Bad people do bad things, and if the people and the things are bad enough, we may call both of them ‘evil’. Various other words may be used to describe such behaviour – wicked, depraved, vicious – and all suggest that a specifically moral boundary has been crossed. But the word ‘evil’ carries a special and distinct connotation, a sort of metaphysical baggage gathered during its long and ancient association with religion.
Standing in a grand cosmic opposition as the antithesis of good, evil is intimately tied up with the idea of sin, the transgression of divine law. The implied offence against God (or gods) is often personified in the agency of a devil or devils. In the Christian tradition, for instance, the supreme embodiment of evil is Satan, the arch enemy of God, whose minions, or demons, enter humans to incite or inflict various kinds of evil.
What makes evil evil? On the face of it, the close link between evil and sin offers a ready solution to the problem of identifying evil – saying what evil is. Something is wrong, in this view, simply because it is an offence against God’s law: morality is based on divine command; good is good and evil is evil for the simple reason that God has ordained that it should be so. And as the word of God is preserved in the bible and other sacred texts, we have a detailed record of God’s pleasures and displeasures and hence an authoritative source of guidance on what we should and shouldn’t do.
There is no doubt that for most people throughout most of history, some such account of morality, of good and evil, has been accepted without question. There are, nevertheless, significant difficulties with this view.
First, there is the familiar problem that the various religious texts through which God’s will is made known to humans, contain many conflicting and/or unpalatable messages. At the very least, it is a challenge to use God’s known views to construct an acceptable and internally coherent moral system. A second problem, casting doubt on the nature of divine authority, was first raised by Plato some 2400 years ago in his dialogue Euthyphro. Suppose that good and evil are based on what is pleasing or displeasing to God. Is what is evil evil because God dislikes it, or does God dislike it because it is evil? If the former, clearly God’s preferences might have been different – God might have liked genocide (say), and if he had, genocide would be all right; so morality is little more than blind obedience to an arbitrary authority. And if the latter – if God dislikes evil because it is evil – the fact that evil is evil is clearly independent of God; God, in this case, is simply redundant. In matters of morality, then, God is either arbitrary or irrelevant: an unhappy conclusion for those who would ground morality in this way.
‘Evils can never pass away, for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good.’
Plato, 4th century BC
The problem of evil There are questions, then, over the foundations of good and evil and God’s relation to them. Perhaps even more damaging is the so-called ‘problem of evil’ – the difficulty of reconciling the fact of evil occurring in the world with the existence of God as usually conceived.
Manifestly, the world is full of evil: famine, murder, earthquake, disease – millions of people’s futures blighted, young lives needlessly snuffed out, children left orphaned and helpless, agonizing deaths of young and old alike. If you could click your fingers and put an end to all this misery, you would have to be a heartless monster not to do so. Yet there is supposed to be a being that could sweep it all aside in an instant, a being that is unlimited in its power, knowledge and moral excellence: God. How can such evil exist side by side with a god who has, by definition, the capacity to put an end to it?
The problem arises as a consequence of certain qualities that are usually thought by believers to be part of the essence of God. As conventionally conceived, God is …
• omniscient: he (or she or it) knows everything;
• omnipotent: he is able to do anything;
• omnibenevolent: he desires to do every good thing.
From this it appears to follow that God is fully aware of all the evil (pain and suffering) in the world; that he is able to prevent it; and that he wishes to do so. But this flatly contradicts the reality of evil in the world. So, unless we simply deny that there is any such evil, we must conclude either that there is no God or that he does not possess one or more of his supposedly essential properties: he doesn’t know what is going on, doesn’t care, or can’t do anything about it.
Is it possible to explain how evil and God, with all his properties intact, can in fact co-exist after all? The usual suggestion is that there are ‘morally sufficient reasons’ why God, while remaining a being of perfect moral excellence, might not always choose to eliminate suffering. The idea is that it is in some sense in our interests – it is good for us – that God should allow evil to happen in the world.
So exactly what interests are served, what greater goods are to be gained, at the price of human suffering? Probably the most powerful answer to this question is the so-called ‘free will defence’, according to which suffering on earth is the price we pay – and a price worth paying – for our freedom to make genuine choices in our actions (see box). Another important idea is that true moral character and virtue are forged on the anvil of human suffering: it is only by overcoming adversity, helping the oppressed, opposing the tyrant (etc.) that the real worth of the saint and the hero is able to shine forth. However, such arguments may begin to look shallow when set against the sheer arbitrariness and scale of human suffering. Not only is the amount of suffering out of all proportion with what might reasonably be required for purposes of character-building; the greater part of the world’s evil is visited upon the blameless while the vicious go unscathed.
‘If all evil were prevented, much good would be absent from the universe.’
Thomas Aquinas, c.1265
the condensed idea
Is evil good for us?