Philip Swenson: The Philosopher's Case for Giving to the Global Poor #26
Can the existence of this extraordinary world really be explained without God, and what does that mean for how we give? JD explores this with Philip Swenson, philosopher at William & Mary, whose work on moral epistemology and the problem of evil brings rigorous academic philosophy to bear on the most practical questions facing Christians who want to change the world. Phil unpacks his extraordinary world argument for God's existence, and why the infinite value of human connection in heaven might be the most compelling reason yet to give generously to the global poor.
Articles, Scripture, organisations, and other media discussed in this episode
GiveWell - The effective altruism-aligned charity evaluator that Phil gives to by default, referenced throughout as a benchmark for high-impact giving.
Malaria Consortium - Referenced as an example of an effective charity whose giving can create life-saving connections with eternal significance.
World Vision - Mentioned by Phil as an occasional recipient of his non-EA giving alongside GiveWell-recommended charities.
The Omission Theodicy - A paper co-authored by Phil arguing that natural evil can be explained by angelic beings who abdicated their God-given responsibilities to prevent suffering, rather than by demons actively causing harm.
Brian Cutter's paper on hell - A paper referenced by Phil describing a view of hell in which consciousness gradually diminishes in intensity over time, approaching but never reaching zero, rather than involving infinite suffering.
The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis's work, raised by JD as a possible parallel to Brian Cutter's diminishing consciousness view of hell.
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Bryan Caplan's book, mentioned by Phil as a book he frequently gives to first-time parent friends.
All the Lives You Can Change - The forthcoming Christians for Impact book, releasing April 28th in the US and June 28th in the UK, endorsed by Lara Buchak, philosophy professor at Princeton.
Mentioned Scripture:
2 Corinthians 9:7 - “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver”.
Matthew 19:29 - “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”
Acts 3:6 - “Then Peter said, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.”
Episode Highlights:
The Extraordinary World Argument
“Our world just is full of interesting, cool stuff that I wouldn't expect to see in a world if there wasn't some kind of agent or force aiming towards goodness that would tend to produce that world.”
Why Moral Realism Points to God
“Moral knowledge, especially if you're a moral realist, fits much better with a theistic worldview”.
On Giving Cheerfully to Effective Causes
“The goal would be to get to where you're excited about giving to the effective charities. It makes you excited to think about, maybe there's a life I'm saving that I can meet them in heaven one day and create this connection based on that I saved their life.”
The Infinite Value of Giving
“You could end up with infinite value from making this positive connection between people.”
On Hiding Your Faith
“Doing that for like five or ten years of your life can really change your values and make you become way too cautious of a person.”
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JD (00:01.23) Hi everyone, JD here with Christians for Impact and I'm excited today to have a philosopher on the channel. So without further ado, Phil, why don't you introduce yourself and how you got here today?
Philip Swenson (00:12.915) Great. I'm a philosopher at William & Mary. I mainly teach and do research on philosophy of religion and ethics. And I don't know how we met. I think it was at a philosophy conference, wasn't it? And we both were interested in effective altruism and Christianity and got to talk. And I think that's what led to this.
JD (00:36.024) So Phil, you have a lot of academic papers, listeners, if you're interested, you can check it out. But you argue that our moral knowledge is better explained by theism. So does that mean that effective altruism as a movement or even just as an idea, doing the most good using evidence and reason, is borrowing from a theistic worldview without knowing it?
Philip Swenson (00:56.081) Yeah, I do think, you know, moral knowledge, especially if you're a moral realist, fits much better with a theistic worldview. I think that naturalists don't really have a very good explanation of why we have moral knowledge, assuming moral realism is true. I guess my sense is effective altruists tend to be moral realists — they think morality is this real objective thing. And so I do think
JD (01:21.548) like two plus two is four kind of real. Like it's a matter of factness about it, no matter who's asking the question or where they're asking it in time or space.
Philip Swenson (01:28.677) Right, yeah, you know, it's true no matter what anybody thinks about it or what any of our conventions are or anything like that. Yeah, so I do think that fits better with a theistic picture of the world than a naturalistic picture of the world. I still think naturalists can have moral knowledge. I just think, you know, we can agree we have moral knowledge and I think that's an argument or reason to believe in God. Yeah.
JD (01:55.342) Okay, is that a big reason why you believe in God?
Philip Swenson (01:58.695) That's definitely one of the reasons. It's in my top few reasons to believe in God, I would say.
JD (02:07.502) Phil, you're a philosopher, an excellent one. What are your best arguments for believing in God?
Philip Swenson (02:11.379) Okay, so the argument I like the best, I call it the extraordinary world argument. So this kind of combines a bunch of different arguments into one in a way. But the basic idea is like, think about all the ways that the world could be, right? So philosophers would call that think about modal space, like that's just all the different possibilities, all different possible worlds or ways things could be, ways the world could be.
And I think most of them are lacking in a lot of the good and cool stuff we have in this world. So there's lots of possible worlds where there's no life at all, or there's lots of possible worlds where maybe like there's consciousness, but just for a second. There's lots of possible worlds where we have no moral knowledge. There's lots of possible worlds where like nothing interesting, we don't get any life, nothing interesting happens. Maybe there's just a few particles bouncing around.
That's it. And yet we got this, like, even just the complexity of like my, you know, the visuals I have in front of my eyes right now. It's like, wow, there's all this richness and complexity and interesting stuff. And our world just is full of like interesting, cool stuff that I wouldn't expect to see in a world if there wasn't some kind of agent or force aiming towards
you know, goodness that would tend to produce that world. So I guess that's my favorite argument for the existence of God. I call it the extraordinary world argument.
JD (03:47.704) Yeah, is it? Okay, and I promise listeners, we'll get to some practical advice about how to have more impact with your career, but we're taking the long philosophical road to get there. So, okay, as an objection to that, what do you say to this kind of counter that, saying that this world's extraordinary is kind of like, you know,
picking a random hand right out of a deck and like having a specific assortment of cards and be like, wow, the chances that I would have a king and a seven of spades and a queen and like this exact hand is just like really extraordinary. Right. The only reason it's extraordinary to you is because you happen to care about the world you live in and the set of circumstances you happen to have now. But you know, ex ante it wasn't extraordinary that you would end up with some random, you know, particular universe. Why is this universe so extraordinary?
