Part 4: Preliminaries
Before we get to theodicies, there are a few preliminaries I want to discuss first.
4a - Definitions:
Here are some tentative definitions to give us something to work with going forward.
Evil = badness; An evil = a bad thing.
To suffer = to endure evil, especially repeatedly or over a period of time.
Badness comes in three types: intrinsic, extrinsic, and deprivational.
Something is intrinsically bad if it’s bad in and of itself.
The only thing I can think of that is bad in and of itself is anything the badness of which is directly accessible, i.e. bad feelings, i.e. pain.
We can see this by asking “Why” questions. Why put on a coat before going outside in the winter? Because you will be cold if you don’t. But why avoid being cold? Because being cold is bad in and of itself. Why eat healthy? Because you will feel sick if you don’t. But why avoid feeling sick? Because feeling sick is bad in and of itself.
Therefore, something is intrinsically bad if and only if its badness is experienced by a person. Intrinsic badness is phenomenal badness, or bad qualia.
To be in pain is to be experiencing bad feelings. There are many different kinds of bad feelings, both physical and mental, and thus there are many different kinds of pain.
There is a subjective component and an objective component to badness. Whether something is intrinsically bad for someone depends on that person’s subjective experience. But whether someone has suffered is a question of fact. So if I say “Well, that movie was painful to watch…”, I am saying something true relative to me and not necessarily relative to anyone else. But if someone says “Ben did not have a bad experience watching that movie”, they have said something false. So while it’s subjective whether someone suffers, the fact that people suffer is objective.
This is why people are not just valuable, but objectively so. It’s a matter of fact that valuable states (states of happiness) occur because people are there to generate them. People generate value states for themselves as well as for each other. Each person is a locus of value.
An extrinsic evil is anything that causes some kind of pain for someone. Wearing too few layers in the cold is extrinsically bad. Eating unhealthy is extrinsically bad. Death is extrinsically bad because it causes the pain of grief to loved ones.
Speaking of death, if badness is ultimately cashed out in terms of experience, and we do not experience being dead, then how can death be bad for the one who dies? This is where deprivational badness comes in. The deprivation theory says death is bad because it deprives the one who dies from goods they otherwise would have experienced had they not died. The one who dies is worse off compared to how they would have been had they lived. FOMO comes from this. If we stay home instead of going to the party, we worry that we missed out on a good time. Staying home deprived you of the good vibes, drinks, and snacks you would have enjoyed had you gone. Failure to fulfill one’s potential is bad in this way too. If you had fulfilled your potential, then there are goods you and others would have enjoyed, and you and they are worse off for not getting to enjoy them.
So when I say something is bad, I am saying that it’s a pain, a source of pain, or something that deprives one of goods they otherwise would enjoy. The categories of evils then are:
INTRINSIC EVIL - Anything the badness of which is directly accessible.
Ex. touching a hot pan, loneliness, boredom, hunger, feeling sick, feeling upset because your car is damaged, feeling frustrated because of technical issues.
EXTRINSIC EVIL - Anything that causes an intrinsic or deprivational evil.
Ex. Forgetting the pan is hot, not having a good social life, not having meaningful projects to work on, not having enough food, illness, bad hail storms, not understanding technology.
DEPRIVATIONAL EVIL - Anything that prevents, ruins, or lessens an intrinsic good.
Ex. Death, poverty, coma, illness.
Conversely:
Happiness = intrinsically good feelings. (Usually “pleasure” is used here, but due to negative connotations surrounding carnal pleasures I will use “happiness”.)
To be happy is to be experiencing good feelings. There are many different kinds of good feelings, both physical and mental, and thus there are many different kinds of happiness.
Happiness (contrasted with “sadness”) can also refer to an emotion of elation, relief, excitement, or satisfaction. She felt so happy when she saw her sister at the airport.
Happiness (contrasted with “misery”) can also refer to a state of contentment. He was happy with his job / He was miserable at his job.
To flourish = to enjoy goods, especially repeatedly or over a period of time.
(I think of flourishing as involving a moral component where not only the one who flourishes is happy, but is happy for the right reasons and is connected to others in the right way. While in one sense violent criminals can flourish, in another sense they are failing to be happy for the right reasons and to connect to others in the right way.)
The categories of goods:
INTRINSIC GOOD - Anything the goodness of which is directly accessible.
Ex. Taste of delicious food, the feeling of a hot shower, the satisfying feeling of sleeping in a comfy bed.
EXTRINSIC GOOD - Anything that causes an intrinsic or saving good.
Ex. Delicious food, hot showers, comfy beds.
SAVING GOOD - Anything which prevents, cures, or alleviates an intrinsic evil.
Ex. Pain medicine, surgery, a peace treaty between two warring nations.
