Ouros wrote:

not counterbalanced by a greater good?

Let's divide evil in four ways:

E1 := Evil that happens necessarily from a situation, and that isn't compensanted by a greater good.
E2 := Evil that happens necessarily from a situation, and that is compensanted by a greater good.
E3 := Evil that happens contingently from a situation, and that is compensanted by a greater good.
E4 := Evil that happens contingently from a situation, and that isn't compensanted by a greater good.

If theism is true, and I encompass both classical theism and theistic personalism, what of those type are possible?

Intuitively, I would say that E4 is impossible, and E2 and E3 possible. I'm not sure for E1, hence my first question

How should we understand the term 'compensate'd here? I can think of two possible readings.

1. An instance of evil is compensated when its happening directly or indirectly entails an instance of good that outweighs that evil.

2. An instance of evil is compensated if the possibility of its occurring is entailed by a greater instance of good.

If the former then my intuitions point in the opposite direction to yours. I'd say E4 is possible on the basis of free will and E1 less plausible (although on skeptical theist grounds I'm not sure there has to be a specific compensation for each instance of evil, only that God actualities a world containing the maximum amount of good to be had for the minimum amount of evil).
 

Last edited by DanielCC (6/11/2018 7:27 am)

Ouros wrote:

Honestly, I'm not too sure why you would even have differents intuitions in your two different readings. Notwithstanding, I was encompassing both of them in my mind.

How so? One is an instance of bringing good out of evil (presumably instance of evil has a causal or at least counter-factual relation to the later instance of good) whereas the other other justifies the possibility of evil that doesn't causally entail a greater instance of good on the basis of some existing good. The latter is surely a weaker kind of compensation than the latter as it allows scenarios where evil appears to triumph, in this life at least.

Ouros wrote:

I'm not sure that free will would be an instance of E4, because it's an essential part of a moral agent to have at some time the possibility to do evil, and also because there's inherent good to have freedom to have morally significant action.

True, but it's only contingent that they do in fact do evil. The situation of the agent's having free will is necessary but evil happens from it only contingently.

Ouros wrote:

If I read you well, it seems that your last sentence imply the possibility of gratuitous evil. Would you say that it's possible for God to say to someone who was tortured "Well, there wasn't a particular reason for this, but the global situation is good enough isn't it?" ?

Persons who hold such a view would not accept that there was no reason for it though. They would say that the reason world A, the world where the person in question is tortured, is actualized is because world A has the greatest degree of good to the minimum degree of evil. God would say to that person that the reason they suffered is because their being tortured was part of the bare minimum of evil that had to be permitted for such a degree of global good to be actualized (why that would be the case specifically would require knowledge of the entire spatio-temporal history of that world - presumably God and any other ideally rational and moral observer would make that decision) ergo any informed observer should have chosen to actualize the world in question as opposed to another.  If that person is really asking 'why was I tortured instead of someone else' the answer would be something like ' it was less evil for you to experience torture at x time in y way than it would have been for anyone else'.

My problem with this very simplistic coarse grained skeptical theism is more that it appears to imply consequentialism (and an austere version if at that) than it allows evil to happen for no reason.

Last edited by DanielCC (6/11/2018 10:48 am)