#145: Is God a Utilitarian?

February 7, 2019

The relation of God to moral good is difficult to understand. The conundrum is simple to state, but impossible to answer well. Are the moral laws God gives to man good because He gives them, or does He give them because he recognizes their intrinsic and absolute truth. Either way there are problems. On the first disjunct, the moral laws appear to be no more than the arbitrary whim of a supremely powerful being; his claim to human love thus seems unsupported. Satan seems different only in being less powerful. Not a desirable outcome. But on the other disjunct, it seems there’s something out there that has authority over God and His only role is that of an enforcer and He is himself subject to that authority. Kierkegaard famously draws attention to these problems in his writing on Abraham and Isaac. Also not a desirable outcome.

Nonetheless, for at least the Judaeo-Christian God, morality is centrally important in His teachings. God spends an enormous amount of time and energy telling us in the greatest detail what is morally good and what is not. Thus, it seems fair to ask what God’s own morality is.

There are really only just two moral theories and the question of which one, if any, informed God’s cosmogony is made even more difficult because he seems sometimes to rely on both, but they are incompatible.

So, is God a Utilitarian or a Deontologist?

A Utilitarian is willing to sacrifice the good of an individual for the sake of the good of the group, while a Deontologist takes the good of the individual to be equal to the good of the group. A Utilitarian accepts the existence of collateral damage in the form of human suffering for the sake of the group’s greater good, a Deontologist does not.

Alternatively, in Utilitarianism, human value is multiplicative, while in Deontologism it is not. Thus, two people are worth twice as much as one for a Utilitarian, while for the Deontologist one person is equal to the worth of any number of people greater than one.

So, is he a Utilitarian?

The problem of evil is unquestionably the most powerful argument against the existence of God and at least Christianity’s response appears Utilitarian. You know how the argument goes: There is evil on earth; either God can’t fix it or he chooses not to. God is supremely powerful, so it’s false that he can’t fix it; therefore, he chooses not to fix it.

But why is this his choice?

Of course, the ways of God pass all human understanding and His providence is utterly mysterious. Blah blah blah. But if He’s going to stick with that, He’s going to lose a LOT of His followers who are expecting a bit more explanation. “Trust me” is not working so well anymore.

If He’s at all rational in his decision making, it must be because He judges that a world with evil in it is better than a world without it. This is certainly Leibniz’s view, who argues that this is the best of all possible worlds. It seems to him that this must be the case, since God created the world and God can’t create anything less than the very best. OK, but what makes it “the best”?

Well, it’s the best because in it Man has freedom of the will. A world with free humans, it’s argued, is better than one with controlled humans. Freedom is a good thing. Unfortunately, a consequence of this good thing is that there exists evil in the world. Free men (and women!) do some really evil things. It’s man’s freedom that is the source of all evil, and not God. Q.E.D.

This implies that God made a moral or ethical decision in his creation of the world. Even knowing as He does all the consequences of His decisions, His providence intentionally includes human freedom and the inevitable suffering of the innocent for the sake of mankind’s greater good, namely freedom. This is a Utilitarian decision on His part.

God’s choice is interestingly the moral version of Adam Smith’s doctrine on the functioning of markets. Smith’s thesis is that a free market benefits the whole more than a controlled market, though there will be losers in it as well as winners. Overall, the principle of free competition yields the best possible of all economic circumstances, it is an “invisible hand” that ensures the optimal outcome.

Perhaps God also thought that an “invisible hand” would operate within man’s free, lustful, greedy, and deranged history to assure that the greatest good would be achieved. So far, not so much.

[What makes this particularly and poignantly interesting is that Communism (and it’s sanitized cousin, Socialism) are also happy to accept the collateral damage associated with decisions aimed at the greatest good for the greatest number. Just ask the peasants and kulaks of the USSR from 1927 to 1934. Sure, they starved … but it was for the greater good.

The difference between Smith and Stalin is that Stalin had no confidence in the “invisible hand” and replaced it with the visible hairy hands of brutal doctrinaire commissars. How’s that worked out, Miz Ocasio-Cortez?]

In any case, God’s (or Leibniz’s) response to the problem of evil seems to be Utilitarian.

But, is He also a Deontologist?

Well, to some extent it depends on what He’s doing. When He’s practising cosmogony, He’s a Utilitarian. But when He’s campaigning, He sounds like a Deontologist. His message on the stump, as it were, is that He loves you qua individual. Love Him, He says, and He loves you right back, in fact He gives you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Even more, in the Christian version He even sacrifices his only son for your sake, qua individual. You couldn’t ask for more. And, by the way, for all those still on the Abraham and Isaac problem, let me point out that the Christian God could defend his demand of Abraham by pointing out that He didn’t ask anything of Abraham that He wasn’t willing to do himself. Abraham, He asked, sacrifice your only son for your love of Me. Later, He sacrificed His own only son for the sake of His love of Man.

Still, it can be argued that in both the Abraham and the Jesus case, He is still in the Utilitarian mode. His Deontological turn is almost exclusively rhetorical and cosmetic, designed just for campaign events.

Remember that He’s willing to accept collateral damage in the form, first, of Isaac and, second, of Jesus. In both cases, there’s a greater good involved. In both cases, a person is treated as a utensil, as an instrument towards some special end. Abraham is made the father of a people special to God because of his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and Jesus dies for “all our sake.”

On balance, for good or for ill, it does seem most likely that God is a Utilitarian.