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Benevolence and evil

a
R.M. Sainsbury
a
Beaford College, University of London
Published online: 15 Sep 2006.

To cite this article: R.M. Sainsbury (1980) Benevolence and evil, Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, 58:2, 128-134, DOI: 10.1080/00048408012341151

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 Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Vol 58, No. 2; June 1980

BENEVOLENCE AND EVIL

R. M. Sainsbury
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I wish to discuss two versions of what I shall call the 'atheological argument'.
One version runs: since there is evil in the world, there is no omnipotent and
benevolent God, for an omnipotent God could eliminate the evil if he chose
and a benevolent God would so choose. The other version differs only in
concerning the quantity of evil rather than the mere existence of evil: even if an
omnipotent and benevolent God would allow some evil, he would not allow
there to be as much as in fact there is. t
I aim to show that the first version must be rejected: God would not eliminate
all evil. Concerning the second version my conclusion is weaker: it is hard to
see how the atheologican can establish that there is more evil than God would
allow; and, in particular, the main idea underlying the rejection of the first
version places an important restriction on the kind of argument that could be
used in the second. (Here, as henceforth, I use 'God' as an abbreviation for 'the
omnipotent and completely benevolent being'.)
I shall consider only those atheological arguments based on what are
traditionally called 'natural' as opposed to 'moral' evils. Natural evils are such
things as earthquakes, famines and diseases, which do not arise from human
agency. Moral evils are men's evil actions and their consequences. I shall
assume that the atheologian, perhaps because he is persuaded by one or other
version of the 'free will defence',2 grants that moral evil is consistent with the
existence of God, but denies that natural evil is consistent with the existence of
God.
I shall also assume that for the atheologian all evil ultimately consists in
frustrated desire, where this is construed broadly enough to include suffering.
My motivation here is to make the atheological case as strong as possible. If the
atheologian allows that some so-called natural evils are not really evil, despite
the suffering they cause, he opens himself to an anti-atheological attempt to
extend the basis of this concession from some so-called natural evils to all.
A feature of my anti-atheological argument to which I attach importance is
that it leaves unchallenged this crude characterisation of evil in terms of
frustration of desire. To see the importance of this feature, consider an anti-

1Cf. J. L. Mackie, 'Evil and Omnipotence',reprinted in B. Mitchell (ed.), The Philosophy of

Religion (Oxford, 1971), pp. 92-104.
2 Cf. A. Plantinga,'The Free Will Defence',reprintedin B. Mitchell(ed.), op cit., pp. 105-120.
128
 R. M. Sainsbury 129
atheological case which clearly lacks it. A theist might attack the atheologian by
drawing on the doctrine o f redemption, the doctrine that the following state is
of value, and that a world in which people attain it is more valuable than an
otherwise similar world in which they do not: having been purged by suffering.
Since it is logically impossible for people to be in this state in a world without
suffering, a God created world will contain suffering.
If the doctrine of redemption is true, or even if it is false but merely
contingently false, the existence of evil does not entail the non-existence of
God. The atheologian will, of course, reject the doctrine of redemption, for the
doctrine is presumably tenable only within a theistic framework. But the
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resulting position of atheologian and anti-atheologian is stand-off: neither wins,

for neither can show the other's moral position to be false without first settling
the very issue between them, that of the existence of God.
By contrast, the atheologian must admit defeat if it can be shown that, even
granting merely humanistic moral values, for example a conception of evil upon
which it consists ultimately in the frustration of desire, the existence or the
quantity of evil does not entail the non-existence of God. So far as the existence
of evil goes, I attempt to show in the next section how this anti-atheological
victory can be won.

