Learning of secret wickedness

When people learn that some apparently really decent person was a hypocrite who secretly practiced execrable vices, that tends to shake people’s faith in God. We can explain this by noting that the case provides one with a vivid case of moral evil, which provides evidence against the existence of God.

But we already knew that there was a lot of moral evil out there. So the effect on belief in God should not be very significant. And it is worth noting that learning of cases like the above can actually help with the problem of evil. In our time, we are very hesitant to use the punishment theodicy for evils that happen to people. But learning that there are more people with terrible hidden vices than we thought increases the probability that any particular evil befalling an apparently decent adult might actually be a well-deserved punishment.

Of course, a punishment theodicy will only go so far. It doesn’t apply to animals or small children. And the Book of Job teaches that it doesn’t apply to all cases of adults either. But realizing the dark truth that people who appear to be exemplars of virtue can be quite wicked should open us to the possibility that the punishment theodicy applies to a lot more cases than we thought.

Of course, the more cases we have to which the punishment theodicy applies, the more moral evils we have that need a theodicy as well. But free will considerations can help a lot with moral evils.

So it may well be that learning of someone’s secret evils is a wash in terms of the evidential import of the evil for God’s existence.

Heaven, the goods of others and the defeat of evil

There is a delight in competing athletically with one’s child: if they win, it feels good, and if one wins, it feels good, too. (The hedonic ideal is achieved when the child wins about 60% of the time; then one feels proud of their superiority, but not rarely one has the pleasure of beating a stronger opponent.)

Parental love makes it easy to love another as oneself (to paraphrase what C. S. Lewis says about Eros). It thus gives us an image of what it is like to be in heaven: we will greatly enjoy the goods had by others. This gives us an attractive picture of how the joy of heaven could fit with enduring differences in personal characteristics. Perhaps being an extrovert would not be true to my self and to God’s vocation for me, and so maybe even over an eternity in heaven I won’t be extroverted. But if so, I will still be fully happy for the joy of the heavenly extroverts, without any regret that I am not one of them, while they will be fully happy for me introverted joys, also without any regret that they are not like me.

Here are two controversial (for very different reasons) applications of this. First, there is a genuine and distinctive good in being a woman and there is a genuine and distinctive good in being a man, and it seems to make sense for a person to desire the goods of the other sex, regardless of whether it is possible to have them oneself. In heaven, however, Joseph can enjoy Mary’s good in being a woman and Mary can enjoy Joseph’s good in being a man, without Joseph regretting that he personally “only” has the good of manhood and Mary regretting that she personally “only” has the good of womanhood. That is what total love is like.

Second, given an eternalist or moving block theory of time, the past will always be fully real. This in turn gives us a solution to the problem that various important goods, such as marriage and self-sacrifice, will not be available in heaven. For we will be able to rejoice in others’ past possession of these goods, without regret for the fact that they aren’t ours and now.

The second point, however, raises the following problem: Won’t we also grieve for others’ past—and even present, if hell is a reality (as I think it is)—subjection to great evils? Maybe, but in God’s plan there is a crucial asymmetry between good and evil. Evils are defeated. How this defeat happens is deeply mysterious. But because of this defeat, I suspect the grief for a defeated evil will not hurt, precisely because of the evil’s being defeated, while goods remain undefeated and hence the joy for them will always delight.

In fact, the last point suggests something to me. A lot of philosophers of religion have said that it’s not enough for theodicy if evils are justly compensated for or their permission is in some way justified. We need these evils to be defeated. I think this is mistaken if all we are after is a response to the problem of evil. But we also need a response to the problem of why the past and present suffering of others doesn’t cause the saints pain in heaven. And it is here that we need the defeat of evil.

The Non-Identity Theodicy (Scott Hill) SCP session

The Analytic Collective and SCP are having an inaugural online session on August 21 at 4-5:30 pm Eastern Time to discuss Scott Hill's fascinating paper "The Non-Identity Theodicy". I will be commenting on the paper.

Abstract: This paper defends a theodicy based on ideas discussed in the literature on the non-identity problem and the literature on origin essentialism. I then address a series of objections about the ethics of God's acts in my theodicy and about the metaphysics of origins on which my theodicy depends.

Join the Analytic Collective facebook group for a Zoom link.

This is a pre-read session. The paper is here. And my comments are here.

Preventing suffering

Theodicies according to which sufferings make possible greater moral goods are often subjected to this objection: If so, why should we prevent sufferings?

I am not near to having a full answer to the question. But I think this is related to a question everyone, and not just the theist, needs to face up to. For everyone should accept Socrates’ great insight that moral excellence is much more important than avoiding suffering, and yet we should often prevent suffering that we think is apt to lead to the more important goods. I don’t know why. That’s right now one of the mysteries of the moral life for me. But it is as it is.

