The Problem of Evil

as an Ethical Problem

Dr Toby Betenson
Version One, Spring 2023
Table of Contents
Précis....................................................................................................................................................1
Chapter One: A Patient History of the Problem of Evil........................................................................5
The Philosophical Problem of Evil..........................................................................................6
The Origins of the Problem of Evil, in a Philosophical Context..............................................7
Epicureanism..........................................................................................................................7
The Four-Part Cure.................................................................................................................9
God is Not to be Feared.......................................................................................................11
Chronic Anachronism...........................................................................................................12
Interlude: Kant......................................................................................................................14
An Ethical Question..............................................................................................................15
The 20th Century...................................................................................................................16
The Evidential Problem of Evil..............................................................................................19
The End of History................................................................................................................21
Diagnosis..............................................................................................................................21
Chapter Two: The Logical Problem of Morally-Impossible Evil..........................................................24
Plantinga’s Critique..............................................................................................................25
The Return of the Inconsistent Triad...................................................................................27
Step One: Some People Believe...........................................................................................27
Step Two: Moral Meaning....................................................................................................29
Step Three: Moral Necessity................................................................................................31
Step Four: Moral Tragedy.....................................................................................................34
The Logical Problem of Morally-Impossible Evil..................................................................36
Chapter Three: Moral Anti-Theodicy..................................................................................................40
Sketch of a Theodicy.............................................................................................................40
Sketch of Sceptical Theism...................................................................................................42
The Failings of Theodicy and Sceptical Theism....................................................................44
Moral Insensitivity................................................................................................................46
Detached Perspective...........................................................................................................47
Consequentialism, Unrestricted...........................................................................................49
Means-Ends Reasoning........................................................................................................51
Denying the Morally Impossible...........................................................................................57
Conclusion............................................................................................................................58
Chapter Four: Moral Modalities and the Limits of Moral Thinking...................................................59
Two Examples of the Morally Impossible............................................................................60
Epistemic Ambiguity.............................................................................................................64
Relative Certainty.................................................................................................................68
Recognising Moral Necessity................................................................................................72
Properly Basic Moral Belief..................................................................................................75
Conclusion............................................................................................................................80
Chapter Five: The Problem of Evil as an Ethical Problem...................................................................82
The Argument.......................................................................................................................83
Not an Intellectual Problem.................................................................................................84
Not Not an Ethical Problem..................................................................................................88
Ivan Karamazov is a Hopeless Romantic..............................................................................94
Author’s Introduction.......................................................................................................................101
I quite acknowledge that these allegories are very nice, but he is not to be envied who
has to invent them; much labour and ingenuity will be required of him; and when he
has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate Hippocentaurs and chimeras dire.
Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless other inconceivable and
portentous natures. And if he is sceptical about them, and would fain reduce them one
after another to the rules of probability, this sort of crude philosophy will take up a
great deal of time. Now I have no leisure for such enquiries; shall I tell you why? I must
first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is
not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And
therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was
saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more
complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a
gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?

Socrates, Phaedrus
Précis
Our current philosophical understanding of the problem of evil is not healthy. Symptoms of
philosophical sickness are easy to see, though often easier to see in the ‘other’ side than in our
own. An impartial yet uncharitable browse through the recent history of philosophical debate on
the problem of evil shows ad hoc argumentative moves, straw men and misattributions, selective
cognitive biases, arguments supported by weak analogies, sceptical appeals to mystery and
ignorance, unfounded probabilistic claims (followed by spurious calculations on the basis of those
claims), metaethical confusion, brute yet absolute assertions of value judgements, implicit or
explicit disagreement about even the most basic terms, and all manner of inconsistency of belief.
In short, exactly the kind of thing that happens when philosophers are confused but are trying to
pretend otherwise.
This is not that unusual in a discipline that deliberately seeks out confused ideas with the
intention of clarification, but even so, the discussion of the problem of evil can sometimes show
levels of philosophical sloppiness that we would not tolerate in other topics. Even the best of our
arguments stand vulnerable to this. The best versions of theodicy are morally blind, the best
versions of the argument from evil are theologically shallow: problem and solution stand equally
accused of missing the point to the worst degree, without either seeing eye to eye about what
that point is.
I suspect my pessimistic view is not shared by many philosophers who are active in this
debate. I think we have tricked ourselves into thinking our understanding is better than it is. By
incrementally narrowing the terms of the debate, and the assumptions on which it is to be
conducted, then insisting that those and only those are the appropriate means, we have created
an artificial sense of clarity. Clarity not only of the problem and its solutions, but of its history too:
we talk so easily of ‘Augustinian’ and ‘Irenaean’ theodicies, as if those now familiar forms have
anything more than a tenuous eponymous connection to their origins, in method, context,
approach, or purpose. It is not the labels but the casualness of the labelling that is the symptom of
a general tendency to self-serving oversimplification. We prefer the simple version, neatly
packaged and ready for export to schools and undergraduate courses and other introductory
works. But this comes at the cost of overlooking some fundamentally important gaps in our
understanding of God, of goodness, of our moral perspective and status as human beings. These
are what ought to be the main focus of the discussion of the problem of evil, since everything
depends on them, but they are conspicuously absent from the philosophical discussion. The result
is a version of the problem that is detached from its proper subject matter. I think we have lost
sight of the purpose, the ‘that for the sake of which’, of what we are doing.
I do not expect to cure this condition, though I will make an attempt at diagnosing it and its
root cause. In doing so, I hope to show where the discussion might have gone off on the wrong
track, hoping then to suggest how we might get back on track and on the way to a more helpful
destination. What and where that destination is it not for me to say, but I think we would all agree
that we ought to have some good idea of where we are trying to get to in order to have a better

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idea about how to go about getting there. My thoughts on this will become clearer over the course
of this book, but as a quick spoiler: if you think this road leads to good reason, conclusive or
otherwise, to believe or not believe in God, then you are probably wrong. If, however, you think it
will lead to a better understanding of your own ethical perspective, then you might be on the right
track.
I will present an argument in this book and this argument has a prima facie forceful
conclusion: a consistent set of theistic beliefs is morally problematic. Which is to say, in effect, that
theism is morally wrong. I think a suitably refined version of this conclusion would be true for
many forms of theistic belief, but – for reasons that should become clear – it doesn’t really matter
whether this conclusion is true. This argument is not the purpose of the book; it’s only serving a
purpose, as a provocation. The therapeutic role of the argument is more important than the truth
of the conclusion. I am certain that many philosophers will not accept my conclusion and they will
consider themselves to have good reason for doing so; what I hope is that the process of engaging
with this argument will cause them to attend to, and thus reflect on, important elements of the
topic that might have been overlooked.
In order to get to this conclusion, two things will need to be established along the way. These
are the basic building blocks of my argument. Firstly, it must be the case that the problem of evil
can be and perhaps should be (I do not say must be) understood to be a matter of having a
consistent set of beliefs. What this means is that the so-called ‘logical’ formulation of the problem
of evil is still a legitimate form of the problem. Many philosophers would dispute the viability of
any such ‘logical’ formulation, but I want to show that the logical problem of evil remains viable if
we focus on the appropriate kind of necessity: moral necessity. With this we can construct a
logical problem of morally-impossible evil. If I succeed here, it follows that there are versions of
the problem of evil that remain logically binding to any theist. This means that the theist must
offer a solution to these forms of the problem of evil if they are to hold a consistent set of beliefs.
Solutions to the logical problem of evil have always been possible; the question is whether
and when they can be considered permissible.
The second basic building block of my argument is the claim that many of the proposed
solutions to the problem of evil are morally problematic. This claim is controversially though
clearly defensible in its own right – in that many theodicies or other such responses are clearly
morally problematic, at least for some of us – but it is also defensible by appeal to a wider
consistency of moral belief. Universal moral agreement is not necessary for this point. There is
always disagreement about moral matters, but whatever the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer is when it
comes to a moral matter, it is prima facie inconsistent to hold one standard of ‘rightness’ to be
universally true in all circumstances whilst also holding it to be false in some others. One cannot,
e.g., consider lying to be categorically wrong whilst also considering it permissible under certain
circumstances; for if it is permissible under certain circumstances, then it is not categorically
wrong, and vice versa. This is the case regardless of whether or not lying is categorically wrong: it
is a matter of consistency. We can acknowledge that the universalizability of moral judgements
might be weakened in exceptional cases, and God’s relationship to evil is certainly an exceptional

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case, but there remains a question to answer about whether and to what extent a theist is willing
to set aside their moral beliefs or surrender their moral judgement for the purpose of solving the
problem of evil. To show this clearly, I consider how it looks to violate moral necessity in order to
solve the logical problem of morally-impossible evil.
I believe that engaging with this question exposes an extremely important point: a capacity
to solve the problem of evil depends on an individual’s moral modalities. Seeking, offering, or even
suggesting the possibility of a morally-sufficient reason to justify any and all of the terrible evils of
the world pushes us beyond the limits of our moral thinking. But should there not be limits to our
moral thinking? Mustn’t there be? Don’t we have good moral reason to impose such limits on
ourselves and consider some things to be morally impossible, condemned to the realm of the
morally unthinkable?
Solving the problem of evil is a matter of what you are willing to countenance, morally; it is a
matter of where you are willing to draw the line, if at all, between the morally possible and the
morally impossible. Those who do not see theodicies or other such solutions to the problem of evil
as being morally problematic clearly consider it within the realms of moral possibility; those who
disagree tend to see it as beyond the realms of moral possibility. The disagreement is not just a
disagreement about morality, about what is rightly thought of as right and wrong, it is a
disagreement in moral modalities, about what could be rightly thought of as right and wrong.
It is uncertain ground, but my intention is to push the discussion of the problem of evil in this
direction. I think it would be helpful to recognise that many of our disagreements about the
problem of evil are just underlying moral disagreements in disguise. They are disagreements about
moral meaning. To push in this direction, I offer an argument to a conclusion that will undoubtedly
be a point of moral disagreement: I argue that theism is morally problematic.

1. A consistent set of theistic beliefs requires a solution to the logical problem of

morally-impossible evil.

2. Solutions to the logical problem of morally-impossible evil are morally problematic.

3. Therefore, a consistent set of theistic beliefs is morally problematic.

Clearly there will be ready responses to this argument, but that is exactly my point: these
responses will take the form of disagreements about, mostly, moral modalities. Accepting my
morally-challenging conclusion depends on whether you think a theist must offer a solution to the
problem of evil or whether they can go without; whether there could be a morally-sufficient
justification for all the terrible evils in the world or whether it goes beyond the limits of moral
meaning to talk about a justification for some cases. I want us to reflect on these questions,
because it is these that ultimately determine not only whether or not the problem of evil can or
should be solved, but also why we philosophise about it in the first place.

3
 The problem of evil is an ethical problem. It is not an argument that tells us anything for or
against the existence of God, it tells us only about our beliefs, our values, our morals, our ethical
perspective on and in the world. In a world of evil and suffering, philosophising about the problem
of evil can help us to clearly see the reality of that evil and suffering, without flinching or blinking
or pretending it to be other than it is. Because of this, it can help us to orient ourselves rightly in
the world. It can strengthen our moral resolve. It can correct a childish optimism or a shallow
pessimism. It can help prepare us to face suffering as philosophers should. If you have faith, then it
can help that faith mature into a sincere and world-defining hope that holds back from fantasist
superstition.
Ultimately, philosophising about the problem of evil can help you to live in a way that is
more consistent with yourself, your ethical beliefs, and with the world as it is. To live in a way that
is ‘consistent’ is a long-standing philosophical and ethical ideal, recurrently buried in esoteric
phrases like ‘know thyself’ and ‘live in conformity with nature’, or even (less esoterically) ‘you do
you’. It’s easy to be flippant about these things; we’ve been trained, professionally, to not give
them too much weight. But the obligation to seek the truth and live in a way that is aligned with
whatever truth there is ought to weigh heavily on people who would call themselves philosophers.
The first lesson of philosophy is scepticism: we know that we don’t know as much as we’d
like to think. Often true and complete knowledge is beyond our reach. But whilst it’s hard to know
what’s true, it’s easier to know what’s inconsistent; that is within my grasp. And what is
inconsistent can never be true. If, therefore, I want to live in a way that is true to whatever truth
there is, shouldn’t I start with the easier thing? I should aim to have no inconsistent beliefs nor live
in a way that is inconsistent with my beliefs. To ensure this, I should subject my life and thoughts
to examination and expose and reject any inconsistencies.
This is why Socratic questioning is so useful. Socratic questioning doesn’t establish truth; it
exposes inconsistency. In so doing, it reveals errors, things that cannot be true because
inconsistencies are contradictions and contradictions can never be true. If you live in a way that is
inconsistent then you live in contradiction with yourself or with the world, and neither can be a
‘true’ way to live. In an uncertain world, a consistent way of living could still be false, but an
inconsistent way of living can never be true. Better, then, to aim to live consistently, because that
will give you the best chance of living in a way that is true to whatever truth there is.

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Chapter One: A Patient History of the Problem of Evil

The problem of evil is the problem of reconciling belief in a good and powerful God with a
sincere recognition of the evil and suffering that exists in our world. This problem is often
expressed as an ‘inconsistent triad’: three propositions (i.e., a ‘triad’) that appear to be incapable
of all being true at the same time (i.e., are logically ‘inconsistent’). God is good; God is powerful;
evil exists. It seems, at least at first glance, that if either two of these propositions are true then
the third must be false. If God is good and powerful, then why would God let bad things happen to
good people or otherwise innocent creatures? Given that we recognise the occurrence of many
injustices and varied bad things, it must be either that God wants to prevent these things from
happening but is not able to, or else is able to prevent bad things happening but chooses not to, or
is both unable and unwilling, which is a state so low that it hardly qualifies as divine; so either God
is not powerful or God is not good or God is non-existent. Or else we are wrong when we
recognise the bad things in the world, all the evil and suffering, as something that a good and
powerful thing would prevent, if they could.
Consult your down-to-earth intuition: we tend to think that if someone is a good person then
they would do what they can to stop something bad from happening. Imagine a doctor has the
medicine needed to treat a sick and suffering child. Imagine the child was bitten by a snake and all
that’s needed is the anti-venom, or the child has a simple infection that would be easily cured by a
dose of antibiotics. All the doctor needs to do is administer the medicine and the child will get
better. There is nothing preventing them from doing this: they have the medicine, they know the
child is sick, no obvious harm will come from saving the child, and the child is in their care. Now
imagine that the doctor does not administer the medicine: the child continues to be sick, suffering
greatly, and then dies. The parents of the child implore the doctor to administer the medicine, but
the doctor steadfastly ignores them and allows the child to die. No reason or justification is
offered by the doctor for their behaviour. As far as we can tell, there is no reason for the doctor
not to administer the medicine. And yet they don’t. What would the parents say? What would you
think of such a doctor? Would you call them a good doctor?
In this example, to say that the doctor is ‘good’ presents an intuitive paradox: if the doctor
really were good, then why would they not administer the medicine to save the dying child? We
want an answer; the parents want an answer; they want to understand why their child was
allowed to die. They are owed an explanation. The doctor is good, the doctor had the medicine,
and yet the medicine was not administered and the child died. Why was this allowed to happen?
Why did they look on yet would not take their part? Did the doctor have any reason to behave as
they did? Could any such reason be good enough?
You can construct structurally-similar examples for almost anything that we call ‘good’. This
doesn’t even need to be ‘goodness’ in a distinctively moral sense. Imagine a good baker of bread.
The baker is good; the baker has all the resources necessary for the baking of good bread; and yet

5
they repeatedly churn out lousy loaf after lousy loaf. What’s going on here? Why does an
apparently ‘good’ baker seem to be incapable of baking a decent loaf? We want an explanation.
The most intuitive explanation is that one of our propositions must be wrong. It turns out that,
contrary to our belief, the baker did not have all the resources necessary for the baking of good
bread, or perhaps they simply weren’t such a good baker after all. It’s even possible that we, as it
turns out, are not reliable judges of good bread. They are making ‘good’ bread, we just don’t like
it.
We can even construct structurally-similar examples where, not only is the ‘goodness’ in
question not distinctively moral, the thing it is applied to could not be considered a bearer of
moral attributes. Imagine a good tool, like a saw. If we say the saw is good, and the wood is
ordinary, and yet the saw cannot cut the wood, then we are presented with a paradox. If the saw
cannot cut the wood, then we must suppose that either the wood must be unusual in some way,
or else the saw must not be a very good saw after all. A good saw can cut ordinary wood: that is
what we mean by a ‘good’ saw.
The problem of evil is structurally similar to these examples. If God is good, then God would,
presumably, do what He can to prevent or alleviate evil and suffering; like a good doctor heals
patients when they can and a good baker bakes good bread and a good saw can cut ordinary
wood. If God is powerful, then God, presumably, has the power to prevent or alleviate evil and
suffering; like a doctor having the necessary medicine to hand or a baker having everything they
need to make bread or a saw only being tested on ordinary wood. And yet apparently preventable
evil and suffering continues to exist, and to a degree of intensity that seems quite capable of being
alleviated. What’s going on here? Why doesn’t God prevent or alleviate the intense evil and
suffering in the world? Just like the cases of the good doctor or baker or saw, we want an
explanation. We want to make sense of the apparent contradiction. This is the problem of evil.

The Philosophical Problem of Evil

This is the problem of evil as it is understood in the philosophical context: it is primarily a
matter of achieving a consistent set of beliefs. We want an explanation that enables us to resolve
the paradox of the ‘inconsistent triad’, either by learning which of our beliefs is false, or else how
the three beliefs can be consistent, even though they appear not to be. What we are left with is a
philosophical puzzle that needs to be worked through and resolved.
The problem would take a different form in other contexts. A distinctively religious form of
the problem of evil might be more concerned with the task of keeping one’s faith in the presence
of evil and suffering. For this purpose, resolving an apparent philosophical inconsistency might not
be necessary; a leap of faith might be the answer. Similarly, a distinctively practical or pastoral
form of the problem of evil might only ask what we can do to prevent or alleviate evil and
suffering, and philosophical speculations can appear idle and somewhat trivial to such a task.
Questions of logical consistency seem less of a priority in either case.

6
 These kinds of variations of the form of the problem of evil – the theoretical versus the
practical, the philosophical versus the theological, etc. – have been acknowledged and discussed
for some time now. I am keen to stress what might have been overlooked, which is the variety of
forms of the problem of evil that we can identify even within the distinctively philosophical
context. It’s easy to miss the extent of historical variation in the problem of evil within the
philosophical context, and even easier to impress an unwarranted homogeneity over the
variations that are recognised. We end up with an over-simplified ‘standard’ version of the
problem of evil, which ends up leading us astray. To illustrate this, I think it’s helpful to take a
quick tour through the history of the problem of evil, from its origins to its present form; not for
the purpose of teaching you what you (no doubt) already know, but with the intention of
attending closely to the differences. If we resist any anachronistic attribution of our now well-
established philosophical form of the problem of evil, I think we will see some very different
philosophical problems.
I began this book with a claim that our philosophical understanding of the problem of evil is
not healthy. The first step in finding a cure is finding a diagnosis, and any good diagnosis should
take account of the patient’s history. This is that patient history.

The Origins of the Problem of Evil, in a Philosophical Context

To start at the beginning, the idea of the problem of evil has probably existed for as long as
there have been ideas about gods. It has always been understood that gods can do things: they
can create, they can act, they can intervene. We tell their stories. Many gods are also understood
to have personalities or character traits, often reflecting our own human traits. Gods love, they get
angry, they seek revenge. Gods care. Or at least we humans think that the gods care.
But according to Epicurus, an Ancient Greek philosopher of the third century BC and the
traditional origin point for the philosophical problem of evil, the gods do not care, and this is an
important lesson. Epicurus creates the first philosophical formulation of the problem of evil in
order to teach us this important lesson. His reason for doing so is wrapped up in his eponymous
school of philosophical thought: Epicureanism. To better understand Epicurus’s first philosophical
formulation of the problem of evil, it’s worth spending some time covering the basics of that
school of thought.
(This will seem like a lengthy tangent in an introductory chapter to a book about the problem
of evil. It is lengthy and tangential by design. Along the way, remember that our purpose here is to
acknowledge any differences between this and the now standard form of the problem of evil.)

Epicureanism
Like many ancient philosophers, Epicurus was only really concerned with one philosophical
problem: What is it to live well as a human being, and how do we go about doing this? Solving

7
abstract philosophical puzzles was a part of that task, but only a part: philosophical puzzles were
not all that important in themselves unless they helped you to understand what it was to live well
and teach you how to do so.
For Epicurus, living well as a human being means nothing more than maximising pleasures
and minimising pains. He comes to this answer by route of his best attempt at an explanation of
the physical world. Following Democritus, and responding to the paradoxes of earlier pre-Socratic
philosophers like Parmenides and Zeno – philosophical puzzles that were intended to demonstrate
that all change and motion is impossible, such as the famous ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’ paradox –
Epicurus suggested that change and motion would be possible if the physical world were
composed of distinct ‘un-cuttable’ pieces (atoms) that could swerve and rearrange themselves in
the void. This would solve the earlier philosophical problem, accounting for both the permanence
of ‘being’ together with the impermanence of objects, but the sparsely reductive physics that
results has important consequences for the question of what it is to live well as a human being.
If all there is in existence is random atoms in the void, then a human being is nothing more
than a collection of these atoms. Consequently, all we could experience is the interaction of our
bodily ‘atoms’ with the ‘atoms’ of the world. We experience this as sense data. A ‘fire’ atom
interacts with our ‘skin’ atom and we experience the sense data of ‘burning’, and we find this
painful. A ‘water’ atom interacts with our burned ‘skin’ atom and we experience the sense data of
‘soothing’ or ‘cooling’, and we find this pleasurable. Epicurus makes use of a bit of an ad hoc
bodge by introducing the notion of a ‘soul atom’ to account for the conscious aspect of this atomic
interaction, but a basic physicalism remains his foundation.
What does this mean for the question of living well as a human being? Simply this: according
to Epicurus’s physics, there is no other mechanism by which we could recognise things that are
good or things that are bad besides the interaction of the ‘atoms’ in our bodies with the ‘atoms’
out there in the world. We experience this interaction as sense data, and therefore sense data is
the only mechanism by which we can recognise good things as good and bad things as bad. When
we experience pleasurable sense data, we call this ‘good’; when we experience painful sense data,
we call this ‘bad’. Whatever might be out there in the world, when it comes to questions of good
or bad, we only have our senses to go on, and so pleasures and pains are the only indicators of the
good (or the bad).
This is not quite full-blown hedonism – the philosophical theory that good and bad are
exclusively defined by pleasure and pain: nothing but pleasure has positive value, nothing but pain
has negative value – because Epicurus does not define good and bad in terms of pleasure and pain.
He only claims that pleasures and pains are the only indicators, for us, of what is good or bad. But
either way, when it comes to understanding how to live well as human beings, we should prioritise
our sense data, and that means maximising pleasures and minimising pains.

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The Four-Part Cure
How do we go about doing this? One option is obvious: seek pleasure, in all its forms, pursue
it as much as you can at all times, and always run away from pains. Such a pleasure-seeker and
pain-avoider, whilst they might experience some very good times, is certain to experience a lot of
bad times too and is perpetually and extremely vulnerable to catastrophe. Such a person does not
understand that you can desire too much of a good thing. Eat or drink too much and you will feel
sick, suffer a hangover, get fat, and suffer long-term health problems. Do too many drugs and you
will get addicted, rot your brain, destroy your health. Have too much sex and you are likely to
catch something nasty, fail to maintain your relationships, or be burdened with unwanted
responsibilities. For all the pleasure found in such a pleasure-seeking life, it comes at the cost of a
great deal of pain. On that basis, it looks like a less-good deal.
Epicurus does not recommend the pleasure-seeking option. Instead, he suggests that the
best approach to maximising pleasures and minimising pains is not to pursue pleasure, but to train
yourself to experience more pleasure in what you already have or can easily acquire. Rather than
trying to make the world fit to you, try to make yourself fit to the world. This might seem more
difficult in the short term, but with training it becomes easier in the long term and is the surer
route to a life that maximises pleasures over pains.
The first step in training oneself to experience more pleasure in what we already have is to
distinguish between various types of pleasures. Some pleasures are what Epicurus calls ‘kinetic’:
these pleasures are like quenching your thirst, satisfying your hunger, getting what you want,
winning an argument, or having good sex with someone that you strongly desire. Whilst
immensely pleasurable, these pleasures require some pain in order to achieve: you need to
experience not having what you want before you can get what you want, you need to have an
argument (and risk losing) in order to win, and you experience lustful and frustrated longing
before you fulfil your sexual desire. These are unpleasant states of desire, relievable only by
fulfilling your desire but perpetually vulnerable to frustration. As a result, they are not states that
would be the first choice of someone looking to maximise pleasures over pains. Kinetic pleasures
tend to leave you locked in a cycle of desire, frustration, fulfilment, leading to boredom,
frustration, and more desire. You encounter pain constantly along the way to your desired
pleasure. But is it not possible to get the pleasure without the pain?
Yes, says Epicurus, if you try your best to limit your pleasures to what he calls ‘static’
pleasures. These are pleasures which don’t require the experience of any pain in order to achieve.
These are more like passive states of being than distinct experiences: like being in a comfortable
temperature, not too hot or too cold, or having a pleasant conversation with a friend. These
‘static’ pleasurable states can be achieved without going through the kinetic cycle of desire and
frustration. They are more appropriately characterised as an absence of desire: to be at a
comfortable temperature is the pleasurable experience of not needing or wanting the
temperature to be any different than it is.
Of the two types of pleasure, then, we should desire the static rather than the kinetic, since

9
that is the surest way to maximise pleasures whilst minimising pains. What sort of static pleasures
should we desire? Epicurus identifies three types of desires to help us choose. Firstly, he
acknowledges that there are some desires and pleasurable or painful states that human beings do
not have the option of opting out of. We need food, water, and shelter, and given that we are
innately social animals, for the most part, we also benefit from social interaction. These necessities
have their corresponding pains – hunger, thirst, exposure, loneliness – giving rise to a desire to be
free from such pains and the experience of a statically pleasurable state when we are. Epicurus
calls these kinds of desires ‘natural necessary’ desires, since they are ‘natural’ to us as human
beings (it would be different if we were lizards or robots) and ‘necessary’ for our continued
existence (we must satisfy our hunger sometimes, or else we will starve to death). Since there is
no opting out of these natural necessary desires, we should accept them and try to find them as
pleasurable as possible, as far as we can keeping ourselves in a static state of pleasure: enjoy
simple food, water, a comfortable environment, and pleasant conversation with friends or family.
If you can learn to enjoy such a simple life, you will be well on the way to living in a way that
maximises pleasures over pains.
The danger comes from wanting more. Too often we get distracted by other desires, or else
get led astray into wanting more than we need. Epicurus calls these the ‘natural non-necessary’
desires and, whilst perfectly natural for a human being to want, we should do our best to avoid
them when we can because they will inevitably lead to pain. We need food but we do not need
that food to be extravagant or particularly tasty. We need water but we do not need wine or beer
or coffee or coca-cola. We need social interaction, but we do not need to be revered, celebrated,
desired, and held in the highest esteem by everyone we have ever met. Pursuing these ‘natural’
desires beyond the point of necessity is bound to put us back into the kinetic cycle of desire and
frustration, with predictably negative results. This should be avoided.
Thirdly and finally, Epicurus identifies the worst of all desires to pursue: what he calls the
‘non-natural’ or ‘empty’ desires. These are desires for which there can never be any fulfilment,
though human beings are often inclined to believe otherwise. The desire to live forever, the desire
for fame, the desire for wealth. There is no end to these desires, either because there is no
possibility of them happening (no one lives forever, e.g.), or else there is no end point for their
fulfilment. How much fame is enough; how much wealth? If you desire such a thing as fame or
wealth, you will never satisfy that desire; no matter how much you get, it will never be enough.
You think you need just a little bit more, but when you get there you find yourself still wanting
more. ‘The wealth of vain fancies recedes to an infinite distance.’ Satisfaction is always just out of
reach. And all along the way you torture yourself with unnecessary pains and frustrations. You can
never fulfil your desire, so end up trapped in a static state of painful frustration. This should be
avoided at all costs.
The route to an Epicurean happy life is to train yourself to desire only what you need, find as
much pleasure as possible in these ‘natural necessary’ things, and to the best of your ability
remain in an untroubled static state of pleasure. Epicurus’s word for this state is ‘ataraxia’.
Ataraxia is a difficult state to achieve and just as difficult to maintain, not least because

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human beings are vulnerable to all sorts of troubles. That we know we are so vulnerable causes us
to worry, compounding troubles by troubling us even when they are not there. We fear death
even though we are alive; we fear poverty whilst we have wealth; we fear sickness whilst we have
health; we fear abandonment whilst we have companionship. Seeking to preserve our untroubled
state, Epicurean philosophy works hard to alleviate our anxiety about the troubles we might face.
To this end, it offers us the ‘tetrapharmakos’ or ‘four-part cure’:

God is not to be feared;

Death is not to be worried about;

What’s good is easily got;

What’s bad is easily endured.

Each of these statements acts as a short-hand reminder for the philosophical arguments that
support them, offering an Epicurean disciple a to-hand summary of their philosophical way of life,
providing comfort in challenging times. I will leave any further exploration of that way of life to
other works. I have covered the Epicurean ground this far to make one point: the first part of
Epicurus’s ‘four-part cure’ is God is not to be feared, and it is the problem of evil that provides the
supporting argument for this reassuring statement.

God is Not to be Feared

Imagine you are in ancient Greece, or many other parts of the ancient world, raised in a
society that believes there to be a pantheon of gods, each with their own responsibilities and
proclivities. These gods must be appeased and must not be angered or else crops will fail, storms
will rise at sea, battles will be lost, or disease or general disaster will lay waste to your home and
family. You are naturally fearful of the gods, since they hold your fate in their hands, and you go to
great lengths to perform the right rites and rituals, the appropriate sacrifices, and anything else
you can do to keep the gods on side. This can be a great source of anxiety and trouble and, if left
unchecked, is liable to disturb the untroubled Epicurean mind.
Epicurus does his best to put your mind at ease by pointing out that, contrary to the popular
belief of the time, the gods do not seem to care all that much about human beings and their
affairs. Many pious people seem to suffer terrible evil; many impious people seem to receive many
blessings. There seems to be little actual correlation between being good in the eyes of the gods
and getting good from the hands of the gods. If the gods were really good and just and powerful,
and cared about human beings and their lives on earth, why would so many bad things happen to
good people, or good things happen to bad people? In actual fact, it seems more the case that

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people pick and choose when to see the hands of the gods at work: when good people receive
blessings and bad people receive punishments, people say it is the will of the gods, but they do not
say the same when good people receive punishments and bad people receive blessings. There is
an apparent contradiction here: if the gods were as people believed, then the world would
consistently show a divine justice; but it does not. And yet people still believe that the gods are
good and just and powerful and care about human affairs.
Instead, Epicurus wants us to understand that the gods are immortal and happy. As such,
they cannot possibly be troubled by human affairs: we have no power to harm or benefit them.
And as a result, they have no inclination to harm or benefit us. The gods are indifferent to human
affairs, and so we can stop worrying about what they think about us and our attempts to be pious.
Pleasing the gods is a paradigmatically ‘non-natural’ or ‘empty’ desire: it is impossible to please
the gods because they are already perfectly pleased. You should abandon this ‘empty’ desire. Do
not condemn yourself to the statically painful state of fearing the gods.
The problem of evil, in its first drafting, is not an argument for the non-existence of God, nor
even the raw material for such an argument. It argues on the basis of the existence and nature of
the gods to the conclusion that the gods are indifferent to human affairs. And it does so for the
sole purpose of putting our minds at ease.

Chronic Anachronism
Tradition has come to look on Epicurus as the originator of the problem of evil in a
philosophical context. In large part, this seems to be due to David Hume, who attributed these ‘old
questions’ to Epicurus:
Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not
willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?

