Category: Good and Evil

Is Death Evil?

So is death evil or not?  What is my answer?  The answer depends on metaphysics.

1. If we are natural beings only, nothing but complex physical systems, continuous with the rest of nature and susceptible in principle of complete explanation by physics and biology, then I cannot see how death in general could be accounted evil.  The premature death of some is perhaps evil on the ground that death deprives the decedent of what he might otherwise have enjoyed.  The happy and healthy 20 year old who is cut down by a stray bullet arguably suffers a loss, not one that he can experience, but a loss nonetheless.  (One can suffer a loss merely by being the subject of it without actually experiencing it.)  There is of course a residual technical puzzle about how a person who no longer exists can be the subject of loss, but for present purposes I won't worry further about this.

My main point is that it cannot be maintained on naturalistic principles that death in general is evil for humans.  For suppose a person lives a productive life of 90 or so years, a life which on balance has been satisfying to the person and enriching to those who have come in contact with him.  What is evil about the death of such a person?  And if death is not evil for such a person, then the philosophical question whether death in general is evil must be answered in the negative.  Here are some further considerations:

a.  It is a conceptual truth that one cannot be deprived of the impossible.  Now healthy productive living after a certain age is nomologically impossible.  So a person who dies at a ripe old age of 90 or 100 is not being deprived of anything by dying.  (Adjust the numbers upwards if you care to.)  At the point at which further living become nomologically impossible, one cannot be said to be deprived by death of a good.  Of course, the old person may want  to live on a another year or decade, but that is irrelevant.

b. Death removes from the decedent  the goods of life but also removes the evils, which are not inconsiderable.  I will spare the reader a litany of the miseries and horrors of this life.  If he opens his eyes he will quickly become apprised of them.  (But don't generalize from your own favorable experience: readers of this blog are members of an elite cadre of well-placed and fortunate individuals.)

c.  Even if being dead involves a loss for the decedent after a long and satisfying life, there cannot on naturalistic principles be any experiencing of this loss by the decedent, so how big a deal could it be?  Suppose your will stipulates that on your death $100, 000 of your estate shall go to Oxfam. Your executrix blows the whole wad at Nordstrom's.  It is arguable though not perfectly clear that you have been violated — but you'll be able to 'live' with it, right?  Others can say that you were wronged.  But what could that be to you who no longer exists?

On this naturalistic way of thinking, then, death cannot in general be an evil for humans.  At most, the premature death of some individuals is evil.  But even this is not clear because of the problem of 'the subject of loss/deprivation.' 

But how do you know that naturalism is true?  That you believe it with great conviction cuts no ice.  As Nietzsche says, in his typically exaggerated and febrile way, "Convictions are the greatest enemies of truth."  Can you prove naturalism?  If you try, you will soon entangle yourself in a thicket of thorny metaphysical questions from which you will not escape unbloodied. You cannot prove it.  I guarantee it.

2.  How then could death be evil?  Here is one way.  Suppose there is the possibility of personal survival of bodily death (with divine assistance) and the possibility of further intellectual, moral, and spiritual development in fellowship with others who have survived and in fellowship with God.  Now if some such version of theism is true, and if one dies and becomes nothing — the possibility of survival not having been realized either because the person in question refuses the divine offer or is judged unworthy of it — then one will have been deprived of a great good.  One will have missed out on the beatitude for which we have been created.  So death (annihilation) would be a very great evil on this scheme, an incomparably greater evil than the evil of death on a naturalistic scheme, assuming it could be said to be evil on a naturalistic scheme.  (You will have noticed that 'the problem of the subject' arises on both schemes.) 

As I see it, death is evil because it deprives us of what some of us feel is our 'birthright' as spiritual beings: continued intellectual, moral, and spiritual progress.  We cannot quite believe that we are nothing more than complex physical systems no more worthy of continuance than trees and swamps and clouds.  We feel it to be absurd that the progress we have made individually but also collectively will be simply obliterated, that our questions will go unanswered, our hopes dashed, that the thirsting after justice will go unslaked.  We are not reconciled to the notion that there will be no redemption, that there will be no answer to or recompense for the terrible crimes that have been inflicted on the innocent.  As easy as it is to be reconciled to the death of others viewed objectively, it is difficult to be reconciled to the utter annihilation of those we love.  If death is annihilation, then this life is absurd, a big seductive joke, and we are the butt of it.

Think of the great questions that have tormented the best minds for millenia.  Does it not strike you as a perfectly absurd arrangement that one day these questions will just cease with the last human being and go unanswered forever?  All that painstaking inquiry and no answer, not even the answer that the questions posed were meaningless and unanswerable!

There is a certain sort of secular humanist who fools himself with dreams of human progress toward a 'better world' in which a sort of secular redemption will be achieved.  But this is pure illusion and pure evasion.  It is nothing but feel-good claptrap.  On a naturalistic scheme there can be no redemption for the billions who have been the victims of terrible injustice.  Be a naturalist if you must, but don't fool yourself with humanistic fantasies.  There is no secular substitute for the redemption that only God could bring about.  Be an honest naturalist, a nihilist naturalist.

