I argue for a partial analysis of ideological parsimony: if two ideologies are expressively equivalent, then neither is more parsimonious than the other. This allows us to divide the theoretical virtue of parsimony into two kinds: ontological parsimony and ideological parsimony. Recall from Quine that we divide theoretical commitment into two types: ontology, the things that must exist if a theory is to be true, and ideology, the primitive concepts or notions used in stating a theory. My work on theoretical virtue starts with my writing sample, Ideological Innocence. This leaves the problem of evil no worse in an Everettian world than in a single universe.
However, we argue that if Everett is to be empirically adequate than something like David Wallace’s decision-theoretic account of probability in Everett must be true, and if Wallace’s strategy is successful then the structure of value in an Everettian universe leaves the act of creating an Everettian universe with expected value equal to the act of creating a single universe with the same wave function. This includes histories filled with pointless suffering. I draw on the surreal value theory laid out in In Defense of No Best World to parry this line of thought.įurther work in progress with Eddy Chen takes up the question, recently posed by Dean Zimmerman and Jason Turner: if Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true, does the problem of evil become immeasurably worse? Plausibly it does, since on the Everettian view every possible history consistent without laws and boundary conditions is, in some sense, actual. Another, embraced by a number of writers, argues that since God’s value must be unsurpassable and without measure, nothing distinct from God should add value to the universe. In response, I note that this line of argument extends to all intrinsic properties and show how a hyperintensional definition of intrinsically gets around the problem.
One, from Erik Wielenberg and Mark Murphy claims that because of the structure of grounds that theists must embrace, everything is dependent on God for its value properties, and so no created thing’s value properties can be intrinsic. There are two lines of argument in support of this view. My in-progress In Defense of Created Intrinsic Value takes on recent arguments that no created thing can be intrinsically valuable. I have a couple of developing papers in this area. In my Forthcoming (AJP) paper In Defense of No Best World, I respond to recent arguments that there is a best possible world, perhaps ours. In my 2018 God Meets Satan’s Apple (Phil Studies), I argue for two theses, assuming that there is no best of all possible worlds: (i) combining plausible moral/rational norms and the standard commitments of theism results in a paradox, and (ii) the best theistic resolution of the paradox is to exempt God from the norms of morality/rationality. My work on infinite value theories supplements my work on the relationship between God and value or morality. In continuing work, we are developing a surrealized approach to decision problems involving infinite state spaces using formalism based on Mark Colyvan’s Relative Expectations, and plan to expand our work into surreal probability theory.
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In it, we show how to give a decision theory with surreal utilities in finite state spaces and analyze Pascal’s Wager. Eddy Chen and I have laid the foundations of a surreal-valued decision theory in our 2020 PPR paper Surreal Decisions. In surreal arithmetic, some of the more problematic aspects of Cantor’s cardinal and ordinal arithmetic, such as the tendency of infinite numbers to ‘absorb’ smaller numbers and failures of commutativity in finite sums disappear. Most notably, this has involved appeals to John Conway’s Surreal Mathematics. My goal in this project is to explore the viability of alternative conceptions of infinity as models of infinite value. Petersburg Game, the Pasadena Game, and the Sphere of Suffering.
We can see this in puzzles like Pascal’s Wager, the St. The standard (Cantorian) mathematics of infinity make a hash of decision rules like expected utility maximization and aggregation techniques such as addition and averaging. Regardless of how infinite value arises, it provide a serious challenge to decision theories and formal value theories. Perhaps because some goods are so much better than others that no finite number could bridge the gulf. Perhaps in the expectations of games with infinite state spaces. Perhaps by aggregating infinitely large collections of goods. We can find infinite values in a number of ways.
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