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The Nature of Evil: Privation or Corruption? with Christophe de Ray
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In this episode, I talk with Dr. Christophe de Ray from Nanyang Technological University about his article “Corruptio Boni: An Alternative to the Privation Theory of Evil,” published in the journal Ratio: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy. Drawing inspiration from Augustine, Dr. de Ray argues that evil is not the mere absence of a good that ought to obtain, but rather the corruption of a good: something that harms, diminishes, or destroys it.
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Transcript
Introduction & Alternative Theories
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Dianesis Circle podcast. Today I'm joined by philosopher Dr. Christophe DeRay from the Department of Philosophy at Nanyang Technological University. We'll be discussing his article, Corruptio Boney, an Alternative to the Privation Theory of Evil.
00:00:15
Speaker
Dr. DeRay has published in Religious Studies, Erkentenis, and the Philosophical Quarterly, among other journals. And I now wanted to just really quick set up the discussion. So Christoph, he's going to present an alternative to the classic privation theory of evil. So privation theory, roughly speaking, is a theory of evil. It says evil is an absence, a privation of a good that ought to obtain.
00:00:40
Speaker
In contrast, corruption theory is going to say that evil is a corruption of a good itself. It harms, diminishes, destroys a good. So whereas privation theory is going to treat evil as a kind of absence, lack of a do-good, corruption theory is going to see evil as something opposed to nature, a process that damages what is good. So I hope you enjoy this episode. hope you enjoy thinking about this Augustinian-inspired theory that Christoph offers.
Historical Ties of Privation Theory
00:01:15
Speaker
So let's just start with the privation theory then. you know What is it and could you just you know give us a very rough sense of how historically important it is? Yeah, so in terms of what privation theory is, I mean, it's pretty straightforward. it'ss It's supposed to be an analysis of the concept of evil and the way it analyzes evil is by saying that evil is a privation of good, meaning the absence of ah a do good. In other words, a good that ought to be there.
00:01:41
Speaker
And all i imagine we'll have a lot more to say about what makes a good do as opposed to not. you last On what basis do we know that are good that a good ought to be there or or not? ah But that's the big picture.
00:01:54
Speaker
In terms of its historical importance, um I mean, the most... sort of the biggest figure associated with privation theory would be st Augustine, who sort of motivates it in various writings of his, including the Confessions.
00:02:09
Speaker
I think I would say most people who've thought about this from a historical perspective would say that it has deeper roots than Augustine. I would argue that it goes all the way back to Plato, who, to my knowledge, doesn't articulate it explicitly, but follows fairly naturally from other things he says.
00:02:27
Speaker
um Sort of Plato's kind of big metaphysical picture has good the goodness or the good um at its root, at its very core. And um the good is sort of this transcendent principle from which everything, um to which everything owes its being.
00:02:42
Speaker
And so if that's how you think of goodness, then um I suppose you're, you know, um for something to For something to be just is for it to participate in the good, right? If you have that sort of picture, um that metaphysical picture, which then raises the question of evil. Well, what do you do with that? Surely there are evil things, there are bad things.
00:03:07
Speaker
and um And so, you know, how can how can bad things exist? And so you're going to be forced to say that evil is unreal. in a way that good isn't.
00:03:19
Speaker
um Which isn't to say that there's no such thing as evil, that evil's an illusion or anything like that, but it doesn't kind it doesn't have the kind of real substantial reality that good has. And so turning to things like absences or privations is is a natural next step, right? Because, you know,
00:03:36
Speaker
your absences like like holes say, like holes in a Swiss cheese. um There's a sense in which they exist. It's true to say that my you know my Swiss cheese has holes in it, but they're not. But the hole itself isn't real in in a kind of substantive sense.
00:03:51
Speaker
So that would be the deep roots. And then it gets taken on explicitly by Augustine and it becomes sort of normative, I would say, for but most of the historical classical theist tradition.
00:04:07
Speaker
like I'll stop there. It's interesting the way you've presented that because it seems to me that sometimes the main motivation for privation theory is presented as theodicy.
00:04:20
Speaker
you know But, you know, in some ways, you know, it's more intuitive that the key thing is that if you think that all of reality is either in some sense God or a manifestation or of God or participation of God. In other words, if you have a really strong sort of monism about the nature reality that because if if you when it comes to the and we can kind of get it. I mean, you you touch on this, that one issue with the theodicy approach is that.
00:04:50
Speaker
And you can say that, okay, evil is an absence of good, but that just creates a new problem, which is, okay, well, why is God allowing for these absences? So um at any rate, I just, yeah, I appreciate the way you just set that up.
Modern Relevance & Illustrations of Privation Theory
00:05:10
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I mean, you're absolutely correct that privation theory also often, so excuse me, gets advanced as a kind of response to what we normally understand to be the problem of evil. The thought, you know, is that, well, somehow that's meant to help with the problem of evil or make it less like sort of, um I don't know,
00:05:26
Speaker
weaken its sting or whatever. um Alex Proust recently wrote and published a piece on the problem of evil, which came out after the piece that we're here to discuss today.
00:05:38
Speaker
And he puts it, in interestingly, and in a sort of helpful way. He says, well, there's the, what he calls the just, I think it's the justificatory problem of evil, right? Which is what people normally understand to be the problem of evil. and And what that is, is basically, you know, what, what are the justifying reasons for, um, for God allowing permitting or even causing evil?
00:06:01
Speaker
Um, and that's,
00:06:06
Speaker
I suppose, yeah the, the, Privation theory isn't going to be all that helpful with that for the reason you just gave. Namely, you know, well, you know, whether evil is a privation or not, there still needs to be an explanation as to why God would allow something like that.
00:06:22
Speaker
But then there's also the, what Proust calls the metaphysical problem of evil, which is what you said. Namely, well, if the ultimate sort of ontological principle is good and everything exists just by participating in the good,
00:06:36
Speaker
then how can evil exist at all? Right. The question here isn't, you know, are there any good reasons to allow evil? Um, it's, is evil just even possible?
