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Three Orders of Good

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I'm thinking today, for no good reason, about the "free will solution" to the problem of evil in theology.


Practitioners of theodicy who rely on the free will solution maintain that evil must be attributed to
the independent actions of human beings, supposed to have been endowed by God with freedom
of the will. This by itself would not solve the problem. It only works as a solution if it can be shown
that God has a Good Reason to allow human beings to be independent of His will. Then one can
conclude that it is for a greater good that He allows us to allow evil into the world.


This point was insisted upon by J.L. Mackie in what a much debated publication on this subject,
his EVIL AND OMNIPOTENCE (1955). Theists, as Mackie understands them, must treat free will
as a “third order good.”

I'm not going to argue the underlying issues today. I have done that here before. I will confine this
post, rather, to simply outlining those three orders of good.

At the bottom rung, there are pleasures and happiness simply conceived. They are good, and
their absence is bad and, if you will, evil (at least as a provisional understanding). But then
there is a “second order” of goods that acts within the context of the first order. For example, sympathy
and courage are both second order goods. I sympathize with somebody else’s pain, and try to help
alleviate that. It is good that I sympathize and (theologians have argued) sympathy is such a good
thing that the first-order evil of pain ceases to be an evil when we see it in this context. It ceases to
be an evil since it is necessary to elicit sympathy.


Likewise with courage. It is a good thing, yet of course first-order adversities have to exist in order
to courage to be meaningful. But what about free will? This, according to the theologians, as interpreted
by Mackie, is a third order good, higher on the scale than the second order goods, because it is
what makes such things as courage and sympathy themselves goods. A wind-up toy, acting
courageous and sympathetic because his creator built those traits into the mechanism, would have
no merit from them. So the world must have human free will in order to be good, and first order evils
(and even second order evils such as cowardice and selfishness) must exist as part of this world.

Quite enough 'thinnin' for one Sunday.

Comments

  1. Why even consider why God allows humans to do evil while ignoring the elephant in the room of why God allows natural disasters to occur? (I'll leave aside the fact that, now, with global warming, some of these disasters are not natural but are caused by humans.) Because God allows the evil of natural disasters, he or she or it is just being consistent in allowing humans to do evil.

    But, going along with ignoring this elephant, God could limit human evil without limiting human free will. He or she or it could create humans who are incapable of thinking up certain evils--torture or genocide, for example. Surely human imagination is limited now; I can't say in what ways, because, being human, I can't imagine them. We already know that some humans have a greater imagination than others. A great writer might come up with a brilliant metaphor that you could never have imagined. Well, there are some metaphors that even a great writer cannot imagine. (Obviously, I can't say what they are.) Just as dogs' brains have not evolved to enable them to do calculus, human brains have not evolved to enable us to imagine "everything," whatever that means.

    Another answer I've heard to the problem of theodicy is that what appears evil to us is not evil in the context of God's scheme of things--that things that appear evil serve a greater good that mere humans are incapable of seeing. That answer is utter nonsense. The Holocaust was evil, period, and, if God is omnipotent, then he or she or it could have accomplished the greater good by a means that did not include the Holocaust.

    The fact is that, if God exists, he or she or it is not both all-powerful and all-good. There is no way around that. If that bothers you, then stop believing in God. You can still hypothesize an all-powerful and all-good entity if you enjoy the intellectual exercise of thinking about the problem of theodicy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, for me this sort of thing is merely an intellectual exercise, intermittently enjoyable. That is why, in the very first line of the above post, I said that I am going down this road today "for no good reason." A cliche, perhaps, but literally true.

    My own view, as expressed in this post, is that there is a spiritual side to the cosmos, which we might for lack of a better term call God, and with whom some of us, those whom we call mystics, are in touch. But I avoid the need for theodicy by allowing this God to be less than omnipotent.

    That is also as it happens the position of Rabbi Kushner in a famous popularizing work of theology (and anti-theodicy), "When Bad Things Happen to Good People."

