The phrase, “Without God … everything is permitted” (also translated as “Without God … all things are lawful”) is uttered by Ivan in Book XI, chapter IV of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, although what he meant by it is a matter for debate. Recently, however, Dr. Luis Oliveira has published a paper titled, “God and gratuitous evil: Between the rock and the hard place” (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 94 (2023): 317 – 345), in which he presents a powerful argument for a mirror image of Ivan Karamazov’s blanket assertion, and in so doing, raises a new problem of evil, which he amicably discusses with Dr. Justin Mooney in the 90-minute video displayed above, which was created as a “Majesty of Reason” podcast hosted by philosopher Joe Schmid. I was impressed by the irenic tone of the dialogue between the two guests, Dr. Mooney and Dr. Oliveira.

Dr. Oliveira’s argument rests on two premises, which he calls “Reasons” and “Symmetry” (bolding is mine – VJT):

1. If God exists, then for all actual instances of evil e, God has justifying moral reasons for allowing e. (Reasons)
2. If God has justifying moral reasons for allowing e, then we have justifying moral reasons for allowing e as well. (Symmetry)
C. So, if God exists, then for all actual instances of evil e, we have justifying moral reasons for allowing e.

In a disturbing mirror image of the old Dostoevskian adage, we can re-phrase this conclusion as an equally ominous slogan: if God exists, then everything is permitted.

Most religious believers will accept the truth of premise 1, which has been upheld by theologians for the past two thousand years, although in the past three decades, there have been a few philosophers who have argued that a perfect God might allow gratuitous evil. Dr. Oliveira has no time for this view: he writes that he finds it simply incredible that a perfect God could turn around and say to a victim of gratuitous evil, “I love and care for you personally, but there is nothing that justifies my permission of this particular evil you have suffered; I knew of it, I could have prevented it, I had no justifying reason not to prevent it, and I still did nothing about it.” Although Dr. Mooney questioned premise 1 in the discussion, I have to say that my sympathies lie with Dr. Oliveira on this particular point. There are Christian philosophers who have argued that God, as the Author of Nature, is not himself a moral agent. I have written elsewhere on why I find this view philosophically unsatisfactory, and I shall not repeat myself here. The rest of this post will therefore address premise 2 of Dr. Oliveira’s argument, which he calls the Symmetry premise.

It should be said at the outset that Dr. Oliveira is not attempting to argue for atheism; rather, what he is trying to show is that theists need to take the problem of evil a lot more seriously. He does not consider the argument he presents to be a proof, but he does think that no satisfactory answer to it has yet been found, and he writes that “denying premise 2 is harder than it looks – indeed, maybe just as hard as denying the beloved premise 1.”

The crux of Dr. Oliveira’s symmetry argument is that appeals to God’s omniscient perspective, as opposed to our limited perspective, fail to explain why God might be justified in allowing an evil that we are morally bound to try to prevent. For if someone has a justified belief in the truth of premise 1, then they will conclude that whatever evils do in fact occur in the world, God must have had a justifying moral reason for allowing them. They might then reason as follows: “Even if I do nothing to stop this evil that I am able to prevent, and it occurs, there will still be a justifying reason for God allowing it.” Hence, to quote Dr. Oliveira, “there is nothing of normative importance that will be accomplished by my actions … that would not be accomplished without them.”

Nor will it do to argue (as many religious people do) that while God has a right to allow certain evils, we do not: we are therefore bound to fight them, to the best of our ability. Once again, if someone has a justified belief that that whatever evils do in fact occur in the world, God must have had a right to allowing these evils to occur. They might then reason as follows: “Even if I do nothing to stop this evil that I am able to prevent, and it occurs, God will still have a right to allow it to do so.” At this point, Dr. Oliveira appeals to a principle he calls the Principle of Authority: “If x is necessary for some greater good or for the prevention of some greater evil, and A, but not B, has a moral right to allow x, then B does not have a moral right to interfere with A’s allowing x.” (To use an analogy: if the law gives a surgeon, who knows that surgery will inevitably harm her patient, the right to decide whether it is nonetheless necessary in order to prevent an even worse outcome, then it would be quite wrong for an outsider, knowing the harm the patient will undergo in surgery, to try to prevent the surgery from going ahead.) Applied to God, this means that if He has a moral right to allow some evil to occur but we don’t, then we have no right to interfere with God’s allowing that evil, by trying to stop it ourselves.

Finally, a religious person might suggest that God has a duty never to interfere with actions by free agents that cause evils, no matter how horrendous those evils may be. (This proposal is rather like the Prime Directive in Star Trek, although I should note that it did have exceptions that permitted intervention.) If this is true, then it would morally justify God’s allowing horrendous evils to occur. In response, Dr. Oliveira argues that we have no good grounds for believing that God has any such universally binding duty. Why should God be morally bound to respect the choices of free agents under all possible circumstances, irrespective of the harm they cause to other agents?

I’d like to make five brief comments in reply. (I may elaborate on these comments in a future essay.) First, I am not at all convinced by Dr. Oliveira’s argument that my having a justified belief in premise 1 (that for each and every evil that occurs, God has justifying moral reasons for allowing it) excuses me from trying to stop the evils happening all around me, as “there is nothing of normative importance that will be accomplished by my actions … that would not be accomplished without them.” I have to say that I find the term “normative importance,” which is employed by Dr. Oliveira three times in his essay, unacceptably vague. As far as I can tell, it has to with ensuring that no moral evils occur which are pointless, or the permission of which is pointless. And from a God’s-eye view, we might say: that’s what matters most. However, this definition of “normative importance” overlooks the moral significance of the moral norms that pertain to cultivation of virtue in human moral agents. For example, it seems quite plausible to argue that my individual acts of preventing the evils that confront me in my daily life will help build my character. And if this is not normatively significant, then I ask: what is?

