Progress on the Problem of Evil

ABSTRACT

A standard reaction to the problem of evil is to look for a greater good that can explain why God (with the traditional attributes) might have created this world instead of a seemingly better one which has no (or less) evil. This paper proposes an approach we call the Moral Progress Approach: Given the value of progress, a non-perfect world containing evil may be preferable to a perfect world without evil. This makes room for the possibility that this world, with all its evil, may be preferable to a world with less evil. We argue that our proposal is different from apparently similar views such as soul-making theodicy.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral progress
• problem of evil
• soul making
• theodicy

Acknowledgments

For valuable discussions, comments and corrections we thank Joel Parthemore, David Alm, Anton Emilsson, Cathrine Felix, Fritz-Anton Fritzon, Jakob Green Werkmäster, Mattias Gunnemyr, Frits Gåvertsson, Ingvar Johansson, Marta Johansson, Gloria Mähringer, Mahmoud Morvarid, Robert Pál, Erik Persson, Björn Petersson, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Matthew Talbert, Amir Saemi, Caroline Torpe Touborg and Alexander Velichkov. Furthermore, thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer of this journal for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. An even more general approach could be formulated in terms of progress simpliciter, focusing on the value of improvement from a less to a more valuable state of affairs, regardless of whether the domain of value is moral, prudential, or aesthetic. If one wonders why God has not created a world of absolute beauty – presuming it is in God’s powers as a being almighty – one’s answer will take a parallel form to the present discussion.

2. We claim that the very process of change to something better is intrinsically valuable and that this captures the value one normally identifies with moral progress. That said, could it not be that the value of the end state gets its ultimate value from the very fact that one had to struggle to get there? In that case, it’s not the process itself that is valuable but the destination, so that the process of getting there is but a condition to achieving the final value. Nothing prevents us from accepting this analysis; indeed, we agree that the value of progress is at least partly determined by the value of the permanent state it results in. Our judgment is simply that this is not the usual way in which progress is justified. When we claim that the change itself is valuable – the process – we have in mind a value conditioned on the value of the end point, not the other way around. The path to an unusually valuable end point gets additional extrinsic value from this fact, over and above the intrinsic value of being a change for the better. Observe that while final or non-instrumental value can be either intrinsic or final, intrinsic value is always final (see Korsgaard 1983). We are grateful to Wlodek Rabinowicz for pressing us on this point.

3. One might argue that if progress can help theism to deal with the problem of evil, regress should be counted as an evidence against theism. But it doesn’t seem to be the case. Thus, a modus tollens leads to the rejection of the antecedent – it is not the case that progress can help theism to deal with the problem of evil. In response, we acknowledge that regress in the world affects the sums of values of the world negatively. That is, if progress is relevant, regress is also relevant and can provide evidence. However, the proposal is that the value of progress is relevant to the debates over the problem of evil and that it suggests an underexplored direction for developing a form of progress theodicy. It is not claimed that the whole debate merely depends on this matter. Therefore, since progress alone does not provide evidence for theism, regress alone does not provide evidence against theism. Thanks to the anonymous referee for raising this issue.

4. With regard to worries raised by anti-theodicists, we believe that although the Moral Progress Account shares some features with some of the more familiar theodicies, it has its own resources to deal with such worries. Here we only argue for the distinctiveness of the Account, but examining it in dealing with anti-theodicies requires separate discussions.

5. Such claims are, of course, contested by sceptics of moral progress, who maintain that slavery is more common today than ever, the rights of millions are violated on a daily basis, innocent people are murdered on an ongoing basis in meaningless wars, and more livestock than ever are raised for food on factory farms.

6. The current discussion is focused on the evidential problem of evil. Logical inconsistency is mentioned merely to explain why the existence of evils does not automatically provide evidence against theism and that progress and its value need to be taken into account: a progressing world has values which are absent in a perfect world, and existence of evils are logically necessary for such values to obtain. God, bounded by laws of logic, has no other way to reach those values.

7. For example, it might be developed in terms of skeptical theism. The skeptical theist can, in light of the complexity of the value of moral progress, attempt to block the problem of evil, claiming that not enough is known about the value of moral progress and how much weight to put on it.

Additional information

Funding

Working on this paper has been made possible for the first author by the postdoctoral grant from Iran’s National Elites Foundation.