Famously, persons with disabilities tend to report higher life satisfaction than persons without disabilities. But we all know that accepting this data should not keep us from working to prevent disability-causing car accidents. While higher life satisfaction is not the same as moral excellence, the example is still instructive. Our reasons to prevent disability-causing car accidents do not require us to refute the empirical data suggesting that persons with disabilities lead more satisfying lives. I do not know why exactly we still have on balance reason to prevent such accidents, but it is clear to me that we do.

Mother Teresa thought that the West is suffering from a deep poverty of relationships, with both God and neighbor. Plausibly she was right. We probably are not in a position to know that affluence is a significant cause of this deep poverty, but we can be open to the real epistemic possibility that it is, and we can acknowledge the deep truth that the riches of relationship are far more important than physical goods, without this sapping our efforts to improve the material lot of the needy.

Or suppose you are witnessing Alice torturing Bob, and an oracle informed you that in ten years they will be reconciled, with Bob beautifully forgiving Alice and Alice deeply repenting, with the goods of the reconciliation being greater than the bads in the torture. I think I should still stop Alice.

A quick corollary of the above cases is that consequentialism is false. But there is a deep paradox here that cuts more deeply than consequentialism. I do not know how to resolve it.

Here are some stories, none of which are fully satisfying to me in their present state of development.

Perhaps it is better if humans have a special focus on the relief of suffering and improvement of material well-being of the patient. An opposite focus might lead to an unhealthy condescension.

Perhaps it has something to do with our embodied natures that a special focus on the bodily good of the other is a particularly fitting way for humans to express love for one another. While letting another suffer in the hope of greater on-balance happiness might be better for the patient, it could well be worse for the agent and the relationship. Maybe we should think of what Catholics call the “corporal works of mercy” as a kind of kiss, or maybe even something like a sacrament.

Perhaps there is something about respect for the autonomy of the other. Maybe others’ physical good is also our business while moral development is more their own business.

I think there is more. But the point I want to make is just that this is not a special question for theism and theodicy. It is a paradox that all morally sensitive people should see both sides of.

Coming back to theodicy, note that the above speculative considerations may not apply to God as the agent. (God cannot but condescend, being infinitely above us. God is not embodied, except in respect of the Incarnation. And we have no autonomy rights against God, as God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.)

Virtue versus painlessness

Suppose we had good empirical data that people who suffer serious physical pain are typically thereby led to significant on-balance gains in virtue (say, compassion or fortitude).

Now, I take it that one of the great discoveries of ethics is the Socratic principle that virtue is a much more significant contributor to our well-being than painlessness. Given this principle and the hypothetical empirical data, it seems that then we should not bother with giving pain-killers to people in pain—and this seems wrong. (One might think a stronger claim is true: We should cause pain to people. But that stronger claim would require consequentialism, and anyway neglects the very likely negative effects on the virtue of the person causing the pain.)

Given the hypothetical empirical data, what should we do about the above reasoning. Here are three possibilities:

1. Take the Socratic principle and our intuitions about the value of pain relief to give us good reason to reject the empirical data.

2. Take the empirical data and the Socratic principle to give us good reason to revise our intuition that we should relieve people’s pain.

3. Take the empirical data and our intuitions about the value of pain relief to give us good reason to reject the Socratic principle.

Option 1 may seem a bit crazy. Admittedly, a structurally similar move is made when philosophers reject certain theodical claims, such as the Marilyn Adams claim that God ensures that all horrendous suffering is defeated, on the grounds that it leads to moral passivity. But it still seems wrong. If Option 1 were the right move, then we should now take ourselves (who do not have the hyptohetical empirical data) to have a priori grounds to hold that serious physical pain does not typically lead to significant on-balance gains in virtue. But even if some armchair psychology is fine, this seems to be an unacceptable piece of it.

Option 2 also seems wrong to me. The intuition that relief of pain is good seems so engrained in our moral life that I expect rejecting it would lead to moral scepticism.

I think some will find Option 3 tempting. But I am quite confident that the Socratic principle is indeed one of the great discoveries of the human race.

So, what are we to do? Well, I think there is one more option:

4. Reject the claim that the empirical data plus the Socratic principle imply that we shouldn’t relieve pain.

In fact, I think that even in the absence of the hypothetical empirical data we should go for (4). The reason is this. If we reject (4), then the above reasoning shows that we have a priori reasons to reject the empirical data, and I don’t think we do.

So, we should go for (4), not just hypothetically but actually.

How should this rejection of the implication be made palatable? This is a difficult question. I think part of the answer is that the link between good consequences and right action is quite complex. It may, for instance, be the case there are types of goods that are primarily the agent’s own task to pursue. These goods may be more important than other goods, but nonetheless third parties should pursue the less important goods. I think the actual story is even more complicated: certain ways of pursuing the more important goods are open to third-parties but others are not. It may even be that certain ways of pursuing the more important goods are not even open to first-parties, but are only open to God.

