Edit: To clarify, when I say "accept Pascal's Wager" I mean accepting the idea that way to do the most (expected) good is to prevent as many people as possible from going to hell, and cause as many as possible to go to heaven, regardless of how likely it is that heaven/hell exists (as long as it's non-zero).
I am a utilitarian and I struggle to see why I shouldn't accept Pascal's Wager. I'm honestly surprised there isn't much discussion about it in this community considering it theoretically presents the most effective way to be altruistic.
I have heard the argument that there could be a god that reverses the positions of heaven and hell and therefore the probabilities cancel out, but this doesn't convince me. It seems quite clear that the probability of a god that matches the god of existing religions is far more likely than a god that is the opposite, therefore they don't cancel out because the expected utilities aren't equal.
I've also heard the argument that we should reject all infinite utilities – for now it seems to me that Pascal's Wager is the only example where the probabilities don't cancel out, so I don't have any paradoxes or inconsistencies, but this is probably quite a fragile position that could be changed. I also don't know how to go about rejecting infinite utilities if it turns out I have to.
I would obviously love to hear any other arguments.
Thanks!
I'm not sure I buy her last argument. Pascal's Wager does seem like a reductio ad absurdum of expected utility theory. Because if you accepted, it then, by equivalent logic, you would have to perform every other belief, no matter how improbable, as long as it had an infinite payoff. For example, somebody could tell me that if I stepped on a crack, the universe will end. And since there's a non-zero chance that they're correct, I couldn't step on any cracks ever again. As long as these potentially infinite payoff outcomes aren't mutually exclusive, you would have to accept them. And there's no bound on the number of them. Imagine being OCD in this world! Since this is clearly insane, there must be a fundamental flaw with how expected utility theory deals with infinities. Yet another reason to embrace virtue ethics :)