Recently in Problem of Evil Category

This is the last installment of the Prosblogion Reading Group. I've found reading these posts and comments edifying, and I hope the rest of the readers have as well. I'd like to thank Matthew for setting this up, and for the other participants--both posters and commenters--for their great thoughts.

Below I discuss Tooley's response to Plantinga's response to Tooley. Or, put another way, Tooley's "Yes way!" to Plantinga's "No way!" To keep my comments at a manageable length I've referred back to Trent and Andrew's posts, rather than presenting the whole dialectic here. But I've tried to summarize the dialectic briefly in most places. For more detail on the original argument or Plantinga's response, be sure to see the discussions of the last two weeks.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews today published William Rowe's review of Plantinga & Tooley's Knowledge of God. A remarkably nice bit of timing on the part of NDPR!

Here are some rambling thoughts. Comments are welcome.

A traditional formulation of the problem of evil is to ask: "Why do bad things happen to good people and good things to bad people?" An interesting feature of our discourse--both academic and popular--about the problem of evil is that the second part is not much talked about these days.

There are, of course, good reasons for me not to be too deeply worried about the second part. Sinner that I am, I had better hope that good things happen to bad people. God's mercy is sovereign, and he has the right to refrain from, or at least delay, punishing the sinner. And, anyway, in the end, vengeance is his, and he will repay the unrepentant (may his grace give us the gift of final perseverance).

Still, the second part of the question does seem to embody a genuine concern for justice. Whether or not there is something bad about someone bad flourishing, there is something prima facie bad about someone bad flourishing because of her bad deeds, and yet we do observe apparent cases of this.

One interesting thing is that this bipartite formulation of the problem of evil makes it clear that this problem is one of divine justice. But considered as a problem of justice, we can see that some of what we say about the second part of the question can also be applied to the first. It is not contrary to justice to delay punishment. Likewise, it is not contrary to justice to delay reward--in fact, it might not be contrary to justice to omit reward completely (if there were a duty to reward good people, altruism would be harder).

Of course, one might hold that besides the question of divine justice, there is the question of divine benevolence. My feeling is that traditionally when religious people have worried about the problem of evil, they have worried not so much about divine infinite benevolence but about divine justice. I wonder if there is a good reason for this. Perhaps the idea is that divine infinite benevolence is sufficiently covered by God's giving us being ex nihilo, or maybe even by the infinite benevolence involved in the Father's generating the Son and the Father and Son producing the Holy Spirit. Maybe there is something right about seeing the problem of evil as a problem about justice.

I've often heard the charge that theists have a harder time responding to the problem of evil if they hold to a deontological ethical view. Deontology recognizes duties that can't easily be overridden by consequences the way consequentialism allows. Consequentialists say the right thing to do is to do whatever leads to the best consequences. If God does this, then God can do things that lead to bad consequences as long as the good consequences that also happen are better enough to outweigh the bad. So it's easier to deal with the problem of evil if all it takes to justify God's allowance of evil is that it leads to a slightly better outcome overall, even if it's worse with respect to the evil itself. Deontologists, on the other hand, might just say that the duty not to harm or not even to allow harm can't so easily be outweighed by the overall good. Some things are just wrong, and God shouldn't therefore do them. Allowing very great evils seems to be a pretty good candidate for that category of action. It's thus harder to respond to the problem of evil with a deontological view than it is with a consequentialist view.

I used to be a little disturbed at this problem, wondering whether a "higher goods" type of defense that I favor requires a consequentialist view, a view I'm not otherwise attracted to. But it's occurred to me recently that the problem assumes a kind of deontology that I don't agree with. It assumes the absolutism of Immanuel Kant's deontology, not a more moderated kind of deontology such as that of W.D. Ross, which I favor. On Ross's view, we have prima facie duties, none of which are absolute the way duties for Kant are. Duties can often conflict for Ross, and when they conflict only one will turn out to be an actual duty, whichever one is morally more important. In a case of lying to save a life, the life is more important than the normal duty not to lie, but in a case of lying to protect your reputation it's still going to be wrong to lie, even if the consequences are better from lying. So this is not consequentialism, but it's not absolutism either.

