I was talking to Norman Daniels the other day about healthcare reform and he had some interesting observations about the history of healthcare reform in the US. He remarked that Roosevelt could have easily provided healthcare in a workers protection bill because healthcare at that time was cheap. Evidently, other nations provided universal healthcare earlier on in the development of the healthcare system (with the exception of Canada which began universal healthcare in the 70's). Norman also mentioned that Ted Kennedy says in his memoirs that he wished he had made a deal with Nixon on healthcare. Evidently, Nixon had a healthcare bill that was much more just than current healthcare bills and Kennedy viewed his failure to work with Nixon as a major mistake. Now, what does this have to do with philosophy of religion? Let's assume Kennedy's lapse is a social evil. It is an omission that results in a much worse state of affairs that led to more suffering than would have otherwise resulted. I think there are some interesting features of social evils that aren't shared by moral evils or natural evils. First, social evils are different from moral evils because the evil that results isn't a direct result of personal agency. It's not as if Kennedy's omission directly caused Joe to be denied healthcare because of a preexisting condition. Second, hindsight can be an important factor in social evils. Kennedy's lapse provides an interesting case in which he seems to have knowledge of the relevant counterfactuals. If he had worked with Nixon then a much more just healthcare system would have resulted. The presence of knowledge of counterfactuals here seems relevantly different from the case of natural evil. There's not to my knowledge a discussion of social evil in the POE literature, though I'd be happy to learn otherwise. If the two differences I mentioned survive reflection then it's possible that reflection on social evil will shed new light on the POE. What do you guys think? I'm particularly interested in whether you think social evil is different in kind from moral evil and natural evil and also whether social evil poses a special problem not already posed by moral and natural evils.
Social evils and the goodness of God
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Ted,
I think this is interesting. I don't know if there's much discussion of this in the literature, but I think tragedy of the commons cases are interesting instances of social evils. I don't think we can fault those who pursue self-interest in ways that they know will lead to horrible outcomes when other similarly situated agents pursue their ends in similar ways when there's really no feasible way to change their behavior in a way that would be really prudentially horrible and none of these agents are violating any sort of deontic side-constraint in how they pursue their ends. Get a small plot of land, some sheep, some farmers with families to feed, and we got problems.
Thanks, Clayton. The commons cases can provide a powerful form of social evil. Idealizing a bit (well, more than a bit): imagine each economic agent is finite but perfectly rational and good (i.e., they won't engage in any action that results in foreseeable harm). Even in this idealized case, we could still get significant harms. The harm that results from individuals following Friedmanian economics isn't a form of natural evil and it isn't a form of moral evil. So it looks like one way to press the problem of social evil is to show that even under ideal conditions with no moral evil and no natural evil, social evils could still arise.
Even in this idealized case, we could still get significant harms. The harm that results from individuals following Friedmanian economics isn't a form of natural evil and it isn't a form of moral evil. So it looks like one way to press the problem of social evil is to show that even under ideal conditions with no moral evil and no natural evil, social evils could still arise.
It's hard for me to see why it isn't a form of moral evil. It is an evil that results from one's free choices or form the free choices of many people. Now, we can add interesting dimensions to moral evils: limited knowledge, probabilistic outcomes, collective moral evil, etc. But it still looks like it is the result of free action, and hence moral evil. That's not to say that it isn't a neglected form of moral evil.
I agree that this is an important and neglected topic, and I agree with Clayton that "tragedy of the commons" cases are good examples. (Prisoner's Dilemmas are a good general form of the problem.)
It is true that these evils result from free choices, as Mike says, but the point of them is that they don't appear to be culpably bad choices. So while you can pin the existence on the evil on the exercise of free will, you can't pin it on a depraved will.
Thanks, Heath. I agree. Free choice is a necessary condition for moral evil but not sufficient. The Kennedy case is instructive. Kennedy's lapse resulted in significant harm, but it wasn't foreseeable and he's not to be blamed for it.
Is the following a case of the same thing? The women who died in childbirth in the past because their doctors thought that hand-washing is pointless.
The structure is: x freely did A, and A resulted in evil E, but x did not know that A increases the probability of E.
There are, indeed, many evils such that had some fact been known, the evil would have been largely averted. If people knew a year earlier that a natural disaster would happen, the death-toll would be much smaller. Similarly, if people knew about vaccines earlier, etc. Or if my friend had known earlier that he was mentally ill, many evils would have been averted through treatment (actually, my thinking on this largely comes through that friend's mentioning this--obviously existentially relevant to him--version of the problem of evil).
