Infinite evil

Alice and Bob are both bad people, and both believe in magic. Bob believes that he lives in an infinite universe, with infinitely many sentient beings. Alice thinks all the life there is is life on earth. They each perform a spell intended to cause severe pain to all sentient beings other than themselves.

There is a sense in which Bob does something infinitely worse than Alice: he tries to cause severe pain to infinitely many beings, while Alice is only trying to harm finitely many beings.

It is hard to judge Bob as an infinitely worse person than Alice, because we presume that if Alice thought that there were infinitely many sentient beings, she would have done as Bob did.

But even if we do not judge Bob as an infinitely worse person, shouldn’t we judge his action as infinitely worse? Yet even that doesn’t seem right. And neither seems to deserve that much more punishment than a sadistic dictator who tries to infect “mere millions” with a painful disease.

Could it be that punishment maxes out at some point?

The evidential force of there being at least one gratuitous evil is low

Suppose we keep fixed in our epistemic background K general facts about human life and the breadth and depth of evil in the world, and consider the impact on theism of the additional piece of evidence that at least one of the evils is apparently gratuitous—i.e., one such that has resisted finding a theodicy despite strenuous investigation.

Now, clearly, if we found that there is not even one gratuitous evil would be extremely good evidence for the existence of God—for if there is no God, it is amazing if of the many evils there are, none were apparently gratuitous, but less amazing if there is a God. And hence, by a standard Bayesian theorem, finding that there is at least one gratuitous evil must be some evidence against the existence of God. But at the same time, the fact that F is strong evidence for T does not mean that the absence of F is strong evidence against T. Whether it is or is not depends on details.

But the background K contains some relevant facts. One of these is that we are limited knowers, and while we have had spectacular successes in our ability to understand the world and events around us, it is not incredibly uncommon to find things that have (so far) defeated our strenuous investigation. Some of these are scientific questions, and some are interpersonal questions—“Why did he do that?” Given this, it seems unsurprising, even if God exists, that we would sometimes be stymied in figuring out why God did something, including why he failed to prevent some evils. Thus, the probability of at least one of the vast numbers of evils in K being apparently gratuitous, given the existence of God, is pretty high, though slightly lower than given the non-existence of God. This means that the evidential force for atheism of there being at least one apparently gratuitous evil is fairly low.

Furthermore, one can come up with a theodicy for the gratuitous part of a gratuitous evil. When a person’s motives are not transparent to us we are thereby provided with an opportunity for exercising the virtue of trust. And reversely, a person’s always explaining themselves when they have been apparently unjustified does not build trust, on the other hand, but suspicion. Given the evils themselves as part of the background K, that some of them be apparently gratuitous provides us with an opportunity to exercise trust in God in a way that we would not be able to if none of the evils were apparently gratuitous. Given K (which presumably includes facts about us not being always in the luminous presence of God), it would be somewhat surprising if God always made sure we could figure out why he allowed evils. Again, this makes the evidential force for atheism of the apparent gratuity of evil fairly low.

Now, it may well be that when we consider the number or the type (perhaps they are of a type where divine explanations of permission would be reasonably expected) of apparently gratuitous evils, things change. Nothing I have said in this post undermines that claim. My only point is that the mere existence of an apparently gratuitous evil is very little evidence against theism.

Presentism, evil and privation

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

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

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

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

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

Trivial and horrendous evils

Nobody seriously runs an argument against the existence of God from trivial evils, like hangnails or mosquito bites.

Why not? Here is a hypothesis. There are so very many possible much greater goods—goods qualitatively and not just quantitatively much greter—that it would be easy to suppose that God’s permitting the trivial evil could promote or enhance one of these goods to a degree sufficient to yield justification.

On the other hand, if we think of horrendous evils, like the torture of children, it is difficult to think of much greater goods. Maybe with difficulty we can come up with one or two possibilities, but not enough to make it easy to suppose a justification for God’s permission of the evil in terms of the goods.

However, if God exists, we would expect there to be an unbounded upward qualitative hierarchy of possible finite goods. God is infinitely good, and finite goods are participations in God, so we would expect a hierarchy of qualitatively greater and greater types of good that reflect God’s infinite goodness better and better.

So if God exists, we would expect there to be unknown possible finite goods that are related to the known horrendous evils in something like the proportion in which the known great finite goods are related to the known trivial evils. Thus, if God exists, there very likely is
an upward hierarchy of possible goods to which the horrendous evils of this life stand like a mosquito bite to the courage of a Socrates. If we believe in this hierarchy of goods, then it seems we should be no more impressed by the atheological evidential force of horrendous evils than the ordinary person is by the atheological evidential force of trivial evils.