00:06:48
Speaker
Um, given everything else we've said about being in goodness. So that's, that's the problem that, uh, we're trying to address here. Great. Um, yeah. So let's now, um,
00:07:00
Speaker
I just wanted to ask, you know, really quick, like current standing of privation theory and philosophy, would you say that it's widely adhered to? is Yeah, I mean, it isn't exactly a hot topic in philosophy. um um In fact, if you were to look at, I think it's the root the sort of one of the one of the main sources that I cite in that paper. I think it's the Rutledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil or something like that. Anyway, and that that was published in 2019.
00:07:28
Speaker
And that textbook or that book, that it's it's a collection of essays, really. And what it overwhelmingly focuses on is what we might call narrow evil. So there's like a narrow concept of evil and a broad concept of evil.
00:07:42
Speaker
So the broad concept of evil is just sort of badness, right? In the broadest possible sense. oh The narrow concept of evil refers to sort of things that I guess we more...
00:07:57
Speaker
in sort of everyday language, we're more likely to call it evil, like particularly heinous things. Um, that becomes a huge topic of discussion. and I guess the 20th century after sort of world war II and the Holocaust and so forth. And, um, you know, with people like Hannah Arendt and, um, and that seems to be where the focus is in terms of like the standing of probation theory. Um,
00:08:22
Speaker
I'd say it's probably safe to say that most philosophers, if they pay any attention to it at all, um Just think that it's a relic of classical theism. So the the general view, this kind of general kind of dismissive view seems to be that, well, privation theory is something that you kind of have to believe if if you believe in God.
00:08:47
Speaker
um But if you don't believe in God, then there's no good reason to to believe in privation theory. and plugv Plus, it has all sorts of issues, which we'll get into. so great So it doesn't have anywhere near the kind of predominance that it used to.
00:09:02
Speaker
right Good. So, I mean, maybe really quick, I was thinking just so people have a good handle on the privation theory, maybe we could give some examples of evils where it's like, oh, yeah, that intuitively is, you know, nicely explained ah by privation theory. You know, one yeah might be sickness, for example, that you bring up. But but yeah, do do you want to make any comments on that?
00:09:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the stock example tends to be blindness, right? Blindness is an evil. And arguably, I mean, it seems pretty obvious that what makes blindness evil is that it it involves a privation of sight. um um so So it works nicely for some of the some of the virtues and vices as well. sort of Cowardness seems like it's evil because it involves a lack of courage.
00:09:51
Speaker
Death seems like it's evil because it's it involves an absence of life or a privation of life. Those kinds of examples. All right. So now we have that on the table. Yeah.
Introduction to Corruption Theory
00:10:03
Speaker
Rough idea of the privation theory. Now, maybe let's get on the table your alternative, which, like I said, it's in many ways very close to privation theory. And it's also inspired by, in many ways, by the work of Augustine. So, yeah, can you kind of just put on the table the corruption theory?
00:10:20
Speaker
Sure. So, I mean, the way I define corruption theory in the paper just is to say that well evil rather than being an absence of good is a corruption of good. And what I mean by that is something is evil to the extent that it is destructive or damaging of the good.
00:10:36
Speaker
Right. So you're right that it's closely connected to privation theory, but, you know, absences and destruction are different things. Right. Um,
00:10:47
Speaker
Another difference, so other than just the difference between an absence and a destruction or damage, is that the priva the privation theory specifically um stipulates that something's evil um to the extent that it involves an absence, or that it is, yeah, involves, I think is better, an absence of a good that ought to be there.
00:11:10
Speaker
And so that's, That's pretty important to the theory because, you know, i mentioned the example of sort of blindness and sight, right? So blindness not only is the absence of a good, the good of sight, it's also the absence of a good that ought to be there. You you and I are human beings. We're meant to see. That's what, you know, properly functioning human beings do.
00:11:33
Speaker
um Whereas you and i presumably aren't able to fly and weren't able to echolocate like bats and so forth. And so, you know, those things are good, I guess you could argue. It's good to fly. It would be nice if we could echolocate.
00:11:45
Speaker
um But they're not evil. The absence of those things um isn't evil because those things, it's not the case that those things ought to be there. um So we don't, in lacking those things, we don't lack anything that we should have.
00:12:00
Speaker
That's really, so, you know, that's really important to privation theory. Whereas of corruption theory, ah there isn't that proviso, right? It's the corruption of any good, regardless of whether it's due in any sense, whether it ought to be there.
00:12:15
Speaker
there Those are the two main differences. For privation theory, it's not merely the absence of good, yeah which is evil. I suppose in the broad sense, right? Like, cause mentioned earlier, we maybe just highlight that as well. You know, there's the narrow sense of evil versus the broad sense.
00:12:33
Speaker
Um, you know, in the narrow sense of evil, right? Uh, someone, um, maliciously tacking, attacking someone, other yeah someone else, uh, let's say an innocent person, harming them, kicking them in the kneecap or something, you know, that's evil in the narrow sense. Yeah.
00:12:52
Speaker
But in the broad sense, um, you know, ah you know, a overcooked steak is bad or something. So that's sort of, it's evil in the broad sense. Exactly. So at any rate, so that's something to highlight, but, but at any rate, so a key idea with the privation theory is that it's not merely an absence of good that makes it evil because, you know, a rock, for example, can't see, but that's,
00:13:22
Speaker
it's not we don't want to necessarily say that's evil or bad because the nature of the rock is not to see whereas when i lack sight or when another human being lacks sight it's part of my nature it seems to see and so if i were to be deprived of sight if i were to lack sight it would seem to be it would seem to be evil in some sense um So yeah, can you kind of yeah speak to this key proviso, this key idea that like the good that is absent must be a do good?
Evaluating Deprivation and Evil
00:14:03
Speaker
Yeah, good. I mean, you you you basically explained it, right? And you you mentioned natures and that's going to be absolutely crucial. So the thing that's generally, according to sort of all the almost – think basically all the kind of the privation theory accounts that I've looked at.