This is true even for some moral evils: if George knew that Fred put poison in his cup, he wouldn't have drunk it; if Fred knew the IRS would catch him, he wouldn't have cheated; if Patrick had known that A was wrong, he wouldn't have done it (in this last case, he might not be culpable, but it's still a moral evil).
So, a serious part of the problem of evil is the problem of ignorance of relevant facts. It may be the case that much of the non-moral problem of evil reduces to this (maybe it's not that the frequency of tornadoes changed when Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden, but because they stopped listening to him, he stopped giving them catastrophic weather updates).
Probably, a theodicy here has to talk about the value of us gaining knowledge by our own powers when that knowledge can be gained by our own powers. I don't think much has been written on this (though some of Descartes' remarks in the Meditations are probably relevant).
"him" is "God" in the second-last parenthetical remark in my comment.
I don't think the problem is fundamentally about ignorance. The problem is strongest when everyone knows what the choice structure is. Again, just take some form of the Prisoner's Dilemma, one with full information about the choice structure but a lack of trust between parties. Then either (a) one holds that it is always morally evil to "defect", no matter how bad the consequences for oneself or one's loved ones, thus saving the Free Will Defense for these cases, or (b) people do defect, in a morally non-culpable way, resulting in significantly greater suffering than if everyone had all cooperated, raising Ted's problem.
A wrinkle on this is when people don't really understand that they are in a PD, and thus can see the predictable bad outcomes of cooperating but not the potential good of universal coooperation.
There is some support in the Christian tradition for (a)--exceptionless prohibitions of various sorts--but taken as a general claim about all possible PD-type situations it sounds superheroic to me.
Again, just take some form of the Prisoner's Dilemma . . . Then either (a) one holds that it is always morally evil to "defect", no matter how bad the consequences for oneself or one's loved ones, thus saving the Free Will Defense for these cases, or (b) people do defect, in a morally non-culpable way, resulting in significantly greater suffering than if everyone had all cooperated, raising Ted's problem.
The problem is that the PD srtucture holds for the altruistic case, too. Suppose you have a bunch of people each of whom is a (pure) altruist. For instance, each insists that others go through the door before he does, or each insists that each take the pain-relieving medicine before he does, etc. And everyone is left outside or suffering more pain, which is the second to worst outcome for each (as in all PD's). If everyone cared less about others than he does, everyone would be better off. So we get "social evils" arising from morally good behavior, too. Good behavior does not in general entail cooperative behavior.
Very helpful thoughts! If the fundamental problem is with collective action given non-culpable limitations of knowledge and resources then the free will defense is not a good candidate theodicy. I wonder about a greater-good defense. I initially thought that our knowledge of the relevant counterfactuals provides a huge obstacle to such defense and this still seems right. Similarly, this knowledge seems to affect a skeptical theist response.
(Apologies if this is all very poor.)
Dr. Almeida: Why couldn't these ideal altruists realize this, and opt for a system of lots as to what order they take the good? If a pure altruist wants to maximise the good others have then something like that seems acceptable (everyone gets the good, and no one violates their altruistic obligations - they don't need to 'care less', but rather recognise how to channel the usually praiseworthy desires of themselves and others to avoid something counter-productive).
If by 'pure altruism' you mean each of them wants to maximize the difference in the good others have compared to them, then my sort of solution wouldn't work. But then again, I'd argue that this sort of altruism isn't as morally praiseworthy as the 'maximize everyone else's goods' idea.
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I think the 'social evil' being talked about so far is two different problems:
1) Circumstances where otherwise good people are driven to do evil things despite good knowledge of how evil they are.
2) Otherwise good people bring about considerable evil through ignorance or (at worst) fairly minor moral lapses.
I think Heath White is thinking of the former, whilst Ted's example is of the latter.
An example of 1) would be that several families (including yours) are stranded somewhere with limited supplies, and you realise the only chance of your family to survive would be to take all of the supplies as your own (and the other families are in the same situation and realise this too). Another would be an account of a Holocaust survivor when having lost her clogs (and knowing that workers without clogs would be killed) she stole someone else's. Perhaps moral saints could do the right thing (pick lots perhaps, not steal), but that seems wildly supererogatory, and accounts of people in these horrific situations tend to tell of them doing horrific things (although not always - see the case of Maximillian Kolbe).
We're more inclined to blame the circumstance than the actual moral choice - imperfect though it was. It is evil for normal (or even almost-saintly) people to be put in such circumstances which drive them to do evil, even out of usually praiseworthy concerns (e.g. love of one's family). Maybe we can call this 'second order' evil: the 'balance of blame' for the evils that occurred lies here, rather than on the agents who actually committed the act. Whether it's natural or moral evil depends on the cause of this 'second order evil'. In the case of the stranding (from some accident, perhaps) it would be natural, in the case of the Holocaust, it is the Nazi's who should be blamed, not only for the evils they committed, but for the evils engendered in the otherwise-good people in their concentration camps. In fact, driving good people to commit moral evil strikes me as an especially heinous moral evil itself.
