I wish to address what is sometimes termed the “existential” form of the problem of evil—the form in which theism is questioned and/or rejected on the basis of moral protest, indignation and outrage at the evils of this world. In the first section of this chapter I shall ask the reader to participate in a meditative, highly personal sort of reflection, in the hope of eliciting therefrom a certain existential premise which is crucial to the argument. In the second section I present and discuss a thesis concerning personal identity, with the aim of establishing a connection between one’s own existence and the world’s past history. In the third section I introduce certain principles of what might be termed the “logic of regret”—or, more generally, the logic of preference—and connect these with the results of the second section. The final section draws all of these threads together and shows their significance for the problem of evil.
I
The questions we shall be asking in this section are questions each person can only answer for himself. It is necessary, then, for you to meditate on your own life, and the meaning that it has for you; my own reflections will be set down here mainly as an aid to this. I ask myself, then, the following question: Am I glad that I exist? The question is not whether my life is all that it ought to be or all that it conceivably could be. It is not whether the pleasure-pain balance in my life to date has been, on the whole, favorable or unfavorable. It is not whether my life is, in general, a benefit to those who are affected by it. It is not even the question whether my life, all things considered, contains more good than evil. All of these questions are deeply interesting, and the answers to them, if known, might affect my answer to the question which I am asking. But the question is simply, am I glad that I am alive? Or is my existence, on the whole, something which I regret? Is my life something which I affirm, or do I wish, like Job, that I had never been? And what, I go on to ask, of my loved ones, of my wife and sons, and of others whom I know well enough that the question makes sense: Am I glad of their existence? If I could rewrite the script for the tale that we are living, would I leave their parts out?
It is my hope that as you reflect on these matters you will be able to say, as I must say, that I am glad for my existence. It is not that my life has been good without qualification and in every respect. It has had its share of pain—whether more or less than other lives, I cannot say. It has had times of deep anxiety, when the worth of living at all has come into question. Yet I can say, I must say, that it is good to live, that I am glad for my existence and would not wish to replace it with non-existence, either retrospectively or for the future. And when I think of certain “significant others,” then I must emphatically say that I am glad that they exist, that I would not choose to rewrite the script without their parts, that their existence is something which I can and must affirm even as I affirm my own.
It is my hope that you are able to follow me in this, that you are able to be glad for your own existence, and the existence of those whom you love, even as I am glad for my existence and for the lives of those whom I love. If this is so, then you have available to you a premise which you can use in the ensuing argument. For the argument to be developed is “person-relative,” in the sense that each person who uses it to enlighten himself must make use of a different premise, one which applies only to himself and which can be affirmed only by himself. Assuming that you are able to affirm such a premise, let us see what can be derived from it.
II
In this section I shall suggest a partial answer to the question: What is necessary in order that you and I should exist as the individual human beings which we are? I shall not be concerned with those things, such as food, air and water, which are necessary for the existence of any human being whatsoever, but only with what is necessary for one’s own existence as distinct from the existence of some other person who might live in the same house, do the same job and so on. In other words, I shall be proposing a thesis concerning personal identity. The thesis is not uncontroversial or universally acceptable, but I think its appeal is wide enough to make it worth pursuing. The thesis is that a human being is initially individuated by his body, so that, had that body not been conceived and born, that particular human being would never have existed. Or in other words:
(A) A necessary condition of my coming-into existence is the coming-into-existence of my body.
This isn’t acceptable to everyone, of course, but it is entailed by the most widely held views on the mind-body problem. It evidently must be accepted by materialists, identity theorists, etc., for whom the person is his body, as well as by epiphenomenalists and behaviorists for whom the mind results (in different ways, of course) from certain aspects of the functioning of the biological organism. More interestingly, however, the thesis must be accepted by some philosophers who hold more or less dualistic views. Thomists, for instance, hold that the soul, as a form, is individuated by the matter which it informs; the soul is created as the soul of this particular body. In order to dissent from the thesis, one must hold that the soul has an identity of its own which is at least logically prior, if not also temporally prior, to its embodiment. To Cartesian dualists and others (if any) who hold such views, we now bid farewell, in order to explore the implications of the thesis we have proposed.
