As part of my interest in theodicy, I am interested in classifying evils. Here is a class I haven't seen discussed in the literature: major evils that are an overwhelming aggregation of small evils. What made me think of this was an email from a student who had suffered from a myriad of individually small things over the week, but where the cumulation is really large. In those cases, the whole appears bigger than the sum of the parts.
The evil grows exponentially(-ish) as the duration/number of evils is prolonged...it is not mere addition of evil.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say it's exponential--eventually one might get used to evils. It's a pretty complicated function, with exponential growth initially, and then decay to linearity, maybe.
ReplyDeletethats what the (-ish) was intended to cover. :)
ReplyDeleteWhen functions get difficult you can simplify and add an (-ish).