And I suspect that this complexity is species-relative: agents of a different sort might have rather different moral reasons in the light of similar goods.

Reincarnation and theodicy

As I was teaching on the problem of evil today, I was struck by how nicely reincarnation could provide theodicies for recalcitrant cases. “Why is the fawn dying in the forest fire? Well, for all we know, it’s a reincarnation of someone who committed genocide and is undergoing the just punishment for this, a punishment whose restorative effect will only be seen in the next life.” “Why is Sam suffering with no improvement to his soul? Well, maybe the improvement will only manifest in the next life.”

Of course, I don’t believe in reincarnation. But if the problem of evil is aimed at theism in general, then it seems fair to say that for all that theism in general says, reincarnation could be true.

Here is a particular dialectical context where bringing in reincarnation could be helpful. The theist presses the fine-tuning argument. The atheist instead of embracing a multiverse (as is usual) responds with the argument from evil. The theist now says: While reincarnation may seem unlikely, it surely has at least a one in a million probability conditionally on theism; on the other hand, fine-tuning has a much, much smaller probability than one in a million conditionally on single-universe atheism. So theism wins.

A consideration making the theodical defeat of evil a bit easier

For an evil to be defeated, in the theodical sense, the evil needs to be not only compensated for in the sufferer’s life, but it needs to be interwoven into a good in the sufferer’s life in such a way that the meaning of the evil is radically transformed in that life.

A requirement of the defeat of evil guards against theodicies where the sufferer gets the short end of the stick, the evil being permitted for the sake of goods to other individuals, or abstract impersonal goods like elegant laws of nature. Defeat appears to have an innate intrapersonality to it.

It occurs to me, however, that in heaven the requirement of defeat can sometimes be met through goods that happen to someone other than the sufferer. For all in heaven are friends of the best sort, and as Aristotle says, a friend (of the best sort) is another self, so that what happens to the friend happens to one. So if Alice has suffered an evil and Bob got a proportionate good out of God’s permitting the evil to Alice, if Alice and Bob are friends in the deepest sense, then the evil that happened to Alice is just as much a part of Bob’s life, and the good to Bob is just as much a part of Alice’s. Thus, defeat can be achieved interpersonally given friendship, without any worries about Alice getting the short end of the stick.

And abstract impersonal goods—like aesthetic ones—can become deeply personal through appreciation.

Thus, the intrapersonality condition in defeat can be met more easily than seems at first sight.

Some arguments about the existence of a good theodicy

This argument is valid:

1. If no good theodicy can be given, some virtuous people’s lives are worthless.

2. No virtuous person’s life is worthless.

3. So, a good theodicy can be given.

The thought behind 1 is that unless we accept the sorts of claims that theodicists make about the value of virtue or the value of existence or about an afterlife, some virtuous people live lives of such great suffering, and are so far ignored or worse by others, that their lives are worthless. But once one accepts those sorts of claims, then a good theodicy can be given.

Here is an argument for 2:

4. It would be offensive to a virtuous person that her life is worthless.

5. The truth is not offensive to a virtuous person.

6. So, no virtuous person’s life is worthless.

Perhaps, too, an argument similar to Kant’s arguments about God can be made. We ought to at least hope that each virtuous person’s life has value on balance. But to hope for that is to hope for something like a theodicy. So we ought to hope for something like a theodicy.

The above arguments may not be all that compelling. But at least they counter the argument in the other direction, that it is offensive to say that someone’s sufferings have a theodicy.

Here is yet another argument.

7. That there is no good theodicy is an utterly depressing claim.

8. One ought not advocate utterly depressing claims, without very strong moral reason.

9. There is no very strong moral reason to advocate that there is no good theodicy.

10. So, one ought not advocate that there is no good theodicy.

The grounds for 8 are pragmatic: utterly depressing claims tend to utterly depress people, and being utterly depressed is very bad. One needs very strong reason to do something that causes a very bad state of affairs. I suppose the main controversial thesis here is 9. Someone who thinks religion is a great evil might deny 9.

Musings on authority

I have a lot of authority to impose hardships on myself. I can impose hardships on myself in two main ways. I can do something that either is or causes a hardship or risk of hardship to myself. Or I can commit myself to doing something that is or causes me a hardship or risk of hardship (I can commit myself by making a promise or by otherwise putting myself in a position where there is no morally permissible way to avoid the hardship). I have a wide moral latitude to decide which burdens to bear for the sake of which goods, though not an unlimited latitude. The decisions between goods are morally limited by the virtue of prudence. It would be wrong to undertake a 90% risk of death for the sake of a muffin. But it's morally up to me, or at least would be if I had no dependents, whether to undertake a 40% risk of death for the sake of writing a masterpiece. I do have the authority to impose some hardships on my children and my students, but that authority is much more limited: I do not have the authority to impose a 40% risk of death for the sake of writing a masterpiece. My authority to impose hardships on myself is much greater than my authority to impose hardships on others.

