Why Rule Utilitarianism Fails To Save Skeptical Theism
Skeptical Theism attempts to dethrone the problem of evil but ultimately fails. This article attempts to address why Rule Utility fails to save this argument.
Skeptical Theism is an attempt to defend belief in God from the grandiose objection known as “The problem of evil.”
The argument was first produced by Stephen Wykstra in 1984 in response to a specific form of the problem of evil but has evolved to become ubiquitously used against any form of argument.
Stephen Wykstra, Spark Magazine
Source: https://calvin.edu/publication/spark/2016/09/15/stephen-wykstra-philosophy
The essential claim of the Skeptical Theist argument is that essentially, since we should be ‘skeptical’ of our ability to understand God's reasoning (God is an omnipotent/omniscient being, and we are meager humans), we cannot assume that God doesn’t have good reasons, perfect reasons even, for allowing evil here on earth. Let’s use an example to lay this out.
Imagine, for instance, an agnostic and Christian allied soldier are burdened with the task of liberating those controlled in the holocaust. The two come across a child who starved for years and then was brutally burned to death in a Nazi death camp. An obvious retort to the Christian soldier would be to ask, “If god exists, why did he let this happen?” The Christian, therefore, most likely would respond with the common phrase, “God works in mysterious ways.” Essentially, the Christian believes that no evil, no matter how seemingly gratuitous, can move us from our belief in God because God's reasons for allowing something will always outweigh ours.
Objections To Skeptical Theism
The skeptical theist makes the grandiose claim that the occurrence of evil cannot reduce the probability of God’s existence at all. Since probability is brought into the argument, this claim can be evaluated mathematically and logically. Simplistic equations and Bayesian theory effectively refuted this claim (Climenhaga, 2022). However, the issues faced by skeptical theists go beyond this. Accepting their argument can lead to unintuitive consequences such as moral agnosticism, hypocrisy, and unfalsifiability. This post, however, attempts to save skeptical theism from one of these objections, namely, that of boxing God into a consequentialist framework.
Skeptical Theism & Consequentialist Morality
Consequentialism, or act-utility as it is being used in this argument, is a normative theory that can be understood simply as follows: The action that leads to the most overall pleasure (happiness, well-being) should be taken, and the one that leads to the most suffering should be avoided and seen as abhorrent.
When the skeptical theist claims, “We really can't know what is evil and good all things considered because we cannot consider all things; only God can do that,” they are essentially framing God in a consequentialist framework of ethics. The reasons it imagines that God might have for allowing evil are impossible for us to detect consequences. For instance, maybe God allowed the holocaust because it would somehow prevent all wars in the future, thus allowing the deaths of six million Jews would, in fact, save billions; perhaps that little girl from earlier should be proud she’s such a hero!
However, philosophers have known the issue here since utilitarianism first arose. Some things are wrong regardless of their consequences; a common thought experiment bore this out. Take, for instance, a situation in the future where some billionaire figures out a brain extraction device that can convert massive amounts of suffering into usable pleasure for all other humans. The issue here is that the device can only fit on a very small brain. The billionaire recognizes that the only brain on earth small enough to fit the device and capable of experiencing suffering immense enough to use is that of a human child. The billionaire thus kidnaps a child and tortures it to produce mass euphoria for all other humans on earth. It is quite obvious that the billionaire has created an egregious wrong by doing so. By saying God may allow the holocaust, it has the same absurd consequence and is thus untenable.
Source: https://peesbox.com/act-utilitarianism-vs-rule-utilitarianism/
The traditional sense of God describes him as all-loving and all-good. If we meager humans are revolted by the idea of God allowing such evils for the greater good, we are essentially changing our definition of God’s benevolence. But what if there’s another way to view God morally without rejecting skeptical theism? What if God operates from a rule utilitarian position rather than an act consequentialist? The next section attempts to address this move and its objections.
Rule Utilitarian Adjustment
Rule utilitarianism is an attempt to preserve the core principles of utilitarianism without accepting its unreasonable outcomes. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2023) defines rule utilitarianism as a normative ethical theory that suggests actions are morally right if they adhere to rules that result in the greatest good. Rule utilitarianism emphasizes following rules that, when followed by everyone, lead to the greateste in utility. Th overall increasis approach helps address common criticisms of act utilitarianism, particularly those related to predictability and consistency in moral judgments. For example, the billionaire's actions are morally wrong because he violates “torturing babies is wrong." Evenons would have the greatest positive consequence though his actis in this case, following the rule would lead to a greater overall outcome in the long run.
