But now what if instead of “torture” and “dust specks” we have a lexical preference ordering on “displeasure of God(s)” and “everything else bad”, and then we remove the former from the picture? Suddenly the parts of probability space that you were previously ignoring (except indirectly insofar as you tried to reflect the preferences of God(s) regarding everything else) are now the only thing you should care about!
I question whether anyone actually has such a lexical preference ordering (religious people seem to frequently violate what they take to be God’s commands), but if someone did wouldn’t they continue to act as if God existed, since a Bayesian can’t assign this zero probability?
From other frameworks the problem looks even worse: If your previous answer to the is-ought problem was to derive every ethical proposition from the single “ought” axiom “We ought to do what God wants regarding X”, and now you’re down to zero “ought” axioms, that makes a huge difference, no?
Again I question whether anyone actually holds such an ethical framework, except possibly in the sense of espousing it for signaling purposes. I think when someone is espousing such an ethical framework, what they are actually doing is akin to having a utility function where God’s pleasure/displeasure is just a (non-lexical) term along with many others. So when such an ethical framework becomes untenable they can just stop espousing it and fall back to doing what they were doing all along. At the risk of stating the obvious, this doesn’t work with the kind of ontological crises described in the OP.
I question whether anyone actually has such a lexical preference ordering (religious people seem to frequently violate what they take to be God’s commands), but if someone did wouldn’t they continue to act as if God existed, since a Bayesian can’t assign this zero probability?
Again I question whether anyone actually holds such an ethical framework, except possibly in the sense of espousing it for signaling purposes. I think when someone is espousing such an ethical framework, what they are actually doing is akin to having a utility function where God’s pleasure/displeasure is just a (non-lexical) term along with many others. So when such an ethical framework becomes untenable they can just stop espousing it and fall back to doing what they were doing all along. At the risk of stating the obvious, this doesn’t work with the kind of ontological crises described in the OP.