Horrendous Evils and Anti-Theodicy

Every position covered so far has treated suffering as a quantity. The defence asks whether some evil is logically compatible with a good God; the evidential argument asks whether the amount and distribution of it are what we would expect; the theodicies ask what good is large enough to outweigh it; the sceptical reply asks whether we are in a position to judge the size of the goods available. All of these operate on a ledger. Something bad goes on one side, something good goes on the other, and the question is which column is larger.

Marilyn McCord Adams argued that for a certain class of evils the ledger is the wrong instrument, and that a theism which answers only in those terms has not addressed the hardest cases at all. A second and more radical tradition holds that the ledger is not merely inadequate but morally objectionable, and that the discipline of constructing justifications for suffering should be abandoned. This rung takes both.

The evils in question

Three features of the definition do most of the work.

It is about a particular life, not about a total. An evil counts as horrendous by threatening to make one person's life not worth having lived, and that threat is not removed by anything that happens in other lives or by any improvement in the world's overall balance. This is a claim about the distribution of value across persons rather than about its sum.

It covers perpetrators. Adams was explicit that participation includes doing, and that a person can be ruined by what they have done as surely as by what has been done to them. This matters, because most discussions of evil treat the victim as the only party with a grievance, and because free will theodicies which explain suffering by the value of free choice have said nothing about the state of the person who made the choice.

And it is stated as a defeasible appearance rather than a verdict. Adams did not claim that such lives are not worth living; she claimed that participation gives a reason to doubt it, which a sufficient response would have to overturn. That formulation is deliberate, and the shape of her positive proposal follows from it.

The examples are the ones anybody would think of, and there is no reason to be graphic about them. What they have in common is not intensity of pain but a quality of ruin: the sense that a life has been made into something that cannot be repaired from the inside, and that the person to whom it happened would have grounds for wishing they had never existed.

Why the standard moves do not reach them

Take the responses of the intermediate tier in turn.

The free will defence establishes that some evil is compatible with God's goodness because free creatures may misuse their freedom. It is an answer about the world, and it says nothing about whether the particular person destroyed by that misuse has a life worth having lived. A defence can succeed completely on its own terms and leave the horrendous case untouched.

The soul-making theodicy holds that suffering develops character. Its problem here is that horrendous evils are precisely the ones that do not build character, since they frequently destroy the capacity for the growth that is supposed to justify them. A child who dies in the process is not improved by it, and an adult broken beyond recovery is not either. The theodicy works best on the moderate difficulties it was designed for, which is not where the pressure is.

Greater good reasoning fails for the reason the definition was constructed to expose. Even if some enormous good depends on a horror, and even if the world is better for containing both, the person who was destroyed has not been compensated by the fact that the world came out ahead. Adams's distinction is between God's goodness in general, understood as producing a good world, and God's goodness to individual persons. A being who arranged an excellent world at the cost of ruining some of its inhabitants would satisfy the first and fail the second, and it is the second that most theistic traditions actually assert.

The sceptical reply of the previous rung has a different problem. It works by denying us a view of the goods available, and that denial is symmetric: it equally denies us the resources to say that any particular life has been made good. It secures the theist against the argument at the price of leaving the pastoral question unanswered.

Balancing off and defeat

The technical distinction Adams relies on comes from an earlier paper by Roderick Chisholm, and it is the pivot of her whole treatment.

The difference is easiest to see with a small example. If someone loses a day's work and later wins a prize, the loss has been balanced off; the prize is simply worth more, and the loss remains an unqualified bad which happens to be outweighed. If a difficult passage in a piece of music makes the resolution what it is, the difficulty is not outweighed but taken up: remove it and the whole is worse. Chisholm's point, which he took from the older discussion of organic unities, is that value does not always add.

Adams's demand is that horrendous evils be defeated in this second sense, and defeated inside the life of the participant. Nothing that happens elsewhere counts, and no aggregate of goods, however large, counts if it merely sits alongside the horror rather than incorporating it.