There is, however, a difference between the cases. Many great ordinary goods that dwarf trivial evils, like the courage of a Socrates, are known to us. Few if any finite goods that dwarf horrendous evils are known to us. Nonetheless, if theism is true, it is very likely that such goods are possible. And since the argument from evil is addressed against the theist, it seems fair for the theist to invoke that hierarchy.

Moreover, we might ask whether our ignorance of goods higher up in the hierarchy of goods beyond the ordinary goods is not itself evidence against the existence of such goods. Here, I think the answer is that it is very little evidence. We would expect any particular finite being to be able to recognize only a finite number of types of good, and thus the fact that there are only a finite number of goods that we recognize is very little evidence against the hypothesis of the upward hierarchy of goods.

Triple effect, looping trolley and felix culpa

Frances Kamm uses her principle of triple effect to resolve the loop version of the trolley problem. On the loop version, as usual, the main track branches into are two tracks, track A with five people and track B with one person, and the trolley is heading for track A. But now the two tracks join via a loop, so if there were no one on either track, a trolley that goes on track A will come back on track B and vice versa. If we had five people on track A and no one on track B, and we redirected the trolley to track B, it would go on track B, loop around, and fatally hit the people on track A anyway. But the one person actually on track B is big enough that if the trolley goes on track B, it will be stopped by the impact and the five people will be saved.

The problem with redirecting to track B on the loop version of the trolley problem is that it seems that a part of your intention is that the trolley should hit the person on track B, since it is that impact which stops the trolley from hitting the five people on track A. And so you are intending harm to the person on track B.

In her Intricate Ethics book, Kamm gives basically this story about redirecting the trolley in the loop case:

• Initial Intention: Redirect trolley to track A to prevent the danger of five people being hit from the front.

• Initial Defeater: The five people come to be in danger of being hit from the back by the trolley.

• Defeater to Initial Defeater: The one person on track B blocks the trolley and prevents the dangers of being hit from the back.

The important point here is that the defeater to the defeater is not intended—it is just a defeater to a defeater. Thus there is no intention to block the trolley via the one person on track B, and hence that person’s being hit is not a case of their intentionally being used as a means to saving lives.

But this defeater-defeater story is mistaken as it stands. For given the presence of the person on track B, there is no danger of the five people being hit from the back. Thus, there is no initial defeater here.

Now, if you don’t know about the one person on track B, you would have a defeater to the redirection, namely the defeater that there is danger of being hit from the back. But learning about the person on track B would not provide a defeater to that defeater—it would simply remove the defeater by showing that the danger doesn’t exist.

That the story doesn’t have a defeater-defeater structure does not mean that one is intending the one person to be hit. Kamm might still be right in thinking there is no intention to block the trolley via the one person on track B. But I am dubious of Kamm’s story now, because I am dubious that the danger of being hit from the front yields a worthy initial intention. For there is nothing particularly bad about being hit from the front. It is only the danger of being hit simpliciter that seems worth preventing.

It is interesting to me to note that even if Kamm’s story doesn’t have defeater-defeater form, the main place where I want to use her triple effect account seems to still have defeater-defeater form. That place is the felix culpa, where God allows Adam and Eve to exercise their free will, even though he knows that this would or might well (depending on details about theories of foreknowledge and middle knowledge) result in their sinning, and God’s reasoning involves the great goods of salvation history that come from Adam and Eve’s sin.

• Initial Intention: Allow Adam and Eve to exercise their free will.

• Initial Defeater: They will or might well sin.

• Defeater to Initial Defeater: Great goods will come about.

Here the initial defeater is not mistaken as in the looping trolley case—the sin or its possibility is really real. Moreover, while it’s not an initially worthy intention to prevent people from being hit from the front, unless they aren’t going to be hit from behind (or some other direction) either, it is an initially worthy intention to allow Adam and Eve to exercise their free will, even if no further goods come about, because free will is intrinsically good.

Thus we can criticize Kamm’s own use of triple effect while yet preserving what I think is a really important theological application.

Evils that are evidence for theism

It’s mildly interesting to note, when evaluating the evidential impact of evil, that there can be evil events that would be evidence for the existence of God. For instance, suppose that three Roman soldiers who witnessed Christ’s resurrection conspired to lie that he didn’t see Christ get resurrected. That they lied that they didn’t see Christ get resurrected entails that they thought they witnessed the resurrection, and that would be strong evidence for the existence of God, even after factoring in the counterevidence coming from the evil of the lie. (After all, we already knew that there are lots of lies in the world, so learning of one more won’t make much of a difference.)

