Reply: Redeeming Sorrows

Abstract

There are two main areas where I find Professor McCord Adams’s paper unsatisfactory in terms both of philosophical analysis and of moral adequacy to the question of suffering — especially the kind of suffering she describes as ‘horrendous’, suffering that gives reason to doubt whether the sufferer’s life as a whole can be regarded as a ‘good’ for him or her. I shall concentrate on these two issues, rather than on the overall critique of Maurice Wiles, which is full of interest and deserves longer consideration in its own right: though some of what I want to say about divine action may prove to be pertinent to this subject. So I intend to look first at the whole matter of how evil, especially of the extreme kind discussed, might be understood as offset or defeated in the general economy of the universe; then at the concepts of divine action invoked to underpin the thesis of the paper.