On Evil's Vague Necessity

Mike,

I'm having a difficult time understanding van Inwagen's position.

Is it part of the view is that there is a range of evils God is permitted to allow? That's consistent with there being a ranking of worlds within this range, God's knowing the ranking, God's knowing how to actualize the least bad world in the range, and God's having a preference for this world to the others in the range. It still seems that there is a puzzle, which is why isn't that world actual? While someone (morally perfect or not) might be permitted to actualize something less good than the least bad in the series, it seems plausible that God would not settle for picking just any world in this range but would pick the least bad rather than those only slightly worse. [I'm assuming that PvI assumes God knows the penumbral connections and something about the boundaries but perhaps he denies this].

This seems like a very academic exercise unless he gives some reason to think that this world is within that range of possibilities.

Hi Clayton-

I think the answer to your question is no. There is no range of evils E-E' noted in the argument such that God cannot permit any world that includes an evil in E-E'. He does address later why there should be so much evil and why it should be so unfairly distributed.
But that aside, the argument is no mere academic exercise (though it would be no less philosophically important if it were. Much of philosophy is this sort of "exercise" and no worse for it). If van Inwagen's argument is right, then our concept of a morally perfect, omnipotent, omniscient being is importantly wrong. Such a being might allow instances of gratuitious or pointless evil. That would be good to know.

Mike,

Sorry, I didn't mean 'academic' in a perjorative sense. I'm here because of a love of academic exercise. What I meant was that if this is ultimately going to serve as a viable defense against the argument from evil, something has to be said about the actual world and how close the level of evil in this world is to the penumbra. I think it matters here precisely because he concedes that God could have prevented an evil or two without making the world massively irregular and that should be enough to ask why not make the world slightly better even if one is permitted in not bothering so long as the better making actions take place determinately within the penumbral range of cases so that there isn't the worry of massive irregularity.

Asides aside, thanks for the reply, I'll have to check out the book when I'm near a library again. Part of me wants to know why regularity is so important and why the fact that prevention requires one to trade off regularity isn't a justification for the evils we're tempted to think of as gratuitous.

Clayton, I think this is exactly right. Think of amounts evil as increasing from necessary to borderline unnecessary to unnecessary. Something like this:

|----Nec. Evil-------|----BL Evil------|-----Unnec. Evil------->

I am assuming you have in mind by 'penumbral evil' amounts of evil that fall in BL Evil. Agreed, there is no precise amount of evil that is necessary, since the borderline between Nec. Evil and BL Evil is itself vague (there are in short higher and higher orders of vagueness), but that does not entail (contrary to PvI) that God might permit unnecessary evil. It entails instead that He might permit an amount of evil that is not definitely unnecessary. But there is no violation of the standard position on evil there. The standard position, as far as I can see, does not state that God must prevent any amount of evil that is indefinitely unnecessary.

Mike,

So this is the Standard Account: An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense evil it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

Here is a reason to doubt it. Some goods are incommensurable with some evils so that an omniscient, wholly good being might allow some evil to obtain even though the good for the sake of which He does this is "not" a greater good. It is just a different good, an important good.

Maybe the good of developing authenticity and taking responsibility for big choices is like this. It is not a greater good than, more valuable than, the disvalue associated with cheating on someone for instance.

I am unsure why one should endorse, or feel rationally obliged to endorse, a commensurability thesis in order believe a central premise in the argument from evil.

Christian,

A reason to doubt what? A reason to doubt that that is the standard account or a reason that the standard account is true? There is no doubt about the former, I don't think.
About whether the standard account is true, you simply assert that "some goods are incommensurable with some evils" and that is by no means the received view on value or the most dominant view. It is rather a position no less controversial than the position that all value is commensurable. So you're criticism of the premise is based on an assumption that is at least as controversial, as far as I can see.
But then you say,

"Maybe the good of developing authenticity and taking responsibility for big choices is like this. It is not a greater good than, more valuable than, the disvalue associated with cheating on someone for instance"

Still, it would be nice to have an argument. It is not obvious that, for instance, authenticity is not a greater value than cheating. What we have here is a controversial claim that has no leverage against PvI's argument unless there is some good reason establishing the claim.
But even then, these are just necessary conditions. Even if you had such an argument it is not clear how this affects the argument negatively.