But of course what I have just said in exfoliation of the sense some of us have of being more than complex physical systems, a sense of having a higher destiny, proves nothing and can be easily rebutted: Death is not an evil because none of what some feel is their birthright as imago Dei is really possible.  It is just pious claptrap born of dissatisfaction with the way things are.  One may feel that it is 'a rotten deal' and 'a bad arrangement' that one must die and be annihilated just when one is starting to make real progress toward understanding and enlightenment and happiness.  But that feeling is just a quirk of some (malcontent) natures: it doesn't prove anything.

3.  So once again we end up in good old Platonic fashion, aporetically, at an impasse.  There is simply no solution to the problem of whether death is evil without a solution to the underlying metaphysical question in philosophical anthropology:  What is man?  (The fourth of Kant's famous questions after: What can I know? What ought I do?  What can I hope for?)  And to the question What is man? there is no answer that can withstand the scrutiny of, and receive the endorsement of, all able practioners.

That is not to say that there is no correct answer.  It is to say that, even if there is, one cannot know it to be correct.  And if one cannot know it to be correct, then it is not an answer in any serious sense of the term.

So I arrive once again at the following long-held conviction.  In the final analysis one must DECIDE what one will believe and how one will live.  There is no evading one's doxastic and practical freedom and responsibility.  When it comes to the ultimate questions one must decide what is true and how one will live.  No one can help you, not even God.  For supposing God, or a divine emmisary, to appear to you right now, you would still have to decide that  it was indeed God or a being from God who was appearing to you; and you would still have to decide whether or not to credit his revelation.  What if the divine intermediary told you to murder your innocent son?  What would you say?  If you were rational your would say, "Get the hell out of here; by commanding me to do what is plainly immoral you prove that you are an illusion."  Or maybe you would decide to accept the veridicality of the experience.  Either way you would be deciding.  (See Abraham and Isaac category and Doxastic Voluntarism category)

The decision as to what to believe and how to live is of course not whimsical or thoughtless or quick or light-hearted.  It must be made with all due doxastic vigilance and fear and trembling, but there is no getting around the need for decision.  But what if you refuse to decide and simply acquiesce in something imposed from without?  Then that too is a decision on your part.

 

Evil As it Appears to Atheists and Theists

In the preface to his magnum opus, F. H. Bradley observes that "Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct." (Appearance and Reality, Oxford 1893, p. x) The qualifier 'bad' is out of place and curiously off-putting at the outset of a 570 page metaphysical tome, so  if, per impossibile, I had had  the philosopher's ear I would have suggested 'good but not rationally compelling.'  Be that as it may, the point is that our basic sense of things comes first, and only later, if at all, do we take up the task of the orderly discursive articulation of that basic sense.

Thus atheism is bred in the bone before it is born in the brain.  The atheist feels it in his bones and guts that the universe is godless and that theistic conceptions are so many fairy tales dreamt up for false consolation.  This world is just too horrifying to be a divine creation: meaningless unredeemed suffering; ignorance and delusion; the way nature, its claws dripping with blood, feasts on itself; moral evil and injustice — all bespeak godlessness.   There can't be a God of love behind all this horror!  For most atheists, theism is not a Jamesian live option.  What point, then, in debating them?

This deep intuition of the godlessness of the world  is prior to and the force behind arguments from evil.  The arguments merely articulate and rationalize the intuition.  The counterarguments of theists don't stand a chance in the face of the fundamental, gut-grounded, atheist attitude.  No one who strongly  FEELS that things are a certain way is likely to be moved by what he will dismiss as so much verbiage, hairsplitting, and intellectualizing.

But for the theist it is precisely the horror of this world that motivates the quest for a solution, or rather, the horror of this world together with the conviction that we cannot provide the solution for ourselves whether individually or collectively. Evil is taken by the theist, not as a 'proof' of the nonexistence of God, but as a reason, a motive, to seek God.  'Without God, life is horror.' 

Addendum 12/21:  I should add that it would be pointless to seek God if any of the atheist arguments were compelling.  But none are. 

Silenian and Epicurean Sources of “Death is Not an Evil”

Clarity will be served if we distinguish the specifically Epicurean reason for thinking death not an evil from another reason which is actually anti-Epicurean. I'll start with the second reason.

A. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence.  This is the wisdom of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth ofTragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him.  When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man.  Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words:  "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.  But the second best for you is — to die soon."

Silenus B.  Death is not an evil for the one who dies because when death is, one is not, and when one is, death is not.  My being dead is not an evil state of affairs because there is no such state of affairs (STOA) as my being dead.  Since there is no such STOA, there is no bearer of the property of being evil.  If this property has a bearer it cannot be an individual or a property but must be a STOA.

And so the Epicurean line is consistent with life affirmation. The Epicurean is not saying that being dead is good and being alive evil; he is saying that being dead is not evil because axiologically neutral.  The Epicurean is therefore also committed to saying that being dead is not a good.