In fact, this is true even for horrendous and apparently gratuitous evils. We could imagine that the three soldiers’ lies crush someone’s hopes for the coming of the Messiah, and that could be a horrendous evil. And it could also be the case that we can’t see any possible good from the lie, and hence the lie is apparently gratuitous.

Rowe-style inductive arguments from evil

The examples, like Rowe’s, of evils in the inductive argument from evil are chosen to make them have a certain epistemic feature F. And the claim is that P(E has F | God) < P(E has F | no God), with the background information containing the occurrence of E (i.e., the evidence isn’t that the evil has occurred, but that the evil has F). Exactly what F is differs from paper to paper, but roughly the feature is that after investigation we don’t have a plausible candidate theodicy.

But not every evil has F. If every evil had F, then the examples in the literature wouldn’t run as heavily as they do to lethal harm to children and animals. The examples used by the atheological arguers are chosen to be particularly compelling and what makes them compelling is that they have F—nobody runs an inductive argument from evil based on robber barons getting stomachaches from too much caviar, because such evils do not have F.

So there are evils that don’t have F. And then P(E has ∼F | God) > P(E has ∼F | no God) by Bayesianism. So checking whether an evil has F sometimes yields an argument against the existence of God (namely when the evil does have F) and sometimes yields an argument for the existence of God (when the evil doesn’t have F).

And we do not know (as far as I know, Tooley is the only one to have made a serious attempt to figure it out, and his account fails for technical reasons) what the result is once the evidence is consolidated.

Defining horrendous evils

Marilyn Adams famously defines horrendous evils as follows:

1. Evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant’s life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to him/her on the whole.

This epistemically-based definition doesn’t really capture the relevant category because of the background-dependence of reasons.

Note that the quotation above is ambiguous as to who is to have the prima facie reason: the participant or the observer. If the observer, then whether an evil is horrendous is observer-dependent, which seems quite mistaken.

If the participant, then we still have a problem (and in fact the following problems apply, with different wording, in the observer-dependent case as well). For suppose that I have fully internalized the absurd view that suffering is always good. Then no matter what the suffering is, it does not give me any prima facie reason to doubt that my life is a great good to me on the whole, and so I can never suffer a horrendous evil—yet that seems mistaken. Or, on the contrary, suppose I have internalized the nearly as absurd view that the only good life is a life without any suffering. Then any suffering gives me prima facie reason to doubt whether the my life could be a great good to me on the whole, and hence a mosquito bite is a horrendous evil—which again seems mistaken.

What if we de-epistemicize the definition, by saying something like this?

2. Evils the participation in which make the participant’s life not be a great good to him/her on the whole.

But now suppose that apart from one mosquito bite, Alice’s life is just about the “great good” line, and the mosquito bite brings the life below that line. Then by (2), the mosquito bite is a horrendous evil—and that seems mistaken.

We could try for something like this:

3. Evils such that it is metaphysically impossible for the participant’s life to be a great good to him/her on the whole.

But if we did that, then Adams’ other commitments would force her to deny that there are any horrendous evils (since given her picture of God’s love and power, God ensures everyone’s life is a great good to them). That, I guess, would be good news. But that’s not Adams’ view.

I don’t have an alternative, besides the unrigorous:

4. Really bad evils.

Essentially evil organizations

Start with this argument:

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

2. God does not create and sustain anything essentially evil.

3. The KKK is essentially evil.

4. The KKK is not God.

5. So, the KKK does not exist.

Now we have a choice-point. We could say:

6. If the KKK does not exist, no organization exists.

7. So, no organization exists.

After all, it may seem reasonable to think that the ontology of social groups should not depend on whether the groups are good, neutral or bad.

But I think it’s not unreasonable to deny (6), and to say that the being of a social group is defined by its teleology, and there is no teleology without a good telos. A similar move would allow for a way out of the previous argument.

Yet another argument against artifacts

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

2. Instruments of torture are essentially evil.

3. Nothing that is essentially evil really exists.

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

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

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

Another is a direct argument from theism:

6. Everything that really exists is created by God.

7. Nothing created by God is essentially evil.

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

A privation theory of evil without lacks of entities

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another way out of the metaphysical problem of evil

The metaphysical problem of evil consists in the contradiction between:

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

2. God is not an evil.

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

4. There exists an evil.

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

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

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

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

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

Talk against privation theory of evil

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

An asymmetry between physical and emotional pain

Here is a puzzling asymmetry. It seems that:

• Typically, we should seek to remove serious physical pains, even when these pains are normal and we are unable to alleviate the underlying problem.

• Typically, when emotional pains are serious but normal, we should not seek to remove them, except by alleviating the underlying problem.