00:14:18
Speaker
um What makes it the case that a good ought to be there um is some fact about a thing's nature, right? So um the reason it's bad for me, it would be bad for me to lack the good of sight is that my nature dictates that I ought to be able to see, right? So that's um the thought there is that, you know, um I have a nature in this case, ah human nature,
00:14:43
Speaker
And um the human my my human nature causes me to tend towards certain things or um to have certain potentials which I tend to fulfill.
00:14:56
Speaker
And I'm going to... some Evil is what happens when i'm I'm unable to fulfill those potentials fixed by my nature or which constitute my nature.
00:15:09
Speaker
So that's going to be really important to privation theory. There might be other ways to sort of make sense of, you know, or to, to, uh, to ground the claim that some good ought to be there or not.
00:15:22
Speaker
But generally that's the way people do it. It's the way Oederberg does it. David Oederberg, for instance, um, who might cite quite a bit in that paper. ah So I kind of had a thought on this that I'm curious what you, what you, what you would think. So and was thinking of this idea of, you know,
00:15:41
Speaker
it seems very plausible that anytime there's an absence of a good that is due to me in virtue of my nature, seems very plausible that in any case that of that, any case of an absence so that's due to me by nature, sure it's going to be somehow bad or evil.
00:15:56
Speaker
But then, you know, I was thinking, well, you know, um what about like, suppose someone is born blind yeah and this being born blind was something ordained by God in God's wisdom and providence.
00:16:18
Speaker
And we might think that, you know, on the face of it, to us who do not have all the effects of providence in view, who can't fathom what God has planned, it seems really bad. This person's blind, but maybe in fact, um,
00:16:38
Speaker
God deprived this person of sight because it would ultimately be for the good and somehow just what they need as a particular person to flourish or something.
00:16:52
Speaker
So I guess my thought there is that um that would seem to be a type of counterexample potentially because it's like, okay, here a person is being deprived of something.
00:17:04
Speaker
that is due to them by nature, but it's actually not bad. um At least all things considered bad, but maybe the privation theorists would want to say in so, you know, it's a bad making feature of it, but maybe all things to get considered it's ultimately for the good. At any rate, I'm just kind of curious what you think of those type of examples. Yeah, it's an interesting example. I'm not sure that it constitutes a counterexample to privation theory, unless I missed something.
00:17:35
Speaker
But it seems like rather what's going on here is we're providing an alternative theory about what grounds, um which goods ought to be there and which goods ought not to be there.
00:17:47
Speaker
Right. So, okay good you know, the standard view, as I said, is that's, you know, those facts, those kinds of facts are grounded by a thing's nature, my human nature, you know, a thing, a plant's plant nature and so forth. But you might think, no, it's not the natures, it's a divine volitions, divine commands, perhaps you'd have almost a kind of divine command theory of oughts of, you know, what goods ought to be there and so forth.
00:18:09
Speaker
I mean, Generally, people don't really want that um for, I think, understandable reasons. um People tend to, well, first of all, people who motivate privation theory tend to be often their Thomists. If not, they're at least sympathetic to some, ah well perhaps you know so some form of natural law theory.
00:18:30
Speaker
um
00:18:33
Speaker
And, you know, you don't want, I guess, you don't really want a theory that that makes it so that, you know,
00:18:42
Speaker
you know, if God sort of snaps and snaps his fingers, so to speak, and says, you know, my plan for you is is to suffer horribly ah throughout your life. um then um Then when you suffer horribly throughout your life, then then that's good. um or that um I suppose you could say it's going to bring about some good. Right. That that wouldn't make sense.
00:19:04
Speaker
But I think you still want to be able to say, well, the suffering itself is bad. even if God draws good out of the bad. um Right. And that's why I was thinking maybe, you know, the way to respond to that is by making a distinction between like all things considered bad versus bad, qua this feature. I'm sorry, that's not very clear, but hopefully, but but I appreciate the point that if that's an objection at all, it would really be more toward an objection of someone who wants to define the do good in terms of, um, a natural, uh, species or the, the natural form of the thing. yeah
00:19:50
Speaker
And so if you anchor the do good in a divine command or, you know, I don't know. Yeah. Something like that, then that wouldn't really, uh, that kind of objection wouldn't touch on that.
00:20:02
Speaker
Um, Great. So I think we have a a pretty decent appreciation for yeah some of the key details of the theory at this point.
Merits of Privation Theory
00:20:10
Speaker
um Maybe let's talk about the motivation for the theory. I mean, honestly, this is one of the most fascinating parts of your paper is going into why the theory is rationally appealing and why, indeed, you talk about you know it deserving the historical popularity that it has.
00:20:29
Speaker
um And normally, we already touched on this earlier, normally when you think about, okay, why is this theory appealing? um The main thing that you would think about is theodicy.
00:20:43
Speaker
But you bring up other considerations related to ontological parsimony, related to explanatory unification. And so, yeah, can can you can you touch on some of this? This is really interesting stuff about what motivates the pribation theory Sure. I mean, we've already touched on the theological stuff, so no need to go over that again. um it seems to me that the primary theological considerations aside, the primary ah benefits of privation theory have to do with theoretical considerations like simplicity, um unification, and so forth. So with regards to simplicity, um I guess...
00:21:25
Speaker
to see To see the appeal of privation theory, it's worth looking at the alternative, which I suppose would be to say, well, you have good on one hand and you have evil on the other, and they're ontologically on par, meaning that you can't define one in terms of the other.
00:21:38
Speaker
They're real and sort of and in the same sense, um and they're just kind of sitting there together at the same ontological level. So... I mean, if you have to have a view like that, well, I guess that's i guess that's fine.
00:21:51
Speaker
But it would be great if we could have a view where rather we were able to explain one of those things in terms of the other, right? um Because in that case, we would, you know, in general, when we when we sort of craft ah metaphysical theories, we want to maximize um explanatory power and minimize um sort of unexplained brute facts.
00:22:18
Speaker
want maximize simplicity, meaning ah postulating fewer kinds of entities. And so if you have something like privation theory, then um the good is what's fundamental and you you explain evil in terms of the good.
00:22:35
Speaker
which is simpler and more unifying than if you just have good and evil sitting side by side on the ontological on the same ontological level with neither explaining the other.
