Sufferer-Centered Requirements on Theodicy and All-Things-Considered Harms[1]
Abstract: Both Marilyn Adams and Eleonore Stump have endorsed requirements on theodicy which, if true, imply that we can never suffer all-things-considered harms. William Hasker has offered a series of arguments intended to show that this implication is unacceptable. In this paper, I evaluate Hasker’s arguments and find them lacking. However, I also argue that Hasker’s arguments can be modified or expanded in ways that make them very powerful. I close by considering why God might not meet the requirements endorsed by Stump and Adams and show how they can modify their requirements to avoid the untenable implications about harm while still respecting the concerns that motivated their requirements in the first place.
- Introduction
Until recently, the analytic philosophical literature on the problem of evil focused overwhelmingly on questions regarding the world as a whole—whether creation might be more valuable for having evils in it, how good a world would need to be for God to create it, and so on. In recent years, this focus has begun to shift; many are now convinced that successful theodicy[2] requires attention to how evils affect the particular people who suffer them.[3] The thought is that God’s concern for the significance of each particular individual would make him unwilling to impose certain sorts of sacrifices upon individuals for the greater good, or that his resourcefulness would make it unnecessary for him to do so. Let a “sufferer-centered requirement on theodicy” be a requirement that our theodicy pay special attention to how God’s governance of the world affects the particular people who suffer terrible evils.
This shifting of focus to the particular individuals who bear the cost of evils can largely be attributed to the influential work of Marilyn Adams and Eleonore Stump.[4] Both Adams and Stump have endorsed very strong sufferer-centered requirements on theodicy, ones which entail (perhaps with a few qualifications)[5] that, as a result of divine providence, either (in Adams’ case) no one is overall harmed by anything that happens to them or (in Stump’s case) something overall harmful can happen to someone only if they freely fail to appropriate the goods their suffering made possible. I will call their requirements (and any other, relevantly similar requirements) the strong sufferer-centered requirements on theodicy, because they are so strong. William Hasker has objected to the strong requirements’ implications about harm, arguing both that they would theoretically undermine morality and that it would be practically bad for us to accept them. In the next section, I will discuss Adams’ and Stump’s requirements on theodicy. In the third and fourth sections, I will discuss Hasker’s objections to their requirements. I claim that Hasker’s own arguments, as stated, are extremely problematic. However, I will develop some Hasker-inspired objections to the strong requirements which I think are very powerful. In the fifth section, I discuss why God might not meet the requirements endorsed by Stump and Adams. I also attempt to show how Adams and Stump can modify their accounts to avoid the objections I raise while respecting the considerations that motivated the strong requirements in the first place. The relevant modifications will shift the focus of the requirements from each evil’s never leaving us worse off to God’s actions and omissions not doing so, even as particular evils really do sometimes constitute (incredibly severe) all-things-considered harms for us.
- Adams’ and Stump’s Accounts
Adams’ theodicy focuses squarely on what she calls “horrendous evils,” which are “evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or the suffering of which) constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant’s life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to him/her on the whole.”[6] Such evils certainly seem to afflict us. Yet Adams also emphatically stresses that God should act for the good of every individual person, not merely the aggregate good of groups of people or to abstract, impersonal goods; the governance of a God who acted with only such global concerns in mind would, Adams tells us, be “at best indifferent, at worst cruel.”[7] The problem is immediately clear: how can we reconcile the claim that God will ensure each of his children an excellent life with the fact that his children often suffer or commit evils that threaten to leave their lives total ruins?