Thus, if one has lost a leg in an accident, it seems one should be given pain killers, whether or not the leg can be reattached, and even if one’s degree of pain is proper to the loss. But if one has lost a friend, the grief should not be removed, unless it can be done by restoring the friend (there is, after all, more than one sense of “lost a friend”).

Structurally, it seems that leg and friend cases are parallel: In both cases, there is a harm, which it is normal to perceive painfully.

Solution 1: The difference is due to instrumental factors. In the case of the loss of a friend, the pain helps one to restructure oneself mentally in the tragic new circumstances. In the case of the loss of a leg, however, assuming one is already seeking medical attention, the pain is unlikely to lead to any further goods.

Solution 2: Due to the Fall, typically our physical pains are excessive. We feel more pain for a physical loss than we should given that our primary ends are not physical in nature. The appearance of asymmetry is due to an equivocation on “normal”: the kind of pain we feel at physical damage is statistically normal for fallen human beings, but is not really normal. On the other hand, when we talk of normal emotional pains, there the pains are either really normal, correctly grasping the tragedy of the situation, or else they are actually deficient. (A standard theological intuition is that Jesus suffered mentally more at evils than any of us, because his virtue made him more acutely aware of the badness of these evils.)

Naturalism and lovability

1. If naturalism is true, Stalin is not lovable.

2. Everyone is lovable.

3. So, naturalism is not true.

Here, by “lovable”, I don’t mean that it is possible to love the person, but that it is not inappropriate to do so.

Premise 2 follows the intuition that it is permissible for every parent to love their children. It also follows from the more controversial claim that everyone should love everyone.

The intuition behind premise 1 is something like this: Stalin’s actions were so horrible that the only plausible hypotheses on which he is lovable are that there is some deeply mysterious and highly valuable metaphysical fact about his being, such as that he is in the image and likeness of God, or that his Atman is Brahman, a fact incompatible with naturalism. For if all we have are the ordinary naturalistic goods in Stalin, these goods are easily outweighed by the horrors of his wickedness.

Impairment and saving lives

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

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

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

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

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

Thus, it seems, you should save Bob.

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

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

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

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

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

Counting good and bad things

People sometimes wonder, perhaps in connection with the problem of evil, whether there is in total more good than evil in the world. The connection with the problem of evil is somewhat tenuous, of course. Even if it were agreed there is more good than evil, it could still be argued that there is gratuitous evil, inconsistent with the existence of God. And even if there is a God, there could presently be more evil than good, if, say, the evil is justified in connection with future good.

All that said, here is a question related to the question whether there is more good than evil:

• Are there more good things than bad things in the world?

I will argue that on two different takes on “things”, there are vastly more good things than bad—or even bad or neutral—things in the world as we know it. Even if we can generalize from the world as we know it, this still does not show that there is more good than evil: perhaps there are more goods, but the bad things are so very bad that the total evil is greater than the total good. Nonetheless, I think the answer has evidential bearing on the existence of God, because it would intuitively be at least a little bit more likely for there to be vastly more good things than bad or neutral things in the observed part of the world if God existed than if God didn’t exist.

On to the argument. On a first take, “things” are substances. Now, I think the best story about substance is a neo-Aristotelian one on which in the part of the world we collectively know, the substances are the organisms and the fundamental physical entities.

Now, our three best theories as to what the fundamental physical entities are is that they are:

1. particles,

2. global entities like fields and the wavefunction of the universe, or

3. particles and global entities.

Suppose that the correct answer is (a) or (c). Then in the known universe, the vast majority of substances are particles. There may be a lot of organisms in the world, but there are way more particles. And the number of global entities, like fields and the wavefunction, on our best theories is in the single digits. But every particle is good: it perfectly fulfills its nature, which is to dance its dance according to the beautiful mathematical laws of the universe. So, on (a) and (c), the vast majority of substances are good. (Maybe good in a very minor way.)

Suppose that the correct answer is (b). Then the substances of the known universe consist of organisms and probably a handful of global entities like fields or the wavefunction. The organisms outnumber the global entities so much that we can neglect the global entities and, besides, the global entities are good, for the same reason the particles are. Among the known organisms there are some that are bad. The clearest cases are a sizeable proportion of humans.

