Sexual Morality and Collectively Harmful Practices

Jason Brennan famously argues that the politically uninformed have a moral obligation not to vote. One of his arguments for this claim goes as follows (2011, 71):

1. One has an obligation not to engage in collectively harmful activities when refraining from such activities does not impose significant personal costs.
2. To cast an unexcused harmful vote is to engage in a collectively harmful activity, while abstaining imposes low personal costs.
3. Therefore, one should not cast an unexcused harmful vote.

Brennan defines a "collectively harmful activity" (CHA) as "a harmful activity caused by a group or collective, where individual inputs into the harmful action are negligible. [...] For instance, producing air pollution is a collectively harmful activity. As a group we do a lot of damage, but as individual polluters we do negligible harm" (ibid., 71).

Now, it is highly plausible that premarital sex qualifies as a CHA: it leads to out-of-wedlock pregnancy (thereby contributing to poverty, crime, and abortion), as well as being correlated with higher rates of divorce and infidelity and lower levels of marital happiness. Given that higher rates of social disorder and a weakening of the married family constitute significant societal harms, it seems that Brennan's argument against uninformed voting will also apply to premarital sex.

It is important to note that given Brennan's definition of a CHA, it is not necessary to show that every act of premarital sex leads to the aforementioned harmful consequences, or even that most such acts do so: the relevant thing is just that the widespread practice of premarital sex in general constitutes a CHA (in virtue of its harmful effects on society and the married family). Given that this is so, it follows from premise (1) of Brennan's argument that there is an obligation to avoid premarital sex when doing so does not impose significant personal costs (i.e. always or nearly-always).

This argument is very similar to one given by Alexander Pruss. In his book One Body, Pruss writes:

The significant number of children born outside of marriage in this country might arguably be a major contributor to poverty, poorer moral education, and other social ills. By engaging in premarital sex, one takes the risk of being a contributor to this serious social problem. It is true that, more likely than not, procreation will not happen in any given act. However, a significant number of children born outside of marriage are conceived despite the use of contraception. Thus, even engaging in contraceptive intercourse, one is risking being a contributor to the problem. And there one is at least presumptively doing wrong. (2013, 187)

Brennan’s principle concerning collectively harmful activities provides a useful way of precisifying this argument. It also provides a way of extending the argument beyond premarital sex to include other potentially wrongful behaviors. The use of pornography is a very plausible candidate: the porn industry is utterly rife with abuse and trafficking, and its proliferation has plausibly contributed to the general loosening of sexual morals in our society (which in turn makes it a contributor to the premarital sex problem). Furthermore, pornography use is correlated with lower levels of relationship satisfaction. Given all of this, it very plausibly constitutes a CHA. Since refraining from pornography use carries no significant personal costs, it follows that there is a moral obligation not to use pornography.

For theists, there is another potential dimension to this argument: even if one does not think that the aforementioned considerations suffice to show the intrinsic wrongness of non-marital sexual activity, they plausibly do suffice to give God very strong reason to prohibit such activity. This fits nicely with the accounts of Christian sexual morality given by e.g. Murphy (2002) and Swinburne (2007).

There are very probably other activities to which one could apply a very similar argument. Hard drug use comes immediately to mind.

Event Causation, Substance Causation, and Aquinas' Cosmological Arguments

I wonder if one might spell out the difference between Aquinas' first and second ways in terms of the distinction between event causation and substance causation. The idea would be something like this: in the first way, we are taking the aggregate of all the contingent events (or perhaps all of the changes) that there are, and asking what causally accounts for this aggregate. In the second way, we are taking the aggregate of all the contingent substances that there are, and asking what causally accounts for this aggregate.

This aggregation-based reading of the Five Ways is inspired by Geach (1961), Lamont (1995), and Martin (1997), among others. While I doubt that this is what the historical Aquinas had in mind, I think it makes for a better argument than do other (perhaps more textually faithful) interpretations of the Five Ways.

