Explaining Evil

Four Views

W. Paul Franks

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501331121
• eBook ISBN: 9781501331138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In Explaining Evil four prominent philosophers, two theists and two non-theists, present their arguments for why evil exists. Taking a "position and response" format, in which one philosopher offers an account of evil and three others respond, this book guides readers through the advantages and limitations of various philosophical positions on evil, making it ideal for classroom use as well as individual study. Divided into four chapters, Explaining Evil covers Theistic Libertarianism, Theistic Compatibilism, Atheistic Moral Realism and Atheistic Moral Non-realism. It features topics including free will, theism, atheism, goodness, Calvinism, evolutionary ethics, and pain, and demonstrates some of the dominant models of thinking within contemporary philosophy of religion and ethics. Written in accessible prose and with an approachable structure, this book provides a clear and useful overview of the central issues of the philosophy of evil.

1

Evil and Agent-Causal Theism

Richard Brian Davis

That there is evil is evident all around us. Indeed, with the advent of the internet and social media, we’re no doubt more aware (painfully so) of the depth and scope of evil than at any other time in human history. However, while evil is confirmed by the facts of experience, it is not always easy to find room for it in our thinking. There is, for example, the claim that evil fits rather badly with theistic ways of thinking—that to believe There is a God is contradictory to (or at least strongly disconfirmed by) the belief that there is evil. Substantial philosophical time and resources have been spent on exploring this alleged incongruity. And philosophy, to my mind, is much the better for it. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been paid to the question of whether there might be other systems of belief where evil is a bad fit.

In this chapter, I attempt to show that evil exists only if what I call Agent-Causal Theism (ACT) is true. According to ACT, human beings are immaterial, conscious agents endued (by God) with a power of self-motion: the power to think, decide, and act for ends in light of reasons, but without being externally caused to do so (even by God himself). By contrast, I argue that there is no space for evil in the worldviews of naturalistic Darwinism or theistic Calvinism.

Making sense of evil

Evil is not hard to recognize. If it were, the so-called problem of evil for theism wouldn’t have nearly the psychological force it does. Strangely, however, you can look high and low in that literature and you will scarcely find any account of evil: what it is essentially or how it arose.¹ I recently asked a famous philosopher known for his work on the problem of evil whether in his many travels anyone had ever defined evil to his satisfaction. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied “No.” I then asked what he thought it was. This time there was a pause: “It’s enough to say it’s ‘bad stuff.’”

But is that enough? Here we don’t need an analytic definition of evil in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; that would be extremely ambitious given the complex and wide-ranging nature of evil. It will suffice to have a rough-and-ready, working definition: something that gives us a basic grasp (however frail) of the concept, setting the stage for assessing attempts to account for it. To get our bearings, suppose we turn to standard discussions of the problem of evil. Here we meet with the distinction between moral and natural evil. Moral evil is the evil we normally associate with human choices—for example, to drive a truck into a crowd of innocent people, or to use chemical weapons on one’s foes and enemies. Much of the terrible pain human beings (and other sentient animals) have suffered has resulted in this way—at the hands of human beings. But not all of it of course. The religious skeptic is sure to remind us here of natural evils: “A volcano unexpectedly erupts and spills burning lava onto a village; or a tidal wave inundates a coastal town” (Rachels 1991, 105). These are evils the cause of which is purely natural (e.g., plate tectonic movement) and not the result of human (or nonhuman) choice.

Taking the volcano example as a paradigm case gives us something like a sensation-based account of evil. According to Epicurus, “All good and evil lies in sensation” (1996, 2). A volcanic eruption in itself is neither good nor evil; it is simply an event that happens. It is only when it leads to pain and suffering on the part of the villagers (or sentient nonhuman animals) that we’re at all inclined to call the eruption a natural evil. On the other hand, restricting our attention to cases of human wickedness suggests a subject-based account of evil. The most familiar cases of evil, of course, involve human decisions (e.g., Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs) and actions (e.g., the Boston Marathon bombing). And while these evils are often associated with painful sensations, they aren’t constituted by them. This is evident from the fact that there are evils that lack (or could lack) this association. For example, there are thoughts, intentions, and desires that may never be acted upon, may never terminate in painful sensations, but are nevertheless evil—and intrinsically so.² But if so, evil cannot lie in sensation. Instead, it is plausibly thought to be bound up with a “failure to perform some duty” or “to exhibit some crucial virtue” (Nelson 1991, 370).

Now let’s say this is right or at least nearly so. The question then arises: is evil, then, simply wrongdoing? According to Calder (2013), there is a crucial difference. Evil isn’t just a matter of going very wrong, or piling up moral wrongs until some threshold for evil is reached. Paradigm cases of evil point to an inexcusable intent to bring about or permit significant harm when it is within one’s power to do otherwise. If a significant harm is one that “a normal rational human being would take considerable pains to avoid” (Calder 2013, 188), Epicurus’s painful sensations are certainly in view even if they don’t define evil. What evil involves—essentially and at its core—is an immoral thought, desire, decision, or action (freely) entertained or undertaken by a conscious, rational agent to deliberately cause or permit significant harm to be done to herself or others for the sake of an unjustifiable end.

This partial sketch captures the notion I have in mind, and while there is need for more chisholming (when isn’t there?), it will be adequate for present purposes. The thing to see is that if this is even approximately what evil comes to, the only worldviews capable of accommodating the reality of evil will be those that can make room for conscious agents with the power to think, desire, decide, and act freely. In what follows, and solely for the sake of convenience, I shall carry out my discussion of ACT and its rivals primarily in terms of our decisions and actions with the proviso that thoughts, desires, and intents are equally in view.

