Abstract
In this chapter, I explore whether the Pauline Principle and the analogy of an ideally just and powerful political state are compatible with God’s widespread permission of significant and especially horrendous consequences of wrongful actions.
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Notes
- 1.
“Ethical” and “moral” are used synonymously here.
- 2.
Again, I am understanding significant freedoms to be primarily those freedoms a just political state would want to protect since that would fairly secure each person’s fundamental interests.
- 3.
Mark Murphy maintains that God could foresee evil without intending it. But that is not logically possible. If there is a God, everything that happens in the world is due to either God’s active or his permissive will. So evil must occur because of God’s permissible will. Furthermore, when God permits evil that he could otherwise prevent, he must be acting intentionally with respect to that evil. For us, after we have turned the trolley from the track where it would kill five to the track where it will just kill one, we (causally) cannot prevent the death of the one child that we foresee. But God in similar circumstances would always be able to causally prevent the death of both the five children and the one child. God is never stuck with just foreseeing the (external) consequences of any evil that he could not have intentionally acted to prevent. So it would be logically impossible for Murphy’s perfect Anselmian God to foresee significant or especially horrendous evil consequences without intending them by permitting them. See Murphy (2016, p. 183).
- 4.
Suppose we allow, as some Open theists do, that an all good, all powerful God may not be able to completely foresee the future (Hasker 2004). Still, when an external act with its morally evil consequences is coming into existence, God must be permitting that external act with its consequences. This implies God must intend not to prevent it, which further implies he is not merely foreseeing that act with its consequences.
- 5.
- 6.
This would still permit a great deal of moral evil in the world, primarily the moral evil of bad intentions. But neither God nor the state political state would be concerned to prevent this moral evil since it does not involve the afflicting of significant or especially horrendous evil consequences on the victims of wrongdoing.
- 7.
See the Department of Homeland Security’s March 2, 2016 report: https://www.dhs.gov/publication/future-attribute-screening-technology# (accessed 10/6/2018).
- 8.
If someone were to object that there is no in-principle way of distinguishing between preventing evil and providing a good but that it is always a matter of what description one employs, as two commentators, Frances Howard-Snyder and Stephen Wykstra, appropriately did with respect to an earlier version of this chapter, the next chapter shows how the two can be distinguished in principle.
- 9.
There are a lot of trivial exceptions to the Pauline Principle like stepping on someone’s foot to get out of a crowded subway to achieve some greater good.
- 10.
An even more conclusive argument will be given for this conclusion in subsequent chapters.
- 11.
See previous note.
- 12.
The opportunity to engage in the virtuous behavior needed to make them less unworthy of a heavenly afterlife is however, at least in part, a gift to which we are not entitled. See Chap. 7 for further discussion.
- 13.
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.
- 14.
Notice that if God had, in fact, met the requirement to prevent the loss of significant freedom, no one would have been deprived of the freedom necessary for soul-making in this life by the immoral actions of others, and so no one, on this account, would have been in need of a second-inning afterlife.
- 15.
Of course, there are cases, such as that of Maya Angelou, where a person overcomes the effects of the significant moral evil inflicted upon them. Yet even in such cases, victims surely should have wished for a life where the evil consequences inflicted on them were prevented. This is because, among other things, they would need to take into account the effects on the wrongdoers themselves and how much better it would be for them, particularly if they later come to repent their actions, if God had prevented significant and especially horrendous evil consequences of their actions from being inflicted on their victims.
- 16.
Interestingly, Thomas Aquinas endorses a similar limited role for a political state, maintaining that human law should not attempt to prevent “all evil,” but “only the more grievous vices.” See Aquinas (1947, Pt. I-II Q.96 Art 2).
- 17.
As we noted earlier, these failings to prevent evil need not be understood to be exceptions to the Pauline Principle, but that does not affect their justification.
- 18.
Strong as this argument is that God would not be morally justified in permitting the significant consequences of wrongful acts to attain a greater good; an even stronger argument will be given for this conclusion in the next two chapters which relies on a jointly exhaustive classification of all the possible goods at issue here.
- 19.
For example, see Maitsen (2017, pp. 141–154).
- 20.
- 21.
The “as needed” clause is there to indicate that whether God acts in this regard and the degree to which he does act depends on what we do.
- 22.
Again, it should be noted that the freedoms of wrongdoers are not always significant moral goods. Sometimes the freedoms of wrongdoers are freedoms they should not have, and clearly in such cases, these freedoms are definitely not significant moral goods.
- 23.
Useful though these additional premises are here, as we shall see, it is possible to support my logical argument against the existence of God primarily on minimal components of the Pauline Principle and the analogy of ideally just and powerful state, along with some more general premises.
- 24.
Now it might be objected that this prohibition does not hold with respect to goods that can be provided to us only by God. In the next chapter, I will address this objection by considering what obtains with respect to such goods.
Bibliography
Aquinas, Thomas 1947. Summa Theologiae. Trans. The Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brother Inc.
Hasker, W. 2004. Providence, Evil, and the Openness of God. London: Routledge.
Hick, John. 1973. Philosophy of Religion. Second Edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Lewis, David. 2000. Evil for Freedom’s Sake. In Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy, ed. Lewis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Maitsen, Stephen. 2017. Perfection, Evil, and Morality. In Ethics and the Problem of Evil, ed. Sterba, 141–154. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Murphy, Mark. 2016. God’s Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Murray, M. 2008. Nature Red in Tooth and Claw. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Swinburne, R. 1998. Providence and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Sterba, J.P. (2019). The Pauline Principle and the Just Political State. In: Is a Good God Logically Possible?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05469-4_4
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