Monday, November 13, 2017

Open theism and utilitarianism

Here’s an amusing little fact. You can’t be both an open theist and an act utilitarian. For according to the act utilitarian, to fail to maximize utility is wrong. It is impossible for God to do the wrong thing. But given open theism, it does not seem that God can know enough about the future in order to be necessarily able to maximize utility.

1 comment:

Heath White said...

You might think God could maximize _expected_ utility, which is one version of the theory. But frankly, I don't think even (the open theists') God could have any interesting expectations of utility over billions of years.