Creation and the Infinitely-Valuable God

Some theists have argued that God's infinite and unsurpassable goodness makes it impossible for him to improve the world by creating good things. Tim O'Connor (summarizing Johnston 2019) puts the point like so:

[Improvement] to reality is impossible for an unsurpassably good being. Whether we think of the value of such a being as measured by an infinite cardinality greater than that measuring any other possible reality or as beyond (even infinite) measure altogether (as Cantor himself supposed), its act of creating a lesser reality would be like adding a point to a line... it is no addition at all. (2022, 235)

Plausibly, this line of thinking also implies that "nothing can make God worse off" (Johnston 2019, 149). After all, if God's infinite value makes it impossible for reality as a whole to be impersonally better or worse, then presumably the same considerations would imply that things cannot go better or worse for an infinitely blessed being.

Now, either the aforementioned line of thinking is correct, or it is not. If it is, then we can justify God's creative act by appealing to the ex-ante Pareto principle: by creating, God makes himself no worse off (since nothing can make him worse off), and he benefits those he creates. So any world in which God creates and gives his creatures on-balance good lives will Pareto dominate the world in which God refrains from creating. On the plausible assumption that a perfect agent always acts in accordance with ex-ante Pareto (perhaps with exceptions involving deontic constraints, which do not apply in the present case), we get a perfectly good explanation for why God would create.

(This might need some finessing in order to bring it into line with the First Vatican Council's decree that God did not create by necessity: he could have created nothing.)

On the other hand, suppose the earlier-discussed line of thinking is false, and God's infinite value does not make it impossible for things to be better or worse. In that case, we can explain God's creative act in the conventional way, i.e. by appealing to God's desire to improve the world by creating good things.

The upshot is that whether or not God improves reality by creating, we can give a plausible account of why he would create.

Of course, this leaves open the crucial question: does God improve the world by creating? I am inclined to think that he does. Tim Mawson gives a useful example to show that a world containing infinite value can still be improved:

[Consider] a range of logically possible worlds, each containing a creation composed of a single angel enjoying the beatific vision. The first is a world in which the angel everlastingly enjoys the beatific vision at a given level of hedonic intensity, which we call level one; call this world ‘God Plus Angel in Beatific Bliss Level 1’ and say its ‘n-number’ is 1. The second is a world in which the angel enjoys the beatific vision at double that level, ‘God Plus Angel in Beatific Bliss Level 2’, n-number 2. The third is a world in which the angel enjoys it at three times the level enjoyed in God Plus Angel in Beatific Bliss Level 1. And so on. So, in this range of worlds, if we suppose... that each such creation has already existed for an infinite amount of time, then each creation has infinite beatific bliss in it (and ex hypothesi no disvalues). Nevertheless, clearly there is a sense in which higher numbered worlds are better than lower – there can be a ranking. (Mawson 2023)

Here's another example which illustrates the same point. Consider two possible worlds, n and m. World n consists of God plus a single angel enjoying the beatific vision. World m consists of God plus a single demon suffering horrifically in an eternal hell. Now, if Johnston is correct that God's infinite value prevents us from making better/worse comparisons among possible worlds, then we would have to say that world n is no better than world m, since both contain God's unsurpassably infinite value. But that's absurd: clearly world n is better than world m.

Note too that even on the assumption that God's infinite value does not prevent us from making better/worse comparisons, we can still plausibly appeal to the Pareto principle to justify God's creative act: after all, if God can be made worse off by our suffering, then presumably he can be made better off by our joys. So God's well-being might actually be greater in a world with happy creatures than in a world without them. (My thanks to Matthew Adelstein for pointing this out to me; see also Stenberg 2019.) It's also possible that even if the world can be made better or worse by God's creative act, God himself cannot be made better or worse off, in virtue of divine impassibility. So even if we reject Johnston's line of thinking, we can still potentially appeal to the Pareto principle in justifying God's creative act.