Making space for evil

The freedom condition

Thus, a staff moves a stone, and is moved by a hand, which is moved by a man.

— Aristotle

To do something evil is to do something for which one is guilty, responsible, and perhaps even subject to punishment. In an ordinary and straightforward sense, this implies that evil is freely chosen. According to ACT, to say that I have freely performed an action means, in the first place, that I myself have decided to undertake it. I am the agent or author of that action: its first mover, so to speak. Thus, it is my responsibility. Evil results from my misuse of the power I have of self-motion, of initiating volitions to act—for example, making decisions or forming “effective intentions”³—in light of the reasons I have for acting.

Now why think I have this sort of freedom—call it agent-causal freedom? Two reasons. In the first place, it fits in perfectly with the facts of my experience. At least on some occasions (the ones on which I take myself to have acted freely), I experience myself as having decided to act upon one set of reasons when I am perfectly aware that I could have acted upon another. As Hasker notes, this may not prove that I have agent-causal freedom, but “it does establish a powerful presumption in its favor—a presumption that ought to be overcome only by the strongest possible reasons for the contrary position” (Hasker 1999, 85). The meager possibility that I am wrong hardly counts as the strongest possible reason for thinking I am.

Furthermore, if I do not have the power of self-motion, then my decisions to act (/refrain from acting) have been determined by a series of prior causes, in which case I am not, strictly speaking, an agent—that is, the originating cause of my decisions. Rather, I am a mere patient acted upon by necessitating causes. To speak of “my decision” to do evil in that case is just a façon de parler: a mere name we give to an effect produced in me by its real author (something or someone else up the causal chain). In actual fact, the “decision” isn’t mine. It doesn’t originate with me; it happens to me. However, as Samuel Clarke, the Great Libertarian, points out, this immediately leads to grief. For it means that I am no more a responsible agent than is a watch or a clock:

A Necessary Agent or Necessary Action is a Contradiction in Terms. For whatever acts Necessarily does not indeed act at all, but is only acted upon; is not at all an Agent, but a mere Patient; does not move, but is moved only. Clocks and watches, are in no sense Agents; neither is their Motion, in any sense, an Action.⁴ (1717, 5)

Thus, no man “can be angry with his clock for going wrong” (Clarke and Collins 2011, 276). And even supposing that a clock were endued (by God) with intelligence and perception, all that would imply is that it had “understanding enough to feel and be sensible that its weights necessitated” (Clarke and Collins 2011) the movement of its hands. It wouldn’t indicate that the clock could in any sense be held responsible for those movements.

This raises a related point. The reason we don’t blame clocks for their evil doing is that we recognize that they cannot avoid doing what they do. Given the arrangement of their parts, and the laws governing their mechanical interactions, they operate out of sheer necessity. They don’t have the power of doing good or evil because they don’t have the power to (decide to) do otherwise. Of course, if one of Clarke’s sentient clocks (call it “Lumière”) could decide to speed up or slow down, Lumière might be praised for having kept the correct time (when it needn’t have), and censured when it didn’t (but could have), thereby misleading me about the time and making me late for an important meeting with the dean. But if it isn’t so much as possible that Lumière fails to operate as it does, then sentient or not, Lumière doesn’t mark the time freely, and its movements aren’t properly classed as good or evil.

But wouldn’t the same go for human beings? If it turns out that there are always prior factors determining my actions and decisions, then wouldn’t I, too, be incapable of good or evil? To be sure, human beings are vastly more complicated than clocks (even Apple watches). But complexity isn’t the issue here. As Derk Pereboom rightly notes, what’s at stake is whether we human beings are genuinely free agents:

I think that if we were undetermined agent-causes—if we as substances had the power to cause decisions without being causally determined to cause them—we might well then have the sort of free will required for moral responsibility. (2007, 94)

And then we might also have the requisite freedom for doing good or evil. The question is: do we have agent-causal freedom? To begin with, we must note that there are certain worldviews that rule this out a priori, and therefore on which evil cannot be said to exist.

Darwinian determinism

Consider, first, Darwinism—not the biological theory we all know and love, but its naturalistic construal. According to the most prominent and powerful versions of naturalism, there are no immaterial persons: no God or gods, no immaterial souls or selves (angelic or human).⁵ If there are any immaterial entities (numbers or sets, let’s say), they are wholly abstract, impersonal, and causally effete—untouched by evolutionary forces.⁶ That’s fair enough. According to Darwinian Naturalism (DN), however, that’s not the way things go for us. Human beings are entirely concrete and physical in nature. Thus Churchland:

The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process. . . . If this is the correct account of our origins, then there seems neither need, nor room, to fit any nonphysical substance or properties into our theoretical account of ourselves. We are creatures of matter. And we should learn to live with that fact. (2013, 35; emphasis added)

Perhaps this is (part of) what Pereboom is driving at when he sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction W. Paul Franks
• 1 Evil and Agent-Causal Theism Richard Brian Davis
• 2 Evil and Christian Classical Theism Paul Helm
• 3 Evil and Atheistic Moral Skepticism Michael Ruse
• 4 Evil and Atheistic Moral Realism Erik J. Wielenberg
• Recommended Reading
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright