The question I seek to address in this book is whether or not an all-good God who is also presumed to be all powerful is logically possible given the degree and amount of moral evil that exists in our world.1
Now it is widely held by theists and atheists alike that Alvin Plantinga conclusively showed against John Mackie that it may not be within Godās power to bring about a world containing moral good but no moral evil.2 Plantinga argued that this is because to bring about a world containing moral good, God would have to permit persons to act freely, and it may well be that in every possible world where God actually permits persons to act freely, everyone would suffer from a malady such that everyone would act wrongly at least to some degree. Accepting Plantingaās defense, both theists and atheists have been willing to grant that it may be logically impossible for God to actually create a world with free agents, like ourselves, that does not also have at least some moral evil in it. Thus, it is widely agreed that a good God is logically compatible with some moral evil. Accordingly, the question I will be focusing on is whether such a God is compatible with the degree and amount of evil that actually exists in our world.
In recent years, discussion of the problem of evil in the world has been advanced by utilizing resources of contemporary metaphysics and epistemology, for example, Alvin Plantingaās application of modal logic to the logical problem of evil and William Rowe, Stephen Wykstra, and Paul Draperās application of probabilistic epistemology to the evidential problem of evil. The results have been impressive. What is a bit surprising, however, is that philosophers currently working on the problem of evil have yet to avail themselves of relevant resources from ethical theory that could similarly advance the discussion of the problem.3
For example, there is no discussion of the Doctrine of Double Effect, or whether the ends justify the means, or how to resolve hypothetical trolley cases that have become the grist for moral philosophers ever since they were introduced by Judith Thompson and Philippa Foot.4 Even though cognitive psychologists now regularly employ hypothetical trolley cases to determine what parts of the brain are involved in the making of ethical judgments, philosophers of religion have yet to recognize the relevance of such cases to the problem of evil.
What is especially surprising, given that most of the defenders of theism in this debate are self-identified Christian philosophers, is that the central underlying element in the Doctrine of Double Effect, what has been called the Pauline PrincipleāNever do evil that good may come of itāhas been virtually ignored by contemporary philosophers of religion despite its relevance to the problem of evil.5
Thus, while the principle has been a mainstay of natural law ethics at least since the time of Aquinas (notice, for example, the fundamental role it plays in the natural law ethics of John Finnis6), contemporary philosophers of religion have simply ignored it when evaluating the goods and evils that are at stake with regard to the argument from evil. Rather, they have focused on the total amount of good or evil in the world or on particular horrendous evils and whether those evils can be compensated for.
It is true that the Pauline Principle has been rejected as an absolute principle. This is because there clearly are exceptions to it. Surely doing evil that good may come of it is justified when the resulting evil or harm is:There is also disagreement over whether a further exception to the principle obtains when the resulting evil or harm is:
- 1.trivial (e.g., as in the case of stepping on someoneās foot to get out of a crowded subway),
- 2.easily reparable (e.g., as in the case of lying to a temporarily depressed friend to keep her from committing suicide).
- 3.the only way to prevent far greater harm to innocent people (e.g., as in the case of shooting one of twenty civilian hostages to prevent, in the only way possible, the execution of all twenty).
Yet despite the recognition that there are exceptions to the principle, and despite the disagreement over the extent of those exceptions, the Pauline Principle still plays an important role in contemporary ethical theory.
Moreover, the widespread discussion of hypothetical trolley cases in contemporary ethical theory is frequently just another way of determining the range of application of the Pauline Principle. To see this, consider the following trolley case first put forward by Philippa Foot:
Is it permissible to redirect the trolley? Would that be doing evil? Clearly your redirecting the trolley would not be intentionally doing evil. What you would intentionally be doing is trying to save the five people on the track. You would not be intentionally trying to kill one to save five, although you would foresee that one personās death would definitely result from your action of saving five. So given that the Pauline Principle, properly understood, only requires that we never intentionally do evil that good may come of it, the principle does not prohibit redirecting the trolley in this case. Moreover, not only is redirecting the trolley in this case not prohibited by the Pauline Principle, it also satisfies the additional requirements for being permitted by the Doctrine of Double Effect.A runaway trolley is headed toward five innocent people who are on the track and who will be killed unless something is done. You can redirect the trolley on to a second track, saving the five. However, on this second track is an innocent bystander who will be killed if the trolley is turned onto this track.
Yet consider another trolley case:
In this case, by contrast, what you are doing, pushing the big guy onto the track, is intentionally doing evil. You are intentionally killing this large innocent person in order to save five other innocent people. Nor arguably would your action count as an exception to the Pauline Principle here, even in virtue of its contested third class of exceptions, because in this case killing one to save five would presumably be judged insufficiently beneficial to justify the killing. Thus, pushing the big guy onto the track in this case would be seen to be a violation of the Pauline Principle.Again, there is a runaway trolley headed toward five innocent people who are on the track and who will be killed unless something is done. This time the only way for you to stop the trolley and save five is to push a big guy from a bridge onto the track.
However, consider a widely discussed trolley case put forward by Bernard Williams.7 In Williamsās case, Jim, an explorer, arrives in a South American village just as Pedro, an army officer, is about have his soldiers kill a random group of twenty Indians in retaliation for protests against the local government. In honor of Jimās arrival, Pedro offers to spare nineteen of the twenty Indians, provided that Jim shoots one of them. Surely this looks like a case where the explorer should shoot one of the Indians in order to save the other nineteen. If you need to be further convinced that this type of irreparable harm to innocents can be justified for the sake of achieving greater benefit for others, then just imagine that larger and larger numbers of innocents (e.g., one hundred, one thousand, one million, whatever number you want) would be lost unless one particular (innocent) individual is killed. Surely, at some point, any defensible moral theory would justify such sacrifices for agents like ourselves.
There is then an intertwining discussion of trolley cases with the Pauline Principle which underlies the Doctrine of Double Effect that is ignored by contemporary philosophers of religion when they seek to morally evaluate the problem of evil.8
Today no one working on the problem of evil ever imagines backing away from the advances that Alvin Plantinga made by applying modal logic to the logical problem of evil or to the advances that William Rowe, Stephen Wykstra, and Paul Draper made by applying probabilistic epistemology to the evidential problem of evil. All now agree that our understanding of the problem of the evil has undeniably been improved by these advances. Could it be then that by bringing to bear untapped resources of ethics on the problem of evil, there would be a similar advance in our understanding of the problem?
I think that we can expect a similar advance once we do bring to bear yet untapped resources of ethics on our understanding of the problem of evil. But I also think that this advance will be e...