An ontology consisting of Gods, Self, Other People, and Dumb Matter just isn’t very different from one consisting of Self, Other People, and Dumb Matter
Benja just posted a neat proof of why, if your preferences don’t satisfy the axiom of continuity in von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory, your rational behavior would be almost everywhere identical to the behavior of someone whose continuity-satisfying-preferences simply ignore the “lower priority” aspects of yours. E.g. if you prefer “X torture plus N dust specks” over “Y torture plus M dust specks” for any X < Y but also for any X==Y, N < M, then you might as well ignore the existence of dust specks because in practical questions there’s always going to be some epsilon of probability between X and Y.
But now what if instead of “torture” and “dust specks” we have a lexical preference ordering on “displeasure of God(s)” and “everything else bad”, and then we remove the former from the picture? Suddenly the parts of probability space that you were previously ignoring (except indirectly insofar as you tried to reflect the preferences of God(s) regarding everything else) are now the only thing you should care about!
From other frameworks the problem looks even worse: If your previous answer to the is-ought problem was to derive every ethical proposition from the single “ought” axiom “We ought to do what God wants regarding X”, and now you’re down to zero “ought” axioms, that makes a huge difference, no?
There is a somewhat trivial way out of this particular mess: replace “We ought to do what God wants” with “We ought to do what God would want, if God existed”. (It’s not any more incoherent than using any other fictional character as a role model.)
But now what if instead of “torture” and “dust specks” we have a lexical preference ordering on “displeasure of God(s)” and “everything else bad”, and then we remove the former from the picture? Suddenly the parts of probability space that you were previously ignoring (except indirectly insofar as you tried to reflect the preferences of God(s) regarding everything else) are now the only thing you should care about!
I question whether anyone actually has such a lexical preference ordering (religious people seem to frequently violate what they take to be God’s commands), but if someone did wouldn’t they continue to act as if God existed, since a Bayesian can’t assign this zero probability?
From other frameworks the problem looks even worse: If your previous answer to the is-ought problem was to derive every ethical proposition from the single “ought” axiom “We ought to do what God wants regarding X”, and now you’re down to zero “ought” axioms, that makes a huge difference, no?
Again I question whether anyone actually holds such an ethical framework, except possibly in the sense of espousing it for signaling purposes. I think when someone is espousing such an ethical framework, what they are actually doing is akin to having a utility function where God’s pleasure/displeasure is just a (non-lexical) term along with many others. So when such an ethical framework becomes untenable they can just stop espousing it and fall back to doing what they were doing all along. At the risk of stating the obvious, this doesn’t work with the kind of ontological crises described in the OP.
Benja just posted a neat proof of why, if your preferences don’t satisfy the axiom of continuity in von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory, your rational behavior would be almost everywhere identical to the behavior of someone whose continuity-satisfying-preferences simply ignore the “lower priority” aspects of yours. E.g. if you prefer “X torture plus N dust specks” over “Y torture plus M dust specks” for any X < Y but also for any X==Y, N < M, then you might as well ignore the existence of dust specks because in practical questions there’s always going to be some epsilon of probability between X and Y.
But now what if instead of “torture” and “dust specks” we have a lexical preference ordering on “displeasure of God(s)” and “everything else bad”, and then we remove the former from the picture? Suddenly the parts of probability space that you were previously ignoring (except indirectly insofar as you tried to reflect the preferences of God(s) regarding everything else) are now the only thing you should care about!
From other frameworks the problem looks even worse: If your previous answer to the is-ought problem was to derive every ethical proposition from the single “ought” axiom “We ought to do what God wants regarding X”, and now you’re down to zero “ought” axioms, that makes a huge difference, no?
There is a somewhat trivial way out of this particular mess: replace “We ought to do what God wants” with “We ought to do what God would want, if God existed”. (It’s not any more incoherent than using any other fictional character as a role model.)
If God doesn’t exist, then there is no way to know what He would want, so the replacement has no actual moral rules.
If God doesn’t exist, loads of people are currently fooling themselves into thinking they know what He would want, and CronoDAS claims that’s enough.
I question whether anyone actually has such a lexical preference ordering (religious people seem to frequently violate what they take to be God’s commands), but if someone did wouldn’t they continue to act as if God existed, since a Bayesian can’t assign this zero probability?
Again I question whether anyone actually holds such an ethical framework, except possibly in the sense of espousing it for signaling purposes. I think when someone is espousing such an ethical framework, what they are actually doing is akin to having a utility function where God’s pleasure/displeasure is just a (non-lexical) term along with many others. So when such an ethical framework becomes untenable they can just stop espousing it and fall back to doing what they were doing all along. At the risk of stating the obvious, this doesn’t work with the kind of ontological crises described in the OP.