PHIL 2003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Moral Evil, Natural Evil, Theism
3 Oct 2016
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Gratuitous evil: the world would be better without them, theist would have to argue that there are none. Logically incompatible with the kind of god that the theist is talking about. Pain and suffering caused by natural causes. Can answer with: soul forming- bad things shape us, transformative, really hard things can change us in positive ways that could not have happened without those hard things. Some things are hard sells because of things like childhood cancer: second-order goods- learn forgiveness, mercy, justice. Learn these things because you go through something bad. Would not have ever learned these things without evil. Maybe these things out-value a world without these things. Pain and suffering caused by free agents. There is moral evil because we have free will. At some point there was the first instance of moral evil. There can be no perfect, all knowing god because we can look at the world and see gratuitous evils.
