This is a theodicy I’ve heard from Richard Swinburne, who says the following:
But there do so often look to be lives in which the bad outweighs the good, about which we say that it would be better for such a person not to have lived. I urge however that this is a wrong assessment of many lives because it does not take into account a good which I have so far not mentioned —the good of being of use to others. It is an enormous good for anyone to be of use—whether by what they do by free choice, or by what they do involuntarily or by what happens to them, including what they suffer. Helping someone freely is clearly a great good for the helper. . . .[*3]
There are two different conversations here. The first is people being of use to others even if they live poor lives. The second is the unique good of usefulness. Let’s start with the first.
#5a - Useful lives
This theodicy fails for three reasons. The first is for a similar reason that the butterfly effect theodicy fails (see Theodicy #7). Let’s say someone dies by falling into a pool of boiling water in Yellowstone National Park. We want to know why God would allow that to happen. Saying “because their life served as a warning to others” is a nonsensical response. That would mean God allows people to fall into boiling water as a means to prevent people from falling into boiling water. If God wants to prevent an evil, then doing so by allowing that very evil, or by allowing a worse or comparable evil, is a contradictory way of going about things.
The second reason is that at best this could only provide a silver lining, not an actual justification. If a parent’s child dies and the death of the child serves some kind of purpose, the parent will naturally prefer to save the child and lose whatever purpose that could be.
The third reason is for deontic concerns. Arguably, a loving God would care about people not as a means to an end but as an end unto themselves. It would be a gross mistreatment of someone to let them boil to death just so their life can be useful to others.
#5b - The goodness of usefulness
I think this theodicy partially succeeds, or at least has a chance to partially succeed.
Consider a boy who falls off his bike and scrapes his knee. Scared and hurt, he walks his bike home and tells his mom what happened. She patches him up.
Many goods come out of this:
1) The mom feels useful.2) The mom gets a chance to express her love and care to her son.3) The son experiences being loved and cared for.4) The son and mom bond over the experience.5) The son is humbled by the experience. He learns that he can get hurt. It’s good to have an accurate picture of what you are.6) At the same time, the son learns that he is strong and can survive a fall and get back up.7) Moreover, the son, who suffers the evil, is the one who benefits from the evil (along with his mom), alleviating deontic concerns.8) Theodical goods are cashed out almost immediately after the evil is suffered.9) The intensity of the suffering is low; there is never a point at which the son or mother consider life to not be worth living because of the suffering.10) The goods mentioned above uniquely depend on the badness of the boy falling off his bike and having him scrape his knee.
I’m not sure about (10). Imagine if instead the boy bakes cookies with his mom. In this case,
1) The mom feels useful teaching her son how to bake.2) The mom gets a chance to express her love by spending time with him.3) The son experiences being loved.4) The son and mom bond over the experience.5) The son is humbled by the experience. He learns that he has much to learn from his mom.6) At the same time, the son learns that he is good at baking, increasing his self-esteem. (We’ll say he doesn’t make any mistakes, because if he did, that would probably hurt roughly as much as a scraped knee, defeating the point of the scenario.)7) There are no deontic concerns as the son is not undignified by an evil for someone else’s sake.8) There is no worry about when or if theodical goods are cashed out.9) There is never a point at which the son or mother considers life to not be worth living because of suffering.10) The goods mentioned above uniquely depend on the mother and boy baking together.11) Bonus: the son never experiences any sense that the world he lives in is hostile. He is more able to embrace the world he lives in as a good world.
Some of these goods are the same as in the hurt knee case, and others are of arguably equal or even greater magnitude, without the badness of the hurt knee. There is even a bonus higher-order good of not experiencing any kind of anxiety about the dangers of the world like we get in the hurt knee case.
But there is a drawback: Emotions are not as heightened and the stakes aren’t as high as in the hurt knee case. So the hurt knee case remains in my mind a plausibly justified evil, though I’m open to some of these higher-order goods in the cookie baking case to override the higher-order goods of the knee hurt case.
It’s hard to imagine a world without problems. Even if we could imagine such a world, it may be better to have problems, as they give us something to do and allow us to be useful to each other and to interact with each other in meaningful ways. If there is a successful theodicy, it will certainly incorporate these kinds of goods for these reasons.
So this theodicy plausibly succeeds, or rather plays a role in a plausibly successful theodicy.
However, I said this theodicy can only partially succeed, and that’s because, like in #5a, this theodicy won’t apply in all cases, or will sometimes only amount to a silver lining. Dementia happens to be one of those cases.
Anti-theodicy #3: It is a great good to feel useful and to be useful to others. Dementia destroys, for the person afflicted, the possibility of both. Dementia also destroys, for the loved ones of the afflicted, the possibility of feeling or being useful, because the disease is untreatable, incurable, and only gets worse over time. Given the overwhelming desire to see the loved one healed, and the impossibility of this, an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness can emerge for anyone affected.
While there is the good of the opportunity to care for the afflicted and for the afflicted to be cared for, it’s obvious that this good is a mere silver lining, dwarfed by the evil. We would much rather have the good of the freedom from the evil than have the good of care.
*3 - Richard Swinburne, "The Problem of Evil" (1995) in (ed.) P. Koslowski, Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover.
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