happen falls apart - "help me man, Goddamnit put the camera down and stop this madness, I was wrong earlier! Please!"
I think some of this comes down to general theories of consent, consent withdrawal etc which I must admit I'm no expert on. My initial thought is that your view requires more of the 'no such thing as marital rape, because sex was agreed to at marriage' model, whereas my objection relies more upon a modern 'active consent' type model.
And more specifically, how those models of consent interact with an (by assumption) omniscient and omnipotent God. I can see how that may work in favour of your view - God knows that if I'm this life you had all the information, then you would consent. But this at least needs further argument. Suppose the patient in my example is affected by their sedation and not remembering all the information - I would suggest that there's a strong case their withdrawal of consent should still be respected.
But also, God's omnipotence may work in favour of my objection, I brought out a practicality/pragmatics condition - "assuming it is safe to do so, the doctor should stop the operation". At least here, omnipotence should mean that no such practical barriers (which would apply to many other human-scale analogies too) are relevant for the divine case.
Finishing typing before the sedation kicks in too hard, but hopefully some food for though!
Hey! Sorry for the late reply—I meant to respond and then forgot. I think this type of objection is the toughest one for my theodicy—I’m writing a paper that discusses it now, which is what reminded me to respond to your comment.
Here’s the basic move: the consent is a type of contract. When you sign a contract, you can consent to X being done to you *even if* you try to revoke consent while X is happening.
This is my favourite theodicy, so I've thought about it a lot over the years, I really like where you go with it. I think the objections can be beaten quite easily:
"Reply #1: I am assuming that souls exist, and that they are sufficient for personal identity over time. If you deny that, you won’t find this theodicy plausible."
Disagree. I suspect we can make this work on the psychological theory of personhood over time. If minds similar to ours pre-existed this earth, and if God arranged events so as to recreate our minds, then minds with the right relations of causation and similarity etc. etc. exist.
Re: Reply #2- The Cartesian response that animal suffering doesn't really exist because (roughly) animals are P-Zombies also works. I prefer your response though.
"Objection #3: If we pre-existed our births, our past-life memories must have been wiped. But you can’t validly consent to something if it will happen to you after the memory of you consenting has been erased."
There's another way around this objection which has the advantage of bolstering our consent. What if, in every single moment, God knows that if, counterfactually, we fully understood our cosmic situation and had our pre-earthly memory restored then we wouldn't withdraw our consent.
Also note it has some implications for whether our simulators are necessarily evil if the simulation hypothesis is true.
Finally, I'd note that while this defence doesn't strictly need it, it tends to push us towards salvific universalism.
“Disagree. I suspect we can make this work on the psychological theory of personhood over time. If minds similar to ours pre-existed this earth, and if God arranged events so as to recreate our minds, then minds with the right relations of causation and similarity etc. etc. exist.”
You’re probably right—though there’ll be some unconventional results. (E.g., if someone suffers a horrendous evil, has a drastic personality change midway through life, loses all his Q-memories, etc., then suffers horrendously afterwards there’d have to have been two pre-existent people to have consented. I don’t take that to be an objection though. The best objection to psychological continuity theory is psychological continuity theory.) One worry is that you might think that if God wiped all our Q-memories, most psychological continuity theorists could end up saying that in their absence, we on earth couldn’t be continuous with anyone in the pre-existent state (or at least: not continuous enough for consent to work it’s moral magic.)
”The Cartesian response that animal suffering doesn't really exist because (roughly) animals are P-Zombies also works. I prefer your response though.”
Yeah. Like, you could just conjoin this theodicy to a different theodicy that accounts for animal suffering. But that’s less simple, and my credence that dogs don’t suffer exactly maps on to my credence that it would be bad to skin one alive.
There's another way around this objection which has the advantage of bolstering our consent. What if, in every single moment, God knows that if, counterfactually, we fully understood our cosmic situation and had our pre-earthly memory restored then we wouldn't withdraw our consent.
Hmmm, I like this. That said, I find it plausible that actual consent—ceteris paribus—is always preferable to counterfactual consent. So God should never rely on counterfactual consent when he could obtain the real thing (without sacrificing anything of greater value, yada yada.)
Also note it has some implications for whether our simulators are necessarily evil if the simulation hypothesis is true.
Agree.
Finally, I'd note that while this defence doesn't strictly need it, it tends to push us towards salvific universalism.
Yeah, I’m a big universalist. Aside from anything else, it’s hard to imagine any rational pre-existent person taking a non-zero risk of infinite torment. But there’s probably a way God could’ve make the risk rational, if he raised the positive stakes high enough.
