Presentism, evil and privation

Suppose at 8 am, I promised you to call you before noon, and then I didn’t, even though I have no excuse. That’s an evil. When did this evil happen?

If time is continuous, there is no good candidate for the time of this evil. For the omission of calling happened before noon, so noon or later are not when the evil happened. But at any time before noon today, it wasn’t yet true that the promise was unfulfilled, since, if time is continuous, there was always a little bit more time (though, granted, once that time got short enough, it would have taken a miracle to call).

If time is discrete, there is exactly one somewhat plausible candidate for the time of the evil: the very last moment of time time before noon, call it t₁₂₋. It was then that the promise became unfulfilled, and yet that time was itself a time at which the promise was being broken. But even so, even though t₁₂₋ is a somewhat plausible candidate for the time of the evil, it’s not really a great candidate. For the omission didn’t just happen at the very end of the interval of times. It happened throughout the interval.

It seems that the right way to temporally locate the evil is to say that it happened on the time interval between 8 and 12. But note that this is interval-valued temporal location is intuitively different from the case of a headache that one might have from 10 to 11. For we can think of the whole evil of the headache as a sum of evils that are located at shorter intervals or even moments. But it seems the promise-breaking isn’t a sum of evils located at shorter intervals or moments, because the only shorter interval or moment that contains a relevant evil is an interval or moment that contains t₁₂₋ (and even that only if time is discrete). Rather, the promise-breaking is essentially spread over the interval from 8 to 12.

This provides a counterexample to the combination of presentism with a privation theory of evil. For on a privation theory of evil, each evil is constituted by a privation—a lack of something that should be there. But on presentism, things can only exist at specific times, and likewise privations can only be found at specific times. But the evil of promise-breaking is not at a time.

Yet another argument against artifacts

1. If any complex artifacts really exist, instruments of torture really exist.

2. Instruments of torture are essentially evil.

3. Nothing that is essentially evil really exists.

4. So, instruments of torture do not really exist. (2 and 3)

5. So, no complex artifacts really exist. (1 and 4)

One argument for (3) is from the privation theory of evil.

Another is a direct argument from theism:

6. Everything that really exists is created by God.

7. Nothing created by God is essentially evil.

8. So, nothing that is essentially evil really exists.

A privation theory of evil without lacks of entities

Taking the privation theory literally, evil is constituted by the non-existence of something that should exist. This leads to a lot of puzzling questions of what that “something” is in cases such as error and pain.

But I am now wondering whether one couldn’t have a privation theory of evil on which evil is a lack of something, but not of an entity. What do I mean? Well, imagine you’re a thoroughgoing nominalist, believing in neither tropes nor universals. Then you think that there is no such thing as red, but of course you can say that sometimes a red sign fades to gray. It is natural to say that the faded sign is lacking the due color red, and the nominalist should be able to say this, too.

Suppose that in addition to being a thoroughgoing nominalist, you are a classical theist. Then you will want to say this: the sign used to participate in God by being red, but now it no longer thusly participates in God (though it still otherwise participates in God). Even though you can’t be a literal privation theorist, and hold that some entity has perished from the sign, you can be a privation theorist of sorts, by saying that the sign has in one respect stopped participating in God.

A lot of what I said in the previous two paragraphs is fishy. The “thusly” seems to refer to redness, and “one respect” seems to involve a quantification over respects. But presumably nominalists say stuff like that in contexts other than God and evil. So they probably think they have a story to tell about such statements. Why not here, then?

Furthermore, imagine that instead of a nominalist we have a Platonist who does not believe in tropes (not even the trope of participating). Then the problems of the “thusly” and “one respect” and the like can be solved. But it is still the case that there is no entity missing from the sign. Yet we still recognizably have a privation theory.

This makes me wonder: could it be that a privation theory that wasn’t committed to missing entities solve some of the problems that more literal privation theories face?