Now apply this to the problem of evil. There will be potential cases when God would not do something wrong, because even though the consequences are better it would be wrong to do it. But it leaves open that some goods are so important that God might allow pretty serious harm in order to achieve them. This means that the moderate deontologist can have consequence-based responses to the problem of evil that an absolutist deontologist can't have. This may have been all I was worried about losing by adopting a deontological ethical view, even if consequentialists might have yet more to say to defend a divinity from being immoral for allowing evil.

I've often heard the charge that theists have a harder time responding to the problem of evil if they hold to a deontological ethical view. Deontology recognizes duties that can't easily be overridden by consequences the way consequentialism allows. Consequentialists say the right thing to do is to do whatever leads to the best consequences. If God does this, then God can do things that lead to bad consequences as long as the good consequences that also happen are better enough to outweigh the bad. So it's easier to deal with the problem of evil if all it takes to justify God's allowance of evil is that it leads to a slightly better outcome overall, even if it's worse with respect to the evil itself. Deontologists, on the other hand, might just say that the duty not to harm or not even to allow harm can't so easily be outweighed by the overall good. Some things are just wrong, and God shouldn't therefore do them. Allowing very great evils seems to be a pretty good candidate for that category of action. It's thus harder to respond to the problem of evil with a deontological view than it is with a consequentialist view.

I used to be a little disturbed at this problem, wondering whether a "higher goods" type of defense that I favor requires a consequentialist view, a view I'm not otherwise attracted to. But it's occurred to me recently that the problem assumes a kind of deontology that I don't agree with. It assumes the absolutism of Immanuel Kant's deontology, not a more moderated kind of deontology such as that of W.D. Ross, which I favor. On Ross's view, we have prima facie duties, none of which are absolute the way duties for Kant are. Duties can often conflict for Ross, and when they conflict only one will turn out to be an actual duty, whichever one is morally more important. In a case of lying to save a life, the life is more important than the normal duty not to lie, but in a case of lying to protect your reputation it's still going to be wrong to lie, even if the consequences are better from lying. So this is not consequentialism, but it's not absolutism either.

Now apply this to the problem of evil. There will be potential cases when God would not do something wrong, because even though the consequences are better it would be wrong to do it. But it leaves open that some goods are so important that God might allow pretty serious harm in order to achieve them. This means that the moderate deontologist can have consequence-based responses to the problem of evil that an absolutist deontologist can't have. This may have been all I was worried about losing by adopting a deontological ethical view, even if consequentialists might have yet more to say to defend a divinity from being immoral for allowing evil.

I've often heard the charge that theists have a harder time responding to the problem of evil if they hold to a deontological ethical view. Deontology recognizes duties that can't easily be overridden by consequences the way consequentialism allows. Consequentialists say the right thing to do is to do whatever leads to the best consequences. If God does this, then God can do things that lead to bad consequences as long as the good consequences that also happen are better enough to outweigh the bad. So it's easier to deal with the problem of evil if all it takes to justify God's allowance of evil is that it leads to a slightly better outcome overall, even if it's worse with respect to the evil itself. Deontologists, on the other hand, might just say that the duty not to harm or not even to allow harm can't so easily be outweighed by the overall good. Some things are just wrong, and God shouldn't therefore do them. Allowing very great evils seems to be a pretty good candidate for that category of action. It's thus harder to respond to the problem of evil with a deontological view than it is with a consequentialist view.