Philip Swenson (04:21.576) Hey.
Philip Swenson (04:39.431) Yeah, good. So you're right. Every possible world is sort of equally unlikely, equally shocking. So if we just got in the world with two particles and nothing else, would a hypothetical observer of that world be like, whoa, what are the odds? We've got this. And I think, no, they wouldn't do that because there's nothing special about that world. So I think that goes back to the idea of moral realism, right? That there are some things that are objectively special. So I think things like consciousness and life are
objectively special or at least necessary for objective value. Yeah, because they're morally relevant. So like you can't have well-being without consciousness, right? I think so. And I think moral knowledge is also clearly, you know, relevant, right? That's another one, you know, that's objectively special if morality is objective. Morality is the sort of thing we were talking about where it's not
JD (05:10.018) because they're morally relevant or?
Philip Swenson (05:34.896) not just a matter of our conventions or what we think, but track something real about the world, real about reality. So if you're a moral realist, if you think there are some things that are objectively special, then you can notice, there's something objectively special about this world. And it is surprising. So think about a poker hand where your opponent gets four aces, 10 hands in a row. They might say, well, that was just as likely as any other distribution of hands. True.
But there's something objectively special about the four aces, 10 hands in a row, that should make you think, maybe there is another explanation. Maybe somebody's rigging the deck or something, right? So I think of our world as like getting the four aces a bunch of times in a row. There's something objectively special about it that makes it more likely that the world would be rigged in that direction than in a random direction.
JD (06:31.672) Yeah, so isn't it possible there's other objectively special things that we don't have in this world, we just happen to not have it in this world, and like, isn't it possible there's like thousands or millions of other objectively special things we happen to not have, and so maybe, you know, we're not that extraordinary in this world?
Philip Swenson (06:47.057) Yeah, so you'd get some of them. Yeah, so if it turned out that most of the worlds had something really, really cool that's equivalent to the coolness of our world, then that would undermine the argument. But I guess I don't think that that is plausible. I think about a world where there's just a few particles floating in space far from each other and no intricate arrangements, nothing interesting happening.
Unless there's just some special stuff that we're just totally in the dark about, I think that world is not as special as our world. It doesn't have as much cool stuff as our world. So I think you have to be pretty skeptical about our ability to know what kinds of things are special in order to say, yeah, yeah, there's nothing. Our world isn't any more special than most of the other worlds.
JD (07:43.788) Yeah, so I'm hoping to move from like more theoretical to more practical. Still on the pretty theoretical front, you talk about, you talk in some of your papers. Actually, I want to ask you a fun question. It's just something I love to ask philosophers, which is
Philip Swenson (07:49.405) Sure.
JD (08:02.274) What's the craziest thing that you have some plausible view of? Like you have some non-trivial credence. You think there's some chance of it being true. What's the craziest thing for the average person? Maybe I can reframe that. I'll cut this out. So what's a belief that you have that most people would find crazy, but you find plausible? Or at least you assign like a non-trivial credence to it being true.
Philip Swenson (08:13.241) Good, yeah.
Philip Swenson (08:28.116) Yeah, good. I have many crazy beliefs, so I'll try to pick ones that would be interesting to people who are interested in Christianity and effective altruism. Let's see, you mentioned in your question, you mentioned as examples like Christian multiverses. Yeah, you said something like that. When you said that, I was like, is that a crazy view? I guess I find it fairly likely that God would create a multiverse.
JD (08:44.994) Did I give an example? I don't know. Okay, yeah, sure.
JD (08:51.35) Yeah, I don't know if it is crazy anymore, yeah.
Philip Swenson (08:58.194) because if he wants good stuff, look, he can have more good stuff by creating more universes. I guess I'd be sort of surprised if he only created one universe. Like if all I knew was there is a perfect God, I would say, probably there's lots of really cool universes. Not that we can be sure of that, but just like why would he limit himself to one?
JD (08:58.712) Why is that?
JD (09:24.088) So conditional on God existing, what's your credence in a multiverse?
Philip Swenson (09:27.974) Yeah, maybe like 70% or something like that. I don't want to be too arrogant about it. I have actually argued that
JD (09:31.789) Yeah.
JD (09:38.414) Is that the odyssey for you? Is that one reason why this world isn't as good as another world? Maybe God created all the perfect worlds and we're like just somewhere below perfect. Maybe positive expected value, maybe infinitely positive expected value if we have an infinitely good afterlife, right? But there's maybe some other worlds where people's temporal existence before afterlife was better than this broken world's history.
Philip Swenson (10:03.494) Yeah, I think it's likely there are worlds like that. I guess I don't know if I think it really helps that much with the problem of evil, because I want to know why is God letting me suffer? Unless you think that he couldn't have done it, like something about my essence means I could only be in this world. Well, then he could have still done better for me, or better for you, or better for anyone who suffers in this world.
It wouldn't be like a major part of my theodicy probably, but I do think it's plausible that he would create those other people. Let's see some other ones I thought of here. So a view I've recently defended, which I think a lot of people at least initially strikes as crazy, is the idea that...
JD (10:39.286) Okay, we can talk about theodicy in a second, but yeah, give me some more crazy views that you have, yeah.
Philip Swenson (10:59.636) There's this problem of natural evil, which is why do bad things happen that aren't the result of human free will? You know, animal suffering before humans evolved or things like that, right? So, philosophers have suggested before that maybe that's due to like the activity of angels and demons or something. You know, the angels messed up and that's what caused this. A lot of people have thought that just seems kind of nuts, kind of crazy. But I recently
wrote a paper defending this idea with a co-author where we say, we call it the omission theodicy. So you don't need to say like the demons are like actively causing bad things to happen. You just need to say God, you know, God wanted some co-laborers in creating the world with him and he gave certain jobs to maybe some angelic beings who weren't him and said like, you make sure there's no hurricanes in this area or you make sure
that this disease isn't a big problem. And maybe some of them just didn't do their jobs, right? Or maybe you steer evolution away from certain kinds of pain and suffering and they just didn't do their jobs. So it doesn't conflict at all with the scientific explanation of why these bad things happen. The causes are just what the scientists say. It's just there were angels who were supposed to prevent those things from happening and they omitted to do it. They abdicated their role and walked away. And we say,
it's really not that crazy to think God would want to work with other people and give them free will and then some of them would not do their job. He wants to work with us, why wouldn't he also want to work with other types of creatures? I think it's something that strikes people initially as crazy, but I don't think it's that crazy.