Would we describe this as a fair reconstruction of Epicurus’s position? I would argue not. I
would suggest that it is unrecognisable, if we are attentive to the differences. Hume’s version
could not serve Epicurus’s purposes. How could these questions help to put our minds at ease?
Should we be more reassured by the prospect of an impotent or malevolent God? If anything, the
need to solve the paradox just gives us one more thing to worry about.
At the very least, Hume’s attribution smuggles some anachronistic cargo. Epicurus does not
question the power or goodness or existence of the gods, nor even allow the possibility of such a
question, and he explicitly contradicts the notion that they would be ‘malevolent’ if they chose not
to intervene in human affairs. For Epicurus, choosing not to trouble yourself with the affairs of
others is exactly what we would expect from a perfectly virtuous, and hence happy, immortal
being. Why on earth would the gods trouble themselves with our affairs?! How much worry we
would cause them!
But philosophical tradition has seamlessly absorbed Hume’s attribution into the canon. The

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important point here is not who said what, when where or why (for the curious: Hume seems to
follow Lactantius, at an uncharitable five-hundred years’ distance from Epicurus, and Gassendi at
over a thousand more). The important point is that the casualness and widespread acceptance of
this attribution shows how easily we overlook certain features of Epicurus’s original philosophical
context. The point is that questioning this allows us to recognise a difference, many differences,
and that opens the way to a healthier understanding of the problem of evil.
The initial philosophical context of the problem of evil is a distinct philosophical school of
thought. It is oriented towards the question of living well as a human being. It is about the
maximisation of pleasures and the minimisation of pains. It is grounded in a physicalist
metaphysics. Its only function is as a remedy to a barrier to living anxiety-free. It is these things
that give rise to the problem of evil, for Epicurus. I think if we attend to the differences here then
we would see a very different form of the problem of evil than Hume’s attribution suggests.
Hume’s version is very familiar to us, immediately recognisable as a form of the ‘inconsistent
triad’, a theoretical rather than practical problem, raw material for an argument for atheism;
Epicurus’s version is none of these things.
Neither is any version of the problem of evil that we find in other ancient philosophical
schools of thought, such as Stoicism. The Stoics held that the world was created perfect by a
perfectly rational divine being. It follows from this that there can be no imperfection in the world.
Why, then, do we perceive the world as being anything other than perfect? Why are we troubled
by the apparent existence of ‘evil’ and ‘suffering’?
For the Stoics, the fault lies with us and our faulty opinions. The Stoic problem of evil, if we
can call it that, encourages us only to reflect on our faulty opinions. Its purpose is only to
strengthen our Stoic resolve. It remains a practically-oriented problem. There is no question of
questioning the perfect nature of God or God’s creation. To do otherwise would be to abandon
Stoicism as such.
And similar could be said of the Neoplatonists, though with them the problem of evil begins
to take on a more theoretical and less overtly practical nature. Ambiguously so, however, because
Neoplatonism esteems intellectual understanding as a quasi-spiritual virtue. For them, to live well
as a human being is to live in intellectual contemplation of the truth. And so having a coherent
picture of Neoplatonist metaphysics is an absolute spiritual and moral duty. Any problems must be
resolved. Problems such as the problem of evil: If, as a Neoplatonist would claim, all that exists
comes as an emanation from a perfect and ineffable ‘One’, how could that One, in being perfect,
give rise to anything other than perfect goodness? It doesn’t make sense; it’s like a source of heat
making something cold. It is a metaphysical puzzle that must be solved. Plotinus resolves this
‘problem of evil’ by arguing that the One cannot give rise to anything that is not perfectly good,
but distance from the One necessarily equates to a distance from perfect goodness. In being
distant from the One, we therefore experience a distance from perfect goodness, which we
experience as a lack of goodness. This lack of goodness we call evil and suffering, but evil and
suffering do not really exist in themselves, being mere absences of the good. It would be wrong to
say that the One is ‘making’ this evil and suffering, in the same way it would be wrong to say that

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the fire is ‘making’ us cold when we move away from it. Perhaps more famously, Augustine used
the Neoplatonic metaphysics of the problem of evil to remind us of our distance from God, our
fallen nature, and thus the need for Christianity to recover the distance. This is still a practical
matter of living well as a (Christian) human being.
Again, I would like to attend to the differences between this and the now standard form of
the problem of evil. The Neoplatonic question is not so much ‘does God have a morally sufficient
reason for permitting evil and suffering?’ as it is ‘how is it metaphysically possible for a perfect
being to create anything that is not perfectly good?’ It is this Neoplatonic version of the problem
of evil that goes forward into early Christian tradition, and later into Islamic philosophy, setting the
terms of the debate for the next 1000 years. It is this version that we see reappear in Aquinas, for
example. It remains long enough to be inherited by the modern period in Europe, in the likes of
Descartes and Spinoza, and onwards to Leibniz, who argued on this basis for the metaphysical
necessity of this world being the best of all possible worlds.
Only then, it seems, does this ‘theodicy’ attract the response that the existence of evil and
suffering, as it is evident to us in the world, is incompatible with the existence of a good and
powerful God; that is, only then does it become recognisable as the now ‘standard’ form of the
problem of evil, provoking a debate about whether and to what extent God has a justification for
the creation or permission of evils. You could even make the case that it is only by offering a
justification for God that you open up the question of whether or not God is justified.
That this happened only in the 18th century likely correlates with the new-found publicly-
philosophical possibility of atheism as much as anything else. But either way, it is here that we get
Voltaire’s savage satire of Leibniz, and Hume’s attribution to Epicurus, and the emergence of
philosophers and theologians offering theodicies for the purpose of defending rational belief in
the existence and nature of God. I think it was anachronistic of Hume to attribute this to Epicurus,
but it is Hume’s version of the problem of evil that goes forward as the standard form in
philosophical tradition.

Interlude: Kant
Kant is an interesting marker here, particularly with his ‘On the miscarriage of all
philosophical trials in theodicy’ (1791). His work is interesting in itself, but also for the way it
shows the traditional ‘solutions’ to the problem of evil being seamlessly co-opted to respond to
the new version of the problem, as if those solutions have always been responding to Hume’s kind
of problem. Whilst Kant’s discussion of the problem of evil is clearly recognisably similar to the
now standard Hume-ish form of the problem, it is considerably more nuanced. Kant does not
recognise one problem of evil, but three: Why does God permit pain and suffering? Why does God
permit moral evil and injustice? Why does God permit there to be no proportionate relationship
between moral virtue and happiness, or moral evil and suffering? Each of these appear ‘counter’
to God’s ‘purposes’ as a good, holy, and just God. The purpose of a good God is the happiness of
creation; the purpose of a holy God is moral goodness; the purpose of a just God is to ensure the

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proportionate correlation of happiness with virtue, or suffering with vice. It would seem that if
God were truly good, there should be no suffering; if God were truly holy, there should be no
moral evil; if God were truly just, there should be happiness in proportion to virtue and suffering in
proportion to vice. But we see suffering, we see moral evil, and we see no proportionate
correlation between virtue and happiness. Why would God permit such counterpurposive features
in His creation?
Kant considers all the traditional solutions, rejecting each one in turn. His reasons for
rejecting the solutions are interesting and well worth a look for any student of the problem of evil,
but his conclusion is more interesting. Kant concludes by citing the Biblical example of Job. In the
Book of Job we are told that Job suffers terribly at the hands of Satan, permitted by God. Job
demands an explanation: why should he suffer so? Job’s friends try to comfort Job by offering
various solutions to this ‘problem of evil’. Perhaps Job deserved it; perhaps the reason for God’s
permission of this suffering is beyond Job’s understanding. Job rejects these attempts at theodicy:
he knows he is innocent and he demands an explanation. God speaks from a whirlwind, not giving
Job an explanation, but seeming only to assert His mighty power in contrast to meagre Job:
‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?’ Job acknowledges God’s power and
place and chooses to say no more about it: ‘I have said too much already’, as some contemporary
translations put it.
What is it about Job’s response that Kant cites so favourably? Job is, above all else, honest:
he is honest when he suffers, honest in his confusion, honest in his demands for an explanation,
honest in his rejection of the inadequate solutions offered by his friends, and honest in his
recognition of God’s power. (And we all know how Kant feels about honesty…) Job sticks with
what he knows. Job’s friends, in contrast, speak of what they do not know. As a result, they are
dishonest, to themselves and to Job: they tell him lies when they are in no position to know the
truth. Better to remain silent and be thought to have no adequate solution to the problem of evil
than speak out and remove all doubt. Kant points out that God Himself agrees here, saying to one
of Job’s comforters: ‘I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the
truth about me, as my servant Job has.’
Kant’s request for an honest quietism went unheeded. Philosophising about the problem of
evil continued, as did the construction of theodicy. But by now we have made a distinct break
from the form of problem that came before. This change in the form of the problem is shown in
the change in the ways of responding to it, and in the motivations for doing so.

An Ethical Question
At some point the problem of evil ceased to be something that was meant to help us live
well as human beings. Once upon a time, the purpose of philosophizing about the problem was to
correct our attitude to the world, one way or another. Whether to alleviate our anxieties about
pleasing the gods, or to remind us of our faulty opinions, or to reassure us about the ultimate
underlying goodness of the physical world, we wanted to reconcile our beliefs about God and evil

15
in order to rightly orient ourselves in the world. This seems to me to have been a noble aim: can
we say the same now?
How could offering excuses for the permission of the terrible evils of the world help you
orient yourself rightly in this world? What purpose would nit-picking about the improbability of
God’s existence serve? There might be answers to these rhetorical questions, but if we don’t know
why we are philosophizing about the problem of evil, how can we possibly know whether or when
we have achieved what we set out to do?
That we have lost something important in our thinking about the problem of evil is the first
part of my diagnosis. It seems to me that we have chosen to believe that the now standard form of
the problem of evil – the one that tries to attack or defend the rationality of theistic belief – is and
has always been the only philosophical form available: all other variations are ‘religious’ or
‘theological’ or ‘pastoral’ but not really philosophical. I think this is a mistake, and one that robs us
of some of the most profound ways of approaching our thinking about the problem. It was not
always the case. Philosophical reflection on the problem of evil can tell us something important
about how to live well as human beings, but only if we let it. It can reassure us about the ultimate
goodness of the created order; if true, what could be more important than that? It can also show
us the essentially chaotic, cruel, and unjust nature of the world; and that’s an important thing to
recognise too, if true. Either way, the problem of evil ought to help us orient ourselves in the
world and live in a way that we consider right and true.
Epicurus’s first philosophical formulation of the problem of evil is offered as a solution to
what we might now call the ‘pastoral’ problem of evil: its purpose is to alleviate suffering in the
here and now, and it poses the philosophical conundrum only to serve that purpose. Surely we
would recognise this as being very different from Hume’s version and the standard philosophical
form that followed. The Stoics reflected on the problem in order to expose our faulty opinions
about suffering, for the purpose of strengthening our resolve in the face of that suffering. The
Neoplatonists reflected on the problem in order to better understand what they already knew to
be true, seeing intellectual understanding as a spiritual virtue. Even Kant discussed the problem of
evil for the purpose of reminding us about the importance of honesty. There was no question of
defending or questioning the nature or existence of God, but they were no worse off for that. I
would say they were better off. The purpose of philosophising about the problem of evil was not
to tell us anything about the probability of the existence of God; the purpose of philosophising
about the problem of evil was to tell us something important about ourselves, our values, and our
perspective on the world. In short, it was an answer to an ethical question.

The 20th Century

By the 20th century, it’s clear that the problem of evil has ceased to be an answer to an
ethical question. It is now an answer to a question in the philosophy of religion, which by this
point, at least in the Anglophone world, is a philosophical sub-discipline that is increasingly
dominated by arguments for and against the rationality of theistic belief. By 1955, J. L. Mackie can

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present the next instalment of the standard form of the problem of evil in a philosophical context:
The traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly
criticised by philosophers. […] I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be
made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious
beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational…

Clearly we are now a long way removed from any sense that the problem of evil is an ethical
question about ourselves, our values, and our perspective on the world: the question is only about
the rationality (or not) of religious belief. And this is the ‘traditional’ problem of evil. The contrast
with Epicurus ought to be clear.
But Mackie presents his now-famous argument and leaves us with a challenge about the
nature of free will and the role that it can play in solving the problem of evil. It is a pointed
challenge, a particular gauntlet laid down, and it’s this particular gauntlet that is picked up by Alvin
Plantinga.
It is a rare thing in philosophy for someone to ‘win’ an argument or ‘settle’ a debate. The
progress of philosophy is rarely linear. But the progress of the problem of evil from Mackie
through Plantinga is an exception. Mackie asks a question, Plantinga gives an answer. The
consensus unites in agreement with Plantinga’s answer.
Mackie says that there is no reason an omnipotent and wholly good being could not create
free creatures that freely choose to do good. Plantinga says there is such a reason, and that reason
is the free will of those creatures. God cannot create a world with creatures that only freely
choose the good, even if He wanted to, because God is not free to create any world that He
chooses. There are certain logical limits on what God can create, as even Mackie would agree. God
cannot create a world with square circles, four-sided triangles, or married bachelors. An inability
to do so would not be seen as a lack of omnipotence but only a definition of its limits. The free will
of free creatures is another example of a logical limit on God’s power.
If God gives His creatures free will, He cannot then decide what those creatures do with their
free will; it would be neither their will nor ‘free’ if He did. But if this is so, then whenever those
free creatures exert their free will, they do something that God cannot control. What those
creatures do, in exerting their free will, is choose which of a number of possibilities they will make
actual. They choose to have toast for breakfast, rather than cereal, for example. Prior to their
decision, both options are possible; but once they decide to have toast and have toast, that
possibility – ‘I choose toast’ – becomes actual, rendering the other possibility counterfactual. ‘I
choose toast’ becomes the way the world is, and ‘I choose cereal’ becomes how the world could
have been. It could have been different if they’d chosen differently, but they didn’t, and so that
counterfactual ‘possibility’ is not actual.
Could God have made that counterfactual world actual? Plantinga says no. That world is the
world in which our breakfast-eater chooses to eat cereal, and that choice is not God’s to make. It is
not in God’s power to make our breakfast-eater’s choices for them. This remains the case no

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matter how the world is created. God could, presumably, have made different worlds, but
whatever world God makes, as long as those worlds contain free creatures it is never going to be
in God’s power to make our choices for us. As a result, our free will acts as a limit on which worlds
God can create. We decide which possibilities become actual and even God has to suffer the
consequences.
Replace ‘toast’ with ‘evil’ and you will get something relevant for the problem of evil. If a
free creature freely chooses to do or be evil, such as Lucifer freely choosing to rebel against God or
Adam and Eve freely choosing to eat of the forbidden fruit, there is nothing God can do about it. It
is logically impossible for God to make us freely choose to do or be good all the time. If we go
wrong, even He must suffer the consequences of our freely-chosen decisions. It could have been
different, if we had chosen differently, but it was never up to God, only us.
This successfully evades Mackie’s argument. Equipped with his free-will defence, Plantinga
can agree that God is wholly good, omnipotent (within logical limits), and that evil exists, and
consistently maintain the truth of all three propositions if it’s the case that a) God creates free
creatures and b) those free creatures misuse their free will to bring about evil. God cannot create
creatures that freely choose always to do the good, because what those free creatures freely
choose is not up to God; it’s up to them. It is not in God’s power to prevent the evil that we choose
for ourselves.
There is no reason to insist that this is actually the case, of course, or that we must choose
evil for ourselves. The conclusion remains behind a hypothetical ‘if’. Plantinga offers only a free
will ‘defence’ rather than a ‘theodicy’ because, even if we accept his claims about our free will
acting as a limit on God’s power, it remains possible that there are evils in this world that are not
the products of our free choices. The problem of evil could be revived on those terms. It also
remains a counterfactual possibility that we could have chosen only good and not brought evil into
the world. Under those circumstances, God would have created creatures that freely choose only
good, which is what Mackie wanted. Sadly, though, it wasn’t up to God whether that world
become actual, and clearly that world is not our world, so it’s not clear what good it would do us
to reflect on that unfulfilled possibility at this stage.
These possibilities are not relevant for Plantinga’s purposes, either way. All that Plantinga
needed to establish in order to avoid Mackie’s logical problem of evil is that it is possible that
there are no evils in this world that are not the products of our – or other fallen free creatures’ –
free choices, and consequently there is nothing essentially inconsistent about the theist’s position.
It’s this that fatally undermines Mackie’s logical formulation of the problem of evil, and it is this
that brings about the downfall of logical formulations of the problem of evil as such. As I said, the
consensus unites in agreement that Plantinga settles the debate about free will and its role in
undermining the logical problem of evil.
Perhaps there are many questions that remain unanswered in this argument: Why allow the
option of choosing badly or, if we must allow that option, why allow the damage that results from
those bad choices? Why, if freedom is so important, force creatures into a situation that is not of

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their choosing? Why create free will at all?
There are also serious questions to ask about what moral status we would assign to this
story, even if true. Consider a simple analogy: Imagine you are a teacher organising a school skiing
trip. You send the kids to the top of a mountain that has two routes down: one route down is nice
and fine and lovely, the other is certain death and painful destruction. The kids are given a free
choice about which route to take but limited indication which is which. That some of them might
choose the bad route is not going to be your decision, of course, but entirely theirs. Once they
have chosen that route, there’s nothing you can do about it. In fact, as you send them off up on
the ski-lift, there’s really nothing you could have done about it beyond that point other than shout
after them: ‘Make sure you choose the good route! You’ll suffer if you don’t!’
And then, inevitably or not, some children choose the bad route and suffer death and painful
destruction. There is outcry. Questions are asked about why on earth anyone organised a ski trip
for children that offered the option of such a dangerous route. Further questions are asked about
why they weren’t given more information to help them to avoid the bad route. Yet further
questions are asked about why they were left to their own devices, without adequate supervision.
As the teacher and organiser, what are your responses here? That the painful consequences were
the product of their decisions, not yours? That there was nothing you could do, once they’d
decided to go down the bad route? That all you could do is choose not to send them up that
mountain in the first place, and anyway they all wanted to go skiing… Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m
not sure any of these responses would cut it in a court of law. Most reasonable people would say
that you should have done more to protect those children under your care.
But these questions and objections are tangential to the precision of Plantinga’s aims. What
he has established is that if God creates free creatures and those creatures choose badly then
there is nothing God can do about it. Consequently, it is not entirely in God’s power to create
creatures that always freely choose the good, as Mackie suggests, because as free creatures our
choices are not in God’s power. We could have freely chosen the good, but we didn’t, so now we
must all suffer the consequences.

The Evidential Problem of Evil

Reeling from Plantinga’s refutation, the problem of evil pivots away from the logical
formulation and returns as the ‘evidential’ formulation. The turning point is traditionally attributed
to William Rowe’s 1979 ‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’. This version of the
problem of evil does not make the ‘extravagant’ claim that evil is logically inconsistent with the
existence of God, but only that evil offers good evidence to think that God does not exist. I think
this is a spurious distinction, especially on the basis as just stated, and have argued as much in
previous work. The evidential formulation of the problem of evil, at least in William Rowe’s first
famous incarnation, maintains that certain types of evil – pointless evil – are inconsistent with
God’s existence, and that is why they would count as evidence against God’s existence, if they
existed. What is left uncertain is whether such types of evil actually exist, or whether the evils that

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we see in the world are all of this type, and it’s this matter-of-fact uncertainty that affords the
problem its ‘evidential’ rather than ‘logical’ status.
But this uncertainty doesn’t mean all that much in itself. In his ‘logical’ formulation, Mackie
seems to allow the possibility of some evil being consistent with God’s existence, such as when he
concedes the possibility of higher-order goods morally justifying the existence of first-order evils,
or when he points out that only a tiny speck of evil would be necessary for good to be defined in
ontological relation. And in his ‘logical’ formulation of the problem of evil of the same era,
McCloskey only argues that God in incompatible with any ‘unnecessary’ or ‘superfluous’ evil, not
that He is under obligation to create a totally perfect world. There is some room to manoeuvre,
even in logical formulations. Mackie’s conclusion indicates that he would have little cause to
complain about a world with a little pain, a little hunger, and a lot of moral goodness: in that
world, there would be some ‘evils’ that are compatible with a perfectly good and powerful God. If
any of those pictures of the world were actual, there would be some ‘evil’ existing in happy
compatibility with God; it’s just that they are clearly not, and contingently not, actual. And besides,
this is not what theists believe, and Mackie is interested in the consistency of theistic belief.
Mackie and McCloskey’s logical formulations of the problem of evil are about the actual evils in
the actual world and the actual beliefs that theists have about them. In that, they are no different
from Rowe’s so-called evidential formulation.
The evidential problem of evil suggests that whilst there might be some reason justifying the
permission of the evils that we see in the world, for a great many of them there does not seem to
be any reason at all. Lightning strikes a tree causing a forest fire in which a little baby deer is
horribly burned. The baby deer lies in agony for days until a slow death puts it out of its misery.
What reason is there for this innocent suffering? Can it be attributed to the consequences of any
human choice? Can it be justified by appeal to some greater good? What greater good could be
achieved by a three-day death that could not have been achieved by two? It stretches credulity to
suggest reasons here. And so whilst Rowe concedes that it remains possible that there is a good
reason justifying all this, it is not reasonable to believe that there is, based upon the evidence in
front of us. And since God would only permit evil and suffering with good reason, on the basis of
the evidence in front of us we should conclude that it is not reasonable to believe in the existence
of God.
All this will by now be very familiar to any student of the problem of evil and will be found in
any introductory work on the topic. From here the story continues with the soul-making theodicy,
and sceptical theism, and patient-centred conditions, and horrendous evils, and cumulative case
arguments, and inferences to the best explanation, and justifications for genocide, and now the
terms of the debate will have been completely established and the ‘standard’ form of the problem
of evil is settled upon. Our position is entrenched. The debate is about whether or not there is
good reason to believe the evils of this world are justified by a morally-sufficient reason. Those are
the terms of the debate – those are our trenches – and all we can seem to do is work with what
we have, or slowly dig ourselves in deeper.
Do you think we should keep digging? Why? For what purpose? What are you hoping will

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happen? If you do not have a ready answer to this question, I question whether we might have
lost sight of our purpose, our ‘that for the sake of which’ we are philosophising about the problem
of evil.
It seems to me that most philosophical discussion of the problem of evil, and most
philosophy of religion, and most contemporary philosophy, is characterised by an eagerness to
further fortify ourselves against the opposing position, or else find new positions along the line to
fortify. It is hard, dirty work. And all the while we are living in trenches. It is not a healthy place to
be.

The End of History

Trench warfare is a grim simile for philosophy. Perhaps it is hyperbolic. Perhaps you’d prefer
to see it as a tennis match that has been stuck at deuce for 2,000 years. Any simile will work so
long as it captures the sense that a) there are some clearly-defined positions, historically
established, b) those positions oppose one another, and c) there is little evidence of progress. The
tennis match simile captures these and perhaps also a sense of the futility of the game, but
perhaps you can still enjoy hitting a good shot once in a while. Tennis is a leisure activity, after all;
there’s no absolute duty not to play tennis badly or even to play tennis at all. Is philosophy no
more important than a leisurely game of tennis?
I would add another feature, which is that the longer you play the game, or remain
entrenched, the harder it is to see the purpose of this practice, to the point that it’s not clear what
progress would look like. Progress towards what? Winning the game? (Is it a game?) Ending the
war? (Is it a war?) What is expected here?
When you are in a trench, it is difficult to see out; it is difficult to see that there might be
another way. You are not inclined to look for another way because sticking your head above the
parapet is a risky business. And so you keep your head down and keep digging. You look left and
right and see other people digging, and they congratulate you on your work, even awarding you
occasional medals for your service. It provides you with a living. You’re not sure why you are doing
what you do but you feel like you have no choice but to keep on digging. Your position depends
upon it.
We dedicate our lives to these matters. Shouldn’t we be clear about their value? We, of all
people. Are we not philosophers?

Diagnosis
Let’s recap. I began this book by suggesting that our understanding of the problem of evil is
not in a healthy state. I began this chapter by suggesting that any remedy requires, first, a
diagnosis, and that any diagnosis benefits from a patient history. Our patient here is the
philosophical discussion of the problem of evil, and we’ve just seen a brief version of its long

21
history. It began as a tool to help us live well as human beings; it ends in the futility of trench
warfare. Where did it all go wrong?
I speculatively suggest three influential factors; or sources of infection, if you will. Firstly,
there is the general (but radical) drift away from philosophy as a way of life. (I take my lead from
Pierre Hadot here.) Once a ‘philosopher’ was someone who lived a certain way, with a certain
cultivated ethical attitude to the world. Philosophy was a way of life. Intellectual exploration was a
part of this way of life, but only a part; and when it was a part it was more properly called a
‘spiritual exercise’. These philosophers came in many diverse forms but what made them a
philosopher was how they lived and not only what they thought, whatever their school of thought.
Philosophy was an ethical vocation. Philosophy had an essential ethical dimension. The theoretical
exercise of philosophy was only an easy way into the more difficult task of living ethically as a
philosopher; if you stopped at only the theory then you were not properly called a philosopher.
This essential ethical dimension of philosophy seems to have slowly faded as the discipline became
handmaiden to theology during the middle ages. The monks kept up their spiritual exercises, made
them their own, and kept them for themselves. When secular philosophy is revived as ‘natural
philosophy’ in the enlightenment period, and with the emergence of modern science, the essential
ethical dimension of classical philosophy gets left behind. Philosophy and its ethical vocation are
now separable: you can now be a ‘philosopher’ with theory alone. Note, I do not say philosophy
and ethics, because today even the philosophical sub-discipline of ethics is separable from any
ethical vocation. That we can now do ethics without necessarily needing to try to be ethical should
set alarm bells ringing as a warning for how detached we have become from our proper
philosophical subject matter.
Secondly, with a separation from this essential ethical dimension to philosophy comes the
possibility of offering abstract and merely intellectual justifications for the goodness of God’s
work. This is not done for the purpose of helping us to live well but only as an intellectual exercise.
It can then be questioned on that purely theoretical level, and swiftly this emphasis on the rational
defensibility of the goodness of God’s work leads to an emphasis on the rationality of theistic
belief. We are left with a question only about the rationality of theistic belief. Ethical questions fall
out of the picture.
Thirdly, I don’t think it is a coincidence that the origin of the standard philosophical form of
the problem of evil is attributed to Epicurus, the hedonist, via Hume, the sentimentalist. I don’t
think it is a coincidence that the problem is revived by J. L. Mackie, the error theorist. It takes a
certain ethical or metaethical perspective to see the problem of evil in its standard form. (Others
can of course simply follow in that standard without sharing the ethical perspective.) Few theists
would be hedonists or sentimentalists or error theorists, I would imagine, and yet they are
engaging with a problem that sometimes comes from those bases. Few atheists would be
Neoplatonists, divine command theorists, or straightforward moral realists, I would imagine, yet
they are sending a problem sometimes against those bases. Can we be surprised when we all get
confused? The solution to this confusion seems to have been to simply not talk about it; try to
speak as if from no ethical or metaethical place at all, then trust everyone will know what you

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mean when you talk about ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Any complications can be glossed over as belonging to
another debate (that we don’t have time to go into here). But these are not trivial matters and
should not be glossed aside.
Speculation only, and even if true there’s little to be done about it now. At the end of our
brief history of the problem of evil, what we are left with is a ‘standard’ form of the problem of
evil that is evidential (not logical) and presents a challenge to the rationality of theistic belief. And
that’s it. For me, this standard is wrong-headed and aspirationally impoverished. It is a corrupted
form of the problem. But the venom has been injected, infection has set in; it’s too late for
medicine. Should this gangrenous limb be cut off in the hope of saving the rest of the body?
In the next chapter, I will make an attempt at reconstructing a version of the problem of evil
that is logical and presents a challenge to more than just the rationality of theistic belief. It should
clarify and defend what can be meant by a ‘logical’ formulation of the problem of evil, setting the
theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling a set of beliefs, and its purpose will be to tell
us something important about our ethical selves. In so doing, it ought to have a role in helping us
to live well as human beings and, what is more, as philosophers worthy of the name.

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Chapter Two: The Logical Problem of Morally-Impossible
Evil

As has been mentioned, the general consensus is that Plantinga’s critique of Mackie is
successful not only in directly answering Mackie’s challenge but also in undermining all possible
logical formulations of the problem of evil. Plantinga has shown that there can be no essential
inconsistency in the theist’s set of beliefs, at least when it comes to the problem of evil. The only
option that remains for the problem of evil is to shift to evidential formulations. I think that is a
mistake.
I do not dispute that Plantinga’s critique successfully answers Mackie’s challenge. What I
dispute is that it thereby fatally undermines all logical formulations of the problem of evil,
necessitating the shift to evidential formulations. In previous work, I have noted that there is some
ambiguity about what people mean by ‘logical’ or ‘evidential’ formulations and the difference
between the two, that our terminology here is very vague and poorly-argued and likely isn’t fit for
purpose. I’ve also argued that logical formulations are preferable in all cases. But I won’t repeat
myself here because it’s not strictly necessary for my point. It’s old news, anyway.
Let’s settle for a simple and hopefully uncontroversial starting point: the ‘logical’ formulation
of the problem of evil claims that there is an inconsistency in the three propositions: God is good,
God is powerful, evil exists. The evidential formulation, by contrast, does not claim there is any
inconsistency here, only that it is unlikely, on the evidence available to us, that all three things are
true. For the logical formulation, if any two of the three propositions are true then the third must
be false; for the evidential formulation, if any two of the three propositions are true then the third
could be true but is more likely to be false.
The crucial difference between the two, for my purposes, is the presence or absence of a
logical ‘must’. It’s the presence of this logical ‘must’ that compels the theist, with all the power of
logic, to offer a solution to the problem of evil. Only the logical formulation of the problem of evil
remains logically binding in this way, which is what’s needed for the first premise in my argument:
‘A consistent set of theistic beliefs requires a solution to the logical problem of morally-impossible
evil.’ A logical problem requires a solution; an evidential problem does not. If a solution is not
required, then there is no need to reach for one. And since the available solutions are morally
problematic, the best response might be to say nothing and remain with your innocence
presumed. But can you remain there, in your silence, in such a way that you are consistent with
yourself?
I think the shift from logical formulations to evidential formulations was a mistake, but the
truth of that is not necessary for my argument. All that is necessary for my argument is that logical
formulations of the problem of evil remain possible after Plantinga. To this end, I will take up the
gauntlet laid down by Plantinga’s critique of Mackie.

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Plantinga’s Critique
Why is Plantinga’s critique of Mackie so successful? Why does it work? A brief summary of it
will show.
According to Plantinga, Mackie claims this set of beliefs is inconsistent: God is wholly good,
God is omnipotent, and evil exists. But logical inconsistency is demonstrated by pointing to a
contradiction, and Plantinga asks: where is the contradiction in this set? There is clearly no
‘explicit’ contradiction, of the form ‘God is good and God is not good’, or ‘evil exists and evil does
not exist’. So this cannot be what Mackie meant to suggest in claiming the set was inconsistent.
Did he mean to suggest that a contradiction could be generated simply by the application of logical
rules? Like this set: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates is immortal. There is no
‘explicit’ contradiction here, but we can easily generate one if we apply basic logical rules and use
the first two statements to infer an additional (unstated yet necessarily following) statement: If all
men are mortal and Socrates is a man then Socrates is mortal. The claim that Socrates is mortal
necessarily follows from the first two statements in the initial set and yet is clearly contradictory
with the third. Plantinga labels this type of contradiction a ‘formal’ contradiction. It’s not clear that
Mackie’s set can do this either: there is nothing in the three propositions, as stated, that would
allow us to generate a contradictory statement merely by the application of basic logical rules.
But if there is no explicit or formal contradiction then Mackie must have meant to suggest an
‘implicit’ contradiction: a contradiction that can be generated via the application of logical rules,
but only if we first acknowledge some additional statements. These statements serve the purpose
of clarifying what we mean by certain words or concepts. As such, they take the form of necessary
truths. For example, there might be something implicitly contradictory about this set: Mike is a
bachelor; Sarah is Mike’s wife. Clearly, if Mike is a bachelor then he has no wife, so the set cannot
be consistent. But there is no explicit nor formal contradiction, as it stands; nothing clearly stating
‘Mike is married and Mike is not married’, for example.
What is needed are some other propositions to add to the set that will clarify what we mean
by the terms ‘bachelor’ and ‘Mike’s wife’: a ‘bachelor’ is an unmarried man, and ‘Mike’s wife’ is a
woman who is married to Mike. These are necessarily true statements; they cannot be false; they
simply capture and clarify what we mean by our words or concepts. In being necessarily true, it
cannot do any harm to add them to any set of beliefs. They cannot change anything because, in
being necessarily true, they were true all along. If we add them to our set about Mike and Sarah
then we can work towards generating an explicit contradiction: Mike is a bachelor; Sarah is Mike’s
wife; a bachelor is an unmarried man; ‘Mike’s wife’ is a woman who is married to Mike. If we put
the first and third statements together we can generate a new statement: Mike is an unmarried
man. If we put the second and fourth statements together we can generate another new
statement: Sarah is married to Mike. A new set of propositions emerges following this clarificatory
work: Mike is an unmarried man; Sarah is married to Mike. Note, these are essentially no different
from the first incarnation. Nothing has changed because we haven’t changed anything: we’ve only

25
clarified what we meant all along.
We can keep working to expose the implicit contradiction, adding further necessarily true
clarifications until the contradiction becomes explicit: if Mike is an unmarried man, then Mike is
not married; if Sarah is married to Mike, then Mike is married. Again, these are just clarifications of
what we meant all along. With these further additions we can now apply basic logical rules and
generate an explicit contradiction from our original set: Mike is a bachelor; Sarah is Mike’s wife; if
Mike is a bachelor then Mike is an unmarried man; if Mike is an unmarried man then Mike is not
married; if Sarah is Mike’s wife then Sarah is married to Mike; if Sarah is married to Mike then
Mike is married. So Mike is married and Mike is not married and we have made our implicit
contradiction explicit. All it took was a little clarificatory work to uncover what was there all along.
Is this what Mackie meant to do with his logical formulation? It certainly seems so. There is
nothing explicitly contradictory about the set: God is wholly good, God is omnipotent, evil exists.
And neither can we easily generate a contradiction simply by the application of logical rules. What
is needed is further work to dig down and clarify what we mean by ‘wholly good’, ‘omnipotent’,
and ‘evil’. Mackie offers his suggestions: ‘good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good thing
always eliminates evil as far as it can’, and ‘there are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can
do’. (It’s worth noting that he does not clarify what we mean by ‘evil’, other than that it is opposed
to good. That lack of clarification could be seen as underselling the importance of the role that our
understanding of ‘evil’ plays in the problem of evil.) These ‘quasi-logical rules’ would need to be
necessarily true if they are to do the work of merely clarifying what we mean when we say ‘wholly
good’ or ‘omnipotent’.
Plantinga’s first step is to take issue with these clarifications. They are not necessarily true,
he says. There are some limits to what an omnipotent thing can do, even if only the limits of logic.
And it is not clear that a good thing must always eliminate evil as far as it can: sometimes a good
thing might only be able to eliminate one of two evils, and so whilst it ‘can’ eliminate either, it
cannot eliminate all; sometimes a good thing might allow a little evil if that meant avoiding
something worse; sometimes a good thing might allow a little evil if it meant attaining something
better.
Mackie’s clarifications will not cut it. Plantinga pushes and prods and makes his best attempt
at helping Mackie out, but none of the statements that result will serve Mackie’s purposes. Try as
he might, Plantinga cannot find any additions that will reveal an implicit contradiction in the set:
God is wholly good, God is omnipotent, evil exists. He concludes there can be no such additions,
because the set is not, in fact, inconsistent.
The consensus unites in agreement with Plantinga. As a result, few are willing to defend the
logical formulation of the problem of evil. Any who wish to discuss the problem of evil should now
do so on an ‘evidential’ basis only.