Another way out of the metaphysical problem of evil

The metaphysical problem of evil consists in the contradiction between:

1. Everything that exists is God or is created by God.

2. God is not an evil.

3. God does not create anything that is an evil.

4. There exists an evil.

The classic Augustinian response is to deny (4) by saying that evil “is” just a lack of a due good. This has serious problems with evil positive actions, errors, pains, etc.

Here is a different way out. Say that a non-fundamental object x is an object x such that the proposition that x exists is wholly grounded in some proposition that makes no reference to x. Now we deny (3) and replace it with:

5. God does not create anything fundamental that is an evil.

How could God create something non-fundamental that is an evil? By a combination of creative acts and refrainings from creative acts whose joint outcome grounds the existence of the non-fundamental evil, while foreseeing without intending the non-fundamental evil. Of course, this requires the kind of story about intention that the Principle of Double Effect uses.

Thus, consider George Shaw’s erroneous (initial) error that there are no platypuses. God creates George Shaw. He creates Shaw’s belief. He creates platypuses. The belief isn’t an evil. The platypuses aren’t an evil. The combination of the belief and the platypuses is an error. But the combination of the two is not a fundamental entity (even if the belief and the platypuses are). God can intend the belief to exist and the platypuses to exist without intending the combination to exist.

Talk against privation theory of evil

I'm giving a Zoom talk against the privation theory of evil (with an alternative provided) for Liverpool University on Thursday at 9 am Central Time / 15:00 UK time. You need to register if you are interested in attending.

Impairment and saving lives

Bob and Carl are drowning and you can save only one of them. Bob is a human being in the prime of life, physically and mentally healthy, highly intelligent, and leading a happy and fulfilling life as a physicist committed to lifelong celibacy. To look at him, Carl is Bob’s identical twin. Carl has the same physical and mental powers as Bob, and leads a very similar happy and fulfilling life as a physicist committed to lifelong celibacy.

But there is one crucial difference that you know about, but Carl does not. Carl is actually a member of a superintelligent humanoid alien species. However, due to an unfortunate untreatable genetic condition, Carl suffers from a severe intellectual impairment, having merely the intelligence of a highly intelligent human. In order that Carl might avoid the stigma of the impairment, his parents had some highly sophisticated surgery done on him to make him fit into human society, and arranged for him to be adopted by a human family and raised as a human. No one except for you on earth will ever know that Carl isn’t human. You know because you happened to see the aliens arranging this (but you haven’t told anyone, because you don’t want people to think you are crazy).

Should you save Bob or Carl from drowning? My intuition is that if the above is all that you know, you have no reason to prefer saving one over the other. If one of them is slightly more likely to be saved by you (e.g., they are slightly closer to you), you should go for that one, but otherwise it’s a toss-up.

But notice that if you save Carl, there will be more natural evil in the world: There will be a severe intellectual impairment, which won’t be present if you choose to save Bob instead. It seems pretty plausible that:

1. If you have a choice between two otherwise permissible courses of action, which result in the same goods, but one of them results in exactly one additional evil, you have a moral reason to choose the course of action that does not result in the evil.

Thus, it seems, you should save Bob.

So there is something paradoxical here. On the one hand, there seems to be no reason to pick Bob over Carl. On the other hand, the plausible general ethical principle (1) suggests you should pick Bob.

How can we get out of this paradox? Here are two options.

First, one could say that impairment is not an evil at all. As long as Carl leads a fulfilling life—even if it is merely fulfilling by human standards and not those of his species—his impairment is no evil. Indeed, we might even take the above story to be a reductio ad absurdum of an Aristotelian picture of species as having norms attached to them with it being a harm to one to fall short of these norms.

Second, one argue that principle (1) does not actually apply to the case. For there is a difference of goods in saving Carl: you are saving a member of a superintelligent species, while in the case of saving Bob, you are saving a mere human. For this to fit with the intuition that it’s a toss-up whether to save Bob or Carl, it has to be the case that what the superintelligence of his species adds to the reasons for saving Carl is balanced by what his abnormally low intelligence subtracts from these reasons.

Of these options, I am more attracted to the second. And the second has an interesting and important consequence: "mere" membership in a natural kind can have significant value. This has important repercussions for the status of the human fetus.