The first reason is axiological, the second ontological.  The Silenian pessimist  renders a negative value verdict on life as a whole:  it's no good, better never to have been born, with  second best being to die young.  By contrast, the Epicurean's point is that the ontology of the situation makes it impossible for death to be an evil for the one who has died. 

This reinforces my earlier conclusion that there is nothing nihilistic about the Epicurean position. 

The Evil of Death and the Rationality of Fearing It

Is death an evil?  Even if it is an evil to the people other than me who love me, or in some way profit from my life, is it an evil to me?  A few days ago, defying Philip Larkin, I took the Epicurean position that death cannot be an evil for me and so it cannot be rational for me to fear my being dead: any fear of death is a result of muddled thinking, something the philosopher cannot tolerate, however things may stand with the poet.  But I was a bit quick in that post and none of this is all that clear. A re-think is in order.  Death remains, after millenia, the muse of philosophy.

My earlier reasoning was along the following Epicurean-Lucretian lines.  (Obviously, I am not engaged in a project of exegesis; what exactly these gentlemen meant is not my concern.  I'll leave scholarship to the scholars and history to the historians.)  

1. Either bodily death is the annihilation of the self or it is not.
2. If death is annihilation, then after the moment of dying there is no self in existence, either conscious or unconscious, to have or lack anything.
3. If there is no self after death, then no evil can befall the self post mortem.
4. If no evil can befall the self post mortem, then it is not rational to fear post mortem evils.
5. If, on the other hand, death is not annihilation, then one cannot rationally fear the state of nonbeing for the simple reason that one will not be in that 'state.'
Therefore
6. It is not rational to fear being dead.

The argument is valid, but are the premises true?  (1) is an instance of the the Law of Excluded Middle. (2) seems obviously true: if bodily death is annihilation of the self, then (i) the self ceases to exist at the moment of death, and (ii) what does not exist cannot have or lack anything, whether properties or relations or experiences or parts or possessions.  (ii) is not perfectly obvious because I have heard it argued that after death one continues as a Meinongian nonexistent object — a bizarre notion that I reject, but that deserves a separate post for its exfoliation and critique. 

Premise (3), however, seems vulnerable to counterexample.  Suppose the executor of a will ignores the decedent's wishes.  He wanted his loot to go to Catholic Charities, but the executor, just having read Bukowski, plays it on the horses at Santa Anita.  Intuitively, that amounts to a wrong to the decedent.  The decedent suffers (in the sense of undergoes) an evil despite not suffering (in the sense of experiencing) an evil.  And this despite the fact, assuming it to be one, that the decedent no longer exists. But if so, then (3) is false.  It seems that a person who no longer exists can be the subject of wrongs and harms no less than a person who now exists.  Additional examples like this are easily constructed.

But not only can dead persons have bad things done to them, they can also be deprived of good things. Suppose a 20 year old with a bright future dies suddenly in a car crash.  In most though not all cases of this sort the decedent is deprived of a great deal of positive intrinsic value he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end.  Or at least that is what we are strongly inclined to say.  Few would argue that in cases like this there is no loss to the person who dies.  Being dead at a young age is an evil, and indeed an evil for the person who dies,  even though the person who dies cannot experience the evil of being dead because he no longer exists.

So we need to make a distinction between evils that befall a person and are experienceable by the person they befall, and evils that befall a person that are not experienceable by the person they befall.  This distinction gives us the resources to resist the Epicurean-Lucretian thesis that death is not an evil for the one who dies.  We can grant to Epicurus & Co. that the evil of being dead cannot be experienced as evil without granting that being dead is not an evil.  We can grant to Epicurus et al. that, on the assumption that death is annihilation, being dead cannot be experienced and so cannot be rationally feared; but refuse to grant to them that dying and being dead are not great evils.

In this way, premise (3) of the above argument can be resisted.  Unfortunately, what I have just said in support of the rejection of (3) introduces its own puzzles.  Here is one.

My death at time t is supposed to deprive me of the positive intrinsic value that I would have enjoyed had I lived beyond t.   Thus I am a subject of an evil at times at which I do not exist.  This is puzzling.  When I exist I am of course not subject to the evil of death. But when I do not exist I am not anything, and so how can I be subject to goods or evils?  How can my being dead be an evil for me if I don't exist at the times at which I am supposed to be the subject of the evil?

We will have to think about this some more.

The Problem of Evil and the Argument from Evil

(A reader found the following post, from the old PowerBlogs site, useful.  So I repost it here with minor modifications and additions.)

It is important to distinguish between the problem of evil and the argument from evil. The first is the problem of reconciling the existence of God, as traditionally understood, with the existence of natural and moral evils.  As J. L. Mackie points out, this "is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds." (The Miracle of Theism, Oxford 1982, p. 150) Mackie goes on to point out that "the problem in this sense signally does not arise for those whose views of the world are markedly different from traditional theism." Thus the theist's problem of evil does not arise for an atheist. It might, however, be the case that some other problem of evil arises for the atheist, say, the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with life's being worth living.   But that is a separate matter.