One explanation of the difference in the degree of our authority over ourselves and our authority over others is that people's authority over others derives from people's authority over themselves: we give authority over us to others. That is what the contractarian thinks, but it is implausible for familiar reasons (e.g., there aren't enough voluntarily accepted contracts to make contractarianism work). I prefer one of these two stories:

1. Both authority (of the hardship-imposing kind) over self and authority over others derives from God's authority over us.
2. Of necessity, some relationships are authority-conferring, and different kinds of relationships are necessarily authority-conferring to different degrees. For instance, identity in a mature person confers great authority of x with respect to x. Parenthood by a mature person of an immature person confers much authority but less than identity of a mature person does.

What about God's authority? On view (1), we would expect God to have more authority to impose hardships than anybody else has, including more authority to impose hardships on us than we have with respect to our own selves. What about on view (2)? That's less clear. We would intuitively expect that the God-creature relationship be more authority-conferring than the parent-child one. But how does it compare to identity? It would be religiously uncomfortable to say that someone has more authority over me than God does, even if I am that someone. Can we give a philosophical explanation for this religious intuition? Maybe, but I'm not yet up to it. I think a part of the story is that all our goods are goods by participation in God, that our telos is a telos-by-participation in God as the ultimate final cause of all.

Suppose we could argue that God has more hardship-imposing authority over ourselves than we have over ourselves. Then I think we would have a powerful tool for theodicy. A crucial question in theodicy is whether it is permissible for God to allow hardship H to me for the sake of good G (for myself or another). We would then have a defeasible sufficient condition for this permissibility: if it would not be immorally imprudent for me to allow H to myself for the sake of G, then it would be permissible for God to allow H to me for the sake of G. This is a much stronger criterion than one that is occasionally used in the literature, namely that if I would rationally allow H to myself for the sake of G, then God can permissibly allow it, too.

Right and wrong choices

Here's a thought I had that might have theodical applications. Agents tend to be more responsible when they choose rightly than when whey choose wrongly. For when one chooses wrongly, one acts against reason. And that cannot but contribute to making one less responsible for the action than had one acted following reason.

The blink of an eye response to the problem of evil

I want to confess something: I do not find the problem of evil compelling. I think to myself: Here, during the blink of an eye, there are horrendous things happening. But there is infinitely long life afterwards if God exists. For all we know, the horrendous things are just a blip in these infinitely long lives. And it just doesn’t seem hard to think that over an infinite future that initial blip could be justified, redeemed, defeated, compensated for with moral adequacy, sublated, etc.

It sounds insensitive to talk of the horrors that people live through as a blip. But a hundred years really is the blink of an eye in the face of eternity.

Wouldn’t we expect a perfect being to make the initial blink of an eye perfect, too? Maybe. But even if so, we would only expect it to be perfect as a beginning to an infinite life that we know next to nothing about. And it is hard to see how we would know what is perfect as a beginning to such a life.

This sounds like sceptical theism. But unlike the sceptical theist, I also think the standard theodicies—soul building, laws of nature, free will, etc.—are basically right. They each attempt to justify God’s permission of some or all evils by reference to things that are indeed good: the gradual building up of a soul, the order of the universe, a rightful autonomy, etc. They all have reasonable stories about how the permission of the evils is needed for these goods. There is, in mind, only one question about these theodicies: Are these goods worth paying such a terrible price, the price of allowing these horrors?

But in the face of an eternal future, I think the question of price fades for two reasons.

First, the goods gained by soul building and free will last for an infinite amount of time. It will forever be true that one has a soul that was built by these free choices. And the value of orderly laws of nature includes an order that is instrumental to the soul building as well as an order that is aesthetically valuable in itself. The benefits of the former order last for eternity, and the beauty of the laws of nature—even as exhibited during the initial blink of an eye—lasts for ever in memory. It is easy for an infinite duration of a significant good to be worth a very high price! (Don’t the evils last in memory, too? Yes, but while memories of beauty should be beautiful things, memories of evil should not be evils—think of the Church’s memory of the Cross.)

Second, it is very easy for God to compensate people during an infinite future for any undeserved evils they suffered during the initial blip. And typically one has no obligation to prevent someone’s suffering when (a) the prevention would have destroyed an important good and (b) one will compensate the person to an extent much greater than the sufferings. The goods pointed out by the theodicies are important goods, even if we worry that permitting the horrors is too high a price. And no matter how terrible these short-lived sufferings were—even if the short period of time, at most about a mere century, “seemed like eternity”—infinite time is ample space for compensation. (Of course, it would be wrong to intentionally inflict undeserved serious harms on someone even while planning to compensate.)