00:22:47
Speaker
So that's um that's one benefit. I guess several benefits kind of packaged into one. Then another benefit, which I think um doesn't really get mentioned very much in the relevant literature, has to do with the fact that good and evil are opposites or contraries. And this comes up a lot in sort of Aquinas' writings on evil.
00:23:10
Speaker
And I quote him several times, I think, in the paper. And so what you really don't want in your theory of evil is a theory that implies that um good and evil have nothing to do with each other.
00:23:25
Speaker
And so in other words, good and evil would be something like, you know, um color and weight, say. but They're just different kind just fundamentally different properties that don't really relate to each other in any meaningful way.
00:23:38
Speaker
Because um you know you know if you look at sort of color and weight, for instance, right um they're not opposites of each other in any sense. So you can have an object um that is colored, say it's red, and it can be very, very heavy. And there's no sort of there's no competition between those two those two those two properties um me try and think of another example. so you know, if you think of,
00:24:06
Speaker
say, say I aspire to be, you know, an accomplished an athlete and also a great musician, right? um Those things, practical reasons aside, yeah in principle, they're they don't they don't compete with each other. In principle, I could be an excellent athlete and an excellent musician, right?
00:24:25
Speaker
And I could just keep improving in those two domains without one kind of biting into the other, so to speak. Again, leaving practical considerations aside, like, you know, i need time to practice. um Let's imagine that I have unlimited time, right?
00:24:38
Speaker
um But good and evil aren't like that. So I can't both aspire, unless I just completely misunderstand the terms. I can't both aspire to be a morally perfect person, the best person in the world, say, or the best possible person, the best possible human person. I can't morally aspire to that and also aspire to be an evil genius. Those things are at odds with each other. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
00:25:06
Speaker
I was thinking, you know, it's it's kind of like if you're told that someone is a great musician, yeah you can't just go, oh, well, that immediately entails that he's terrible at sports. Precisely. Yeah, there's no, yeah, i could say that's good. Yeah.
00:25:22
Speaker
Yeah. Like you said, practically speaking, you might be probable that he's not great at sports given the constraints of, I don't know,
00:25:33
Speaker
of our nature or time and things like that. So it might be likely that, okay, if a guy is incredible at music, he's not going to be great at sports, but it definitely does not immediately entail it. Whereas if someone, if you're told someone is a great morally virtuous person, it's not like, Oh, I have a further question. Is he,
00:25:52
Speaker
is he a scoundrel? You know, it's like, well, no, that's immediately entailed that he's not a scoundrel because I just told you that he's a, so, so that shows, um, or that seems to suggest at least that, um, good and evil are opposites.
00:26:07
Speaker
And so the kind of point you're making is that when you define goodness, when you define evil, you want it to entail that they are opposed to each other, that they, um,
00:26:22
Speaker
maybe are destructive of each other or something like that. Yeah. So, yeah you know, you've put it very well and yeah, you want a theory that entails that. And, you know, equally importantly, you want a theory that explains that. Why is it right that, you know, you can't both be, as you say, a scoundrel and a perfectly virtuous person um or even just a good person.
00:26:44
Speaker
Whereas you can be, and you can in principle be an accomplished musician and a great athlete. So, so That's what you want. And to get that, you need to think a little bit about what it means for two things to be opposites of each other.
00:27:02
Speaker
So um one way for two things to be opposites of each other would be for one to be the absence of the other, right? What's the opposite of sight or blindness? Why? Because blindness is the opposite of sight. And that explains why you can't both be great at seeing and also blind.
00:27:21
Speaker
So that's one way. Um, there are other ways for two things to be the opposite of each other. For instance, um, black and white are opposites of each other, but it's not like white just as the absence of black or vice versa.
00:27:34
Speaker
Um, rather in this case, it's that white and black share, um, they share a genus, I suppose they share, it you know, they, they, they belong to the same category, but in a, but they're radically different to each other.
00:27:47
Speaker
So, um, Different ways for two, for X and Y to be opposites of each other or contraries of each other. Now, if evil just is an absence of good or a privation of good, then you have a nice nice straightforward explanation as to why they're opposites of each other and why you can't, you know, why they why they sort of bite into each other, as I was saying earlier.
00:28:14
Speaker
Whereas if you if you have two if if good and evil are sort of ontologically on par, then there's no reason in principle why you couldn't be perfectly good and perfectly bad or you know why why those two things are going to compete against each other, why you know becoming better well mean um will mean that you're less bad or less evil.
00:28:36
Speaker
Perfect. Yeah. So to reiterate, yeah this is one of the... great merits of the privation theory is that it is capable of explaining this really for important phenomenon is that good and evil are yeah not only opposites, but are opposites in a way that you described in terms of kind of being competitive and yeah destructive of each other in a way.
00:29:06
Speaker
Okay, great. So, excellent. So we kind of have a sense now of, you know, why the privation theory is
Challenges for Privation Theory
00:29:13
Speaker
appealing. is multiple reasons it's appealing, you know, theological in terms of theodicy, ontological simplicity, explaining why good and evil are opposites.
00:29:28
Speaker
But yeah, let's now turn to some difficulties because and so in terms of the first kind of difficulty, you know, we we touched on before, there are certain cases of evil where the privation theory just seems to be the natural explanation.
00:29:43
Speaker
But there are other instances of evil where the evil seems to have a sort of positive dimension. And the most famous example here is pain.
00:29:58
Speaker
So yeah, maybe let's just talk about that. Why is pain – I'm not trying to say it's like just straightaway a counterexample or just refuse the theory. but but why is it difficult for privation theory to handle?
00:30:10
Speaker
Why is pain difficult? Yeah, i mean the you know the most straightforward way of putting it just is to say that pain isn't an absence. Quite clearly you know when you're in pain, that's not – You know, that that is that is so that's something you experience. Anyone who's ever been in pain knows, which is to say everybody on earth.
00:30:29
Speaker
um Pain isn't itself an absence. Pain is a feeling. Feelings aren't absences. Pain is a sensation. Sensations aren't absences. um And it certainly isn't an absence of pleasure, right? You can, you know...