The chief advantage of this thesis is that it entitles us to include among the necessary conditions of my existence whatever is necessary for my body’s existence. But what is necessary for this? To begin with, it is necessary that the individuals who are, in fact, my parents should have had a child. Had my mother married someone else, none of their children could have been me; none of their bodies could have been this body. But clearly, not just any child of my parents would have been me. I believe it would be widely accepted that personal identity requires an identical genetic heritage—that a child born to my parents at the same time that I was, in fact, born but with a significantly different genetic endowment would have been a different individual. But even genetic identity is not sufficient: identical twins are not identical persons, nor is either identical with the individual who would have existed had twinning not occurred. Thinking along these lines, it seems clear that for my existence it is at least necessary that a particular pair of male and female reproductive cells should have joined to form a viable individual.
It should already be clear that the coming into existence of any particular human individual is, antecedently, an extremely improbable event, one which is contingent upon a multitude of other highly improbable events. Not to put too fine a point on it, let us consider some of the contingencies involved, in some cases at least, in the fact that one’s parents happened to meet one another. My own father and mother came from widely separated parts of the country and met as a result of a complex series of events, some of which affected many other individuals as well. Not least among these was the First World War, which sent my father to France and brought my mother to Washington to work in the expanded Federal government, leading in each case to life-changing experiences. Quite simply: had there been no war, I should not be here. But this is not all, for behind my parents there stands the whole series of their progenitors, persons whose own coming-into-being must have been influenced in similar or even more striking ways by major and minor events of their own times. The conclusion to which we are led, and which is not at all too strong for the argument on which it rests, may be formulated thus:
(B) Had major or significant events in the world’s past history been different than they were, then in all probability neither I nor the persons whom I love would ever have existed.
Ill
By this time you may foresee the direction of my argument and the use that I intend to make of the points established in the first two sections. But in order to link those points together we need to establish some principles governing the logical relationships between certain attitudes—attitudes which are expressed by the phrases “being glad that…” and “being sorry that…” Attitudes such as these cannot be true or false, as beliefs are, yet it is my contention that they share with beliefs, moral judgments and imperatives the property of being rationally consistent or inconsistent. In order to see this, it is important to notice that “being glad that…” is not just a matter of having certain feelings of joy and gladness. Normally, indeed, being glad does involve feelings, but this is not true without exception. I am glad that the rate of unemployment declined by one tenth of a percent last month. But it would take a much bigger shift—or one sustained over several months’ time—to trigger any noticeable feeling of gladness. What is the case, however, is that I prefer the rate’s having declined to its having remained constant or climbed even higher. And this, I suggest, is true in general: my being glad that P entails my preferring that P be the case rather than not-P. Conversely, if I am sorry, or regret that P, this means that I would prefer that not-P be the case rather than P. And it is in virtue of these preferences that the attitudes in question are, as I claimed above, rationally consistent or inconsistent.
But this is not sufficiently explicit. Suppose I am glad that Indiana won the NCAA basketball championship, defeating North Carolina in the final game. What is preferred to what? Is it not that I would prefer Indiana’s having won under all conceivable circumstances—for instance, if I had placed a large bet on North Carolina. What is the case is that I prefer the actual situation, in which Indiana won, to the state of affairs which would have obtained had Indiana failed to win—presumably, a state of affairs in which Indiana is defeated by North Carolina in the final round. And on the other hand, my regretting Indiana’s victory would entail my preferring that other state of affairs, in which North Carolina wins, to the one which actually obtains.
What logical principles apply to these attitudes? To begin with, we surely can say that:
(C) If I am glad that P, I rationally cannot be sorry that P.
One may, indeed feel both gladness and sorrow about something; many events in life have such a “bitter-sweet” quality about them. But “being glad” in the sense which is of interest here involves preference, and clearly it cannot be true both that one prefers that P be the case and that one would prefer that it not be the case.
Another principle which may suggest itself is:
(D) If I am glad that P, and P entails O, then I rationally must be glad that Q.
But there are objections to this. For one thing, I may be quite unaware that P entails Q. and if so I can hardly be expected to extend my gladness that P to include Q. This is easily remedied by adding to the antecedent of (D) a clause specifying that I am aware of the entailment. But even with this addition, (D) would still be false. The reason for this may be elicited by a further consideration of the basketball example. Clearly, Indiana’s winning the NCAA basketball championship entails the existence of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its national championship. But one might take the view that the NCAA’s existence is on the whole a bad thing—that the very existence of such an organization with its national championships, television contracts, etc., inevitably fosters overemphasis on athletics, commercialism and the corruption of which we have recently been hearing so much. An Indiana fan who took this view might very well regret the NCAA’s existence, even though Indiana’s victory could not have occurred if there were no association. Yet it is still true that he is glad that Indiana won. For the alternative to Indiana’s winning (the state of affairs which would have obtained had Indiana not won) would not include the (supposedly beneficent) disappearance of the NCAA; it would, no doubt, be simply a state of affairs in which Indiana was defeated in the final round of the tournament.