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The Return of the Inconsistent Triad
Is it possible to construct a logically-binding formulation of the problem of evil on the basis
of the inconsistent triad? I think it is, but only if we acknowledge the fundamental role that moral
beliefs play in the problem of evil. Up to now, it seems as if atheologians have tried to construct
versions of the problem of evil that question the consistency of theistic belief. They have spoken
about the problem of evil as if it were not an ethical problem at all. Is it any wonder, then, that
they find insufficient means to ground an incompatibility between God’s goodness and the evils of
the world?
For me, the problem of evil is an ethical problem. It is a problem about goodness, value, and
how we are to orient ourselves in a world of suffering. As such, any inconsistency will not be found
in ‘beliefs’ but in ‘values’; or rather, not in beliefs as such but in specifically ethical beliefs about
what is good, what is evil, and what is the appropriate attitude to take to a world of suffering. If
we are to find an inconsistency that grounds a logically-binding formulation of the problem of evil,
we should look to find an inconsistency in values.
Let’s start again from the beginning. Let’s work away at it, in the same way we worked away
at our earlier example of ‘Mike is a bachelor; Sarah is Mike’s wife’. Let’s dig down and uncover
what we mean by ‘God is wholly good’, ‘God is all-powerful’, and ‘evil exists’ in order to expose an
implicit contradiction. I think if we do this then we can construct a version of the problem of evil
that is logically binding. I call it the logical problem of morally-impossible evil. It comes from our
capacity to recognise a difference between what is morally possible and what is morally
impossible, between the morally contingent and the morally necessary; in short, this version of
the problem of evil is a product of our understanding of moral modalities. (And this, of course, is
the purpose of investigating the problem: to reflect on, understand, and improve our moral
understanding.) But since the product of this investigation can only be a clarification of ‘what we
mean when we say’, it is not a matter of establishing a fact about the external world but only of
understanding a truth about ourselves. The question is not ‘are there moral necessities?’ but only
‘do you recognise moral necessities?’ And who can answer that question, other than you? (This
will be discussed in more depth in chapter five: ‘The Problem of Evil as an Ethical Problem’)
What do I understand, when I investigate my own understanding? I find that I do recognise
moral necessities, and that recognition sends me on the way towards a viable formulation of the
logical problem of evil.

Step One: Some People Believe

Some people believe that God exists. Some people believe that God is good. Some people
believe that God is powerful. Some people believe that God created the world; some people
further believe that God can and perhaps does intervene in the world, either by miraculous or
more ordinary means. Some people recognise that there is evil in the world. Some people seem to
believe all of these things. Of the great and complicated Venn diagram that could be constructed

27
for these beliefs, we will find a certain subset of people that will occupy the intersection of all
these beliefs. Some people believe that God exists and is good and powerful, and that that God
created this world and can sometimes intervene in it, and that evil exists in this world. So far, so
uncontroversially good, no?
The claim of the logical formulation of the problem of evil is that no one can consistently
hold all of these beliefs, meaning that some of these beliefs must be rejected or modified in order
for rational consistency to be saved. That ‘must’ carries the force of a logical ‘must’, mandated by
the law of non-contradiction. It is a powerful mandate, not lightly cast aside.
Where is the inconsistency? Clearly, it’s not clear. More needs to be done to unpack quite
how or why it is not possible to believe all these things at the same time. Intuition suggests there
is some kind of inconsistency, lurking beneath the surface, but we’re not sure. We need to do
some digging to unearth the inconsistency, if it’s there.
Where should we start digging? Where is the inconsistency likely to be found? Some areas
are more promising than others. There seems to be little point trying to find an inconsistency
between God’s creative act and God’s power, for example; or between God’s power and God’s
goodness; or between God’s existence and God’s ability to miraculously intervene in the world.
There may be paradoxes to be found there, but they are of no great concern for the problem of
evil (not yet, at least). Clearly, the inconsistency we are interested in, when it comes to the
problem of evil, is between some or all of the other beliefs and the recognition that there is evil in
the world. The clue is in the name: it is the problem of evil, after all.
Which of the other beliefs in the set are understood to be inconsistent with this recognition
that there is evil in the world? It’s unhelpful to say ‘all of them’. We want to narrow it down so
that we can find somewhere promising to dig. Which of the other beliefs are most likely to be
inconsistent with the recognition that there is evil in the world? Or, to put it another way, which of
the other beliefs are most obviously inconsistent with a recognition that there is evil in the world?
The natural answer, I suggest, is the belief that God is good. There is an intuitive clue in the natural
opposition of the words used. Power is intuitively opposed to weakness or ‘impotence’, and there
is no mention of weakness here. Existence is intuitively opposed to non-existence, and there is no
mention of non-existence here. Creation is intuitively opposed to destruction, and there is no
mention of destruction here. Goodness is intuitively opposed to evil, and there is mention of both
here. That suggests we should start digging there.
What is it that could be inconsistent about believing that God is good and recognising that
there is evil in the world? It will depend on what you mean by ‘God is good’ and ‘there is evil in the
world’.
It would be difficult to find a more obvious statement than this: that any inconsistency in the
problem of evil will depend on your values. And yet, it is an issue that is often glossed over in any
discussion of the problem of evil. Sometimes it is neglected entirely. This can be for superficially
virtuous reasons. Often the philosophy of religion, in an attempt to speak as objectively as
possible, tries to speak of the ethical (or religious) world as if from no place within it. But we are

28
not interested in what an object might think about the problem of evil; we are interested in what a
particular human being believes. Even if that particular human being is represented in a way that
makes it objectively representative of a human being ‘as such’, it still requires an ethical
perspective on the world in order to be representative. It’s that ethical perspective that will
ground any inconsistency in the problem of evil, because it is only an ethical perspective that
enables you to recognise good or evil.

Step Two: Moral Meaning

What is it to say that evil exists in this world? It is to make a moral or value judgement. It is
to identify something as bad, not to be preferred, perhaps even forbidden. It is to say that it ought
not to be. If you say ‘it ought to be’, then what reason would you have to label it ‘evil’? If you
didn’t think it was all that bad, wouldn’t you label it something else, such as ‘regrettable, but
necessary’? Or ‘tough, but on balance worthwhile’? When I think about the pain I experience
when I exercise, I’d hesitate to label it ‘evil’. Uncomfortable, maybe, but not evil. Let’s avoid
making a straw man of the evils of the world and focus only on the bad things that can do some
heavy lifting in the problem of evil.
When we recognise the existence of evil in the world, we are not interested in the bad things
that we suspect are justified by good reason, or even the bad things that we do not know whether
or not they are justified by good reason; we are interested in the bad things that happen for no
good reason, or at least seem to us to happen for no good reason. We are interested in the bad
things that it seems to us could not have a good justifying reason. This lack of good justifying
reason causes us to recognise these bad things as things that, in our judgement, ‘ought not to be’.
And in most cases, we’re not just talking about bad things but very bad things, the worst kinds of
things. And this is what I think people mean when they say ‘evil exists’, in the context of the
problem of evil. They mean that very bad things happen that really ought not to happen. A
recognition of their badness forces us to see these things as something that we judge ‘ought not
to be’.
What is it to say that God is good? It is to say that God has a moral capacity and to determine
what that capacity is. It is to say that God has moral judgement, and it is to make a moral
judgement about God’s moral judgement. Is God a good God, or an evil God? Not an evil God,
surely. Is God a good God, or an indifferent God? Not an indifferent God, surely. What does it
mean to say that God is good, morally good, and not indifferent or evil?
It’s a tricky question. There are various ways we use the term ‘good’. Only some of these are
distinctively moral. In the context of the problem of evil, when we say ‘God is good’ we tend to
mean a distinctively moral kind of goodness. We do not mean ‘God is good’ in the same way as we
mean ‘this car is good’ or ‘this food is good’, etc. We do not mean that God is useful, or that God is
good at being God, or that God is good for you, etc. We mean God is just ‘good’, morally good. But
this raises immediate problems, because the only version of moral goodness that we commonly
ascribe to things is a distinctively human concept of moral goodness. We are normally fairly

29
restrictive on where and to what we apply this distinctively human concept. We apply it to
persons, and only to certain types of persons. It’s obviously inappropriate to apply a moral
concept to non-persons. I might shout and swear at my car if it does not start, even give it a damn
good thrashing, but it would be stupid to hold my car morally accountable for its failings. I cannot
demand an apology, for example. Even in more liminal cases, it’s clear we can’t straightforwardly
apply the same human moral concept to non-humans: we do not mean the same thing when we
describe a dog as ‘good’, for example, even though many dogs I’ve known have been better
people than many people I’ve known. A distinctively human concept of moral goodness requires
that one can be responsive to moral reasons, but since a non-human object or subject cannot
respond to those moral reasons, there can be no sensible obligation for them to do so. And
therefore we don’t include non-human objects or subjects within the conceptual space of being
responsive to moral reasons. On that basis, we hesitate to assign them a moral capacity.
But that means that if we are to speak meaningfully of God being morally good and assign
God a moral capacity, we need to include God in that conceptual space. We do this intuitively
when we describe God as ‘good’ and certainly not ‘evil’, for example. This is to make a moral
judgement about God’s moral capacity, which implies that God has a moral capacity. And that
implies that God must be responsive to moral reasons.
What is it to be responsive to moral reasons? Another tricky question. I tentatively suggest,
in simple, circular, and evidently self-serving terms, it is an ability to recognise and be responsive
to our judgements about what ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ to be. If our judgement recognises
something as ‘good’ and ‘ought to be’, then that recognition in itself gives you a reason to do or
promote or favour it. If our judgement recognises something as bad or ‘ought not to be’, then that
recognition gives you a reason not to do or promote or favour it; it gives you a reason to change it
to what ‘ought to be’, or at least something that is not ‘ought not to be’, or else prevent it entirely,
if you can. Perhaps these are over-simplifications too far, but that you probably believe them to be
true can be shown by imagining the counterexample: what would it mean to recognise that
something ‘ought not to be’, yet see no reason not to do or promote or favour it? Such as saying
and sincerely believing that ‘you ought not to beat children’, yet seeing no reason not to beat
children. That seems to me to be contradictory; I wouldn’t know what to make of such a person;
they seem confused. If you think you have no reason not to do what you know ought not to be
done, you only show that you are lacking a moral responsiveness.
But if God is wholly or perfectly good, then God cannot be lacking in goodness. And since
goodness requires that you have sufficient moral responsiveness, this means that God cannot be
significantly lacking in moral responsiveness. That God is good implies that He is responsive to
moral reasons, and that He is wholly or perfectly (or even just highly) good implies that He cannot
significantly lack in responsiveness to those reasons.
The contradictory tension within the problem of evil is now becoming clearer. When we say
‘evil exists’, we mean that there are some things in this world that, in our judgement, ‘ought not to
be’. Our judgement that something ‘ought not to be’ gives us a moral reason not to do or promote
or favour it, and to change it or prevent it if we can. When we say ‘God is good’, we mean that

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God is responsive to moral reasons. It follows that God would seem to have a moral reason not to
do or promote or favour those things that we judge ‘ought not to be’, and to change or prevent
them if He can. A good God does not want evil to exist; a wholly good God cannot allow what
ought not to be.
Whilst this might be enough to establish this statement as true, for you, this is not yet a
necessarily true statement; but it is getting there. More digging is required to make it clearer.

Step Three: Moral Necessity

To say that ‘God is good’ is to say that God has a moral reason to prevent the occurrence of
what ought not to be. To say that ‘evil exists’ is to say that something is that ought not to be. It
follows that God has a moral reason to prevent the occurrence of evil. But perhaps this is only a
prima facie or pro tanto reason? Perhaps this moral reason can be overridden or overruled? Only,
perhaps, under certain ethical perspectives. But we should allow the possibility of those ethical
perspectives. How can we firm up our moral reason to make it something that cannot be
overridden or overruled?
Or perhaps our judgements about what ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ to be are different from
God’s? And so whilst we recognise various reasons to do or not do certain things, those reasons
are not recognised by God because He does not share our judgement. Value judgements are
notoriously difficult to universalise, after all. How can we firm up our moral reason to make it
something that applies universally?
I think these questions suggest an obvious concept: the morally necessary, or (more
accurately in the case of evil) the morally impossible. There are many versions or expressions of
this moral modality, and clearly any acknowledgement of it will depend on your ethical and
metaethical perspective. Some of these ethical perspectives will be more hospitable to the
concept than others. All that matters is that you recognise some moral reasons to be undeniable
and incapable of being set aside; they necessitate a moral responsiveness. There are some things
that categorically ought not to be; no ifs, no buts, no obfuscations, no excuses, and no escape
from the guilt and remorse that necessarily follows if it is done, promoted, favoured, unprevented,
or unchanged. (This is not to say that these things cannot happen, of course, because moral
necessity is not alethic. But that is not relevant here because we are looking for an inconsistency
amongst values, not between values and contingent states of affairs in the world.) I will discuss
this concept, and the role it might play in the problem of evil, in more detail in chapter four:
‘Moral Modalities and the Limits of Moral Thinking.’ All that is necessary to establish for now is
that a) there are such things as moral modalities, and b) those concepts can be applied here, in
some way, to the problem of evil. I am aiming for relatively minimal claims here, only establishing
enough to ground the inconsistency in the problem of evil; I will leave the more expansive claims
for later.
I think most people would happily concede that there are moral modalities, that there are

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lines to be drawn between the morally possible and the morally impossible, even if they might
disagree wildly about where the lines would be drawn and why. For this reason, perhaps it’s best
to avoid any detailed line-drawing at all and remain at the level of loose intuition; you can decide
for yourself where you draw the moral lines, if you want, all I ask is that you accept that there are
lines to be drawn.
For example: Let’s say that it’s true that you ought to give to charity or that you ought not to
lie to your friend, and let’s say that it’s true that you ought not to commit murder or rape. Clearly
these types of obligations would be true in different ways. You ought to give to charity, perhaps,
but it’s not fatally undermining of your moral status if you don’t; it’s morally possible to not give to
charity and remain a tolerably good person. You do not need to give to charity. There might also
be contingent states of affairs that affect your ability to fulfil this obligation, such as that you are
poor and lack the surplus means to give to charity. If this is the case, then you’re off the hook. It is
morally possible to justify your lack of charitable giving. Likewise, you ought not to lie to your
friend, but it’s not unthinkable that you should do so. Perhaps you would rather tell a kind lie than
a cruel truth. It is not necessary that you don’t lie to them. Perhaps it might even, under certain
circumstances, be better to lie to your friend; it might seem like the right thing to do. These are all
within the realms of moral possibility.
But if you commit a murder or rape, that is not the same thing. To commit a murder or rape
is to step into a radically different moral status, destroying any moral status you once had. It is
morally impossible to do these things and remain the same person you once morally were. There
might be contingent states of affairs that affect your ability to fulfil this obligation – or
‘extenuating circumstances’, as we might say – but these are not sufficient to absolve you of the
guilt of murder or rape. (Note I say ‘murder’ rather than ‘killing’, such as in self-defence. That we
recognise a difference between the two – that you can have ‘killed’ but not committed ‘murder’ –
is another example of the meaning of our concepts being defined by the limits of justification via a
morally-sufficient reason. We recognise no comparable possibility of justification in the case of
rape.)
It is morally necessary that you do not commit murder or rape. We recognise this in our
moral responsiveness, when we might ask ‘How could you do such a thing?!’, rather than ‘I think
you could have done better’. We would say you have done the morally impossible, rather than
opted for the wrong choice amongst a range of moral possibilities. We capture this difference
when we say that it is unthinkable that we could commit murder or rape, that murder or rape is
not an option, even if it could somehow be a solution to our problems; but presumably it is
‘thinkable’ and an open option to solve our problems by lying to our friends or not giving to
charity. And yet you would still say that it’s true that you ought not to commit murder or rape, and
that it’s true that you ought to give to charity and not lie to your friends. The two types of moral
obligation are true in different ways. One is expressive of a moral necessity, the other of moral
contingency.
To be clear, I am not saying what is or must be considered to be morally impossible, or even
that anything in particular is morally impossible; I’m not even asking that you agree with my

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example and say that murder or rape is morally impossible (though I reserve the right to look at
you funny if you disagree...). And it is not relevant that some types of moral violation are more
destructive than others, or that some are obligations and others prohibitions, or that these things
would be seen differently in the eyes of the law. All the examples are intended to show is that
there is a conceptual difference between the morally possible and the morally impossible; that
some things are not right, but could be, and other things are not right and can never be. Do you
recognise this difference? If you do, then I suggest that you recognise that there are such things as
moral modalities, in some form. The question that remains is whether and to what extent this
applies to the problem of evil.
I think it does apply to the problem of evil. In fact, I think it is absolutely fundamental to our
understanding of the problem of evil. That is why I will discuss it in more detail later. For now, it
will suffice to say that if there is any meaning to be given to the morally impossible, at all, then it
must apply to the problem of evil, because the ‘evil’ that the problem of evil considers is not just a
particular instance or type of evil, such as murder or the refusal to give to charity, but any evil that
has ever occurred. As such, if the morally impossible has ever happened, then the problem of evil
will consider that as an instance that might be incompatible with the existence of a good and
powerful God.
Has the morally impossible ever happened? This depends on where you draw the line on
what is or is not morally impossible. We all know that truly terrible things have happened. Did any
of them violate a moral necessity? Are any of them such that we would judge that they
categorically ought not to be?
I suggest, minimally, that some of them could be. I suggest, minimally, that we should not
exclude that possibility. I suggest, minimally, that it is possible that the morally impossible has
happened.
For me, I believe that the morally impossible has happened and does happen, a lot. I think it
happens all the time, so often that it is practically routine. That I recognise such an intolerable
frequency of violations of moral necessity is likely what makes me side with Ivan Karamazov and
reject any story of an ‘eternal harmony’ that is achieved on that morally impossible basis, even if I
am not right. But these are more expansive claims and can be left for later chapters.
All that is necessary for my argument is the extremely minimal claim that it is possible that
the morally impossible has happened. It’s possible that some of the terrible things that have
happened have violated a moral necessity. This claim is defensible by argument and not only
intuition. I suggest that if there is any meaning whatsoever to the concept of the ‘morally
impossible’, then that concept cannot be necessarily empty: that is, it cannot refer only to things
that have never and could never happen. If it were such an empty concept, it would remain only
ever hypothetical, an intellectual construction that can have no real reality (like a square circle), a
figment of the imagination; that would seem to undersell it, and it would then be difficult to see
what role the concept could play in our down-to-earth moral thinking. Because we do recognise
the conceptual difference, do we not, between the morally possible act of lying to your friends and

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the morally impossible act of raping them? Or the morally possible act of an interventionist war
(however ill-judged) and the morally impossible act of genocide? But if we insist that the morally
impossible cannot happen, then were we to actually do the morally impossible, we would thereby
show it not to be so. And that cannot be right.
We can say, then, that it is possible that the morally impossible does happen. Some of us will
think this possibility is actual, others will disagree. Universal agreement is not necessary for my
argument.

Step Four: Moral Tragedy

Let’s recap: For the purposes of finding an inconsistency between the belief that God is good
and the belief that evil exists, we found: First, that ‘evil’ represents things that we judge ‘ought not
to be’, and that this gives us a moral reason not to do or promote or favour these things, and to
change or prevent them if we can. Second, that God’s ‘goodness’ entails that God must be
responsive to moral reasons, and therefore a good God does not want evil to exist and a wholly
good God cannot allow what ought not to be. But it is possible that these moral reasons could be
overruled or overridden, or else that God does not judge as we judge and so share our moral
reasons. To avoid falling into these blind alleys, we can restrict our talk to only those moral
reasons that cannot be overruled or overridden or opted out of: the morally impossible. With this
amendment in place, ‘evil exists’ is taken to mean not only that things are that ought not to be,
but that things are that categorically ought not to be.
No one is under obligation to believe that these morally impossible things have happened, of
course; that is something you will need to decide for yourself. But if you think that the morally
impossible has happened, then you will find that belief to be inconsistent with a belief in the
existence of a wholly good God. Because such a God would be morally necessitated to prevent
those things from happening, if He can.
This phrase ‘if He can’ suggests that there is one final gap that remains to be plugged: God’s
ability to prevent what categorically ought not to be. I don’t think this divine attribute needs to be
overstated or overcomplicated, in this context. The amount of power required to change these
categorically awful things would not be all that much, in itself. It is the kind of power that even
lowly human beings have. We can cure children of cancer, sometimes; we can prevent rapists
from perpetrating, sometimes; we can prevent genocidal atrocities, sometimes. Terrible things can
be prevented by happy accident. It’s not that uncommon for cars to randomly break down in the
middle of nowhere; we’ve all been there. Is it too much to ask that the terrorist’s car breaks down
on the way to their target? And as they sit there on the side of the road, waiting for the AA, they
get cold and tired and rethink their life choices. Is it too much to ask that the rapist slips and
breaks their ankle, and cries in pain for help, never appreciating the irony of choosing somewhere
quiet and isolated to pursue their nefarious purposes? We’re in danger of slipping into slapstick
trivialisations. But the point remains that the level of intervention required is extraordinarily
minimal; it is entirely ordinary, in fact. There is nothing that would be obviously supernatural in

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these examples, allowing God to retain His epistemic distance. There is nothing here to suggest
that God could not physically prevent what categorically ought not to be.
Perhaps you will object that there might be something logically preventing God from
intervening. A creature’s free will, perhaps, or the prevention of one morally impossible event only
by the permission of another. If this were the case, then God’s inability to prevent the morally
impossible would seem to undermine any sense that God has an obligation to prevent what
categorically ought not to be. Ought implies can, after all, so God cannot ‘ought’ to do what God
cannot do. Ordinarily, this point would be telling, especially if we were talking about prima facie or
pro tanto obligations. But it won’t change anything in the face of moral necessity.
With moral contingencies, the ‘ought implies can’ principle holds very clearly. If you have
failed to do something that you feel you ought to have done, but then discover that you could not
have done differently, it gets you off the hook. The inability to fulfil an obligation can affect and
possibly eliminate your moral responsiveness to that obligation, and there is nothing obviously
wrong with it doing so. But it does not seem to work in the same way with moral necessities. If you
violate a moral necessity, your guilt might be lessened by learning that you could not have done
differently, but it is not eliminated. The clearest examples here are ‘Sophie’s choice’-style
scenarios in which you have a forced choice between two morally impossible options. That you
have no choice but to do the morally impossible does not affect your moral responsiveness to
those obligations, let alone eliminate it. If someone has suffered such a moral tragedy, we might
encourage them to not feel too bad about what they’ve done, but we wouldn’t expect them to
feel indifferent to what they have done, safe in the knowledge that they had no choice. We would
expect some grief, some remorse, some recognition of the meaning of what they have had to do.
The morally necessary nature of the wrong that has been done necessitates some moral
responsiveness. If someone were to feel genuinely indifferent to the participation in a moral
tragedy such as this, we would likely question their moral responsiveness, in the same way that we
might question the moral responsiveness of someone who orders the detonation of an atomic
bomb over civilian populations, twice, exclaims ‘this is the greatest thing in history!’, and loses no
sleep over that decision, even if they felt they had to do it. We might rather empathise with the
bomber’s copilot’s reaction: ‘My God, what have we done?’
We don’t ordinarily incinerate the children of our enemies in an attempt to preserve the
lives of our soldiers. Whether or not it is sometimes right or necessary to do the morally
impossible, we are free to question whether one ought to feel right about it. We might still think
that participation in the morally impossible, even if impossible to avoid, has an inescapable impact
on your moral status. That you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t is what makes it a
moral tragedy, but you are damned either way. If you lacked a moral responsiveness in such a
morally tragic situation, feeling yourself absolved because you had no choice, we might question
whether you recognise the morally impossible nature of what you have done. When we discover
that we have done the morally impossible, we feel remorse, we seek forgiveness, we do what we
can to atone, but we do not justify ourselves because to do so would be to deny the nature of
what we have done: it would be to say that we ought to have done what categorically ought not to

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have been done. That is at the very least inconsistent.
There is a difference between doing and letting be done, of course. When it comes to the
problem of evil, it’s rare to suggest that God is perpetrating the morally impossible. Ordinarily we
say only that He looks on from the heavens and will not take His part. But whilst there is a
difference between doing and letting be done, when it comes to the morally impossible, letting be
done is sufficient to incur unavoidable guilt. The distinction between moral necessity and moral
contingency remains even at this distance of ‘omission’ because the power of necessitated moral
responsiveness remains. You can stand by and watch one friend lie to another, without
intervening with the truth, and nothing compels you to do otherwise. You can recount this story
later, without expression of remorse, and we probably wouldn’t think any less of you. But to stand
by and watch one friend rape another, without intervening, and consider yourself free from guilt
on account of the fact that it was not you that did the deed? Could you tell that story later,
without expression of remorse, and expect people to see you guiltless? ‘How could you stand by
and do nothing?!’, they might say. They would be incredulous that you were not more morally
responsive in the face of the morally impossible.
Can it make a difference, then, if God has no choice but to do or permit the morally
impossible? If we are to stay true to our ideas about necessitated moral responsiveness in the face
of moral necessities, it cannot. God might have to do or permit the morally impossible, but God
cannot escape the impact that this has on His moral status. If He is responsive to moral reasons,
He will know this as much as we do. He becomes a grief-stricken and guilt-ridden God, a damned
God, a God who knows He has done wrong, even if He had no other option. He would seek our
forgiveness and look to atone. If He does not have this moral responsiveness then He would be
callous and insensitive. Not even God would call Himself ‘good’ under either circumstance. He
would say ‘Oh Me, what have I done?’ and not ‘this is the greatest thing in history!’ He would ask
His children to forgive Him, for He knows what He has done.

It’s possible I have over-egged this pudding. It’s possible I have put more emphasis in this
argument than is needed. I think it is enough to say that the morally impossible has happened,
that a good God could not let the morally impossible happen, and that if He did then He would
incur guilt for doing so, even if He had no other option.

The Logical Problem of Morally-Impossible Evil

I think we can find an inconsistency in the problem of evil if we look to our values and to the
concept of the morally impossible. Such a problem of evil would look like this:

1. God is good (by which we mean wholly good).

2. God is powerful (by which we mean all-powerful).

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 3. Evil exists (where ‘evil’ is the morally impossible, what ‘categorically ought not to be’).

4. ‘God is good’ means that God is responsive to moral reasons and so must be responsive to
moral necessity.
5. ‘Evil’ here means what is morally necessary to prevent or change, such that you incur guilt
if you do not.
6. ‘God is powerful’ here means that God is powerful enough to prevent the morally
impossible in all cases except morally tragic cases where the permission of the morally impossible
is logically unavoidable.

From this it follows that:

7. The only evils that can exist in the world, consistent with this set of beliefs, are those of a
morally tragic nature.

But:

8. It is the nature of a moral tragedy that those who do or permit the morally impossible
recognise that they have done wrong, even if they had no other option, and that that wrongdoing
prevents them from being considered wholly good.

From this it follows that:

9. If God permits the morally impossible in a case of moral tragedy, God cannot be
considered wholly good.

From this, we should be able to generate an inconsistency. If, in permitting the morally
impossible in the case of a moral tragedy, God cannot be considered wholly good, then in order
for Him to be considered wholly good, it is necessary that God does not permit the morally
impossible in the case of a moral tragedy. But if this is true, and God does not permit the morally
impossible except in cases of moral tragedy, then God ought not permit the morally impossible at
all. And yet the morally impossible is permitted by Him when it happens. The set is inconsistent.
The only options that remain are to deny one of the constituent propositions and say that
the morally impossible does not happen, or that God is not wholly good, or that God is not all-
powerful (and given the relatively low level of power required here, really this is to say that God is

37
not at all powerful). Alternatively, you could reject the ethical perspective underlying all this talk of
necessitated moral responsiveness. These are open options and philosophers can and do occupy
these positions: You could say that moral goodness does not necessitate responsiveness to moral
reasons; you could reject the concept of the morally necessary; you could reject that doing the
morally impossible in the case of a moral tragedy prevents you from being considered wholly
good. Each of these comes at a cost. But either way, that philosophers can and do occupy these
positions does not change the inconsistent nature of the problem of evil any more than that some
philosophers have been willing to say that God is not wholly good, or not all-powerful, or that evil
does not exist.
The original three propositions of ‘God is good’, ‘God is powerful’, and ‘evil exists’ have been
shown to be inconsistent with one another. The additions that reveal this inconsistency, which
take the form of clarifications of ‘what we mean when we say’, are necessarily true. Not true of
metaphysical necessity, perhaps, nor logical necessity, nor even physical necessity, but true of
moral necessity. You cannot say that the morally impossible ought to happen or that you can be
indifferent to it happening. If you recognise the concept and agree that it does sometimes happen,
then you will face the challenge of clarifying and if possible reconciling that belief with your beliefs
about God’s goodness and power. That is the logical problem of morally-impossible evil.
The inconsistency is at the level of values only. It should not be considered any less
necessary for that. In fact, I think focussing on values makes it easier to find the kind of necessity
that we’re looking for. Rather than trying to generate an essential inconsistency between
contingent states of affairs, or between some contingent states of affairs and some other
conceptual/analytic claims, I say ‘necessarily this or that value is inconsistent with this other
value’: your value judgement relating to the morally impossible is inconsistent with your value
judgement about God’s goodness and moral responsiveness. This can be necessarily true, even
when we are talking about contingent states of affairs, and even when the value judgements
themselves are not necessarily ‘true’ claims. What matters is only that these ideas are related to
each other in a necessary way.
A good thing cannot permit the morally impossible without incurring guilt. A guilty thing
cannot be considered wholly good. Therefore, there cannot be a wholly good thing that permits
the morally impossible. This statement is necessarily true and so it can establish an inconsistency
in any set of beliefs that includes the claims that there is a wholly good thing that permits the
morally impossible.
That this is a logical problem entails that the theist wishing to retain their set of beliefs must
offer a solution to it, in the form of a theodicy, or else reject the ethical perspective that underpins
all talk of moral necessity. In the next chapter, I explore the first option. The prospects are not
promising, I think, because all solutions to the problem of evil can be shown to be morally
problematic, especially when the problem of evil is understood in this morally necessary way. If
this is true, then only the other option would remain for the theist, which is to reject the ethical
perspective that gives rise to any talk of moral necessity. That comes with its own morally-
problematic costs but it remains a bullet to be bit. I suspect it is the more preferable of the two

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options. This serves to expose a key point of difference between the theist and the atheist on the
matter of the problem of evil, understood as an ethical problem: the theist must believe that
everything that has happened could be justified by a morally-sufficient reason, whereas the atheist
need not believe such a thing. The disagreement here is one of moral modalities. The theist cannot
believe that the morally impossible has happened, but the atheist can. They inhabit different
moral worlds: in one world there is no conceptual space for the reality of the morally impossible;
in the other, there is. Depending on your moral beliefs, this might give you some reason to swing
towards atheism over theism. That reason would be a moral reason: a recognition of the reality of
the morally impossible and an incapacity to remain indifferent to it.

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Chapter Three: Moral Anti-Theodicy

If you are a theist, and you agree with an ethical perspective that is happy to talk about
moral necessity, then the argument of the previous chapter will leave you with a dilemma: Either
‘evil exists’, by which we mean that there are things in this world that categorically ought not to
be, or evil does not exist, meaning nothing is that categorically ought not to be; whatever is, is
right, or at least could be alright.
If there are things in this world that categorically ought not to be, then it would be morally
necessary for a good God to prevent these things from happening; it would be morally impossible
for Him to do otherwise. If He does not prevent these things from happening, then He permits the
morally impossible, participates in a moral tragedy, and cannot be wholly good. He would be guilt-
ridden and grief-stricken or else morally callous. The only way God can be considered wholly good
is if there is nothing that categorically ought not to be. God is only good if the morally impossible
does not happen.
A theist looking to defend the goodness (and existence) of God must therefore argue that
the morally impossible does not happen. Everything that happens can be justified by a morally-
sufficient reason. I think this goes against intuition, but perhaps I’m just too sensitive.

