1. The privative theory of evil used to be a fixture in Christian theodicy, but it's fallen on hard times. A function of the privative theory was to insulate God from complicity in evil by claiming that God didn't create evil, but good. Since evil is not a thing or substance, but the absence ,loss, or negation of something, it couldn't be an object of divine creation.
I think the reasoning goes something like this. If you create a donut, you indirectly create a donut hole. But the donut hole isn't a thing. If you create light, you indirectly create shadow. You produce the conditions for the contrast. You make a boundary. But only one side of the boundary has positive existence. Dropping the metaphor, sickness is the absence of health.
2. The privative theory is ingenuous, but unsatisfactory. To begin with, while some evils might be categorized as negations or relations, the privative theory overextends the classification. For instance, pain isn't just the absence of pleasure, but a positive sensation in its own right. It's not a relation between something and nothing.
By the same token, while we might say cancer represents loss of well-being, cancer is very much a thing or substance. It has a real, positive existence. Same thing with pathogens generally.
Likewise, in what sense is the evil of raping a little girl privative or not a thing? That's a real event, not a nonevent.
A malevolent attitude has the same psychological status as a benevolent attitude. If one is real, the other is real.
A malevolent attitude has the same psychological status as a benevolent attitude. If one is real, the other is real.
If we were starting with some paradigm examples of evil, we wouldn't classify them as privations or relations. Rather, the traditional position begins with an a priori theory of evil, then jams everything into that classification. The result is very artificial.
3. Perhaps even more to the point, the privation theory fails to exonerate God. For even if we define evil in privative terms, there's still the question of why God allows that harm. Just to call it privative fails to justify divine permission. Even if evil is a side-effect of making something good, God is responsible for the necessary, albeit incidental, consequences of his creative fiat.
Conversely, if God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting evil or generating deleterious, but "unintended" side-effects, then the privative theory is superfluous. A morally sufficient reason will suffice with or without the privative theory of evil. If, say, a theodicist appeals to the double effect principle, assuming that distinction is an adequate justification, that will suffice independent of any privative theory of evil.
> pain isn't just the absence of pleasure, but a positive sensation in its own right. It's not a relation between something and nothing.
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether pain, per se, is evil. If you get a brief pain for half a second from burning your hand on a hot object, is that evil or just the body functioning properly?
Pain really becomes an "evil" when it causes the loss of certain goods, e.g. the brilliant Phys Ed. teacher who can no longer do his job because of chronic back pain.
>By the same token, while we might say cancer represents loss of well-being, cancer is very much a thing or substance
But the fact that there is a particular thing called a "cancer" is not what makes it evil. After all, there are such things as "benign tumors". The fact that an abnormally growing set of cells can cause privation of certain good bodily functions (being able to walk, talk, worship God, ) or even death is what makes it evil.
>Likewise, in what sense is the evil of raping a little girl privative or not a thing? That's a real event, not a nonevent.
At least a partial account of the evil will refer to the loss of goods like psychological health (i.e. trauma)
On 3. Brian Davies's excellent book "The Problem of Evil and the Reality of God" is worth every penny on this topic.
Yes, pain is not intrinsically evil. Depends on the context. But chronic pain is evil when there's no remedy.
ReplyDeleteA problem with the privative theory of evil is that it's juggling several unrelated categories.