I used to be a little disturbed at this problem, wondering whether a "higher goods" type of defense that I favor requires a consequentialist view, a view I'm not otherwise attracted to. But it's occurred to me recently that the problem assumes a kind of deontology that I don't agree with. It assumes the absolutism of Immanuel Kant's deontology, not a more moderated kind of deontology such as that of W.D. Ross, which I favor. On Ross's view, we have prima facie duties, none of which are absolute the way duties for Kant are. Duties can often conflict for Ross, and when they conflict only one will turn out to be an actual duty, whichever one is morally more important. In a case of lying to save a life, the life is more important than the normal duty not to lie, but in a case of lying to protect your reputation it's still going to be wrong to lie, even if the consequences are better from lying. So this is not consequentialism, but it's not absolutism either.

Now apply this to the problem of evil. There will be potential cases when God would not do something wrong, because even though the consequences are better it would be wrong to do it. But it leaves open that some goods are so important that God might allow pretty serious harm in order to achieve them. This means that the moderate deontologist can have consequence-based responses to the problem of evil that an absolutist deontologist can't have. This may have been all I was worried about losing by adopting a deontological ethical view, even if consequentialists might have yet more to say to defend a divinity from being immoral for allowing evil.

If skeptical theism is right, then any event may have ramifications far beyond our ken, ramifications that dwarf the original event in significance.  Some folks--notably Graham Oppy and our own Mike Almeida--have argued that this means that if skeptical theism is right, we ourselves do not have reason to prevent great evils, such as rapes and murders, because for aught that we know great good will come of them.

While I no longer accept skeptical theism, I think this argument is mistaken.  I am going to be very rough probabilistically here.  To do this precisely, would require bringing in appropriate measures of correlation, and then the post would be snowed under with technicalities.  The technicalities in this case are important, and I have not worked them out, so maybe what I say will ultimately fail.  But let's try to be rough here.

Any action has foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences.  We all agree on this, even if we are not skeptical theists.  The only difference is that the skeptical theist thinks that the unforeseeable ones may be much larger than we think.  Now, there are, basically, three possibilities about the space of all possible actions:

1. There is no correlation between the values of foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences.
2. There is a positive correlation between the values of foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences.
3. There is a negative correlation between the values of foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences.

The quick version of my rough argument is this.  Even given skeptical theism, we have no reason to accept (3).  But given either (1) or (2), we should prevent evils when the foreseeable consequences are good, without worrying unduly about unforeseeable consequences.  For unless there is a negative correlation between the values of the foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences, it is not more likely that something unforeseeable and bad will come of preventing the evil than that something unforeseeable and good will come of preventing the evil. 

Skeptical theism makes (1) plausible.  Naturalism makes (1) or (2) somewhat plausible (evolutionarily, we would likely develop choice-procedures that have beneficial unforeseeable consequences).  In either case, we have no reason to accept (3), I think.

Theism entails that evil is not a positive reality, since all positive reality either is God or is continually sustained in existence by God. Augustine thinks that evil is a privation of good. A privation is more than a lack. Leglessness in a dog is a privation, but in a snake is just a lack. If evil were just a lack, then the problem of evil would be easily solved by the consideration that, of necessity, everything other than God is lacking, since only God is infinite. I want to argue, however, that seeing evil as a privation of good still helps vis-a-vis the problem of evil. This argument continues two earlier posts of mine which discuss an Augustinian theodicy (Part I; Part II).

Sometimes an atheist who argues against the existence of God based on the problem of evil does not herself believe that there is such a thing as objective evil. The standard explanation of the apparent inconsistency here is that the atheist is arguing on the assumption that there is objective good and evil, an assumption that it is fair to use in an argument against the typical theist who is committed to it. I used to think this was a perfectly satisfactory story about what the atheist is doing. But no longer.

