Abstract
In this chapter, I consider whether goods, other than freedom, provided in this life, or goods provided in some n-inning afterlife could morally make up for the loss of significant freedom due to God’s permission of significant and especially horrendous consequences of wrongful actions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting that the course of argument we are pursuing here is available only to a deontologist who thinks that there are exceptions to the requirement never to do or permit evil that good may come of it or that sometimes the end does justify the means. An absolute deontologist would summarily reject this line of argument and therefore would immediately be led to the conclusion that God does not exist. Here I am assuming that the absolute deontologist is mistaken about this. Later, however, I will base my argument on specific moral requirements that are acceptable to both consequentialist and deontologists alike, including absolute deontologists.
- 2.
I am assuming here that a morally good God would not arbitrarily assign just some people to a heavenly afterlife, and that where people ended up would appropriately depends to some extent on what they did and/or chose to believe.
- 3.
It might be objected that if we could still be free in a heavenly afterlife without the possibility of acting immorally, why can’t we be free in the same way in this life? That would mean that there would be no moral evil in this life just as there is said to be no moral evil in the traditional heavenly afterlife. The usual response to this objection is that creatures, like ourselves, could only be appropriately free in the afterlife if we first have proved ourselves through soul-making in this life, where we had the possibility of acting immorally. This response also shows why those who have been deprived of the significant freedom required for soul-making in this life cannot be candidates for admission to the heavenly afterlife until they too have proven themselves, after having been provided with the freedom necessary for soul-making. This idea that people must show themselves at least less unworthy of a heavenly afterlife through a process of soul-making before being able to enter into a heavenly afterlife is surely a morally defensible element to theism. This, of course, holds for those who are capable, given the opportunity, of doing what we could be reasonably expected to do to make themselves less unworthy of such a life through soul-making. For those who lack such a capacity something else may be morally appropriate.
Nevertheless, it is possible that God could have made creatures different from us, who are free without the possibility of acting immorally in the way that God is said to be free yet can never act immorally. Of course, God would be under no obligation to anyone to make a world with such creatures rather than a world with creatures, like ourselves, whose freedom in this life is such that we can and sometimes do act immorally. The only obligation God would have is to create creatures whose lives are worth living (otherwise they would be better off never existing!), and to take care of whatever creatures he decides to create. Nothing else is morally required.
- 4.
See Sterba (2018).
- 5.
Whenever I speak in this chapter of significant evils, I am here restricting the class to those evils that are caused by human actions, not simply by natural forces.
- 6.
For an account of the beatific vision, see Aquinas (1947, III, Q 9, a2 obj. 3).
- 7.
There is a general problem here. Why should a heavenly afterlife be an appropriate response to soul-making or living a morally good life? Moral actions when properly motivated are done because they are the right thing to do not because they lead to anything like a reward, heavenly or otherwise. Of course, in some cases, particularly with regard to self-regarding virtues, like temperance, the right thing to do is truly good for oneself. However, what would be bad is for immoral people to benefit from their wrongdoing. So what is required is not that virtuous people be rewarded for their virtue and bad people punished for their vice, but rather that people, both the morally good and the morally bad, get what they deserve. Thus, what morally good people deserve is not necessarily a reward, unless they are in a contest and then they desire the reward not for being morally good, per se, but rather for being the best contestant in the contest. So when we say that it is appropriate for morally good people to have a heavenly reward, it cannot be because they deserve it as a reward for being moral. So maybe the idea is that if anyone is going to get a heavenly afterlife, better that it goes to those who have made themselves, as far as possible, the least unworthy of receiving it, and morally good people are clearly less unworthy than others to receive a heavenly afterlife. Alternatively, we could construe at least part of the required soul-making to include pursuing a friendship with God because that clearly would be relevant to how unworthy one would be to entering a heavenly afterlife.
- 8.
Even while I am using the imagery of running in a race, I don’t want to prejudge whether what is required of the to-be-blessed is some special kind of good works rather than some special kind of faith. Even so, I tend to think that what is involved, the “special kind” in each case, incorporates some of what we normally mean by both faith and good works taken together. Moreover, by faith here I mean belief that goes beyond not against reason, so it must be consistent with what reason tells us.
- 9.
In an organic unit, the value of the components taken together is greater than the value of the sum of those components taken separately.
- 10.
In addition, as I have argued, it would be morally inappropriate for God to bestow the fantastic consumer good of a heavenly afterlife without any connection to what a person did or chose to believe.
- 11.
Notice that I am allowing that in all these combat friendships an organic unity can develop between such friendships and particular wars or segments of wars, even though the participants should be willing to wish those friendships away because they developed through an unjust war or an unjust segment of a war. So, in fact, that an organic relationship exists between two things is clearly not enough to morally justify them. However, an organic unity can be a necessary requirement for moral justification in certain cases, as Adams suggests.
- 12.
Adams seems to be suggesting that knowledge that God is present when the two things are connected suffices to show that there is an organic connection between those two things. But if this is the basis for an organic connection, then it is trivially true that such connections would be present wherever two things are connected because God, on the standard view, is present everywhere. But I do not think that Adams is holding such a trivial thesis.
- 13.
There is an interesting difference between the way that Adams treats the wartime-friendship/evils-of-war example and the significant-evils/heavenly afterlife example. In the first case, she wants us to consider whether we would wish away the good (the wartime friendship). In the second case, she wants us to consider whether we would wish away the evil (the horrendous evils, unchosen and unaccepted). In my final treatment of the two examples, I take it to be most relevant to just ask about wishing away the good in each case.
- 14.
Although living a morally good life and engaging in soul-making will not make someone deserving a heavenly life (or even make one worthy of it), having done none of these things certainly makes receiving a heavenly life morally inappropriate.
- 15.
Note that one can, at least in part, make oneself a less unworthy candidate for being provided with a heavenly afterlife by doing one’s best to establish and maintain morally good and just relationships with one’s fellow human beings without making it the case that one ever deserves or is worthy of that heavenly afterlife.
- 16.
Adams strongly objects to this interpretation of a second-inning afterlife.
- 17.
See, for example, the fundamental role it plays in the contemporary natural law ethics of John Finnis.
Bibliography
Adams, Marilyn. 1999. Horrendous Evils. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 2006. Christ and Horrors. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2013. Ignorance, Instrumentality, Compensation and the Problem of Evil. Sophia 52: 7–26.
Aquinas, Thomas 1947. Summa Theologiae. Trans. The Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brother Inc.
Sterba, James P. 2018. Eliminating the Problem of Hell. Religious Studies.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sterba, J.P. (2019). An Attempt at Theodicy. In: Is a Good God Logically Possible?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05469-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05469-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05468-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05469-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)