Objection 1: Can one say this while saying that the fleeting goods of our lives yield a teleological argument for the existence of God?

Response: One can. One can be quite sure from a single paragraph in a novel that it is written by someone with great writing skills. But one can never be sure from a single paragraph in a novel that it is not written by someone with great writing skills. (For all we know, the author was parodying bad writing in that paragraph, and the paragraph reflects great skill. But notice that we cannot say about the great paragraph that maybe the author has no skills but was just parodying great writing.)

Objection 2: It begs the question to suppose our future lives are infinite.

Response: No. If God exists, it is very likely that the future lives of all persons, or at the very least of all persons who do not deserve to be annihilated, will be infinite. The proposition that God exists is equivalent to the disjunction: (God exists and there is eternal life) or (God exists and there is no eternal life). If the argument from evil presupposes the absence of eternal life, it is only an argument against the second disjunct. But most of the probability that God exists lies with the first disjunct, given that P(eternal life|God exists) is high. Hence, the argument doesn't do much unless it addresses the first disjunct.

Eternal life and the crucible of character theodicy

Consider the crucible of character theodicy, that we are permitted by God to meet with great evils in order to form a character with virtues like courage and sacrificial love whose significant exercise requires significant evils.

I take it that it’s clear that forming such a character is worthwhile. But there are at least three problems with this theodicy:

1. While such character formation is valuable, is it valuable enough to justify our suffering great evils? Wouldn’t it have been better if God just gave us the virtues directly, rather than having us pay a great price?

2. Even if it is valuable enough to justify our suffering great evils, wouldn’t it be better if we suffered fewer or lesser ones?

3. What about those who suffer and develop a vicious character?

I think these three problems can be overcome if we think about heavenly life as an infinite value multiplier.

Ad 1: There is clearly some additional value to having virtues that were formed through significantly free exercises of them rather than having had these virtues imposed on one. In heaven, on infinitely many days one has and enjoys the value of having virtues. But if one has formed these virtues through significantly free exercise, then on infinitely many days one also has and enjoys the additional value of having virtues that were thus formed. That’s an infinite additional increment. So as long as the disvalue of the sufferings in this life was finite—which surely it was—it’s worth it.

Ad 2: The greater the sufferings that one endured courageously and the greater the sacrifices one made in love, the more fully one owns the resulting courage and love. For in more extreme exercises of these virtues, one has a greater opportunity to abandon the path of virtue, and one’s presence on that path is more truly one’s own. And this deeper ownership over one’s virtue—bearing in mind, of course, that all one has is a participation of God, and that grace is deeply involved—adds an additional value of virtue-ownership throughout an infinite number of future days. Hence, it adds an infinite amount of value, which is surely worth it.

Ad 3: This is probably the most serious worry. Start with this thought. God is choosing whether to snatch Judas up to heaven in the first moment of his existence, imposing on him a perfectly virtuous character, or to give Judas the opportunity to freely develop and own that character. A toy model for this an extended utility calculation. On the first option, we have an expected utility of

• V(eternal unowned virtue),

where V is value. On the second option, we have an expected utility of

• pV(eternal owned virtue) + (1 − p)V(Judas chooses vice)

where p is the probability that Judas would come through the crucible well. (Of course, this line of thought requires rejecting theological compatibilism and Molinism.) Here, V(eternal unowned virtue) and V(eternal owned virtue) are each infinite and positive. Plausibly, V(Judas chooses vice) is negative. Is it infinite? That’s not clear. One might think that on orthodox Christian views of hell, it is both negative and infinite. But that need not be the case. It could be that the suffering and vice in hell actually decreases from day to day, so that the total amount of suffering and vice over eternity is actually finite (think of how 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + ... = 2).

If V(Judas chooses vice), the argument still isn’t over, but I will assume that V(Judas chooses vice) is finite—we could just build that into the theodicy. In that case, we can basically neglect V(Judas chooses vice)—when the other quantities are infinite, a finite subtraction is only going to be a tie-breaker.

So now the question is whether V(eternal unowned virtue) is bigger than or equal to pV(eternal owned virtue). And here it seems very reasonable simply to make a sceptical theist move. We don’t know what was Judas’ probability of coming through the crucible well. We don’t know exactly how V(eternal owned virtue) compares to V(eternal virtue). It could be that a day with owned value is three times as valuable as a day with unowned virtue. If so, then as long as p > 1/3, God’s giving Judas the opportunity for freely choosing virtue was worthwhile.

There are many objections, of course, that one can make. Here’s one that particularly comes to my mind: Wouldn’t it be better for God to first give people the opportunity to freely choose a virtuous character, but then if they refuse to do so, to impose that character on them? After all, at least some infants go to heaven after death. But they haven’t developed a virtuous character through the described kind of crucible. And so it seems that God imposes on them a virtuous character.