In answering this, Adams draws on Roderick Chisholm’s distinction between defeating goods or evils and merely balancing them off. When an evil is merely balanced off, it is countered by an equal or greater amount of good. When it is defeated, however, it becomes part of an organic unity—a collection of value bearers whose total value is not equal to the arithmetic sum of the values of its parts—whose value is at least as good as it would be without the evil (so that, for instance, the disvalue of a discordant part of a symphony is defeated when that part, in virtue of its very discordance, makes the whole symphony more beautiful.) Adams believes God’s love for us would require him to defeat all evils by making them partial constituents of organic unities which are good for the person who suffered the evil:
At a minimum, God’s goodness to human individuals would require that God guarantee each a life that was a great good to him/her on the whole by balancing off serious evils. To value the individual qua person, God would have to go further to defeat any horrendous evil in which s/he participated by giving it positive meaning through organic unity with a great enough good within the context of his/her life.[8]
God can do this by making our horrendous sufferings moments of identification with the suffering of Christ, or by expressing gratitude to us for the suffering we bore while God carried out his purposes, or by making them moments of contact with the divine, and (in each of these cases) by helping us come to appreciate these values during a wonderful afterlife. Horror-strewn lives will not be better than lives without horrors, since God can also give unsurpassably great goods to us without our suffering horrors. But the defeat of the horrors within our lives ensures that horror-strewn lives will not be worse, either; rather, both sorts of lives will be incommensurately good.[9] Because horrors will thus be “given a dimension of positive meaning,” in the afterlife participants in horrors will “be brought to the point of accepting them and so no longer retrospectively wishing to erase them from their life stories.”[10] It is in this way that God’s willingness to set us up for horrors is reconciled with his perfect love for each individual. We can thus say that Adams’ position apparently implies what I will call Adams’ requirement: no suffering that God allows can leave its sufferer worse off than they could have been had the evil not occurred.[11]
Eleonore Stump likewise believes that the occurrence of evils must, in some sense, be aimed at the good of their sufferers:
With considerable diffidence, then, I want to suggest that Christian doctrine is committed to the claim that a child’s suffering is outweighed by the good for the child which can result from that suffering. This is a brave (or foolhardy) thing to say, and the risk inherent in it is only sharpened when one applies it to cases in which infants suffer, for example, or in which children die in their suffering… It seems to me nonetheless that a perfectly good entity who was also perfectly omniscient and omnipotent must govern the evil resulting from the misuse of… significant freedom in such a way that the sufferings of any particular person are outweighed by the good the suffering produces for that person; otherwise, we might justifiably expect a good God to prevent that particular suffering, either by intervening (in one way or another) to protect the victim while still allowing the perpetrator his freedom or by curtailing freedom in select cases.[12]
For Stump, our ultimate good is freely achieving union with God, and our ultimate evil is rejecting such union. Unfortunately, our sinful wills prevent us from achieving such union, and sometimes horrific suffering is the best way to heal this defect and encourage us to will union with God. Because the point of the suffering is to encourage a particular free response, it may fail to achieve the desired effect; God cannot make the free decision for the person. Nonetheless, all suffering is aimed at the good of the sufferer, just a medical treatment is aimed at the good of the patient even in unfortunate situations where it fails to achieve this aim.[13]
We may thus say that Stump has endorsed what I will call Stump’s requirement: the occurrence of any suffering[14] God allows must be such that no other event would be a better[15] way of making the sufferer better off than they could have been otherwise, though it may leave them worse off it they freely fail to appropriate the goods it makes possible.[16] This requirement is stronger than Adams’ in one way and weaker in another. It is stronger because it requires that the evil be aimed at making the sufferer better off than they would have otherwise been, while Adams is happy to admit that God could have given people lives which were no worse and didn’t have any horrors in them. It is weaker because some evils may actually leave their sufferers worse off. Achieving the goods in question requires a particular free response on the part of the sufferer, and some people, believe it or not, may ultimately be so perverse as to not love God no matter how horrific the torments he allows to befall them.
Both requirements have implications for how and whether evils can harm us. Suppose—awfully plausibly—that if an event is what I’ll call an overall harm (sometimes called an all-things-considered harm) to someone, they are worse off for the event’s having occurred than they would have been if the event hadn’t occurred.[17] And suppose that an event is a pro tanto harm (sometimes called a prima facie harm) for someone if and only if it possesses an overall harm-making feature. A pro tanto harm is a merely pro tanto harm when, despite its harmful features, it fails to make its sufferer worse off on the whole. Surgeries are paradigmatic cases of events that are intended to be merely pro tanto harms—one experiences discomfort, incapacitation, etc., but one is (one hopes) nonetheless better off for having undergone the surgery and thus not overall harmed by it.[18]
If these suppositions are true, Adams’ requirement entails that all harms are merely pro tanto harms, and Stump’s requirement entails that overall harms occur only when their sufferers fail to appropriate the goods their suffering made possible. [19] These implications about harm are, I think, pretty central to the work the strong requirements are supposed to be doing: it is easy to reconcile God’s concern for the welfare of particular individuals with his willingness to allow their suffering if their suffering will not, in the grand scheme, negatively impact their welfare. But these implications about harm are also, I claim, ultimately untenable. I will argue as much in the next two sections.