Mike, just to register my opinion, I'm a fan of PVI's no minimum argument. For one thing, I think it points to an important point about the nature of creation often otherwise overlooked or not explicitly taken into account or not given enough weight by most philosophers of religion. When we realize that though it seems like God could have prevented almost any evil considered individually and many taken collectively, but not the collective itself, I myself am led to begin thinking of *general* parameters of creation. Like PVI's "The Place of Chance in a World Sustained by God" (also in God Knowledge and Mystery) I think it points to the fact that God does not actualize the world in its particulars. Jon uses the terminology of God creating galaxies of worlds. He gives definitions and discussion on p. 123 and following of his The Possibility of an All-Knowing God. It's actually we free agents who co-create the world. We often talk like God looks at a big master list of worlds with their descriptions and just "picks one out" but that is a misleading picture. I think this kind of picture is behind what you're calling the "standard account." All the best worlds require serious freedom and God sees to it that any world which obtains is one of those worlds, but how the galaxy of worlds narrows after that is largely up to us. I think Jon's discussion of galaxies greatly benefits Plantinga's Free Will Defense by steering us way from the picture--which I find to be suggested by Plantinga's wording, though I don't know whether he endorses it--of God picking a world off a list and actualizing it. "Hmmmm. I'll actualize *that* one: fiat!" I don't think that's how it works. If it isn't, and if the best worlds are ones where God only intervenes under pretty extraordinary circumstances, then how many "preventable" or "unnecessary" evils there are will be the result of human agency, chance, or both.

"We often talk like God looks at a big master list of worlds with their descriptions and just "picks one out" but that is a misleading picture."
Trent, claims like yours above, I think, misrepresent a bit what FWD arguments show. At the very most (I have little doubt Plantinga would agree) if we assume that Plantinga's FWD works without qualification, then we have no reason to believe that free moral agents have anything to do with actualizing any world. It simply does not follow from any FWD argument (and, you know, there are many). What follows from FWD is that the actions of free moral agents *might* contribute to the actualization of worlds.
Apart from this I guess I'm also a fan of PvI's argument. I'm a fan in the sense that I like the idea of bringing considerations of vagueness into the problem of evil. It raises interesting questions, and in this sense I am a fan. But I am not a fan in the sense that I think anything like his conclusion follows from his premises. It doesn't. And this fact does not depend on the theory of vagueness one happens to find appealing.

Hey Mike,

Yeah, the second option is what I was intending. By suggesting that goods might be incommensurable I was suggesting a reason to doubt the truth of the standard account, not a reason to doubt whether the standard account is the "standard account." And I also agree that the premise that some goods are incommensurable is "a position no less controversial than the position that all value is commensurable." They are both plausible views and arguments for either one needs to be looked at carefully.

Finally, I also agree that it would be nice to have an argument for the view that some goods are incommensurable. I don't have anything like an interesting argument. But I think that's okay. I thinks so because whether all good are comparable is controversial. I also think some pairs of goods seem incommensurable, and that is enough to make the point I want to make.

And the point is just that the standard account is no more reasonable to me than the view that all goods are commensurable. And that view is no more plausible than the view that every intuitive pair that strikes me as involving incomparable goods is misleading. When I thnk to myself "What world would be better: A really beautiful world with a bit of suffering or an ugly world without much suffering at all?" I really feel a pull to say that neither is all things considered better, holding other facts the same. Intuitively, one world is better in one way, and worse in another, and I really don't feel rationally compelled to deny this.

And this is to say that if the good for the sake of which God permits evil is incomparable to the evil, then the standard account is lacking in an important way: It assumes that relations like "greater than" can be instantiated by the goods we are concerned with. But that is not obvious to me and so I would prefer a statement of what God could allow, or whatever we call the premise, that is non-commital on commensurability.

I'm not sure I understand what you said about necessary conditions. What I am suggesting is that it is possible that an omniscient, wholly good being would "not" prevent the occurrence of any intense evil it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. But, an omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense evil it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some important good or permitting some evil or other.

