Ever since the Religion at Rutgers conference earlier this month I've been thinking about evil and have posted here and here about it (note: thoughts about evil should be strictly distinguished from evil thoughts!). Here I want to report, as accurately as I can, an experimental conversation I had with my wife, Sarah, about bringing suffering people into the world.
The starting question was this: Suppose you had to take intense fertility treatments in order to have children. Suppose further that it is virtually guaranteed that you will have octuplets (just bracket ordinary concerns about having octuplets, go to a world where that's really no hassle), and that it is also virtually guaranteed that at least one and possibly two of the children will experience side-effects of the fertility treatment such that they will suffer serious physical and emotional pain for the first decade of their life. However, it is also virtually guaranteed--perfectly guaranteed if it helps--that the other children will have quite good lives and in fact most will be quite happy. The only other option is not to have any children at all. What would you do? I'll put her reply and the rest of the dialog below the fold.
Sarah: Hmmm. That's tough. I don't know if I could do it.
Trent: Would you be prevented by moral reasons or what?
Sarah: No, I'm just not sure if I could psychologically handle being responsible for that.
Trent: So what if someone you knew did it.
Sarah: I'd probably thing she was a better person than me, stronger.
Trent: So you don't think there'd be anything morally wrong or immoral about doing it?
Sarah: Oh, no.
Trent: So your reservations would be based on what then?
Sarah: I suppose it would be a selfish desire on my part not to watch them suffer.
Trent: Now keep in mind that after the ten years of suffering they will have normal happy lives. In fact, suppose you knew that one day they'd be asked if they wish they'd never been born and their response would be to laugh at the question. What then?
Sarah: I suppose if I knew that, really knew it, then I could maybe force myself to go ahead with it and endure.
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Personally, I find this very telling. The application is fairly obvious. It does shift the problem of evil toward the problem of Hell, since it seems that those in Hell have existences which are on whole not worth living. When I asked Sarah what she'd do if it were virtually guaranteed that one or two of the children would never get better. She said that now that she knew where the questioning was going she knew what she thought she ought to say but didn't know if she really thought that. At any rate, its a much harder question that way (and I no longer think free-will helping much with the Hell problem without transworld damnation, which, as I've said, I don't gravitate toward).
Hi Trent
I don't think the thought experiment quite captures precisely what people (like me) who are very moved by the problem of evil. This is two things.
1. That the explanation of the existence of evil doesn't seem plausible given God's omnipotence (ie why octuplets). In other words, we can see how your wife could only have one possible choice, but this seems much less plausible for God.
2. and that often the explanations of why evils are deemed to be necessary involve what looks like using one as a means to the end of benefiting another.
This last part in particular seems disanalogous.
David
Trent
I find your dialogue interesting, but I am not convinced that your questions do not lead one to specific answers, interesting as they are.
How about the following:
1) Evil (suffering, harm injury) is a necessary condition for good.
2) We have free-will to bring about either the existence of evil with the possiblity of some good developing out of the evil or refraining from doing evil and eliminate the possiblity of a recognizable good.
3) If 1 and 2 are true should I choose to do the evil so as to make it possible for those goods to exist?