The argument from evil, on the other hand, is an attempt to show the nonexistence of God from the fact of evil, where 'fact of evil' is elliptical for 'the existence of natural and moral evils.'

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL

The main difference between the problem of evil and the argument from evil is that the former is an ad hominem argument whereas the second is not. I am using ad hominem in the way Peter Geach uses it on pp. 26-27 of his Reason and Argument (Basil Blackwell 1976):

This Latin term indicates that these are arguments addressed to a particular man — in fact, the other fellow you are disputing with. You start from something he believes as a premise, and infer a conclusion he won't admit to be true. If you have not been cheating in your reasoning, you will have shown that your opponent's present body of beliefs is inconsistent and it's up to him to modify it somewhere.

As Geach points out, there is nothing fallacious about such an argumentative  procedure. If A succeeds in showing B that his doxastic system harbors a contradiction, then not everything that B believes can be true. Now can an atheist prove the nonexistence of God in this way? No he cannot: at the very most he can prove (with the aid of various auxiliary premises that he and his interlocutor both accept) that God exists and Evil exists cannot both be true. But it does not follow therefrom that God exists is not true. For the atheist to transform the ad hominem problem of evil into a non-ad hominem argument from evil, he would have to establish, or at least assert, that evil exists, and not merely that the theist believes that evil exists. To see my point consider the following conditional, where P is the conjunction of auxiliary premises:

C. If evil exists & P, then God does not exist.

The atheist who raises the problem of evil for the theist asserts (C), or rather a proposition of that form. But to assert a conditional is not to assert its antecedent, or its consequent for that matter; it is to assert a entailment connection between the two. Now although it is the case that for each argument there is a corresponding conditional, and vice versa, arguments must not be confused with conditionals.

Transforming (C) into an argument from evil yields:

Evil Exists

P

Therefore

God does not exist.

Clearly, an atheist who gives this argument, or rather an argument of this form, must assert both premises. Doing so, he ceases his ad hominem examination of the consistency of another person's beliefs, beliefs he either rejects or takes no stand on, and 'comes clean' with his own beliefs.

THE ARGUER FROM EVIL NEEDS TO AFFIRM OBJECTIVE EVIL

If the atheist's aim is merely to poke holes in the logical consistency of the theist's belief-set, then it doesn't matter whether he thinks of evil as objective or subjective. Indeed, he needn't believe in evil in any sense. He could hold that it is an illusion. But if the atheist's goal is to support his own belief that God does not exist with an argument from evil, then he needs to maintain that evil is objective or objectively real.

Consider all the enslavement of humans by humans that has taken place in the history of the world. Suppose it is agreed that slavery is morally wrong. What makes this true? Define a moral subjectivist as one who agrees that the claim in question is true, but holds that the truth-maker of this moral truth, and of others like it, is an individual's being in a psychological state, say, the state of being repulsed by slavery. For the moral subjectivist, then, sentences like 'Slavery is wrong' are elliptical for sentences like 'Slavery is wrong-for-X,' where X is a person or any being capable of being in psychological states. Furthermore, the moral subjectivist grants that moral claims have truth-makers, indeed objective truth-makers; it is just that these truth-makers involve psychological states that vary from person to person.

Now if our atheist subscribes to a theory of evil along those lines, then, although there will be objective facts of the matter regarding what various individuals feel about the practice or the institution of slavery, there will be no objective fact of the matter regarding the wrongness or moral evil of slavery.

If so, the fact of evil subjectively construed will have no bearing on the existence of God, a fact, if it a fact, that is objective.

Suppose a torturer tortures his victim to death solely for the satisfaction it gives him. And suppose that moral subjectivism is true. Then the torturing, though evil for the tortured, is good for the torturer, with the upshot that the torturing is neither good nor evil objectively. Now if I were on the scene and had the power to stop the torturing, but did not, would my noninterference detract from my moral goodness? Not at all. (The same goes a fortiori for God.) For nothing objectively evil is transpiring: all that is going on is that one person is securing his pleasure at the expense of another's pain. If you insist that something evil is going on, then that shows that you reject moral subjectivism. But if you accept moral subjectivism, then nothing evil is going on; the torturing is evil only in the mind of the victim and in the minds of any others who sympathize with him. If you accept moral subjectivism and continue to insist that the torturing is evil, then you would also have to insist that it is good, since it is good from the perspective of the torturer. But if it is both good and evil, then it is (objectively) neither.

What I am claiming, then, is that the atheist arguer from evil must construe evil objectively. This will result in trouble for the atheist if it can be shown that objective evil cannot exist unless God exists. For then the atheist arguer from evil will end up presupposing the very being whose existence he is out to deny. No doubt this is a big 'if.' But it is worth exploring.  The problem for the atheist is to explain how there can be objective good and evil in a Godless universe. 

And another line worth exploring is a theistic argument to God from the fact of objective good and evil.  No such argument could PROVE the existence of God, but it could very well have the power of cancelling out the argument from evil.