Online talk on privation theory of evil

I will be speaking online at the New Perspectives in Philosophy of Religion conference tomorrow, July 21, 2021, at 3:00 pm Central Time (5 pm Brasilia Time), on the privation theory of evil. Live streaming will be here.

Bennett's positive and negative instrumentality

Bennett offers this account of positive vs. negative instrumentality. If the volume of the space of possible bodily movements occupied by doing A is greater than that occupied by doing not-A, then doing A is a negative instrumentality; if it is less, then it is positive. Thus, raising one’s hand is positive: one can, for instance, raise, lower or keep one’s hand level, and raising occupies less volume of movement space than not-raising.

Here’s a curious consequence. Let M be the maximum speed at which I can move. Let A be moving at a velocity of magnitude greater than half of M. Then A occupies more of the space of possible bodily movements than not-A and hence counts as negative by Bennett’s criteria.

Why? Well, velocity is a vector: it has a magnitude and a dimension. The relevant action space (assuming the movement is two-dimensional—we can’t fly) is a disc of radius M. The subset occupied by not-A is the a (closed) disc of radius M/2. The area (the two-dimensional analogue of volume) occupied by not-A is (1/4)πM². The area of the whole movement space is πM². The area occupied by A is thus πM² − (1/4)πM² = (3/4)πM². Thus, A occupies three times the area occupied by not-A. Hence, not-A is a positive action and A is a negative action.

This seems quite wrong.

Privation, false belief and time

According to the privation theorist, when an evil occurs, some entity is lacking such that were that entity to exist, there would have been no evil there.

The challenge for the privation theorist is to find the missing entity. Here is one special case of this challenge: the case of justified false belief.

Suppose yesterday I had a justified belief that today you will not dance a jig. And yet today you did dance a jig. What is the missing entity, such that if it existed, there would have been no evil? I can think of only two candidates for the missing entity: truth and correspondence.

Consider first the truth suggestion. My belief yesterday lacked truth. But is this missing truth an entity? It had better be for it to help the privation theorist. But then by choosing to dance a jig today, you brought it about that an entity did not exist yesterday. But we surely do not have such routine and easy power over what entities existed in the past!

The above argument generalizes: whatever the missing entity is, it had better not be an entity that would have existed yesterday. It needs to be an entity that would have existed today, presumably at the very time when by dancing a jig and thereby ensured its nonexistence. (This is already problematic. For what went wrong was my belief yesterday, not your action today, so it seems that what makes the evil an evil should be located yesterday, because of the world-to-mind direction of fit of belief.)

So, perhaps correspondence is such an entity, and perhaps the correspondence between mind and reality exists precisely at the time at which that reality exists. But this is also problematic. For suppose that today you secretly dance a jig, and tomorrow Alice forms the false belief that you didn’t. If correspondence exists at the time of the reality, then were it to be the case that Alice instead tomorrow formed the belief that you did dance a jig, there would have been a correspondence between mind and reality today, during your jigging. Thus, depending on which belief Alice forms tomorrow, either a correspondence does or does not exist today, and so once again we have a routine and ordinary power over what entities existed in the past, which is absurd.

Could we say that the correspondence exists at both the time of the belief and the time described by the belief? But that doesn’t help: Alice by forming a belief tomorrow still affects whether there is a correspondence today.

I suppose one could have a messy view on which when a true belief is about the past, the correspondence exists at the time of the belief, and when the true belief is about the future, the correspondence exists at the time of the described reality. But now suppose that I have a conjunctive true belief about what you did yesterday and what you will do tomorrow. That belief is about both the past and the future. When does it exist? If we say that it exists today or yesterday, then your action tomorrow can affect what exists today or yesterday, and that’s absurd as before. So that correspondence has to exist tomorrow.

