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Ethics Within the Divine Order – Why Oliveira’s Symmetry Challenge Fails
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2024
Abstract
Recently, Luis R. G. Oliveira has developed the ‘symmetry challenge’ as follows:
(1) If God exists, then for all actual instances of evil e, God has justifying moral reasons for allowing e (the ‘reasons’ thesis).
(2) If God has justifying moral reasons for allowing e, then we have justifying moral reasons for allowing e as well (symmetry thesis).
(3) So, if God exists, then for all actual instances of e, we have justifying moral reasons for allowing e (Oliveira, 2023).
Thus, per Oliveira, given God’s sovereignty over evil, there is no ethical asymmetry which would compel a moral agent to prevent rather than permit a preventable evil. In this paper, I will defend the asymmetry claim and argue that Oliveira’s argument ultimately fails. First, I will sketch Oliveira’s argument. Then, I will briefly articulate a broadly Reformed-Thomistic model of providence which I will deploy in this article. Third, I will argue that this model of providence and the ethical aim of the Christian life generate two distinct yet inter-related reasons to hold to the asymmetry claim. Finally, I will canvas several theodicies my model rules out and anticipate several objections.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
References
1 Luis R. G. Oliveira, ‘God and Gratuitous Evil: Between the Rock and the Hard Place’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 94 (2023), 317–45. <https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-023-09883-0>
2 Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), p. 30.
3 Graham Floyd, ‘Organic Unities: A Response to the Problem of Evil’, TheoLogica, 3 (2019), 122–39. <https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v3i1.15243>
4 Michael J. Almeida and Graham Oppy, ‘Sceptical Theism and Evidential Arguments from Evil’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 81 (2003), 496–516; Stephen Maitzen, ‘Skeptical Theism and Moral Obligation’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 65 (2009), 93–103.
5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1952) ST I.q22.a2.
6 Thomas Flint, Divine Providence: A Molinist Account (New York, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
7 Sean Luke, ‘Not a Bare Permission: Calvin and the English Reformed on God’s Relationship to Evil’, Journal of Reformed Theology, 17 (2023), 1–17.
8 John Girardeau, The Will in Its Theological Relations (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2023).
9 One finds an exposition of Edwards in Guillaume Bignon, Excusing Sinners and Blaming God: A Calvinist Assessment of Determinism, Moral Responsibility, and Divine Involvement in Evil (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018).
10 Steven Baldner, ‘Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suarez on the Problem of Concurrence’, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 90 (2016), 149–61; Steven J. Duby, ‘Election, Actuality, and Divine Freedom: Thomas Aquinas, Bruce McCormack, and Reformed Orthodoxy in Dialogue’, Modern Theology, 32 (2016), 325–40. <https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12257>; Thomism and Predestination: Principles and Disputations, ed. by Steven A. Long, Roger W. Nutt, and Thomas Joseph White (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2016).
11 Bill Anglin and Stewart C. Goetz, ‘Evil Is Privation’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 13 (1982), 3–12; Donald A. Cress, ‘Augustine’s Privation Account of Evil: A Defense’, Augustinian Studies, 20 (1989), 109–28; W. Matthews Grant, ‘The Privation Account of Moral Evil: A Defense’, International Philosophical Quarterly, 55 (2015), 271–86; Gregory M. Reichberg, ‘Beyond Privation: Moral Evil in Aquinas’s “De Malo”’, Review of Metaphysics, 55 (2002), 751–84.
12 St. Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love, trans. by Thomas S. Hibbs (Washington, DC; Lanham, MD: Regnery Publishing; Distributed to the trade by National Book Network, 1996), pp. 10–12.
13 Sean Luke, ‘Molinist Thomist Calvinism: A Synthesis’, The Heythrop Journal, 65 (2024), 3–18. <https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.14273>
14 For a fuller account, see Dietrich Von Hildebrand, Ethics (Steubenville, OH: Hildebrand Press, 2020); Dietrich Von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, trans. by John F. Crosby and John H. Crosby (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009).
15 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. by A. J. Krailsheimer, Rev. ed. by Penguin Classics (London; New York: Penguin Books; Penguin Books USA, 1995), p. 425.
16 Aristote, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2011).
17 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 2017).
18 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edn (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 148–50.
19 Joseph Fitzpatrick, ‘Hume’s “Is-Ought” Problem: A Solution’, New Blackfriars, 81 (2000), 216–25.
20 Jesse Kalin, ‘Two Kinds of Moral Reasoning: Ethical Egoism as a Moral Theory’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 5 (1975), 323–56.