JD (12:33.652) He wants to work with us, right? So, you know.
JD (12:47.052) Okay, so conditional on God existing, what credence do you give to there being non-human agents with superhuman power like that? I don't mean AIs. I mean archangels or something like you're describing. Yeah.
Philip Swenson (12:58.408) Yeah, so if it's just superhuman power, I would say very high, you know, 0.8 or something. If it's all, yeah, well, tricky in our universe, with influence on our universe, yeah, maybe then, you know, 0.6 or something, you know. And then as you add more details, I get lower, so my whole theodicy would be below 0.5, but, you know, I think it's like not a crazy, crazy view. Yeah.
JD (13:06.528) In our universe. Yeah.
Or with influence on our universe. With influence on our universe, yeah.
JD (13:25.054) That's a pretty high credence.
Philip Swenson (13:27.816) Well, that there are supernatural beings that have influence on our universe. Or you think that's too high? Point six.
JD (13:32.684) Well, I mean, I suppose it's not a high credence from a Christian perspective, but if this was your credence for this particular theodicy, that would feel like pretty high credence. Yeah, yeah.
Philip Swenson (13:42.388) Yeah, that would be too much. I don't know exactly what it is, but it would be below — the whole thing may be 0.15 or 0.2 or something. Because there's so many details that go in. But that's enough to help. Yeah, that's right.
JD (13:51.596) Yeah, okay. All right, let's hear one or two more. This is great. Yeah, it does work. So I think Bentham's Bulldog has written about this. I think he's sympathetic to some form of it. Yeah, yeah.
Philip Swenson (14:02.599) Mm-hmm.
Philip Swenson (14:07.391) Good, good, yeah.
JD (14:11.926) Any other crazy views you have, spill your secrets.
Philip Swenson (14:13.968) Let's see. This one is kind of wild. I recently started thinking that maybe all Christians should get double baptized as kind of like a risk aversion sort of thing. So you know, I lean more towards the view it's like it's not that important to be baptized, it's more symbolic. But there's a lot of Christians who think it's really, really important to be baptized.
And then they argue about whether infant baptism counts or not. So you might think, you should get baptized as an infant. And then just in case that didn't count, to make sure you're baptized — but just in case that didn't work, get baptized again when you're 20 or something to make sure. That's a view. Whenever I floated that to another Christian, they've said, no, that's crazy. But it doesn't...
JD (15:04.652) Okay, so this comes from a place, I think, of thinking in terms of having weights on different spiritual probabilities and spiritual harms and reading the biblical witness and seeing that there's a compelling case both for infant baptism, maybe more from the tradition, and there's a biblical compelling case for believers' baptism, and you wanted to split the difference somehow, minimise risk of spiritual harm, but also honour
Philip Swenson (15:30.834) Right, exactly.
JD (15:33.742) you know, the potential witness. So yeah, is that something you're gonna do? Are you gonna double baptize your kids? You have five kids, right?
Philip Swenson (15:41.908) Well, we did infant baptize them. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So I think I'll leave it up to them whether they want to do the second half of it or not. You know, I might pitch the idea, with humility, of course.
JD (15:55.406) Do you think that Christians have a duty to have as many kids as possible if they have the financial means to do so and there's no health obstacles?
Philip Swenson (16:05.244) I wouldn't say that.
JD (16:06.658) I wouldn't use duty language. You certainly — I presumably don't think it's a bad thing to do.
Philip Swenson (16:11.73) Yeah, kind of by the Ross-style thought that you have — how do you say his name — his line of like, if you're not a saint, have children. Because having children is kind of the easiest way to do like really valuable, meaningful things with your life. Because before I had kids, there would be often days where I just didn't do anything very valuable that day. But every day when you have kids, you're doing meaningful, valuable, important
things, caring for them, raising them. I'm a little hesitant to push this advice to effective altruists in particular because I think effective altruists are more likely to be trying to live saintly lives than the average person. If you're going to do the earning to give and give away 50% of your money and work 60 hours a week, maybe you should do that and not have
kids or only have one kid or something because many kids would slow you down. So I don't want to push this as like universal advice, but I think for most people, they're better off having children. Does that make sense?
JD (17:26.19) Do you think the effective altruist who is married should consider at least having one kid? Assuming there's no other constraints, you know, both partners are different — would you encourage them not to have kids? Or would you encourage them to have at least one?
Philip Swenson (17:41.928) Yeah, I don't have any strong views either way on what's the ideal. The argument for kids from an effective altruist perspective is, well, you're the kind of person who can get into effective altruism — that makes it more likely that, especially with your influence, your kids will be the kind of people who could get into effective altruism and maybe it will be a massive gain for creating an additional effective altruist. But the odds are...
JD (18:09.52) It's not that heritable. I mean, you know, regression to the mean.
Philip Swenson (18:11.22) That's right. Yeah, yeah. That's probably not 80 or 90% that there'll be an effective altruist. So I don't have any special insight into making those calculations about which would be more ideal. So I would hesitate to give any advice either way.
JD (18:28.918) Yeah, that's funny. No, I gave away 50% of my income and I have one kid. You spoke right to me. I don't work 60 hours a week though. I'm a little lazier than that. But I do wonder about this. Maybe there's some duty within a marriage to be open to having kids. And maybe once you've had one child, you've satisfied that part of the marriage, the family ecosystem, right? Like you've completed,
Philip Swenson (18:33.766) Okay.
Right.
Philip Swenson (18:57.8) Mm-hmm.
JD (18:58.182) you've made whole your family in some sense. Not to say that a family can't be whole without children, to be clear, but openness to children. But once you've had a child, there's maybe not the marginal duty to have more or something. I wonder about it. My wife and I go back and forth about it.
Philip Swenson (19:04.852) Right.
Philip Swenson (19:11.933) Yeah.
