Evil, The Problem of
N. N. Trakakis
australasian philosophers have in many ways led the field in recent discussions on the notorious problem of evil, the problem of reconciling the existence of a being that is unlimited in power, knowledge and goodness with the existence of evil (or evil of certain sorts or amounts) in the world.
it all began with J. L. mackie’s ‘Evil and omnipotence’ paper, published in 1955 in Mind. here Mackie posed the problem of evil as a logical problem: it is the problem of removing an alleged logical inconsistency between certain claims about God and certain claims about evil. Mackie argued that the inconsistency can be removed only by giving up one or more of the propositions constituting the problem, e.g. by denying God’s omnipotence (or placing significant limits to God’s power) or denying the existence of evil. Seemingly more promising strategies, such as the idea that evil is due to human free will, were rejected by Mackie on the grounds that ‘if God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made men such that they always freely choose the good?’ (1955: 209).
This view, that God could have created a world in which everyone always freely did what is right, came to be known as Mackie’s ‘utopia Thesis’, and it provoked much debate in subsequent literature.
interestingly, two early australian responses to Mackie’s argument came from Catholics who challenged Mackie’s utopia Thesis. Father P. M. Farrell, in a response to Mackie also published in Mind (1958), defended the Thomistic view that evil is a privation of being that is inherent in the creation of contingent things (though Farrell’s critique of Mackie soon became more public and more strident, if not uglier as well; see Franklin 2003: 84–5). anticipating Plantinga’s free will defence, Selwyn Grave (1956) argued that, if free will is given an indeterminist reading, then for all we know it might not have been possible for even God to create a world in which all free agents always do what is right. Mackie replied to these critiques in his 1962(b) paper, ‘Theism and utopia’. and in his posthumously published The Miracle of Theism (1982)—a work which functions as a kind of counterpoint to the natural theology of Swinburne’s The Existence of God (1st ed. 1979)—Mackie again turns to his argument from evil, which he modifies and defends against recent critics such as Plantinga. (despite this, Plantinga’s free will defence is widely considered today as having decisively refuted logical arguments from evil such as Mackie’s. For an opposing view, see oppy 2004.)
one innovative twist in australasian contributions to the problem of evil relates to the widely held assumption that compatibilist theories of free will render the problem of evil insoluble (for if compatibilism is true, then God can
Evil, The Problem of
simply determine all his creatures to always do the right thing, without thereby removing their free will). John bishop (1993b), however, has argued that even compatibilists can avail themselves of the free will defence, provided that the defence is supplemented with a further higher good (beyond freedom of action itself), viz. the good of the highest forms of mutual loving personal relationship (though Perszyk 1999 has replied that bishop’s compatibilist version of the free will defence is not in fact consistent with compatibilism). Like bishop, robert young (1975) contends that, even if compatibilism is true, it does not necessarily follow that God would prefer a world in which people always freely choose the good over a world with moral evil in it. having defended a compatibilist account of freedom against rival libertarian accounts, young then admits that resolving the problem of evil given the truth of compatibilism becomes ‘one of the most difficult exercises in Christian apologetics’ (1975: 214). not deterred, however, he conducts a thought experiment where a compatibilist world in which every person always (freely) does what is right is described in detail and compared with a world like ours where people (with compatibilist freedom) regularly do what is wrong.
young argues that, although there is nothing obviously incoherent or inconsistent in the description provided of the evil-free world, such a world is so radically different from our world that it is easy to overlook not only the difficulties in drawing evaluative comparisons between the two worlds, but also the many demerits of a world without (moral) evil: for instance, the inhabitants of such a world ‘wouldn’t even be of moderate moral stature because they wouldn’t be faced, for example, with needing to forgive or with the difficult task we presently have of acting rightly even when morally wronged’ (1975: 221). Similarly, Martin davies (though not at the time working in australia) argued that, ‘even if causal determinism is true, it is very far from clear that the mere existence of evil, or the existence of moral evil in particular, provides an argument against the existence of God’ (1980: 127).