Why Evil Can’t Be an Illusion

Suppose evil is an illusion. Then the illusion of evil is itself evil, a non-illusory evil, whence follows the falsity of 'Every evil is an illusion.'

Or is that too quick? Then permit me some exfoliation.

1. Every evil is illusory. (Assumption for reductio ad absurdum)
2. The illusion that there are evils is not itself an illusion: it is real. (See subargument A infra)
3. The illusion that there are evils is itself evil. (See subargument B infra)
Therefore
4. There is an evil that is not illusory, namely, the illusion that there are evils.
Therefore
5. (1) is false: it is not the case that every evil is illusory.

Subargument A: The illusion or false seeming that there are evils, qua false seeming, is either nothing or something. If nothing, then it cannot be the case that every evil is illusory. (After all, evil must have some entitative status, however exiguous,  if  'illusory' is to be predicable of it.) If, on the other hand, the illusion or false seeming that there are evils is something, then this false seeming, though nonveridical, exists in people's minds and is as real as can be.

Subargument B: The illusion that there are evils, which subargument A shows to be real qua false seeming, is itself evil because it is false and deceptive.

One of the metaphysical problems of evil is that, while evil cannot be an illusion, as I have just demonstrated, it cannot be fundamentally real either, as such luminaries as Augustine and Aquinas clearly saw.  Evil has a strange 'in-between' status, an ontologically derivative status. This is what the classical doctrine of evil as privatio boni is supposed to capture. That doctrine, though, we have seen to be problematic. But progress has been made in better understanding the question, What is evil?

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain (Part Two)

Part One is here.

Some pains, though bad in themselves, are instrumentally good. You go for broke on your mountain bike. At the top of a long upgrade your calves are burning from the lactic acid build-up. But it's a 'good' pain. It is instrumentally good despite its intrinsic badness. You are satisfied with having 'flattened' that hill one more time. The net result of the workout is hedonically positive. But surely not all pains are classifiable as instrumentally good. Think of someone who suffers from severe chronic joint pain so bad that he can barely walk let alone pedal a bike. In alleviation thereof he daily ingests a cocktail of drugs with nasty side effects that make it impossible for him to think straight or accomplish anything. Surely the person's condition is evil. (But don't get hung up on the word 'evil' and don't assume that every evil is the responsibility of a finite agent. The evil of pain is a natural or physical, not a moral, evil.) Is this not a counterexample to the thesis that every evil is a privation or absence of good?　

Now pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' I developed this suggestion in Part One  and found reason to reject it.

B. Or one might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. One might point to the fact that pains are often very useful warning signals that indicate that something is going wrong in the body or that some damage is being done to the body: the pains in my knees inform me that I am running too long and hard and am in danger of an overuse injury. On this suggestion, then, pains are real but not evil. Consequently, pains are not counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni.

But this response is not very convincing. There are several considerations.

1. If pains are warning signals, then they are instrumentally good. But what is instrumentally good may also be intrinsically evil. The searing pain in a burnt hand, though instrumentally good, is intrinsically evil. Its positive 'entity' (entitas in scholastic jargon) is apparently not well accommodated on the classical doctrine that evils are privationes boni. Again, the pain is not the mere absence of the good of pleasure, but something positively bad. After all, the hand is not numb or as if aenesthetized; there is a positive sensation 'in' it, and this positive sensation is bad. So even if every pain served to warn us of bodily damage, that would not detract from the positive badness of the pain sensation. One cannot discount the intrinsic positive badness by pointing to the fact that the pain is instrumentally good.

2. If pains are warning signals, it seems that many of them could perform this function without being so excruciating. The intensity of many pains seems out of all proportion to the good that they do in warning us of bodily damage. This excruciatingness is part of the evil of pain.

3. It is a fact that the pain in my hand that warns me to remove it from the hot stove typically does not subside when the hand is removed. It continues to hurt. But what good purpose does this serve given that the warning has been heeded and the hand removed from the hot stove? The argument that pain is good, not evil, because it warns us about bodily damage fails to account for the pain that persists after the warning has been heeded. The pain in my burnt hand continues, of course, because the hand has been damaged; but then that pain is intrinsically and positively evil and the evil cannot be discounted in the way the pain at the time of the contact of hand with stove can be discounted.

4. There is no necessity that a warning system be painful. A robotic arm could have a sensor that causes the arm to retract from a furnace when the furnace temperature becomes damagingly high. The robot would feel nothing. We might have had that sort of painless warning system.

My interim conclusion may be set forth as follows:

Pains are natural evils

The evil of pain is not a mere absence of good

Ergo

Not all evils are privationes boni.

REFERENCE: Jorge J. E. Gracia, "Evil and the Transcendentality of Goodness: Suarez's Solution to the Problem of Positive Evils" in Scott MacDonald, ed., Being and Goodness (Cornell UP, 1991), pp. 151-176.

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain (Part One)

A reader recalled my posts on evil as privatio boni from the old blog and wants me to upload them to the new, which I will gladly do.  So far I managed to scare up two.  Here is the first.

