I have read Klaas Kraay’s two articles in Philosophy Compass on gratuitous evil.
Nothing in these articles causes me to revise my definition of gratuitous evil.
Kraay says that the strong definition of ‘gratuitous evil’ where God is logically incompatible with gratuitous evil is not standard.
Here’s a dialectical argument in favor of using the stronger definition:
By using the strongest definition of ‘gratuitous evil’ we place all the weight on whether there is gratuitous evil. This should make the theist’s job as easy as possible in showing that it’s more likely than not that there is no such evil. But if the theist cannot do this, and can only show that such probabilities are inscrutable, or only that we cannot conclude there are such evils (but it’s just as plausible that there are such evils), then the argument from evil will have succeeded. And if the argument from evil succeeds at that point, then it will have succeeded despite making the theist’s job as easy as possible.
We could just stipulate that gratuitous evil is that evil which is incompatible with God. Naturally, the theist could just say that such evil is impossible. But this brings us to the problem of hell: Could God torture all humans and animals for fun from the beginning of time for eternity?
If not, why not?
After all, if God is compatible with gratuitous evil, then shouldn’t God be compatible with any degree of evil? Why would God be compatible with some arbitrary degree of evil?
It strikes me as obvious that a loving being could not torture all humans and animals for fun from the beginning of time for eternity. But why not?
The reason has to do with the nature of love, badness and goodness, how reasons map onto badness and goodness, and so on, per my discussion in my posts on the problem of evil.
This leads to my definition of gratuitous evil. For an evil to be justified:
Condition 1: The goodness of G that an evil E produces must be of greater magnitude than the badness of E.
God has reasons to prevent badness in the badness itself. So if badness outweighs goodness, then God is unreasonable.
When you love someone you never want them to suffer unless the suffering is for their own good. But suffering that results in greater badness than goodness is never for someone’s own good. So if badness outweighs goodness, then God is unloving.
Condition 2: Even if G + E is a net good, God allowing G + E cannot entail treating any person in an unloving way, such as by treating them as a means to an end.
The worry in all of this is that God is not loving. You can argue that Condition 2 falls out of Condition 1. If G + E treats an individual in an unloving way, then this failure of love generates emergent badness which will render G no longer greater than E. Or, even if the emergent badness of the failure of love is somehow outweighed by G, an even better G + E could be achieved by G’ + E’, one that would demonstrate God’s love better by lacking the failure of love that G + E demonstrates.
Therefore, Condition 2 is arguably subsumed between Conditions 1 and 3.
Condition 3: Even if G + E is a net good and does not require treating any individuals in an unloving way, the net good of G + E must not be outweighed by the net good of an alternative God could have actualized.
If I get into a car accident that nearly kills me and I ask God why this happened, and God says “Because I wanted you to know I am real and watching over you”, then I could respond “Is there a way you could have let me know you are real and watching over me without the car accident?” The answer is obviously yes.
It makes no sense for God to allow an evil to obtain a good that God could have obtained without the evil. The only difference is the excess evil which God has reason to prevent in the badness of the evil and no reason to allow. Again, this leads to God being irrational and unloving per the reasoning behind Condition 1
William Hasker notices the paradox of the permissibility and impermissibility of evils (at least the part about common sense morality), and says that evils must be gratuitous or else we will not be appropriately motivated against them.
This is why I introduce LGEs and the Grand Story as discussed.
Satisfying Condition 3 entails that our world is the best possible world. Of course, given the superiority of heaven to Earth you might say this world cannot be the best possible world. But ‘world’ is being used more broadly to include the whole of history. We might call this the best possible state of affairs, which includes, on the Grand Story theodicy, the greatest possible story, which in turn includes the atonement and all the evils we see on Earth. So on the Grand Story theodicy, we are living in the best possible state of affairs, and this is consistent with our intuitions that our world is not the best possible world.
I don’t believe there is a best possible world in the narrow sense of 'world' as you could always make that world better by increasing its number of flourishing persons. Our capacity for happiness could also grow over time as our capacity for understanding grows. But you can have a best possible state of affairs, which would include this continual improvement for eternity.
So my account of evil does imply that God must create the best possible world in a sense that fits both with the Grand Story theodicy and our intuitions (namely, that a maximally great being would create a maximally good state of affairs, and our intuition that our immediate world is not a good one). Of course, I argue that in the end the Grand Story doesn’t work, but it comes as close as the Christian can to making sense of evil.
So I arrive at a strong definition of gratuitous evil; God is logically incompatible with gratuitous evils. But this is not a brute stipulation. The strong definition follows from the nature of God, love, reason, and so on. And even with a strong definition, which should make the theist’s job in refuting the existence of such evil as easy as possible, I show how the argument from evil succeeds.
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