How could a theist argue that the morally impossible does not happen? There seem to be
two options. The first option is to show how the permission of all evils can be morally justified:
God has good reason to permit all the evils of the world. To do this is to construct a ‘theodicy’,
meaning a justification of the ways of God. The second option is not to show how the permission
of all evils can be morally justified, but only to suggest that, for all we know, they could be. This is
the route of ‘sceptical theism’. Either way, the goal is to show that nothing is morally impossible,
that everything is possibly permissible.

Sketch of a Theodicy
I’ll give a brief sketch of a theodicy. It will only be a sketch; you will have to go and consult
the literature to find these theodicies fully and better expressed in all their glorious technical
detail.
We are asking why a good God allows bad things to happen. There are classically two
answers to this question: a) It’s good for us, and/or b) it’s our fault.
Bad things are good for us because they give us the opportunity to be better people. And we
would choose to be better people, if we could. If we lived in a world of pure pleasure and
happiness, with no pain or suffering, we would have no reason or inclination to do or be any
better. We would have little inclination to do anything at all, in fact. We could just lounge about in

40
our blissed-out state. This is not a state that is conducive to the development of virtue. Given the
absence of any negative states of affairs whatsoever, it would be difficult to see how virtue could
even be possible. Virtues emerge when we encounter and overcome pain and suffering, or moral
vice. But in a world without pain or suffering, there would be nothing to overcome and no
possibility of moral vice. Virtue is redundant in such a world, and in being redundant has no value.
Why bother trying to be better? Everything is already as good as it can be.
But we know, at least since Socrates, that once we understand what virtue is then we see
that it is more valuable than pleasure and freedom from pain. We understand that it’s more
important to be better than it is to feel better. Pleasure and freedom from pain might be nice, but
they are of no great worth. They are shallow, superficial, lightweight; they lack any deep and
meaningful value. They are nothing to be proud of. A life dedicated to pleasure and the ignorance
of virtue might be one that we envy but it is not one that we can admire. A world without pain or
suffering is a world as good as it can be, but it is also a world as flat and as trivial as it can be; it has
no depth, no weight, or heights. It is a world without meaning.
Wouldn’t you rather be courageous than cowardly? Wouldn’t you rather be compassionate
than cruel? Wouldn’t you rather be wise than foolish? But a cowardly and cruel fool can
experience just as much pleasure as a courageous and compassionate sage, and is probably more
inclined to avoid pain. Recognising virtue to be of greater value, we would choose to be virtuous
even if it is the more painful road. But if we do value virtue above pleasure, why would we be
willing to trade the more valuable in exchange for the less valuable? Because that is what we
would get in a world without pain or suffering: we would trade the great prize of virtue for the
trifling compensation of pleasure and freedom from pain.
The world is better, therefore, with some pain and suffering, because such a world allows us
to be virtuous. It also allows us to be vicious, of course: it would hardly be possible to be cowardly
if there were nothing to fear, or cruel if there were no pain to inflict. This vicious possibility
presents us with a serious choice: are we to be good or evil? All virtue after this question becomes
even more valuable because it will be freely-chosen virtue. It is not virtue that you fell into, or
inherited; it is virtue that you have earned by your own choices and efforts. But in order to earn it,
you must face the choice, and that means there must be the real possibility of vice. Virtues that
are freely chosen, earned from our own efforts, are things we can really be proud of. They make
us worthy as human beings. But the only way we can achieve these great things is by living in a
world of pain and suffering and temptation and vice. Living in such a world literally makes our
souls what they are. A soul-making theodicy says that the destination is worth the journey.
Why can’t the journey be a bit easier? It would not be the same if the journey were easier,
because the value of the achievement is in part granted by the difficulty of achieving it. The value
of the achievement comes from the fact that you have hard-earned it. Would you want everything
to be easy? Would you want everything handed to you on a plate? What would there be to
celebrate in having what you have not earned? You would be like a spoilt child boasting about
their inherited wealth.

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 God, like Socrates, wants us to be morally and spiritually virtuous. He understands that, to be
of real worth, this needs to be earned. But the way must be hard for the virtues to be hard-
earned. And it is hard to live in such a world, but what is achieved is valuable precisely because it is
hard. As Kierkegaard said, it’s not that the way is narrow, it’s that the narrowness is the way. If the
way were broad and easy, it would not mean all that much to travel along it, and it would be no
great achievement to reach the destination. As Spinoza said, everything excellent is as difficult as it
is rare: if it were common and easy, there would be little to celebrate in its achievement. It is only
because it is difficult that it is worth anything at all.
So why does a good God allow bad things to happen? Because it’s good for us, because it
makes us better people, and because it’s more important to be better than it is to feel better.

But if this is God’s plan, why isn’t the plan going better? Why aren’t we all being better
people? Why does a good God allow us to do such bad things?
Because God has given us freedom, and it’s up to us what we do with that freedom. And
because it’s up to us, the responsibility is ours. It’s our fault when we go wrong. In giving us the
freedom to choose between virtue and vice, when we choose vice, there’s nothing God can do
about it because our decisions are our decisions, not His. He could, presumably, take our decision
away from us, but then He would be robbing us of our freely-chosen virtue, which is the most
valuable thing we could have. We can hardly complain if He leaves us with the most valuable thing
we could have. We have been given the option of living in a world of perfect virtue and yet we
continually choose otherwise. We can hardly complain for getting what we choose.

We apply these lines of reasoning to the evils of the world and infer, as hard as it may be,
that all evils can be justified by these morally-sufficient reasons. Consequently, nothing is morally
impossible.

Sketch of Sceptical Theism

I’ll give a brief sketch of sceptical theism. It will only be a sketch; you will have to go and
consult the literature to find this view fully and better expressed in all its glorious technical detail.
We are asking why a good God allows bad things to happen. If we are not going to answer
with a theodicy, then there is another answer available: we don’t know.
But we should not be surprised that we don’t know. Although we have familiarity and little
difficulty using moral concepts, we should recognise that our ability to know and understand the
deep moral workings of the universe is very limited, especially compared to God’s. God is
omniscient; He has all the knowledge. By comparison, we really do not. It’s difficult to quantify our
lack of knowledge, because, clearly, we don’t know how much we don’t know. But let’s take an

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example of something we do know and understand and use all the time without difficulty, like our
words. We know what we’re talking about when it comes to talking our own language, surely? And
yet, most of us don’t know half the words in our native language, and even the most advanced
linguist is very unlikely to understand more than 0.01% of the available human languages. If we
don’t even fully know something as close to us as our own language, could any of us be surprised
when we come across things in the world that we can’t understand? And languages are human
creations; how much more complicated is a universe! If an omniscient God created the universe,
can we be surprised when His reasons work in ways that are beyond our understanding?
There are other examples of things we know how to use even though we can’t see the
reasons for their working. I can use a computer, for example, but I don’t really understand how a
computer works. I don’t really understand how, when I press these keys, letters appear on the
screen and then get ‘saved’ in some kind of immaterial form that can be copied and transported to
another computer anywhere in the world. I understand about 1s and 0s, and circuits and
electricity and microchips, and that logic plays an important role in there, but my understanding is
confessedly shallow. If you asked me to build a computer from raw materials, and not just
assemble one from pre-made parts, I wouldn’t have the first clue what to do. And a computer is a
pretty basic thing, compared to a universe. If I cannot get my head around the deep workings of
something as simple as a computer, why on earth would I expect to understand the deep moral
workings of the universe?
But if I cannot expect to understand the deep moral workings of the universe, how can I be
surprised when I fail to fully explain those workings?
That I cannot see any morally-sufficient reason to permit the evils of the world is hardly
surprising. Would I expect to see those reasons, if they were there? Imagine someone who doesn’t
understand how to play chess not being able to see a winning move. Would their inability to see it
give you any reason to believe that a winning move isn’t available? Of course not. If there were a
winning move available, the ignorant chess player wouldn’t be able to see it because they don’t
understand how to play chess. So that they can’t see any winning move means absolutely nothing
in terms of whether there is a winning move to be found. Presumably a more experienced or more
skilled player might see things differently. If anything, the person who doesn’t play chess would
probably assume there is a winning move available – most games of chess are won, after all – but
they just can’t see it because they don’t understand the game. That is, the inference goes in
exactly the opposite direction. An acknowledged lack of understanding gives you some reason to
doubt your perception.
Imagine talking to someone who speaks a language that you don’t understand. They are
making noises and gestures but you can’t make a single bit of sense of what they’re saying. Would
you infer from this that they are talking nonsense? Would you infer that because you cannot see
any meaning in their words, there is no meaning in their words? Of course not. You’d only think
they were talking nonsense if you were in a position to understand what they were talking about
in the first place. The natural reaction otherwise is simply to acknowledge that you don’t
understand and leave it at that. If anything, when someone is talking to us in a language that we

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don’t understand, we assume they are talking meaningfully and we don’t understand because we
don’t speak their language. An acknowledged lack of understanding gives you some reason to
doubt your perception; in this case, quite a strong reason.
Sceptical theism works in a similar way. We look at the evils of the world and we fail to see a
reason why they should be permitted. But we also acknowledge that God is in a position to know a
great deal more about these things than we are. Our knowledge is extremely limited by
comparison, to such an extent that we probably wouldn’t be able to understand the big picture,
even if it were shown to us. If God had a reason to permit all the evils of the world, would we
expect to see it? Like someone who doesn’t know how to play chess wouldn’t expect to see a
winning move, or someone who doesn’t speak the language wouldn’t expect to see meaning in a
foreigner’s words, we, as finite creatures, wouldn’t expect to see the deep moral workings of the
universe. It’s beyond us. That we can’t see any reason why these evils should be permitted
therefore doesn’t tell us all that much about whether there is a reason, just like the ignorant chess
player can’t infer that there is no winning move, and the inadequate linguist can’t infer the
foreigner is talking nonsense. If anything, like the ignorant chess player and the inadequate
linguist, we might assume there is a reason and we can’t see it because we don’t understand. The
inference could go in the opposite direction. An acknowledged lack of understanding gives you
some reason to doubt your perception.
Following this line of reasoning allows us to be sceptical about our perception of the morally
impossible. Consequently, we are free to say that, possibly, nothing is morally impossible.

Both theodicy and sceptical theism can conclude that the morally impossible does not
happen. Theodicy offers us a justification for all the evils of the world, thereby eliminating the
morally impossible from its view of the world. Sceptical theism does not offer us a justification, but
does offer us a reason to doubt our moral perception, thereby eliminating the morally impossible
from its view of the world.

The Failings of Theodicy and Sceptical Theism

Both theodicy and sceptical theism have been thoroughly criticised elsewhere. I won’t repeat
those criticisms excessively, only sufficiently. I will focus on theodicy shortly, but to highlight only
the most obvious failings of sceptical theism: It’s very difficult to stop sceptical theism sliding into a
more widespread moral scepticism. Ultimately, this would be morally paralysing. If sceptical
theism says that ‘for all we know’, what seems bad is in fact for the best, then how are we to ever
judge anything as bad? For all we know, anything we judge to be bad is not, in fact, bad. And for all
we know, everything we judge to be good is not, in fact, good. We are not in a position to
understand the deep moral workings of the universe, after all, so how can we be expected to be
reliable judges on these matters? It would be rational to withhold judgement, in light of our
ignorance and epistemic limitations. But that means we cannot make any moral judgements at all,

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and that is hardly a desirable outcome and not particularly conducive to virtue.
The problem is worse than this, in fact. If, as sceptical theism has it, everything bad might be
for the best, we are presented with a difficult decision when we encounter something that
appears to us to be bad and preventable. Should we prevent the bad thing? What if, for all we
know, this bad thing is necessary for some greater good thing, or necessary for the prevention of
some even worse thing? It would be very regrettable if we intervened, prevented the bad thing,
and thereby caused something even worse. Perhaps, in preventing this small bad thing, we deny
someone the opportunity to develop their virtue. We’d be robbing them of the most valuable
thing imaginable! And we certainly don’t want that. All things considered, perhaps we shouldn’t
prevent the bad thing. We are not in a position to understand the deep moral workings of the
universe, after all, so how can we be expected to be reliable judges on these matters? We should
let it happen, trusting God’s judgement over our own.
But this leads to the absurd situation in which we ought never to prevent anything bad when
we can, which is hardly a virtuous attitude.
These are old criticisms and much debated. Nothing much depends on them for me or my
purposes. For my purposes, the more significant problem with sceptical theism is what might
follow from it for the meaningfulness of our moral judgement. These issues will be discussed in
more detail in the next chapter, but to foreshadow: For moral judgement to be meaningful, it
must have limits; a shape is defined by its edges and boundaries and so a shape must have edges
and boundaries. Sceptical theism, like all unrestrained forms of scepticism, tells us to doubt the
most basic certainties we have; and not just some of them, but all of them. It tells us to think the
unthinkable. But if I do this then I lose my footing.
I know that child abuse is wrong. I understand that as clearly as I understand the meaning of
the terms involved. If child abuse is not-wrong then I no longer understand what ‘wrong’ means. I
say it is unjustifiable; I say it is not the kind of thing that can be excused or made-good; I say it is
morally impossible, something that categorically ought not to be. This judgement is an edge or a
boundary or a cornerstone of my moral judgement; it shapes my moral world; it is a moral
necessity. But sceptical theism asks me to doubt my judgement in this and in all cases, saying: it
might be that, sometimes, child abuse is justified. But if I do as I am asked, I lose that cornerstone
of my moral judgement and with that the shape of my moral world, the boundaries that
determine its meaning, and so I no longer understand what you are asking me to do. To change a
moral judgement? But the claim that child abuse is sometimes justified is not something that I
would understand to be a moral judgement: it’s wrong to justify child abuse. You don’t ask me to
change my moral judgement but to abandon it entirely and replace it with something else,
something I don’t recognise as anything that can be called ‘moral’. You may as well ask me to keep
doing ordinary arithmetic on the assumption that one plus one does not equal two.

The failings of theodicy have been well-documented elsewhere, by others and by me. Again,
it’s not my intention to repeat myself excessively here. My task is to show how theodicy and

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sceptical theism fail specifically in the case of the morally impossible.
As a rule, the question will always be one of moral limits. Specifically: are there any? The
nature of the morally impossible or morally necessary is that it specifies some moral limits. The
nature of denying the morally impossible or morally necessary is therefore to deny that there are
any moral limits. But shouldn’t there be limits to our moral thinking? Shouldn’t there be some
things that we ought not to consider? Aren’t there some moral beliefs that are not open to doubt,
and ought not to be, because doubting these beliefs shows us to have lost our moral minds?

Moral Insensitivity
Theodicy stands accused of being morally insensitive. Theodicy does not take the evils of the
world seriously enough, attempting always to downplay and diminish and claim that things are not
as bad as they seem. In the construction of theodicy, routine examples are used such as trips to
the dentist, cars breaking down, or discordant music. You will rarely find a theodicy explicitly
discussing the worst evils in the world. Not many theodicists are willing to explicitly defend the
value of child abuse or genocide. They stick to the easy cases. But there is no getting around the
fact that if theodicy offers a justification for the permission of all evils in the world, then it offers
that justification for the hard cases as much as for the easy. In doing so, theodicy draws a
comparison between these easy examples and the worst evils in the world, as if they were morally
comparable.
Anyone sensitive to the horrors of these ‘hard cases’ could not allow themselves to draw this
comparison. Perhaps we can justify sending our children to the dentist and can offer a morally-
sufficient reason in defence of the pain suffered at the dentist’s hands, but wouldn’t we hesitate
(to put it extremely mildly) to offer a defence of the pain suffered at the hands of the child abuser?
Should we override this hesitation as irrational over-sensitivity, safe in the knowledge that both
the evils of the dentist and the evils of the child abuser are morally comparable and justified by
the same set of morally-sufficient reasons? It stretches our moral conscience to say so. I would say
it stretches it to breaking point. Our moral sensitivity will not allow that comparison to be drawn.
Anyone who draws that comparison reveals themselves to lack this moral sensitivity. And so
this is what theodicy stands accused of, since this is what it does. It is only possible to construct a
theodicy if you are willing to treat all evils as comparable under the same category: raw material
for soul-making, or outweighed by the value of free will. But not all evils are created equal and
some are unequal enough to give us reason to pause. Again, I feel I’m putting it extremely mildly.
Shouldn’t we hesitate to offer a justification for genocide? What would it say about us if we did
not hesitate, or else hesitated but then overruled our moral sensitivities? What is it that we are
trying to be if we were to do this: morally or intellectually virtuous? Is a justification for genocide
recognisable as a picture of virtue? Can it be? What genocide-apologist have you ever looked at
and thought: ‘There goes a virtuous person.’
The accusation of moral insensitivity becomes clearer if we talk in terms of the morally

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impossible. In being something that ‘categorically ought not to be’, there can be no justification
for it: that is part of its categorical nature. To offer a justification is therefore to deny its morally
impossible status. The answer to the question: ‘Should child abuse be permitted?’ would not be
‘categorically, no’, but ‘it depends’. But if you deny the morally impossible nature of the morally
impossible, you reveal yourself to lack the moral responsiveness necessitated by moral necessity.
And given that theodicy covers all conceivable evils, this amounts to a rejection of the morally
impossible as such. Which is hardly surprising, given that this was the horn of the dilemma that
theodicy has chosen to escape the logical problem of morally-impossible evil.
The morally problematic status of theodicy is exposed in exactly this way. From a certain
ethical perspective, we look at the world and identify some things that categorically ought not to
be; we identify the morally impossible. Theodicy corrects our perception and insists that, contrary
to moral appearances, nothing is morally impossible. Everything is permissible. But in normal
running, if someone were to offer a moral justification for genocide or child abuse, I would think
moral insensitivity to be only the most visible of their failings.

Detached Perspective
Theodicy stands accused of adopting too detached a perspective when theorising about the
potential justifications for the evils of the world. As part of the process of constructing a theodicy,
we are encouraged to step back from our down-to-earth moral perspective and try to see the big
picture. We are encouraged to look at the world as if from a God’s-eye view. How else can we
understand God’s reasons for permitting the evils of the world except by trying to see things from
His perspective? But it is claimed there is something morally problematic about adopting this
detached perspective, or at least something problematic about insisting that we adopt this
detached perspective and therefore that we detach ourselves from our down-to-earth moral
perspective.
Ordinarily, this criticism depends upon the essential inappropriateness of morally theorising
at that detached perspective. Such a perspective runs the risk of being callous and insensitive, for
one, but also denies us access to the important subjective elements that we might think are
essential to any moral perspective at all. Theodicy claims that to see more clearly, we need to step
away from our loves, our connections, our emotions, our past and present, our place in the world,
and all that informs our values. According to theodicy, in theory, these are all corruptions of our
moral perspective; they cloud our thinking about the deep moral workings of the universe. But
these things are what make our moral perspective, are they not? These things are what make us
human. There is something inhuman, in the worst sense of the word, about a moral perspective
that speaks and calculates as if from no place within the moral world. It is the objectivity
characteristic of an object, monstrously impartial, ruthless, and indifferent.
Why is this inappropriate? Imagine someone taking that attitude in the presence of a moral
atrocity: ‘Sure it seems bad now but let’s try to see the big picture!’ And if we asked how they
could remain so unaffected by the horror in front of them and bring themselves to take such an

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objective view, they reply, scornfully: ‘Your subjective human emotions are clouding your
judgement.’ This has echoed tones of a comic-book villain, or of ‘I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t
do that’, or some similarly terrifying amoral android about which might be warned: ‘It can’t be
bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and it absolutely
will not stop, ever, until you are dead!’ (That was from The Terminator, in case you weren’t sure.)
To insist on retaining a detached perspective to moral atrocity is not the behaviour of a paragon of
moral understanding; it’s a sign of a profound lack of moral engagement.
Of course, this doesn’t happen. It would be a mistake to think that theodicy is actively
engaged in the presence of moral atrocities. Theodicy is a theoretical exercise, and it happens in a
theoretical space where detachment is possible and reasonable in a way that would it not be in
normal life. The point, therefore, is not so much that it would be inappropriate to adopt this
detached perspective in the presence of moral atrocity, because this is not what theodicy does.
The point is that something important is lost in adopting this detached perspective. What is lost is
a sense of moral engagement and the access to moral reality afforded by that engagement.
Can moral thought be accurate and true if it is not engaged? If, in order to see things more
clearly, you detach yourself from the pain and suffering, the injustice, the violation suffered in the
moment by a particular individual, a moral reality captured and fully expressed by a perspective
that is crying out in anguish, a cry that prompts a recognition and response in you that ‘this ought
not to be’, what is it you are trying to see more clearly? In turning away from that particular
perspective, it seems more that you are doing everything you can not to see the moral reality that
is staring you in the face. And not just this particular moral reality, but all such moral realities. It
seems more that you are trying to look everywhere but to the most obvious and profound moral
realities we can access. How accurate and true can any moral thinking be when it is so wilfully
detached from any kind of sincere moral engagement?
The question is more obvious in the case of the morally impossible. The nature of moral
necessity is that a recognition of it compels a necessary moral responsiveness: you cannot turn a
blind eye, and you cannot look away to see things more clearly because nothing can be clearer.
That theodicy insists on stepping back and distancing itself from such a recognition, in order to see
more clearly, only shows that it does not recognise any moral necessity in the first place. And the
problem is not just that this is done but that it is deliberate. Theodicy insists that, in a theoretical
space, we must overrule our moral engagement with the world and try to make the impossible
possible. But if we are sincere in our recognition of moral necessity, we know this cannot be done.
Theodicy’s morally problematic status is exposed in this way. In insisting that we adopt a
detached perspective in the face of the morally impossible, to look away and step back to see the
bigger picture, theodicy reveals itself to lack any kind of moral perspective worth having. It shows
itself to have lost contact with moral reality and to have chosen that loss of contact. It thinks a
moral perspective is more true the less it is engaged with the world. It wants to detach itself from
the reality of the worst moral atrocities, showing itself unwilling to see them for what they are,
and that it can do so only shows that it is incapable of recognising the morally impossible.

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 In normal running, if someone were to claim that in order to really understand the moral
status of genocide or child abuse, you need to step back and ignore the individual stories or the
perspectives of the victims, looking instead to the big global and societal picture, I would think
such a person has shown themselves to lack any perspective worth listening to. Their perspective
is not more accurate for their detachment, but less; their detachment has not clarified their
thinking, but clouded it. I’m not sure such a perspective could see the truth, let alone speak it.
To be clear, that is if they are making a moral claim. If they were making a political or
economic claim then things would be different. But if we are discussing the moral status of a
particular thing, citing economic or political reasons exposes a lack of moral understanding and/or
responsiveness, such as when people defended slavery on the grounds of economic necessity.
Even if people used economic reasons to argue against slavery, it would be a case of ‘right answer,
wrong reasons’. The wrongness of slavery could not be accurately captured in the claim that it is
bad for the economy, just as that wrongness cannot be countered by the claim that it is good for
the economy. Both claims would undersell it and it doesn’t matter if either claim is true; neither is
morally relevant. If you think that the economic consequences are a legitimate reason for or
against such practices, then you show that you have not understood something important about
the morally impossible. Surely we would recognise slavery to be wrong even if it were good for the
economy, and perhaps made even worse because it would be good for the economy, because
whilst there is something terribly unjust about people being enslaved, that injustice is only added
to when other people profit from it. The analogy with theodicy ought to be clear. Regardless, it is
clear that theodicy is making a moral and not a political or economic claim.

Consequentialism, Unrestricted
A collection of accusations revolve around theodicy’s being either covertly or overtly
consequentialist or instrumentalist in its moral reasoning. This is more obvious in the case of the
soul-making theodicy. This theodicy says that the end, of having a morally and spiritually virtuous
soul, justifies the means, of living in a world of pain and suffering. Whilst it might be difficult to see
at the time, in the final analysis we would judge the benefit to be worth the cost. It’s for this
reason that theodicy appeals to examples such as going to the dentist. This is a clear case where
the end, of good dental health, justifies the means, of temporary discomfort in the dentist’s chair.
Extrapolating from this case, we infer that many if not all instances of suffering might be nothing
more than a short-term investment for a longer-term gain. They are all capable of being justified
on consequentialist grounds. As long as the consequence is worth the cost, and as long as the
consequence is realised, then there is no problem. Theodicy tells us that God has a plan, that the
consequence of that plan is worth the cost, and therefore God will achieve His plan by any means
necessary. There is a problem here, though, because we would not normally endorse such an
unrestricted consequentialism, and it’s particularly unusual for theists to do so. Are there no limits
on what can be permitted in order to reach our goal?
Some of the costs that are required for this goal involve the suffering of others. This raises

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another problem: The suffering of others becomes useful for us. It helps us to achieve our goal,
because our goal is to become better people and the suffering of others helps to make us better
people. If all that really matters is that we achieve our goal of moral and spiritual virtue, and that
goal is to be achieved by any means necessary, then it seems, paradoxically, that we should want
others to suffer so that we have more raw material for our soul-making. We should be
disappointed to live in a world with less suffering, because it gives us less opportunity for growth.
Our own suffering might be something we can bring ourselves to sign-off on, on consequentialist
grounds, as being a cost that is worth bearing for the greater benefits that come from it. But can
we see the suffering of others in the same way? To do so would involve, as D. Z. Phillips said, ‘the
objectionable instrumentalism in which the sufferings of others are treated as an opportunity for
me to be shown at my best. Ironically, if I think of their sufferings in this way, I am shown at my
worst.’
The morally problematic status of theodicy is shown in this way. There is something wrong in
seeing the suffering of others as being, ultimately, a good thing, because it is instrumentally useful
for me and my purposes. Can their suffering be made good on the grounds that it is useful for me?
It misses the point to say so. Their suffering harms them, not me; or at least if it harms me then it
does so only indirectly and I cannot lay claim to it. I am not the victim of their suffering. But if I am
not the victim of their suffering, and their suffering is helping me achieve my purposes, then the
cost is theirs but the benefit is mine. And so there can be no untainted benefit for me if that
benefit only comes at the cost of someone else’s harm. My gains are made ill-gotten by this, and if
I am virtuous I would understand that ill-gotten gains are not gains at all.
Many of us who are not totally unrestricted consequentialists would think there is something
wrong with God achieving His plan by any means necessary. There ought to be limits on what can
be justified by a consequentialist cost-benefit analysis. Ordinarily these limits are determined by
questions of justice, by questions about what is right and not only about what is good. It might be
‘good’ if you can save a town from a riot and all the destruction that follows, but it is not ‘right’ to
do so by convicting someone you know to be innocent. We should not convict innocent people
even if the consequences are better. Possibly, we should not convict innocent people especially
when the consequences would be better by doing so, if, by that, we are using the innocent person
for our own benefit; because there is something unjust about convicting an innocent person, but
there is something more unjust about profiting from it and considering ourselves righteous and
justified for doing so.
Does God acknowledge these right-based limits? Are God’s means to the ends of soul-
making restricted in any way? It’s difficult to see how, given the range and extent of suffering and
injustice that is already seen as part of the soul-making plan. We might ask: if these are within the
restrictions, what is left without?!
Perhaps we are not in a position to know what sort of restrictions God is operating under,
but we could at least settle on a compromise that, even if God’s means-ends reasoning is
restricted in some way (that we can’t see), the moral objection to theodicy is that it is not
restricted enough. Some things happen that ought not to happen and cannot be made good by a

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consequentialist appeal to the end justifying the means. There ought to be restrictions on using
the violation of innocent children as a character-building exercise, for example. Even if good
characters were built that way, it wouldn’t be right to do so.
The case is clearer with the morally impossible. It is difficult to see how the concept could be
compatible with an unrestricted consequentialism. The identification of something that
‘categorically ought not to be’ does not come with the caveat ‘unless you can get something really
good out of it’. Our previous examples of child abuse, genocide, and slavery are natural examples
here. It doesn’t matter how much good comes of these things, that good can’t make them right.
Imagine someone justifying genocide on the basis of the genetic improvements to the future
human race, or of having extra living space. Imagine! ‘But aren’t these good consequences?’, they
might say. That is hardly the point. ‘But what if these good consequences outweighed the costs, in
the long run?’ Would that make a difference? Does the wrongness of genocide hinge upon the
question of whether or not it works out for the best in the end? How could it? It is truer to say it is
wrong regardless of the long-term consequences, not made wrong because the consequences
happened to be bad, and certainly not made right because the consequences happened to be
good. ‘But what if God knows these good consequences outweigh the costs?’ That doesn’t change
the nature of the consequentialist justification. If we find it objectionable as such, regardless of the
outcome, without knowledge of the outcome, why would it be any different with knowledge of
the outcome? Unless we abandon our objection to an unrestricted consequentialism, God’s
knowledge doesn’t change anything. Our rejection of a consequentialist justification wasn’t
conditional on it having bad consequences, or good consequences, and so how could it make any
difference to know which it is?
To escape the moral problems of instrumentalism and consequentialism, theodicy would
have to show either that its means-ends reasoning is in some way sufficiently restricted in terms of
what is right, or else it does not, in fact, depend on a means-ends reasoning at all. The first route
will come up against the problem of all currently-known evil and suffering being, as it stands, fair
game for means-ends justification, which certainly seems to be very unrestricted indeed; we can
at least say this is not nearly restricted enough, which is much the same problem: it’s not right,
even if it were good. The second route would abandon the central pivot point around which all the
heavy lifting of theodicy turns. If this evil and suffering does not serve a purpose, then what is the
point of it?
Theodicy, especially in its soul-making form, is forced to commit to a too-unrestricted
consequentialism and cannot help but slide into an objectionable instrumentalism. It inherits the
moral problems of both.

Means-Ends Reasoning
Related to the generic problems of instrumentalism and consequentialism is a distinctly
Kantian problem of using human beings as a means to an end. That we ought not to do this is a
famous expression of Kant’s Categorical Imperative: We must always treat human beings as an

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end-in-themselves and never only as a means to an end. This acts as a categorical limit on the
ways we are permitted to treat one another. We can treat people as a means to an end only if we
also respect their humanity and the limit that it imposes on us. So I can hire someone to do a job
but I cannot make them my slave.
This is a profoundly important moral insight and not one that is confined to its Kantian
expression. But, perhaps unfortunately, it has become so strongly associated with its Kantian
expression that it’s now difficult to separate the baby from its Kantian bathwater. Even if we are
only talking about ethical bathwater, few people are avowed Kantians; fewer still are Kantians
about the rest. But we do not need to be Kantians to accept his point. All we need is to accept
some parts of his argument. The parts we need are found scattered across the whole Kantian
system, traceable back through from his philosophy of religion, through his ethics, to his
metaphysics. I think the point is important enough to warrant plunging into this murky bathwater,
or at least be willing to dip a toe. I apologise to those immersed in these deep waters, because I
can only dip a toe and take disgraceful short cuts. There is so much more than I can cover here. If
you do not know about these greater depths already, I hope you will go and learn about them. It’s
a fool’s errand to offer a rushed summary of the argument, and a wise man would fear to try, but I
will have a go.

It might be that few of us are avowed Kantians, but most of us would accept that a human
being acts as a peculiar kind of limit to our will. I can do what I want to an object, like a stone or a
car or a piece of fruit, especially if I own the object, but I can’t treat people however I want. An
object doesn’t feel or think, it has no desires, no purposes, no aims or ends. I cannot frustrate a
stone or thwart its purposes; I cannot harm a stone. But a person is different. A person can feel,
can suffer, can want and desire. A person can have aims and ambitions. I can harm a person. A
person can say ‘please don’t’, and this gives me a reason not to.
What accounts for this difference? Why can I do what I like to a stone but not to a person?
For Kant, the answer lies in the nature of these things. The nature of a stone is to be an object: it
has no subjective consciousness, it does not think or feel, and so it is governed only by the laws of
nature. It is a thing, only. A person, on the other hand, thinks and feels and is aware of itself: it has
subjective consciousness. Because of this it can think about what it is doing. And because it can
think about what it is doing, it can respond to reasons of thought and not just the physical process
of cause and effect. A person is more than just a thing. A person can make a choice.
We know this because we are persons, and being a person forces us to accept certain
realities. That we are things that think, for example, is something we cannot help but recognise – it
being famously self-justifying in a ‘I think, therefore I am’ kind of way – and it is this that in part
defines us as persons and not only objects. But Kant moves further than Aristotle’s rational
animals and Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. The great insight of Kant’s metaphysics is that the limits
of my world are determined by my nature. As a thinking thing, my world can only be as a thinking
thing can think it.

