How Good Is the Universe??

The idea of “the value of the universe” comes up in ethical theory: utilitarians, for example, want to maximize the value of the universe (or: maximize the sum of all the goods in the universe minus all the bads). So it’s worth pausing for a minute to think about what the total value of the universe is. In other words: how good is the universe?

I think it’s extremely likely that the value of the universe is either positive infinity, or negative infinity. This is because the universe is infinite. It extends into the future forever. It may also extend into the past forever, and there may be infinitely many “parallel universes” existing right now (those are controversial). From the consequentialist standpoint, maybe the past doesn’t matter, and perhaps parallel universes don’t matter to our decision-making. But the infinite future matters, and the infinitude of the future is pretty uncontroversial.

Given the infinitude of the universe, presumably there are infinitely many lives of conscious beings. The average welfare level of these beings is negative, zero, or positive. The case where the average welfare is exactly zero is a measure-zero subset of the possibilities; the probability that goods and bads in people’s lives just happen to be exactly evenly balanced, on average, is zero. So the average welfare is (certainly or almost certainly) either negative or positive. In the former case, the total value of the universe is negative infinity; in the latter, positive infinity.

Similar reasoning applies to values other than welfare – whatever you value or disvalue, the universe probably contains an infinite amount of it.

Having said that, there seems to be a strong case that the value of the universe is in fact negative infinity, not positive. This case is easy to overlook if you happen to be one of the tiny minority of beings who lead comfortable, prosperous lives (which probably includes approximately 100% of readers of this blog).

Throughout human history, however, most people lived in conditions that we would regard as the most severe poverty, far worse than the situation of “poor people” in today’s America. In the past, almost everyone lived under oppressive dictatorships, or else in primitive tribes for whom fighting was so common that perhaps a fifth of all people died at the hands of other people. Before the 20th century, most people’s work was backbreaking, physical toil. There was no air conditioning or indoor plumbing. If you needed surgery, there was no anesthetic. Nature was cruel, and other human beings were crueler. War was much more common than today, and its victims were commonly either dismembered, raped (if female), or enslaved. People enjoyed torturing each other, as in the case of the ancient Romans forcing slaves to fight to the death. If you were sent back to 1000 A.D. using a time machine, and you knew you could never return, it’s not obvious that the rational response would not be to immediately kill yourself.

Of course, human lives in the future might also be much better than today. And perhaps there will be many more of these lucky future people than there were of the unfortunate past people. Then again, maybe not – there is a pretty good chance that the human species will destroy itself in one way or another.

But all that is just to speak of the lives of human beings, which are a tiny fraction of all the conscious lives that have existed and will exist on this planet. There have been many times more non-human conscious beings who have lived and died just in farms run by human beings than there have been of human beings themselves; needless to say, the lives of most farm animals are awful.

What about wild animals, who are by far the majority of sentient beings in the history of the Earth? While not as bad as factory-farm animals, the lives of wild animals are probably worse than the lives of primitive humans. They are in constant danger from one cause or another – starvation, disease, parasites, being eaten alive by predators. They must sleep outside when it snows. If they become sick or injured, there are no doctors; they’ll just have to wait to die. I don’t think it’s obvious whether these are overall positive- or negative-utility lives. But it’s at least plausible that they are negative.

Life on other planets is probably broadly similar. The reasons for the suffering on Earth are broad facts about life that are likely to obtain as well on any planet in the universe where life evolves. For instance, there is likely to be a chronic threat of starvation for animals on any planet, because if there were ever a time of plenty, that fact would lead to an increase in the population until the food supply was used up. That dynamic isn’t specific to Earth; that’s about the nature of life.

Now, what if the universe is infinitely bad? Does that have any practical implications for us? Maybe it affects the appropriate emotional attitude toward the world; perhaps we should hate the universe.

It also poses an annoying intellectual puzzle for consequentialist moral theories. Suppose you want to say “The right act [or the act one has the most moral reason to choose] is always the one that maximizes the value of the world.” Well, the value of the world is minus-infinity, and it’s going to be minus-infinity no matter what you do. So . . . every action is morally optional? (There is some literature on this, which I’ve barely looked at.) You get the same puzzle, of course, if the value is instead +infinity.

Maybe the problem is solved for us by contingent, empirical facts: perhaps the set of consequences of one’s own actions are finite, even though the future of the universe is infinite. Because perhaps, in the sufficiently far future, events are completely unaffected by anything you do now. (E.g., nothing you do now will have any effect on what happens 100 billion years from now.) Then you can just focus on maximizing the value of the portion of the world that is affectable by you.

Now, here are some assumptions I made, which someone could dispute:

• There is agent-neutral, objective value – so there could be such a thing as the value of the universe in general. Some people (J.J. Thomson, Ayn Rand) deny this.

• Welfare exists, and it matters. Some things benefit a being, and that’s good; some things harm one, and that’s bad.

• Welfare value has no upper limit. So an infinite amount of welfare implies infinite value.

• There is a natural way of aggregating goods and bads. When you have an infinite number of both negative and positive numbers, it is possible to order them in different ways, so as to get any sum one likes. I assume that there is some preferred way of adding benefits and harms, e.g., ordering them temporally. (But note that consequentialism faces a problem if the value of the universe is undefined, just as it does if the value is infinite.)