………………………

The goddess of blogging sent me Peter Lupu whose comments are a welcome stimulant. Peter displays the virtues of a good commenter and indeed co-worker: he is 'up to speed,' 'in there' with the terminology, and he knows how to oppose without becoming churlish. He tells me that theists, confronted with the logical argument from evil should not reject the premise that objective evil exists. I agree. But a good philosopher examines every aspect of a problem, no matter how bizarre it appears at first, and every premise and every inferential joint of every argument pertaining to the problem. So we need to consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:

 For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present –namely, the diseases and wounds — go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils — that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem — dating back beyond Hume to Epicurus — of reconciling the existence of God (as standardly defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.

Without going that far, let us first  note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Thus in one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.

The Problem of Pain

But then how are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils. Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The Nagelian what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.

The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a  felt pain is a positive evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good.

The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness.  Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, etc.

Two Possible Responses. Pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' One might flesh this out as follows. There is a certain sensory quale that I experience when my knee slams into the leg of the table. Call this the experiential substratum of the pain. But the painfulness of this substratum is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The substratum, the sensory quale, exists in objective reality despite the fact that its esse est percipi. But the painfulness, and thus the evil or badness of the sensory quale is an interpretation from the side of the sufferer.

What's more, this interpretation or projection can be altered or withdrawn entirely. Thus, with practice, one can learn to focus one's attention on a painful sensory quale and in so doing lessen its painfulness. If you try this, it works to some extent. After a long day of hiking over rocky trails, my feet hurt. But I say to myself, "It's only a sensation, and your aversion to it is your doing." Focusing on the sensation in this way, and noting that one's attitude towards it plays a role in the painfulness, one can reduce the painfulness.  If you try it, you will see that it works to some extent.   This suggests that the painfulness is merely subjective.

Unfortunately, this response is not convincing as a general response to the problem of pain.   Imagine the physical and mental suffering of one who is being tortured to death. And then try to convince yourself that the pain in a situation like this is just a matter of 'attitude' or aversion. "Conquer desire and aversion" is a good Buddhist maxim. But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.

B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response for another time.

A Modal Ontological Argument and an Argument from Evil Compared

After leaving the polling place this morning, I headed out on a sunrise hike over the local hills whereupon the muse of philosophy bestowed upon me some good thoughts.  Suppose we compare a modal ontological argument with an argument from evil in respect of the question of evidential support for the key premise in each.  This post continues our ruminations on the topic of contingent support for noncontingent propositions.

A Modal Ontological Argument

'GCB' will abbreviate 'greatest conceivable being,' which is a rendering of Anselm of Canterbury's "that than which no greater can be conceived."  'World' abbreviates 'broadly logically possible world.'

1. The concept of the GCB is either instantiated in every  world or it is instantiated in no world.

2. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in some world.  Therefore:

3. The concept of the GCB is instantiated.

This is a valid argument: it is correct in point of logical form.  Nor does it commit any informal fallacy such as petitio principii, as I argue in Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110.  Note also that this version of the OA does not require the controversial assumption that existence is a first-level property, an assumption that Frege famously rejects and that many read back (with some justification) into Kant.  (Frege held that the OA falls with that assumption; he was wrong: the above version is immune to the Kant-Frege objection.)

(1) expresses what I will call Anselm's Insight.  He appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be noncontingent, i.e., either necessary or impossible.  I consider (1) nonnegotiable.  If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. There is no god but God.  End of discussion.  It is premise (2) — the key premise — that ought to raise eyebrows.  What it says — translating out of the patois of possible worlds — is that it it possible that the GCB exists.

Whereas conceptual analysis of 'greatest conceivable being' suffices in support of (1), how do we support (2)?  Why should we accept it?  Some will say that the conceivability of the GCB entails its possibility.  But I deny that conceivability entails possibility.  I won't argue that now, though I do say something about conceivability here.  Suppose you grant me that conceivability does not entail BL-possibility.  You might retreat to this claim:  It may not entail it, but it is evidence for it:  the fact that we can conceive of a state of affairs S is defeasible evidence of S's possibility.

Please note that Possibly the GCB exists — which is logically equivalent to (2) — is necessarily true if true.  This is a consequence of the characteristic S5 axiom of modal propositional logic:  Poss p –> Nec Poss p. ('Characteristic' in the sense that it  is what distinguishes S5 from S4 which is included in S5.)  So if the only support for (2) is probabilistic or evidential, then we have the puzzle we encountered earlier: how can there be probabilistic support for a noncontingent proposition?  But now the same problem arises on the atheist side.

An Argument From Evil

4. If the concept of the GCB is instantiated, then there are no gratuitous evils.

5. There are some gratuitous evils. Therefore:

6. The concept of the GCB is not instantiated.

This too is a deductive argument, and it is valid.  It falls afoul of no informal fallacy.  (4), like (1), is nonnegotiable.  Deny it, and I show you the door.  The key premise, then, the one on which the soundness of the argument rides, is (5).  (5) is not obviously true.  Even if it is obviously true that there are evils, it is not obviously true that there are gratuitous evils. 

In fact, one might argue that the argument begs the question against the theist at line (5).  For if there are any gratuitous evils, then by definition of 'gratuitous' God cannot exist.  But I won't push this in light of the fact that in print I have resisted the claim that the modal OA begs the question at its key premise, (2) above.

So how do we know that (5) is true?  Not by conceptual analysis. If we assume, uncontroversially, that there are some evils, then the following logical equivalence holds:

7. Necessarily, there are some gratuitous evils iff the GCB does not exist.

Left-to-right is obvious: if there are gratuitous evils, ones for which there is no justification, then a being having the standard omni-attributes cannot exist.  Right-to-left:  if there is no GCB and there are some evils, then there are some gratuitous evils.  (On second thought, R-to-L may not hold, but I don't need it anyway.)

Now the RHS, if true, is necessarily true, which implies that the LHS — There are some gratuitious evils — is necessarily true if true. 

Can we argue for the LHS =(5)?  Perhaps one could argue like this (as one commenter suggested in an earlier thread):  If the evils are nongratuitous, then probably we would have conceived of justifying reasons for them.  But we cannot conceive of justifying reasons.  Therefore, probably there are gratuitous evils.

But now we face our old puzzle: How can the probability of there being gratuitous evils show that there are gratuitous evils given that There are gratuitous evils, if true, is necessarily true?

Conclusion

We face the same problem with both arguments, the modal OA for the existence of the GCB, and the argument from evil for the nonexistence of the GCB.  The key premises in both arguments — (2) and (5) — are necessarily true if true.  The only support for them is evidential from contingent facts.  But then we are back with our old puzzle:  How can contingent evidence support noncontingent propositions? 

Neither argument is probative and they appear to cancel each other out.  Sextus Empiricus would be proud of me.

Supererogation and Suberogation

It would be neat if all actions could be sorted into three jointly exhaustive classes: the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory. These deontic modes would then be analogous to the alethic modes of possibility, impossibility, and necessity. Intuitively, the permissible is the morally possible, that which we may do; the impermissible is the morally impossible, that which we may not do; and the obligatory is the morally necessary, that which we must do.

Pursuing the analogy, we note that the following two alethic modal principles each has a deontic analog, where 'p' ranges over propositions and 'A' over actions:

Richard Taylor on Goodness: Critical Remarks

Richard Taylor, Good and Evil: A New Direction (Prometheus 1984),  p. 134:

Goodness . . . is simply the satisfaction of needs and desires . . . the fulfillment of purposes. The greatest good for any individual can accordingly be nothing but the total satisfaction of his needs,
whatever these may be.

There seems to be a tension in this passage, between the first sentence and the second, and I want to see if I  can bring it into the open.

Taylor plausibly maintains that nothing is good or evil in itself or intrinsically. If a thing is good, it is good only relative to a being who wants, needs, or desires it. If a thing is evil, it is evil only relative to a being who shuns it or is averse to it. In a world in which there are no conative/desiderative beings, nothing is good or evil. This is plausible, is it not?

Imagine a world in which there is nothing but inanimate objects and processes, a world in which nothing is alive, willing, striving, wanting, needing, desiring. In such a world nothing would be either good or evil. A sun in a lifeless world goes supernova incinerating a nearby planet. A disaster? Hardly. Just another value-neutral event. A rearrangement of particles and fields.  But if our sun went supernova, that would be a calamity beyond compare — but only for us and any other caring observers hanging around.

Taylor's point is, first, that sentences of the form 'X is good (evil)' are elliptical for sentences of the form 'X is good for Y.' To say that X is good (evil) but X is not good (evil) for some Y would then be like saying that Tom is married but there is no one to whom Tom is married. Taylor's point, second, is that these axiological predicates can be cashed out in naturalistic terms. Thus,

D1. X is good for Y =df X satisfies Y's actual wants (needs, desires)

D2. X is evil for Y =df X frustrates Y's actual wants (needs, desires).

It is clear that good and evil are not being made relative to what anyone says or opines, but to certain hard facts about the wants, needs, and desires of living beings.  That we need water to live is an objective fact about us, a fact independent of what anyone says or believes.  Water cannot have value except for beings who need or want it; but that it does have value for such beings is an objective fact.

Taylor's view implies that there is no standard of good and evil apart from the actual wants, needs, desires, and aversions of conative/desiderative beings. Goodness consists in satisfaction, evil in frustration. But satisfaction and frustration can exist only if there are indigent beings such as ourselves. It follows that nothing that satisfies a desire or fulfills a need or want can be bad. (p. 126) It also follows that no desire or purpose is either good or evil. (p. 136) For if good and evil emerge only upon the satisfaction or frustration of desires and purposes, then the desires and purposes themselves cannot be either good or evil.  The rapist's desire to 'have his way' with his victim, qua desire, is not evil, and the satisfaction of desire via the commission of rape is not evil, but good, precisely because it satisfies desire!  (Glance back at the above definitions.)