Yeah, I've heard that view expressed. It doesn't seem crazy to me, it doesn't seem obviously true to me either. Yeah, I don't have any strong views on that. Yeah, yeah.
JD (19:18.169) You have? Interesting.
JD (19:27.822) When I don't get much sleep, I'm like, this view is definitely correct. When I'm awake at 3 a.m. and I think about Phil with five kids, I'm like, we've done our duty, we've had a kid. Yeah, we shouldn't have more, we should just donate more.
Philip Swenson (19:36.902) Overdoing it.
Philip Swenson (19:41.842) Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Do you think having the one has like limited your giving? Would you be giving 60% or something if you didn't have the kid? Or has there been a big trade off there?
JD (19:54.604) I don't know, I don't think so. But I do think if we had a second that we would not be giving as much, so I give 50% of my income. As a family, it's maybe closer to 30%. We would definitely be giving less if we had a second kid, because we'd be paying for two daycares, or she would stay home, and so our household income would go down, and so we couldn't give away as much. So like, you know, it would be a real financial cost.
Philip Swenson (20:07.668) Anyway.
Philip Swenson (20:13.48) Yeah.
Philip Swenson (20:20.156) Yeah, that's been my experience — we definitely gave significantly more before we had five kids. So there's definitely a real trade off there.
JD (20:29.762) Thanks for your honesty there. Yeah, it does seem like though for the average person who's not thinking in like kind of EA ways or radical generosity kind of ways or just really in a privileged position through their vocation to influence
society at scale, like it seems like for the average person, having kids is perhaps the most saintly thing they can do, or one of the most saintly things they can do. I think that's right.
Philip Swenson (21:01.084) Yeah. And, you know, even if you're like EA adjacent, like even if you're like a give 10% to effective charities kind of person, you can probably do that and have kids and not have that be too big of a trade off. Maybe there'll be some, but less than if you're doing 50% or something. So it really might depend on your particular situation — what am I going to be like if I have kids? What am I going to be like if I don't have kids?
JD (21:48.952) So do you think that there's a greater duty or reason to have kids if you believe in an infinitely good afterlife? Especially if that's somewhat contingent on their belief in God and Christianity, and they're more likely to believe if you have those kids, right? Because you're in a Christian household. You know, that's like infinitely valuable. I'm guessing you're going to object with some counter to something like, well, there are many things that could be infinitely valuable.
And you have this great paper, I think it's a paper where you talk about this connection theodicy. You actually frame it as a theodicy, a response to the problem of evil, that there are some goods that can be infinitely valuable, such as connections between people. Can you spell out how that connection theodicy works?
Philip Swenson (22:22.889) Mm-hmm.
Philip Swenson (22:29.716) Yeah. So like, I guess what I think is, you know, if you give — well, you want to hear it as a theodicy first? Yeah. So the way it works is...
JD (22:40.334) Well, I'm actually less interested in it as a theodicy and more as like a decision theory. But yeah, sure.
Philip Swenson (22:44.948) Yeah, good. The value — the interesting part for this conversation is like the value of making connections can have an infinite payoff. Say you give some money to the Malaria Consortium or one of these charities and it actually causes a life to be saved. Well, that, you know, and then imagine like a few years later you met the person whose life you saved. That could be like a really cool thing that would add value to
your relationship and that I think could — if we have an infinitely long relationship in heaven — I think it's plausible that at least a tiny bit of value gets added to your relationship at infinitely many times. You could end up with infinite value from making this positive connection between people. There are certain connections that you make with people I think will never have zero value in the relationship.
When I was a kid one time, I was in a canoe and it capsized and my dad jumped in and pulled me out of the water. I don't know if he said, maybe I wouldn't have died anyway.
JD (23:51.438) I have a similar memory with my brother, but in the ocean, he swam out and said we were playing rescue heroes. And I guess somewhat in a funny way, yeah, I needed rescue as we were playing rescue heroes. I went too deep and he came and he rescued me and swam me to shore. And I'll always see him differently because of this.
Philip Swenson (24:09.672) Yeah, good, yeah.
Philip Swenson (24:13.62) That's right. Will that ever go to zero, that value? You probably don't think about it every time you see your brother. I think every million years or so, that's right. You'll go, yeah, that was cool and that adds some real value.
JD (24:20.79) No, but you know, once a month for the rest of my life or for a million years, right? Like, yeah.
JD (24:31.17) But that's an infinitely positive thing if I think about that once a year for infinity.
Philip Swenson (24:34.088) That's right.
That's right. That's the thought. Yeah. And so it could pay off to an infinite value. On the comparing it to having kids thing, like if you create a child, then I think you'll get — you know, it's tricky with ranking infinities — but I think you'll get a bigger payoff there than making one connection would be. But
you might for the cost of creating and raising a child be able to make many such connections, right? So it's hard to...
JD (25:08.504) So doesn't this all boil down to some kind of welfarism? Like how do you trade off infinities, right?
Philip Swenson (25:14.632) Yeah, so it's very hard to figure out how to trade off infinities. I think the easiest cases are where one of them dominates the other. Imagine heaven one is plus 10 units of happiness at every time, heaven two is plus five units at every time. I think that's obvious. There are some philosophers who would say those are equally good, but I think it's got to turn out that plus 10 forever is better than plus five forever.
JD (25:41.347) Yes.
Philip Swenson (25:43.08) But it gets much more messy than that in many cases.
JD (25:45.336) Because otherwise you might have to say something like, well, infinite number of people in heaven is no better than one person in heaven. They're both infinities, you can't make comparisons. And that just seems nonsense.
Philip Swenson (25:54.62) Right, right. And that seems kind of nuts. Yeah, there's also some very trivial solutions to the problem of evil that come from that. Like if you say all infinitely good worlds are equally good, well, as long as God makes sure there's infinite goodness in the world, then he can let anything happen. Yeah, and that seems too easy to me. Yeah, so I don't, yeah, I wouldn't.
JD (26:14.744) He can let anything, any horror of the universe happen, yeah.
Philip Swenson (26:24.988) I do think it is a wonderful thing to create a life. I think believing in an afterlife adds wonder and amazement to that infinite potential value for my kids. But I do think there are other things that echo an eternity as well. And so I don't think that's a clear, everybody should have as many kids as they can.