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 There are limits to what can be known and experienced, and these limits are determined by
me; or rather, by my nature. I am a human being, physical and embodied, with five senses and a
capacity for rational thought. I can know only what such a thing can know: that is, only what is
accessible to the senses or to the powers of rational thought. I cannot know what I am not able to
know, and what I am able to know is determined by the abilities of my human nature. I can reflect
on these abilities and categorise them, and in so doing I would identify the limits of knowledge. All
that I can know would fall within these ‘categories of understanding’; everything that falls without
is beyond me and must be excluded from my picture of the world because it is literally nothing to
me. I cannot go beyond what my nature allows.
I cannot conceive of a world without space, because ‘space’ is how I arrange the outer world
of physical objects. I cannot think of an ‘object’ without defining its location and edges in spatial
terms. I define an object in space, but space is not itself an object: space is the way I think about
objects. This is a fact about me and my nature and the nature of my human way of thinking.
I cannot conceive of a world without time, because ‘time’ is how I arrange my inner world of
thoughts. I cannot think of a thought without locating the experience in the present moment,
placing it in a sequence that moves from the inaccessible past that has been, to the inaccessible
future that has yet to be. I have memories of the past, and I have imaginings of the future, but all
my thoughts are always located in the ‘now’. They cannot be otherwise; I cannot be anywhere but
the present moment. I define my experience of thinking in terms of time. This is a fact about me
and my nature and the nature of my human way of thinking.
I cannot conceive of a world without the laws of reason, because those laws are a
precondition for my thinking coherently at all. Cause and effect, substance and quantity, necessity
and possibility, the impossibility of true contradiction; these are all definitive of the way that I
think, as an embodied thinking thing. I cannot know a non-spatial, non-temporal, non-rational
world. That is not something an embodied thinking thing is able to know.
My world is my world, because my nature determines what the world is like for me. If I have
eyes then I live in a world of light. If I have no eyes, no way of detecting light, and no one is in a
position to tell me differently, then light is a meaningless concept for me.
But choice is not a meaningless concept for me. I understand what it means to think and
deliberate and choose. This suggests that I have a capacity to think and choose, and this is central
to my understanding of what I am as a person and not just an object like any other object. I can
think and choose; a stone cannot.
Were it not for this capacity to think and choose, I would be much like a stone. The stone
and I inhabit the same physical world, after all. I understand, because I observe, that I am
constrained by the laws of nature like any other physical thing. Like a stone, I cannot choose not to
be held to the earth by gravity, for example. These laws of nature appear to be regular, fixed, and
deterministic. They are knowable and predictable. Under the laws of nature, if I drink alcohol then
I will get drunk. I know this, and there’s really nothing I can do to stop the biological processes
being what they are and acting as they do. It’s a deterministic and so inevitable process, subject to

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the laws of cause and effect; a domino effect. If I drink alcohol, then the biological dominoes will
fall, and if I drink enough then I will too. I cannot choose to drink alcohol and avoid the effects of
doing so. I cannot escape my nature. But I do get to decide whether to drink alcohol. I know that if
I drink I will experience the effects, but I know that I can avoid the effects by not drinking. This
seems like a choice that I can make. From my perspective, this seems like a free choice.
An object would not have this luxury. This marks a clear difference between me and it. As a
person, I view myself under two aspects: on the one hand, I am a physical object, constrained by
the laws of nature; on the other, I am a thinking and freely-choosing subject. This is my nature, as I
see it, and my world is determined by my nature. My world is the world of a person amongst
objects: I can choose to drink the drink and get drunk, but the drink cannot choose not to be
drunk. But my world is also the world of a person amongst other persons. Everything I realise
about myself I also realise applies to any other thinking thing. Other people, too, are living as a
person in a world of persons and objects. They too can and must choose how to think and act. I
can ask them and they can refuse. I can appeal to their reason. I cannot ask a stone to move,
because it cannot respond to reasons.
Human beings live in a world of reasons and not just physical causes and effects. For Kant,
this is what separates us from mere ‘things’ and makes us more than just a thing. It is this that
defines our humanity. To treat a human being as if it were a mere thing is therefore to deny its
humanity. Is there anything wrong with this?
Kant says yes. It’s straightforwardly contradictory, for a start: you recognise something as a
person, not only an object, yet treat it as if it were only and object and not a person. So which is it,
a person and not only an object, or an object and not a person? It cannot be both. A man would be
judged insane if he were to talk to a stone as if it were a person; is it any less insane to treat a
person like an object? It is showing a disconnect with reality in either case.
But to treat a human being only as a means to an end is to treat it as if it were only an object
or a thing to be put to use. It is to show yourself to misunderstand – or rather, fail to sufficiently
respect – the distinctly human nature of a human being. This is self-contradictory, because you
cannot help but recognise this distinct nature in yourself: you recognise that you are not only a
thing to be put to use. And you can also recognise that other human beings are no different from
you. But if you recognise the reason in the former case, with yourself, then you should recognise
the reason in the latter case, with other people. You are not merely a thing to be put to use, and
neither are they, so to treat them as if they were collapses into incoherence.
So far the mistake is a rational mistake only. But Kant pushes further and says that this
‘humanity’ (that is present in and definitive of persons) is of absolute value and that we have a
categorical duty to respect and value it. It is not only a rational failing to treat human beings as if
they were only objects, it is also a moral failing.
Human beings do not only think and choose: we also value things. We have aims and
ambitions, desires and aversions, likes and dislikes. We govern our behaviour by reasons directed
towards the satisfaction of these ‘ends’. None of these ‘ends’ necessarily have value beyond our

54
valuing them. I want a piece of cake, I like to sit in the sun, I want to write a good book, I like
certain comedians because I find them funny, but this is just me. These are subjective preferences.
There’s nothing to say anyone else ought to align their values with mine or recognise them as
being important. All we must recognise is the bare fact that we, as persons, value things. If I
recognise you as a person, then I recognise that you value things too. None of these things are
necessarily of value, but that you have a capacity to value is necessarily something that I must
accept.
Is there anything that is necessarily of value? Is there anything objectively valuable? Kant
says that humanity, in ourselves and in others, is objectively valuable. This is because whilst all our
individual valuings might be subjective, none of them would be possible without our capacity to
value. As such, nothing has any value if there is no capacity to value. And therefore the capacity to
value is a necessary precondition for anything being of value at all. If there is anything that can be
considered universally or objectively valuable, then, it will be the source of all value, what makes
any value possible, which is the capacity to value. And this is precisely what in part defines a
human being: a thinking thing with a capacity to value.
A human being is objectively valuable because it is not only something that values –
something that has ‘ends’ – it is the source of all value, a necessary precondition of value,
becoming objectively or universally valuable and an ‘end in itself’.
This is not the only route to this conclusion, but it does help to demonstrate the way that our
humanity, understood as the capacity to think and value and be responsive to reasons, can act as a
limit to our will. There are other routes. If I value something, and want that thing, there are certain
choices I cannot coherently make in pursuit of it. I cannot pursue something in a way that removes
the necessary preconditions for it; I cannot cut off the branch on which I’m sitting (and expect to
remain sitting on it). To illustrate: I cannot pursue a trivial want by choosing to do something that
seriously endangers my life, for example. My continued existence is a necessary condition for the
satisfaction of any desire, so to throw it away in an attempt to get what I want is self-defeating
(quite literally). It follows that I ‘ought not’ jump onto the train tracks as a train approaches in
order to pick up a £5 note. This is not a hypothetical imperative, of the form ‘you ought not jump
on the train tracks if you want to spend the £5 note’, but a categorical imperative, because there is
no ‘if’ about it: you cannot spend that £5 note when you are dead, or do anything else for that
matter. Self-preservation acts as a categorical limit to our will, in all cases except those morally
tragic cases where the weight of reasons weighs heavy enough to outweigh this categorical duty. If
there were a child on the tracks instead of a £5 note, for example, I might reasonably say ‘I
couldn’t live with myself if I stood by and did nothing’.
But if these reasons show self-preservation to be a categorical duty for me to myself, then
they will do likewise for any thing that thinks and values and responds to reasons: that is, these
reasons will apply universally to any human being. The reasons themselves become universal.
They are reasons that all human beings must recognise. If I recognise the power these reasons
have in myself, I must recognise this in others. And so, categorically, I must not kill. I must not
enslave. I must not deprive another of their capacity to think and choose and value. I must respect

55
their humanity for their sake, just as I must respect my own humanity for my sake, because
humanity is objectively valuable as an end-in-itself.

It ought to be clear by now how this relates to theodicy and the morally impossible.
According to the stories of theodicy, we are placed in a hostile and unforgiving environment where
we are subjected to terrible pain, suffering, injustice, and often premature death, all in pursuit of
some grand plan. It is judged that the ends justify the means. But we are the means to this end.
Theodicy treats human beings as if they were mere things to be put to use, cogs in a machine, not
deserving of a say in the means of production. In being subject to these univocal laws of creation,
human beings are fundamentally no different from stars and planets, stones and bacteria. Can I
say that my capacity to choose has been respected when I never had a say in the matter, not even
given an option of opting out?
What choice is the child given when they are abused? How could we say that their humanity
is respected? And why speak only of innocent children, when it is often the accumulation of
terrible experiences over a longer life that goes to break a human being. What sense can it make
to say that someone has their autonomy respected when they are subject to a genocide? Could
any of us say that we could have chosen to endure these atrocities better? The most that theodicy
can say is that they were useful.
How could any of us universalise these means-to-an-end? Could we choose to place
ourselves in their shoes, grateful for the opportunity for soul-making? Could we make that choice
for all? If you were to choose on behalf of humanity, could you choose for the child to be abused?

We do not have to be avowed Kantians to accept that there is something terribly wrong with
theodicy’s attitude to human beings. Its attitude is to treat people and their sufferings as if they
were only things to be put to use, something that serves a purpose.
Better, I think, are the attitudes of an older time, long before theodicy emerged. The attitude
of Boethius, who would say that you have been given everything you need to think and choose
and endure in this world, even in the worst of times. The attitude of Augustine, who would say
that it is no lack of respect to allow you to suffer, but precisely out of respect for your freedom
that you must suffer the consequences of your choices. These attitudes call us not to excuse or
justify suffering and injustice, but to endure it like philosophers should. These attitudes are more
respectful of our Kantian autonomy.

Given the Kantian ‘categorical’ background, the moral objection to theodicy as treating
people only as a means to an end is clearly applicable to the morally impossible. In this case,
theodicy does not just deny the morally impossible, but does the morally impossible when it
violates the categorical imperative to respect humanity, in your own person or in others, always as
an end in itself. If there is any weight whatsoever to this duty, then theodicy falls heavily under it.

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And if the goal of theodicy is to offer a morally-sufficient reason for the permission of evil and
suffering, but theodicy can only reach its goal by appealing to a morally-insufficient way of
reasoning, then theodicy cuts off the branch on which it sits. It pursues its end in a way that
removes the necessary preconditions for it. In this way, theodicy is its own categorical refutation.

Denying the Morally Impossible

There is a final morally-problematic feature of theodicy and sceptical theism that is
particularly relevant to my purposes. Whilst it is morally objectionable to deny the morally
impossible for various reasons, as we’ve seen in the criticisms outlined in this chapter (and
elsewhere in the anti-theodicy literature), it is also morally impossible to deny the morally
impossible. This is so regardless of the reasons for doing so and regardless of any particular way of
doing it, with or without sensitivity, from a detached or engaged perspective, appealing to
consequentialism or not, treating people as a means to an end or not. If we acknowledge the
reality of the morally impossible, then we acknowledge it as something that cannot be denied.
That is the nature of necessity. The same would be true of recognising a necessary mathematical
or logical truth: in being necessary, it cannot be denied; it is not possible that it is possibly false. In
a moral context, the nature of moral necessity and of necessitated moral responsiveness is that
we cannot justify the unjustifiable or excuse the inexcusable. But theodicy cannot help but do this
because it must do this, and therefore theodicy ought to be seen as morally impossible per se by
anyone who accepts the reality of the morally impossible.
Again, this is not a particularly revelatory statement, since we began this chapter by pointing
out that theodicy (and sceptical theism) must deny the reality of the morally impossible in order to
preserve the goodness and existence of God, as part of a consistent set of beliefs when faced with
the logical problem of morally-impossible evil. We cannot be surprised when theodicy does exactly
what it set out to do. But it is important to recognise the cost of it doing so. In excluding the
possibility of the morally impossible, theodicy denies that there are limits to moral thinking. The
dangers and difficulties of this will be explored in the next chapter.

And again, just to reiterate, whether or not the morally impossible actually happens is not
the point. The point is whether we judge that the morally impossible happens, whether we
acknowledge it as real. It is a question about ourselves. And so if you acknowledge your own
recognition of the morally impossible, you cannot deny that without being inconsistent with
yourself.
What the moral objections to theodicy show is that a consistent theistic position on the
problem of evil is morally problematic to anyone who acknowledges the morally impossible. This is
not to say that there are not consistent theistic positions on the problem of evil, only that they
come with a certain moral cost. Specifically, they come at the cost of denying the morally
impossible.

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 Similarly, I’m sure there are consistent positions on the dropping of an atomic bomb over
civilian populations: it ended the war, saving lives, etc. But these positions are morally problematic
to me, because I acknowledge the categorical duty not to incinerate the children of our enemies in
order to preserve the lives of our soldiers. The categorical nature of that duty means there is no
consistent position available whereby dropping that bomb could be morally justified, because you
cannot justify the unjustifiable. If it is done, if it must be done, it is done as part of a moral tragedy
whereby the doing of the morally impossible is unavoidable. In such a case, perhaps the morally
impossible must be done, but it cannot be celebrated or lauded as the ‘right’ thing to do. It is
necessary, but equally necessary is the guilt and shame that must follow from doing what we
know ought not be done. You cannot admire or worship anyone who did such a thing; you can
only pity them for their misfortune of being put in such a terrible position. Perhaps they can be
forgiven but it seems to me that that might depend on their attitude. Are they remorseful, for
example? Do they recognise the gravity of what they have done? Do they acknowledge
themselves to be evildoers, even if they were in a position such that they had no choice? Do they
recognise the categorical nature of their violation? Do they say ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I’m sorry, but…’? And
in any case it wouldn’t be my place to forgive on someone else’s behalf.
To my mind, an eagerness to justify or excuse the morally impossible shows that there is a
lack of recognition of the gravity of the matter. It shows a lack of remorse. Forgiveness is more
difficult in that case.

Conclusion
Any response to the problem of evil, understood as a logical problem about the morally
impossible, is left in a bind. If it chooses to escape the dilemma on the horn of denying the morally
impossible, it will necessarily incur the moral cost of doing so. The response will become morally
objectionable. If the moral objections outlined in this chapter mean anything at all, then it would
be wrong, morally wrong, for theodicy to respond to the problem of evil as it does. And you
shouldn’t do what is morally wrong. So you shouldn’t construct or endorse theodicy. Far from
defending the truth of it, you should hope it isn’t true.
But if the theist does not construct or defend a theodicy, then they are left with only one
other option to preserve the consistency of their belief, which is to reject the ethical perspective
that gives rise to any talk of moral necessity. Do not only deny that the morally impossible
happens, deny that it is a meaningful concept. Reject the very notion of moral necessity. It’s to this
option that I now turn.

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Chapter Four: Moral Modalities and the Limits of Moral
Thinking

The task of this chapter is to defend the concept of the morally impossible. The logical
problem of morally-impossible evil depends on our judgement that the morally impossible
happens. There are two ways to reject this judgement: the first is what we see with theodicy and
sceptical theism, which is to accept the concept, even if only for the sake of argument, but deny
that the morally impossible happens or has ever happened. The concept is meaningful, but empty.
I have argued that this denial only comes at great moral cost: it reveals a lack of moral sensitivity,
coming from a perspective that is too deliberately detached, utilising a consequentialism too
unrestricted and an instrumentalism too ruthless. It also violates the ‘Humanity Formulation’ of
the Categorical Imperative, which is a big no-no if you think there’s anything at all to what Kant
says. Denying the morally impossible is itself morally impossible and we cannot do the morally
impossible without incurring the cost in terms of guilt and shame. Consistent positions are
available for the theist here, but they will appear morally reprehensible to anyone who recognises
instances of the morally impossible in the world.
There is another option, however, which is to reject the concept of the morally impossible
per se. This response does not argue against the truth of the claim that the morally impossible has
happened but rejects the concept as meaningless trumped-up nonsense. Analogous with a
disagreement about whether or not a cloud is angry, the proper response is not to argue ‘yes it is’
or ‘no it isn’t’ but rather to point out the meaninglessness of the question. The thought that a
cloud might be angry is no more than a philosophical confusion to be dissolved by rigorous
analysis. Perhaps ideas about the morally impossible are also no more than a confusion, a fantasy,
a myth, a philosophical hobgoblin. My logical formulation of the problem of evil collapses, like any
imagined danger, as soon as it is faced. The curtain is drawn back and the problem is exposed as a
spurious and pseudo problem that achieves its sense of moral challenge only by making up
outrageous claims about moral necessity. These outrageous claims are dismissed as
unsupportable, incoherent nonsense on stilts, and with that the theist can rest easy, safe in the
knowledge that there is no hobgoblin to defeat.
I think the morally impossible is more than just a hobgoblin, however. I think it is not a myth,
but real, and as real as any moral reality can be. The purpose of this chapter is to defend the
meaningfulness of the concept. I know I am in controversial territory here. I do not expect many
philosophers to agree with me, and certainly not all. Whilst few would (or could, if they are honest
with themselves) deny the intuitive power of morality, many philosophers are sceptical about
moral meaning even in its contingent form, let alone any claims about necessity. I want to dispel
some of these doubts if I can.

My approach is straightforward: to firm up the intuitive power of moral necessity and offer

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some defence of it. I want to reassure you, and me, that our intuitions about moral necessity are
sound. They are not a philosophical hobgoblin. It is not the case that they ought to be dismissed,
and it is the case that they ought not be dismissed. They should be taken seriously. We can, do,
and should hold fast to our understanding of the morally impossible.
I’ll start by clarifying what I understand by the morally impossible. I think this is a distinct
kind of moral judgement that is identifiable by two features: a) that something is recognised as
being wrong in a way that is inexcusable or unjustifiable, and b) that even though we might
sometimes disagree about which things are so, a capacity to recognise that some things are
inexcusable or unjustifiable is a condition for the possibility of sound moral judgement. Over the
course of this clarification, I expect to show you that you already recognise this concept, both
practically and theoretically. Practically, you live and operate with this concept and apply it in your
quotidian moral reasoning. Theoretically, you have no compelling reason to dismiss this concept,
and it is essential to your understanding of the limits of moral meaning. Because of this you cannot
deny the meaningfulness of the concept without contradicting yourself practically, such as when a
man denies he has feet whilst walking about on them, or contradicting yourself theoretically by
cutting off the branch on which your moral reasoning sits.

Two Examples of the Morally Impossible

It will be clearer if I work with some examples. But it’s important to remember that they are
just some examples that are taken to be indicative of a much wider-reaching concept. It is the
nature or quality or type of moral judgement that is represented in the example that matters, not
the specifics of the example or even the specific moral judgement in its case. I will trust that you
will probably (surely) share in the moral judgement in the first example; I am less confident in the
others. Other instances of the morally impossible will be analogous to these cases only if they
share the general features that I am pointing out; other more specific features would not be
relevant to any analogy.
The first example I will use is Jimmy Savile. This is an example that will be more familiar to
British readers of various generations, but has been subject to internationally-aired documentaries
since the ‘revelations’ came out and has become a fairly well-known story, and so I think it’s safe
to assume it’s a fairly widely-known example. I’ll summarise it in brief:
Jimmy Savile was a popular British television presenter and personality for much of the latter
part of the 20th century. He presented ‘Top of the Pops’, a very important popular music show of
that era, amongst other things, and he used his celebrity and profile to do an awful lot of very
notable charity work. He was best known for his children’s show ‘Jim’ll Fix It’, the basic premise of
which was that children would write in to Jim with various wishes and Jim would then ‘fix it’ to
make those dreams reality. It was all very heart-warming and entertaining stuff, carried along by
Savile’s accessible and easy-going, if a little odd, manner. I remember watching this show growing
up. I remember feeling that Jimmy Savile was a bit of an old weirdo, as I think most people did, but
that this was more in the category of ‘harmless eccentric’ – of which there is a long-standing

60
British tradition – than anything particularly sinister. It turns out his eccentricity was extremely
sinister and anything but harmless.
After his death, it emerged that Jimmy Savile was an abuser and a paedophile. He had spent
a lifetime exploiting his celebrity to gain access to children, particularly vulnerable children, in
order to sexually abuse them. These opportunities were often linked to his charitable activities. He
would raise a great deal of money for a hospital, for example, becoming such a well-liked and
respected figure in that hospital that he would be given free access to it and within it; he then
used this unfettered access to abuse patients in that hospital. When these revelations emerged, it
was shocking to discover that this was not an occasional arrangement: he did it all the time, over
many decades, for his whole life. Savile had various residences in these institutions, as well as a
motorhome, and he would freely flit from one to the other taking children wherever he went. His
overt charitable work and persona as a beloved children’s TV personality somehow blinded
everyone to what he was doing, or else overpowered any serious inclination to look too closely.
I have already cited child abuse as an example of the morally impossible, so this example is a
natural fit for my discussion. But there are more features that are relevant in this case. It’s not just
that Savile abused children, it’s that he used, in part, his good works and reputation in order to do
so. It’s that these good works somehow enabled him to be granted free access to the vulnerable.
It’s that he died before any serious evidence emerged; he died before facing any serious
repercussions; he got away with it. It’s that he seemed to think his ‘good works’ could somehow
outweigh the bad that he knew he had done. For Savile, it was clearly morally possible to do what
he did. It was a fair trade. This is clear because it was not only morally possible for him, but
morally actual, because he did it, and he showed no remorse for doing so, and seemed to believe
that his good works got him off the hook. Whereas for the rest of the shocked British public, when
the revelations emerged, we reacted with one voice: that Savile had done the morally impossible –
and not just once or twice, but for a lifetime, a catalogue of the morally impossible – and we
couldn’t believe such a thing could have been allowed to happen. We couldn’t believe that no one
knew, but we equally couldn’t believe that if anyone knew then they could have stayed silent and
allowed it to happen. We remain incredulous.

Let me extract what is relevant for my purposes as part of a philosophical argument about
the problem of evil. That it is wrong for old men to sexually abuse children would seem to go
without saying. So this is clearly a case of ‘wrongness’ or ‘evil’: it is something that we judge ‘ought
not to be’. I don’t think I need to explain why that is the case.
Is it a case of ‘evil’ that can be justified by greater goods or the avoidance of worse evils?
Clearly not, I would say. Imagine Savile defended himself: ‘Now then now then, if I hadn’t been
free and able to abuse these children, I wouldn’t have done all that charity work to make up for it.
This charity work did an awful lot of good, so much good that it clearly washes away the bad I
might have done. A few children might have suffered, but many more people benefited. When
all’s said and done, on balance, I think my behaviour is excusable and justified. The suffering of

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those children was a small price to pay for all the good I gave in return. I earned it. Children’s
television and charity work; who can ask more than that?’ Would we seriously countenance this
argument? Could we bring ourselves to condone, on this basis, and not condemn?
Of course not. No one disputes the good works that he did or the good consequences that
followed from them, but no one in their right mind would think this excuses what he did to those
children. That’s not something Jim can fix.
Could he have, if he had done more good works? Is it a matter of quantity? Would it be
different if he had done more charitable work and less child abuse? How much more would be
required, or how much less? At what point would his behaviour become justified by appeal to
greater goods? What is the going rate for sexually abusing a vulnerable child these days? Has this
price been subject to inflation like the rest of the economy? Is that why we notice the wrongness
of Savile’s conduct now when we didn’t before?
This is all absurd, obviously, because the sexual exploitation of children is not something
that’s up for sale. There is no ‘market value’ for that. It is not an economic transaction, like wages
for labour, or tax-deductible charitable contributions. To speak of it as if were is to mutilate the
concept. But this is what would be done if we were to take Savile’s hypothetical defence seriously.
We would be asking: is that a reasonable price to pay for the abuse of children?
Asking the question shows that you don’t understand what you’re asking about. No one who
understands the moral reality of child abuse could ask at what price it becomes morally
acceptable. (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)

Some things we judge to be excusable and justifiable by compensation or other ways of

‘making good’. Some things we judge not to be so. An ability to discern the difference between the
two is essential to sound moral judgement. But we need not always agree on where to draw the
line.
Consider my second example: the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945.
Many people consider this, together with Hiroshima, to be morally justified for various reasons:
principally that it ended the war and saved many lives, but also that it ended the war swiftly and
saved many American lives. (Few could doubt that the war would have ended at some point, after
all, and most would accept that there were alternative war-ending options available.) I happen to
disagree that dropping the bomb on Nagasaki (or Hiroshima) was morally justified. In fact, I’d go
further and say that the dropping of atomic bombs over civilian populations is a case of the
morally impossible, that it is not just contingently unjustified but necessarily unjustifiable, but it’s
clear that some people would disagree with my judgement in this case and I accept that people
disagree about such things. But you don’t need to agree with my judgement to accept the point of
this example.
Some bad things we consider to be justified by sufficient reason, others we do not. Often we
have to draw a line and make a judgement to discern between the two. Recognising some things

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as unjustifiable is necessary to be able to make this kind of discrimination.
Imagine it were to come out that the Japanese had actually surrendered just before the
bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and that that bomb had been dropped only as a weapons test or
just to make a point to the Russians. Presumably we would say with one voice that those are not
acceptable reasons to justify dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian population. Such a thing
would be inexcusable. But it is only because of this that we are able to contrast that
counterfactual with what actually happened and make some attempt at justifying the
circumstances under which it is permissible to drop an atomic bomb on civilian populations. You
can only sensibly say ‘under these conditions, yes’ if you acknowledge that ‘if those conditions do
not hold, then no’. Otherwise what is the meaning of specifying any conditions at all?
The attempt to justify the dropping of atomic bombs over civilian populations is made by
offering reasons. ‘Dropping the bomb was justified because…’ If those reasons are not true, then
the justification does not follow. For example: ‘Dropping the bomb was justified because it caused
the Japanese to surrender, ending the war.’ Under those circumstances, dropping the bomb
becomes justified (or so it is argued). But if the Japanese surrendered before the bomb was
dropped, then those reasons would no longer hold. It would then become ‘unjustified’ because
there would be no justification.
But what is the assumption here? That dropping an atomic bomb over civilian populations
should not be done without (very) good reason. You cannot drop the bomb without (very) good
reason. That is why we need those justificatory reasons. But this ‘need’ is just a form of the
morally impossible: ‘It would be morally impossible to drop an atomic bomb over civilian
populations without (very) good reason.’ Everyone recognises the morally impossible, in some
form, or else we cannot make any sense of the reasons we offer to justify the bad things that we
do.
And not just any reasons, because only some reasons count. It wouldn’t be enough to say:
‘Dropping the bomb was justified because I really enjoyed the flight, and I’d have had no reason to
fly over Nagasaki if I hadn’t been there to drop a bomb. It was a nice day and I really enjoyed the
view.’ That is an admittedly silly example. Closer to reality would be the unspoken assumption that
if the USA had dropped the bomb primarily for the purposes of conducting a weapons test and
making a point to the Russians, the action would lose any claim to the moral high ground. Those
are not offered as alternative morally-sufficient reasons, but as potentially corrupting reasons that
we hope weren’t amongst the main reasons for choosing that course of action. It would be morally
impossible to drop the bomb on the basis of those reasons.
We discriminate between these reasons and weigh up their justificatory power always on
the basis of the underlying assumption that at some point we encounter a limit: we define
something that cannot be justified and define what can in relation to that limit. This limit is the
morally impossible. People differ widely about when or where they hit this limit, but that limit
must always be there if there is to be any sensible distinction between what is and is not justified.
A condition for the possibility of sound moral judgement is a capacity to distinguish between

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what can and cannot be justified or excused. You need to recognise when reasons run out; you
need to know when to stop. But to do this requires that some things are held to be inexcusable or
unjustifiable. When all excuses and reasons run out, then we say that is beyond justification. We
hit our moral limits. If you cannot hit that limit, then you show that you cannot distinguish
between what can and cannot be justified or excused, and therefore that you lack an important
element of moral judgement. You cannot recognise when you ought to stop.
Dropping the bomb ended the war and saved lives. But if the war was ending within a few
weeks anyway, or if dropping the bomb cost more lives than it saved, or if the real reason for
dropping the bomb was to test a new toy and make a point to the Russians, then dropping the
bomb would have been inexcusable and unjustifiable. If you then say, finding that you cannot
stop, that perhaps testing the weapon and making a point to the Russians might be a good reason
to drop an atomic bomb over civilian populations, then the error moves beyond being an error in
moral judgement and becomes an error of moral judgement – strictly, a lack of moral judgement –
indicative of something more fundamental: that you have moved beyond the limits of reasonable
moral thinking. Like the difference between making a bad move in chess and an illegal move in
chess. Some mistakes show that you lack a capacity for the proper exercise of judgement on these
matters; some mistakes prompt the response ‘I see you are doing something altogether different’.
Certain judgements are like cornerstones of our moral judgement, hinges around which our
moral judgement swings, and these form the limits of our moral thinking. They are the limits we
hit when we encounter something that we consider to be inexcusable or unjustifiable. Though we
might disagree about what those things are, that there are some things that are beyond
justification or excuse is something that must be a part of any meaningful moral picture of the
world.