Semantic drivel on my part. It just seems obvious to me that you are here putting out a broadly logically possible state of affairs that would theoretically be able to explain the distribution of evil in the real world without committing yourself to the facticity of the account. That seems as clear an example of a ‘defense’ as you can get. I assume that an actual Mormon could use this as a theodicy, but I don’t think that you have put it forward as a theodicy
I intended to put it forward as a theodicy. (I don’t necessarily *endorse* the theodicy, because I think you might only need it if you endorse an absolutist form of deontology, which I don’t.)
Your objection to it being a theodicy seems to be: absent a prior commitment to Mormonism, or another religion that endorses pre-existence, there’s no independent reason to endorse pre-existence, or think that it’s predicted on theism. But what do you make of my suggestion at the end?:
“But more to the point, it’s not clear that pre-existence isn’t predicted on theism, given that it might be God’s only way to actualise various evil-induced greater goods in a deontologically permissible way. As a theist, you might think: If God permissibly could, then God permissibly would. Since God permissibly can actualise various evil-dependent greater goods—namely, by securing our consent in a pre-mortal life—, and since theism predicts that God would want to actualise these goods if he were able to, the doctrine of pre-existence just falls out of the hypothesis of theism.”
That’s a reasonable way to understand what I wrote.
I should define my terms better- (I loosely follow PvI here. He says weak and strong theodicy, but I like the more popular terms defense and theodicy)
Defenses say that ‘for all we know’ x is the case and x explains y
Theodicies say x is the case and x explains y
My contention was that someone who isn’t a Mormon probably isn’t in the position to be making a theodicy.
As for your paragraph, I’m not confident that the deduction is that sound. However, someone who does think that deduction is sound could treat this argument as a theodicy. I, however, do not think that I have good reason to believe that God needs our consent in this way, so I would just accept this as a defense since ‘for all I know’ it’s true and ‘for all I know’ it’s consistent with my religion.
However, I think that it is pushing back the problem a bit and that there is still an issue beyond consent of how much suffering God could actually be justified in inflicting on an individual, even if they consent, so I can’t say that I think it’s a perfect shield. But that’s neither here nor there.
Thanks for the argument. Josh Rasmussen had got me thinking about this recently too
Great post! I guess if I ever become a theist, I’ll have to consider Mormonism. I have just a couple questions/objections.
I understand that we have consented to not be saved from certain evils, not to being tortured by some third party, but it seems since God created this third party in the first place he is least partially response for the evil. You are not bystander if you hand the torturer his instruments.
Also, don’t some deontologists argue that certain rights are inalienable, meaning we can't consent to give them up - like the right not to be enslaved? Wouldn’t God be violating these rights even if we consented to any and all sufferings, no matter how severe?
(1): This is an important point: For all evil actions, God plays an indispensable causal role in it, insofar as he creates the immoral agents, the tools they use for evil, etc. (And on some views of divine providence, God plays an even closer causal role than that, sustaining evil actions in being.) I think the right response is to ay that, as long as the indispensable causal roles played by God and the evil agent are non-identical (and they are, since they came from different sources/have different content) pre-existent people could've consented to one indispensable causal contribution (God's) while refusing consent to that of the wrongdoer.
(2): The debate about whether/why there are inalienable rights is complicated, but I guess I'll just say: *even if* there are rights we can't alienate, like the right not to be enslaved, it's not obvious that there's a corresponding inalienable positive right to be prevented from being enslaved. (Indeed, it seems pretty intuitive to me that there isn't; just consider a case in which someone is enslaving you, and ask: "If there were a third party who could stop me from being enslaved, wouldn't I be able to waive them of that obligation by telling them to leave me alone?".)
Also, I think the strongest case for an inalienable right against even voluntary slavery is the thought that we don't have the moral authority to transfer full ownership of ourselves to another, forever. But given the infinite scope of salvation history, waiving one's right to be enslaved for a miniscule period of it - a period that's certain to end when the slaveholder dies - seems much harder to argue against.
we can all be a little Mormon, as a treat
Thanks for your argument, I'm going to present an objection and draw out some of the poincts of contention where some further argument might be needed.
It seems to me that there's an obvious extension of Objection 3 that I'm not sure your consent-based model can handle. Is it enough to say "you previously consented, bad luck old chap you'll have to suck it up", when at a later time, someone actively withdraws consent?
I think this is often the situation that we're dealing with in the Problem of Evil. Dear God, many prayers start, I'm suffering, others are suffering, please make it stop!
In your analogy of a medical procedure, if the patient wakes up and says the pain is interminable, I don't care about finishing the procedure, make it stop, then assuming it is safe to do so, the doctor should stop the procedure.