I think it follows that the standard account is false if God would be justified in permiting certain evils for goods that are not greater than, or outweigh, the evils in question.

Christian,

Here's what I had in mind. Even if there are incommnensurable values, it does not follow that worlds cannot be ordered by their value. w1 might be overall worse than w2, even if there are some respects in which we cannot compare w1 and w2. For instance, let w1 include nothing but suffering and apples. Let w2 include nothing but joy and oranges. We cannot compare w1 and w2 with respect to apples and oranges--I hear you can't compare these--but it is pretty clear that w1 is worse than w2. So even a good argument for the existence of incommensurable values does not alone affect the argument. That's what I had in mind.

Mike,

You might be right that two worlds w and w' could have some goods g in w and g' in w', such that g is incomparable to g' and w is all things considered better than w'. I'm inclined to think this is impossible if g and g' are incomparable though.

Take an example: (1) w contains only a bunch of oranges and w' only a bunch of apples and (2) oranges are incomparable to apples.

I am inlcined to think that w is incomparable to w' in this case. More generally, for any pair of worlds w and w', if w contains only goods of type T and w' contains only goods of type T', and goods of type T are icommensurable with goods of type T', then w is incommensurable with w'.

Let us add (3) that w contains some bad B and w' contains some bad B' that are comparable, where B is worse than B' (some orange in w is spoiled more than some apple is spoiled in w').

Does it follow that w is all things considered worse than w'? About all I can say is that it is not obvious to me at all. I am not sure what hangs on this distinction though, perhaps we can stipulate which relata will be eligible for the relations we care about, i.e. that the 'better than' relation when applied to worlds takes only those goods in those worlds that are comparable as relevant.

Anyway, the reason this all seems important to me is that the standard account of evil puts pressure on, lets say, "the theist", in a way she should resist. Perhaps she thinks the value of freedom is incomparable to the disvalue of suffering of a little girl or that the value of beauty if incomparable to the disvalue of the suffering of a fawn burning in the woods. The "atheist" asks the "theist" to explain how the value of freedom outweighs the suffering of the girl, and in every similar case.

If the incommensurability view is right, and if these goods are really incomparable, then the "atheist" is presenting the "theist" with an impossible task and it would be nice to have a principled reason for denying the task is one the "theist" must take.

And the point is more general for the argument. The theist might think that there is some good for the sake of which God permits all the evil and that this good is important. She might argue that we can't see what it is, but that whatever it is, it is more likely to be incomparable to the evils and this is because comparable goods are such that, if God permitted evil for their sake, we would likely see it. But, incomparable goods are such that, if God permitted evil for their sake, it is unlikely tht we would see them.

So, I really do think the issue of incommensurability is an important one. And although I am an atheist and I find an argument from evil rather persuasive, if I were a "theist" then I would not accept Rowe's Standard Account with an independent reason for thinking that goods and evils in question, whatever they are, are commensurable.

Suppose there are no commensurable values. How does this burden the theist, even assuming that the standard position (SP) is true? SP requires that there exist no evil event/state-of-affairs such that every good weighs less that it does. But under the incommensurability assumption, the theist can conclude that there is no evil such that all goods weigh less than it. This is trivially true under these assumptions. Since we cannot compare goods and evils, there is no evil such that every good weighs less. We could say that some evil is such that every good weighs less than it only if we could compare the good and evils and make some estimate. But, by hypothesis, we can't. So the theist should not feel burdened.

Mike, I don't think I claimed that FWD entailed that we co-create the world. I take it as a datum that we do and that this helps explain why there are what evils there are (better than that there is no God). I only adverted to Al's presentation because I think he can give the impression that God does it all by himself. If one takes a robust view of God's relatively "non-interventionist" approach--like I think PVI does--then the question of why God settled on just this much evil doesn't even arise. His actions leave largely indeterminate facts pertaining to the distribution of evil (though he does play a larger role in determining the galaxy of worlds open to actualization).

"If one takes a robust view of God's relatively "non-interventionist" approach--like I think PVI does--then the question of why God settled on just this much evil doesn't even arise."