- Theoretical Objections to the Strong Requirements[20]
William Hasker has argued that the strong requirements’ implications about harm present insoluble ethical problems. It seems to me that there are at least two threads to Hasker’s argument. One thread is pragmatic—apart from whether they are plausible, we have practical reasons not to accept the strong requirements, either because doing so is itself somehow morally or relationally inappropriate or else because doing so is likely to lead to bad consequences. The other thread is theoretical—our moral obligations would be objectively unjustified if the strong requirement is true, since the grounds for those obligations would not exist. Since it is incredibly plausible to think that we have such obligations, we have very strong epistemic reasons to reject the strong requirements. I will focus on theoretical objections to the strong requirements in this section and pragmatic ones in the next.
One of Hasker’s most sustained presentations of his version[21] of the theoretical objection is in response to Eleonore Stump’s endorsing her strong requirement.[22][23] Hasker claims that Stump’s view implies that “no person can ever ultimately be harmed by anything that happens to her or is done to her” [24] and thereby undermines “that (crucially important) part of morality which deals with our obligations towards other people.”[25] In fact, if Stump’s view is right, we have no moral obligations to one another at all; “from the standpoint of any form of consequentialism,” Hasker claims, “the very idea of treating another person wrongly disappears,” while on deontological views, “obligations to persons might co-exist consistently with Stump’s theodicy” but would “in an important way be unmotivated.”[26] Hasker grounds this final claim in his endorsement of what he calls “Frankena’s principle,” expressed in the following quotation from William Frankena:
[M]oral reasons consist of facts about what actions, dispositions, and persons do to the lives of sentient beings, including beings other than the agent in question, and the moral point of view is concerned with such facts.[27]
The thought is supposed to be that if the principle is true, Stump’s requirement would entail that we could not wrong others, since we could not negatively affect their lives by inflicting all-things-considered harms on them. Hasker has the following to say in defense of Frankena’s principle:
This claim of Frankena’s is not uncontroversial, but it seems to me that it enjoys strong intuitive support. Frankena’s principle does not require a utilitarian or consequentialist morality; it does not stipulate that the only reasons which are relevant to the moral justification of an action are the consequences for sentient beings of that particular action. But it does say that morally relevant reasons must in some way have to do with the tendency of the action in question, or of the class of actions of that kind, to do good or harm to sentient beings.[28] And it seems to me that this is correct—that if we become convinced that certain ostensibly moral requirements or prohibitions have no connection whatever with the weal or woe of any rational or sentient being, then we soon cease to regard such commands or prohibitions as morally serious.[29]
I think there’s something to Hasker’s argument here, but it is very far from clear whether we should accept the use he wants to make of Frankena’s principle.[30] Right or wrong, commonsense morality is against Hasker here, as it recognizes many obligations which are grounded in things other than welfarist concerns. Many people, for instance, believe that agents have a fundamental right to live their own lives as they see fit, and thus think we have moral reason not to interfere with the private behavior of others even if doing so will promote their well-being. Many people likewise think we have duties of truth-telling and promise keeping to others that are not grounded in welfarist considerations; accordingly, W.D. Ross, in his landmark The Right and the Good, argues that we have a fundamental duty to keep promises that is separate from any sort of welfarist considerations and can sometimes override them:
If I have promised to confer on A a particular benefit containing 1,000 units of good, is it self-evident that if by doing some different act I could produce 1,001 units of good for A himself (the other consequences of the two acts being supposed equal in value), it would be right for me to do so?... I think not. Apart from my general prima facie duty to do A what good I can, I have another prima facie duty to do him the particular service I have promised to do him, and this is not to be set aside in consequence of a disparity of good of the order of 1,001 to 1,000 though a much greater disparity might justify me in so doing.[31]
Many more examples could be given.
Arguing that the actions in question—promise keeping, and so on—nonetheless tend to promote well-being, despite not doing so in every circumstance, would be beside the point. The people in question believe that, even if obeying the obligation to (say) keep promises does, as a matter of fact, tend to minimize overall harm, this is not the sole ground for the obligation, so that the obligation has force even in possible worlds where inflicting overall harms on others is impossible. (One of those possible worlds is this one, if one of the strong requirements holds.) One might, of course, reject the judgments in question, or one might attempt to modify one’s account of welfare to subsume these apparent counterexamples (claiming that having a promise broken to one is intrinsically harmful, say, and that this accounts for our everyday intuitions about the relevant cases.) But even if one accepts these controversial moves, it is just not true that one’s opponents—whether ethical theorists or the numerous “folk” whose intuitions their theories attempt to do justice to—think all of our obligations to one another are “morally unserious” apart from welfarist considerations. Indeed, they think these non-welfarist moral reasons are serious enough that we should sometimes act on them, even when doing so is not the best way to promote the important value of welfare.