JD (26:49.24) Does the downside concern you? Like whatever credence you have in eternal conscious torment or at least like negative existence in the afterlife, does that deter you from this kind of pronatalist tendency? I've never heard anybody avoid having kids because they were worried about hell for their kids in an eternal sense. I've never heard anyone actually have that view, but I do hear people argue for having more kids in part because they want to be a co-creator of another soul.
Philip Swenson (27:03.165) Yeah.
Philip Swenson (27:19.804) Yeah, there is a literature on theistic antinatalism where people — I don't know if it actually affects what they do — but people argue that if you believe in the traditional view of hell and you think a significant percentage of humanity is headed to hell, then that's a very powerful reason not to have a kid. I think even if you thought — I think what really matters...
JD (27:44.462) Even a 1% chance? I asked a friend who said if there's a 1% chance my child will go to hell, then I won't have kids.
Philip Swenson (27:50.738) Yeah, I was going to say something higher, like 20%. But I feel the intuition even at 1%.
JD (27:58.51) Because you could say, you know, if somebody told you there's a 1% chance your child is going to be born with a disease that would cause them extreme severe suffering in every moment that they couldn't make sense of, that they would never know you, love you, understand you. And you just painted out the most abysmal hellish existence possible. And you told someone there's a real chance that their kid is going to have that. Like many people would just be like, well, that's just unconscionably high, even at 1%. Yeah.
Philip Swenson (28:08.638) Infinite.
Philip Swenson (28:20.488) Yeah.
Philip Swenson (28:23.947) Yeah, too much. That's too much. Yeah, I feel that although you have to weigh that against the infinite reward, but I have this sort of risk aversion that kicks in like, don't even take the 1% chance of the horrible outcome. I tend to lean universalist, but the versions of the traditional view of hell that I find most attractive do not actually give infinite
intrinsic badness to the people in hell. Like, Brian Cutter has this nice paper on hell where he says like, what happens in hell is like your consciousness gradually diminishes in intensity over time. You never get to — you've never experienced infinite suffering. So it's like, you start out at like one unit. Yeah, well, yeah, you start out at one unit of badness and then go to half and then, you know, keep going down.
JD (29:12.051) It's kind of asymptotic. It kind of converges towards zero.
JD (29:19.254) It's not like a Taylor series, like you can have an infinite sum that is finite and it's... Yeah, it limits, yeah, that's right.
Philip Swenson (29:23.252) You're approaching a limit and you never hit it — some finite limit. You just get less and less intense qualia or intense feelings, conscious feelings as you go. I could live with that.
JD (29:36.398) Yeah, do you think Lewis had a view like this?
Philip Swenson (29:40.53) I don't know. Does that sound like what The Great Divorce paints to you?
JD (29:48.236) Well, these people are definitely not fully alive, right? And so, you know, once you keep dividing that life, you know, and cut it into smaller and smaller pieces and start pulling parts of it away, it's not this like, you know, glaring bright hellish landscape where you're fully present and alive in the burning. It's more like you're dissipating, right? Which reminds me of what Cutter maybe is describing.
Philip Swenson (29:53.33) Yeah, yeah, maybe it's a—
Philip Swenson (30:10.15) Yeah, that sounds... I haven't read it for so long, but yeah, that sounds like a similar kind of idea then. Yeah. Yeah, so I guess, you know, if universalism is wrong, I think either that kind of hell or annihilationism would be more plausible. But then the view where you have an infinite amount of suffering in hell would be my lowest ranked view. But even there are certain infinities —
negative infinities that don't scare me so much. Imagine we tell you we're going to put you to sleep and once every hundred years we're going to wake you up and you'll feel a slight twinge of a headache and then we'll put you back to sleep for another hundred years and wake you up and you'll feel a slight twinge of a headache, but that'll never end. I'm not horrified by that even though I guess I think it adds up to infinite negative value. But if it's like the...
JD (30:56.524) Yeah. Right.
JD (31:06.572) Or do you think it's possible that for believers who follow Jesus and have put their trust in him — that if they, in the afterlife, have some memory of some sin that they've committed that reappears once every five years? I actually don't know theologically how that works or squares. It wouldn't shock me. Yeah, if you had some cringe of like,
Philip Swenson (31:25.65) Mm-hmm. Like the cringe and guilt. Yeah, yeah.
JD (31:32.494) not like deep-seated remorse because you're sanctified beyond that, right? But you still have this intellectual memory of your life. And there's maybe some moment of disappointment you had about your old earthly self. And maybe it's some twinge of dissatisfaction or disutility in that.
Philip Swenson (31:39.164) Right, right.
Philip Swenson (31:46.887) Yeah.
Philip Swenson (31:53.16) Yeah, good. And that would be a case where there's infinite negative value in your life, but it's so swamped by the positive. Yeah. And it seems like you'd be happy to risk just that to get a higher chance at all the goods of heaven. Yeah. So it really depends on like what kind of infinite suffering even in hell, whether I would take that gamble.
JD (31:58.218) Yeah, it's so swamped. Yeah.
JD (32:16.472) So when you think about the trade-offs between the good that Christians can do, between promoting evangelism and knowledge of saving faith in Jesus and relationship with him, versus doing acts of temporal mercy and compassion, like saving lives from malaria through Malaria Consortium, or even caring for animals, right? How do you think about that trade-off with these infinities, as sort of the elephant in the room?
Philip Swenson (32:43.506) Yeah, good. Yeah, I guess I have the opinion that it's clear the church as a whole ought to do both — spread the gospel and try to care for the material needs of people. And I don't know, I don't have any good systematic way of saying how much of one, how much of the other, how to — of course people like charities that can do both at once, but is that really better?
JD (33:10.86) Yeah. Okay, that's what ends up happening, right? It's like Christians give to ones that do both and they don't do either one particularly well.
Philip Swenson (33:18.748) Yeah, and that might be better just to give half to each and separate it, you know. I guess my sense — kind of what I've adopted as my role — is I think the American church is underperforming on aiding the global poor. So I'm going to direct my giving towards that to try to balance out how the church is doing as a whole in terms of that obligation. I give mainly just to the GiveWell charities. I don't have any special insights into like, here's something that's better. So I just give to the GiveWell recommended charities. And then I do some small amounts of like non-EA giving where I'll...