In fact, as I write I'm sat in a hospital gown awaiting a procedure, and it's just been emphasised that if I ask for them to stop, they'll end it there. That's also my excuse for rambling and any lack of clarity!
And similarly for your prison cannibalism example. It strikes me that if, once the eating started and the victim has the full experiential knowledge of the horror and pain of the situation, and therefore rescinds their earlier consent, the case for letting things happen falls apart - "help me man, Goddamnit put the camera down and stop this madness, I was wrong earlier! Please!"
I think some of this comes down to general theories of consent, consent withdrawal etc which I must admit I'm no expert on. My initial thought is that your view requires more of the 'no such thing as marital rape, because sex was agreed to at marriage' model, whereas my objection relies more upon a modern 'active consent' type model.
And more specifically, how those models of consent interact with an (by assumption) omniscient and omnipotent God. I can see how that may work in favour of your view - God knows that if I'm this life you had all the information, then you would consent. But this at least needs further argument. Suppose the patient in my example is affected by their sedation and not remembering all the information - I would suggest that there's a strong case their withdrawal of consent should still be respected.
But also, God's omnipotence may work in favour of my objection, I brought out a practicality/pragmatics condition - "assuming it is safe to do so, the doctor should stop the operation". At least here, omnipotence should mean that no such practical barriers (which would apply to many other human-scale analogies too) are relevant for the divine case.
Finishing typing before the sedation kicks in too hard, but hopefully some food for though!
Hey! Sorry for the late reply—I meant to respond and then forgot. I think this type of objection is the toughest one for my theodicy—I’m writing a paper that discusses it now, which is what reminded me to respond to your comment.
Here’s the basic move: the consent is a type of contract. When you sign a contract, you can consent to X being done to you *even if* you try to revoke consent while X is happening.
This is my favourite theodicy, so I've thought about it a lot over the years, I really like where you go with it. I think the objections can be beaten quite easily:
"Reply #1: I am assuming that souls exist, and that they are sufficient for personal identity over time. If you deny that, you won’t find this theodicy plausible."
Disagree. I suspect we can make this work on the psychological theory of personhood over time. If minds similar to ours pre-existed this earth, and if God arranged events so as to recreate our minds, then minds with the right relations of causation and similarity etc. etc. exist.
Re: Reply #2- The Cartesian response that animal suffering doesn't really exist because (roughly) animals are P-Zombies also works. I prefer your response though.
"Objection #3: If we pre-existed our births, our past-life memories must have been wiped. But you can’t validly consent to something if it will happen to you after the memory of you consenting has been erased."
There's another way around this objection which has the advantage of bolstering our consent. What if, in every single moment, God knows that if, counterfactually, we fully understood our cosmic situation and had our pre-earthly memory restored then we wouldn't withdraw our consent.
Also note it has some implications for whether our simulators are necessarily evil if the simulation hypothesis is true.
Finally, I'd note that while this defence doesn't strictly need it, it tends to push us towards salvific universalism.
Thanks for this! Some important points.
“Disagree. I suspect we can make this work on the psychological theory of personhood over time. If minds similar to ours pre-existed this earth, and if God arranged events so as to recreate our minds, then minds with the right relations of causation and similarity etc. etc. exist.”
You’re probably right—though there’ll be some unconventional results. (E.g., if someone suffers a horrendous evil, has a drastic personality change midway through life, loses all his Q-memories, etc., then suffers horrendously afterwards there’d have to have been two pre-existent people to have consented. I don’t take that to be an objection though. The best objection to psychological continuity theory is psychological continuity theory.) One worry is that you might think that if God wiped all our Q-memories, most psychological continuity theorists could end up saying that in their absence, we on earth couldn’t be continuous with anyone in the pre-existent state (or at least: not continuous enough for consent to work it’s moral magic.)
”The Cartesian response that animal suffering doesn't really exist because (roughly) animals are P-Zombies also works. I prefer your response though.”
Yeah. Like, you could just conjoin this theodicy to a different theodicy that accounts for animal suffering. But that’s less simple, and my credence that dogs don’t suffer exactly maps on to my credence that it would be bad to skin one alive.
There's another way around this objection which has the advantage of bolstering our consent. What if, in every single moment, God knows that if, counterfactually, we fully understood our cosmic situation and had our pre-earthly memory restored then we wouldn't withdraw our consent.
Hmmm, I like this. That said, I find it plausible that actual consent—ceteris paribus—is always preferable to counterfactual consent. So God should never rely on counterfactual consent when he could obtain the real thing (without sacrificing anything of greater value, yada yada.)
Also note it has some implications for whether our simulators are necessarily evil if the simulation hypothesis is true.
Agree.