21 John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, 25th anniversary reference edn (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah, 2011), pp. 93–94.
22 Matthew D. Mendham, ‘Kant and the “Distinctively Moral Ought”: A Platonic‐Augustinian Defense, against MacIntyre’, The Journal of Religion, 87 (2007), 556–91. <https://doi.org/10.1086/519772>
23 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, 1st HarperCollins edn, [rev.] (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p. 21.
24 See Hans Boersma, Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018).
25 Matthew Levering, Biblical Natural Law: A Theocentric and Teleological Approach (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
26 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by John McNeill, vol. 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960) p. I.I.1.
27 Robert Adams, ‘A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness’, in Divine Commands and Morality, ed. by Paul Helm (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 83–108.
28 W Matthews Grant, ‘Moral Evil, Privation, and God’, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 9 (2017), 125–45. <https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v9i1.1870>
29 Mendham, ‘Kant and the “Distinctively Moral Ought”’.
30 Though this bucks against Aquinas’s view that the consumption of a plant might be a natural evil for the plant, I’d define ‘evil’ more pointedly along teleological lines. That is, evil is a break down in God’s purposes imbibed in the order of creation; natural evil is an instance of such a break in the natural structure of the world, whereas moral evil is a willful rebellion against God’s purposes for moral agents. For example, earthquakes are not evil in themselves (on my framework, since I reject – as mentioned in the footnote – Aquinas’s claim that a human eating a plant is a natural evil to the plant); they become evil when they kill living creatures and inflict suffering. So it’s the *disorder* that constitutes the evil – the occurrence of an event where living creatures (in my view) were never *meant* to inhabit simultaneous to the earthquake. However, given the absence of God’s rule from the world in light of the Fall, animal and all sentient life no longer have the rule of God as a kind of compass which indicates the purposes of things. Natural evil, in the way I’m thinking through things, is thus a species of the effects of moral evil. Just as a consequence of my neglect to turn off the stove might be a burned down house, a consequence of creaturely moral evil is the absence of God’s rule, in which the purposes of things are made manifest. God thus permits moral evil (wrought by moral agents, human or non-human), which then have the consequence of bringing a divine exile – a divine exile in which the purposes of created things are somewhat obfuscated, just as ignoring the rule of a king in a kingdom might mean that I don’t know the purposes for which a king has set up x or y thing in the kingdom. This, once again, could be a paper in its own right but would – I think – expand the present work beyond its appropriate scope.
31 See H. L. Bosman, ‘Humankind as Being Created in the “image of God” in the Old Testament: Possible Implications for the Theological Debate on Human Dignity’, Scriptura, 105 (2010), 561–71; John Frederic Kilner, Dignity and Destiny: Humanity in the Image of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015); Carmen Joy Imes, Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023).
32 Philosophy in America, ed. by Max Black (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967).
33 An anonymous reviewer has expressed worry that this entails a divine need on creation in order accomplish divine ends and thus might be seen as a denial of divine aseity. This charge deserves a fuller exposition – one provided for in Sean Luke, ‘Beatific Governance and the Problem of Evil’, Journal of Reformed Theology, Forthcoming. However, a few things may be said here. The permission of evil in time for the accomplishment of higher order goods in no way implies a dependency of God on creation for two distinct reasons. First, the necessity of evil to particular higher order goods is a contingent necessity – contingent on God’s decision to create the world. Just as the good of the incarnation requires a created field in which the Word might become incarnate without entailing a dependency of God on creation, so God’s permission of evil for a higher order good is indexed to those worlds in which God creates. Second, suppose creation is somehow necessary simply for the sake of argument. Even then this would not entail a dependency of God on creation. Consider an ‘if p then q’ claim. For instance, if there is fire in the room, then there is heat in the room. P here does not depend upon q for its existence but entails q by its existence. It receives nothing from q which it does not have in itself. If all of creation is an emanation of God’s nature (as implied by the doctrine of divine ideas – see Daniel Kemp, ‘Created Goodness and the Goodness of God: Divine Ideas and the Possibility of Creaturely Value’, Religious Studies, 58 (2022), 534–46. <https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412521000032>; Mark Allen McIntosh, The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology, 1st edn [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021]), then the ways God displays the excellencies on the divine nature does in no way depend on creation, but creation – and its history in its totality – is an expression of the excellency of the divine nature. For this defense of God’s aseity even given a necessity of creation, see Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning The End for Which God Created the World, vol. God’s Passion for His Glory (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998).