00:30:42
Speaker
um You can live and in principle, you could live a pleasureless life without ever experiencing any pain. So that's that's immediately going to be a problem. Now, it's not immediately a knockdown problem because privation theorists are going to say, well, yeah, sure.
00:30:59
Speaker
ah Pain isn't itself a privation, but what makes it evil is a privation. And likewise, you're going to do this with every every every evil that seems to resist a kind of simple, straightforward, privative analysis.
00:31:14
Speaker
They're going to say, yeah, yes, the thing itself um isn't just an absence, but what makes it bad is um is an absence that it involves.
00:31:25
Speaker
So with pain, people will say things like um pain involves a privation of or a lack of... um
00:31:35
Speaker
a lack of harmony, perhaps, a lack of mental sort of a mental equilibrium, maybe. Some people will say, well, actually, the the lesson here is that pain in and of itself isn't bad. um Pain is only bad when it malfunctions.
00:31:49
Speaker
So the purpose of pain is to kind of signal harm. And sometimes it does that. and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you feel pain for no good reason. um where you feel too much pain, you know proportional to the harm that's actually being that's actually there.
00:32:05
Speaker
And so evil arises when when when there's a mismatch in that sense. And maybe you can all analyze a mismatch in terms of an absence. Now, Yeah.
00:32:16
Speaker
Whether that works is subject to much debate. i don't really focus on paying myself in the debate right in the paper, but um it's certainly you talk about something that comes up again and again in the literature. Yeah.
00:32:28
Speaker
Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, you focus a little bit more on malevolence. So um basically this is supposed to be kind of another hard case yeah for privation theory. And so, yeah, maybe can you tell us you know, what is malevolence and then you know, maybe what privation theories tend to say about it and why you think it's still poses a sort of serious challenge.
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah, good. So malevolence just is to will evil on someone, to desire evil. Yeah. So there's there's different kinds of malevolent attitudes. you know Envy is one of them. And so far as you know when you're envious of someone, you want them to be worse off so that they're not better off than you.
00:33:10
Speaker
um Sort of sadism, um sadistic, cruelty, you know, um Attitudes that involve wanting somebody to suffer, you know, out of spite.
00:33:22
Speaker
um Murderous rage, right? Those would be, you know so any kind of, you know, wanting evil as such on someone. um wanting some Wanting someone's life to be worse than it otherwise would be.
00:33:35
Speaker
um So, yeah, that's malevolence. So there's malevolent attitudes and there's malevolent acts as well. So a murder would be a malevolent act in so far as if you're if you try to murder someone, if you intend to murder someone, you intend to harm them.
00:33:51
Speaker
um that's what you you know it's not It's something you intend to do. It's not a side effect of of what of your action or anything like that. So again, malevolence, whether it's a malevolent act or malevolent attitude, um those things aren't absences, right? They're attitudes, which aren't absences or acts, which yeah by definition aren't absences. But here again, the privation theorist is going to say, well, yeah, they're not absences, but what makes them bad, what makes them evil is an absence.
00:34:16
Speaker
So um the standard move to make here is going to be that malevolence is bad in so far as it involves um the failure to will another person's good, which is itself a good.
00:34:33
Speaker
ah Willing someone's good is good, right? Benevolence, right? So that's what makes it bad. Now, the reason I think that doesn't really work is because the implication of that is that malevolence is bad in the same way and to the same degree that moral indifference is bad.
00:34:52
Speaker
Right. So if I'm indifferent to um to your good, then I lack benevolence towards you. Right. I am not benevolent to you. um If I'm malevolent.
00:35:03
Speaker
that towards you, if I wish evil upon you, God forbid, then likewise, I lack ah benevolence towards you. In both cases, you lack benevolence, right? So they're evil for the same reason and to the same degree. And that's really important because you can't say that, you know, if I'm malevolent, um I want, um I desire your good even less than if I were just indifferent. Because in both cases, if we were to attach a numerical value to might to the to my desire for your good, it's zero, right?
00:35:33
Speaker
Right, it's zero. It's zero in both cases, so it's the same. so um But but intuitivelyly intuitively, that's not right. Intuitively, malevolence is is worse than indifference.
00:35:44
Speaker
It's much worse to be malicious and spiteful and so forth than to just not care. um And so that's a bit of a problem.
00:35:54
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, it it reminds me of, it's akin The issue here is ah is structurally akin to what's going on with pain because there's a sort of, it seems like the privation theorist has a problem explaining why pain is worse than just a pleasureless yeah life because in both cases, there's an absence of joy and pleasure or something like that.
00:36:25
Speaker
Similarly here, it looks like the prohibition theorist is going to have trouble explaining um
00:36:34
Speaker
why it is that malevolence is worse than just being indifferent to someone else. So awesome. um Let's maybe move on to the second problem. So but we I'll try to just,
00:36:47
Speaker
run through it to see if I kind of understand it. So the second problem that you bring up for privation theory, it has to do with unrequired goods. Okay. So privation theory, it's saying that evil is the absence of a good that ought to be there, that ought to exist.
00:37:04
Speaker
Not just any absence of a good, but an absence of a good that ought to exist. And And the thing here though, is that there are some goods like musical genius or maybe moral heroism where they don't really seem to be required by human nature, maybe especially musical genius. Musical genius is not required by human nature.
00:37:28
Speaker
But if Mozart were to lose this unrequired good, that law still feels like an evil. yeah Still seems to be evil. And so, yeah, why does this kind of case, i mean, it might be obvious, but yeah, just maybe spell out, why is this a challenge to the probation theory?
00:37:50
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, good. So as I was saying right at the start, you know, privation theory has two components, right? may one One being, you know, evil is a privation or involves a privation, and that's what makes it evil.
00:38:01
Speaker
And then the second component being, you know, it's a privation of a do good, a good that, ah or a required good, as you might put it, as you just did put it, right? A good that ought to be there. So overwhelmingly, critiques of privation theory will focus on the first component and say, well, no, there are evils that can't be understood in purely kind of privative terms.