This brings me to my second point, which is that although God is a moral agent, He is not a member of society. The individuals who are born into a given society develop their moral character by interacting with the other members of that society: family members, relatives and friends, and fellow citizens. A vital part of this moral development involves coming to the aid of those in need. A person who fails to do this is rightly judged to be a morally stunted individual: cold, heartless and lacking in concern for others. No human being can cultivate a good moral character by doing nothing when confronted with a preventable social evil which is afflicting people in their community. Only by striving to remove this evil and assist those who are harmed by it can one demonstrate compassion and a concern for social justice. God, on the other hand, is not defined within the framework of any human society. God is essentially loving, but God, unlike us, does not need to grow in virtue by helping others. Hence God will not become morally stunted by failing to prevent people from suffering evil, so long as there is a genuinely justifiable reason for Him not to do so.

My third point in response to Dr. Oliveira is that I consider his Principle of Authority to be defectively worded. The reader will recall that the principle states that if some evil (call it x) is necessary for some greater good or for the prevention of some greater evil, and A, but not B, has a moral right to allow x, then B does not have a moral right to interfere with A’s allowing x. However, under the popular “free will” theodicy, it is not necessarily the case that all evils contribute to the greater good or to the prevention of some greater evil. Rather, it is the toleration of these evils that contributes to the greater good (or the prevention of a worse evil). That means we can get rid of the antecedent of the principle. That leaves us with the Truncated Principle of Authority, which says that if A, but not B, has a moral right to allow some evil x, then B does not have a moral right to interfere with A’s allowing x. The last phrase is oddly worded. What does it mean to interfere with someone’s allowing something? To prevent it? In that case, why not just say so? But the real source of the problem lies with the letter x: does it denote a particular evil or a class of evils? If the latter, then the principle loses its plausibility. If A, but not B, has a moral right to allow some class of evils, then it simply isn’t true that B does not have a moral right to interfere with A’s allowing this class of evils by preventing a particular occurrence of the evil in question. For example, let us picture a community where the Governor, Mayor or relevant person in charge decides to tolerate social evils such as public drunkenness, drug addiction or prostitution, on the grounds that attempting to stamp out these evils might make things worse – say, by leading to an increase in organized crime. Does it follow that the individual citizens of this community have no right to try and stop members of their own families from becoming drunkards, drug addicts or prostitutes? I think not. An individual could consistently agree with the leader’s decision to tolerate these social vices as a general category of evils, while striving to prevent them from springing up within their own family. The Principle of Authority needs some further work, if it is to be deployed in an argument attempting to undermine the religious believer’s claim that while God has the authority to allow certain evils, we don’t – which is why we’re still bound to combat them.

Fourth, although the Prime Directive fails to supply a plausible reason for why God should never interfere with actions by free agents that cause evils, I can think of one theodicy that would require God to step back in the vast majority of cases. I’ll call it the NDE theodicy, as I’ve noticed that it features in a number of NDE reports by people who have come back from the brink of death, although it can also be found in Theosophy. The idea is that human souls are reincarnated until they have fully acquired the moral virtues. Prior to each incarnation, however, each soul chooses the family and the community it will be born into and the individual limitations that it will suffer from, such as physical or mental disabilities and emotional problems. By consenting to be born into a certain family or community, the soul knows full well that it is exposing itself to the risk of being afflicted by certain evils – some of them horrendous evils – but chooses to do so anyway. Perhaps the soul, prior to being born, might even tell God, “If I’m in a desperate situation, don’t help me. I want to learn from the experience,” and God, after asking the soul, “Are you sure?”, might reluctantly acquiesce with that soul’s choice. Alternatively, the soul may request divine assistance if it finds itself in a really bad situation. Cases will vary. The point is that God arguably has a duty to respect the informed choices of individuals to either undergo or risk undergoing certain evils. If there were anything that constrained God’s freedom to intervene to prevent evils occurring in the world, this would be it.

Finally, I should point out that attempts to build theodicies that are capable of accounting for all of the different kinds of evils we see in the world come at an enormous epistemic cost: they require their advocates to believe a lot of metaphysically extravagant tenets, for which there is not an iota of scientific evidence. In the previous paragraph, belief in the pre-existence and reincarnation of souls was required to explain why God does not prevent people from suffering the often horrendous consequences of bad agents’ wicked acts. That’s quite an assumption. And if we’re going to account for animal suffering, will we have to entertain the idea that animals are reincarnated too, and that in between incarnations, while contemplating where and in what form they will be born next, they magically cease to be brute beasts and become rational agents, capable of planning their next birth? The mind boggles. (Another alternative is Trent Dougherty’s theodicy in which animals, resurrected to eternal life in some future Paradise, retrospectively consent to the hideous suffering they have endured on earth, but I have to say I find this proposal morally problematic, as it involves God not only turning a blind eye to but actually causing the systemic evil resulting from the operation of natural selection, for a period of billions of years, and only afterwards asking His creatures to consent to this suffering as the price of their future immortality. In reply, I would argue that the end doesn’t justify the means. If I were a resurrected fawn who’d died a painful and lingering death in a forest fire, I’d be inclined to tell God, “You should have asked me first.”)

I seem to have ended up drawing a similar conclusion to Dr. Oliveira: namely, that believers in a morally perfect God really have their work cut out for them. In short: it may be impossible for us to come up with a solution (or solutions) to the problem of evil which is at once morally satisfying, metaphysically plausible and empirically well-grounded. Does that reflect the limitations of our moral intuitions, our metaphysical intuitions or our scientific knowledge? What do readers think?