Rowe's argument from evil revisited

In his 1979 classic paper, Rowe says that a necessary condition for an “omniscient, wholly good (OG) being” to fail to prevent an evil s₁ is that at least one of the following three conditions holds:

1. there is some greater good, G, such that G is obtainable by OG only if OG permits s₁, or

2. there is some greater good, G, such that G is obtainable by OG only if OG permits either s₁ or some evil equally bad or worse

3. s₁ is such that it is preventable by OG only if OG permits some evil equally bad or worse.

We might put it this way: Rowe is saying that OG will prevent all gratuitous evils, and an evil is gratuitous if none of (i)–(iii) are satisfied.

First, note that (i) can be omitted, since if we have (i), we have (ii) as well. That’s a nice simplification: we only need (ii) and (iii).

More interestingly, however, note an ambiguity in “there is some greater good”. To see the ambiguity, consider this apparent counterexample to Rowe.

Suppose both theological compatibilism and Molinism are false, and God decides to give Alice a free choice between a great moral good G₁ and a tiny moral evil s₁, in circumstances where Alice is very likely to choose G₁. Absent theological compatibilism and Molinism, God cannot, however, ensure that Alice will choose G₁. Suppose, also, that free choice is not valuable as such, but significantly freely choosing well is very valuable (where significant freedom is freedom to choose between right and wrong), and much more valuable than choosing well without significant freedom. Finally, let’s suppose Alice goes for s₁. It is reasonable to say that s₁ is non-gratuitous, for preventing s₁ would lose the opportunity for the great good of Alice significantly freely choosing G₁. But an opportunity for a good may not count as a good. Condition (iii) is not satisfied—if God didn’t give Alice the choice between G₁ and s₁, no other evil would have to be permitted. But neither is (ii). For the good G of Alice significantly freely choosing G₁ does not exist, since Alice does not in fact choose G₁.

For many years I thought that this was a counterexample to Rowe. Today it hit me that this might be uncharitable. When Rowe says “there is some greater good”, he might mean a greater possible good or a greater type of good. Thus, in my example there is a greater possible good or a greater type of good, that of Alice significantly freely choosing G₁, albeit this is a good that isn’t actually instantiated.

Thus, charitably, let’s take Rowe to be quantifying over possible goods (or, pretty much equivalently, types of goods). A weak support for this is that the “some evil” in (ii) clearly quantifies over possible evils, so it makes the conditions neater to quantify over possible goods and evils.

Here is another problem for Rowe’s account. Suppose (ii) and (iii) are not satisfied, but instead we have:

4. there is a good, G, such that G is obtainable by OG only if OG permits s₁ or something at least as bad while the only way that s₁ is preventable by OG is by permitting some lesser evil s₂ or something at least as bad as s₂, and that G plus s₁ is better than s₂.

It seems that in case like this, s₁ need not be gratuitous. But note that a case like this does not require either G to be a greater good in comparison to the evil s₁ nor does it require s₂ to be at least as bad as s₁. For intance, suppose the value of G is 10, the value of s₁ is  − 11 and the value of s₂ is  − 3. Then G plus s₁ has value  − 1, which is better than the  − 3 we get by preventing s₁ at the cost of s₂ and loss of G. In cases like this, (ii) and (iii) need not be satisfied, and yet the evil need not be gratuitous. In other words, there cases where we have a kind of mix of (ii) and (iii). (It’s hard to think of examples, but it’s also hard to think of examples of (iii). I think the examples would have to involve divine promises.)

I also worry about incommensurability. For simplicity, let’s suppose there is no incommensurability: all values and disvalues are comparable. Also, let’s suppose that there are only finitely many scenarios in play, so we don’t have to worry about infinite sequences of less and less bad options and stuff like that.

Still Rowe’s necessary condition for non-gratuity have become more complicated: (ii) or (iii) or (iv), and with the quantifiers ranging over possible goods and possible evils. And once conditions get so complicated, one starts to worry that we are missing something. It would be nice to simplify the conditions.

Here is my attempt at such a simplification:

1. There is a possible scenario where s₁ is permitted by OG which is at least as good as any possible scenario where s₁ is prevented by OG.

Before continuing, I want to worry a bit about the following. Suppose that by preventing an evil s₁ you lose a good G, where G is not a greater good, but an “equal good”, i.e., the value of G equals exactly the disvalue of s₁. In that case, it seems plausible that a morally perfect being would prevent s₁, since there is a presumption in favor of preventing evils. I will take avoid this worry simply by assuming that it’s better to have neither G nor s₁ than to have both G and s₁ in cases where the value of G equals the disvalue of s₁, i.e., that axiology has a presumption in favor of no-evil. Otherwise, we need to slightly modify (1).

Suppose (1) is true. Let G be the sum total of the goods in the scenario A that’s at least as good as any possible scenario where s₁ is prevented by OG. It follows that any way of preventing s₁ involves either the loss of G or a scenario where the totality of evil is greater than s₁. If G is a greater good compared to s₁, then we thus have (ii). If G is empty, then it seems that there are no goods in the scenario, but we must have greater evils in the s₁-prevention scenarios than in A, and so we have (iii). Finally, if G is non-empty but not greater in comparison to $s_1 then I suspect we are going to have (iv) or something very close, but it’s a bit too complicated for me to think through in detail at the moment.

Moreover, (1) is intuitive as a necessary condition on God’s permitting an evil, in a way in which the triple disjunction (ii) or (iii) or (iv) is probably too complicated to be intuitive. I take it, then, that (1) is a friendly amendment to Rowe’s atheistic argument.

But at this point there is an interesting skeptical theist move. Rowe needs to be able to be epistemically justified in pointing to some evil s₁ and denying (1). But that’s pretty hard. Claim (1) existentially quantifies over all possible scenarios where s₁ is permitted by OG. It’s not that easy to know that one of them has the property indicated in (1), given the vast range of scenarios where s₁ is permitted by OG.