Epistemic Ambiguity
Though both of my examples are meant to express something about the morally impossible,
there is a clear difference between the two, at least if my reaction is anything to go by: If someone
comes to me and defends the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I am
inclined to question their moral judgement; and in questioning their moral judgement I investigate
my own and subject both to examination, as a good student of Socrates. If someone comes to me
and defends Jimmy Savile’s abuse of children, I am inclined to throw their moral judgement out
altogether: they show themselves to be someone who has nothing to say. These are expressions
of my moral limits in both cases, but only one is exclusionary, at least for me. Anyone who defends
Savile’s behaviour shows themselves to lack a capacity for sound moral judgement: they defend
the indefensible. For me, anyone who defends the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki also defends the indefensible, but I am not as quick to dismiss their capacity for sound
moral judgement. But if they are both cases of the morally impossible, for me, then what is the
difference here?
I think the difference between the two examples can be accounted for epistemically. It’s

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easier to see that there could be no good justification for Savile’s behaviour than it is to see that
there could be no good justification for dropping the bomb on Nagasaki. The latter is morally
ambiguous in a way that the former is not. But after investigation, we might come to see more
clearly and resolve the ambiguity. Once resolved, we might find ourselves clearer about our moral
limits. This is a useful exercise. (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
I think progress in moral understanding can be made by trying to get a clearer understanding
of these moral limits. Finding these limits, these cornerstones and hinges, helps to firm up your
understanding of your own moral understanding. I used to be unclear about where I stood on the
dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps I naively thought that it was
probably justified by the reasons offered, that it ended a war that would not have ended in any
other less-costly way. Then I engaged with the philosophical literature, and reflected on it, and
attended some exhibits of various kinds (a photographic exhibition ‘Camera Atomica’, for example,
or a visit to the ‘National WWII Museum’ in New Orleans), and my view slowly clarified.
As trivial as it might sound – and I am slightly ashamed of how trivial this will sound – a small
photographic negative of the first atomic test had a powerful and lasting impact on me. This
makes more sense for me than it would for others. I am a sort of amateur photographer and I like
to work with photographic film when I can. I have a philosophical argument that I like to bore
people with every now and then, about how photography captures ‘a moment in time’, but that
digital photography offers only copies of copies but never anything that can be properly identified
as an ‘original’: it is just data, metaphysically indistinguishable from other data. In that, something
of the original ‘moment in time’ is lost, at least in contrast to analogue film. If you were to craft a
copy of a digital photograph, pixel by pixel, and then save that copy as data, that data would be
exactly identical with the ‘original’ image. Whereas a film negative is the original, in the camera at
the time and place, exposed to the light of that day. When you look at the negative, or the
reflected image whilst developing that negative, you see something of the light of that day
reflected back at you. You are connected to something that was there; it is as unique as the
moment captured; something lacking in its digital data equivalent. In any case, for me, seeing a
small photographic negative of the first atomic test allowed me to feel connected to something
that had been hit by the light of the first atomic bomb. It felt the world change and that change
was captured in it. Decades later, I can look at that moment of change in a museum. I can connect
myself with the place where that photographic negative was and dare to imagine that same
impact. That connection forces me to place myself in the perspective of being underneath the
bomb as it dropped. That perspective gives me moral insight.
A detached (and largely ignorant) perspective makes it easier to sign off on some purported
moral justifications. As your perspective becomes more engaged (and less ignorant), that becomes
harder to do. You see pictures of children, of victims, of the immediate and lasting damage of such
an action and you find yourself incapable of imagining the turn of events that would make you
choose to do such a thing. It is unimaginable, unthinkable. I do not say I could or would not do
such a thing, in reality, because who knows how we would react in such extreme circumstances,
conditioned by the brutality (and banality, so they say) of that world war. But I imagine that if I

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were brought to the point of choosing to do such a thing, I could not do so without acknowledging
the evil of it – even if not at the time, inevitably later. I would curse my fate and lament being put
in a such a morally tragic position. And then I would be mortally ashamed of my selfishness for
cursing my fate, as if I were the victim.
These are abstract and indulgent philosophical investigations. Sometimes the discovery of
moral limits is more concrete: experience can be the best teacher. Sometimes we only find a limit
when we have transgressed it. But those concrete regrets are surely best avoided and you can find
your moral limits in abstract philosophical investigations. And in finding those limits, you find your
boundaries and your shape, and in that shape you find your moral picture of the world. The
picture can be changed, modified over time, but it cannot be thrown out entirely. After these
abstract philosophical investigations on the dropping of atomic bombs over civilian populations, I
find that part of my moral picture of the world is that we should not incinerate the children of our
enemies in order to preserve the lives of our soldiers; we should not obliterate children as an
intimidation tactic. ‘Look how big and strong and fearsome I am: I have killed all your children in a
rain of ruin the like of which has never been seen on this earth! You’d better give up now, or I’ll do
it again!’ We cannot bypass that moral duty to serve our purposes, even if they were worthy
purposes. (Just as Jimmy Savile cannot justify his bad behaviour by the good of charity work.) This,
in turn, reinforces something important about the nature of ethics, for me: that it is a judge of our
purposes and not a servant of them. It is not something that can be put to use; it is something that
holds us to account. I have heard this cliché and broadly accepted it, but it takes a philosophical
working out and concrete examples to make it clear. I accept that people will see things differently
and will disagree, but I am content to have a clearer picture of my moral world. My ethical life is
my responsibility, after all, and only mine, and their ethical life is theirs and only theirs. It’s not my
job to make their moral decisions for them, only to make my own. To make those decisions (in any
way other than unthinkingly) I need a clear picture of my moral world. To that extent, my abstract
and indulgent philosophical reflection has served its purpose. (The connection with the problem of
evil ought to be clear.)
A clear picture of your moral world can help you live your life in a way that is consistent with
yourself. In simple terms, it can help you avoid doing things that you will regret. I don’t expect
ever to be put in the position of choosing whether or not to drop an atomic bomb over civilian
populations, but this is obviously an extreme example that is chosen for the sake of its clarity and
philosophical renown. There are other examples that are closer to home.
Consider child abuse, for example. Clearly, ‘doing a Jimmy Savile’ is not something that’s up
for consideration. But what about hitting a child, for the purposes of discipline? As I write this, at
this moment in time in the UK the government in Westminster is debating laws about banning the
‘smacking’ of children in any form. Currently this is the case in Wales and Scotland, so the question
is whether Westminster will align with these laws. As it stands in England, ‘smacking’ a child is
legal so long as it doesn’t leave a visible mark. The issue is debated and people have their views. Is
the physical disciplining of a child always, sometimes, or never justifiable? Like a good student of
Socrates, I ask myself where I stand. As I write this, my wife is pregnant with our first child, and I

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am surrounded by a diverse range of views couched under the name of ‘advice’, so it’s a pressing
question for me.
Under what circumstances would I think it is right to hit a child? Not for personal enjoyment
or satisfaction, obviously. Nor either for the entertainment of others. I cast these into the realm of
the morally impossible. To do such things would show yourself to lack any contact with moral
reality.
For discipline, then? As a punishment? I hit the child because it deserves it? But I know a
child has limited moral accountability. I’m not quite clear where the line is drawn, and at what
ages and stages moral accountability progresses with the child, but I know that a child is not as
morally culpable as an adult. Would I hit an adult, as punishment? Presumably not. Why not?
Because I am afraid they would hit me back? What if I were significantly stronger than them,
would that make it right? If the world heavyweight boxing champion (or perhaps an actor who
played one) went around smacking people in the face because they’d stepped out of line, would
we celebrate them? I think not. Would you think it right to hit your adult spouse if they stepped
out of line? All clearly absurd. But if I wouldn’t think it right to hit an adult, who is fully morally
culpable, then why would I think it right to hit a child, who is less?
For education, then? I have a duty to raise the child right, to teach it lessons, and so I hit the
child because it’s the only way they will learn. They are not sufficiently cognitively advanced to
understand my reasoning, so I must resort to the only language they understand: physical threat.
But is the language of physical threat the only language a child understands? Surely not: they learn
all sorts of things without me hitting them about it. Is there really no other way they will learn, no
alternative to violence? Asked like this, I think it’s clear that there is always going to be an
alternative to physical threat, isn’t there?
I think most people who hit their children do so because they get irritated and angry. They
lose patience. For whatever reason, they have given themselves permission to stop looking for
alternatives to physical violence. Hitting their children is within the realm of the morally possible:
it’s an option, and so sometimes they take that option. I think they justify it to themselves because
they were hit as children (‘it did me no harm’) or otherwise see it as normal. They do this so much
that they stop calling it violence and hide its reality under other euphemisms. ‘Are you violent to
your children?’ Surely not! ‘Do you discipline them?’ Spare the rod, spoil the child…
It’s remarkable how often people defend their attitude to the physical punishment of
children by parroting the cliches and platitudes of their parents (and grandparents), sometimes in
a way that is strikingly out of character. I have seen otherwise bleeding-heart liberals defend the
physical punishment of children on the basis that ‘otherwise you just make a rod for your own
back’; but that’s not them talking. I should hit my child because it makes my life easier in the long
run?! What a reason! I suspect if we lived for two generations without any physical punishment of
children it would swiftly become unthinkable to do so.
Considered from the perspective of the child, the situation becomes clearer, I think. A child
cannot always understand what is going on: that is an essential part of the question. All they see is

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a giant, on whose good opinion their life depends, angrily displaying physical dominance. ‘I could
kill you if I wanted’, the child hears, ‘so you’d better comply’. Perhaps it does teach them a lesson,
but is it a lesson we want them to learn? Are we glad to think of our children being so mortally
afraid of us? Are we glad to be an object of fear, for them? I think it’s a parent’s job to do what
they can to protect the child from violence and the cruelty of the world, not be the source of it.
Can we not earn their respect any other way? And is it not basically shameful to resort to violence
against something you stand in such unequal physical and mental and emotional power towards?
Can’t you be better than that? (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
You can decide where you stand, but these reflections make my thinking clearer. I’d like for
my children to not be afraid of me. I’d like for them not to carry that fear out into the world,
where they will soon enough find enough things to fear. I’d like for them to feel like I have their
back, no matter what. I’d like to be a source of safety and security for them, not fear and threat.
I’d like to find a way to teach them lessons in ways other than violent ways, not least because I
understand that moral understanding is something you have to come to see for yourself: you can
be led to see something morally important but you cannot be made to see something morally
important; you cannot be beaten into anything other than submission. Perhaps I am hopelessly
naive. Perhaps I’ll learn as much in time.
Nevertheless, I come to my decision: I categorically ought not use violence against my child.
For me, it is a moral impossibility. There can be no sufficient justification for it. I could not do it
without incurring guilt and shame. I understand this because I probe my moral limits. And I probe
those limits because there are limits, established by the cornerstones or hinges of what is
inexcusable or unjustifiable. Jimmy Savile’s behaviour, for example, is inexcusable and
unjustifiable. Beating a child for fun would fall into the same category. I investigate the ‘justified’
instances of violence towards children and see if they too fit into that category. I can only do this
because there is such a category. If I could not bring myself to say that Jimmy Savile’s behaviour
was inexcusable, how on earth would I make sense of the question about whether it was right or
wrong to hit my child?
You can only discriminate between what is and is not justified by specifying circumstances
under which it would not be justified. And those circumstances can only be understood in light of
what is judged to be ‘unjustifiable’. When a judgement of what is ‘unjustifiable’ is clear enough to
be a cornerstone of moral judgement, such that denying it undermines the practice of moral
judgement as such, then that is properly called ‘morally impossible’. It is these characteristic
judgements that I have in mind when presenting my version of the problem of evil.

Relative Certainty
Many judgements about the morally impossible will remain epistemically ambiguous and
subject to change over time. Many philosophers who do not share my metaethical perspective will
think this is a problem for any claims about moral necessity. But I think the issue of epistemic
ambiguity actually reinforces my point, rather than weakening it, because this epistemic ambiguity

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is always relative to something more certain. The question ‘does 2547 + 2376 = 4943?’ is relatively
epistemically ambiguous compared to simpler questions like ‘does 1 + 1 = 2?’. But answering the
relatively ambiguous question only makes sense if you are happy to accept the answer to the
simpler question. Some of these questions and answers are so epistemically simple that they
become paradigmatic. They express the limits of meaningful thinking in that case. They in part
determine what we mean when we say that someone has a capacity for judgement on such
matters. If you cannot answer, off the top of your head, whether 2547 + 2376 = 4943, I won’t hold
it against you. But if you cannot answer, off the top of your head, whether 1 + 1 = 2, then I doubt
your capacity for mathematical judgement.
Mathematics is a confusing case because it is so clear. Take a muddier and more realistic
example like empirical evidence. ‘Does x count as good evidence for y?’ This can be asked of many
different things and the answers can sometimes be very difficult to discern. Unlike mathematics,
we must talk in terms of the weight of evidence rather than categorical proof. But still, if someone
were to defend the efficacy of a certain medical intervention on the basis of one inconclusive
study that suggested there might be something in it, ignoring the ten studies that told against, I
might dispute the truth of their claim and question their empirical judgement in this case, but I
would not necessarily doubt their capacity for empirical judgement. They are playing the right
game, just doing it badly, perhaps. Likewise if a fellow juror were to deny that DNA evidence
placing the suspect at the scene constituted good reason to convict, I might question their
judgement, but not necessarily their capacity for judgement. Perhaps they are just keen to uphold
the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and are exercising due diligence. But if someone
were to tell me that the Holocaust was a Zionist fabrication, or that the Earth is flat, and refused to
acknowledge all evidence to the contrary, I wouldn’t just dispute the truth of the claim and
question their judgement, I would doubt their capacity for judgement on these matters. Their
errors show that they are not just playing the ‘history’ game or the ‘cosmology’ game badly, they
are doing something altogether different. Likewise when people defend absurdly pseudo-scientific
claims: they might think they are citing evidence, but in truth they are not talking in terms of
evidence at all, because they clearly don’t understand how evidence works, because no one who
did would defend those ridiculous claims.
Empirical claims – whether medical, historical, criminal, or cosmological – are always going
to be more ambiguous than mathematical claims. They will never be necessarily true, as any good
Humean knows. But that doesn’t change the structure of the limits of meaningful thinking on
these matters. There will always be paradigmatic cases of ‘certainty’ that must be held as such in
order for the rest of the way of thinking to make any sense. We take these paradigmatic cases to
be clear indicators and even determinations of someone’s capacity for judgement on these
matters. Don’t know whether 1 + 1 = 2? Then you can’t have a capacity for mathematical
judgement. Don’t know whether the Earth is flat? Then you can’t have a capacity for cosmological
judgement. Don’t know whether what Jimmy Savile did was wrong? Then you can’t have a
capacity for moral judgement.
It is controversial to say so, because people disagree wildly about moral matters in a way

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that they do not (so much) about mathematical and empirical matters, but is the structure any
different with moral judgement? If someone says there is nothing wrong with amassing great
personal wealth, avoiding tax where you can, and remaining indifferent to the poor, I dispute the
truth of the claim and question the moral judgement, but I do not necessarily question the
capacity for moral judgement. I suppose they are just different to me; I shrug and move on. If
someone were to say that there’s nothing wrong with physically disciplining a child, when it is
warranted, then I might dispute the truth of the claim and doubt this moral judgement, but I
wouldn’t necessarily doubt the capacity for moral judgement. It seems they are trying to to the
right thing as a parent, as they see it; perhaps their experience of growing up was different from
mine. But if someone were to say that Jimmy Savile was, on balance, a good bloke, my reaction is
different. I don’t just dispute the truth of the claim, I consider it beyond the conceptual space of
reasonable moral judgement. I would be incredulous. I would assume they haven’t heard about
the revelations of child abuse. If I found that they were fully aware, and simply thought that the
charity work he had done was enough to make-good his behaviour, then I would not be able to
believe that anyone could make that moral judgement with such an awareness. They cannot think
such a thing. No one in their right moral mind would make such a judgement. The judgement is so
wrong that it is no longer a ‘moral’ judgement at all, simply a lack of it. To agree with them would
require me to not only modify the picture of my moral world but throw it out entirely.
There will be paradigmatic cases in any sphere of thinking. In all cases, one function that
these paradigmatic cases perform is to establish the limits of reasonable thought. They are like the
rules of the game, rules that you cannot reject without rejecting the game as such. You cannot
reject a rule in chess and remain playing chess, for example, because the game is defined by its
rules. Similarly, you cannot reject that 1 + 1 = 2 and remain doing ordinary arithmetic. You cannot
say the Earth is flat and remain doing cosmology. You cannot say the Holocaust didn’t happen and
remain doing history. And you cannot say that Jimmy Savile was a good bloke and remain doing
morality. You can do different things and operate in different spheres of thinking, obviously, but
you cannot make those kinds of judgements, judgements that transgress the limits of reasonable
thinking, and remain in that sphere of thought. And so if you do then we say ‘now you are doing
something altogether different’.
My favourite teaching example was a contrast between rugby and football. (For the benefit
of Americans I will say ‘soccer’ for football.) Imagine you are playing football (soccer), and a
defender is standing on the goal line defending a corner kick. The ball comes in and is hit
goalwards by an attacker, and in an instinctive reaction the defender throws their hand up to block
the ball. It is a penalty, because you are not allowed to handle the ball in soccer unless you are the
goalkeeper, and because it prevented a goal it would certainly be a red card for the defender,
meaning they would be sent off. It is a very clear violation of the rules. They have played soccer
badly.
Contrast this with another game of soccer where, in open play in the middle of the pitch, an
attacker picks up the ball with their hands, charges towards the opposing goal line, smashing into
defenders along the way, before placing the ball down behind the goal line and throwing their

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arms up in celebration. Everyone is confused. The infringement is the same in both cases – it is a
hand ball – but it is clearly more than just a violation of the rules. It is a ‘blunder’ so big that it
shows they are doing something altogether different. Their ‘mistake’ shows that they are playing a
different game entirely. They think they are playing rugby (or American Football). They are not just
playing soccer badly. Their behaviour shows that they have stopped playing soccer altogether.
Though it is against the rules of soccer for a defender to use their hands to stop a ball
crossing the goal line, it’s within the bounds of sense that someone might do so and still be playing
soccer. It’s the kind of mistake that shows only that they are not very good at sticking to the rules,
but it doesn’t show that they lack a fundamental understanding of the rules. But if an attacker
does what to all intents and purposes is play rugby when they are in the middle of a soccer game,
then this is not just a mistake, this makes no sense: it is not properly called a ‘mistake’ at all but a
radical separation from reality. It shows that they are doing something altogether different. It
causes us to question whether they understand the game they are playing.
If they were playing rugby it would be different. But that alone doesn’t make it any less
absurd in the context of soccer. Some judgements show that you are playing the game badly;
some judgements show that you are not playing it at all. Like mounting an economic defence of
Jimmy Savile, arguing that his professional and charitable work made more money than was lost
by the loss of earnings suffered as a result of the damaging effects inflicted on his victims. Whilst
this might be true, no morality worth its name could consider it a legitimate moral reason. In
defending Savile on economic terms, you would be doing something altogether different from
moral reasoning. Within soccer, you cannot sensibly speculate about the virtues of mauling over
the line; within morality, you cannot sensibly speculate about the economic advantages of Jimmy
Savile’s behaviour (or slavery, genocide, or dropping an atomic bomb over civilian populations).
Anyone who did so would show themselves to have lost contact with soccerring/moral reality.
Similarly, I’m sure there were perfectly sound military reasons for the course of action taken
at Nagasaki, but good military reasons do not always fall within the sphere of moral reasoning.
Likewise, there might even be sound pedagogical reasons to beat children: it teaches them a
lesson like no other. And if you get hung up on your moral duty to teach your children, you might
get led down a certain path. But the power of moral necessity is such that it reaches over into all
our morally-relevant decisions and stands in judgement over them. It specifies what we are
allowed to do in pursuit of our (military, economic, hedonistic, pedagogical) purposes. It acts as a
limit on our will. (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
This is what I mean by the morally impossible. They are the paradigmatic cases of the
inexcusable or unjustifiable. Everyone who reasons morally has these at the limits of their moral
thinking, even if those limits might differ. They are the points at which we stop looking for reasons.
They are the points where we start ruling certain things out of consideration. If you cannot do this,
then you are like a chess-player who cannot stop considering illegal moves, or a mathematician
who cannot sum 2547 + 2376 because they cannot decide whether 1 + 1 = 2, or a cosmologist who
keeps looking for more evidence that the Earth is round, or a historian still trying to convince
themselves that the Holocaust really happened. These are not pictures of the sound exercise of

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judgement but of a distinct lack of it. In extreme cases, they are pictures of madness, like a man
walking around seriously convinced he doesn’t have feet. In less extreme cases, they are at least
pictures of inconsistency, such as a philosopher putting down their sceptical argument about the
sun rising tomorrow, thinking ‘I’ll try again in the morning’. (The connection with the problem of
evil ought to be clear.)
An understanding – we might say ‘mastery’, though I don’t think that’s necessary because it
connotes too much – of a particular domain of reasoning is marked by an ability to discern what
does and doesn’t make sense in that domain. For someone who understands, it makes no sense to
ask certain questions. For Socrates, anyone who asks at what price you ought to stop being
virtuous shows themselves to not understand what virtue is: anyone who understands virtue, as
he understands it, would not ask that question. For me, anyone who asks at what price child abuse
(or slavery, genocide, etc.) becomes acceptable shows themselves to not understand something
important about morality. Not everything is rightly thought of as being for sale. The connection
with the problem of evil ought to be clear. It’s not that as a matter of fact Jimmy Savile’s child
abuse was categorically wrong, but that it makes no sense to say that it might not have been
categorically wrong. It is rightly thought of as inexcusable and unjustifiable, it is a paradigmatic
case: it is morally impossible. If Jimmy Savile’s child abuse was not categorically wrong, then I no
longer know what ‘wrong’ means.

Recognising Moral Necessity

Do you recognise anything to be morally necessary? I can easily imagine that many of you
don’t. Scepticism is easy, and in any case easier than holding yourself to account. It’s easy to
overlook or dismiss the morally necessary because most of the time we live in a murky world of
moral contingency and epistemic uncertainty. But every now and then we hit upon a clear moral
limit. I have sometimes found these limits in my own life; remorse is educational; life has shown
me what I believe. I imagine some of you have experienced the same. It’s difficult to think what
would show the same to someone who has never found these limits in their own moral
experience. Classically, we appeal to stories and literature. We look to cautionary tales. We turn to
Dostoevsky and Raskolnikov, Shakespeare and Macbeth, Dickens and Scrooge.
Or we look to examples from real life, like Jimmy Savile or Hiroshima. War is as good a
source of examples here as any because it shows people mostly at their very worst, but the
extremity of the situation occasionally shows them at their truest. (I won’t say best.) I have in
mind here a well-known example of George Orwell finding himself unwilling to shoot a man who is
holding up his trousers:
I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a
‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like
shooting at him.

Orwell says – in what seems to me to be an exercise in English understatement – that this

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doesn’t reveal anything particularly morally relevant. I’m inclined to disagree. He recognised a
difference, and recognising a difference requires that you have a capacity to recognise that
difference. Perhaps he thinks that goes without saying. But I don’t think we should gloss over the
power that the capacity to recognise someone as a ‘fellow-creature’, and not only a ‘thing’ like a
‘Fascist’ or an ‘enemy’, has over us. I’m not sure we can make sense of that power without
acknowledging a categorical moral limit of some kind, even if we might disagree about where and
when and how that limit will be hit. We shoot at ‘things’ without a second thought, but we do not
shoot at ‘fellow-creatures’ without hesitation.
Modern military training is often a matter of training soldiers to forget this distinction in
order to eliminate the hesitation. I have no near experience of this reality, so I will outsource to
Major Dr Peter Kilner, Instructor at the US Military Academy, who reports:
Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli – such as fire
commands, enemy contact, or the sudden appearance of a ‘target’ – and this
maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy.
Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their
actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so.

Perhaps we might all agree that this isn’t a good thing, but we might disagree about why. He
continues:
In and of itself, such training is appropriate and morally permissible. [sic] Battles are
won by killing the enemy, so military leaders should strive to produce the most
efficient killers. The problem, however, is that soldiers who kill reflexively in combat
will likely one day reconsider their actions reflectively. If they are unable to justify to
themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely – and
understandably – suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who
performed their duty in combat.

He cites some examples of modern soldiers who later struggled to come to terms with what
they had done in combat. Of course these soldiers had all the justifications or excuses or ‘morally-
sufficient reasons’ necessary to exonerate them from any real wrongdoing. They did what they
had to do; they are blameless. But that’s not really the point, is it? Here is only one representative
example: ‘[I just] reali[zed] that he was another human being, just like I am. And so that’s hard to
deal with, but that day it was too easy. That upsets me more than anything else, how easy it was
to pull the trigger over and over again…’
I’m reminded of a sequence in the documentary film Restrepo (2010), where young
American soldiers are shown engaged in a heated firefight. They are seen a’whoopin and a’hollerin
and celebrating at the destruction of the enemy at their hands, as if they were playing a computer
game or scoring touchdowns. Of course it’s meant to be shocking, even if no judgement is offered
for or against the morality of their action. We can sit back and wring our hands and clutch our
pearls at the sad reality of young people going to war and what necessarily comes with that. There
is moral tragedy in what they do, and perhaps more tragedy in becoming (in needing to become)

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the kind of people that do what they do: it is better to suffer evil than do it, after all. But I would
ask what we could expect when we send young people out to fight. Having been put in a situation
where they have to do what they know ought not be done, do we expect them to do it with moral
sensitivity? And as they are shooting and blowing people up they shout: ‘Sorry! I hope that didn’t
hurt too much! I really find this all terribly difficult!’ Such inconsistency is not sustainable and must
be resolved one way or another.
Orwell follows his well-known example with what seems to me a lesser-known example
which he takes to be more morally revealing. He tells a story of a recruit who was an ethnic
minority from a poor background. This recruit is unfairly suspected of a theft and is summarily
accused and humiliatingly strip searched. He is not guilty, of course, but Orwell says:
What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed after his innocence
had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave him brandy and
chocolate. But that too was horrible – I mean the attempt to wipe out an injury with
money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could not be
wiped out.

Is this not a sober recognition of a violation of moral necessity, a failure to see and respect
this recruit in their full humanity, because he was poor and dark skinned, and that this wrong
cannot be made right by compensation? The same recruit later defends Orwell. This is what strikes
Orwell as most revealing of the characteristic ‘moral atmosphere’ of that time and place:
Could you feel friendly towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you
had been ignominiously searched in his presence for property you were supposed to
have stolen from him? No, you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through
some emotionally widening experience.

War is a time when the morally impossible becomes possible. Most of the time this is a
terrible thing. Very occasionally it goes in the opposite direction, such as when one man is
naturally forgiven by another, even though he might not deserve it, for the simple reason that
they have fought alongside one another.
I can keep citing example after example, battering you over the head with examples of moral
necessity in an attempt to get you to see what I am talking about. But these examples will only
work as examples of moral necessity if you are receptive to their recognition. If you stubbornly
refuse to accept the concept then you will be eager to keep coming back with justificatory
responses that entirely miss the point: ‘So Orwell felt guilty about falsely accusing the recruit; it’s
natural, but he did what he could to make amends: he gave him brandy and chocolate.’ But could
he dismiss his own moral response so easily, and retain his understanding of the ‘moral
atmosphere’ of that time and place? Could he come to understand that he did make good with
brandy and chocolate? And if he could, then what would be remarkable about the recruit coming
to his defence? And in turn, what would this incident say (of any ‘morally revealing’ interest) about
war? That sometimes mistakes are made but you can make people feel better with brandy and
chocolate? What a lesson!

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 Wouldn’t dismissing a response so revealing of the moral character of that time, for him,
force him to reassess his moral understanding of that time? And if he throws out his moral
understanding of that time, would he lose a vital part, a corner or an edge, of the shape of his
moral world? It seems to me that those moral responses, captured as important in his
recollections, are definitively expressive of his moral understanding as such. That is why he
recollects those incidents, in their way, and not others. He comes to understand that the wrong he
has done to the recruit cannot be made good with brandy and chocolate, and that tells him
something important about ethics. These are paradigmatic cases, the cornerstones and hinges of
his moral understanding. They are a realisation of moral limits. How else could they have the
meaning that they do?
What are these stories without their recognition of the morally impossible? Is the lesson of
Raskolnikov that we should be wary of our natural human psychological tendency to beat
ourselves up? Is the lesson of Macbeth that we should be careful not to murder one-too-many, on
our way to the top? Is the lesson of Scrooge that children and family are bad for business? These
are not conclusions that you can seriously conclude.
I say that you do recognise the morally necessary – of which the morally impossible is an
instance – in your quotidian moral reasoning. I say this because you are not stupid and when you
are not being deliberately obtuse you do recognise the meaning in these stories. What you are, if
you are sceptical, is hesitant to endorse that recognition. You are hesitant to rationally commit to
that recognition because you think it has insufficient rational foundation, and you think having
insufficient rational foundation is a sufficient reason to doubt, or even throw the judgement out
entirely. We do recognise moral necessity, you might agree, but there is nothing that conclusively
establishes that we are right to recognise it.
To that I say this: Whilst there might not be any evidence or argument that conclusively
establishes that we are right in our recognition of moral necessity, still we have every right to
recognise it.

Properly Basic Moral Belief

The suggestion that we have every right to hold something to be true, even though we might
have no evidence or argument that makes it true, will ring familiar with anyone schooled in the
philosophy of religion. Certainly this will be familiar to anyone involved in the discussion of the
problem of evil. Alvin Plantinga’s discipline-defining contributions to the philosophy of religion are
not limited to the free-will defence:
The believer is entirely within his intellectual rights in believing as he does even if he
doesn’t know of any good theistic argument (deductive or inductive), even if he
doesn’t believe that there is any such argument, and even if in fact no such argument
exists.

Any sympathies to Plantinga’s claim that religious belief can be a properly basic belief can be

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co-opted for my purposes. According to Plantinga, religious belief is properly basic because it is
involuntary and it arises from a properly functioning natural faculty that, if its origin story is true,
grants the belief epistemological warrant. Is there any reason to suppose moral belief, especially
at its limits, is any different from a properly basic religious belief?
Perhaps you will say that there is no secular moral equivalent of the ‘sensus divinitatis’ that
provides the externalist epistemological justification for properly basic religious belief. God plants
this divine sense in believers, but if there is no God, who or what plants a moral sense in moral
believers?
I think this question is easy to answer, at least superficially. Moral naturalists answer it all
the time, with varying degrees of success. Isn’t it enough to say that we have evolved an innate
disposition? Isn’t it enough to say we learn and develop this moral sense by interacting with our
fellow creatures? Certainly these are sufficient causal explanations. They do not seem to be very
different from the causal explanations considered sufficient to account for other basic beliefs, like
seeing a tree or being in pain. Moral beliefs are ‘produced by cognitive faculties whose purpose it
is to produce true belief’, in this case true beliefs about how to interact with our fellow creatures.
Do we need anything more to account for our properly basic moral beliefs?
Of course there is the possibility of this cognitive faculty misfiring or going wrong, and there
are questions to answer about what counts as ‘proper function’ of this faculty and what holds it to
account. But the unsettled nature of these questions does not, in itself, give us sufficient reason to
dismiss our moral beliefs. Plantinga would argue the same for religious belief, at least. That we
cannot know (de facto) whether or not God exists and has given us the sensus divinitatis does not
in itself mean that any believer lacks warrant for their theistic belief. They would not be
blameworthy for holding those beliefs, despite their de facto ignorance. It would be different if
those beliefs were shown to be inconsistent or contradictory: that would defeat the warrant, as
Plantinga is all-too-aware, and so much of his work on the ‘warrant’ of Christian belief has
defended against any accusation of contradiction. But it seems to me that no one is seriously
suggesting that all our beliefs about the morally impossible are contradictory or inconsistent; the
suggestion is only that they lack conclusive ground.
In light of this, can we not talk of warranted moral belief? These are the morally basic beliefs
that are not shown to be obviously contradictory. They are involuntary, just like religious beliefs,
and they arise from a natural faculty whose origin story, if true, grants them warrant. These can be
causally accounted for naturalistically, if you like, with evolution and social interaction. Of course,
we do not know them to be true (de facto) but we have no good reason to reject them as false (de
jure). Plantinga’s description of a properly basic religious belief seems to me to be closely aligned
with a necessitated moral responsiveness: ‘I don’t choose between believing this and not believing
it: I just find myself believing. In the typical case, what I believe is not under my control; it really
isn’t up to me.’
Perhaps you will say that it isn’t just that our natural moral sense can sometimes misfire, it’s
that there is nothing in the naturalistic origins of our moral sense that can grant any kind of

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epistemological warrant to our morally basic beliefs. Unlike the sensus divinitatis which, if true,
would grant total epistemological warrant to properly basic religious belief, the naturalistic origins
of our moral sense could never, even if true, grant any epistemological warrant to our morally
basic beliefs. Moral naturalism is false, and there are no moral facts to form true beliefs about.
How, then, can we talk about a natural faculty whose purpose is to produce true beliefs, when
there are no true beliefs to be had?
Whilst it is easy to dismiss strongly naturalistic accounts of ethics (and I do), the idea that our
evolved natures might play a role in determining our moral natures is not so easy to dismiss. Or at
least it’s harder for a non-believer to dismiss this than it would be for a non-believer to dismiss the
sensus divinitatis. There are some things that we, as human beings, cannot do. If you dispute these
limits then I encourage you to follow Diogenes and try to eat raw meat (like a dog) and you will
quickly discover your human limitations, as he did. Just as our evolved natures shape our physical
limits (we cannot breathe underwater, photosynthesise, lay eggs, etc.), it’s possible that our
evolved nature shapes our moral limits, at least in part. And if this is the case then, whilst you
would be free to transgress these limits, you would not be free to do so without consequences.
(Just as Diogenes is free to eat raw meat but cannot do so without consequences.) These limits
would be as ‘true’ as anything can be for you. A human being cannot eat raw meat without risking
the digestive consequences, and a human being cannot do the morally impossible without risking
the consequences of guilt and shame. Can you, as a human being, love a fellow human being, form
a bond of trust with them, make oaths and promises with them, have a family with them, become
part of a community with them, entwine your lives and identities over time (activating all the
evolved dispositions along the way) to such an extent that your life feels empty when they are not
around, and then turn around and shamelessly betray them brutally? You can do the deed, of
course, but can you do it shamelessly? Can you do this without facing any judgement, and can you
be sincerely indifferent to that judgement when it comes? I think you would discover that doing
this guilt-free would be no more possible for you than eating raw meat indigestion-free. Diogenes
would say it is wise to align your will with nature, your nature.
We can call these empirical facts, if you like, though I would hesitate to say so because that
description would always fall short and suggests it to be less than it is. You can call them ‘natural’
if you like. I would prefer to call them an essential part of what it means to be a human being. I
would say they are ‘true’, even if not a ‘fact’, and that it is obvious that part of what makes them
true is my evolved human nature. It would be different if I were a lizard.
Should we try to transcend these natural limits? Are these limits limitations to our potential?
Should we use technology to overcome this human moral frailty, just as we learn to cook our food,
or use scuba gear to breathe underwater?
A wholly naturalistic account that sees ethics as only a helpful tool that has evolved to serve
our purposes would seem to recommend ditching that tool when it is no longer useful. That kind
of thinking reveals a misunderstanding, I think. For this reason, I would say that these kinds of
naturalistic accounts can be only partially and never wholly true for ethics. They can show us our
limits, but they cannot of themselves determine those limits. Ancient philosophers seemed to

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understand this; we seem to have forgotten. You can begin by being motivated by a natural
tendency to ‘self-interest’, but as soon as you reflect and philosophise on it you realise that ethics
is self-supporting or sui generis: it stands alone. The good is good for goodness’ sake, and virtue is
its own reward. It is in your self-interest, but it is not done for the sake of self-interest.
Once you understand what virtue is, you understand that nothing is more important, not
even your own ‘wellbeing’, because understanding virtue changes your understanding of what it is
to be well. A healthy soul is a virtuous soul. That is why those old philosophers can say, straight-
faced and with absolute seriousness, that ‘virtue is sufficient for happiness’. These virtues are not
mere instructions about how to achieve a particular purpose, they are recognitions of what our
purposes ought to be. They are a recognition that ethics does not serve our purposes but judges
them; a recognition that there is goodness beyond wellbeing. That is why they can say with
sincerity that ‘a good man cannot be harmed in life or after death’, and this would remain true
even in a virtual or post-human life where all harm is artificially removed. It would be shameful to
take a pill that allowed one to be a glutton without consequence, rather than exert some self-
restraint, even though it seems to go against motivations of self-interest. With philosophical and
moral understanding, you learn that those self-interested reasons are the wrong kind of reasons
to be motivated by.
This idea of ‘goodness beyond wellbeing’ would make no sense on a purely naturalistic
account that sees ethics as an evolved disposition that serves our adaptive purposes, that ethics
just is the way to achieve our purposes. Such an account suggests that if we can rid ourselves of
the need for ethics then we can and should do so. At the point when we can achieve our purposes
without ethics, ethics will become something that used to be useful at some point in our distant
evolutionary past; like an appendix. We can cut it away and suffer no loss. Keeping it on beyond its
purpose only offers us an ever-present risk of infection. But I suppose the post-human world of the
future will have an easy cure for that too, just as soldiers can be (first) trained to kill reflexively,
and then (later, once we have realised our ‘mistake’) trained to do away with the guilt that
follows.
(Is the connection with the problem of evil clear, in this instance, or do I have to make it
clear? I said philosophy has become like trench warfare. I say soldiers are trained to dismiss their
capacity for moral discriminations about the morally impossible. I say this leads to an intolerable
inconsistency that must be resolved one way or another. Is dismissing our understanding of the
morally impossible the correct way to resolve this inconsistency? If we recognise the morally
impossible, then we understand that we are not permitted to dismiss it in pursuit of some
purpose. And that shows us something important about ethics: that it does not serve our
purposes; that it cannot be made to serve our purposes. The connection with theodicy ought to be
clear.)
In any case, the lesson of Socrates is that ethics is sui generis; it stands on its own two feet.
Even if it might have its origins and some of its limits accounted for by our evolutionary past, its
meaning is not entirely determined by that naturalistic account. That we can offer some
naturalistic account for our moral beliefs helps to support the notion that those beliefs can be

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considered properly basic, but it is not necessary for it. Properly basic moral beliefs can stand
alone. It can be its own warrant, just as belief in God can be its own warrant. It can me made true
by the fact that it is true, even if we cannot know with certainty whether it is (in fact) true.
Properly basic moral belief stands alone, but it does not stand on a lone individual’s
judgement. As with Plantinga’s argument about properly basic religious belief, it’s relevant that
there is a ‘community of believers’. This community of moral belief extends far wider than
Christianity. As I’ve said, whilst we might disagree wildly about where or what the moral limits are,
that there are limits would seem to be a common ground. So common, in fact, that it acts as a
condition for the possibility of moral reasoning as such. There are denominational differences, but
moral limits would seem to be an ecumenical matter. There is no meaningful morality without
moral limits.
Plantinga’s analogy with our belief in other minds is relevant here too. All the more so, in
fact, because our belief in other minds is more intimately connected with moral belief than
religious belief. We would seem to have no more (or less) reason to believe in the existence of
other people’s minds as we do to believe in our moral responsiveness to those people, in part
because in recognising them as people with minds, we ordinarily recognise them as being
something of moral importance. It would be difficult to separate those two things. Could you
recognise someone as a person who has a mind but not see anything morally important in that?
But perhaps we shouldn’t beg these questions.
‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a
soul.’ There is more that should be said in defence of this idea, but if you are not already on board
with Wittgenstein’s approach to this issue then it is unlikely that any discussion of mine will bring
you aboard. It is sufficient to say that we do believe in the existence of other people’s minds and
we are morally responsive to those people. We happily believe in the existence of other people’s
minds even though we have no conclusive reason to believe in the existence of other people’s
minds. We don’t ordinarily think there is anything wrong with this. In fact, we would question the
sound mind of anyone seriously committed to solipsism. By analogy, why shouldn’t we be just as
happy to believe in our necessary moral responsiveness to those people, even though we lack
conclusive reason to believe in that responsiveness?