Here's why. The atheist is arguing that there are events E such that:
(*) If it were the case that there is a God and objective good and evil, then E would be an evil, and God would have no justification for permitting E.
(Or maybe it should be an indicative conditional, but not argued for merely on the grounds that the antecedent is false.) Now it seems strange to be confident about this complex conditional proposition when one is not confident about the proposition:
(**) E is objectively evil.
To argue for (*), the atheist will use our intuitions about what kinds of things could morally justify what. But these intuitions also pull us towards (**), and do so more strongly. We should be rather more confident that, say, some horrible crime is unambiguously and objectively evil than we are of the claim that somewhere there isn't some justification for God's allowing it. For one, part of what makes the atheist's argument plausible is precisely our belief that the crime in question is so horribly evil that it is hard to see what could justify such an evil. And that the crime is objectively evil is an essential part of this (if relativism holds, allowing the crime would be justified if God simply got himself to think about this as justified!). But if the atheist thinks that our faculties of moral intuition are wrong about the crime being so horrible that it is an objective evil, then I do not see how she can have a justified confidence in thinking that they are reliable at judging of conditionals like (*).

But perhaps the amoralist atheist is not offering an argument that she finds plausible. Perhaps she is simply offering an argument that she thinks the theist finds plausible. The theist claims, let us say, that God would be justified in allowing the crime in order to allow the victim the opportunity for exercising the virtue of forgiveness. The atheist says that the justification is not sufficient. But the atheist does not believe this. Instead, she believes that this is what the theist is committed to by the theist's moral intuitions. But the theist denies such commitment. Then the discussion takes on an air of unreality--the atheist claiming that the theist's intuitions say otherwise than the theist claims they do.

Of course none of this arises in the case of the problem of evil raised by someone who believes in objective good and evil.

I have a question about Plantinga's Free Will Defense that I assume someone here can help me answer.  It's a question, not an argument.

I've long suspected that the basic structure of Plantinga's free will defense doesn't require a libertarian view of free will, but I've never gotten around to trying to figure out in detail why that might be so. Well, Andrew Fulford has a proposal. Relying on the notion of creaturely integrity, Andrew offers an account of why God's options might be limited by how God himself may have intended a person's compatibilist freedom to work itself out, and for all we know this may be true for every actual person. In other words, it may well be that transworld depravity of a very particular sort may be true. It's possible for all we know that, for each actual person, there is no possible world in which that person does no wrong. There is the problem of dealing with non-actual people, but that's where God's choice to actualize people with a certain kind of creaturely integrity comes in. Perhaps it's true that anyone with the right sort of creaturely integrity, that God would have good moral reasons for wanting to bestow on people, will be transworld depraved in the way Andrew imagines.

What's interesting about this proposal is that objections to it seem to be the same sort that people might raise against Plantinga's own libertarian version of transworld depravity or his use of it. If that's right, then he's used the basic structure of the free will defense without relying on libertarian freedom.

It has occurred to me--this is likely well-known--that one should not both accept sceptical theism and Plantinga's self-defeat argument against naturalism+evolution.

The conditional probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable given sceptical theism is inscrutable.  It remains inscrutable no matter what non-question-begging evidence is added to the mix.  If Plantinga is right that the inscrutability of

P1 = P(our cognitive faculties are reliable | naturalism and evolution)

would be an undercutting defeater for all our beliefs if we accepted naturalism and evolution, then by the same token the inscrutability of

P2 = P(our cognitive faculties are reliable | sceptical theism)

would be an undercutting defeater for all our beliefs if we accepted sceptical theism.

The argument that sceptical theism is self-defeating seems stronger than that naturalism+evolution is self-defeating.  For the claim that P1 is low or inscrutable is highly controversial.  But the claim that P2 is inscrutable is obvious.

Likewise, if radical voluntarism says that God chooses what is right and wrong and good and bad independently of any prior normative facts, then I think

P3 = P(our cognitive faculties are reliable | radical voluntarism)

is inscrutable.  For P(falsehood is good | radical voluntarism) is inscrutable (and no evidence will help to make us conclude that falsehood is bad if radical voluntarism is true, because if falsehood is good, God might well try to make us think falsehood is bad, because being wrong about the value of falsehood would be good for us), and P(our cognitive faculties are reliable | God exists and falsehood is good) is low or inscrutable.

I am inclined to endorse these as arguments against sceptical theism and radical voluntarism.