Think about what this could mean for the skeptical theist. If God allows evils based on the premise of rule utility, he could see something like the Holocaust and recognize that the holocaust led to the last world war and thus saved billions of lives. God’s rule may thus be to not intervene in human wars. He could also understand that breaking this rule would, yes, save the little girl but, in fact, kill millions of other girls in her place. God is omniscient, so he knows which rules lead to the best outcomes and which do not, and he only operates based on the best calculus.
There is a slight blip here to be aware of. Part of the initial attractiveness of rule utility comes from our inability to ever tell for sure what the consequences of any act are, but following a rule makes it much easier to hold what will usually be the best consequences. But if God is omniscient, he doesn’t have this problem, so why does he need rule utility? Well, there's a move here that saves God in two ways: open theism. A central argument against the problem of evil is that God allows evil because he wants us to be free creatures, but if God is omniscient and outside of time how could we be free? He already knows our future and created us exactly how we are, knowing we would do every action that we commit, then we couldn’t do otherwise and are not free (the debate on free will is much more complicated than this but for sake of brevity this should suffice). However, if open theism is true, not only does this objection fall flat, but it would also make sense why God would be a rule utilitarian.
Open theism states that God, in fact, does not know the future in the way we typically think. He knows every possibility and what is most likely to occur but doesn’t actually know definitively which way the future will go. In order to implement God as a rule utilitarian the skeptical theist will have to bite this bullet and admit God is not omniscient in the way they conceive him. A small price to pay to save their argument.
Skeptical Theism is Saved Right?! Well….
So, we’ve fixed the issue of boxing God in as a consequentialist and placed God as a rule utilitarian; he knows that stopping events that seem evil to us would lead to good consequences that we cannot conceive. But there are some serious issues to address here.
We live in a world where child rape occurs on a unfortunate relatively frequent basis and was even more frequent in the past. What sort of God would create a rule to allow child rape? Are we really willing to say an all-good God allows children to be raped so the rapist could have free will? Couldn’t God allow free will for everything except egregious actions that are clearly evil? It's hard to imagine what good could come from a rule of not intervening with child rape. God is an omnipotent being; he could easily create a version of human beings that don’t even have the impulse or want to rape, so it's not clear how the rule of utility actually saves the problem of evil.Another issue here comes more generally from rule utilitarianism. Take, for instance, the rule not to steal; stealing would, over time, lead to more negative consequences than positive ones; therefore, the rule is to not steal. But what about the poor single mother that needs diapers for her baby? If she steals diapers from her local supermarket, a business owned by people who have more money than one could ever reasonably need, are we to say she is morally reprehensible? Some may retort that she could just go to her local government-provided support facilities, but this is simply missing the point. There are situations in which breaking the rule would clearly be better than following it. Some rule utilitarians admit this point and say that in situations like this, we should temporarily collapse back into act utility. Since God knows exactly when it would be best to do this then perhaps this objection doesn’t apply to the skeptical theist.
The last and most damning objection to accepting God as a rule utilitarianism is the absurd consequences it may have on us. For instance, imagine one night you are walking home from your job in the city. You hear a distressed child screaming for help and you run in the direction of the noise. You come across a grown man raping a small child in a back alley, and you, of course, immediately begin to step in and stop this disgusting act but wait! Child rape is happening, has happened, and will happen in the future. You, as a skeptical theist, accept that God is a rule utilitarian. Thus, it must be the case that God has some rule allowing child rape. If this is the case, God must know the rule leads to the best outcomes, and he's not intervening here, so he must not be collapsing back into act utility, so why should you stop him? In this case, you are forced to say this action is ultimately for the greater good and is God’s wish, and you must walk away. This objection is enough on its own to dispel any hope of saving the skeptical theist with rule utility. God knows best; he knows the best rules and the best times to collapse the rule, so when we are confronted with what seems to us like gratuitous evils, we are forced to wash our hands of the abhorrence and walk away. This is obviously absurd and thus defeats the argument.
Accepting God as a rule utilitarian can help us address the problem of evil on its own without claiming that the problem of evil saves us from any probabilistic relinquishment. It may even get us closer to understanding the nature of God which has been a topic of interest for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the arguments for rule utility here yield absurd objections that must be addressed before we can continue these conversations.