II

The first task is to give some rough characterization of human benevolence, a

characterization which, given our self-imposed limitations, we shall take as
adequate to divine benevolence.
A benevolent man is, very roughtly, one who wants and tries to satisfy the
needs and desires of his fellow men. I shall discount needs as opposed to desires
for two reasons. One is that I happen to think that it is not benevolent to act to
satisfy a healthy adult's needs if doing so would conflict with his desires and this
conflict is not merely the result of his ignorance. The other reason for
discounting needs is that their intrusion is liable to take us outside the
humanistic frame. The theist might say that we have needs (e.g. the need to
suffer) of which we are never aware, though God is. So, as a first attempt, let us
say that a person A is benevolent if, if A knows that there is someone who
desires that p, A desires that p.
This raises at least two problems. One is: does a benevolent person have to
treat all the desires of other people alike? One might want to distinguish what
one may call the 'honourable' desires of others from their 'dishonourable' ones,
where a desire is honourable only if a benevolent person would share it. I shall
not discuss how this distinction is to be spelled out, but I shall assume that it can
be. The other is: how is a benevolent person to weigh conflicting altruistic
desires, as relating to a single person or several? In other words, how would
distribution go, within a single person's possibly conflicting desires as well as
between different people, if satisfaction of desires is to be maximized? I do not
know the answer, but I see no reason for thinking that there is no answer. Its
 130 Benevolence and Evil
details, which will provide what one may call an 'overall satisfaction function',
will be of no concern here.
Our simple account of benevolence can be usefully refined in the light of two
distinctions. One concerns the order of desires. Let us say that a desire is first
order iff its satisfaction condition is logically independent of desires, and of
order n iff its satisfaction condition logically depends on desires of order n-1.
Wanting food is thus a first order desire, since it can be satisfied regardless of
what other desires there are. Wanting Jane to want to spend the evening with
me, however, is a second-order desire, since its satisfaction logically requires the
existence of a certain first order desire (Jane's). The other distinction, cutting
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across orders, is that between active and non-active desires. A actively desires
that p iff the truth o f p requires that d act in a certain way; otherwise, he non-
actively desires that p. For example, your wanting to play golf is an active
desire, since it can be satisfied only by your doing something, viz. playing golf.
Wanting to be a millionaire, by contrast, is a non-active desire, since it could be
satisfied without your doing anything in order to satisfy it. You might be the
victim of a lottery.
In terms of these distinctions I propose that A is benevolent iff, if A knows
that someone has an honourable non-active desire that p, ,4 desires that p, and,
in so far as he can, and modulo the overall satisfaction function, A tries to bring
it about that p. The atheological charge I shall discuss is that no being is both
benevolent, in this sense, and also omnipotent.
Natural evils such as famine and earthquake frustrate first order desires, all
of them subsumable under the first order desire for freedom from suffering.
This involves an over-simplification, but I hope a harmless one for present
purposes. If B is killed in an earthquake, this may frustrate ,4 's desire that B's
desires be satisfied, and perhaps this is a potent element in grief. But I shall
assume that the atheologian will be under no handicap if he confines himself to
the first order impact of natural evils. Granted this, his argument can be
expressed as follows. The first order desires that are frustrated by natural evils
are honourable and non-active and would thus (modulo the overall satisfaction
function) be ones which a benevolent being would want and try to satisfy. If he
were omnipotent he would succeed. But evidently there is no such success.
Hence there is no being both benevolent and omnipotent.
From this argument we can extract a vision of the atheologian's view of what
I shall call an 'optimal' world: one whose existence is compatible with God's. It
is a world in which (modulo the overall satisfaction function) all first order non-
active honourable desires are satisfied. The essence of my case is that the
atheologian has not correctly characterised optimality. Before stating it, I shall
emphasise two points about optimality and desires.
The first point to notice is that there is no question of God single-handedly
bringing about the satisfaction of our active desires, for the satisfaction of such a
desire involves our acting. We all have active desires, and I take it that none of
us would regard as satisfactory a life in which we did not. For to have no active
desires is not to want to do anything. Divine intervention could facilitate the
satisfaction of active desires, for example by bringing golf courses into
 R. M. Sainsbury 131
existence, but it is logically impossible for divine intervention to be wholly
responsible for the satisfaction of active human desires. (One's desire to do a
round at par is not satisfied by God's accurately propelling the ball while one
watches from the clubhouse.) This is why the atheologian is right to confine
himself, in his characterisation of optimality, to the satisfaction of non-active
desires.
The second point of emphasis is that in this characterisation the non-active
desires are supposed to be satisfied regardless of human action. If A non-
actively desires that p (where p is consistent with the overall satisfaction
function) it will be the case that p regardless of whether A or anyone else can or
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does do anything to bring it about that p. This consequences flows from our
everyday concept of benevolence. It is true that the fact that you cannot satisfy
one of your non-active desires gives me a special reason to satisfy it for you, if I
can. But it is not the only reason. The fact that you can walk to the hospital even
though your arm is broken does not exonerate me from giving you a lift, if I
can. Again, even if we think that a man has brought his troubles on himself, he
still has a call on our benevolence. There are special circumstances in which it is
indeed benevolent to refrain from helping someone, for example when it is
necessary to foster their self-reliance. The truly benevolent parent does not spoil
his children. But, in the first place, the circumstances are special: it is not clear
that such a reaction is right when it comes to transactions between equal adults
(e.g. one not the teacher or doctor of the other), and not clear that, despite
orthodox theology, a truly benevolent God would treat us as we treat children.
In the second place, if the only motive for refusing aid is to further self-reliance,
this will be undercut in the optimal world the antheologian envisages, where
this quality will be valueless. If God helps only those who help themselves, he is
not benevolent (in the sense under discussion). Hence there is something to be
said for the atheological view that in an optimal world first order honourable
non-active desires will be satisfied automatically, regardless of what efforts or
actions human beings make or take.
Let me draw out some features of this allegedly optimal world, starting with a
familiar first order desire, the desire for food. We have all experienced non-
active desires of this kind, and some people have active desires: they want to
hunt or grow or cook their food. The active desires I shall for the moment set
aside. If the atheologian is right, God would have to bring it about that the non-
active desires were satisfied as they arose. There would be no room for
puritanism: Irish broth is all very well, but benevolent omnipotence could not
refuse the more succulent dishes it could provide. Nor would it be fully
benevolent to provide not food but the means of producing it: fertile land and
well-stocked rivers and seas. For some people desire food without desiring to
grow it or hunt it, and for these people food would have to be provided without
their having to do anything more than just want it.
Imagine that you occasionally enjoy cooking and that you find yourself in the
sort of supposedly optimal world the atheologian envisages. At any moment it
will be true of you up to then, and known by you to be true of you up to then,
that whenever you have had a non-active desire for a certain menu it has
 132 Benevolence and Evil