Here's a possible reason (due again to Matthew Adelstein) for thinking that God can be made better or worse off: Christianity teaches that God the Son became incarnate and was crucified for our sins. Now, it seems intuitively obvious that crucifixion makes the one who suffers it worse off; otherwise, why does Christ seem so eager to avoid it (Matthew 26:39, Mark 14:36, Luke 22:42)? But if Johnston's view is correct, then it seems we must say that God the Son is not made worse off in any way by his crucifixion: after all, he has infinite wellbeing, and surely the suffering of crucifixion is only finite. This conclusion may not be heretical (Christianity requires us to believe that God incarnate suffered, but not that he experienced a reduction in overall wellbeing), but it is certainly strange.

Two Anti-Naturalistic Arguments from Value

Here's a plausible (and entirely unoriginal) argument:

1. If naturalism is true, then our capacity for profound aesthetic experience is a mere evolutionary spandrel.
2. Our capacity for profound aesthetic experience is not a mere evolutionary spandrel.
3. Therefore, naturalism is not true.

Motivating (1): If naturalism is true, then we are the product of an unguided evolutionary process. Now, our capacity for profound aesthetic experience clearly does not confer any direct evolutionary benefit (a taste for Bach would not have been terribly useful in Paleolithic times). So on naturalism, our capacity for such experience is merely the accidental byproduct of selection for some other useful trait.

(2) is motivated by the fact that it is very hard to believe that something so central to a good human life as profound aesthetic experience is a mere evolutionary spandrel. That sort of assessment seems to profoundly undervalue such experiences. 

Replacing the word "aesthetic" with the word "moral" in the above yields a second argument of comparable force.

Why Would God Make Physical Beings?

One objection to theistic arguments from design is that it seems as though God could have achieved most (if not all) of the goods of creating finite beings without bothering to make a physical world, complete with finely-tuned constants, life-permitting laws, and so on. As Neil Manson puts the objection:

The problem here for proponents of the fine-tuning argument is that, if God does exist, then clearly it is possible for there to be a non-physical intelligence. After all, God is supposed to be just such an intelligence. Why think God would prefer to create other intelligent, conscious beings by creating a life-permitting physical universe? God had other, seemingly much more efficient and sensible, options. For example, God could make Berkeley right. So even if they grant that God has a preference function over possible creations, fine-tuning sceptics are going to need to hear a lot more before they agree that that function favours the creation of a life-permitting physical universe – and favours it enough to make the fine-tuning argument persuasive. (2020, 315-316)

It seems that Thomists have available a potential response to this objection. Aquinas argues that only a material being can change its will over time: an immaterial entity (such as an angel) can only make one choice, fixing its will either for good or for ill. If this view of things is true, then we seem to have a good explanation for why God would want to make embodied beings: only they could experience repeated free moral choice, and all of the goods which come along with it (e.g. moral development, soul-building, deliberation, and so on).

Here are some other reasons why God might want to make physical beings. Firstly, the goods of sensory pleasure (including beautiful sights and sounds, gustatory pleasure, and so on) seem to require the existence of bodies. (Perhaps God could simply give disembodied minds the requisite pleasurable mental states without requiring any actual physical experiences. But there seems to be something off-putting about that; it smacks rather too much of a divine experience machine.) Secondly, one might argue that the unique aesthetic value of material beings would give God good reason to create them. (This is distinct from the just-discussed point about pleasure; beings can have objective aesthetic value even if nobody is around to derive sensory pleasure from the sight of them.) Thirdly, one could appeal to the point (made here) about God wanting to make a great variety of beings: it seems plausible that material beings can image the divine goodness in ways that no purely immaterial being could.