2) I think is closer to the Ted Kennedy example. Presuming the necessary about implementing universal healthcare being good, then Kennedy not teaming up with Nixon lead to a lot of evil (fiscal conservatives can pick an example of unintended consequences of state intervention if they like). Even if Kennedy should have known to team up with Nixon, then it seems what happened is wildly disproportional to this moral lapse - a bit like me not paying attention to a boring lecture in medical school leads to an avoidable death of one of my patients. Although moral evil, it seems to be a case of evil taking a 'life of it's own' and having ramifications disproportionate to Kennedy's blame. Kennedy's lapse might have killed a lot of people, but he surely wasn't worse than a murderer.
Another example would be charity. Assume Singer and Unger are right in that we should give all of our unnecessary wealth (beyond a decent minimum: I think Singer recommends $30,000 pa as a highest value for this) to charities to save and improve lives in the developing world. Although I think (like them) that doing so isn't supererogatory, I don't think not doing so is a great moral evil. Yet the collective failure of affluent societies to do so produces vast evils.
So I think this stuff does raise interesting wrinkles for the problem of evil. On the other side of the coin, these considerations might serve as good reasons for agreeing with the Christian thesis of our depravity or moral poverty: almost all of us would do unspeakable things but for living in propitious circumstances (I think Kant said something about how blessed we are to so often not have the opportunity of evil), and that what we think are 'minor' lapses aren't really minor at all. Anyway, sorry if I've written much but said little.
Ted:
"If the fundamental problem is with collective action given non-culpable limitations of knowledge and resources then the free will defense is not a good candidate theodicy"
But it may be that the same thing that makes free will defenses plausible applies here, namely the intuition that there is a great value in our--individually or collectively--being to a significant degree the causes of our lives. This includes not just being significant partial causes of our characters (the free will defense case) but also being significant partial causes of our knowledge-that and knowledge-how (so it wouldn't do for everything to proceed by divine revelation).
It may, also, be that some of the counterfactuals lack truth value, and maybe even that the conditional probabilities are undefined.
Alex:
Perhaps, but the causal relations here hold of a plural entity, not an individual.
Dr. Almeida: Why couldn't these ideal altruists realize this, and opt for a system of lots as to what order they take the good? If a pure altruist wants to maximise the good others have then something like that seems acceptable (everyone gets the good, and no one violates their altruistic obligations - they don't need to 'care less', but rather recognise how to channel the usually praiseworthy desires of themselves and others to avoid something counter-productive).
Hi Greg,
'Mike' or whatever is fine. There are lots of ways to resolve interaction problems in which cooperation fails. My point was simply that altruistic agents are in no better position to resolve PD's than are egoistic agents. They both fail to resolve these, and for pretty much the same reasons. One might think that neutral agents--for instance, utilitarian agents--might do better in PD's. And often they do. But in many cases there are altruists/egoists who can better.
Resolutions to PD's are often coercive, not rational. In social schemes in which agents are not in general coerced, it can be better to have a mix of egoistic agents and altruistic ones. This might be better of we are measuring by the overall utility of outcomes. But how good a social scheme is might not be measured by how beneficial it is. Compare how poorly rational agents do in Newcomb problems. Rational agents "ain't so rich".
So Ted's problem raises lots of fascinating issues about how to measure the goodness of a society/world; the kinds of worlds God might want to actualize; whether God might want a world with perfectly altruistic agents; whether it might be better overall to have some mix of good and bad agents; whether God might want a world with perfectly rational agents; whether God might want a world without coercion (even God's coercion), and so on.
Ted:
But if God is himself a community, and if value is related to similarity to God, then there may be a value to a community's being a se to a significant degree. (Hey, one might derive a principle of subsidiary from this, too.)
Probably, a theodicy here has to talk about the value of us gaining knowledge by our own powers when that knowledge can be gained by our own powers. I don't think much has been written on this
I think Swinburne develops something like this in response to natural evil (in Providence and the PofE, I believe). He claims that it is more valuable for us to gain knowledge of good and evil via experience with the world than it is for God to implant such knowledge into our minds. (For some reason this kind of move seems more intuitively plausible to me when we are talking about moral virtues rather than knowledge, though maybe you can tell a story about the value of intellectual virtues freely chosen, in the teeth of temptation, etc.)