I guess I don't see it. I mean, suppose we are libertarian free and suppose God does not intervene. Why on earth does the question not arise as to why so much evil? Are you assuming that when choosing a world and choosing to create free beings God does not know what we will freely do? Or are you assuming that He knows what each creature will freely do, but actualizes a world in which we do evil anyway? Or is it that we are in fact transworld depraved and so would do evil no matter what world God actualized?
The fact alone that we are free and God is not an interventionist does not explain why there is more evil than necessary or any particular amount of evil at all. We can still ask why God did not create other, better, free beings. We can ask why God did not create other beings that never bring about evil. We can still ask why God did not actualize a world in which we, as a matter of contingent fact, act better than we do here. I have no reason to believe that there are no such worlds. So these questions remain open.
Concerning the commitments of PvI, he offers the argument from vague levels of evil. That is his argument for why there is more evil than necessary. I'm not sure how the fact that we are libertarian free and God is a non-interventionist helps with *that* particular argument. But maybe that is not what you're saying here.

I didn't mean to imply that on the assumption that no values are commensurable the theist is under some special burden. I don't see how that could burden the theist at all.

And the expression 'trivially true' has always been confusing to me. Many conditionals with impossible, or merely false antecedents are not trivial. So, I don't exactly know how to respond to that.

The way I understand Rowe's Standard Account (RSA) if God allows some evil to obtain that he could prevent, then there is some good that requires it, a good that outweighs it or God could not have prevented that evil without allowing some evil at least as bad as it. All I mean to suggest is that a believer in incommensurability might think God exists, allows an evil to obtain that he could prevent, and that there is no good that outweighs it, or an evil equally bad or worse. They instead might think there is some morally significant property for the sake of which God does not prevent the evil and this property does not outweigh the evil because it is incommensurable with it.

If that makes Rowe's account trivial, or just false, or...I'm not sure.

All this said, even buying into incommensurability the theist will need to present evidence for a good that is morally significant in that God would be justified in allowing evil for its sake.

Christian,
I guess I took you to be implying that the theist is under some special burden given incommensurable values when you claimed this two posts up,
"...if these goods are really incomparable, then the "atheist" is presenting the "theist" with an impossible task. . ."
That sounds like a burden. But maybe you meant something else. No matter. At the close of your last post you say,
"All this said, even buying into incommensurability the theist will need to present evidence for a good that is morally significant in that God would be justified in allowing evil for its sake."
Under the assumptions this, I think, is false. Take the full blown view that all value is incommensurable. Now suppose someone offers an atheistic argument from evil that says this much: (1) There is some evil e such that any actual good weighs less than e. (2) The standard position entails that God would not permit e. (3) Therefore God does not exist. The theist rightly denies (1). He denies (1) since, given incommensurability, it is false that there is some evil that weighs more than any actual good. Goods and evils cannot be compared and so no good weighs more or less or the same as any evil. But then the theist does not have to provide evidence ". . . for a good that is morally significant in that God would be justified in allowing evil for its sake." Since it is impossible to compare them, there is no good that is more significant than any evil. But so? There is no good that is less significant than any evil, either. There is then no problem of evils for which there are only less significant goods.

Mike,

First thing: Happy New Year's Eve! and New Year's too.

Second thing: I just checked out your publication list and you are writing about just those things that I am interested in! I'm going to have to e-mail you sometime, perhaps we can talk about imperceptible harms.

Okay...I just don't see where it is that we disagree or where I have been confusing when it comes to incommensurability. I want to set that to the side.

But, I want to distinguish two things that seem importantly different to me.

One, whether there are evils such that any actual good weighs less than it.

Two, whether there are any evils such that god would not be justified in permitting it for the sake of some actual good.

One way to understand Two is to interpret as One. Instead, one might think that god could be justified in permitting an evil for some good that does not outweigh it (that doesn't underweigh? it either). That is the view I'm interested in. I am thinking about someone who, for example, will argue that all natural evil is bad and that the beauty of simple natural laws is good, and that the good of having simple natural laws does not outweigh all the bad of the natural evil. But, they will go on to suggest that God is justified in permitting natural evil for the sake of having a world with beautiful simple natural laws.