00:38:20
Speaker
No, the second component almost never gets critiqued. And the reason it's still subject to critique, it's excuse me, I should say, the reason it's also ah vulnerable to a critique is for the reason you just said, which is that there are goods which um don't seem to be required or needed in any sort of any meaningful way. They're just kind of there. If, for instance, you you have sort of someone who's a musical genius like Mozart,
00:38:52
Speaker
Mozart is a human, just just like all of us. And there's nothing about human nature that requires us to be musical geniuses, such that if if you and I failed to be musical geniuses, um then that would make us bad human beings or that that would constitute evils.
00:39:10
Speaker
um And yet, intuitively, we think, well, if those if those goods disappear, right if those goods get taken away, then that would be an evil.
00:39:22
Speaker
right That would be bad. um If some supergatory good went away, got taken away, then that would be an evil. But it's not an evil that can that seems to be... The privations theory seems to be able to explain. Yeah, like for like for example, if you imagine, the let's suppose like of you Satan wanted to to harm Mozart.
00:39:47
Speaker
One way he could do it is by taking away his musical genius. And so... and So that suggests that you know taking away his musical genius, even though it's not something that is sort of required by his nature,
00:39:59
Speaker
is is an evil that Satan could visit upon ah Mozart. And anyway. Yeah, I mean, and correct. And similarly, i mean, it would be really odd if, say, if if say this happened to Mozart and he was very upset about it um yeah know and says, you know, that well that that was just really bad what happened to me. It would be really weird if our response to Mozart would be like, what are you complaining about, man? You know, this this wasn't required.
00:40:23
Speaker
um You know, you weren't meant to have this anyway. It was nice while you had it, but now that you don't, you've you've got no grounds to to complain. um And I also just real quick, I just wanted to really emphasize, I thought i thought this was another kind of feature of your paper that I really appreciated, which was that, yeah, there are two components to the privation theory that need to be kept in mind, you know, and so when it comes to defending it, both components need to be defended. On the one hand,
00:40:54
Speaker
the issue of evil being an absence of something good, but then also the idea that it's the absence of something good that ought to obtain potentially in virtue of of the nature. So yeah, I just really think that's that's really helpful to kind of distinguish those two components of the theory.
00:41:16
Speaker
um Great, so ah let's maybe now turn to your alternative, the corruption theory.
Corruption Theory & Augustine's Influence
00:41:23
Speaker
um So, I mean, I think maybe just to start off, just so people appreciate this dimension, you know, obviously the your the goal of your paper is not to do, you know, really deep exegesis of St. Augustine, but maybe it might be helpful for the listener to just to hear a little bit how plausibly the corruption theory you know not only harmonizes with St. Augusta, but maybe it's actually what he would have preferred if he were
00:41:59
Speaker
I don't know if that's the right way to put Anyway, I just, yeah, just, if you want to introduce a corruption theory again and and talk about its harmony with Augustine. Yeah. I guess what often happens with, know, thinkers like Augustine who've written a hell of a lot is that we sort of build theories and we'll take sort of bits and pieces of things that they've said, he said, and build a theory out of that. I think, I feel like the free will defense in the context of the, you know, the theodicies and so forth is a good example of that. Yeah.
00:42:27
Speaker
um often these these theories of, you know, these Augustinian theories are built out of like offhand commons, um sort of spread out throughout his writings. And I think this is this is another example of this.
00:42:38
Speaker
um So you're right. I'm not trying to do this. The paper, the the point of the paper wasn't to try and exegete Augustine. um the But I think it's worth...
00:42:52
Speaker
thought When researching for this paper, I sort of went to Augustine himself, right? Thinking, expecting to see privation theory, right? Trying looking for the kinds of arguments that he that he gave in favor of it. And I was surprised to see that the picture didn't seem entirely consistent.
00:43:09
Speaker
So there were some places where it looked like he was saying, yeah, evil is privation. Evil is the absence of good and so forth. um where Whereas there were other places where he used a different term, namely corruption. And if you look at the paper, there's a couple of passages that I cite from ah his writing against the Manichaeans in which he explicitly sort of endorses a definition of evil in terms of corruption, right? Corruption of good.
00:43:32
Speaker
We'll say things like, well, you know, evil is hurt and hurt is what takes away good. Her evil diminishes good. And that, it seemed to me, was quite different to just a mere absence or a mere privation. It's one thing for an evil to just, ah sorry, a good to not be there.
00:43:47
Speaker
It's another thing for it to be taken away. um In terms of what Augustine himself thought, I mean, Again, not trying to do exegesis here, but it could be that he was just inconsistent. He had different sort of um competing views of evil that um that he sort of played around with throughout his life. They're quite closely related to each other anyway.
00:44:10
Speaker
um Or it could be that really what he was meant to, what he was trying to do all along is to advance a corruption theory. um I leave that question to sort of Augustine scholars and historians of philosophy.
00:44:29
Speaker
Yeah, and I just maybe real quick, I just wanted to mention one point that you make. You bring up something Philip Carey notes, which is that um while, you know, Bravatioboni,
00:44:41
Speaker
privation of the good is and is indeed one of the ways in which Augustine speaks of evil. So I'm quoting you here. yeah But interestingly, Carey goes on to say that he much more often used the other term of corruptio in its cognates. So that's just something yeah to think about in terms of this exegetical issue. But yeah, let's let's just talk a little bit more about the corruption theory. So um
00:45:05
Speaker
So just to be clear, you know, corruption theory, it's not necessarily saying that every instance of corruption is evil because um there are cases where it is good for something to be corrupted or destroyed, such as a tumor, yeah right?
00:45:21
Speaker
Okay. um So for the corruption to be evil,
00:45:29
Speaker
what needs to be added there? It needs to be... I guess you don't have the nature requirement. You don't say that the good has to be required by something's nature, right?
00:45:42
Speaker
No, I mean, you're right. you know i mean, corruption here means to sort of destroy or diminish or damage, right? right um You know, some things should be destroyed, right? You know corrupt, maybe, you know, corrupt evil regimes need to be destroyed. Tumors need to be destroyed, perhaps, and so forth.