But then we are forced into this even messier view: if a belief is true, the correspondence exists at the time of the belief or at the last of the times the belief is about, whichever comes later. But now we have more problems. For suppose you will exist forever (in heaven, say), and I form the true belief that you will never dance a jig. But there is no last time that the belief is about! Indeed, whatever the time t the correspondence exists at, there will be a later potential jig-dancing time at which by choosing whether to dance a jig you control whether that correspondence exists at t. And it seems implausible that just by living forever you gain the power to create or annihilate past entities.

Note that the problem here afflicts anyone who thinks that tokens of correspondence between belief and reality are genuine entities.

More on the privation theory of evil

Back in April, I suggested that there are two possible privation theories concerning evil:

1. every evil is a privation

2. for every evil, what makes it be evil is a privation.

Well, Aquinas essentially scooped me, in the first article of the De Malo, by distinguishing two senses of evil in the statement “evil is a privation”. If “evil” means the evil thing, the claim is false. But by “evil” we could mean the evilness of the evil thing, and then Aquinas holds the claim to be true. And it seems to me that the evilness of the evil thing is basically that which makes it evil, so Aquinas’ theory is basically my theory (2).

I think too much of our current literature on the privation theory of evil suffers from a failure to explicitly make the distinction between the evil thing and the evilness of the evil thing. As a result, some of the counterexamples in the literature are only counterexamples to (1). And indeed it’s not hard to find uncontroversial counterexamples to the claim that every evil entity is a privation. Josef Stalin was an evil entity (I hope he has repented since), but he was never a privation; an act of adultery is an evil thing, but it is not a privation.

Consider, for instance, the most discussed example in the literature: pain. It gets pointed out that pain is not a lack of pleasure or any other kind of privation. That is very likely true. But Aquinas’ version of the privation theory does not require him to hold that pain is a privation. He can just say that pain is an evil thing, but evil things don’t have to be privations. Rather, what makes the pain be an evil is a privation. Of course that still requires a privative theory as to what makes pain be an evil. But there are such theories. For instance, one might hold a modification of Mark Murphy’s theory about pain and say that what makes pain in paradigmatic cases bad is a privation of a correspondence between our mental states and our desires, given that in paradigmatic cases we desire not to be in pain (and it’s not much of a bullet to bite to say that pain isn’t bad when it doesn’t go against our desires).

The story about pain doesn’t end here. One might, and I think should, question whether the correct ontology of the world includes such entities as “matches” between mental states and desires for pain to be a privation of. I think what Aquinas would likely say is that because being is said analogically, “matches” do exist in an analogical sense, and hence we can correctly talk of their privation. I think this is problematic. For once we allow that “matches” exist analogically, we should equally allow for privations and other lacks to exist analogically—and Aquinas indeed does. And then we run into the problem that even positive things can count as lacks: for instance, sight could count as a lack of the lack of sight. And once we have gone this far, the privation theory becomes trivial.

But the point remains: once we have seen Aquinas’s distinction between the evil being a privation and the evilness of the evil being a privation, the critiques of the privation theory are apt to get a lot more complex.

Presentism, promises and privation

It appears that the presentist (and maybe even growing blocker) may not be able to accept either the privation theory of evil, which says that every evil is the lack of a due good, nor the privation theory of evilmaking, which says that every evil either is the lack of a due good or is made evil by the lack of a due good.

For suppose I promise you that one unspecified day I will do A for you. But it turns out that I never do it. That’s an evil, and intuitively it is an evil because of the lack of fulfillment of the promise, which sure sounds like a privation. But when do we have this evil? Either when I make the promise or at some later time. The nonexistence of future promise fulfillment isn’t the lack of a due good given presentism or growing block. For the nonexistence of future action A is automatic given presentism or growing block, and something automatic like that can’t be an evil. Another way to put the point is that something that would have to be future can’t be such as to be due to exist. Suppose, now, the evil is at some later time. But no later time is such that I ought on that day to do A, since the day for doing A was not specified, so on no day is my failure to do A a lack of a due good.

The growing blocker might at least say that at the last moment of my life the nonexistence of A during the present and past is the lack of a due good—but even that won’t work if I live forever and never do A.