The Prior Probabilities of Theism and Naturalism

According to (what I think is) the right theory of intrinsic probability, there are three primary criteria which determine the prior of any given hypothesis:

1. Modesty: How little a hypothesis says about the world. 
• Example: "There is a living thing in my room" is a more modest claim than "there is a human being in my room," which in turn is more modest than "Richard Swinburne is in my room." More modest theories have more possible ways of being true: "There is a living thing in my room" could be true in any number of ways, "There is a human being in my room" in fewer ways, "Richard Swinburne is in my room" in only one way. Thus, more modest theories get a higher prior probability.
2. Coherence: How well the parts of a theory fit together, raising (or at least not lowering) one another's conditional probabilities.
• Example: "All Asian ravens are black and all non-Asian ravens are black" is a more coherent hypothesis than "All Asian ravens are black and all non-Asian ravens are white." (This is Draper's example.) Finding out that all Asian ravens are black increases the conditional probability that all of the non-Asian ravens are black, and vice versa. However, finding out that all Asian ravens are black reduces the conditional probability that all of the non-Asian ravens are white, and vice versa. So the parts of the first hypothesis raise one another's probability, while the parts of the second theory reduce one another's probability.
3. Brute limitations: Theories with arbitrary, inexplicable limitations should receive a lower prior than theories which lacks such limitations.
• Example: Consider two possible worlds, n and m. World n consists of a single particle moving at a constant finite velocity, while world m consists of a single particle moving at a constant infinite velocity. These two worlds seem to be equally modest and coherent: they both posit a single substance, behaving in a simple, uniform manner. Yet world m seems (to me at least) to be more intrinsically probable than world n. Why is this? The answer, I think, is that world n contains a brute limitation: why is the particle moving at the particular finite velocity that it is? Why not slightly faster, or slightly slower? World m, by contrast, has no such arbitrary limits. As such, it has a higher intrinsic probability.

(Note that this theory is largely a combination of Draper 2016 and Poston 2020.) It seems that if these three criteria are correct, then theism will always have an advantage over naturalism in terms of prior probability. The reason is this: the naturalist has to choose between coherence and a lack of brute limitations, whereas the theist can have both. Consider: if naturalism is true, then either every possible universe exists (i.e. there is something like a Lewisian multiverse), or else not. If not (i.e. if only one or some possible universes are realized), then the naturalist's theory will suffer from serious brute limitations. Why are these particular laws and physical structures instantiated, instead of all the other conceivable laws and physical structures which there could have been? Alternatively, if there is a Lewisian multiverse, then the naturalist's theory will avoid arbitrary limits, but only at the cost of an extreme lack of coherence (the Lewisian multiverse is just about the least uniform way that reality could conceivably be).

The upshot is that the naturalist faces an inevitable trade-off between coherence and a lack of brute limitations. The theist, however, faces no such difficulty: theism is both a highly coherent hypothesis (it posits a being with all possible perfections, which is a very uniform array of properties), and it is largely lacking in brute limitations (since God's properties are infinite). If all of this is correct, then it seems as though theism should get a relatively high prior as compared to naturalism.

Why Would God Make a Complex Universe?

While perusing Alexander Pruss' blog, I came across a post in which he offers this quote from Aquinas:

Hence we must say that the distinction and multitude of things come from the intention of the first agent, who is God. For He brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be represented by them; and because His goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided and hence the whole universe together participates the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever. (ST 1.47.1)

It occurs to me that this line of thinking could be used to support Swinburne's inductive cosmological argument, which goes like so: let "h" be theism, "e" be the existence of our universe, and "k" be our background knowledge (which in this case will consist only of logically-necessary truths). Since the physical universe is extremely complex, it is a priori very improbable that it should exist. However, Swinburne claims that God would have very good reason to produce such a universe, since he would be motivated to create embodied rational creatures, and such creatures would need a universe to live in. So P(e|h&k) is relatively high, while P(e|~h&k) is very low. Hence, P(h|e&k) > P(h|k).

Aquinas' aforementioned reasoning can, it seems to me, be used to substantially strengthen this argument. It does so by explaining why God would want to make a complex universe (such as we observe) rather than a very simple one, suited simply to the purpose of playing host to embodied rational agents. If all goodness involves participation in God (which it does), then (as Aquinas notes) the particular perfections of each individual type of creature can model the divine goodness in unique ways. This plausibly gives God good reason to make a varied and complex universe. This in turn raises P(e|h&k), thus strengthening the argument.