God is a utilitarian par excellence

 God is a utilitarian par excellence.

One of the best qualities I like and attribute to God is His utilitarianism, and by extension our utilitarianism which is a spin off of our free will. Similarly, it is also a spin off of God's free will.

In essence, utilitarianism is the act of doing the best for yourself or for groups on whose behalf you may act or choose.

Utilitarianism is a philosophical view or theory about how we should evaluate a wide range of things that involve choices that people face. Among the things that can be evaluated are actions, laws, policies, character traits, and moral codes.

Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism because it rests on the idea that it is the consequences or results of actions, laws, policies, etc. that determine whether they are good or bad, right or wrong. In general, whatever is being evaluated, we ought to choose the one that will produce the best overall results. In the language of utilitarians, we should choose the option that “maximizes utility”, in other words, that action or policy that produces the largest amount of good. (I will be quoting here and there from the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, as in this paragraph)

The big problem however is that we can only judge our actions by their foreseeable consequences, and the upside is that God can judge by the unforeseeable consequences of actions.

The above has very rich and interesting implications.

The first is that, if you choose for groups, you better be impartial, otherwise you will not succeed in bringing about the best benefit for the group as a whole. If you buy ice cream, you should buy the flavour most people like, even if you do not like that flavour. And this is the reason for the folly of leaders and politicians. They choose the flavour they like and they are never impartial. They also do not see the unforeseeable consequences of their bad choices and policies.

And here is where I love the utilitarianism of God. He is impartial and wants the maximum benefit for the most people, and knows what the unforeseeable consequences of His choices and actions are.

In a certain sense our choices are not fully utilitarian, even if we think they are, as they are contaminated by our moral judgement of good and evil, because we have all eaten from the Tree of Good and Evil.

God does not judge on moral principles. He has not eaten from that tree, so to speak and does not even have a moral undertone in His judgement. Morality is something we manufactured.

A case in point is this:

A person is busy drowning, and we jump in to save him or her.

Firstly, we see our action as good as we are saving a life, which is regarded by us all as a good thing, which it might not necessarily be.

Secondly, it is morally right to save him or her even if they are our enemies.

However, if the person drowning was Hitler, we will be partly responsible for the killing of fifty million people in WWII. That was not a foreseeable consequence for us.

And that brings me to our misguided ‘love’ for other people, especially for beggars and other weaklings, as we believe in the survival of the weakest. Are we sure that our alms will be used for the good and not for the bad or evil. I do not think so. Conventional wisdom has it that our alms will used for the bad and evil, and in the process, we become accomplices in their demise.

If we get to be given the ice cream flavour we do not like, we blame God for the event, but we forget that we are contributing to the good of a group or of all people. This is just a consequence of God’s way in the scheme of things.