A really bad moral dilemma

Here would be a really bad kind of moral dilemma:

• It is certain that unless you murder one innocent person now, you will freely become a mass murderer, but if you do murder that innocent person, you will freely repent of it later and live an exemplary life.

If compatibilism is true, such dilemmas are possible—the world could be so set up that these unfortunate free choices are inevitable. If compatibilism is false, such dilemmas are impossible, absent Molinism.

We might have a strong intuition that such dilemmas are impossible. If so, maybe that gives us another reason to reject compatibilism and Molinism.

An argument that Trans-World Depravity is unlikely to be true

Assume Molinism. Plantinga's Trans-World Depravity (TWD) is the thesis that every feasible world--world compatible with the conditionals of free will--that contains at least one significantly free choice contains at least one sin. I want to think about an argument that TWD is likely false.

For consider a world where God creates exactly one intelligent creature with the typical motivations and character of a typical morally upright adult human being. God then forbids the creature from imposing pointless pain on itself, and only ever gives the creature only one significantly free choice: to eat a nutritious food that it likes or to endure five hours of torture. Let's imagine the situation where God creates such a creature and it's about to make that one significantly free choice. Call this circumstances C. Given what we know about decent human beings and their motivations, the creature would very likely eat the nutritious food rather than be tortured. Very well. So very likely the conditionals of free will are such that the world where the creature eats the nutritious food is feasible. But if that world is feasible, then TWD is false.

That was too quick. I jumped between answers to two different probabilistic questions:

1. What is the epistemic probability of the Molinist conditional that were C to obtain, the creature would choose wrongly?
2. Were C to obtain, what would be the chance of the creature choosing wrongly?

It is clear that the answer to (2) is "Very low." But to argue that TWD is very likely false, I have to say that the answer to (1) is also "very low". This leads to a difficult set of questions about the relationship between Molinist conditionals and chances. Lewis's principal principle does imply that if we were to knowingly (with certainty) find ourselves in C, and if we were certain of Molinism, we would have to give the same answer to (1) and (2). The argument goes as follows: given C the Molinist conditional has the same epistemic probability as its consequent, but the epistemic probability of its consequent is the same as its chance by the principal principle. But the answer we should give to (2) in those circumstances where we were knowingly in C may not be the same as answer as we should actually give to (2). Consider this possibility. Our current epistemic probability of the Molinist conditional in (1) is 1/2, but God would be very unlikely to make C obtain unless the conditional were false. He just wouldn't want to create a world where the creature would freely wrongfully choose to endure the torture. In that case, if we were to learn that C obtains, that would give us information that the Molinist conditional is very likely false. And hence the answer to (1) is "1/2", the answer to (2) is "Very low", but were C to obtain, the answer to (1) would be "Very low" as well.

Maybe. But I think things may be even less clear. For the biased sampling involved in God's choosing what to create on the basis of conditionals of free will undercuts the principal principle, I think. I think more work is needed to be done to figure out whether or not there is a good argument against TWD here or not.