Originally posted by FreakyKBH
I'd already stated my rejection of premise #2, as described in the posts above this one. As you are equating suffering with blah, blah, blah... just read the posts above this one, starting with the one that quoted your word "unnecessary."
Did you read what you wrote, above? There aren't any arguments in there, and none of the claims you make are relevant to anything I've actually argued. If you reject premise (2) then you reject the following:
(2)There has occurred, at least once, an instance of suffering that was not logically necessary for the greater good.
a) Suppose (2) is false.
b) If so, then every instance of suffering is logically necessary for the greater good.
c) Hence, had any instance of suffering not occurred, the world would have thereby been less good than it could have been.
As before, 'less good' here just means 'less morally preferable'. So, a world that is less good would be less morally preferable to God. Since God is morally perfect by definition, it follows that God would prefer a world that is maximally morally preferable and act accordingly. Hence, the actual world is maximally morally preferable; it is the world that is the most good. In short, the actual world is the best of all possible worlds. Astute and bookish readers will recognize that this is the position endorsed by Leibniz and famously lampooned by Voltaire in “Candide” and Mark Twain in “Letters from Earth”.
At this point we should distinguish between suffering brought about by the intentional acts of agents and those brought about by natural forces. The former I will refer to as 'moral evil' and the latter as 'natural evil'. These are the terms commonly used in presentations of the problem of evil, and are used here to facilitate the research of interested parties. As before, the use of these terms is intended to be neutral between non-skeptical ethical theories.
d) Hence, had any instance of moral evil (e.g., murder, rape, theft, deception, etc.) not occurred, the world would thereby have been worse.
e) Further, had any instance of natural evil (e.g., disease, natural disaster, etc.) not occurred, the world would thereby have been worse.
Now, in many cases of moral evil and natural evil there are numerous victims. During Stalin's reign, for instance, some twenty million people were murdered (and that is a conservative estimate). During the 1918 influenza epidemic, some eighteen million people died. I encourage the reader to research the manner in which people were murdered under Stalin, and the manner in which people died during the influenza epidemic, in order to get a sense of the amount of suffering involved.
f) Hence, had any single person who suffered under Stalin's regime (or during the Holocaust, or Rwanda, or currently in Sudan, or any war in history) not suffered, the world would have been worse.
g) Hence, had even one fewer infant had its brains dashed against walls by Nazis; had even one fewer infant been tossed in the air and caught on the point of a bayonet by Cossacks; had even one fewer person been hacked apart by machetes in Rwanda; had even one fewer adolescent girl been raped by paramilitary squads in Darfur, the world would thereby have been worse.
h) Further, had any single person who suffered as a result of the 1918 influenza epidemic (or smallpox, or AIDS, or the recent tsunami or any other natural disaster in history) not suffered, the world would have been worse.
i) Hence, had one fewer child been orphaned by influenza; had one fewer infant been born with AIDS; had one fewer person been battered and broken by the recent tsunami; had one fewer person been buried alive by the earthquakes in Turkey and Iran, the world would have thereby been worse.
You are committed to all these entailments by virtue of your rejection of premise (2).
Religious tolerance
26 Feb '06 13:27
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