That is a coherent view I think. It is one that will be motivated in part by accepting the idea that normative aesthetic properties are incommensurable with normative biological properties (pain).

I think this view has not received enough attention because, and this is rough, theist who argue that beauty "outweighs" the suffering from natural evil are susceptible to empirical disconfirmation. The more people suffer, the less likely it is that the beauty of our laws outweighs it. Also, the must believe that beauty can be measured, and that is not obvious. Finally, they will be forced to acknowledge equivalences between beauties and suffering, which is to say, roughly, that there is n number of deaths, or x hours of agony that will equal the value of the beauty of the natural laws. Again, this is odd.

Now, the theist can reject this conversation altogether and deny that beauty outweighs natural evil, but rather, that beauty is just plain important and that something like it could justify god in permitting natural evil.

So, there are some funny questions they do not need to answer. That is good, but they still must say something, by my lights, crazy. That the beauty of laws justifies god in permitting horrendous suffering. But, I once heard someone argue that the Mona Lisa is more valuable than one hundred starving Africans, so somewhere out there are people who think beauty is pretty important.

I also think the status of intuitions wrt comparable goods may be different, more reliable than, those wrt incomparable goods and this may make a difference too. But...I haven't argued for this for sure.

Christian, I'd be happy to forward these papers. Let me know.

What I can't understand are sentences like,

(1) X justifies G in permitting Y

or

(2) G permits Y for X's sake

when X and Y cannot be compared. How could X justify G in permitting Y if X is not better than (or as good as) Y? Indeed, justification actually requires much more. X justifies G in permitting Y only if (X&Y) is better than ~(XvY) and it is not possible for G to bring about (X&~Y). If one of these conditions is not fulfilled, then I don't think G is justifed in permitting Y. Or, perhaps less controversially, I don't understand what you have in mind by 'justification'.

Happy New Year!

The ethical view I favor is a pluralistic consequentialism. Roughly, one ought to perform the act from amongst ones alternatives that maximizes value. What is valuable will have subjective and objective elements and possibly some of these elements will be incommensurable. The values will be different kinds, justice, pleasure, autonomy, virtue, beauty and knowledge, to name a few. I take this to imply that on some occasions, one will be permitted to perform various acts such that by performing one act one will permissible maximize one type of value, and by performing another act, one will maximize a different type of value.

One is justified in performing some act if a world in which that act is performed is one of those worlds where a value is maximized. So,

(1) X justifies G in permitting Y

I think this might entail something like,

X is a reason for G to permit Y and permitting Y does not entail that some important value is not maximized.

Okay, I know that is a bit sloppy. Here is a pictorial sketch. Three non-overlapping spheres each which represents a domain of eligible value-stuffed worlds. They do not overlap because they are inconsistent and they are not better or worse than one another, but worlds in each sphere are better than or worse than other members in the same sphere. God can actualize, on some occasion, the best member of one of these spheres, but this entails not actualizing a world in some other sphere and hence God maximizes one value rather than another and a world which is not better than some other worlds.

Then again, perhaps the easiest way to do this will be to say S is justified in performing A iff a world in which A is performed by S is not worse than any world in which ~A is performed. This will be trivially true relative to some worlds, interesting relative to others.

Mike, I wasn't suggesting that

    Q1 Why is there so much evil?

Doesn't arise.

You summarized PVI's argument thusly:

"if there is no minimum amount of evil necessary for divine purposes, then God can permit more than the minimum necessary...if there is no minimum amount of evil necessary for divine purposes, van Inwagen urges, we cannot conclude that God is unjust or cruel for permitting more than the least amount of evil necessary for those purposes"

So the question to which I was referring was

    Q2 Why did God make a world with just this amount of evil.

which is a version of the question

    Q2' Why did God determine that there was just this amount of evil in the world?

or perhaps

    Q 3 How much evil is necessary for divine purposes?

This question is a prior question to

    Q4 Is there more evil than is necessary for divine purposes.

which could be a prelude to

    Q5 Is an affirmative answer to Q4 evidence against the existence of God?