JD (33:53.582) So where do you give to?
Philip Swenson (34:13.364) donate to like a friend who needs a fundraiser or my sister raised money for a charity — okay, I'll donate. But most of the giving that's EA giving in my mind is just to GiveWell. Once in a while, I'll give something to like World Vision or something like that too.
JD (34:29.292) Is that how you think Jesus would give if he was alive today? How would Jesus give if he was alive today?
Philip Swenson (34:33.308) Yeah. Well.
JD (34:36.374) He maybe has a specific role — somebody that's perfectly aligned with the will of God alive today in America. They have this moment of perfect moral compassion of Christ-like love for others, perfect conviction of justice and love for the kingdom of God. Where are they giving? What are they doing?
Philip Swenson (34:41.896) Yeah.
Philip Swenson (34:52.659) Yeah.
Philip Swenson (34:57.244) Yeah. I mean, I don't want to say they would do what I do because obviously if I thought they would do something else, I would do that. That's right. Yeah. You know, this is one of my — I guess one of my doubts about EA — is it's hard to see Jesus like walking by the homeless guy on the street and going, you know, I've got better places to give my money. That would be hard. You know, he would have something — he'd find something to do for that guy too.
JD (35:01.198) You're not in the picture, it's not about you, right? What are they gonna do?
Philip Swenson (35:27.602) But then I think maybe he's special in a way. He would find the thing to do that would be effective there. And I'm not able to find the thing that would be effective there. But I guess my best guess is he would do what I'm doing. Otherwise, I would do something else.
JD (35:45.996) Yeah. So he would do both. He would care for those in front of him and around him, but he would also give globally for the global poor that are much more marginalised and neglected in a holistic sense, perhaps.
Philip Swenson (35:50.566) Right. He would somehow avoid the trade-off.
He'd avoid the trade-off problem somehow.
JD (35:58.67) You'd ask him a question, he'd ask you one back or something. Yeah, yeah. I like that. And you know, one thing I started — and I'm not a perfect person and I'm not giving or as compassionate or serving as well as I ought to be and I have room to grow here — but one thing I started doing is carrying around ones. I learned this from Mike Morrell, who carries around ones in his wallet to give to anyone who asks him. Right. Just echoing the
Philip Swenson (36:02.738) That's right.
JD (36:28.878) teaching of Jesus here. And that is maybe not ineffective, right? To hand someone a dollar or two and look them in the eyes and encourage them in some small way as you're passing by. You know, like, I mean, I understand the trade off. It's like a couple days of life of somebody from malaria, right? It's like not insignificant, but yeah.
Philip Swenson (36:31.09) Mm-hmm.
Philip Swenson (36:42.066) Mm-hmm. Yeah. My wife has made these...
Yeah.
My wife has made these bags with like a candy bar or a protein bar — different handout bags that if someone asks you can give, but that probably costs even more than a couple dollars to do that. So maybe not ideal either. But yeah, it's hard to do nothing I think. So I understand why you're doing that.
JD (37:11.938) We need some like small, scalable, low cost, high meaning, high significant symbolic value things that we can give in passing — which is maybe a prayer, right? But like, that's not maybe effective for everyone. Yeah.
Philip Swenson (37:20.072) Right.
Philip Swenson (37:24.243) Yeah.
Philip Swenson (37:28.616) And it can also make people angry sometimes if they want money and you give them something else.
JD (37:34.638) Yeah, I just think about Peter's response. Gold and silver I do not have. If I imagine a pastor saying that today, I'd be kind of miffed, you know? Well, probably because they have gold, right? I mean, like probably because the average American is just like really well off. It's like, what the heck? You have the resources. So yeah, what the heck, man? Like your organ is a million dollars, you know? It's like, gosh.
Philip Swenson (37:44.338) You should try that line on someone. That's right. You're wearing gold on your finger right now.
That's right, yeah. The church can no longer say silver and gold have I none.
JD (38:02.718) Mm-mm. So.
Good. So you have a paper that talks about the duty to gather more information and that there might actually be a duty that we have morally to learn more about the consequences of our actions. Can you share a bit more about that and how we can learn from that, how we can do more good as Christians, or maybe how we ought to do more good in the world?
Philip Swenson (38:31.026) Yeah, so that paper is kind of a technical paper just trying to explain how deontologists can explain that duty, that we have a duty to gather evidence. But I think it's very clear there is a duty. There'll be lots of cases where if I acted on my evidence that I have right now, A is the best option. But even better than just doing A would be to get more evidence about whether A is better or B is better.
This happens in all areas of life. If you're trying to decide what product to buy, you have the one that looks better now, but you clearly should still do more research. Now, for some reason, people are bad at this when it comes to charities. This is one of the effective altruist insights — the care you put into making purchases in your own life, often people don't put into evaluating charities. They just are moved by their heartstrings and automatically give.
I think people recognise, yeah.
JD (39:30.126) So let me ask, should Christians just give according to their heartstrings when they're trying to help the poor or do good in the world?
Philip Swenson (39:34.524) Yeah. I think no. I taught a class on effective altruism at my church. And one thing some people push back on is they'd say, shouldn't we just give as prompted by the Holy Spirit instead of trying to do these calculations and stuff? Of course, if it really is the Holy Spirit prompting you, you should follow it. But I guess it's very hard to separate
the Holy Spirit's prompting from the prompting of human bias or what we're naturally more likely to be moved by even if it isn't the most important thing in the situation. So I would, yeah.
JD (40:14.892) Doesn't Paul say God loves a cheerful giver? So if you're cheerful about it, you can give, right? You feel like you should give, you feel cheerful about it, you should give.
Philip Swenson (40:26.972) Yeah, I don't think he would say he meant you should give to whatever you might feel cheerful about. He said you should try to get to the place where you can cheerfully give to the good cause. Because he had a particular cause he was advocating for — like, give to the good cause cheerfully is probably what he meant. Like imagine someone was donating to something terrible. He wouldn't say, yeah, as long as you're cheerful, right? He'd say, no, you want to give cheerfully to a good cause. So I think
the goal would be — and this can be hard — but the goal would be to get to where you're excited about giving to the effective charities. It makes you excited to think about, maybe there's a life I'm saving that I can meet them in heaven one day and create this connection based on that I saved their life.