There are two things I’m inclined to say to this. First, there is a relevant difference between the case of imposing virtue on an infant and imposing virtue on someone who has chosen against virtue. Second, those who choose virtue own their virtue more fully if they had the possibility of not having that virtue at all.

Diversity of goods, heaven and theodicy

Alice was tortured for weeks, but she remained loyal to the true and the good. Alice’s moral victory over her torturers was of great value. Let’s take it for granted that this situation represents something that is on balance a great good for Alice (and for the world). But suppose that God was choosing between Alice’s moral victory, on the one hand, and Alice doing something else that was virtuous, worthwhile but not painful—perhaps with great singlemindedness throwing herself into producing a great work of art. One might well make the judgment that while Alice’s moral victory was a great good, given the horrendous cost to Alice, it would on balance have been better for God to have steered her life away from the suffering and towards a good that comes without much pain.

I am sceptical of this judgment, but for the sake of the argument let’s grant it. Nonetheless, I think the assessment should change if one adds to the above a story about an infinite heavenly afterlife. Here is why. The judgment was that while there was great value in Alice’s moral victory, it would have been good to substitute a painless but valuable achievement for it.

But what if, instead, the question was this:

• Is it better for Alice to have the painful moral victory plus a hundred painless but valuable achievements, or just the hundred painless but valuable achievements?

If we grant the initial judgment that Alice’s moral victory was of great value, then we need to say that the first option is on balance better. The life with the painful victory and hundred painless achievements not only exhibits the additional good of the painful victory, but also exhibits the higher-order value of a diversity of types of goods.

Now ask this question:

• Is it better for Alice to have the painful moral victory plus an infinite number of painless but valuable achievements, or just the infinite number of painless but valuable achievements?

It sure seems like the first option is the better one. But now when we ask the initial question, whether God shouldn’t have given Alice a painless achievement instead, in the context of a theory of God that includes an infinite happy afterlife, that is in fact what the question comes to. The additional painless achievement would not add much to the infinitely many painless achievements in heaven. But the painful achievement adds something different in kind.

And when we add to the story that in the afterlife Alice (as well as her friends, likely many in number) will be able to enjoy, infinitely many times, the memory of her moral victory, without the memory of her suffering being itself a source of suffering (for, I take it, there is no suffering in heaven), it sure seems worth it.

But what if instead Alice cracked under torture, thereby losing the good? Well, now how well the story works depends on other questions. If we have Molinism, then it doesn’t work very well: given Molinism, God can foresee that Alice would crack, and so the value that there would be in her victory is irrelevant. But given simple foreknowledge (or open theism, but that’s a heretical option) God’s decision whether to put Alice in that situation can only be based on chances. For all we know, the chance of Alice’s cracking under torture, given the grace that God gave her, was not very high, and so the significant chance of the great goods of having a diversity in the types of goods one experiences and of having an infinite number of reminiscences of that diversity was worthwhile. Or, at least, we have little reason to think it wasn’t.

Two kinds of free will theodicies

I want to make a distinction that I've long thought is quite important, but which I think is not made enough. Suppose the theist responds to the problem of moral evil by saying that God's allowing moral evils is justified by the value of free will. There are two different ways that "the value of free will" could be invoked here.

First, the theodicy could depend on the intrinsic value of freedom itself. God allows me to freely choose the wrong thing, because my freely choosing something is intrinsically good qua free choice even when the thing I choose is bad.

Second, the theodicy could depend not on any value of the freedom in freely choosing the wrong thing, but only on the value that there would be in freely choosing the right thing were one to choose that. On this story, the only logically possible way God can have a chance of my freely choosing right over wrong in a given situation is by allowing me to have the possibility of choosing wrong over right in that situation. Notice that on this second story, if I end up freely choosing wrong over right, the evil of my choice might well be gratuitous in the sense that there is no compensating good for it. But even if the evil is gratuitous, God could be justified in permitting the evil to happen, since the only way he had to prevent it would have removed all possibility of my freely choosing right over wrong. This second story doesn't require there to be any intrinsic value in freedom as such. It only requires there to be value in freely choosing right over wrong.

I think the second story is superior to the first. But, interestingly, the second story is not available to a Molinist. For the second story only works when God cannot rely on knowing how you would choose in a situation when setting up the situation. (The story is available to a simple foreknowledge theorist if God cannot rely on knowledge of the future in ways that set up explanatory circularity.)

Limitations, art and evil

It's a standard thought that art thrives on limitations. These may be imposed by the technical capacities of the medium (I was reading this today) or by repressive authorities (think here of communist-era Eastern European literature), or they may be limitations imposed by the artist or her artistic community. In this regard art is like sport, where there are rules that constrain one from what might otherwise be thought of as efficient ways to achieve the goal, such as using a car to "run" a marathon.