Since I was suggesting that free will "helps explain why there are what evils there are" it would be kind of weird if I didn't think Q1 arose. 

I do believe there are other worlds where there are better beings and ones where we act better.  However, I believe that whether or not God knows what we will do (or they would do) with our (or their) freedom, our free acts are a large part of the explanation of the amount and distribution of evil in the world (other factors are necessary moral truths which God follows, and perhaps ontic indeterminacy).  [The paper I mentioned above argues that though there is no best *token* world there is a best *type* of world and that God created by saying "Let a token of that type be" and left it literally indeterminate which token came to be (it's inspired by PVI's "Place of Chance in a World Created by God").]]

Here's the present argument in a nutshell.

1. The question "Why did A determine that X" is appropriate only if A solely determined that X.
2. God does not solely determine that there are 1013 turps of evil in the world. 
3. The question "Why did God determine that there are 1013 turps of evil in the world?" is not appropriate. 

Some people don't think there's a moral difference between causing and allowing when you're omnipotent, and they are free to make their arguments, but that's a different discussion. 

Sorry, my HTML for superscript text was not accepted. That should be 10^13 turps of evil.

Trent,

It seems painfully obvious that all of these complications are unnecessary. Let me simplify the point. Suppose God can choose to actualize world w1 or w2. Suppose God does not alone fully actualize either world: w1 and w2 are each partly the result of our libertarian free actions. Let w1 have 3 turps of evil and w2 have 5,000,000 turps of evil, and let all evil be the result of our libertarian free actions. So far, so good?

Now suppose God knows exactly how many turps there are in each world and how they come about. Finally, suppose w2 is actual.

Now pick whatever description you'd like, it does not matter ot me one jot. If the overwrought description 'determining a world' is being used as some term of art, pick something else. However it's decided, there remains this question.

(1) Why would a God select the particular level of evil in w2 when w1 is so much better?

And I am perfectly happy to put it this way instead,

Q2. Why did God make a world with just this amount of evil?

After all, if he exists, he did make/determine/bring about/let occur/what have you, this world. And (we agree) he knew what he was doing. And (we agree) he had an alternative that was much better. And (we agree) he nonetheless passed over a better world and actualized this one.

If God did not "determine" w2 on your particular interpretation of 'determine', he is nonetheless responsible (on any plausible account of responsibility) for w2 being actual rather than w1. So Q2 is a perfectly reasonable question to ask. And frankly, it would be kind of silly to think that God is not responsible for w2. Imagine that God offers me a choice to have person A or B brought into being and he informs me that A will freely destroy the lives of a billion people and B will freely enhance the lives of 100 people. Kind of silly to deny that I am responsible for the deaths of those people if I ask God to create A. So the question (now to me) makes perfect sense,

Q2. Why did you make a world with just this amount of evil?

I could very easily have lessened the exact amount of evil in the world by having B actualized. But I didn't. And it is an absurd defense to respond that A (not I) freely brought about the evil; all I did was have A created in the full knowledge that he would freely kill all of those people.

All of this I think makes it clear that there is nothing inappropriate about asking Q2.

On a different point, you say,

"So the question to which I was referring was
Q2 Why did God make a world with just this amount of evil.

which is a version of the question

Q2' Why did God determine that there was just this amount of evil in the world?"

But Q2' is not even close to a version of Q2, under your assumption that God does not "determine worlds" that free agents play a role in actualizing. Assuming that Q2' is a version of Q2 plainly begs the question, given your views about "determining worlds".

On the first response, we're obviously comming at this from a quite different perspective. We probably have some very different assumptions (hopefully Jon will tell me what an assumption is on CD :D

On the second, at that point I was writing from the perspective I was critiquing.

Trent,

I don't know. Maybe our assumptions are different. I suppose I don't see why the question "why just this amount of evil?" is fairly and reasonably responded to with "that's inappropriate, I didn't bring about this evil alone". It seems either a dodge or a red herring or both. That is, even granting that the question is inappropriate (and I don't think it is), we agree that God could have seen to it that there was not just this amount of evil. He could have seen to it that there was much less. But he instead selected a world in which there was (or would be) just this much. That's what we're pointing up in asking why just this much.