Gratuitous evil and compensation

In the last couple of decades, the most prominent argument from evil is base on the idea that God couldn’t allow a gratuitous evil. Here is one way to define a gratuitous evil, paraphrasing Rowe:

1. E is gratuitous if and only if there is no greater or equal good G that is only obtainable by God if God permits E or something equal or worse.

(For simplicity, I am taking the prevention of an evil as itself a good.)

By (1), if E is any earthly evil, it’s too easy to show that for all we know E is not gratuitous.

To see this, observe that for all we know, the persons suffering from E are compensated in an afterlife by God bestowing on them a greater good G₀. Now let G be the good of receiving G₀ in compensation from God for suffering E. Then G is a good, and is at least as good as G₀ itself. But G₀ is greater in magnitude than E. Thus, G is greater than E. Moreover, God’s permitting E is a necessary condition for God’s compensating someone for suffering E, since God cannot compensate someone for something that didn’t happen. Therefore, G is obtainable by God only if God permits E.

So we don’t want to go for (1), since it’s too easy to find goods that are only obtainable given E if there is an afterlife.

The problem with this example is that while it is impossible for God to give G₀ as compensation for E without E, God can give G₀ gratuitously, and that seems to be just as good as giving it as compensation. The atheist who wants to argue for the existence of God should modify (1) as follows:

2. E is gratuitous if and only if there is no greater or equal good G such that something at least as good as G is only obtainable by God if God permits E or something equal or worse.

But given (2), it is implausible to say that God couldn’t allow a gratuitous evil. Consider a case where Alice makes a slightly mean joke at Bob’s expense. She then repents, and asks Bob for forgiveness, who forgives. It is easy to imagine that the value of the repentance and forgiveness is greater than the disvalue of the joke, but just as the joke was a minor evil, the repentance and forgiveness are minor goods. It seems intuitively clear that the case of Alice’s slightly mean joke does not require any theodicy beyond what has just been said. Yet Alice’s joke appears to be a gratuitous evil according to (2).

For the goods in the previous paragraph are all minor goods. But God could create a major good without permitting any evil at all. For instance, God could create an infinite number of happy mathematicians who eternally enjoy the search for truth and who do not have the freedom to choose between good and evil, but must do good. That infinity of happy mathematicians would be a major good. But surely any minor good is less than any major good. Thus, if we let G be the minor goods of repentance and forgiveness in the previous paragraph, then something greater than G—namely, the infinite number of happy mathematicians—is obtainable by God without any evil at all. And hence the story in the previous paragraph isn’t enough to provide a theodicy, if (2) is the right account of gratuitous evils.

Maybe the solution is a very strong doctrine of incommensurability, on which the good of the infinitely many mathematicians is incommensurable with the goods of repentance and forgiveness even when the latter two are minor. But given such a strong doctrine of incommensurability, we can go back to my original compensation story. The problem I saw with that original story is that God could give G₀ gratuitously and not as compensation, and I said that that would be at least as good. But given a strong doctrine of incommensurability, giving G₀ gratuitously will be incommensurable with giving G₀ as compensation for E. And, plausibly, any good that isn’t and instance of compensating for E or something at least as bad will be incommensurable with the good of compensating for E with G₀. Thus, mere compensation will suffice for theodicy.

I am not comfortable with saying that mere compensation suffices for theodicy. But there is something to this idea.

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.

The argument from apparently gratuitous evil

I think the following two claims are plausible:

1. If God exists and there is a lot of evil, then we would expect that some of the evil is such that we cannot see its point.

2. If God doesn’t exist and there is a lot of evil, then we would expect that some of the evil is such that we cannot see its point.

Premise 2 is pretty plausible: without God, and given a lot of evil, we’d expect evils to be pretty much random, some of them connected to goods that give them a point and others not. Now, if God exists and allows for a lot of evil, then there will be a point to all the evil allowed. And it would be intrinsically good for us to see the point of any particular evil, since knowledge is intrinsically good. But given the assumption that God has allowed a lot of evil, it would be surprising if all of this evil was such that its point (a) could be understood by us and (b) it would be on balance good for us to understand its point. In regard to (a), we can cite our cognitive limitations. In regard to (b), we can cite the fact that it is likely that some of the justifications for permissions of evil would involve soul-building, whereas it is very plausible that some soul-building would require techniques that are hidden from its beneficiaries.

Thus, once one has already taken into account the fact that there is a lot of evil, observing that there are evils that we cannot see the point of does not yield much evidence for or against the existence of God. It may, of course, yield some evidence if the degrees of expectation in (1) and (2) are different, but not much.

If this is right, then Rowe-style “evidential” arguments from evil don’t accomplish much beyond the “naive” argument that God wouldn’t allow so much evil.

Of course, one might try to argue that it’s not just the existence of pointless evil that is relevant, but how common it is. But then one would need to get into a messy discussion of just how common it is, and how common one would expect it to be on theism and on atheism.

Apparently gratuitous evil

Consider this piece of evidence:

• E: There are apparently gratuitous evils.

Does E favor naturalism (N) or theism (T)? To answer that, we need to ask which theory E is more likely to occur on.

Now, given theism, the mere existence of evil is perhaps not all that surprising—there are lots of great goods, such as heroic self-sacrifice, that cannot exist without evil, so God has good reason not to eliminate certain evils. But what about apparently gratuitous evils? An evil is gratuitous provided that God would have no moral justification for permitting it. If there are gratuitous evils, there is no God. An apparently gratuitous evil is an evil that appears to be gratuitous. That there are apparently gratuitous evils is surprising on theism, but not overwhelmingly surprising. After all, there may be goods of trust in God that are enabled by apparently gratuitous evils. And God has reason to create beings with fallible intellects, since intellectual limitations enable various important goods, and such beings are apt to make misjudgments on occasion. So it is not too surprising that some evil would look gratuitous to us despite not being so.

What about on naturalism? There is a lot packed into E, and much of what is packed in there is not friendly to naturalism. The evidence E entails such facts as:

1. There are evils.
2. There are beings that have a moral concept.
3. There are beings that have a theological concept.

Now, the existence of instantiated value properties is unlikely on naturalism. It is hard to reduce such properties to natural ones. So, (1) is unlikely on naturalism. Moreover, (2) and (3) entail that there are beings that have concepts, and that is unlikely on naturalism, since (a) it is hard to reduce the property of having a concept to natural properties, and (b) the existence of beings with concepts is subject to the fine-tuning argument—it is unlikely we'd have constants in the laws of nature such as to permit there to be such beings. Furthermore, that we have genuinely moral concepts (as opposed to concepts of what promotes fitness, say) is perhaps not so likely on naturalism.

So it is plausible that once we take into account E's entailments, P(E|N) will be smaller than P(E|T), and hence on balance E supports theism over naturalism.