Often, things are a complicated mix of good and bad. Pain can be intrinsically bad while extrinsically good as it alerts you to a bigger problem your body has. The intrinsic pain of guilt can be extrinsically good by alerting you to the need to change your ways. One person’s happiness can cause others to be happy, and thus be both intrinsically and extrinsically good. Death is deprivationally bad for the one who dies (and deprivationally bad for those who would have enjoyed moments of happiness caused by the one who died) and extrinsically bad because it causes the pain of grief. A good can turn into an evil if getting it causes you to miss out on a greater good.
4b - Reasons-Value Principle:
The Reasons-Value Principle says that the badness of an evil provides the reason to prevent that evil. Likewise, the goodness of a good provides the reason to cause that good.
You might wonder how this connects to God. Our pain might give us reason to prevent it, but why would that give God reason to prevent our pain?
There are a few options:
For God’s Sake: Because of God’s empathy and love, God suffers when we suffer. God has direct access to the badness of his suffering, and thus understands the cause of his suffering, our suffering, to be bad.
For Our Sake: You might want to maintain God’s impassibility and thus reject the notion that our suffering causes God to suffer. But God, in his love for us, can still desire for us to be free of suffering; God himself does not suffer, but because of his omniscience he understands our suffering perfectly, and by his love is moved to minimize it.
Rationality: The objectively smart thing to do is to maximize as much flourishing and minimize as much suffering in the world as possible. God understands the badness of the suffering of sentient creatures and the goodness of their flourishing and by that understanding sees the reasons to promote flourishing and minimize suffering.
So the Reasons-Value Principle applies not only to us, but to God as well. For each instance of evil that a sentient creature faces, the badness of that evil gives God a reason to prevent it, and for each instance of goodness a sentient creature might enjoy, the goodness of that good gives God a reason to cause it.
With these tools in hand, we can get an idea of the reasons God has for preventing EJ’s dementia.
4c - Reasons to prevent the evil:
4c1: Because goods and evils ultimately cash out in terms of experience, we can categorize everything under intrinsic goods and intrinsic evils like the following:
1 - INTRINSIC EVILS
1a - The pain EJ experiences.
1b - The pain EJ’s immediate family members experience, especially that of her husband who is the closest to her.
1c - The pain of EJ’s friends, neighbors, churchgoers, extended family members, etc.
2 - INTRINSIC GOODS
2a - The happiness EJ would have experienced had the disease been prevented.
2b - The happiness EJ’s family would have experienced had the disease been prevented.
2c - The happiness EJ’s friends, neighbors, churchgoers, extended family members, etc., would have experienced had the disease been prevented.
4c2 - Almost all evils are apparently gratuitous: God has at least six layers of reasons to prevent EJ’s dementia. If I had healing powers, or if we had the technology to cure dementia, we would cure EJ without hesitation, and these reasons explain why.
Indeed, this is how we can know there are apparent gratuitous evils. For any evil, if you would be inclined to prevent or cure that evil had you the power to do so, then this tells you the evil is apparently gratuitous to you.
A similar test is the “prayer test”. If you believed in the power of prayer and were inclined to pray for God to resolve an evil, then that evil is apparently gratuitous to you. Why would you try to pray away an evil unless it seemed to you that its badness outweighed its goodness?
If the prayer test shows us which evils are apparently gratuitous, then nearly all evils we encounter are apparently gratuitous, as nearly all evils we encounter we would be inclined to pray away if we believed in the power of prayer.
Christians will even pray to God to help find their car keys. It sounds funny, because if God is willing to allow the Holocaust then certainly he is willing to allow you to lose your car keys, or lose your life in a car accident for that matter. Still, losing your keys is a pain in the butt. A gratuitous evil needn’t be a massive evil. As long as the badness outweighs the goodness, it’s gratuitous, no matter how small the badness is. So yes, even losing your keys is an apparently gratuitous evil.
4c3 - Getting a rough idea of the number of reasons God has to prevent EJ’s dementia:
For the sake of simplicity, let’s say the following:
-A moment is a 5 second interval.
-A day is a 16 hour period. So each day contains 11,520 moments.
-A year is 360 days. So a year contains 4,147,200 moments.
-Let’s say EJ’s symptoms started 12 years ago (I’m not exactly sure when they started, but it was at least 12 years ago). 12 years is 49,766,400 moments.
In one way or another, all of those moments are corrupted, either because they become moments of suffering because of the disease (layer 1a), or because moments of flourishing would have occurred without the disease (layer 2a). So there are basically up to 50 million reasons to prevent EJ’s dementia, and that’s not even counting the unknown millions of reasons that fall under 1b, 1c, 2b, and 2c.
Of course, I’m simplifying massively. There are many complexities that emerge when trying to quantify reasons. The point is to get a general feel for the reasons there are to prevent EJ’s suffering. We are so familiar with suffering that it’s easy to miss just how many reasons there are to prevent it. While it’s impossible for us to quantify the exact number and weight of the reasons to prevent any evil, in EJ’s case the reasons are clearly in the tens of millions and beyond. Keeping these reasons in mind will give us an intuitive feel for the weight that theodicies are up against.
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