Note what the argument concludes. It is not that God does not exist. It is that the usual defences are aimed at the wrong target, and that a theism which claims God is good to persons and not merely good at world-arranging has an unpaid debt.

What could defeat a horror

Adams's own answer is unusual in this literature, and its unusual feature is that it is openly theological.

She argued that the goods available within any finite life are simply the wrong size for the job. No amount of ordinary happiness, achievement, or relationship is of a kind to defeat a horror, because these are commensurable with the harm and defeat requires something that is not. What would be the right size is a good incommensurate with anything finite, and on her account there is exactly one candidate: relationship with God, understood as a good so great that a life containing it is thereby a great good to the person living it.

The second half of the proposal is that the horror itself is taken up into that relationship. Adams appealed to the divine participation in suffering, on the ground that if God has been in the same place, then the sufferer's experience is not merely compensated afterwards but becomes a point of identification with God, and so becomes a constituent of the very good that defeats it. This is defeat rather than balancing, and it is the only structure she thought could do the work.

The cost is one she accepted openly. This is not a proposal available to bare theism. It requires a specific theology, with claims about incarnation and about divine suffering that most philosophical treatments of evil deliberately avoid in order to argue on neutral ground. Adams's view was that neutrality had been purchased at too high a price, and that the philosophy of religion had impoverished itself by restricting the resources it would allow the theist to use. Whether that is a legitimate move or a change of subject is one of the live disputes about her work.

Two objections recur. The first is that a good great enough to defeat any horror whatever looks suspiciously accommodating, since a value that can absorb anything explains nothing about the particular distribution we observe. The second is that describing an atrocity as a point of identification with God risks the very insensitivity the next section is about.

Whether the sufferer has to see it

A condition mentioned at rung 14 becomes central here, and it is worth stating on its own.

If the claim is that a person's life is a great good to that person on the whole, then it is hard to see how the claim can be true without the person eventually being in a position to recognise it. Goodness to someone is not the same as goodness in someone's vicinity. A benefit conferred on a person who never comes to have it, never knows of it, and derives nothing from it is not obviously a benefit to them at all, and this is the point at which theodicies that appeal to goods far outside the sufferer's life look weakest.

Adams's proposal accepts the condition rather than evading it, and the acceptance has an immediate consequence: the recognition often cannot occur within the earthly life, since many of the people in question die in the horror or are destroyed by it. So the account is eschatological. It says that the defeat is completed in a life beyond this one, in which the participant comes to see their experience as taken up rather than merely ended.

Whether this is a cost depends on what one already holds. For a theist who independently believes in a life beyond death, the appeal introduces nothing new; it uses a commitment already in place. For anyone assessing theism from outside, it moves the answer to a place where nothing can check it, and the objection of rung 15 applies again: the more the answer relies on states of affairs beyond observation, the less the resulting position predicts about the world we can see.

There is a further wrinkle for perpetrators. If participation includes doing, then defeat within a life must also apply to those who caused the horrors, and an account on which their lives too are great goods to them on the whole runs into the difficulty of the previous rung's ledger from the other side. Adams was aware of this and took the harder line, which most readers find either the most impressive or the least credible feature of her position.

How it relates to the sceptical reply

The two theistic responses of these last two rungs pull in opposite directions, and holding both is harder than it may appear.

The sceptical reply works by insisting that we cannot see far enough into the space of value to say what goods are at stake. Adams's project requires saying, quite specifically, what kind of good would be needed and why nothing smaller will do. It is an argument about the structure of value, and it could not be made by someone who held that our grasp of value is too poor to support such judgements.

This does not make the two positions strictly inconsistent, since one could hold that we can identify the shape of an adequate response without being able to survey the goods available in any particular case. But the combination is uncomfortable. A theist who has spent the previous rung insisting on human incapacity in matters of value, and who then argues that only intimacy with God is of the right order to defeat a horror, is relying on exactly the kind of comparative value judgement they have said we cannot make.