The eternalist, on the other hand, can say that the non-existence of A throughout a finite or infinite interval of times can count as the lack of a due good, regardless of whether these times are past, present or future.

Is wrongdoing an evil?

In my previous post, I said that murder is a counterexample to the privation theory of evil. For a murder is an evil, but a murder is not a privation. It may be that what makes a murder be an evil is a privation—say, the privation of justice in the agent—but the murder itself is not a privation.

But I wonder if one could save the privation theory of evil by severely narrowing the scope of what counts as an evil, so that instances of sin, suffering, error, natural disasters, etc. are not actually evils. Instead, the real evils are what I called “evilmakers” in earlier post. Thus, a murder is not an evil, but the privation of justice in the agent is the evil. An erroneous belief is not an evil, but the evil is its erroneousness, which is a privation of truth.

I don’t think I like this. It departs too far from ordinary language to say that murder or torture aren’t evils, but the privations of justice are. Here is one reason not to like it. Some evils cause direct harm to their victim, and torture is a paradigm example. But when we think of the paradigm harms of torture—namely, intense suffering as well as psychological and psychological damage—then these harms are not caused by the privation of justice. They are caused by the electric shocks, etc. So on the view that it is only the privation of justice that is an evil, the stuff that actually causes most of the suffering isn’t an evil. And while sometimes something can cause suffering without being an evil (e.g., when your well-meaning friend’s advice annoys you), torture doesn’t seem to be a case like that. It’s the torture as a whole that seems to be evil, not simply its injustice. Thus, it seems to me to be truer to say that the injustice is an evilmaker (and evilmakers are also evils), and the torture is an evil.

Two privation theories

The privation theory of evil says that:

• If E is an evil, then E is a lack of a due good.

Here is a quick counterexample: Brutus's murder of Caesar. A murder is an evil but it is not a lack of a due good. It causes a lack of a due good (life) and it is caused by a lack of a due good (the virtue of justice), but the murder is not itself a lack of a due good. For a part of Brutus's murder of Caesar is the stabbing motion of his arm. But a lack is not the sort of thing that can have a stabbing motion as a part of it!

But there is a closely related theory that is not subject to the murder counterexample. We might call it the privation theory of evilmaking:

• If E is an evil, then E either is a lack of a due good or E is made evil by the lack of a due good.

Now, murder is not so clearly a counterexample. An act of murder is an act of killing, but plausibly what makes this act of killing be an evil is a lack of justice.

I am now suspecting that some people who have taken themselves to be upholding the privation theory of evil have in fact been upholding the privation theory of evilmaking.

But it is worth noting that the privation theory of evilmaking doesn’t accomplish everything Augustine needs from his privation theory. What Augustine needs to do is to save the idea that God doesn’t create evils. But if E is not itself a lack but is something that exists and is made evil by a lack, and God creates everything that exists other than God, then it follows that God creates an evil.

Goods arranged evilly

St Augustine holds that God creates and sustains everything that exists other than God himself. Thus, he reasonably and correctly concludes:

1. Everything that exists is good.

Augustine then concludes further:

2. Evils are privations of goods.

I think (2) doesn’t follow from (1). Compare van Inwagen’s view on material composition:

3. Everything that exists is simple or alive.

But we shouldn’t conclude from (3) that:

4. Ordinary artifacts are privations of simple or living things.

Granted, it follows from (3) that ordinary artifacts don’t really exist, and it likewise follows from (1) that evils don’t really exist. But that does not mean that ordinary-language sentences affirming the existence of artifacts or evils should be analyzed as sentences affirming a privation.

On the contrary, famously, van Inwagen suggests that the ordinary claim that there is a table here is to be understood as claiming that there are simples arranged table-wise. As far as (1) goes, then, it could be that analogously a claim affirming the presence of an evil could be understood as claiming that there are goods arranged evilly. And in some cases this seems a better story than the privation theory. For instance, suppose Alice thinks that platypuses do not exist. What makes there be an evil here is not the lack of something, but the presence of two kinds of discordant good things: Alice’s mental acts of thinking platypuses not to exist and the platypuses themselves. The mental acts and the platypuses are jointly arranged evilly. But there is no evil.

This much more neatly handles the two-nose problem for Augustine’s theory, a problem I once came across in an article that I don’t remember the author of. It is an evil for a human to have two noses, but that evil does not seem to consist in the lack of anything. (We could say: a lack of harmony, but the harmony here doesn’t seem to be a real being, but is entirely just a matter of the arrangement of things.) But we can certainly say that there are two goods, the noses, but they are arranged evilly by virtue of being on the same face. There isn’t, however, a third thing beyond the noses, an evil. There is no ontological problem with God creating the two-nosed human. He creates two goods, the two noses. He foresees that they will be discordant, but he does not will them qua discordant. So he does not intend the evil. There are further theodical questions, but the Augustinian problem is solved.

Of course, there are privative evils. The person who has zero noses suffers from a privative evil, and perhaps when Bob thinks unicorns do exist, the evil of his mistake fits with the privative theory (this depends on the exact formulation of the privative theory).

Evil artifacts

Short version of my argument: Artifacts can be evil, but nothing existent can be evil, so artifacts do not exist.

Long version:

1. Paradigmatic instruments of torture are evil.

2. Nothing that exists is evil.

3. So, paradigmatic instruments of torture do not exist.

4. All non-living complex artifacts are ontologically on par.

5. Paradigmatic instruments of torture are inorganic complex artifacts.

6. So, non-living complex artifacts do not exist.

The argument for 1 is that paradigmatic instruments of torture are defined in part by their function, which function is evil.

The argument for 2 is:

7. Everything that exists is either God or created by God.

8. God is not evil.

9. Nothing created by God is evil.

10. So, nothing that exists is evil.

I think 4 is very plausible, and 5 is uncontroversial.

(My argument nihilism about artifacts is inspired by a rather different but also interesting theistic argument for the same conclusion that Trent Dougherty just sent me, but his argument did not talk of evil.)

Pain and a hybrid privation theory of evil

According to Augustine’s privation theory of evil, evil has no positive reality, but is always a lack of something. It seems that theists are committed to the privation theory of evil. For if evil has a positive reality, then obviously that positive reality is other than God. But according to theism, every positive reality other than God is created by God. But God does not create evil. So theism is incompatible with the idea that evil is a positive reality.

However, that argument doesn’t seem to be quite right, as it assumes that the only two options for evil are that

1. Evil is a positive reality,

and

2. evil is a lack.

But in fact it is more plausible to think that

3. an evil is grounded in both a lack and a positive reality.

Consider Alice’s cowardice when she discovers that her employer is producing defective medication and nonetheless does not report this to the FDA. Alice’s cowardice is only partly grounded in by a lack of courage. It is also partly grounded in Alice’s humanity. After all, Alice’s pencil also lacks courage, but does not therefore count as a coward.

This observation is closely related to the fact that a careful definition of the privation theory of evil will specify that evil isn’t just a lack, but a lack of a due good, of a good that ought to be present. And courage should be present in a human but not in a pencil, so that evil is not constituted merely by a lack but by a lack plus whatever—say, humanity—that grounds the dueness of what is lacking. So perhaps the hybrid theory (3) just is a charitable way of understanding the classic Augustianian theory.

Note, too, that (3) can be reconciled with theism just as (2) can. For we need not say that God creates such things as holes that are constituted by combinations of positive and negative realities. We can say that God makes the positive realities, and the holes, shadows and evils are just a logical consequence of what he has made and what he has not made.

Now, one of the main objections to the privation theory of evil is pain, which sure doesn’t seem to be a lack, or even a lack of something due, but rather seems to be a positive reality. But the hybrid privation theory (3) can be reconciled with the phenomenon of pain.

Here’s how. We don’t know what constitutes pain. Start by imagining that a computer could feel pain (something that seems plausible given materialism). We don’t know what kind of program and data would constitute pain, but it might well be encoded as a sequence of zeroes and ones, or lacks and presences of electrical potential. Well, then, that fits perfectly with (3): the pain is constituted by a combination of negative reality—the zeroes—and positive reality—the ones. If we were to fill in all the negative realities, the pain would disappear, as we would have just a sequence of ones, which, we may suppose, wouldn’t be sufficient to constitute pain.

Similarly, if materialism is true, we don’t know what brain states constitute a pain. It is plausible that the brain states that constitute pains are grounded in both positive and negative neural realities. After all, that’s generally how the material representational states we know of work. As I type this sentence, its inscription on the screen is constituted by a combination of absences and presences of light— the black and white pixels. (Things are more complicated with colored text, but the absence of light of particular wavelength is always going to be crucial.) When I say something, the periodic combination of pressure and lack of pressure (i.e., lower pressure) encodes the sound. So, given materialism, it is plausible that pain is grounded in a hybrid of positive and negative states (and that so is pleasure, for that matter).

Now, if materialism is false, there are multiple options. One option is that pains are simple existences, qualia. If so, that’s incompatible with the hybrid privation theory. But we do not know that that theory of pain is true, even if we know dualism to be true. Just as on materialism, pain is constituted by more fundamental states, so too on dualism, pain could be constituted by more fundamental (but immaterial) states. For all we know it is so, and for all we know the more fundamental states are partly negative in nature.

So, whether materialism or dualism is true, for all we know, pain is consistent with the hybrid privation theory. (I should add that I am not actually confident that pain is an evil in itself.)

Do theists have to believe the privation theory of evil?

St. Augustine argued somewhat like thus:

1. Everything that exists is sustained by God.
2. God sustains only good.
3. Thus everything that exists is good insofar as it exists.
4. Thus evil is only a privation of good.

I've found the argument compelling for most of my life. I continue to be confident of (3). But I am now not sure about the inference from (3) to (4). Here's why. Essential to Augustine's account is an ontology sufficiently sparse not to include lacks. After all, if holes, lacks and privations exist then Augustine's account is in trouble. But if the true ontology is sparse enough not to include lacks, then there will likely be other "things" that don't exist. And these other "things" will escape Augustine's argument.

For instance, why couldn't some evils instead of being privations be mismatches? The mismatch between Jones' belief that Americans never landed on the moon and the fact of the moon landing could be an evil. An ontology could, for instance, include both Jones' belief and the moon landing, but not include as a further item the mismatch between the two. One might try to argue that a mismatch is a privation of a due match. But the correct ontology might not include matches either. Or consider the example, discussed in the secondary literature, of the man with two noses. It's an evil to have two noses, but at least prima facie (sorry!) the extra nose isn't a privation. But if we do not suppose that evil has to be a privation, then we can say that the problem is the mismatch between the face and the human form.

This approach would allow one to retain the central anti-Manichean insight that Augustine has, namely (3), while at the same time escaping some counterexamples. I am not sure it escapes the biggest counterexample, namely pain. Though if we take Mark Murphy's theory that what is bad is not pain itself, but the disharmony between reality and desire that tends to correlate with pain, then the above approach helps, since a disharmony is a kind of mismatch.

I am not claiming every mismatch is an evil. The argument doesn't establish that every "thing" that doesn't exist is an evil (remember the remark that matches might not be in the correct ontology).

Final note: An alternative to the above would be to weaken (1) to the claim that everything that fundamentally exists is sustained by God, and hence everything that fundamentally exists is good insofar as it does so.

Mersenne's supreme bad vs. supreme good argument

In his 1624 The Impiety of Deists, Atheists and Libertines of This Time... (dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu, by the way), Mersenne gives this fascinating little argument:

Nobody fails to acknowledge that if there is a supremely good being [un estre souverainement bon], it merits the name of God, since we don't mean anything by that name other than that which has all [the] sorts of perfections, and which lacks nothing. Now I will show that this supreme good exists. If it didn't exist, its privation would exist, which would be a supreme bad [mal], and consequently the supreme non-being, since the bad and the non-being are the same thing: but it doesn't in the least seem that the privation exists more than its actuality, which must necessary precede it. Thus one must confess that there is a supreme goodness, and then that there cannot be a supreme badness. So we have a supreme being, since we deny a supreme non-being, it being necessary that the one or the other exist....

There is actually more than one argument here. There is an interesting and deeply metaphysical argument based on evil as the privation of a good. But there is also the kernel of a rather interesting and simple argument:

1. It would be supremely bad if God doesn't exist.
2. The world doesn't exemplify a supreme bad.
3. So, God exists.

My son suggests using the goodness in the world to argue for (2). That would be an interesting hybrid design argument.

Evil, privation and disability

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 suggest 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 on prosblogion which discuss an Augustinian theodicy (Part I; Part II).

Imagine two closely related alien species, the flerts and the grents. Both are four-legged, and have basically the same habits. Flerts and grents are solitary and reproduce asexually, never knowing their parents (e.g., the parents produce spores which mature away from them), but the flerts have wings in addition to their four legs and can fly away from predators, while the grents are confined to the ground. Suppose now that Gribby is a normal grent, while Flibby is a flert that, due to a genetic defect, never developed wings.

Winglessness is a lack in Gribby and a privation in Flibby, but unless Gribby and Flibby observe their conspecifics, they are not going to know this. It is not an evil that Gribby is stuck on the ground, but it is an evil that Flibby can't fly. But Gribby and Flibby look and behave in pretty much the same way. They eat the same food, they have to run from predators and cannot fly from them, and so on. They have the same joys and the same pains, and they live pretty much the same lives. All this makes plausible the following:

Claim: Flibby is not worse off than Gribby.

I think this claim is plausible. One might think that Flibby is worse off because he suffers from an evil from which Gribby does not suffer. But "suffers" here is a tendentious choice of word. There is no conscious suffering here, we may suppose. We could imagine that when Flibby is faced with a predator he feels an urge to fly and the inability to fly is painful to him; but we can also suppose--and let us do so--that Flibby also has a second privation, namely that his instincts to fly are missing. Flibby suffers from an evil merely in the sense that he is subject to an evil. But his life is just like Gribby's, and the concrete goods that Gribby's life instantiates are also instantiated by Flibby's life. Another way to see this is to imagine some minor concrete good that Flibby has but Gribby does not. Maybe, Flibby happens to be a slightly better at fishing than Gribby is. Then, if per impossibile we were choosing whether to be Flibby or to be Gribby, we would be very reasonable in choosing to be Flibby. But if Flibby is worse off than Gribby, he is significantly worse off--winglessness is not a minor evil. So if Flibby is worse off than Gribby, it wouldn't be all that reasonable to choose to be Flibby just for some minor concrete good.

Still, it's undeniable that Flibby is subject to an evil, while, as far as the story goes, Gribby is not. We now have two conflicting intuitions: first, that Flibby is no worse off than Gribby, and, second, that Flibby is worse off than Gribby, because Flibby is subject to an evil that Gribby is not subject to. I want to argue that the second intuition is mistaken. For Flibby has a more distinguished nature--by nature he has the dignity of being a winged creature. This good that he possesses, the good of being by nature winged, is a good that Gribby does not have. Because he has this good, he is capable of being subject to an evil that Gribby is not--viz., the evil of being deprived of wings. The additional good outweighs or cancels out the additional evil. Hence, we can consistently say that Flibby is no worse off than Gribby even though Flibby is subject to an evil that Gribby is not.

I want to suggest, now, that if Gribby would have no right to complain to God about being created a grent, likewise Flibby would have no right to complain to God about being created a flert without wings.

Evil is not just a lack but a privation. However, possessing an evil also means one possesses a certain good, namely the dignity of being such as to naturally have the good that the evil deprived one of.

In particular, it follows that while an adult whose intellectual functioning is like that of a child thereby is subject to an evil, the developmentally challenged adult is not thereby less well off than the child. (She may be thereby worse off if she compares herself to others, or if others treat her poorly.)

How far one can take these thoughts in the direction of a theodicy, I do not know.