Continuing with the non-theistic side, both h. J. McCloskey and Michael tooley have also developed arguments from evil. McCloskey (1960) discusses and rejects a number of purported solutions to the problem of natural evil, before doing the same with the problem of moral evil, rejecting as does Mackie (but not for the same reasons) appeals to human free will. (McCloskey 1974 is a book-length treatment of the subject.) Michael tooley (1991), at the time a senior research fellow in the Philosophy Program at the australian national university’s research school of the social sciences, distinguishes different ways the argu-ment from evil can be formulated; contends that the arguargu-ment is best stated in concrete, not abstract, terms (thus focussing on particular kinds of evil, and not on the sheer existence or quantity of evil); considers a number of responses to arguments from evil, and argues that each of these fail; and concludes that
‘nothing less than a reasonably complete theodicy will do’ (1991: 131), though he does not engage in an assessment of theodicies. although tooley left australia’s shores long ago, it is worth mentioning that he has recently engaged in a debate on the existence of God with alvin Plantinga, published as Knowledge of God
Evil, The Problem of
(2008). here tooley’s case against theism is based largely on his evidential (or inductive) argument from evil, and his defence of this argument rests on his justification of the crucial ‘inductive step’ that proceeds (roughly put) from ‘no goods we know of justify God in permitting evil e’ to ‘(it is likely that) no goods whatsoever justify God in permitting e’.
another debate on the existence of God, in the same blackwell series, features J. J. C. smart against John haldane (1996, 2nd ed. 2003). Evil, argues Smart, is readily explicable from the perspective of evolutionary naturalism, but not from a theistic perspective: there is no plausible way of reconciling the existence of God with the existence of evil, especially natural evil (1996: 66–73). haldane’s reply (1996: 152–60) that natural evil is an unavoidable by-product of a natural system made up of a variety of species with different capacities and competing interests, only prompts Smart to ask: ‘but could not God have created a universe with different laws, non-metabolising non-competitive spirits, all engaged in satisfying non-competitive activities such as pure mathematics or the production of poetry?’ (1996: 184).
on the theistic side, the Catholic philosopher M. b. ahern (1971) ends on the irenic note that, given the nature and complexity of the problem, it is impossible for any theist to show that all actual evil is justified, and similarly impossible for any non-theist to show that actual evil is not justified. This view, now known as ‘sceptical theism’ as it is usually proposed by theists who are sceptical of our ability to discern God’s reasons for permitting evil, was ably defended by another Catholic philosopher from australia, F. J. Fitzpatrick, in a 1981 article in Religious Studies. The sceptical theist view has found many proponents of late, but its shortcomings and dangers have been documented by both oppy (2006:
289–313) and trakakis (2007: chs 4–7).
Theistic yet less sceptical has been the Jesuit, John Cowburn (1979, rev. 2003), who has developed a theodicy based largely on teilhard de Chardin’s view that evolutionary progress—and hence the concomitant physical suffering and disorder—is an unavoidable feature of any universe containing corporeal living beings. bruce Langtry also develops a (partial) theodicy in God, the Best, and Evil (2008), but one that appeals to goods bound up with free will and moral responsibility, while remaining neutral between compatibilism and libertarian-ism. While Langtry’s theodicy can be seen as attempting to account for at least some natural evil, insofar as it attempts to account for the fact that humans undergo much ‘dysfunction’ (where this includes such conditions as paralysis, blindness and senile dementia), trakakis (2007: ch.11) argues against received opinion that leading contemporary theodicies do not succeed in explaining any instances of natural evil at all.
other australasian contributions to the problem of evil that are worthy of note include Ken Perszyk’s work on Molinism, this being the theory that God’s omniscience encompasses both foreknowledge and middle knowledge (i.e. knowledge of what every possible free creature would freely choose to do in any possible situation in which that creature might find itself). Perszyk has
Evil, The Problem of
contested various common assumptions about Molinism, including the view that Molinism, in virtue of attributing a high level of knowledge and control to God, renders the theodicist’s task harder in comparison with some alternative conceptions of divine omniscience, such as the ‘open theist’ view that the future is open and unknowable even for God (Perszyk 1998).
