Messy Forgiveness and Pascal’s Wager

And is Philosophy Boring?

This week, I decided to change up how I use substack. I talked about it in the note below (click for full note, obviously). I’m going to experiment with this new format where I sort of just post what I consider higher quality journals I wrote by hand.¹

Messy Forgiveness

The viral clip of Erika Kirk’s forgiving Tyler Robinson² of her husband’s murder rubbed me the wrong way. I told my fiancee³ that if I was brutally murdered in front of millions of people, and she forgave the murderer at a memorial service in front of thousands within a fortnight, I would come back and haunt her.

Far be it from me to tell a grieving widow how she should grieve, but my experience with public facing Christianity made me uneasy with the spectacle of her forgiveness. I agree that we need to forgive people more as a society, and provide the space for that forgiveness, but I believe we also need more time, space, and privacy to feel authentic negative emotion.

I’ve thankfully not been in the position where someone I know closely has been murdered, but I know that I would probably be distraught with various powerful and negative emotions for a while. If I was murdered, I would want my loved ones to forgive my murderer eventually but not immediately (but also mad respect to them if they never did!), if only because it helps them heal.

Forgiveness should come toward the end of the healing process, not toward the beginning. When it comes early, regardless of the infraction, it runs the risk of incentivizing bad behavior or failing to hold to account bad behavior. Obviously, accountability in a case like this is somewhat irrelevant because the state is involved and will be holding the murderer accountable, but my point is that when bad things happen to us or the people we love, retributive and otherwise negative emotions are overwhelming.

It’s valid and healthy to not forgive someone who has severely wronged you because it indicates the depth of your loss and the pain you feel. Forgiveness, however, is often necessary to heal. The overwhelmingly negative emotions can become a road block to healing, and forgiveness is the tool we use to override those emotions. Put another way: whenever I forgive people, it’s usually not for their sake, but my own.

In this way, I don’t think accelerated forgiveness is healthy because you may be suppressing valid negative emotions for the sake of maintain relationships. If you put the forgiveness cart in front of the healing horse, you will not heal!

So, when Erika Kirk forgives her husband’s murderer, there is something powerful there.⁴ I just worry that it’s rushed and the cost of her own healing.

What’s more, I think spectacular public gestures like this can be harmful. Christianity suffers from an inherently religious problem, where instructions become somewhat idolatrous. Namely, Jesus, a prophet, or some other holy man instructed their followers to do one thing for a reason for a purpose that was contextual to their time, but not explicitly stated in the text. Over time, adherents do the practice because they were told to do it, not for the contextual reason. This eventually leads to a weird idolatry problem, where the practice itself is seen as fundamental to the religion, but the social function is lost. Someone on substack recently referred to Jewish and Christian prohibitions on idolatry as just codifying Goodhart’s Law, and I couldn’t say it better.⁵

Forgiveness in Christianity is a good example of this idolatrous dynamic. There is a social reason for forgiveness, and the mere fact that God can forgive anything in an instant is a testament of God’s greatness. But it’s also a sign of psychological perfection that is impossible for human beings.

When churches strive for that perfection, they end up hurting people. Call it Toxic Christian Forgiveness: If you read various court filings of churches that covered up systemic abuse, especially sexual abuse, victims are often pressured to forgive abusers and shamed if they don’t or if they continue making a fuss.

Kirk’s forgiveness is hers to express and distribute, I just hope that she didn’t feel pushed to do something she was not ready to do. Some people never forgive people who hurt them, and that’s okay. I worry that she did, but I’m more worried that her example will be used to further the harms of Toxic Christian Forgiveness.

Again and finally: the problem is not forgiveness, but the pace of forgiveness, and prioritizing forgiveness over healing and accountability.

Is Philosophy Boring?

I have found on substack that a lot of philosophy is just…boring?

Don’t get me wrong: Philosophy is important, especially the boring parts, but I get the impression that the practice of philosophy is for the idiosyncratic and obssesive.

Philosophy is certainly useful. “Conceptual engineering,” the exploration of what words mean, their use case, etc., is important. But lots of philosophy seems to go farther than just exploring what words mean!

Namely, when I think of a philosopher or someone with strong philosophical opinions, they seem to say “I believe this subset of words mean this one thing, while those people over there think it means something else. They’re wrong and may also be threats to society. Anyway, I’m restructuring my life as a result of the implications of these specific words. Also, do you want to see my bug collection?⁶”

In all this, what makes philosophy kind of boring to me at the moment is that I don’t think words and beliefs function independently of the whole of one’s life experiences.

The fixation on restructuring one’s beliefs and life based on the implications of atomistic conceptual engineering seems wrong and obsessive. What makes it so is that it takes a small segment of one’s life (arguably, how one defines words) and demands one to radically reorient one’s life. Your definition of pain, morality, consistency, etc informs how you live your entire life, instead of (my preferred way of doing philosophy) how you live your life influencing your definitions.

I don’t typically engage with the deeper kinds of philosophical conversation, not only because I’m unqualified, but also because I don’t care and don’t think the consequences of these conversations are significant to care. I don’t care about free will, consciousness, or advanced decision theory.

None of this is to say that philosophy is bad or useless or that the implication of words is meaningless or that the proper understanding of words can’t or shouldn’t lead to significant life changes. I just don’t think much of the philosophy I observe is all that useful and that discovering the “correct” answers won’t change my life that much.