materialised. Accordingly, the following suspicion is likely to cross your mind:

the menus you produce when you actively desire them are overdetermined;
they would have materialised even if you had merely non-actively desired them
and had not gone to the trouble of cooking. But then you are likely to feel that
there is no point to the active culinary desires unless the process, however
enjoyable, leads to a product that would not otherwise exist. Why slave over the
spaghetti Bolognese if a cordon-bleu menu is yours for the (non-active)
desiring? The automatic satisfaction of non-active culinary desires would, for
most of us, undermine the active culinary desires. We have here a higher order
desire to the effect that action prompted by active culinary desires be causally
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necessary to the culinary productions, and this desire, it seems, will not be
satisfied in the envisaged, supposedly optimal, world.
Not all active desires are in this respect like culinary ones. The case depended
on the fact (to put it rather roughly) that a given state of affairs could be, and
typically was, both actively and non-actively desired. The feature is absent from
such desires as the desire to play golf. Probably it is best to say that typically
there is no state of affairs, not involving our activity, that is the object of our
desire. Even if we count the motions of the ball as such a state of affairs it is
something which, unlike a meal, is not normally non-actively desired. Hence
the optimal set-up could be that if anyone desired this state of affairs non-
actively it would come to be; and this would not leave the golfer demoralised in
the way that the cook was.
Philosophy is like cookery: sometimes one wants simply that certain
philosophical problems be solved; at other times, shamefully perhaps in this
case, what one wants is not just this but rather that one solve them. I suppose
that writing novels is more like playing golf: the dominant desire is to write,
rather than merely that books of a certain kind be written.
Golfing and novel writing belong to a range of activities which can be
pursued wholly for their own sake: the active desires have no corresponding
non-active ones. We may call these 'pure' activities. They would be immune to
the demoralising effect of the automatic satisfaction of non-active desires
precisely because they do not issue in something which is non-actively desired.
My present point is this: in the atheologian's supposedly optimal world, the only
action animated by first order desires will belong to pure activities.
This fact, I suggest, is what decisively shows that the envisaged world is not
really optimal. We would not want to inhabit such a world, so a benevolent
being would not wish it on us.
This supposedly optimal world is a playland. All the activities are
recreational, like games. All is self-entertainment, egoistical, self-contained:
doing your own thing taken to the furtherest extreme. There would be no
excitement, except of the kind that sport provides, no challenge except what
one elects to set for oneself; there would be no place for concern for others (at
least in point of their first-order desires). Nothing would really matter. Any
mess one's pure activity might get one in to could instantly be remedied by an
appropriate non-active desire.
As philosophy, like other academic disciplines, can be engaged in as a pure
 g. M. Sainsbury 133
activity, that is, without any non-active concern for the state of the subject, it is
perhaps harder for academics than for others to appreciate that a life of pure
activity is not one that would generally be found attractive. As a corrective,
think of those whose satisfaction stems from the exercise of manual skills:
cooks and cabinet-makers, for example. It seems to me unlikely that the
pleasure and pride they take in their work could survive their belief that they
could simply will their products into existence without touching pan or plane.
Think, too, of the world of business and administration, and the satisfaction
derived from the skills involved at being good at such jobs. To the very
considerable extent to which business and administration tend non-active first
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order desires, these sources of satisfaction would be absent from the supposedly
optimal world.
Perhaps the very wealthy already come close to living in such a world, for at
least their egocentric first order non-active desires are satisfied, technology
permitting. Some have indeed led apparently satisfying lives of pure activity,
engaged in field sports, scholarship or making money. But many have led
unsatisfying lives, and many have derived their satisfaction from impure
activities, activities, leading to an end which is also non-actively desired: public
service, succouring the pour, championing worthy causes, or simply
embellishing their estates. Perhaps there is a certain type of person who can be
satisfied with a life of pure activity, but we are not all made to that mould, and
true benevolence would respect that fact.
So I think we have this second order desire: that not all first order desires be
satisfied automatically. Moreover, I think that this second order desire is
honourable and dominant: we would on balance feel less satisfied if it were
unsatisfied, even if our first order desires were satisfied. Many of us can regard
an activity as really important and deeply satisfying only if it leads to a state we
could reach in no other way. The atheologian's allegedly optimal world, by
trivialising activity, trivialises our lives. This is why it is not really optimal, and
thus why the first version of the atheological argument, based on the existence
of natural evil, fails.