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am not aware of any evidence of a "spiritual side to the cosmos." I am aware of emotions that we label "spiritual" and of a psychological state that we label "mystical," but of no basis to find their origin outside the brain. We need not view this as diminishing the value of these emotions or this psychological state.

    If I thought that there were a spiritual side to the cosmos, I would find it misleading to call it "God." I would limit the term "God" to a being with a mind who had at least some power over people on earth. I don't see how a "spiritual side to the cosmos" would be capable of allowing or disallowing evil, and, if that is true, then the problem of theodicy would not arise.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Henry,

    I know I always lose you when I talk this way and I a resigned to it. I'll make only one point here out of the many that I could make.

    To say that there is no basis for the origin of mystical experience outside of the brain is no different in principle from the claim that there is no basis for the origin of the sight of a tree, outside of the brain. Tree-sighting certainly CAN be defined and discussed in purely neurological terms. Further, some tree-sighting occurs without any tree in the vicinity: as in hallucinations or dream states. But, if we put aside the Matrix movies and Rene's evil demon, we generally expect that even the most deluded tree sightings are confused memories of some real tree sighting, do we not?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Christopher,

    I see a difference in principle between the claim that there is no evidence for the origin of a mystical experience outside the brain and the claim that there is no evidence for the origin of the sight of a tree outside the brain. The difference between them is that the existence of a tree outside of a person's brain can be verified by other people.

    I grant that there is no difference in principle between a hallucination of a tree and a mystical experience, because neither can be verified by other people. You are cheating to conflate a sighting of a real tree with a hallucination of a tree. A mystical experience might be viewed as a form of hallucination, which, again, is not to disparage its value.

    I agree that a hallucination of a tree would be unlikely to occur to a person who had never seen a tree or a picture of a tree and had never even heard of a tree. Can a mystical experience, by contrast, ever have no resemblance to anything in its experiencer's experience? Even if it can, that does not seem substantial evidence of its origin outside its experiencer's brain.

    ReplyDelete
  6. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the only one to see the tree. That doesn't make him wrong. Further, it may allow him to avoid the annoying experience of walking into a solid object and making that cartoony "bonk!" sound.

    Likewise, I suggest that we understand the value of the sight of tree -- and the value of mystical perception -- pragmatically. And I believe the sense of unity and peace attained by those who have contact with the spiritual side of the cosmos indicates that they really do have contact with something, not that they are all (there are a fair number of them) having the same bizarre dream.

    ReplyDelete
  7. The sole sighted man can verify the reality of the tree himself. He can, for example, set his watch for every hour on the hour, and observe the tree each hour. If he observes it for, say, ten straight hours, then the chance that he had an identical hallucination each time is close to nil.

    You write, "And I believe the sense of unity and peace attained by those who have contact with the spiritual side of the cosmos indicates that they really do have contact with something." You beg the question by saying "those who have contact with the spiritual side of the cosmos" instead of the neutral "those who have a mystical experience." It is tautological to say that those who have contact with the spiritual side of the cosmos have contact with something.

    In any case, I doubt that the mystical experience, whether it derives from outside or inside the brain, would be the same for everyone. In fact, I imagine that every mystical experience is unique. But, if they are all the same, that would not be evidence that they have contact with something outside the brain. It would be evidence that humans all have relatively similar brains, which we already know to be the case.

    I also believe that you devalue the mystical experience by calling it a "bizarre dream." We all have bizarre dreams every night, but mystical experiences occur only under unusual conditions. I don't know whether I've ever had one, but I think that I've come close on rare occasions when listening to music such as a late Beethoven quartet or Schubert's string quintet or Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. And I didn't find the experience comparable to a bizarre dream.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I write to clarify some sloppy writing in my third paragraph: "But, if they [mystical experiences] are all the same, that would not be evidence that they [the people who have mystical experiences] have contact with something outside the brain."

    ReplyDelete

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