The fan we have just described is in no way irrational or inconsistent, and he does constitute a counter-example to (D). But his gladness about Indiana’s victory is qualitatively different from that of the typical fan who is less concerned about the undesirable aspects of national associations and their tournaments. The first fan is glad about Indiana’s victory under the circumstances—circumstances which include the undesirable but inevitable fact that there is a tournament and it will be won by some other team if not by Indiana. We may also say, in the interests of brevity, that he is circumstantially glad that Indiana won, where:
‘A is circumstantially glad that P’ = df ‘A is glad that P, and there is some state-of-affairs Q such that A knows that if Q did not obtain neither would P, and A regrets that Q‘.
The other fan, we may suppose, is glad on the whole that Indiana won. He may, indeed, recognize that the national association and its championship tournament involve some undesirable consequences, but he definitely prefers Indiana’s victory under these less-than-ideal circumstances to the alternative of no association, no tournament, and no championship for Indiana. More formally:
‘A is glad on the whole that P’ = df ‘A is glad that P, and for any state-of-affairs Q such that A knows that if Q did not obtain neither would P, A is glad that Q‘.
Being glad on the whole is a rather strong attitude of preference, but it is not an unfamiliar one: it is commonly expressed in the locution, “I wouldn’t trade this for anything!” This may of course be said when it is not strictly true, but there is no reason to doubt that it is sometimes a true expression of one’s attitude.
Finally, we may say that a person regrets on the whole that P whenever he is clearly not glad on the whole that P—whenever, that is, he regrets that P or is only circumstantially glad that P.
Given these definitions, we are able to proceed with some further principles. For instance, we can replace the objectionable (D) with:
(E) If I am glad on the whole that P, and I know that P entails Q, then I rationally must be glad on the whole that Q.
This is easily proved, given the definitions above. For suppose I am glad on the whole that P, but I am not glad on the whole that Q, where Q is a state of affairs which I know to be entailed by P. If I regret that Q, this is definitionally inconsistent with my being glad on the whole that P. (I may of course “regret” that Q, but this is consistent with my being glad on the whole that Q.) Suppose, however, that I am circumstantially glad that Q. Then there is some state-of-affairs R such that I know that if R did not obtain neither would Q, and I regret that R. But since P entails Q, it follows that if R did not obtain neither would P. And this, once again, is inconsistent with the assumption that I am glad on the whole that P.
Clearly, our definitions entail not only (E) but also:
(F) If I am glad on the whole that P, and I know that if Q did not obtain neither would P, then I rationally must be glad that Q.
These principles seem clearly correct. But when (F) is combined with the results from Section II, a rather striking conclusion results. The reasoning is straightforward: My existence depends on the existence of my body, and that body would never have existed had major events in the world’s past history been different. Therefore:
(G) If I am glad on the whole about my own existence and that of those whom I love, then I must be glad that the history of the world, in its major aspects, has been as it has.
This conclusion, to be sure, does not follow deductively from (F) and (B) as they have been stated. For (F) speaks of my knowing that if Q did not obtain neither would P, whereas (B) says only that in all probability there is such a connection. What difference, if any, should this make in our attitude toward (G)? Very little, I believe. Note first of all that, given the truth of (A), it is certain, and not just probable, that subsequent to any major calamity, such as a war, many of the persons who come into existence are different individuals from those who would have existed had the calamity not occurred. Many persons who would otherwise have become parents die without having children. Those who would have been their mates have children with other partners, and so on. Within a few generations, it is likely that hardly anyone living in the affected area is identical with any individual who would have existed, had the calamity not occurred. What is more difficult is to show that this is true in the case of a given individual. But even in the individual case, the probabilities mount up very rapidly. Suppose, for example, that had the First World War not occurred there is one chance in ten that my parents would have met each other. (I am sure that this is too high. But at this point I can afford to be conservative.) Suppose, furthermore, that on just two previous occasions the meeting and mating of some of my earlier ancestors has been influenced in similar ways by calamitous events of their own times. Then neglecting all other factors (all of which, if considered, would further strengthen my argument), the likelihood of my existing, if just these three major calamities had not occurred, is no better than one in a thousand! The truth is that I have no reason whatever to suppose that I would have existed, had the course of the world’s history been substantially different. But what I have no reason to suppose true must for practical purposes be disregarded. So (G) must be accepted.
