A Preemptive Response to Nathan Rockwood.
A Mr. Beast video I recently watched has made me question a theodicy I previously thought was brilliant. Participants of Mr. Beast’s game shows voluntarily participate in contests that involve suffering. It ranges from social isolation to twisted social experiments and limited dietary constraints. Participants do not hold Mr. Beast accountable because they sign a waiver, but that doesn’t mean Mr. Beast’s actions are ok.
Nathan Rockwood is publishing a chapter in the upcoming Routledge publication, Contemporary Philosophy and the Latter-day Saint Tradition, titled Social Theodicy. He mentions it uses social contract theory, but again, contracts don’t make parties’ actions morally permissible.
But first, what is a theodicy anyway? A theodicy is an answer to the problem of evil.
So what is the problem of evil? The problem of evil has two major formulations: the logical problem of evil and the evidentiary problem of evil.
The Logical Problem of Evil:
The logical problem of evil’s formulation is popularly attributed to J. L. Mackie. It follows:
a) God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good.
b) Good beings prevent evil when they can.
c) There is evil that exists in the world.
d) God does not prevent all evil.
e) Therefore, God is either not all-powerful and cannot prevent all evil; is not all-knowing because there are evils he does not know about, so He cannot prevent; or is not all good because he does not prevent evils that He could prevent.
The Evidentiary Problem of Evil:
The evidentiary problem is not syllogistic. But rather, based on observation that there is pain, suffering, and things that may or may not be morally wrong in the absolute sense, but are unpleasant. Because of those circumstances, an all-good being would prevent or lower the amount of such pain, suffering, and wrong in the world.
It asks, does a deer in a forest fire need to be struck down in this world?
Leibniz’s Theodicy:
Leibniz (an inventor of calculus), who coined the term theodicy, proposed two theodicies. [1]
(1)Free will is necessary for moral goods.
(2) The world we live in is the best-possible-world God could have created.
These answers solve the logical problem by saying the world is necessary for how it is for moral goodness, and answer the evidentiary problem by invoking epistemic humility (admitting we don’t know the bigger picture), and there may be some reason for the suffering in a butterfly effect causal chain.
Rockwood proposes a Social Contract Theodicy:
“My proposal is similar. I argue that if you did or would rationally choose to live in a world like this one, then the conditions of the world, including the existence of evil, are justified by your own agreement to live in this world.”[2]
Latter-day Saints accept the premise that we chose to be in this world and were rational beings, then it is likely that we made a rational choice to be in this world. And so, as Rockwood provides, we are then justified by our agreement to live in a world with evil.
So, while our consent to live in a world may not make God responsible for evil happening to us, this does not explain why evil was necessary. This leaves the logical problem of evil unaddressed. Why did there need to be evil anyway? If evil could not have been prevented by God, He is not all-powerful. If there are evils that God did not know, then He is not all-knowing.[3]
We may have consented to experience evil because God is not all-powerful, or God did not completely know the volume of evil that would be experienced.
There is also an issue that God knew the pain, suffering, and evil that would follow from our consent. If the social contract theodicy is a rational choice that justifies evil, then we could not have known what the evil was like in any meaningful qualitative sense. We could study evil our whole life, but experiencing it is entirely different.
The gap of knowledge between God and us then needs to be explained by a leap of faith. We needed to trust that God is all-good if we wanted to endure evil. The same leap is needed when a practitioner questions “why me?” in the face of life’s troubles.
All these answers require a theodicy to explain why there is still evil in the face of an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God. The theodicy can be a free-will theodicy or a best-of-all-possible-worlds answer. A social contract theory then does not solve the logical problem of evil; it only pushes the explanation back. Moreso, the evidentiary problem of evil still stands. If rational beings consent to evil, that does not permit evil acts done against non-rational beings, such as the deer in the forest fire.
All of this to say, I am excited to see what Rockwood says. He is an incredible philosopher, having written on miracles, John Locke, free will, and foreknowledge, amongst many other things, and I imagine he has considered these problems. I recommend checking out his work, much of which is publicly available.[4] And expect me to provide a future update to what he actually says in his chapter in Contemporary Philosophy and the Latter-day Saint Tradition.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/SocietyChristianPhilosophers/posts/we-are-hosting-a-talk-this-friday-at-2pm-central-time-in-the-scps-work-in-progre/1059424039552290/
[3] This is a contested point in philosophy of time discussions on if future truthmakers are actualized (entities that correspond to truth) for statements about the future. If there is, then there can be true justified belief (knowledge) about future suffering. If not, there could be no knowledge. In this example, God would still have predictive power about evil because He is requiring us to consent, showing he acknowledges evil’s existence.
[4] https://philpeople.org/profiles/nathan-rockwood