If God exists, is everything permitted? | Dr. Justin Mooney & Dr. Luis Oliveira

Today I’m joined by Justin Mooney and Luis Oliveira to discuss a new aspects of the problem of evil.

OUTLINE

0:00 Intro
1:45 Summary of the paper
28:40 Symmetry argument
34:33 Necessary evil theodicies
56:32 Necessary permission theodicies
1:12:03 Divine right theodicies
1:26:28 Final thoughts
1:34:00 Conclusion

RESOURCES

THE USUAL...

[jmike]

Man God could have really cleared this up in any of the texts he inspired

[belialord]

Wow, I didn't know about Dr. Luis, it's awesome to see a philosopher from my country being on Joe's channel. Did you ask him if he likes soccer? 🇧🇷😂

[HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke]

Danny from Philtalk runs this same rebuttal to greater good defenses, that there is nothing which is (all things considered) evil. Everything evil in isolation has a justifying reason.

[doxasticmastery]

Love this dialogue!

I think it's helpful to make explicit what norms about justification we're working with. If one's set of justifying norms follow a Rowe-style stricture, then it follows that, under these conditions, we have what can be accurately termed a "necessity condition" (Schneider) or an additive approach to value-assigments (Adams). Within authorizable range delimited by the necessity condition, gratitious evils are just defined in terms of it's negation. If our norms are numerically identical with the necessity condition, then God having "morally sufficient reasons" is just the upper and lower limits of the necessity condition.

I appreciate how Luis mentioned Chisholm's defeat-thesis and Pittard's defense of such in his paper. What if there's an alternative justifying-norm? This condition conceives of the justifiedness of permitting an evil in terms of "screening-off" the negative impact/influence of the evil on an agent's life, while integrating it into an over-all non-regrettable whole that is that agent's life-history. This condition is inherently anthropic, and I think it makes sense of the contextual dependency of moral authorization given God's unique relationship to the moral order.

[mendez]

For me, it was Divine Command Theory that drove me to inverse the Dostoevsky's dictum. But it is good to see there are other pathways to get there too.

[Tothaumazein]

1. Se tem brasileiro no vídeo, então o vídeo terá meu like.
2. Tem brasileiro no vídeo.
C. Logo, o vídeo terá meu like.

🇧🇷

[EarnestApostate]

I always like hearing a philosopher formalize the same thoughts that I have had on a subject.

Except the agrippa trilemma, I actually had hoped to be wrong about that one.

[Overonator]

I have never heard of philosophers who actually argue that a god does not need justifying reasons to permit evil to happen. It is wild to me that even such a view exists. But I supposed I should not be surprised given how in philosophy for any problem there is some views that denies that problem even exists.

[tudornaconecinii]

Hey Joe, I thought of three counterarguments to this thesis and am curious if you find any compelling.

The two level utilitarian argument:
We should act in ways that generally promote good outcomes unless there are particular instances where a locally immoral act guarantees a good result. So the means justify the ends only if the ends are obvious to the actor. Letting a child drown is almost always negative EV, so only an omniscient or near omniscient agent is justified to do it.

The happenstance vs instance argument:
Necessary evils promote virtues because they are possible to happen and happen *sometimes*, not because every single one of them does so. So, it is a morally better world because it's a world in which children *can* drown, not because as many children as possible drown, so every individual time we see a child drowning, we should still save them.

The virtue mechanism argument:
Necessary evils promote virtues because they make us strive against them. So it's not that children drowning promotes virtue qua the child drowning, it's that children drowning promotes virtue qua it moving us to exercise courage in saving them, so we should save them.

[macmac]

It feels good to know I figured this out on my own just be debating in YT comments. Allow me to sum it up in a couple questions as that is what I do, I am a huge fan of the socratic method and this is a lot faster then typing out a syllogism.

#1 If all evil is for the greater good, then does evil even exist or is there only good and the greater good?
#2 If the child death is for the greater good, are you bad if you save the child and prevent the greater good from coming about?
#3 If the child drowning is for the greater good and only god knows what that greater good is and we dont, then should we not sit and watch to see if god saves the child as that will be the only way to be sure that the childs death is bad or good?

[brando]

Listening to this while playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as Henry in 15th century Bohemia…. Fitting, very fitting 😂👍

[vulteiuscatellus]

So as a theist who’s into greater-goods theodicies, I think intrinsic goods like showing care or empathy take motivational precedence over whatever might be an instrumental good. So punching someone randomly under the idea that there’s an all-good God who allows necessary evils is not as motivated as being friendly to that person, all else being equal. You should also save the drowning child and not let them drown because that would show mercy, an intrinsic good, which takes motivational precedence over letting the child drown so some other good to be brought out of their suffering.

Moreover, at least for my perspectivalism, the issue isn’t my not knowing merely *if* there is a justifying good for some apparently-evil action under theism. The issue is *how* the justifying good will come about from, e.g., my letting a child drown. I might know *that* God has set the cosmos so that other humans or conscious creatures will cultivate care, community, and empathy out of apparent harms that would be instrumental goods under theism. Nevertheless, as a human, I do not know *how* other humans will cultivate intrinsic goods like empathy out of such instrumental goods. Other people might show mercy to a victim of apparent harm immediately after the harm takes place, or they might not. A victim might well wind up as a statistic that eventually motivates care-driven government action in the far future. Or the government might collapse and their neglect of those who died will serve as a cautionary tale to whatever civilization comes after ours. An omniscient, omnipotent God would know how these justifying intrinsic goods would come about, but I don’t. If I don’t know how some good will be cultivated out of, e.g., letting a child drown, then my motivation to do apparently-harmful actions or allow those actions to happen is even more significantly weakened.

[donjindra]

History has proven that with God, everything is permitted.

[apricotjuicea]

just what I need on a night before a sunday at 3 am

[HumblyQuestioning]

If god wanted Justin to respond to divine duty he would have intervened and given him the opportunity to do so. Who are we to question god 🤣

[Snowforest]

I'd love to see you talk with SIIG about anything philosophy his a Christian, young 19-20 years old and is now going onto different big channels over time

[ChristineVress]

To a religious person: *Harmless things become bad if god says he doesn't like it and what's worse is that harmful things become moral and even good if god tells you to do it*

[LBoomsky]

4:36 symmetry is ok
It is not wrong for people to bring children into this world, why is this not acceptable for god to do?

[bengreen]

interesting chat with some new - at least new to me - angles of looking at this stuff.

[itachigrain]

As a Christian, it is easy to say that we can permit moral evils for our own creations but since other people are not our own creation/property, we cannot act like God (some permission with regards to our own children). I think his argument falls short because it is not a parallel case. Good attempt though.