Finally, I'd note that while this defence doesn't strictly need it, it tends to push us towards salvific universalism.
Yeah, I’m a big universalist. Aside from anything else, it’s hard to imagine any rational pre-existent person taking a non-zero risk of infinite torment. But there’s probably a way God could’ve make the risk rational, if he raised the positive stakes high enough.
Plausible defense, but I wouldn’t call it a theodicy
Why not?
Semantic drivel on my part. It just seems obvious to me that you are here putting out a broadly logically possible state of affairs that would theoretically be able to explain the distribution of evil in the real world without committing yourself to the facticity of the account. That seems as clear an example of a ‘defense’ as you can get. I assume that an actual Mormon could use this as a theodicy, but I don’t think that you have put it forward as a theodicy
I intended to put it forward as a theodicy. (I don’t necessarily *endorse* the theodicy, because I think you might only need it if you endorse an absolutist form of deontology, which I don’t.)
Your objection to it being a theodicy seems to be: absent a prior commitment to Mormonism, or another religion that endorses pre-existence, there’s no independent reason to endorse pre-existence, or think that it’s predicted on theism. But what do you make of my suggestion at the end?:
“But more to the point, it’s not clear that pre-existence isn’t predicted on theism, given that it might be God’s only way to actualise various evil-induced greater goods in a deontologically permissible way. As a theist, you might think: If God permissibly could, then God permissibly would. Since God permissibly can actualise various evil-dependent greater goods—namely, by securing our consent in a pre-mortal life—, and since theism predicts that God would want to actualise these goods if he were able to, the doctrine of pre-existence just falls out of the hypothesis of theism.”
That’s a reasonable way to understand what I wrote.
I should define my terms better- (I loosely follow PvI here. He says weak and strong theodicy, but I like the more popular terms defense and theodicy)
Defenses say that ‘for all we know’ x is the case and x explains y
Theodicies say x is the case and x explains y
My contention was that someone who isn’t a Mormon probably isn’t in the position to be making a theodicy.
As for your paragraph, I’m not confident that the deduction is that sound. However, someone who does think that deduction is sound could treat this argument as a theodicy. I, however, do not think that I have good reason to believe that God needs our consent in this way, so I would just accept this as a defense since ‘for all I know’ it’s true and ‘for all I know’ it’s consistent with my religion.
However, I think that it is pushing back the problem a bit and that there is still an issue beyond consent of how much suffering God could actually be justified in inflicting on an individual, even if they consent, so I can’t say that I think it’s a perfect shield. But that’s neither here nor there.
Thanks for the argument. Josh Rasmussen had got me thinking about this recently too
Great post! I guess if I ever become a theist, I’ll have to consider Mormonism. I have just a couple questions/objections.
I understand that we have consented to not be saved from certain evils, not to being tortured by some third party, but it seems since God created this third party in the first place he is least partially response for the evil. You are not bystander if you hand the torturer his instruments.
Also, don’t some deontologists argue that certain rights are inalienable, meaning we can't consent to give them up - like the right not to be enslaved? Wouldn’t God be violating these rights even if we consented to any and all sufferings, no matter how severe?
Thanks for your comment!
(1): This is an important point: For all evil actions, God plays an indispensable causal role in it, insofar as he creates the immoral agents, the tools they use for evil, etc. (And on some views of divine providence, God plays an even closer causal role than that, sustaining evil actions in being.) I think the right response is to ay that, as long as the indispensable causal roles played by God and the evil agent are non-identical (and they are, since they came from different sources/have different content) pre-existent people could've consented to one indispensable causal contribution (God's) while refusing consent to that of the wrongdoer.
(2): The debate about whether/why there are inalienable rights is complicated, but I guess I'll just say: *even if* there are rights we can't alienate, like the right not to be enslaved, it's not obvious that there's a corresponding inalienable positive right to be prevented from being enslaved. (Indeed, it seems pretty intuitive to me that there isn't; just consider a case in which someone is enslaving you, and ask: "If there were a third party who could stop me from being enslaved, wouldn't I be able to waive them of that obligation by telling them to leave me alone?".)
Also, I think the strongest case for an inalienable right against even voluntary slavery is the thought that we don't have the moral authority to transfer full ownership of ourselves to another, forever. But given the infinite scope of salvation history, waiving one's right to be enslaved for a miniscule period of it - a period that's certain to end when the slaveholder dies - seems much harder to argue against.
this opener is a deontic rights violation of a non-insignificant amount of undergrads
Hey, I just checked out your substack—cool stuff! Might you be free to come on my channel some time to talk about parental authority? https://youtube.com/@going_awoll?si=C-NZPDIyXDVoUPkt
down!
I'll email you soon!