00:45:57
Speaker
Or at least it's good, in some cases, it's good to destroy those things um and not evil. um But the requirement is pretty simple, right? The thing for it for it for for evil to be there to obtain, it has to be that what's being corrupted is a good thing, by which I mean an intrinsically good thing.
00:46:18
Speaker
Um, something, yeah, something that's good. Something that's absolutely good. Right. So tumor is not good. So the tumor can corruption of a tumor is, yeah. So go ahead and destroy tumors. Uh, you're doing nothing wrong.
00:46:33
Speaker
Um, but when you destroy good evil, when you destroy good things, then, um, then that's, that's when you're doing something evil. Good. So I guess, if we, I'm just thinking, okay, if we drop the nature requirement and we just make it a good, I guess then the is are a bunch more things going to be
Corruption Theory Explained with Examples
00:46:55
Speaker
evil than we wanted? Because sure we talked about earlier, we don't want the rock to be evil in virtue of it not being able to think, or maybe the rock nature to be evil in virtue not being able to think.
00:47:09
Speaker
But you might think, oh, you know, in some sense, ah the rock nature is
00:47:16
Speaker
is destructive or it takes away, it deprives the rock of the being able to think. So is, you know, some might wonder, is that a type of corruption of a good, just the the mere rock nature? So yeah, I'm just curious what you think about that.
00:47:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's certainly interesting. I haven't really thought about that kind of counter example. appreciate the worry about sort of over generating evils. um In terms of the rock, um I mean,
00:47:47
Speaker
I suppose the rock the rock's nature,
00:47:54
Speaker
I suppose the rock's of nature, it's not in the rock's nature to see, I guess, right? um Does that mean that the rock's nature is sort of destroying or diminishing um the good of sight?
00:48:07
Speaker
not sure. That doesn't seem right to me. it It doesn't seem to me that there's, you know, ah for that to be the case, so it's for for that really, to make sense. It would have to be the sort of the rock, I don't know, somehow the rock would see.
00:48:22
Speaker
And then it got given this, this, this sort of nasty rock nature, which stops it from seeing. So something interfered with a process that would bring about, um, the rock, the rock's capacity to see or visual experiences in the rock.
00:48:35
Speaker
Um, good. So, so, so it's not as though the rock
00:48:46
Speaker
It's tricky. It's not as though the rock would have seen if it wasn't for the rock nature. It's tricky because it's like, well, there would have wouldn't have been a rock if it wasn't for rock nature. Anyway, so it's a little bit of a funny thing to to try to articulate.
00:49:05
Speaker
I guess one thing you... you Correct me if I'm wrong, but like you probably wouldn't want to say it must be the case that historically the thing previously had the good.
00:49:17
Speaker
No, no. because i mean you can So you can preemptively, I suppose, destroy a good. You can preempt the existence of a good. right It seems to me that you know if you have some kind of genetic – think I talk about this in the paper.
00:49:28
Speaker
you have some kind of genetic defect that means that you're going to be blind, and so you're born blind as a result. um That seems to be much more straightforwardly to be a case of a corruption of good because you have something that interferes with the process that's going to bring about your capacity to see, that's going to enable you to have all these wonderful visual experiences.
00:49:48
Speaker
I think that's quite different to the rock case, it would seem to me. Right. Yeah. Great. um I was kind of had some thoughts about, you know, it's interesting to think like, is corruption a species of privation? Is privation a species of corruption? that That was kind of logical things, but we could maybe skip those, but it's just, i don't know, something interesting to think about, but um maybe um we can talk about, okay, so there are certain examples or cases where,
00:50:23
Speaker
the evil seems to be best explained in terms of privation. So in other words, there are certain cases where it seems like the privation theory does really well, maybe like paralysis. yeah um And so one might wonder, oh, you know, is the corruption account, is it going to do just as well in those cases? So do you want to maybe touch on that a little? bit Sure. Yeah. I mean, um the thing that got me thinking about corruption theory that gave me the idea of corruption theory in the first place um was ah something I read in Robert Adams' book, Finite and Infinite Goods, which is of my favorite books and one of the books that
00:50:58
Speaker
Can't think of a book that it's that's influenced my thinking more than that one. There might there are other books that influence me just as much, um but it's right up there. And so he talks about evil at that point, at so at a point at at a certain point in ah in the book.
00:51:13
Speaker
And what he does is he says, well, there are certain evils that are privative and there are other evils that involve an opposition to good, right? Which is much closer to what I'm getting at, except that with with Robert Adams, he's he isn't saying all evils are involve opposition to good or destruction of the good or anything like that.
00:51:31
Speaker
um Rather, there's there's these separate categories. right And so then the question is, well, do we just leave things at that right and say, well, evil comes in these two varieties?
00:51:42
Speaker
Or do we try and explain one in terms of the other? Now, I think, and I argue in the paper, that you can explain all the cases that privation theory explains nicely. You can also explain in terms of corruption theory.
00:51:54
Speaker
Because, um again, privation theory says, well, you know, you have an evil when there's a good that ought to be there. And again, according to most standard versions of the theory, the the thought is, well, the goods that ought to be there are the ones that are there ah because of the because of the things nature.
00:52:13
Speaker
Right. um the that the and And that's that that itself is understood to mean that, you know, there are certain goods which you have a you are disposed to have given the nature that you have. You have tendency to acquire this good, be it the good of rationality, and the good of sight and so forth.
00:52:30
Speaker
Now, you mentioned paralysis. So suppose, you know, paralysis seems like a case that's kind of, you know, ah nice and easy for privation theory to make sense of.
00:52:42
Speaker
um And it is. But can you also make sense of it through corruption theory? Well,
00:52:52
Speaker
Paralysis, what's paralysis paralysis? Paralysis means I'm deprived of the good of motility. I can't move around. Okay. um Why is it that I can't move around? Well, it's in my nature to tend to acquire the good of motility, right? That's because because I'm human and human beings naturally tend towards ah the acquisition of of the good of motility.