Let's not think of God as setting out to create the best possible work of art. The idea of a best possible work of art divorced from model on which God "first" institutes for himself a set of limitations which both constrain and constitutively make possible a particular kind of artistic achievement, and "then" tries to produce the best work within those limitations. For instance, among these limitations there might be a small number of laws of nature and of fundamental kinds of things (compare pixel artists who limit their palette), perhaps with a limited number of self-allowed deviations from the laws. But in addition to such "technical" restrictions, there might be restrictions coming from the content of an artistic vision: what kind of thing it is that God is trying to say in the work.

If we have this sort of a model, then two things happen. The first is that the worry that a perfect being couldn't create since there is no best of all possible worlds disappears. For it is not so hard to think that within certain genre constraints there could be an optimal work (after all, some genre constraints may constrain a work to a finite size; see also this).

The second is that some progress is made on the problem of evil--though by no means is this a solution. For we can answer some "Why did God not do it this way instead?" questions by pointing to the self-imposed artistic limitations. Nonetheless, caution is required. One is very uncomfortable with the thought of God allowing horrendous undeserved suffering for art's sake. Though maybe if the sufferers eventually fully appreciate the art...?

The argument from partial theodicy

The following would be a superb teleological argument for the existence of God if only we had good reason to accept (1) without relying on theism:

1. Every evil has a theodicy.
2. If every evil has a theodicy, then probably God exists.
3. So, probably God exists.

I can think of two (perhaps not ultimately different) ways of making (2) plausible. First, the best explanation of (1) would be that God exists. Second, that an evil has a theodicy means that it's the sort of thing that God would have a reason to permit if God existed. But it would be very odd if all evils had this hypothetical God-involving property without God existing. It would be a cosmic coincidence.

But as I said, (1) is the rub. However, what about this version:

4. Most evils happening to humans have a theodicy.
5. If most evils happening to humans have a theodicy, then probably God exists.
6. So, probably, God exists.

And while we're at it, let's add:

7. If God exists, all evils have a theodicy.
8. So, probably, all evils have a theodicy.

Premise (5) is harder to justify than (2), but I think the reasoning behind (2) still contributes to the plausibility of (5). The best alternative to theism is a form of naturalism, and we just wouldn't expect most evils, or even most evils happening to people, to have a theodicy on naturalism, so our best explanation for why most such evils have a theodicy is that God exists.

I want to say something about why I am restricting (4) and the antecedent of (5) to evils happening to humans. The reason is that we have much better epistemic access to evils happening to humans, and so we are better able to judge of both the magnitude of the evils and the theodicies and lack thereof.

And (4) is much easier to justify than (1). All we need is enough partial theodicies. Plausibly, for instance, many evils—perhaps it's already most evils—are moral evils that are sufficiently non-horrendous that a free will theodicy directly applies to them. Many evils have a good theodicy in terms of the exercise of virtue they enable. And when I reflect on the evils that have befallen me in my life, it's easy to see that I deserve punishment for them all by my sins, and would have deserved a lot more than I got. Granted, I've lived a charmed life, so the applicability of this will be limited. But between freedom, virtue and punishment, it is plausible that the majority of evils happening to people have been covered.

A somewhat different argumentative route is:

9. Most evils happening to humans have a theodicy.
10. The best explanation of (9) is that all evils have a theodicy.
11. So, probably, all evils have a theodicy.
12. If all evils have a theodicy, then probably God exists.
13. At least somewhat probably, God exists.

Finally, there will be first-person versions that make use of a premise like:

14. Every evil (or: most evils) that happened to me has a theodicy.

Freedom and theodicy

Invoking free will has always been a major part of theodicy. If God has good reason to give us the possibility to act badly, that provides us with at least a defense against the problem of evil. But to make this defense into something more like a theodicy is hard. After all, God can give us such pure characters that even though we can act badly, we are unlikely to do so.

I want to propose that we go beyond the mere alternate-possibilities part of free will in giving theodicies. The main advantage of this is that the theodicy may be capable of accomplishing more. But there is also a very nice bonus: our theodicy may then be able to appeal to compatibilists, who are (sadly, I think) a large majority of philosophers.

I think we should reflect on the ways in which one can limit a person's freedom through manipulation of the perfectly ordinary sort. Suppose Jane is much more attractive, powerful, knowledgeable and intelligent than Bob, but Jane wants Bob to freely do something. She may even want this for Bob's own sake. Nonetheless, in order not to limit Bob's freedom too much, she needs to limit the resources she uses. Even if she leaves Bob the possibility of acting otherwise, there is the ever-present danger that she is manipulating him in a way that limits his freedom.

