problem of evil

I've been eavesdropping long enough. I suppose its time I said something.

Bijan wrote

>I'm not sure about the grotesquery of the "big picture" argument. In the
>Republic, Socrates argues that generally you don't make something
>beautiful by making each part as beautiful as it can be after its
>kind. So, the happiest city may have some lest than perfectly happy
>classes (e.g., the philosopher kings would be happier as philosophers than
>kings).
>
>Which really means that god chooses the *overall* good, in some weighted,
>prolly Moorean way.

To which Kendall replied,

>Yeah, but I meant *grotesque* not in a fully articulable epistemic way but,
>rather, in a kind of angst-ridden, existentially fractured totally fucked up
>way in which it's *really* hard to conceive of something weighting... the
>Holocaust. (And that whether weighting means quantitatively, qualitatively,
>or both.)
>
>Which, even if it doesn't ultimately bear on the holiness v. goodness
>argument, sets me to thinking about evil and the imagination and how the
>facts of some evil overawe my imaginative capacities to understand (and so
>to *fully* emphathize), which seems to short-circuit my capacity to reason
>about the good *according to some patterns*, i.e., big picture weighting
>patterns especially.
>
>I wonder if Plato and Socrates would have had the same reaction to the
>Holocaust?

The discussion is concerning a theodical approach wherein evil is apologized
for by arguing its necessity towards some greater good. The unhappiness of
the philosopher-kings at being forced to rule is cited. Kendall cites the
holocaust in response. This raises a sound criticism of this kind of theodical
approach (I remember having read this articulated formally as an undergrad).
The problem is that even if the argument succeeds in showing that there are
some necessary evils (necessary for a greater good), it doesn't show that there
is necessarily this much evil. I think this is a real problem for anyone
approaching this argument from a rational standpoint because, as Kendall
points out, it is difficult indeed to see what good came from the holocaust.
Even if it can be shown that some "good" came of the holocaust, it would remain
to be shown how that good wouldn't have been obtainable with 3,000,000 deadinstead of 6,000,000. Untimely death, of course, may be evil only from a
naturalistic metaphysical perspective, but the theist is still challenged
to show that the "good" wasn't obtainable with only half the suffering (or
for that matter 99% of the suffering). The point is that it is incredibly
difficult to show that there is no unnecessary evil, as it seems the theist
must.

Lest the theist find an out in some kind of free will nonsense, the argument
could just as easily have been formulated with reference to suffering caused
by a natural disaster.

By way of introduction, I'm Jeremy Shipley. I teach composition and rhetoric
at Northern Illinois U., where I'm studying for a master's in philosophy. I
have a Bach w/ a double major in math and philosophy.

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