Counting good and bad things

People sometimes wonder, perhaps in connection with the problem of evil, whether there is in total more good than evil in the world. The connection with the problem of evil is somewhat tenuous, of course. Even if it were agreed there is more good than evil, it could still be argued that there is gratuitous evil, inconsistent with the existence of God. And even if there is a God, there could presently be more evil than good, if, say, the evil is justified in connection with future good.

All that said, here is a question related to the question whether there is more good than evil:

• Are there more good things than bad things in the world?

I will argue that on two different takes on “things”, there are vastly more good things than bad—or even bad or neutral—things in the world as we know it. Even if we can generalize from the world as we know it, this still does not show that there is more good than evil: perhaps there are more goods, but the bad things are so very bad that the total evil is greater than the total good. Nonetheless, I think the answer has evidential bearing on the existence of God, because it would intuitively be at least a little bit more likely for there to be vastly more good things than bad or neutral things in the observed part of the world if God existed than if God didn’t exist.

On to the argument. On a first take, “things” are substances. Now, I think the best story about substance is a neo-Aristotelian one on which in the part of the world we collectively know, the substances are the organisms and the fundamental physical entities.

Now, our three best theories as to what the fundamental physical entities are is that they are:

1. particles,

2. global entities like fields and the wavefunction of the universe, or

3. particles and global entities.

Suppose that the correct answer is (a) or (c). Then in the known universe, the vast majority of substances are particles. There may be a lot of organisms in the world, but there are way more particles. And the number of global entities, like fields and the wavefunction, on our best theories is in the single digits. But every particle is good: it perfectly fulfills its nature, which is to dance its dance according to the beautiful mathematical laws of the universe. So, on (a) and (c), the vast majority of substances are good. (Maybe good in a very minor way.)

Suppose that the correct answer is (b). Then the substances of the known universe consist of organisms and probably a handful of global entities like fields or the wavefunction. The organisms outnumber the global entities so much that we can neglect the global entities and, besides, the global entities are good, for the same reason the particles are. Among the known organisms there are some that are bad. The clearest cases are a sizeable proportion of humans.

Whether there are any bad non-human organisms on earth (essentialy the only place we know of with organisms) depends on whether we count instrumental value. For if we limit ourselves to intrinsic badness, plausibly all organisms that aren’t persons are good (and there are many good persons), and non-personal organisms vastly outnumber personal ones. If badness (and goodness), however, includes instrumental assessment, then there are bad organisms. But how many? There may be some species most of whose members are bad: perhaps some mosquito species are like that. But it seems very plausible that such species form a very small portion of the whole, and that the vast majority of species are such that the vast majority of their members are good. (Quick thought experiment: Suppose by pressing a button you could wipe out a randomly chosen non-human species? Surely it would be a very, very bad idea to press the button.) So, it seems quite plausible that the vast majority of organisms are good.

On a second take, “things” include events in addition to substances. Well, now, the vast majority of events in the known universe seem to be purely physical events that are neither good nor bad for living things, and they do no harm to non-living things either. But they are an intrinsically good part of the dance of nature according to beautiful mathematical laws. So, it seems, the vast majority of events is good.