Infinite Value is Useless

So, everyone is arguing about Pascal’s Wager. Pascal’s Wager is one of the more annoying arguments for religious belief because most people misunderstand it. It’s a different argument than what most people are used to. Namely, it’s not an explicit argument about the Truth of God’s existence or non-existence, but a value proposition about what you should believe, given the payoffs or consequences of a worldview being true.

Before I give my thoughts, I just want to promote some of the articles that have been written on this. I promise you my thoughts are not nearly as complicated!

First of all, The Flagship Blog of Substack (love him or hate him)

Bentham's Bulldog

wrote a piece, which you can find here:

Pascal's Wager Is A Good Argument

Another poster,

Dylan

wrote a piece critical of it which you can find here:

Tyranny of the Mean

There are more pieces floating about (Bentham posted his 22 days ago, he’s a discourse Whale, it’s great!), but I will also promote

Kyle Star

aka Kyle Brown Dwarf’s⁷ post you can find here:

I'm an Atheist, and I Believe Pascal's Wager is a Good Argument

Long story short, Bentham and Star (Dwarf) think the wager is a good argument, while Dylan and others think it’s a bad one. From what I can tell, there’s a little bit of anger and conversational impasse, but I imagine that will be resolved soon, based on what I’m seeing on notes.

Anyway! Here is my position on Pascal’s Wager. I agree with Dylan that infinite value basically royally screws up any decision calculus one does. If you think something has a one in a googol chance of being true, but the payoff is infinitely positive, it makes sense to accept that thing as true, or reorient your life toward that thing, or however the heck you conceptualize it.

The problem I have Pascal’s Wager is similar to what Dylan says, but it goes deeper. Infinite Positive Value, Negative Value, Pain, or Pleasure are absurd concepts that make no sense!

When I was younger I read two good books on death, Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler and Death by Shelly Kagan. My main takeaway from those books is that death - but specifically scarcity of time and life - is a powerful influence underpinning our psychology. Life just does not make sense if we have infinite time and life! When we talk about pain or pleasure, we understand this intuitively: unless you have a chronic illness, in any given moment you’re probably not feeling pain or pleasure.

In my experience, discussions about expected value (EV), cognitive biases/intuitions, and “correct” values are often biased by the fact that many people who have these discussions misunderstand the science behind them. Many of the experience demonstrating human irrationality are in situations where there are two (or so) answers and the exchange value of the decisions are agreed upon. Five dollars is greater than three dollars, etc. Or these situations entail specific certain measurements of fictional utils that are completed understood or agreed upon.⁸

But in economics, the whole point of market pricing is that some people value some things more than others, while other people may have different preferences altogether. So, the fact that you’re willing to pay $10 for KFC double-down and I’m willing to pay $20 (because I’m a psycho), the price is probably going to be set somewhere between there, as is optimal or more profitable to Colonel Sanders. But how much the double-down “costs” or “is worth” doesn’t make sense because there isn’t an objective character to its worth that isn’t also mediated by the preferences of the people involved. The fact that it may cost $5 has little to do with the actual contents of the chicken and cheese monstrosity, but how much someone is willing to buy or sell it.

That detour into economics may seem unrelated to the wager, but the point is that for any value to be infinite, the currency of infinity must be agreed upon. For a Christian, infinite pleasure may be Praising God Forever and Ever Amen, but for an atheist, that may seem like infinite pain.

In this way, I say that infinite value/pain/pleasure makes no sense because:

1. We don’t actually experience infinite anything in this life

2. Experiencing the possibility infinite value/pain/pleasure would change us on a fundamental to where we’re a different person.

3. I’m not sure if we could come up with a “common currency” of infinite value (good or bad). It just seems like an empty word without referential content.

4. To the extent that we can make sense of value/pain/pleasure, it’s to the extent that we can appeal to objective brain states like being tortured or high as a kite, but even then those in our experience do not have infinite qualities. Your nervous system will hit a wall after certain point, and there will be diminishing feelings of sensation either way. It’s not infinite! And if it was, well, see #2.

To the extent that the wager can be persuasive, it’s to those who are sympathetic to Christian conceptions of value in the first place, and those who have not been critical of what value actually is in an empirical sense. A Christian account of infinite value is plausible because Christians have a pre-defined definition of what is valuable, but it’s not shared with everyone. People have different values from Christians, and for the wager to be persuasive, it demands people redefine their values (something that is really hard!) to conform to the wager’s values.

I don’t find it persuasive because I can’t do that. And I’m also bad at math.

1. The last bit on Pascal’s Wager I didn’t do by hand for what it’s worth.

2. Allegedly of course

3. Less than a month until the big day!

4. And to be clear, I believe her forgiveness is sincere.

5. If someone can find me that note, I will edit this post and embed it.

6. Okay, that last part is just a roast

7. I have to be nice to Kyle because he followed me when I was bigger than him, but he surpassed me like a month ago. I have to be nice to him to not seem bitter and/or as a content strategy to re-surpass him and then Defeat Utilitarianism Forever

8. At that point, we aren’t talking about values or philosophy, we’re doing math! But I digress. Fight me Kyle, I dare you.