More radically, Michael Levine (2000a) characterises the theodicies (or defences) recently developed by Christian philosophers—especially Swinburne and van inwagen—as ‘terrible solutions to a horrible problem’. ‘if van inwagen and Swinburne were political figures,’ Levine writes, ‘there would be protesters on the street. i mean this literally and not polemically. after all, what they have done is to offer not just a prima facie, but an ultimate justification for the holocaust and other horrors. What should be explained is how this has gone virtually unnoticed in the literature’ (2000a: 107). Levine goes on to suggest that the proposals of Swinburne and van inwagen are ‘indicative of the lack of vitality, relevance and “seriousness” of contemporary Christian analytic philosophy of religion’ (2000a: 112). (a similar stance on theodicies is taken in trakakis 2008.) in his comprehensive study of pantheism, Levine (1994) has also argued that pantheistic conceptions of divinity, unlike traditional theistic conceptions, evade the problem of evil altogether.
More radically still, John bishop (1993a, 1998, 2007b) has long argued that the problem of evil renders the traditional theistic conception of God (or ‘the omni-God’, as he calls it) morally problematic. The argument from evil that bishop develops is a logical (and not evidential) one, and one that is based on particular concrete cases of great suffering. bishop’s claim, in short, is that from the perspective of certain non-utilitarian value-commitments (commitments which, bishop concedes, can rationally be rejected), God cannot justifiably permit, say, a child being tortured to death, even if this were necessary for the realisation of some supreme good. Consider, for example, the fact that God, in the classical theodicist world, must sustain the world even while some terrible evil is taking place, so as to bring about some greater good. but what this entails—e.g. sustain-ing in each episode of torture and abuse the perpetrator’s capacities to inflict suffering and the victim’s capacity to endure it—seems incompatible with what a perfectly virtuous moral agent would do, at least given certain value-commit-ments. The theist’s best option, then, is to look for alternative and religiously adequate understandings of the divine, and bishop’s preferred alternative is one that is thoroughly naturalistic: God on this view is not a supernatural agency or entity, but is (literally) love, a supreme community constituted by and emerging from persons-in-loving relationship.
(Thanks to Peter Forrest, John bishop and bruce Langtry for reviewing an earlier draft of this article.)
Existentialism
Existentialism
Maurita Harney
Introduction
The common concern that loosely unites the diverse assortment of writers known as ‘existentialists’ is a preoccupation with the question of what it means to exist as a human individual situated in the world.
although it is not a doctrine or even a unified set of themes, what marks existentialism as significantly different from analytical philosophy is its app-roach and style. its starting point is the phenomenological orientation of the experiencing subject and for this reason it is seen as part of the husserlian phenomenological tradition. Within the broad field of Continental philosophy it is further distinguished by a number of features: it emphasises authenticity and is a philosophy of engagement, seeing values and meanings as the creation of the individual rather than a matter of conformity to fixed, universal and rational principles. Existentialist philosophy embraces the experiential dimension of human existence, emphasising and evoking moods and emotions such as angst, dread, absurdity, futility, and alienation.
amongst australian philosophers, there is general agreement about the cen-trality of the French existentialists, most notably Sartre and to some extent beauvoir and Camus. Some of the ideas of heidegger, Kierkegaard, nietszche and Merleau-Ponty, though problematic, are also included. Marcel and Jaspers are usually included to a lesser extent as are writers such as Kafka, dostoevsky and beckett.
in australian philosophy, existentialism-related teaching and research has largely followed the fortunes of phenomenology, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. as a teaching area it is usually understood as a fairly well-circumscribed movement, or at least a cluster of agreed-upon themes and exponents. however, research in the area is much richer and far more diffuse, ranging from exegetical commentaries and interpretations of key thinkers and themes, to the practice of existential phenomenology. Existential phenomenology is the use of husserl’s phenomenological method to address existential themes, specifically those con-cerning heideggerian-derived being-in-the-world. These themes include relat-ions with others and embodiment, as well as a broad range of cultural and political themes.
The 1940s to the Mid 1970s
despite their geographical isolation from Europe, australian philosophers in the 1940s and early 1950s were not totally unfamiliar with the ideas of the