III

Even if the atheologian is forced by these considerations to concede that an

optimal world is one in which not all non-active first order desires are
automatically satisfied, he may still claim that our world is non-optimal on the
grounds that there is too much frustration of desire. The nature of our world is
unduly harsh. This is the second version of the atheological argument, based on
the quantity rather than the mere existence of natural evil.
Though I know of no way of refuting the claim that the nature of our world is
too harsh for it to be optimal, I would like to give four reasons for thinking that
it is difficult to establish this claim. Perhaps the difficulties can be overcome. But
this will require substantial and detailed argument from the atheologian, and,
until it has been produced, the atheological case has not been made out.
(i) The atheologian cannot establish that God would not have permitted all
 134 Benevolence and Evil
the harsh features our nature possesses by showing that there is a harsh feature
which God would not have permitted. For the only resource available to him to
establish the lemma is that some harsh feature frustrates desires. But the same
will go for every harsh feature, so parity of reasoning would lead the
atheologian to the conclusion that God would permit no harsh feature, a
conclusion which is false if my earlier argument is correct. The general point is
that the atheologian cannot use any argument whose soundness with respect to
the quantity of evil in our world is equivalent to its soundness with respect to
worlds containing an arbitrary non-zero quantity of evil.
(ii) One way to show that nature is too harsh might be to show that it is too
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harsh for us ever to tame, so that we are forever doomed to suffer from it. But
there is no reason to believe this, and some reason to believe the opposite.
(iii) Both atheologian and theist will agree that an optimal world will have a
high degree of causal interconnectedness, to permit understanding and control.
Within this constraint, there may be no possibility of a merely marginally less
harsh nature.
(iv) In trying to consider the degree of natural harshness consistent with
optimality, we must think not only of our generation but also of the future. The
forces of nature which we confront are those which our descendants will
confront. If ever knowledge, technology and co-operation permit total control
of these forces, the exercise of this control will still require activity, on pain of
the kind of trivialisation already discussed. A world which might seem too
harsh for optimality for one generation might be insufficiently harsh for
optimality for another.
The implicit underlying strategy in these last remarks could, I think, be
represented as follows: from the point of view of the present discussion, the
problem of natural evil is being transformed into the problem of moral evil. The
abstract distinction may still exist between evils resulting from man's activity
and evils not so resulting, but its substance will be eroded by the view that
responsibility for the suffering inflicted by the forces of nature lies with man's
failure to control them. This view harmonises well with the following: if I were
invited to construct a utopia, in which nature could be adjusted to my fancy,
nature would not figure intrinsically in my account. My utopia is something like
this: in every order of desire, some maximum of satisfaction is achieved thanks
to (and only thanks to) man's skill, effort and courage. In our concept of the
perfect life, nature has simply to be given. It is not it but what we make of it that
makes the difference. This is why, I suggest, we can get no leverage on the
question of what nature would be created by an omnipotent and benevolent
being. In particular, it is why we have no reason for thinking that the nature of
our actual world is other than optimal.

Bedford College, University of London Received June 1979

Revised January 1980