The cleanest positions are the two extremes: full retreat into inscrutability, which answers the argument at the price of silence about persons, or a substantive account of what defeats what, which speaks to persons at the price of being open to assessment. The middle is where most of the literature sits, and it is under pressure from both sides.

The other tradition

The position is easy to misread as a concession. It is not the claim that the argument from evil succeeds; several anti-theodicists are theists, and some of them are more confident of God's existence than the theodicists they criticise. Their claim concerns the standing of the question rather than the answer.

Three lines run through the literature.

The first is about what a religious response to suffering is for. On this reading, the tradition's texts about suffering are not attempted explanations at all. They are laments, protests, and expressions of trust, and reading them as failed theories misdescribes them as badly as reading a funeral oration as a coroner's report.

The second is about the concept of God the theodicies employ. Phillips in particular argued that a God who permits an atrocity in order to secure a benefit is a moral agent among others, doing sums with people's lives, and that such a being is not the God of the tradition but something that would be monstrous if it existed. On this view the theodicist wins the argument by defending an object of worship no one should worship.

The third is the one with the widest reach, and it deserves its own statement.

The objection is not that theodicists are bad people, and the better versions are careful to say so. It is that the practice has a tendency, in the way that any repeated way of attending to something has a tendency, and that its tendency is to make horror thinkable as a means. If that is right, the discipline carries a cost that is invisible to the standards by which its arguments are assessed, since an argument can be valid and its premises true while the practice of producing such arguments deforms the person producing them.

Ivan's refusal

The literary statement of the anti-theodicist's position predates the philosophical one, and it is still the clearest.

In the fourth chapter of the fifth book of The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan sets out a series of accounts of cruelty to children and then makes a move that is not an argument against God's existence. He grants, for the sake of the discussion, that there may be a final harmony in which everything is reconciled and every wrong is seen to have been necessary. His response is to refuse the ticket to it. Even if the justification is available, he says, he does not want it, and he takes the acceptance of such a bargain to be itself a moral failure.

The structure is worth pausing on, because it is unlike anything else in this subject. Ivan is not disputing a premise. He is declining to be reconciled, and treating the willingness to be reconciled as the thing to be judged. That is precisely the anti-theodicist's stance transposed into fiction, and it is why the passage keeps appearing in this literature.

It is also where the position is most vulnerable, since a refusal is not a reason, and the theist can reasonably ask why anyone else should share it.

What the challenge establishes

Three things can be said with some confidence.

The distributive point is secure and is now widely conceded. A theodicy that shows the world to be better on the whole has not thereby shown that God is good to each person, and any theism which claims the latter owes an account that operates within individual lives. That is a permanent change to the shape of the problem, and it came directly from Adams.

The demand for defeat rather than balancing has also held, though it is harder to satisfy than it looks. Once accepted, it rules out most of what the standard theodicies offer, and the candidates that remain are all theologically substantial in ways that make the debate less neutral than philosophers of religion have generally wanted it to be.

The anti-theodicist's charge is the least settled. It is not the kind of claim that can be established by argument in the way the first two can, since it concerns the effect of a practice on those who engage in it, and evidence about that is not the sort of thing the discipline collects. What can be said is that the charge has changed the tone of the literature. Contemporary theodicists routinely acknowledge that their proposals are not to be offered as consolation, that a true explanation may be the wrong thing to say to a person in front of you, and that the philosophical question and the pastoral one come apart. That acknowledgement was not standard before the objection was pressed.

Next

Both traditions on this rung concern what God permits. The next rung takes up a different absence: not suffering, but the apparent unavailability of God to people who are looking. If God is perfectly loving and desires relationship with every person, then the existence of people who would be open to that relationship and cannot find grounds for belief is itself a difficulty, and one that runs on a structure closely parallel to the argument from evil.