JD (41:12.75) So are you motivated to give to global charities because you have this real hope that you'll meet this person in heaven and you can share this joy with them in heaven — that while they were in need on earth and God blessed you with the resources that you blessed them with God's resources?
Philip Swenson (41:29.404) Yeah, I guess that's not my main reason — I think more hopefully more altruistic, like, which probably makes it like mundane selfish things like.
JD (41:35.406) You're not giving to maximise your eternal well-being in heaven. Doesn't Jesus say that there's nobody who gives these up now who won't be rewarded? Jesus does seem to preach certain heavenly rewards.
Philip Swenson (41:40.948) How good I feel and everything.
Philip Swenson (41:54.12) Yeah, and he even teaches — it seems to me — that those can be some of your motives, like part of your motives for doing good is the... Yeah.
JD (41:59.552) You think he teaches they're motives? It seems to me he does teach it, but I've always thought, okay, that's just part of the universe. That shouldn't be my motive. My motive should be to do it because it's the right thing to do, right? Like you just do it because it's good, not because it benefits you, right?
Philip Swenson (42:07.522) Mm-hmm.
Philip Swenson (42:11.11) Yeah.
Yeah. I guess the store up treasure in heaven thing sort of sounds like advice. You should care about what you're building for heaven for yourself. That's a permissible motive to act on. Maybe it's sort of like not the ideal motive, but like, hey, we're flawed human beings. This is a pretty good one to use to get yourself to do good stuff. But I think when I actually give to charity, I'm
it's mainly a mix of mundane, selfish motives — wanting to feel like a good person — and more altruistic motives, wanting to help people. And then the idea about meeting them in heaven is kind of like a cherry on top sort of motive.
JD (42:59.884) Yeah. Do you have a hard stop in 10 minutes or do you have 20 minutes more?
Philip Swenson (43:04.526) Yeah, I have a pretty hard stop in 10 minutes. I have office hours in 10 minutes, but if you want to go longer, we could come back or something.
JD (43:07.35) Okay, then that's all good.
Let's do rapid fire questions and answers for what's left here. Phil, you're a philosopher. What is the highest impact thing you do as an academic philosopher, as a professor?
Philip Swenson (43:15.644) Okay. Okay.
Philip Swenson (43:27.86) That's a good question. I don't know what is the highest impact. Things I do that I think have potential for great impact are pretty much every semester I get to teach about effective altruism to 35 or 70 students, depending on the year. Even if those ideas seep in a little bit, I think that could end up having an impact. I also teach most every semester about
animal ethics and our treatment of animals. There is some empirical evidence that philosophical teaching on that actually affects, at least in the short term, how much meat people buy. So I'm hoping that's also true for the effective altruism thing. I don't know if that's been studied as directly, but...
JD (44:14.128) I know someone who might help you do an RCT for this, so let's talk. Yeah.
Philip Swenson (44:16.518) Good. Okay, good. Great. So those are both things I have hoped for. I also teach a lot of classes about the existence of God and theism and religious belief. And I do think, you know, there's potential benefits there as well to thinking clearly about those issues. So all three of those are things I hope have impact, but I don't know how much each of them have.
JD (44:40.536) Do you think in expectation you have more impact for the world and for God's kingdom by talking about effective altruism or by helping really smart people have a higher credence in God's existence or in the truthfulness of Christianity?
Philip Swenson (44:53.012) Yeah, I have no idea. I don't know how I could make that calculation. I hope they both have significant impact, but I don't know how to. I would guess probably the effective altruism one just because that's such an under — like a lot of people, it's like their first time really thinking through that issue, whereas most people have thought about religion prior to coming into my classes.
JD (45:17.964) Yeah. So how do you think about the trade-off between maybe supporting missions in low-cost countries? You can support a church planter for a thousand dollars a year, you know, in India, for instance, where there's maybe only a couple percent at most Christian population. And I don't want to put a cost per conversion number, but it's really like around a hundred or two hundred dollars per baptism, if that. So how do you think about that kind of at-scale, low-cost evangelism versus funding
Philip Swenson (45:41.094) Okay.
JD (45:47.694) you know, really intelligent, thoughtful apologetics work in the West, you know, like Veritas — I don't know, like the best form of a Veritas forum — or like, you know, philosophers at William and Mary who are defending Christianity, or making YouTube videos or something. What's your gut on how to think about that? Yeah.
Philip Swenson (45:53.499) Yeah.
Philip Swenson (46:09.384) Yeah. Yeah, I guess the funding the intellectuals thing is like a very high risk, high reward. There's a good chance it does nothing, but maybe it'll seep down and have some big impact. If it was me, I would probably give to the church planter — but if the numbers you're giving me are correct, which sounds amazing, I'd probably give to the church planter. I don't know though.
Yeah, I don't know how to make these kind of comparisons. I would say both things sound like great things to give to rather than spending your money on consumption or something.
JD (46:47.598) So imagine a young Christian who's sympathetic to effective altruist ideas and cares a lot about missions and also about spreading Christianity and convincing Christians in the West of the truthfulness of Christianity. They can either earn to give to support missions or they could become like a thought leader, a philosopher, right? Like maybe pursue your path, academic philosophy. What are some broad brushstroke advice that you would give to someone, a generalist, talented person who's contemplating these options?
Philip Swenson (47:11.634) Yeah.
Philip Swenson (47:16.71) Yeah. I would be very hesitant to give advice just because, as I said, I don't know how to do these calculations. I think if you're going to do the earning to give thing — I'm sure you know more about this than me — but there are big worries about gradual lifestyle creep and how long will you keep up with it? And I think it seems to me like unless you have a really good community who's
wanting to live the same life with you, it would be really hard to do that for like 40 years. Maybe I'm wrong about that. So I would take that — like the odds of success — into account when making that decision. But it's a tough, tough decision. I don't know.
JD (48:05.026) Yeah, yeah. What advice would you give somebody considering a career in philosophy, right? There are lots of guides about this online, you know, a lot of horror stories and people scaring other people away. In as few words as possible, what are the best reasons to pursue academic philosophy and what are maybe some of the warnings you would give?