Whether there are any bad non-human organisms on earth (essentialy the only place we know of with organisms) depends on whether we count instrumental value. For if we limit ourselves to intrinsic badness, plausibly all organisms that aren’t persons are good (and there are many good persons), and non-personal organisms vastly outnumber personal ones. If badness (and goodness), however, includes instrumental assessment, then there are bad organisms. But how many? There may be some species most of whose members are bad: perhaps some mosquito species are like that. But it seems very plausible that such species form a very small portion of the whole, and that the vast majority of species are such that the vast majority of their members are good. (Quick thought experiment: Suppose by pressing a button you could wipe out a randomly chosen non-human species? Surely it would be a very, very bad idea to press the button.) So, it seems quite plausible that the vast majority of organisms are good.

On a second take, “things” include events in addition to substances. Well, now, the vast majority of events in the known universe seem to be purely physical events that are neither good nor bad for living things, and they do no harm to non-living things either. But they are an intrinsically good part of the dance of nature according to beautiful mathematical laws. So, it seems, the vast majority of events is good.

An argument for nominalism

Assume theism. Then, there is nothing in existence that is intrinsically bad. For everything that exists is either God or created by God, and neither God nor anything created by God is intrinsically bad.

On radical nominalism, all that exist are substances: there are no relations, properties, tropes, accidents, essences, etc. And it is very plausible that no substance is intrinsically bad. The most plausible candidates for intrinsically bad things are non-substances, like properties (being in pain) or relations (being mistaken about something). Thus, radical nominalism has a neat and elegant way of preserving the theistic commitment to there not being anything in existence that is intrinsically bad.

This seems to me to be a significant advantage of radical nominalism over other theories.

Of course, this is not a decisive argument for radical nominalism: there are other ways of preserving the commitment to there not existing intrinsically bad entities, such as Augustine’s privation theory.

Online talk on privation theory of evil

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

Double Effect and symbolic actions

There is an intrinsic value to standing against evil. One way to do that is to intentionally act to reduce the evil. But that’s not the only way. Another way of standing against evil is to protest it even when one reasonably expects one’s protest to have no effect. When we see standing against evil as something of significant intrinsic value, then sometimes it will even make sense to stand against evil even when we foresee that doing so will unintentionally increase the evil. It can be legitimate to protest an abuse of power even if one foresees that such protest will lead to further abuses of power, such as a crackdown on the protesters. Of course, prudence is needed, and one must keep proportionality in mind: if the abuses of power inspired by the protest are likely to be much worse than the ones being protested, it is better not to protest. Another way to stand against evil is to punish it. Again, this can make sense even when one does not expect the punishment to reduce the evil (e.g., perhaps the evil is a one-off and it is unlikely that there will be any further temptations to deter people from).

Similarly, there is an intrinsic value to standing for good. A central way to stand for good is to act to increase the good. But, again, it’s not the only way. Admiring, rewarding and praising also are ways of standing for good, even when they are not expected to increase the good.

The actions that constituting standing for good or against evil but that are not intentional acts to increase the good or reduce the evil may be called symbolic. “Symbolic” is often used as a way to downplay the importance of something. That is a mistake: the symbolic can be of great importance. Moreover, “symbolic” suggests a social dimension that need not be relevant. When an atheist hikes alone in order to contemplate the goodness of nature, that is a way of standing for the good of nature that is symbolic in the above sense but not social. Moreover, “symbolic” suggests a certain arbitrariness of choice of symbol. But there need not be such. There is nothing arbitrary in virtue of which admiring a beautiful view is a way of symbolically standing for the good. We thus need to understand “symbolic” in a broad way that is compatible with great intrinsic value, that need not be social in nature, and need not involve arbitrary socially instituted representations.

If we do this, then here is a promising way to make the kinds of deontological views that are tied to the Principle of Double Effect plausible. On these views, certain fundamental evils are wrong to intentionally produce but may be tolerated as side-effects. But now things look puzzling. Let’s say that we can end a war by dropping a bomb on the wicked leaders in the enemy headquarters in a busy city, and which bomb will also kill and maim thousands of innocents in the surrounding buildings, or one can end the war by kidnapping and maiming the enemy leader’s innocent child. The attack on the child is wrong while the attack on the headquarters is permissible on this deontological ethics, but that may just feel wrong. But if we see symbolic standing for good and against evil as really important, the difference becomes more plausible. In intending the maiming of the child, one is standing for evil: for it is unescapable that by intending an evil one stands for it. In refusing to maim the child, one is standing against evil. But in dropping the bomb, the mere foresight of the plight of thousands of innocents does not make one be standing for evil. One can still count as standing against evil by intending to kill the evildoers in the headquarters.

It is tempting to think that when standing against evil does not actually reduce evil, as in the case of the refusal to maim the child, the the action is merely symbolic, and moral weight of the obligation is low. But that is a mistake: “merely” is a poor choice of words when connected with “symbolic”. Symbolic actions can be of great import indeed.