We now have a reason to toss Taylor's book out the window.  But I want to point out a rather more subtle difficulty with his theory. 

If goodness is relational in the manner explained, how can there be talk of the greatest good of an individual? Glance back at the quotation. Taylor tells us that the greatest good for an individual is nothing but the total satisfaction of his needs.  This is a higher-order state of affairs distinct from a ground-level state of affairs such as the satisfaction of the desire for water by a cool drink. What need does this greatest good satisfy?

Suppose I satisfy all my needs, wants and desires. How can this higher-order state of satisfaction be called good if a thing is good only in relation to a needy being? There would have to be a higher-order need or want, a need or want for total satisfaction, and the goodness of the first-order satisfaction would have to consist in the satisfaction of this higher-order need. But this leads to a vicious infinite regress.

Taylor should say about the satisfaction of desire what he says about desire, namely, that it is neither good nor evil. Consider the desire to drink a beer. By Taylor's lights, drinking a beer is intrinsically neither good nor evil. It is good only insofar as it satisfies some desiderative being's desire. Thus the goodness of drinking a beer is nothing other than the satisfaction of the desire to drink beer. The desire itself, however, is neither good nor evil, and the same goes for the satisfaction or frustration of this desire.

My critical point is that Taylor is using 'good' in two senses, one relative, the other absolute, when his own theory entitles him to use it only in the relative sense. By his theory, a good X is a satisfactory X: one that satisfies some desiderative/indigent being's need, want, desire, for X. But then desire can't be said to be good or evil, as Taylor himself realizes on p. 136. Similarly, the satisfaction of desire cannot be said to be good or evil. Otherwise, the satisfaction of desire would have to be relative to a higher-order desire. Hence Taylor is not entitled to speak of the "greatest good for any individual" as he does in the passage quoted.

God and Evil, Mind and Matter

It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both true, then they are logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be consistent. This is so whether or not anyone is in a position to explain how it is possible that they be consistent. If something is the case, then, by the time-honored principle ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it is possible that it be the case, and my inability, or anyone's inability, to explain how it is possible that such-and-such be the case cannot count as a good reason for thinking that it is not the case. So if it is the case that God exists and Evil exists are logically consistent, then this is possibly the case, and a theist's inability to explain how God and evil can coexist is not a good reason for him to abandon his theism — or his belief in the existence of objective evil.

The logical point I have just made is rock-solid.  I now apply it to two disparate subject-matters. The one is the well-known problem of evil faced by theists.  The other is the equally well-known 'problem of mind' that materialists face, namely, the problem of reconciling the existence of the phenomena of mind with the belief that nothing concrete is immaterial.

The theist is rationally entitled to stand pat in the face of the 'problem of evil' and point to his array of arguments for the existence of God whose cumulative force renders rational his belief that God exists. Of course, he should try to answer the atheist who urges the inconsistency of God exists and Evil exists; but his failure to provide a satisfactory answer is not a reason for him to abandon his theism. A defensible attitude would be: "This is something we theists need to work on."

Generic and Specific Problems of Evil

(A reader requested a post on evil.  I am happy to oblige.  The following has some relevance to the recent soul thread.  So I'll leave the ComBox open in case Peter L. or others care to comment.  As usual, the default setting for cyberpunk tolerance = 0.)

Suppose we define a 'generic theist' as one who affirms the existence of a bodiless person, a pure spirit, who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and who in addition is perfectly free, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and the ground of moral obligation. This generic theism is common to the mainstream of the three Abrahamic religions. Most theists, however, are not 'generic' but adopt a specific form of theism. Christians, for example, add to the divine attributes listed above the attribute of being triune and others besides. Christianity also includes doctrines about the human being and his ultimate destiny in an afterlife. Generic theism is thus an abstraction from the concrete specific theisms that people accept and live.

Continue reading “Generic and Specific Problems of Evil”

Sophocles on the Root of All Evil

Via Mike Gilleland, we read in Sophocles, Antigone 295-301 (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones):

There is no institution so ruinous for men as money; money sacks cities, money drives men from their homes! Money by its teaching perverts men's good minds so that they take to evil actions! Money has shown men how to practise villainy, and taught them impiousness in every action!

Mike has the Greek for you purists and elitists.

The Sophoclean sentiment, however, is quite false.  For a view with a much better chance of being true, see Radix Omnium Malorum.

Radix Omnium Malorum

One often hears that money is the root of all evil. But this cannot be true, since money is an abstract form of wealth, wealth is a good thing, and the root of all evil cannot be something good. Perhaps it is the love of money that is supposed to be the root of all evil. But this too is false. Given that money is a good thing, a certain love or desire for its acquisition and preservation is right and proper. To fail to value money would be as foolish as to fail to value physical health. Well then, is it the inordinate love of money that is the root of all evil? Not even this is true. For there are evils whose root is not the inordinate love of money. The most we can truly say is that the inordinate love of money is the root of some evils.

Continue reading “Radix Omnium Malorum“