Conclusion
I recognise moral necessity; I suspect you do too. There is no reason to reject that
recognition, and there is reason not to reject it, because a recognition of moral limits is a condition
for the possibility of sound moral judgement. But if I recognise moral limits, then I recognise that
there are certain things I cannot do, things like dismissing my moral limits when they are not
convenient. That is the nature of moral necessity.
What emerges is an accusation of a peculiar kind of inconsistency on the part of theodicy; or
at least an inconsistency within myself were I to endorse a theodicy. To dismiss these moral limits

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by, say, speculating about whether or not Jimmy Savile’s behaviour can be fit into a network of
divine purposes, to ask whether it might be worth it, would be inconsistent with myself. Those
speculations fall beyond the reasonable limits of moral thinking. All I can say in such a case is that I
cannot (morally) do such a thing. It makes no moral sense. It is like the man walking around
proclaiming that he doesn’t have feet. It’s not just a confusion; it’s not a matter of evidence or a
lack of understanding. It’s not as if he believes his shoelaces are tied when they are not (because
he hasn’t looked), or that he believes he is wearing brogues when he is not (because he doesn’t
understand what ‘brogues’ are). You can believe these things and be wrong. You can be shown
your mistake. Even if he were walking around on prosthetics, and comes to learn as much, what he
learns concerns the nature of his feet: ‘I am walking on prosthetic feet.’ These are confusions that
can be responded to with better evidence or greater understanding. But who can show a man that
he doesn’t have feet, the things he understands to be walking around on, when he is walking
around on them? Would that be a conclusion that he can really conclude? Without, perhaps,
jumping into a chair in fright and alarm.
Having feet is a condition for the possibility of walking around on them; and I am walking
around on my feet; so if you ask me to dismiss the belief that I have feet then I’m not sure what
you are asking me to do. Should I stop walking around? If I am to continue walking, what do I walk
on?! Having moral limits is a condition for the possibility of sound moral judgement; and I do (and
ought to) exercise my moral judgement; so if you ask me to dismiss my moral limits then I’m not
sure what you are asking me to do. Like walking around on my feet, my understanding of moral
limits stands on itself. Dismiss it and I lose my footing.
So when it comes to the problem of evil, you might be able to argue that some, or many, or
even most of the bad things in the world are justifiable by appeal to a morally-sufficient reason.
But not all. There are limits, and a recognition of the morally impossible is a recognition of those
limits. If you recognise those limits (as I think you must) then you cannot dismiss, doubt, or deny
them without falling into inconsistency with yourself.
In conclusion, I say that we do recognise the morally impossible, that these are expressive of
our moral limits, that these limits determine the shape of our moral world, and we cannot dismiss
all our moral limits without also throwing away our entire moral world. As such, I must, morally
and rationally, recognise some moral limits; and so I ought not and I cannot dismiss the morally
impossible, even if I am not right.

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Chapter Five: The Problem of Evil as an Ethical Problem

To begin the final chapter, I’ll briefly summarise what has come before. I began this book by
saying that our philosophical understanding of the problem of evil is not in a healthy state. It is
characterised by various markers of philosophical ill-health, showing symptoms of sophistry and
confusion. I offered a patient history to aid diagnosis, suggesting that our philosophical discussion
of the problem of evil has lost something important: the ‘that for the sake of which’ it is done.
This, I suggest, is to orient ourselves rightly, ethically, to the evil and suffering of the world.
Without wishing to be hyperbolic, for those of us who discuss the problem of evil at the ‘highest
level’ (as it were), we have the option of our discussion being amongst the most important things
that can be understood by any human being. Instead we choose to nit-pick trivialities.
But I accept that this is how the game has come to be played and there is some virtue in
specialism, and that this virtuous specialism comes with some unavoidable consequences. I just
don’t think we should have given up our ethical vocation so easily.
We begin by sincerely asking what it means to live well as a human being and we notice that
the problem of evil can have some significant bearing on that question. So we investigate the
problem of evil. We become so focussed on this problem and its component parts that we become
specialists in it. And as we get specialised we forget our original purpose and slowly get detached
from it to the point that we can’t find a way to reconnect what we’re doing with the reason for
doing it. Then we look up from our work and turn around in surprise to find that what we’re doing
seems not to be valued? How can we be surprised, when we left what mattered so far behind?
I can’t help but think all we need to do is retrace our steps a little and reconnect with our
original purpose. Then it seems obvious that philosophy is the most important of all things.
To this end, I suggest an alternative way of engaging with the problem of evil. I retrace our
steps and question whether we ought to philosophise about an evidential formulation of the
problem of evil that challenges the rationality of theistic belief. I offer a logical formulation of the
problem of evil that is based on an inconsistency of values and not of facts or contingent states of
affairs. In theory this could work with any values, but since we are asked to offer a ‘necessary’ and
not merely contingent contradiction, I focus only on the absolute values of moral necessity. I
suggest the concept of the ‘morally impossible’ and suggest that this is not an empty concept: the
morally impossible can and does happen. A sincere recognition of the morally impossible would be
inconsistent with an insistence on God’s perfect goodness (and sufficient power) because such a
God could only permit the morally impossible in morally tragic cases where the only way (logically)
to prevent one morally impossible thing is to allow another: i.e. a ‘Sophie’s choice’. But such a
morally-perfect being could not avoid acknowledging the wrong they would have done in such a
situation and so could not be considered wholly good. That being would ask for our forgiveness.
As with all logical formulations of the problem of evil, this problem is not without solutions.

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One solution would be to construct a theodicy and argue that nothing bad happens without good
reason; or else say, with sceptical theism, that ‘for all we know’ nothing bad happens without
good reason. Everything that happens in this world is justified by a morally-sufficient reason. But
for this to be the case, it must be that everything can be justified. And if that is the case, then
nothing is not justifiable. But the morally impossible is unjustifiable. And so theodicy (and sceptical
theism) must deny the morally impossible. This, I say, comes only at great moral cost. If you are
willing to bear that cost then theodicy remains an option, but be clear about what it takes from
you. It will remain morally reprehensible to anyone who clear-sightedly recognises the morally
impossible.
An alternative solution would be to reject the meaningfulness of the concept of the morally
impossible. Talk of the morally impossible is as easy to dismiss as talk about angry clouds. It is
nothing but a philosophical hobgoblin. But I say it is no hobgoblin, that you can and do recognise
the morally impossible in your quotidian moral reasoning, insofar as it is no more than a
recognition of moral limits. We all have moral limits, even if we might differ wildly about when and
where we hit those limits. These limits are the morally impossible. I argue that we cannot do
without them because they shape our moral world. Having some moral limits is a condition for the
possibility of sound moral judgement. I argue that we have as much reason to hold firm to our
understanding of these moral limits as we do to our properly basic religious beliefs, or our belief in
the existence of other minds. I say that our moral limits are fused to the foundations of our moral
understanding. They are the hinges around which our moral understanding turns. I cannot dismiss
my recognition of the morally impossible and remain a morally-thinking thing.

The Argument
The combination of these claims throws up an argument:
1. A consistent set of theistic beliefs requires a solution to the logical problem of
morally-impossible evil.

2. Solutions to the logical problem of morally-impossible evil are morally problematic.

3. Therefore, a consistent set of theistic beliefs is morally problematic.

The first premise follows from the construction of a logical formulation of the problem of
evil: a theistic set of beliefs, in the traditional form of the ‘inconsistent triad’, can be exposed as
inconsistent if part of that set of beliefs are beliefs about the morally impossible. This
inconsistency would be within and between value claims about God’s goodness and the morally
impossible. A wholly good God could not permit the morally impossible and remain wholly good. If
this is true, then in order for a theistic set of beliefs to be consistent it must offer a solution to the
problem of evil. It must surrender its recognition of the morally impossible or else abandon its
notion of divinely-perfect goodness.
The second premise follows from the arguments that point out the morally problematic

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nature of denying the morally impossible. In simple terms this means that denying the morally
impossible is morally insensitive, too detached, too consequentialist or instrumentalist, too willing
to treat people as a means to an end, and all in all too willing to transgress moral limits and excuse
the inexcusable, justify the unjustifiable, and permit the impermissible. These moral limits are
essential to our moral understanding, they shape our moral world, and as such we cannot
abandon or dismiss them. We ought not abandon or dismiss them. But if we do not abandon or
dismiss them, then we must know that we cannot transgress them without suffering the
consequences in terms of guilt and shame.
The conclusion of this argument is controversial, however you look at it. The problem of evil
shows theism to be morally problematic. Any theist who denies or dismisses or downplays the
morally impossible ought to be ashamed of themselves. Any theist who sincerely recognises the
morally impossible but doesn’t see why this has any bearing on their theistic belief is inconsistent
with themselves, and if they are a philosopher then they ought to know better. Either way, they
could be judged very harshly by those of us who do not participate in their inconsistencies.
But it would be a mistake to think that I am pronouncing judgement on the theist. It would
be a mistake to think I am straightforwardly offering this argument as a reason to accept the
conclusion. I am not saying that theistic belief is morally unsupportable per se. And this is certainly
not an argument for atheism.
This argument is a result of my reflections on the problem of evil as an ethical problem, not
what we could call the ‘intellectual problem’ of weighing up the rationality of theistic belief. As I
see it, an ethical problem does not work in the same way as an intellectual problem. It has
different purposes, different aims, a different scope.

Not an Intellectual Problem

The purpose of intellectual problems, as I am using the term, is to find the truth or the ‘right
answer’; ordinarily the ‘objective’ or real truth, not just the truth as I see it (which would not be
enough of a solution to an intellectual problem). It is intended to settle a matter of fact. The
problem of evil tends to be understood in this way: it is an attempt to get a clear picture of the
real state of things, one of many tools (or arguments) that we use in our attempts to ascertain
whether or not God exists. It serves this purpose; it is like a saw that cuts wood. But this is not how
I am treating the problem.
Let me offer some examples, to make it clearer what I have in mind: The task of calculating
how much tax I owe is an intellectual problem. It’s a combination of empirical facts and
mathematical calculations. It is ethically-relevant, obviously, but it is distinct from the questions of
whether I ought to pay tax or how much I ought to be taxed. The ethical problem is whether and
how much tax their ought to be, the intellectual problem is then the calculation of the objective
‘right answer’ according to those ethically-guided aims. These problems are separable. The
calculation itself requires no moral understanding: a machine could do it. You could say it is my

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responsibility that this intellectual problem be solved – because I am responsible for ensuring that
my tax is paid – but the problem itself is not necessarily my problem to solve. Because of this, I can
detach myself from it and suffer no loss. I can hand the calculation over to someone else to do for
me; and perhaps I ought to do this, if I’m not confident I will get the right answer. This is what I
mean by an intellectual problem. As I am using the term, intellectual problems can be called
impersonal. There is nothing in an intellectual problem that says I must solve it. Obviously it is
different in the specific context of studying for examinations and such (where the purpose is not
so much to find the objective truth but to demonstrate your personal understanding of it), but as a
rule I can ask you to solve an intellectual problem for me and nothing is lost in that. I can
outsource my intellectual pursuit of the objective truth. I can read a report of scientific data and
take it as informative; I do not need to gather the data myself in order for it to be meaningful. In
fact, that is intellectual understanding at its best and truest, because subjective perspectives are
generally considered a corrupting influence on purely intellectual matters: in the pursuit of ‘the
facts’ you are called to be as objective as possible; you are called to take yourself out of the matter
as much as possible.
Ethical problems, by contrast, as I am using the term, are irreducibly personal. An ethical
problem is something that I must solve. I cannot ask you to make my ethical decisions for me
because, if I do so, they cease to be my decisions and so cease to be ethical decisions at all: in that
circumstance, the ethical decision I have made is not to make a decision. I have abdicated. I have
just passed the buck and taken no responsibility. And whilst I can inform my ethical understanding,
I cannot outsource it. My ethical life is my responsibility, as yours is yours. When it comes to
settling on my ethical values, I must decide where I stand, and only I can decide this because it is
me that has to stand behind my words. You must decide where you stand.
What, then, is the purpose of philosophising about the problem of evil? What is the scope of
the problem?
As an intellectual problem, it is to find the objective truth of the matter. It is to settle the
question of whether or not God exists, or at least appraise the rationality of theism. This is, in
principle, an impersonal exercise. I can (and perhaps should) outsource it to better minds than my
own. If I want good bread, I should go to a baker. But if I am here writing a book on the topic, it
would seem to be up to me to provide you with an answer. Is this what I am doing?
Say I have found the objective truth of the matter, and I present this to you as an argument:
what is the purpose of that? To show you that you are mistaken (unless you agree with me)? What
is it to me if you are mistaken about this matter? Surely your ethical and religious beliefs are your
own responsibility, not mine. Who am I to tell you what to believe, objectively, about these things?
Perhaps it would be different if you were my student and I were your teacher and I had some kind
of duty to furnish you with true beliefs. But is that the case? Have you asked for a lesson? Can I
impose my teaching on you, when you have not asked for it? And if I am a good teacher, can I be
proud of that imposition, when I know that few will be taught who are not willing to learn?
What is my aim in presenting an argument to people who I know will disagree with me? Is it

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to show you that you are stupid? Why would I want to do that; what good would it do me (or
you)? And why would I care if you are stupid? I know there are many stupid people in the world; it
would be an odd thing to care about and even dedicate a life to, telling them all that they are
stupid. Can I be so sure that you are stupid, and I am not? Is it then to show everyone else (who
has sense enough to see) that I am not stupid, but clever? And yet if I really am clever, can I be
proud of that aim?
What possible purpose could it serve for me to provide you with an answer to the problem
of evil? I mean that to be a serious question. Treated as an intellectual problem, I think you will
struggle to find a purpose that you can be proud of. Can we be surprised, then, when writing on
the topic becomes defensive, grandiose, condescendingly combative, and full of nit-picking self-
importance?
If the problem of evil is, instead, an ethical problem, what is the purpose of philosophising
about it? As an ethical problem, is it an irreducibly personal problem. It is a part of my ethical life. I
want to be good and do right; I want to orient myself rightly in the world; I want to have true
beliefs about what really matters and live as much as I can in alignment with those beliefs; I want
to live well as a human being. This is my responsibility, not yours. And your ethical life is your
responsibility, not mine. What good would it do either of us for me to provide you with ‘the
answer’ when any answer must be your own?
To put it bluntly: The ‘answer’ is not the aim here; the process is the aim. I am not offering
an answer: I am provoking you to find your own answer. That is why I say that it would be a
mistake to think that I am offering my argument as a reason to accept the truth of the conclusion. I
am not doing that, because that would be to offer this conclusion as an answer to the intellectual
problem of the problem of evil, an attempt to settle the ‘objective truth’ of the matter. But the
problem of evil is not an intellectual problem; it is an ethical problem, and it calls for a different
kind of response. It calls for your response.
If I am offering any argument then it is to the effect that treating the problem of evil as an
intellectual problem will not get you the answers you are looking for. The problem of evil is better
thought of as an ethical problem. My intention has been to show this whilst saying something else.
I ‘say’ that theism is morally problematic. In arguing so, I ‘show’ that ethical considerations are
most fundamental to our understanding of the problem of evil. It is an ethical problem to its core;
why treat it as anything else?
But can I separate the intellectual from the ethical so easily? Am I not saying that theism is
inconsistent? And if it is inconsistent then why not say it is irrational? I am saying the problem of
evil could show a theist to be inconsistent in only the same way that you could say a man who
proclaims that beating children is wrong, whilst mercilessly beating a child, is inconsistent. I say
this is ‘inconsistent’, but it is difficult to say that this ‘irrational’ in the sense that it is a
contradiction in propositional beliefs. It is not even that it is a contradiction between beliefs and
behaviour, because obviously we can be weak-willed and do one thing when we know we
shouldn’t. It is a contradiction between professed moral belief and manifest moral responsiveness:

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i.e., that he professes the belief whilst lacking the responsiveness expected of that belief. If this
‘mistake’ were pointed out to him, there could be all manner of ‘rational’ responses. Perhaps he
will say this is a special case, an exception. Perhaps he will say that he has no choice. Perhaps he
will simply acknowledge that, as it turns out, he wasn’t as committed to the idea that you
shouldn’t beat children as he thought he was. These are all open options. They avoid any rational
inconsistency, but the original accusation remains which is only that he lacks a moral
responsiveness that he ought, really, to have; at least if his professed beliefs are anything to go by.
(The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
The inconsistency works at the level of values. When someone expresses a moral belief –
such as ‘it is wrong to beat children’ – they make a value claim. They could express this as an
intellectual belief only, devoid of value, as if it were mere words, parroted but not really held with
moral sincerity. They could express this belief without having any moral responsiveness to it, and
they would show it to not really be a ‘moral’ belief at all. In that case there would be no
inconsistency in going against that belief. But if it is a moral belief and not just mere words, then in
being a value claim it has a motivational force, a ‘to be doneness’. Moral responsiveness is internal
to sincere moral belief. And therefore, if there is no responsiveness, there cannot really be the
belief. It is mere words, as it turns out. There is nothing wrong with it being mere words; we
cannot insist that people ought to have a certain level of moral responsiveness. All we can say is
that they cannot lack that responsiveness and make a serious claim to the moral belief. Not
without being a hypocrite, at least.
Truman was no hypocrite. He had a perfectly consistent set of beliefs. Where he saw duty,
he acknowledged that duty and responded accordingly. ‘It was no great decision.’ If, however, he
were to have said that it is categorically morally wrong to incinerate the children of your enemies
to preserve the lives of your soldiers, then it would be different. Then we’d have a point of
apparent inconsistency. Then we might be able to ask the question: how could you bring yourself
to do such a thing?
What would be the purpose (now, especially, many years after the event) of offering an
argument along these lines, in an attempt to settle an intellectual problem? Were I tasked with
offering a contribution to ‘the problem of Nagasaki’, what would I say? Would I tell him what he
should have done, what he should have believed? Who am I to say such a thing! Would I offer an
argument to rationally compel him to accept the ‘right answer’? What difference would that make,
what purpose would it serve, other than to show him that he was wrong? Is it intended to be
action guiding? Whose actions?! ‘The problem of Nagasaki’ is not an intellectual problem to be
solved. Not now, at least. No one wins by winning that argument because everything is already
long since lost.
Instead, what if I were to treat it as an ethical problem? What if I viewed it as a part of my
ethical life? This is not selfish or grandiose; the opposite, in fact, because it is nothing more than a
recognition that it is hardly my place to make decisions or judgements about other people and on
other people’s behalf about something that is so far removed from me. But viewed as an ethical
problem, I can reflect, philosophically, I can investigate the moral reality of the question, and I can

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decide where I stand. This process helps to shape my moral world. If I am asked to offer a
contribution to ‘the problem’, I can only say where I stand and explain my thinking, because my
ethical life is my responsibility and theirs is theirs. But in doing this, perhaps I show a different way
of looking at things. I show the shape of a different moral world. Or else I reflect something of
their own moral world back at them. Perhaps this will cause them to see things differently, but I
leave them to their conscience. It’s not my place to tell them what to think.
I see the problem of evil as being analogous to this kind of example. After all, whose actions
are to be guided by our intellectual understanding of this matter? Are any of us expecting to be in
the position of having to decide how to create a universe? Are we intending to tell God what He
should have done? Is our purpose only to judge Him? And would it make any difference
whatsoever if we were right?
I think these reflections point to the true purpose of philosophising about the problem of
evil. The purpose of philosophising about the problem of evil is to gain moral understanding, not
intellectual understanding. And moral understanding is essentially personal. To gain moral
understanding, we need to treat it as a moral problem, an ethical question. We need to
understand the problem of evil within the context of our ethical lives, with the purpose of
informing those ethical lives, and that is something only we can do. It is a matter of understanding
where you stand. You already know that child abuse (and genocide, slavery, etc.) is unjustifiable.
Remain true to yourself and anti-theodicy will follow naturally.

Not Not an Ethical Problem

That the problem of evil should not not be treated as an ethical problem has I think become
clearer over the course of its recent history. The already-mentioned moral criticisms of anti-
theodicy aside, many voices have called for the problem of evil to be seen as less of a purely
theoretical intellectual problem and more of a practical or pastoral concern. I join in these calls,
but I don’t think it’s enough. I think we can show that, when treated as a purely theoretical or
intellectual problem, the problem of evil fails unless it takes its ethical nature seriously.
I have argued as much in previous work. I will restate one of those arguments briefly here,
since it forms some of the background to my thinking on this matter and so it will help to explain
it. I have always felt that there was something intuitively wrong with someone trying to argue for a
non-moral conclusion – that God does not exist – on the basis of moral premises. The conclusion is
something that sounds an awful lot like a statement of a fact, like a claim that ‘no human being
that exists is over 10ft tall’, but the grounds for this fact are at times little more than a report of
your moral feelings. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t give this kind of argument the time of day. ‘No human
being that exists is over 10ft tall, because it would be really unfair to the game of basketball.’
When I came to present this argument with more rigour (philosophically nit-picky though it
was), I cited it as an inconsistency in J. L. Mackie’s thought because he argues against moral
arguments for the existence of God on the basis that they argue from values to facts, and that this

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gets the direction of supervenience between facts and values back to front. And yet he also offers
the problem of evil as an argument against belief in God, which surely repeats the same error (if it
is an error). I stand by that argument and the other lines of argument in that article, but I don’t
think it needs to be as complicated as all that. Some illustrations can make the underlying point
clear.
Imagine an atheist offers a version of the argument from evil. For example, they say that
there is something essentially morally wrong with God violating the Pauline Principle that we
should never do evil so that good may come. But as far as they can see, God, in creating the world
with so much evil and suffering but with the purpose of everything coming good in the end, does
violate this principle. The only sensible conclusion to this paradox is that God does not exist. But
imagine God appears to this atheist and sets them right: ‘Where were you when I laid the
foundations of the earth?’, etc. The atheist’s original paradox remains, perhaps, and they will
certainly feel confused: it remains the case that they cannot consistently believe both that it is
wrong for God to do this thing and that God, the morally-perfect being, does it. But can they still
maintain their original conclusion? Of course not, because God’s existence has just been
confirmed. What is their alternative, to avoid paradoxical inconsistency? They must conclude that
they were mistaken in their moral beliefs. In light of new information, they change their moral
minds. They align their value judgements with the facts. It turns out God can violate the Pauline
Principle under certain circumstances. The atheist learns a valuable lesson and continues
forwards, as a theist, with a more accurate understanding of the world.
An atheist (who is an atheist on the basis of the problem of evil) who learns that God exists
must take a very different view of the moral world. Such a piece of information radically changes
the shape of their moral world. The fact can and does and must affect their value judgements,
because value judgements ought to be aligned with the facts, and especially if those value
judgements are inconsistent with the facts. But it does not work the other way around. The
discovery of a new moral principle cannot make it so that God does not and has never existed.
That is not something that is within the power of values to do. The fact of God’s existence changes
what is true or false about moral beliefs, but moral beliefs do not have the power to change the
fact of God’s existence. Moral beliefs cannot change the facts; they can only change how you
perceive those facts or how you feel about them. But facts can force you to change your moral
beliefs.
Facts have a kind of logical priority over values: facts come first, then we try to align our
value judgements with the facts. Because of this logical priority, if there is a contradiction between
facts and value judgements, the value judgements must be rejected or modified, because value
judgements do not have the power to change the facts; and yet we cannot remain with an
inconsistent set of beliefs, so something must be done.
When J. L. Mackie makes this point, he does so in opposition to the moral argument for
theism. Many atheists are keen to reject any of the moral arguments for belief in God for the
reason that you cannot argue a point about how the world is on the basis of a set of beliefs about
how the world ought to be. Just because the world ‘ought’ to be just and good does not mean that

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it is just and good, and certainly doesn’t imply that there must be something that makes it just and
good.
Mackie’s primary target is Kant. (He does also target Newman, but he uses a different
argument there.) In this, Mackie picked the high-hanging fruit; easier targets were available and
would have been more appropriate for Mackie’s line of argument, which does not fit quite as
easily with Kant’s peculiar transcendental context. As Mackie deals with Kant’s argument out of
that peculiar context, Kant’s moral argument for belief in God is really an argument about practical
consistency. It would be inconsistent to believe that you ought to uphold the moral law unless you
also believed that you can uphold the moral law. Or at least, it would be practically impossible to
maintain a commitment to the moral law without some assurance of goodness and justice in the
end. According to Kant, the function of human reason is a good will or reverence for the moral
law, and human beings are naturally (essentially) desiring of happiness. We need to do our duty
and we want to be happy. Were it to be the case that these two essential drives contradicted each
other in some way, then human beings would be doomed to a tormented absurdity. We must,
therefore, on pain of tormented absurdity, believe that goodness and happiness and justice will
align in the end. And the only way this can be is if there is a God who can make it happen. God is a
necessary postulate of practical reason.
Mackie thinks this is a bad argument because you cannot argue for a fact (even if only as a
‘postulate of practical reason’) on the basis of a set of values. This gets the direction of
supervenience between facts and values back to front. Values change in response to the facts, but
the facts do not change in response to values.
The same principle is obvious beyond the context of the problem of evil. Imagine we say it is
virtuous to give money to someone living on the streets. We think we do them good. This is a
value judgement. Then someone comes along and shows us that, as a matter of fact, we are doing
them more harm than good because they will only use the money to buy drugs. Say we accept this
as a fact. Can we hold to our moral belief that it is virtuous to give money to someone on the
street? Can we argue that we do in fact do them good by giving them money because we have
decided it is the virtuous thing to do? ‘It would be wrong to give money to someone living on the
street if they will only use that money to buy drugs; it is right to give money to someone living on
the street; therefore, they will not use the money only to buy drugs.’ This argument runs: value,
value: fact. It runs: ‘ought, ought: is’. That would get things back to front. Our beliefs about what is
good to do depend on the facts of the matter, but the facts of the matter do not depend on our
beliefs about what is good to do.
Imagine someone fatally shoots someone. They point a loaded gun, pull the trigger, fire a
bullet, and the bullet hits a person, killing them dead. We make a value judgement. Such a thing
ought not to be done. We judge the shooter badly. We judge in response to the facts. But if the
facts change (or rather, if our understanding of the facts changes) then we change our value
judgement. If we learn that the shooter had good reason to believe the gun wasn’t loaded, or that
they had no way of knowing they were pointing the gun at a person, or that the bullet was meant
to be a blank, we do not judge the person in the same way. Our value judgements respond to the

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facts. We try to establish the facts in order to make the right value judgements. We try to align our
value judgements with the facts.
But the facts are not so kind as to align with our value judgements. No matter how much you
tell it that it would be wrong to hit that person, or how clearly you hold that value judgement to
be true, a bullet will not alter its course. It will not misfire or change into a blank for the sake of
moral consistency. The shooter cannot say ‘it would be wrong to shoot this bullet at someone; I
will not do anything wrong; therefore this bullet will not shoot at someone (even if I point the
loaded gun and pull the trigger)’. This argument runs: value, fact: fact. It runs ‘ought, is: is’. But
that’s not how the world works.
Our beliefs about what ought to be done depend on our beliefs about what is the case, but
our beliefs about what is the case cannot depend on our beliefs about what ought to be done. Our
moral beliefs do not have that fact-impacting power.
But isn’t that essentially what theists are doing when they present a moral argument for the
existence of God? ‘It would be wrong for the world to require goodness without reward; the world
requires goodness; therefore, there must be reward’. This argument runs: value, value: fact. It
runs: ‘ought, ought: is’. But just because the world ought to be a certain way doesn’t mean that it
is. The moral argument for the existence of God erroneously argues from values to facts.
Similarly erroneous would be the attempt to argue for the existence of God on the basis of
the existence of objective moral values. The moral law could not exist without a divine lawgiver, or
so it is claimed. If we recognise a moral law, we must recognise it as divinely-given. Setting aside
the clear falsity of this claim – because there are many ways we could understand having
obligations to one another without needing it to be divinely-mandated – it would remain a case of
arguing for a fact on the basis of a value judgement. ‘Murder is not wrong unless God exists to
command us not to murder; murder is wrong; therefore, God exists.’ Whether the first premise
here is considered a fact (of an a priori nature, presumably) or a value I leave undecided, but even
if we concede it as an analytic fact, this argument would run: fact, value: fact. It runs: ‘is, ought: is’.
Is the argument from evil to the non-existence of God any different? ‘It would be wrong for a
good and powerful God to permit evil; evil exists; therefore, God does not exist.’ This argument
runs: value, value: fact. It runs ‘ought, ought: is’. (I take ‘evil exists’ to be a paradigmatic value-
judgement, but even if you disagree and think it is a fact, it makes no difference because there will
still be the value judgement that God ought not permit it, and this is enough to make the whole
line of reasoning depend on a value judgement.) The argument from evil to the non-existence of
God also argues from values to facts. If it is wrong to argue for the existence of God on the basis of
values, why isn’t it also wrong to argue against the existence of God on the basis of values? For
this reason I would say that the argument from evil to the non-existence of God is fundamentally
flawed, exactly as Mackie says the moral argument for the existence of God does not work. You
cannot argue for a fact from a value.
Perhaps we could say that, in contrast to the argument from evil, the problem of evil is not
about arguing for a ‘fact’ but establishing a consistent set of beliefs. Obviously I would be