If the argument leading to (G) is as sound as it seems to be, how are we to explain the fact that it has largely been ignored? Perhaps one reason is the non-obviousness of (A) and (B), for without these principles the connection between past historical events and my own existence would not obtain. As a matter of fact the ideas expressed in (F) and (G) have received some attention, most frequently in connection with determinism. In a strict deterministic system, every event in a causal network is causally interlocked with every other event, so that one can’t be glad or sorry on the whole about anything without being glad or sorry about everything. This is the source of the complaint urged by William James in “The Dilemma of Determinism”—that if determinism is true, one can’t rationally regret any single event (a brutal murder, for instance) without implicating the entire universe in one’s regret. Some determinists have seen this and have found it acceptable. Spinoza considers our ordinary judgments of good and bad to be irrational precisely because in making them we overlook the necessary connections between events; the only rational happiness is the joy with which we contemplate deus sive natura as one single, immutable fact. And Nietzsche, in “The Drunken Song” (Zarathustra, BK IV), enjoins us to love all of life and to will all of it back in “eternal return”:
“All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, ‘You please me, happiness!’ ‘Abide, moment!’ then you wanted all back.”
A final (to my mind wonderful) example, which is neither deterministic nor philosophical, comes from the Roman liturgy of the Easter vigil:
“O truly necessary sin of Adam, that is wiped out by the death of Christ! O happy fault, that was worthy to have such and so great a redeemer.”
IV
Supposing the argument so far to be sound, and that the truth of(G) has been established, what follows for the problem of evil? Or better, who can be helped by our argument, and how can it help him? To begin with our argument can be of no help to the atheologian who finds himself sincerely unable to affirm that he is glad for his own existence, and for the existence of persons whom he loves. If one on the whole regrets the sheer fact that he has lived at all—as opposed to regretting some, or many things that one has done, or that have happened to one—then his own life gives him no reason to be glad for the world’s existence. If on the other hand you are glad on the whole that you exist then it follows (in the light of (G) above) that you must be glad also about the world’s existence and about the general course its history has taken.
It may occur to you, however, that I am trying to extract too much from your admission that you are glad that you exist. Probably when you considered this question you weren’t thinking at all about all those tragic events which (as it now turns out) are required for your existence. You were probably thinking just about your own life and its immediate surroundings, rather than about its connection with other lives and other events—and this is what you said you were glad about. If we agree to call this “gladness simpliciter” you may want to say that you are indeed glad simpliciter that you exist but that you are not necessarily glad on the whole that you exist.
Quite so. There is a difference between being glad simpliciter and being glad on the whole, and it’s not at all impossible for a person to have one of these attitudes without having the other. But, now that we have clarified this distinction, I would like you to ask yourself, “Am I on the whole glad, or sorry, that I exist?” There are just three possible answers. If your answer, now that the issues have been clarified, is still “yes,” then the argument proceeds just as before. But perhaps you find that you can’t easily give this answer, in the light of all those tragic events of the past. Perhaps, indeed, your reaction is one of bewilderment—you may feel, as a colleague suggested, that when you lump your life together with the whole past history of the world, you don’t know what to say about it. Thus you may fail to have any “on the whole” attitude toward your own existence; you are neither glad on the whole nor sorry on the whole about it.
I can understand your feeling this way about the matter. The interesting point (which will emerge below) is that this failure to have an “on the whole” attitude toward your own existence leaves you just as unable to formulate a problem of evil as if you were definitely glad about it. In order to state a problem of evil (of the sort we are discussing) you must positively regret on the whole that you, your family, your friends and all the rest of us, have lived. You must be able to say “Although my life has brought me some pleasures, I truly wish and would prefer that some other world, in which no one now living has a share, or perhaps no world at all, should exist in place of this present evil world of which I am (unhappily) a part.” If this is your sincere attitude, then the argument I am presenting will necessarily fail to engage you. In this case the fact that I am glad of my existence is of no help to you. But this point cuts both ways. If you are glad on the whole that you, and persons close to you, have lived, then it makes no difference that others might, or actually do, feel differently about their lives. In such matters as these, each of us is bound to the consequences of his own convictions and attitudes, regardless of whether they are shared by others or not.
It may be, however, that even an atheologian who is glad on the whole for his own existence will be unaffected by my argument. This will be the case, for instance, if he conceives and presents the problem of evil merely as an internal inconsistency in theistic belief. He may, for instance, allege that the famous triad “God is all-powerful, God is good, and the world contains evil” is either logically or probabilistically inconsistent, and that this shows the theist’s position to be untenable. Such an atheologian does not need to commit himself to any substantive premises whatever; in particular, he need not commit himself to any moral principles, nor need he make any moral judgments of his own, or express any kind of dissatisfaction with the actual state of the world. His atheological argument does not depend in any way on his personal convictions, attitudes and commitments, so we can’t expect the argument to be affected by our reminding him of these things.