Philip Swenson (48:13.236) I'm sorry.
Philip Swenson (48:28.38) Yeah, okay, yeah. I guess the advice I came up with was kind of more like how to do it if you're gonna do it. Yeah, so,
JD (48:37.11) Okay, maybe that — if you prefer to answer that way, that's fine. Okay, so let me scrap this. Phil, somebody's going to pursue academic philosophy. How do they do it as best as possible?
Philip Swenson (48:50.896) Yeah, one piece of advice I might give is don't hide who you are too much. A lot of Christian philosophers have this idea of like, I'm gonna keep my head down and not tell people I'm Christian or have Christian values that are kind of not popular until I get a job or get tenure or something like that. And I do think there's reason to be somewhat strategic about these things, but I think
doing that for like five or 10 years of your life can really change your values and make you become way too cautious of a person. I think in certain ways, I became more cautious than I should be because of — I think I did pretty well at telling people what I thought, not hiding my views. Most people in my grad programs always knew I was a Christian, things like that, but I still became maybe
more cautious than ideal because I wanted to get a job and things like that. So I think, you know, you have to be somewhat strategic, but don't hide who you are for a long period of time.
JD (50:01.186) That's a good piece of advice for almost any field, I think.
Philip Swenson (50:05.522) Yeah, it can apply to so many things. Like I had a student the other day — she's a Democrat, but she was offered an internship at a conservative-leaning think tank. And she's like, is it okay to do this and kind of hide that I'm a Democrat? So no matter what your values are, as you're trying to get ahead in life, you can encounter this — do I say what I think or do I hide it — kind of question.
JD (50:29.516) Yeah. So do you think that your values do shift if you only hold them internally but don't actually voice them outwardly?
Philip Swenson (50:38.548) I think it can gradually actually change what you think because if you get to the point where you cringe at the thought of saying something or cringe when you hear somebody else say it, it can actually be — yeah, well, I don't even believe this anymore. Yeah, I do think that happens.
JD (50:48.546) It's like reinforcement, negative reinforcement learning that you're putting on yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Do you think that our prayers can do that, or our lack of prayer can do that?
Philip Swenson (51:00.53) I suspect, yeah, maybe a good prayer life could be a way of counteracting that. Like imagine you're like a spy or something and you have to hide your religion for like years. Maybe a good prayer life where you are saying it in your head could be a good way to counter that to some degree.
JD (51:16.898) But even belief in faith and commitment to God, right? I would imagine that praying actively reinforces a genuine belief in God.
Philip Swenson (51:30.228) That sounds very plausible to me, yeah.
JD (51:33.806) Yeah, yeah. Do you think that effective altruists that don't believe in God should still pray to God or at least pursue the religious life if they think that there's some non-trivial chance of God being true and Christianity being real?
Philip Swenson (51:47.604) Yeah, I think it makes sense for agnostics to pray and even atheists to pray. If your credence gets super duper low, maybe it's weird to pray. But I don't think anybody's credence should be below 1% or something. I think at 1%, it makes sense to say, God, if you're out there. I think that would be because often that's a low cost thing to do or no cost, so why not?
JD (51:56.642) What's the threshold? Yeah.
JD (52:02.668) Yeah, I don't think so either.
JD (52:15.992) Hmm. Any, yeah. How many more years do we have until AIs just completely outcompete humans at philosophy?
Philip Swenson (52:26.814) That's a great question. I mean, it's getting like — it can already write philosophy better than at least 98% of people. Someone sent me a paper. It was written by the new version of Claude, I guess, the other day. And it was like, if I was a journal referee, I would have rejected it, but it was like getting close. So I don't know, I guess there's a decent chance of it. Maybe it'll be something where it's the creativity at the forefront that's harder for it or something, but
JD (52:47.726) Mm-hmm.
Philip Swenson (52:56.382) there's a decent chance I think in the next few years that we'll be writing papers better than me. So yeah, that'll be interesting.
JD (53:02.292) Mm. Are you tenured?
Philip Swenson (53:06.248) Yeah, I'm tenured, you know, I'll probably be one of the last people to — I don't know if like,
Philip Swenson (53:15.348) It seems to me there's a lot of value in having conversations with other human beings about these issues, even if we're not the smartest. I already believe there's God and angels who are way smarter about philosophy than me, but I still like to talk with other humans about what they think. Of course, that's different because God doesn't always just tell us the answers, and the AI might just tell us the answers. So it may be that philosophy done by humans becomes more interpretive of
JD (53:30.478) Mmm.
JD (53:38.039) Hmm.
Philip Swenson (53:43.132) what the AI is telling us and we sit around and talk about what do we think about what this AI is telling us. I don't know.
JD (53:49.804) Hmm. Well, I'd love to put you on that committee. And yeah, just any final advice you would give to Christians who want to have a maximum impact on the world — career advice, general faith advice.
Philip Swenson (53:53.542) You
Philip Swenson (54:03.124) You can do it. Yeah, I don't have any great big advice, but if you have those goals, you're already in a good place — stick with it.
JD (54:15.436) Awesome. Phil, thanks so much for coming on. It's been a joy. And if people want to get in contact with you, maybe pick your brain for advice on philosophy careers or have a giving question, maybe some philosophical question about how to allocate their giving — are they okay to reach out to you, or should they go through me or through our advising? What's your email?
Philip Swenson (54:30.952) Yeah, please send me an email. That would be PJSwenson at wm.edu. And you can find it online as well. Yeah, I'm happy to — if you send me an email about any philosophical question, I'm happy to try to help.
JD (54:43.201) Awesome.
JD (54:49.518) Listeners, if you like this conversation, you can apply for free one-on-one career advising to have a career for maximum impact. We'd love to connect you with people like Phil. Also, if you enjoyed these topics, we discuss all these kinds of things in our forthcoming book, All the Lives You Can Change. It's endorsed by many wonderful Christians, including Lara Buchak, philosophy professor at Princeton, who, Phil, I think you're a friend of. And yeah, I'd love to give you a free copy. So you can find it on Amazon, order it wherever books are sold.
Thanks so much, Phil, for coming on.
Philip Swenson (55:21.406) Thank you.