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sympathetic to this. But in that case is the moral argument for belief in God any different? Isn’t
that also about establishing a consistent set of beliefs about how to live in this world? You need to
do your duty and you want to be happy: to avoid the tormented absurdity that follows from these
two being in any way contradictory, you need to find a way to make them consistent. Belief in God
would make them consistent. So would Socrates’ claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Or
else you can abandon your duty and try only to be as happy as you can (Epicurus can show you
how). So long as these are value-based inferences from value-based claims then there is nothing
obviously wrong with this. The mistake only emerges once you try to infer a fact from these. That’s
like crossing the is-ought gap but the wrong way; not inferring an ought from an is, but an is from
an ought. If Socrates were to say that he was bullet-proof, on the basis that he is a good man and
‘a good man cannot be harmed’, then we would say he has made an obvious mistake: his value
judgements, however true, cannot determine the facts of the matter. Mackie would say that any
moral argument for the existence of God makes the same mistake, though less obviously. I would
say that the argument from evil to the non-existence of God makes the same mistake again, and
the problem of evil shares this mistake if it infers a fact in an attempt to resolve an inconsistency
between facts and values. You cannot infer an is from an ought.
What is the upshot of this? It is that any attempt to propose the problem of evil as an
intellectual problem is doomed to failure. Intellectual problems, as I have termed it, aim to provide
an objective ‘right answer’. These are claims of fact, not merely an expression of my feelings or the
truth as I see it. Any move from the value claims made within the problem of evil – those claims
that state what ‘ought to be’ the case – to a solution that is fact-type or making a claim about
what ‘is’ the case, will inevitably get the direction of supervenience between facts and values
back-to-front.
The point is clearer if we try to mangle our examples to fit with the idea of moral necessity.
Imagine we say it is morally necessary to give money to people on the street, even if it does them
more harm than good because they will only use the money to buy drugs. (I think this is a bad and
mangled example because it is implausible to suppose that the specific action of ‘giving money’ to
people on the street is the kind of thing that could be accounted a moral necessity. Even if you
think it is the right thing to do, it makes sense to doubt the rightness of this action. That action
could at most be seen as an expression of an underlying moral necessity – such as to ‘be
charitable’ or ‘uphold fairness’, etc. – but those are moral absolutes whose expressions are very
adaptable and variable. We might recognise it as morally necessary to do ‘something’, but it is not
necessarily clear that ‘giving them money’ is that something. But let’s run with the mangled
example for the sake of argument...) We say it is right to give money to people on the streets, and
we refuse to change our value judgement because we find we cannot do so without abandoning
our entire moral world along with it. It is recognised as a moral necessity: ‘I can’t just walk by and
give nothing.’ If we hold to this moral necessity, does it change the facts? Of course not, and we
don’t claim it to. We don’t expect our discovery of moral necessity to change a single thing in the
world, because we understand we have only discovered something about ourselves, about our
own moral limits. We conclude with a value judgement only, fully aware that is powerless to

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change the facts. What changes in us is our understanding of why we might give money to people
on the streets. If we think we ought to give money to people on the streets even if it does them
more harm than good, then clearly our motivations are not so nakedly consequentialist. Our actual
motivations might not be clear; we are probably motivated by compassion, charity, empathy, pity.
We see someone in need and we feel we’d like to help them. Perhaps we are expressing only our
own guilt about having money in our pockets when others do not, and so we look to assuage our
guilt by giving some away to the first needy person we see. Perhaps we just want to be seen to be
good, regardless of the actual good we are doing. We can reflect on whether we are content to be
motivated by those reasons and prioritise them over the harm we might be doing. This is a
decision we have to make. Philosophical reflection can help us come to understand this moral
matter more clearly. It seems that it’s not really about the good or harm we are doing them, but if
it’s not about that then what is it about? Making yourself feel better? Is that a worthy aim?
Likewise with our other example (a more suitable example here: less mangled, more
plausible), if the shooter understands what they have done to be morally impossible. Can they
conclude with any kind of fact, that they did not in fact do what they did? Of course not, they just
understand the full wrongness of it. They conclude with a value judgement but know, tragically,
that it cannot change the facts. Even if they know that they have every ‘justification’ or ‘excuse’,
that they didn’t mean to shoot the person, or they thought the gun wasn’t loaded, or that the
bullet was a blank, etc., etc., they know that none of that changes the fact that they have killed
someone. They find this in itself to be morally impossible but cannot deny that it happened; in this
they know that moral necessity is not alethic. In fact, they come to know this all too well, because
they find they have done what they know ought never be done. Moving forward from this place is
not a matter of dismissing or downplaying or justifying or excusing: these are all understood to be
morally inaccessible responses. The only way forward is remorse, acknowledgement, and
forgiveness, if it is possible. But there’s no denying what they have done.
This is just an example, and I am obviously speaking as an outsider here. I have never killed
anyone, either intentionally or accidentally, so I have no idea what a recognition of that heavy
moral necessity would be like. I can only speculate. But it’s not like it’s fiction. People do kill
people. From accounts I have seen of it, in people who are morally sensitive and not psychopaths,
it is world shattering. It can be life-defining, a weight of guilt that will never quite lift. It needs to
be worked through. This can be the case even when the killing was ‘justified’; again showing its
morally necessary nature. I would be very hesitant to dismiss someone as being morally
oversensitive or irrational for feeling guilty about killing someone, even if they had no choice.
How right would it be to treat this guilt as if it were an intellectual problem? Even if what we
say is factually correct, is it our role to educate the guilty killer about the facts of their situation,
about their justifications or excuses for killing? And when they say ‘I know all that, but can’t you
see what it means to kill someone?’, we reply: ‘Well now you are just being irrational…’ Ought we
dismiss their ethical problem, and reduce it to an intellectual problem, just so it is something we
can understand and do away with? (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
The moral argument for belief in God is very amenable to a reading in terms of moral

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necessity. The believer finds it to be morally impossible not to believe in God. This is not a
statement of fact, like ‘God exists’. It is a statement about their own moral judgements or beliefs,
about the limits of their moral world. For them, their moral world is defined by their belief in God:
therefore, for them, there is no moral world without that belief in God. Belief in God is a
foundation stone, a hinge around which their moral reasoning swings. These are expressions of
value, absolute value, not of fact. How right would it be to treat this as if it were only an
intellectual matter of fact? It would miss the point to do so; it would reduce the argument to such
an impoverished form that it wouldn’t be worth giving it the time of day. The conclusion of the
moral argument is not that God’s existence has been demonstrated but only that the believer is
firm in their moral resolve and equally firm in their hope that this resolve is not foolish.
I am saying the problem of evil should be understood exactly like this. It is an ethical problem
that tells you about your moral limits. The conclusions of these ‘arguments’ are not facts, but
values, absolute values. Due to the fundamental role that value judgements play within it, the
problem of evil cannot conclude with a fact-type claim. It can only conclude with a value
judgement. This means that it should not be treated as an intellectual problem, as I am using that
term. It ought to be treated as an ethical problem. The conclusion of the problem of evil, either
‘for’ or ‘against’, ought to be expressed as a value judgement only. It tells us nothing whatsoever
about the fact of God’s existence.
The problem of evil does not tell you anything about the world because it cannot do such a
thing. It can only tell you about yourself and your moral beliefs. This is why it ought to be treated
as an ethical problem.

Ivan Karamazov is a Hopeless Romantic

If we look beyond the world of academic philosophy we find that there is nothing particularly
novel in treating the problem of evil in this way. Is Job tackling an intellectual problem? Is that the
kind of answer he is looking for? Is that the kind of answer being offered to us? And if not, then
why should we take it as so? Is it a task he, or we, can outsource to his friends? How shallow it
would be to think so! Can the deep moral questions raised by something like Shūsaku Endō’s
Silence be settled by a matter of fact? Are they trying to be? Is that their true meaning? Can they
be responded too in the same way we might respond to a problem in physics? How would we
react to someone who engaged with the Book of Job and responded: ‘Well of course his questions
would have been answered by a better understanding of economics and dermatology.’ How would
we react to someone who engaged with Silence and thought the whole matter could be settled by
recognising that ‘it’s just a piece of bronze’?
Most of these types of literary instances escape a philosophical rendering. Dostoevsky’s Ivan
Karamazov is not so lucky. He has been paraded across the philosophical literature on the problem
of evil, made to stand as an example of a particular kind of argument from evil, one that is
concerned not with the quantity or severity of evil in this world but with a certain qualitative type
of evil. This argument focusses on the suffering of innocent children. Adults deserve what they get,

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perhaps, and it could be argued that they are acting from their free will and so are accountable for
their actions. But children? How can it be that they are accountable for the sins of the world?
What have they done to deserve this? How can we say that they have been helped along in their
soul-making process, when they suffer and die at such a young age? They were not given the
chance to endure and develop virtue. They were not given the chance to sin. And we are told that
they must suffer for our freedom and soul-making? Who can abide with that?!
I think Ivan is often misunderstood. Or rather, Dostoevsky is often misunderstood, in the way
that Ivan is put to use in the context of the philosophy of religion. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan
is a ‘famous atheist’, it’s true, but the novel shows him to be an atheist of a peculiar kind. For one,
he does not deny the existence or goodness of God. Ivan confesses to having a ‘Euclidean’ mind,
bound to earthly laws and incapable of making inferences beyond those laws. He accepts that he
cannot understand God, and that he cannot deny the existence of what he cannot understand.
And so Ivan says that he accepts God, ‘directly and simply’. What he cannot accept is the world
created by God:
Let me make it plain. I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for,
that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful
mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean
mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something
so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all
resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve
shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has
happened with men – but though all that may come to pass, I don’t accept it. I won’t
accept it.

Ivan cannot accept this world because the suffering of innocent children, especially for the
purpose of buying a future harmony, violates a moral necessity. In recognising this as a violation of
moral necessity, he cannot agree to endorse it; and so he will not go along with it, and he would
rather remain with his unassuaged indignation, as he says (with emphasis, in some translations),
‘even though I am not right.’ Consequently, famously, it isn’t God he doesn’t accept, it’s just God’s
ticket that Ivan most respectfully returns to Him (and if he is an honest man he should return it as
soon as possible).
There is a philosophical argument here but it would be a mistake to think it is an argument
from evil to the non-existence of God. Ivan’s argument is a paradigmatic example of the problem
of evil being treated as an ethical problem, not an intellectual problem. Consider the concluding
phrases of his ‘argument’:
Imagine that you yourself are erecting the edifice of human fortune with the goal of, at
the finale, making people happy, of at last giving them peace and quiet, but that in
order to do it it would be necessary and unavoidable to torture to death only one tiny
little creature […] and on its unavenged tears to found that edifice, would you agree to
be the architect on those conditions, tell me and tell me truly?

[...]

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 And are you able to allow the idea that the people for whom you are constructing the
edifice would themselves agree to accept their happiness being bought by the
unwarranted blood of a small, tortured child and, having accepted it, remain happy for
ever?

These are questions that Ivan puts to his younger brother, as part of their process of ‘getting
acquainted’, but they are also questions that Dostoevsky puts to you, to us. They are questions
about our moral limits. The two Karamazov brothers, Ivan the atheist and Alyosha the novice
monk, are trying to understand where one another stands, and in reading their story, we come to
understand where we stand. With whom do we identify, or admire or pity, and why? Dostoevsky
writes for this purpose, offering up a mirror to our nature, showing virtue in its true form,
exposing its false image. In correspondence he describes the ‘point’ of The Brothers Karamazov as
being:
...blasphemy and the refutation of blasphemy. The blasphemy I have taken as I myself
have realised it, in its strongest form, that is, precisely as it occurs among us now in
Russia with the whole (almost) upper stratum, and primarily with the young people,
that is, the scientific and philosophical rejection of God’s existence has been
abandoned now, today’s practical Socialists don’t bother with it at all (as people did
the whole last century and the first half of the present one). But on the other hand
God’s creation, God’s world, and its meaning are negated as strongly as possible.

This is what Ivan stands for, not the ‘scientific’ or intellectual rejection of God’s existence,
but the negation of the meaning of the world: it is a matter of values, not facts. Dostoevsky’s plan
is to counter this with a reassertion of Christian values (not facts); or, more accurately, a Christian
form of life:
The refutation of this (not direct, that is, not from one person to another) will appear
in the last words of the dying elder. [...] In the next book the elder Zosima’s death and
deathbed conversations with his friends will occur...If I succeed, I’ll have...forced
people to recognise that a pure, ideal Christian is not an abstract matter but one
graphically real, possible, standing before our eyes, and that Christianity is the only
refuge of the Russian land from its evils. I pray God that I’ll succeed; the piece will be
moving, if only my inspiration holds out...The whole novel is being written for its sake,
but only let it succeed, that’s what worries me now!

Dostoevsky wants his critical readers to understand that ‘...it is not I who am speaking in
distressing colours, exaggerations, and hyperboles (although there is no exaggeration concerning
the reality), but a character of my novel, Ivan Karamazov. This is his language, his style, his pathos,
and not mine.’ Ivan is meant to stand for something; he is an embodied (fictional) example of
something that Dostoevsky is not: a blasphemy. Ivan is intended to be an illustration of a mistake.
What mistake?
Dostoevsky is speaking in defence of Christianity. He not so subtle in presenting Ivan, the
atheist, as a grandiose and contradictory figure, ultimately flawed. In truth Ivan is a hypocrite. He
claims to argue his case out of ‘love for humanity’, but this is shown to be mere words:

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 I have never been able to understand how it is possible to love one’s neighbour. In my
opinion the people it is impossible to love are precisely those near to one, while one
can really love only those who are far away. […] In order to love a person it is
necessary for him to be concealed from view; the moment he shows his face – love
disappears.

And later: ‘It’s possible to love one’s neighbour in the abstract, and even sometimes from a
distance, but almost never when he’s close at hand.’
Ivan does not seem to like people. For the most part, he looks down on them. He thinks he is
cleverer than them. In what we are shown of Ivan prior to the brothers ‘getting acquainted’, Ivan
talks like an intellectual: detached, self-important and satirical. Though the meeting between the
brothers takes place in an inn, we’re told Ivan is ‘no lover of inns in general’ and that Ivan has been
a confessedly uncaring brother. He says he has no friends. He speaks of disenchantment and
revulsion at life. He plans to ‘drink from the cup’ until he is 30, then fling it to the ground even
though he hasn’t drained it all. Ivan is angry, depressed, misanthropic. He has little real love for
humanity, but what he does have, from his lofty arrogant heights, is pity. This pity becomes
focussed on innocent children because it is difficult to maintain pity for adult human beings who
behave badly (and anyway are ugly). Pity for an adult human being too easily turns into
condescension and it is hard to love what you look down on. You are more inclined to kick them
away like dirt on your shoe.
So for all his talk of his moral stance being taken ‘out of love for humanity’, Ivan doesn’t
show manifest signs of compassion. This is a common feature in Dostoevsky’s ‘villains’, in contrast
to his ‘heroes/heroines’. I suppose you could call it false moral pretensions: claiming moral
motivations to be grand when they are really petty. These are always held up in contrast with the
humble moral pretensions of Christianity, the only truly moral pretensions Dostoevsky thinks one
ought to have. These pretensions manifest as self-effacing compassion and an acknowledgement
of one’s own moral inadequacy, not grandiose moralising.
But it is not a moral sense that Ivan lacks; that is not his mistake. We are shown this when
we are shown that Ivan is misunderstood by Smerdyakov. Ivan is mistakenly thought to believe
that ‘everything is permitted’, and many naive readers take him at his word. But Ivan says of this
hypothesis only that he ‘wasn’t entirely joking’. The holy Elder Zosima sees through his satirical
facade, saying to Ivan: ‘you don’t believe your own arguments, and with an aching heart mock at
them inwardly.’ (Zosima recognises Ivan’s tormented absurdity and acknowledges the ‘great
future suffering’ that awaits him, inevitably.) In truth Ivan feels all too strongly what it means for
not everything to be permissible. He chooses to stick to the facts of the horrors of the world, the
unconscionable sufferings of innocent children, and will not accept any story that requires him to
relinquish these moral facts. His moral sense is strong and absolute. It is precisely this moral sense
that is his fatal flaw. He is too absolute, and lacking a faith that is a necessary co-requisite for that
strong moral resolve.
What Ivan learns when he sees his words reflected in Smerdyakov, and what drives him mad

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with remorse, is the terrible consequences of living and speaking in the tormented absurdity that
comes from a moral conscience denied the hope of a religious faith. Ivan is living out this
tormented absurdity. Ivan is an embodied (fictional) example of Kant’s moral argument for belief
in God. Dostoevsky is showing us why faith is a necessary postulate of practical reason. Ivan lacks
this necessary postulate; he even recognises it as necessary, and yet still he cannot accept it. He
will not let himself accept it. That is Ivan’s mistake. That is what drives him mad. (Well, that and
his drinking, which is no doubt a product of his despair; a point that isn’t laboured but is hinted at
throughout.)
It seems to me that to show this clearly Dostoevsky gives the two brothers, Ivan and Alyosha,
a shared ground. They both share a Romantic ‘Karamazovian’ inheritance. They agree that one
should ‘live with one’s insides’ and ‘love life over logic’; ‘especially before logic’, Alyosha says ‘for
only then will I understand its meaning.’ This is a late echo of Dostoevsky’s own youthful
discussions with his brother, Mikhail. In correspondence, Mikhail implores his overly-sentimental
younger brother, Fyodor, to be more rational: ‘To know more, one must feel less.’ Fyodor
Dostoevsky replies: ‘What do you mean by the word to know? To know nature, the soul, God, love
[…] These are known by the heart, not the mind.’ This Romanticism is fertile ground for what
Dostoevsky sees as true faith and it’s clear that he wants the Karamazov brothers to be read as
Romantics. The text of their discussion is littered with allusions to Romantic literature and much is
made to depend on them: Pushkin’s ‘stick leaf-buds’, Fet’s ‘dear corpses’, Goethe, Tyutchev,
Polezhayev, and, vitally, Schiller’s ‘I hasten to return my entry ticket’.
But where the Romantic Alyosha finds hope in Christianity, the Romantic Ivan finds only
despair in the unconscionable evils of the world. His strong moral sentiment is combined with a
lack of faith and hope, denying him any chance of reconciliation, forcing him to remain in his
unassuaged indignation, and so he is doomed to a tormented absurdity. Dostoevsky surely means
him to be a cautionary tale. Dostoevsky has shown us this without saying his argument. Ivan’s
character and story is his ‘argument’.
Ivan has everything that his brother has apart from Christian faith and the true love for
humanity that comes with that. In drawing this contrast, Dostoevsky isolates the variable. Ivan has
the moral sense that is lacking in other mutinous pseudo-intellectuals like Raskolnikov (Crime and
Punishment) or Stavrogin (The Devils); he has the ‘acceptance’ of God, on an intellectual level, that
is present in Alyosha; and he even shares the Romanticism necessary for truth to extend beyond
scientific knowledge. But he lacks faith and hope, the non-cognitive dimensions of religious belief.
Ivan Karamazov is a Romantic, like his brother, but he is a hopeless Romantic. He is driven by a
Romantic recognition of moral necessity, a recognition that denies him any intellectual satisfaction
because rationality cannot make sense of such senseless suffering. What is required is a leap of
faith. But this is something Ivan cannot do even if he is not right. His Karamazovian moral
sensibility will not permit him. The correct ‘refutation’ of this, as Dostoevsky says, is found in the
depiction of the religious life of the Elder Zosima. Dostoevsky worries whether this will be ‘a
sufficient reply’, it being only ‘indirect’ and ‘an artistic picture’. Needless to say, this is not a
philosophical rebuttal. This offers no morally-sufficient reason for the suffering of innocent

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children. This does not make rational sense of senseless suffering, or even try to. It is like the Book
of Job in that regard.
Camus says that Ivan Karamazov appeals to a ‘justice which he ranks above divinity. He does
not absolutely deny the existence of God. He refutes Him in the name of a moral value’. But I am
uncomfortable with Camus’ reading, which seems to portray Ivan as a sort of failed hero. Camus
says in a footnote that ‘Ivan is, in a certain way, Dostoevsky, who is more at ease in this role than
in the role of Alyosha’. But this is clearly false, and would be misleading if it were taken as a hidden
truth. Ivan is a villain. Dostoevsky knows this. Zosima knows this. It is only Ivan who cannot
understand how it is that he can stand in the name of justice, ‘out of love for humanity’, and still
end up the villain. But his moral sense is enough to tell him that he is, undoubtedly, even if he
cannot understand how or why. We are meant to feel sorry for him, but we are not meant to
endorse his view. He is no hero. Zosima is the hero, and Alyosha for seeking to emulate Zosima.
Ivan’s story ends with a confession.
The Brothers Karamazov is a paradigmatic instance of the problem of evil being treated as an
ethical problem. It shows without saying; it shows a form of life; in it, the ethical is made manifest.
It would be hideously reductive to extract an intellectual argument from that context.
Camus also said: ‘People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write
novels.’ I’m sympathetic to that sentiment, especially when the truth-revealing quality of a great
novel stands in such stark contrast to the quality of many academic journal articles and books
(quite fine in their own right), but in the final reckoning I don’t think we need to talk only in novels.
There’s nothing stopping us from sincerely engaging with these issues using rigorous philosophical
argument. I would even defend the much-maligned ‘analytic’ style of philosophy as being able to
do this better than any other philosophical approach. It just needs to be oriented rightly, with the
right aims and intentions and recognition of scope. It is not settling facts; it is not sharing
perspectives; it is seeking truth through clarity and consistency. And when truth is inaccessible it is
seeking truthfulness, because whilst any good philosopher will know that ‘the Truth’ is hard to
settle, meaning we cannot stand behind the essential truth of our beliefs, we can always stand
firmly behind their truthfulness. And what is inconsistent can never be truthful. So we, as
philosophers, to seek the truth and be truthful, must seek consistency.
Real-world examples show us when our pretensions to the truth or understanding come up
short. Life exposes the inconsistency of our ‘mere words’; life shows us what we really believe.
Fiction can do this too, when it is good enough to ring true. Philosophy ought to do this better and
more directly than either. But rather than holding a mirror to our truest nature, we choose instead
to build elaborate plans of castles in the sky that will be visible only from high towers.
Once upon a time (in a philosophical fairytale far far away) all questions in philosophy helped
to shape your moral world. Because what else was the point in doing philosophy, if not to be a
better human being? I think this is the correct and true purpose of philosophy. I think we undersell
it when we think of it as merely a handmaiden to the sciences, mopping up problems for which
there is no data, or else treat it as if it were a leisure activity for the mind. I think when we do that

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we only argue ourselves into irrelevance. We cannot then complain when the world turns around
and tells us that we are of no value, because we chose to do what has very little value to anyone
not already interested in those philosophical problems. Philosophy is not a game; it is not trivial; it
cannot be put down or set aside when you are bored or tired. It is your life because your
philosophical understanding determines everything that is of value within your life. If what you are
doing in philosophy does not measure up to that high standard then I would question whether you
are really doing it properly. ‘The unexamined life is not worthy of a human being.’ Can we say that,
with sincerity, about the ‘examined life’ depicted as a professional philosopher concerned only
with nit-picking trivialities and winning academic arguments? Are we not ashamed to try to
pretend that such a model of philosophy measures up to its Socratic ideal?
The great pyramid scheme of academic philosophy is in danger of collapsing; and if they are
not careful the pharaohs responsible for its construction will be buried beneath ruins of their own
making. They cannot complain for getting what they choose.

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Author’s Introduction
I was reluctant to write this book, for various reasons. I was also spurred to write it for
various reasons, one of which was a stumbled-upon phrase from Cicero. ‘How inconsistent it
would be for us to expect the immortal gods to love and cherish us, when we ourselves despise
and neglect one another!’
I have come to see much of contemporary philosophy as little more than indulgent game-
playing, superficial and shallow, marked by triviality, having lost any but the most tenuous
connection to a justification by worthy purpose; in a dirty word (that philosophers should
recognise to connote all that is meant by it): sophistry. This despising has caused me to neglect it.
Not all philosophy is like this, but it seems to me that an increasing proportion of it is, and that the
subject is, in the ever more business-oriented character of the modern university, coming to be
dominated by this impoverished form. There is a chance that it will come to be be defined by that
form.
I know philosophy to be more than this. The truer form of the subject is rarely if ever trivial
and can claim to be the most important thing a person can do. The truer form of the subject does
not invite accusations of shallowness but has unfathomable depth; not in mere complexity, but in
profundity, and can often be most profound when it is most simple. Only that form of the subject
is what enables us to say, with unflinching sincerity, that ‘the unexamined life is not worthy of a
human being’. It is more than a learning of facts and theories or the construction of arguments; it
is a love of wisdom. It is a commitment to the pursuit of wisdom, of having true beliefs about what
really matters and making an attempt at living in alignment with those beliefs. It is more than
something that increases your earnings potential. Its value is intrinsic. Its worth is self-evident to
anyone who understands it; sadly, it appears to be invisible to those who don’t. I don’t know if
that truer form of the subject can survive in the modern university. I am pessimistic; I think it’s too
late. But I can hope that the subject will survive in some sense and not come to be totally
dominated by the counterfeit form. I am grateful to be able to discern the difference.
‘Why perpetuate that game by playing it? Why feed the beast?’ This is a question that makes
me reluctant to write this book. But if I think, as I do, that philosophy has a better and truer form,
and I think there is a chance that I have the power to remind people of that or provoke them into
it, what would I be if I held back? I believe good philosophy to be good; I believe I might have the
power to provoke good philosophy; if I did not at least try to do so then I would be no more
consistent than the ‘inconsistent triad’ that is the topic of discussion in this book. It would be a
moral failing for me to do otherwise.
What more indulgent a reason could one need to play the game?

When I returned to write this book in the customary manner, I found I couldn’t. Exile
(however self-imposed) has sent me a bit too Diogenes. In exile, I find I am more free to write in a

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style of my choosing. This is probably not a good thing. I am inclined to be more rebellious than I
might otherwise be. It’s childish, unsophisticated, simple. I find I do not want to replicate the self-
important and serious tone of academic writing. This pushes me into a slightly mocking and ironic
tone, at times sloppy, at times rhetorical. It is indisciplined; it is melodramatic. I am still in the grip
of my pessimistic disdain and so my tone is harsher than I would like. I have eliminated what I can
of this, but I would also choose to leave much of it in because it’s part of my point. It’s good to
trim the fat, but sometimes it’s the fat that gives the flavour.

Style is not the only virtuous convention against which I’ve chosen to rebel. Other than the
‘brief history’ segments, and occasional other segments where it is strictly necessary to go over old
work, I have deliberately chosen not to engage with the literature whenever it’s possible to avoid
doing so. I want to make a fresh start wherever I can, even if it’s obvious to anyone in the know
that I am doing no such thing. (If it’s good enough for Descartes, it’s good enough for me.) It’s not
that I don’t want to show any respect or appreciation of those who have contributed to the
literature. Quite the opposite, in fact: I want to avoid them being seen as guilty by association with
me, or otherwise imply that they might be on my side. I don’t insist that they support what I say.
But another compelling reason is that time and time again we show ourselves to be incapable of
avoiding misinterpreting or misrepresenting one another. One way to avoid this problem is simply
to stop representing anyone at all and leave them to speak for themselves. I speak for me, and
make no claim to speak on behalf of any other. You can hear it as you will; that is not in my power
to control. Obviously I have my influences. I can only hope you have an ear for tone.
And also: it makes a point. A friend once joked to me in our first year of university: ‘Look how
smart I am; I’ve got two massive books!’ To recognise this as a joke requires that we understand
‘having big books’ as not equating to ‘having knowledge’. Whilst books might hold knowledge,
they are not themselves knowledge. Anyone who seriously claimed to demonstrate their
knowledge by showing their books would show themselves to miss the point. But what is it we see
in academic writing that offers citation after citation, quotation after quotation, that all say the
same thing and add nothing except a nod or a wink or a hat tip? It seems to me that many of our
attempts to offer citations and support are only attempts to give the illusion of weighty
knowledge… I will not do this.
And so I have not included a bibliography or any detailed bibliographic references. I don’t
cite page numbers for my literary quotations, because I think it would be better if you were to go
and read the book and not just jump to the quotations as if you were an undergraduate student
looking for essay content. I should not enable you to cherry pick. In the words of Ron Swanson:
‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Don’t teach a man to fish and you feed yourself.
He’s a grown man. And fishing’s not that hard.’
But I’m torn, because whilst I don’t want to imply that certain philosophers are aligned with
what I’m saying, or an accessory to it, I also don’t want to imply that I am the sole source of all of
the ideas, arguments, and phrases deployed in this book, as if they were all original. (That might

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have been good enough for Descartes but it’s not good enough for me.) Most direct quotations
and references will be obvious or else easily sourced by a quick copy-and-paste into your preferred
search engine (they are; I’ve checked); I’m not too worried about them. What remains are the
paraphrases and clear allusions, included but not necessarily named, which will be obvious to
anyone familiar with their origin but not to those who aren’t. I don’t want to pass these off as my
own. And so, to make it clear, in addition to those named in the text, in this work you will find
clear allusions to or paraphrases of the work of: Raimond Gaita, D. Z. Phillips, Nick Trakakis,
Kenneth Surin, Stephen Wykstra, Andrew Gleeson, Gavin Hyman, and Michael Almeida and
Graham Oppy. And Plato and Kant and Wittgenstein, obviously, but I think that goes without
saying (like the Bible or Shakespeare). There is one major exception that necessitates a proper
acknowledgement because I depend on it but have no reason to mention it by name in the text:
Dostoyevsky’s correspondence is all sourced from Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). And the translation of The Brothers Karamazov is
David McDuff’s (London: Penguin, 2003).

Perhaps it’s obvious, but I am trying to do something different here. This book is not a
straightforward academic argument: it is a provocation, in content and form. It is meant to pose a
question. It an attempt to shout above the choir. It irks that I have to point this out – it’s self-
defeating, like explaining a joke – but like Plato’s dialogues, this book is written with layered
intentions: on the surface, there are some philosophical arguments with which you may or may
not agree; beneath that, there is a show of doing philosophy in a certain way (a way that many of
you will not like and I’m not sure I do either); and beneath that there is a provocation to
philosophise. What’s on the surface is not really what the book is about. Like Socrates, I ask you
unsophisticated questions. It’s your job to answer. Isn’t that what philosophy ought to be?
It’s all rather clumsy, of course, because I am no Plato. My attempts at narrative structure,
foreshadowing, reflecting characters in themes and themes in characters, etc., are half-hearted
and lack confidence. Is it obvious that I am the doctor, we are the baker, and philosophy is our
saw? I am frustrated that I find myself feeling the need to put some parts in parentheses to make
it obvious, labouring ‘the connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear’ at the end of
some sections that are meant to show but not say. But we are so used to everything being offered
to us with absolute explicit clarity that we have forgotten to look beneath the surface and
between the lines. We have lived so long with everything on the surface that we have forgotten
that philosophy can have hidden depths. But what would it be to read Plato’s Socrates literally?
Other than shallow and superficial, of course. How much would be lost in that.

This book displays a distinct lack of humility, which makes me very uncomfortable. It is a part
and product of an experiment in provocation. Like Ivan, I am meant to be a villain. As I say, it is an
attempt to shout above the choir. The irony is I am doing this in an attempt to avoid being self-
important. It should be clear that I am playing at being Ivan Karamazov or Socrates or Diogenes.

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There is an arrogance in this, of course, and this work is dripping with it, but I won’t hide this
arrogance behind faux intellectual humility and fancy words.
It’s relatively easy to say stupid things in a way that seems clever. Like the Drake equation.
Or the simulation argument. I choose to say clever things in a way that seems stupid, or at least I
choose to try to. I have chosen to present my work barefoot, visible poor, ugly. Self-published and
given away. It is a renouncing of the markers of respectability.
The lack of a bibliography is a good example of what I’m doing. Obviously I think people
should cite their sources – the virtues of that go without saying. But I also think we’ve become
corrupted by the idea of ‘presenting’ a certain thing: an image of academic respectability. The
image takes over, we compete and communicate in these terms, and this hides what really
matters. So to work against that, I adopt the contrary habit. Of course it is not correct – I am a
villain – but it is a corrective provocation. And likewise with the language and style, so childish and
petulant: this is not the most admirable form of philosophical writing. But, again, because I think
we have become corrupted by the attempt to appear a certain way, I choose to do the opposite.
Why not stick to the proper form? Why not try to say clever things in a way that seems
clever? Because in doing so we get so caught up in the cleverness of our arguments that we spin
ourselves into a vacuum. Because in doing so we exclude anyone who is not able or educated or
willing or sympathetic enough to the topic to bother making the effort to learn and decipher our
complicated and idiomatic terms of art. Because in doing so we pursue cleverness so much that
we forget why what we are talking about matters, as if the only thing that matters is saying
something more clever than our opponent. To break a habit, you need to adopt the contrary habit,
so I will try to not appear clever; I will try to appear stupid. If I have anything worth saying, it will
survive my stupid telling of it.
I’m not saying this is the best way to carry on, but I think we need to do more. We can no
longer assume that people will acknowledge philosophy’s value. If we do not make them realise
why it matters then we will fade into obscurity, withering under the weight of the economic
pressures of a world that does not suit us.
People do not understand why the problem of evil matters. They think it is one amongst
many obscure technical problems in philosophy, or else of interest only to religious believers and
zealous atheists. One Socratic conversation can bring them into the fold. How better to do this
than by throwing an accusation?

It is a question. I do not tell you my conclusion. I ask you my questions and I tell you my
reasoning, I give you an insight into my way and my way of thinking. It is meant to be irritating.
This points to my conclusion, but I do not say it, because you must make your own conclusion.
Because it is an ethical conclusion and ethical conclusions must be your own if they are to mean
anything at all.

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 In the end I use the word ‘reflections’, and reflections is exactly the correct word. I reflect,
philosophically, and give serious thought to my own thoughts. But these thoughts ought also to be
a reflection of what is in you; they ought to show only what you already know but have forgotten.

But I had to include this ‘introduction’ at the end, rather than the beginning, otherwise it
would have defeated the whole point.

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