Typically, however, the problem of evil is not presented in this noncommittal kind of way. Not only is such a presentation generally lacking in the rhetorical force desired by atheologians, but it seems not to express the convictions which they wish to convey. Far more commonly, presentations of the problem convey a strong sense that there is indeed something drastically wrong with the world from a moral point of view; that a supremely wise and powerful being such as God is alleged to be would, if he existed, be morally at fault for causing or permitting the world to be as it is; and sometimes that believers in God are not only logically obtuse but morally insensitive for failing to recognize that the deplorable moral state of the world is a decisive objection to what they believe.
To this kind of presentation of the problem of evil, our present argument provides an effective answer. To see this, we have only to conjoin the “moral protest” involved in the presentation of the problem with the results derived in the first three sections of this chapter. We then have, for instance, the following:
(H) The world as we know it is morally so objectionable that a God who tolerated it could in no meaningful sense be called good—nevertheless, I am glad for my own existence and therefore I am also glad that the world exists and that the main events and features of its history have been as they have.
Or, in relation to the alleged moral insensitivity of theists, we have:
(I) Those who would maintain that the world as we know it could be created and governed by a just and loving God “must have led sheltered lives and closed their heart to the voice of their brothers’ blood,” nevertheless I am glad on the whole that I have been able to live in this world, and glad also that its history has been such as to give me that opportunity.
Isn’t it clear on the face of it that the admission in the latter parts of these two statements effectively cancels out the moral protest involved in the first part of each statement? That one simply can’t rationally and consistently, press home the complaint of the first part if one has the attitude expressed in the second part? The principle involved might be formulated something like this:
(J) I cannot reasonably complain to someone that P, or blame or reproach someone for Its being the case that P, unless I myself sincerely regret, or am sorry, that P.
This, I think, is intuitively evident, and applying it to the problem at hand, we have the following:
(K) If I am glad on the whole about my own existence, and that of persons close to me, then I cannot reproach God for the general character or the major events of the world’s past history.
But this is just what the atheologian wants to do: it is just the “general character and major events,” many of them tragic for the persons involved, which in his view render the world morally unsatisfactory and which, should God exist, would constitute a decisive objection against his goodness. Nor will it be feasible for the atheologian to develop a problem of evil based solely on events within his own lifetime, events therefore on which his own existence does not depend in the way in which it depends on those tragic events of the past. For the atrocities and tragedies of our lifetime are all of them the same kinds of events that have occurred countless times in the past; to protest loudly and indignantly against just these few calamities, while accepting with equanimity all the similar evils in the past which happen to have contributed to our own existence, is to adopt a moral stance which is too egocentric to deserve serious notice.
So much for the atheologian, at least for now. But what of the perplexed theist, who is troubled by the problem of reconciling the world’s evil with the goodness of the God in whom he believes? Does our argument offer him any help?
To begin with, the argument cannot bear the weight of “positive theodicy”—that is, of the task of explaining why evil exists or why it is appropriate that God should allow it to exist. In order to do this along the lines of the present argument, we should have to assume that we, the persons actually existing, are uniquely valuable in comparison with any other persons whom God could have created—but I take it no one would want to assert this. These questions about the justification of evils must be answered, insofar as answers are possible at all, along other lines.
I think, however, that the argument is able to offer some help in another way—namely, by effecting a certain change of perspective. To be sure, the point of view presented here does not represent what philosophers would ordinarily be prone to describe as “viewing things in proper perspective.” Ever since Plato, we have wanted to view such matters sub specie aeternitatis, taking our places as “spectators of all time and all existence.” But are we really able to take this place? Can we actually make the innumerable judgments, both factual and evaluative, which are required if we are to sum things up from this point of view? Our argument suggests, on the contrary, that my judgments about the goodness or badness of existence as a whole are best made, not from the standpoint of “a cosmic ideal observer,” but from my own standpoint as an individual existing human being—one who loves and struggles, who sorrows and rejoices, and who is glad for the opportunity to live out his life upon the earth. To sum it up in a word—the argument shows something about what it means to be a creature.
William Hasker, “On Regretting the Evils of This World,” Providence, Evil and the Openness of God, London: Routledge (2004). First published in Southern Journal of Philosophy 19 (1981), 425-37.