I think the issue of manipulation is particularly pressing if what Jane wants Bob to do is to love her back. To make use of vastly greater attractiveness, power, knowledge and intelligence in order to secure the reciprocation of love is to risk being a super-stalker, someone who uses her knowledge of the secret springs of Bob's motivations in order to subtly manipulate him to love her back. Jane needs to limit what she does. She may need to make herself less attractive to Bob in order not to swamp his freedom. She may need to give him a lot of time away from herself. She might have reason not to make it be clear to him that she is doing so much for him that he cannot but love her back. These limitations are particularly plausible in the case where the love Jane seeks to have reciprocated is something like friendship or, especially, romantic love. And Scripture also presents God's love for his people as akin to marital love, in addition to being akin to parental love (presumably, God's love has no perfect analogue among human loves).

So if God wants the best kind of reciprocation of his love, perhaps he can be subtle, but not too subtle. He can make use of his knowledge of our motivations and beliefs, but not too much such knowledge. He can give us gifts, but not overload us with gifts. He may need to hide himself from us for a time. Yes, the Holy Spirit can work in the heart all the time, but the work needs to be done in a way that builds on nature if God is to achieve the best kind of reciprocation of his love.

I think there are elements of theodicy here. And a nice bonus is that they don't rely on incompatibilism.

The Incarnation is also an important element here—I am remembering Kierkegaard...

Self-inflicted sufferings, Maimonedes and anomaly

Suppose I know that if I go kayaking on a sunny day for two delightful hours, I will have mild muscle pains the next day. I judge that the price is well worth paying. I go kayaking and I then suffer the mild muscle pains the next day.

My suffering is not deserved. After all, suffering is something you come to deserve by wrongdoing, and I haven't done anything wrong. But it's also awkward to call it "undeserved". I guess it's non-deserved suffering.

It would be very implausible to run an argument from evil based on a case like this. And it's not hard to come up with a theodicy for it. God is under no obligation to make it possible for me to go kayaking on a sunny day and a fortiori he is under no obligation to make it possible for me to do so while avoiding subsequent pain. It is not difficult to think that the good of uniformity of nature justifies God's non-interference.

How far can a theodicy of this sort be made to go? Well, it extends to other cases where the suffering is a predictable lawlike consequence of one's optional activities. This will include cases where the optional activities are good, neutral or bad. Maimonedes, no doubt speaking from medical experience, talks of the last case at length:

The third class of evils comprises those which every one causes to himself by his own action. This is the largest class, and is far more numerous than the second class. It is especially of these evils that all men complain,only few men are found that do not sin against themselves by this kind of evil. Those that are afflicted with it are therefore justly blamed .... This class of evils originates in man's vices, such as excessive desire for eating, drinking, and love; indulgence in these things in undue measure, or in improper manner, or partaking of bad food. (Guide for the Perplexed, XII)

Maimonedes divides evils into three classes:

1. evils caused by embodiment,
2. evils inflicted by us on one another, and
3. self-inflicted evils.

In the third class he only lists self-inflicted evils that are inflicted by bad activity, but we can extend the class as above. He insists that evils in the first and second classes are "very few and rare" and says that "no notice should be taken of exceptional cases".

The last remark is quite interesting. It goes against the grain of us analytic philosophers—exceptions are our bread and butter, it seems. But Maimonedes' insight, which mirrors Aristotle's remarks about precision in ethics, is deep and important. It suggests that the evils for which there is a plausible "problem of evil", namely the evils of the first and second classes, are an anomaly, and should be handled as such (for a development of this idea, see this paper by Dougherty and Pruss, in Oxford Studies).

Earthly life is very short

We have good a priori reason to think that:

1. If God exists, persons exist forever.

Persons are the sort of non-fungible beings whose cessation of existence would be a cosmic tragedy, and we would not expect that in a world created by God. (Sometimes atheists write as if the hypothesis of an afterlife was an additional posit, brought in ad hoc to counter the problem of evil.)

Our earthly life is very short, then. At most about a hundred years. Which is 0% of eternity. And by (1), we have good reason to think that if God exists, there is infinitely more later.

It is not that surprising that there is evil in a very good existence if the evil occupies only a small portion of the existence. And 0% is a small portion. Moreover, if we were to guess where the evil might be met with, the beginning of existence would be a reasonable guess. For improvement is much better than decay. And while we cannot be self-existent like God, being in some way the co-authors of our goodness is a great value. But that requires the possibility of not being good. And makes plausible the actuality thereof.

Searching for meaning in one's suffering

Here is a logically valid argument:

1. If theism is false, most evils are meaningless.
2. If most evils are meaningless, it is inadvisable for sufferers to put significant effort into searching for meaning in their suffering.
3. It is not inadvisable for sufferers to put significant effort into searching for meaning in their suffering.
4. So, theism is true.

All the conditionals here are material conditionals and I am not claiming any kind of necessity for them. I do find the premises fairly plausible. I am least sure of (2). I not clear on what "meaning in suffering" is, but there does seem to be such a thing—at least, many people report finding it.