00:53:16
Speaker
And so if I don't acquire it, if I don't acquire that good, then presumably that's because something interfered with that tendency. So I was moving, I was sort of naturally moving towards that good, and then something stopped me from getting there. Something interfered, whether it's like a damage to to to the spinal cord or whatever, so again, a genetic mutation, perhaps, right?
00:53:38
Speaker
Something happened. um
00:53:43
Speaker
And once you see it that way, you can see how corruption theory makes sense of the case, right? And so the evil of paralysis is going to be explained by um something which interfered or blocked my actualization of my potential to be able to move.
00:54:08
Speaker
And that seems to be a pretty straightforward case of a corruption of good or a destruction of good, even if it's just a purely kind of preemptive destruction And I think you can do that with every every case of every privative evil.
00:54:26
Speaker
Yeah, it was the one I was just popping in my head was like promise-keeping or, you know, um or maybe not promise-keeping, but truth-telling. I was thinking, you know, when you lie, it's the absence of telling the truth. But...
00:54:42
Speaker
When you lie, it's also corruptive of, let's say, friendship. Yeah, or the virtue of honesty, perhaps. Yeah. Integrity, maybe. so Because, I mean, yeah, lies are actually quite hard for privation theory because they they seem to me to involve much more than just you know an absence of truth or a you know ah failure to tell the truth. you're you know You're actively saying something which you know to be false.
00:55:06
Speaker
Right. um You can see how that would be closed. Because yeah if you could be silent. yeah Sorry. No, please, go ahead. I was just going because you you could be silent and then you're not maybe actively telling the truth, but that's ah clearly different than.
00:55:20
Speaker
And it's not necessarily evil. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Good. um Perfect. I mean, why not, you know, let's let's also talk about then, and um I want to be sensitive with the time here, but.
00:55:34
Speaker
um You know, you mentioned there's a lot of merits to the privation theory. You mentioned how it, you know, is historically deserving of its, it's it's deserving of its historical importance.
00:55:46
Speaker
And we talked about it offering parsimonious unifying account of evil, evil, which is able to account for the fact that good and
Concerns & Limitations of Corruption Theory
00:55:55
Speaker
evil are opposites. And it seems like that's going to also apply to the corruption theory. It's going to have those same merits. Sure. So, um yeah. Yeah.
00:56:04
Speaker
that that That is indeed what I argue in the paper. You know, I've raised some problems i raised some problems for privation theory, and I argue that ah corruption theory can overcome those. and um And I say that the benefits, and and it can do so while retaining the benefits of privation theory.
00:56:21
Speaker
So remember, one of the key benefits of privation theory was that, you know, you're explaining ah evil in terms of good, which means you you sort of gain in simplicity and explanatory unification as compared to a theory that sort of postulates so good and evil as being on the same ontological level, right?
00:56:42
Speaker
With neither being explained in terms of the other. Now, corruption theory also explains evil in terms of good, just not in the same way, right? So that benefit is kept Now, regarding contraries or opposites. So I mentioned that one way for X and Y to be opposites of each other is for, say, X to be the absence of Y. Another way, it turns out, for ah for for two things to be contraries is for one to be destructive of the other. So if you take the goods of the good of life, take life and death, right? Death, you might think, is just the absence of life, but it isn't.
00:57:17
Speaker
It turns out because otherwise we'd say that rocks are dead. with We don't really say that. and When when do we do, we mean it sort of figuratively. You might talk about dead matter or something, but we don't we don't normally think of rocks as being dead.
00:57:32
Speaker
So um death life and death are contraries in the sense that death sort of interrupts or destroys life, it seems to me.
00:57:43
Speaker
By the way, I just, I feel like that really reminds me of some of the discussion of life and death and and in the Fado by Plato. The argument from opposites. Yeah.
00:57:54
Speaker
Yeah. and The other thing too, I'm thinking about like in the Republic, Plato talking about, you know, injustice causing factions, causing hatred, causing conflict.
00:58:06
Speaker
And so there, you know, this evil and injustice, it has this corruptive of the good type effect, corruptive of...
00:58:18
Speaker
like-mindedness and friendship. Anyway, just a lack of justice that opposes the good friendship and justice and so forth. It's corrosive in those ways. And so, right. So yeah, good.
00:58:29
Speaker
um Two things can be contraries if one opposes the other. um damages the other, destroys the other, corrupts the other. And so if we say that evil is, um if we if we understand, if we explain evil in terms of corruption of the good, then we retain um we retain that, we do justice to the the fact that good and evil are contraries.
00:58:54
Speaker
So the benefits are still there. But in addition to that, you don't have the problems that I think are pretty intractable. And again, kind of want to be sensitive to time, but it seems like we should maybe touch on this objection, that an objection you bring up in your paper, which is going to be, I think it's an objection that would really be one that...
00:59:20
Speaker
you would only direct toward the corruption theory rather than yeah the privation theory. and And basically it's this, it's that um the critic, and you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but the critic might be like, oh, you know, it looks like corruption theory is making all evils instrumental, because it seems like corruption involves causing harm, which is an effect.
00:59:43
Speaker
And um And so, yeah, someone might worry that there aren't going to be any intrinsic evils. They're always going to be instrumental. And so, yeah, but you how do you, is that correct? Did I capture that objection correctly? And then how how do you respond to the, yeah, you've explained that very well. So the thought is that, well, you know, the theory says something's evil to the extent that it's destructive of good or corruptive of good.
01:00:09
Speaker
Right. So, and someone might think, well, you know, doesn't that mean that, all evils are only evil in terms of the the consequences that they have or the effects that they have.
01:00:22
Speaker
In which case, perhaps there are no intrinsic evil there are evils. there are There are only... There's nothing that's evil in and of itself. The only thing that makes something evil is the effects that it has.
01:00:35
Speaker
right And you might think that's just mistaken. Surely some things are evil in and of themselves. right Not evil just purely because of ah what they bring about in the world. So... think it's a fair objection. You're right. i don't think it's I don't think it affects privation theory. I think um i think it's think there is um i think i think I have a good response though.
01:00:55
Speaker
So in a sense, the objection is correct to say that something on my theory, something's evil you know only insofar as it negatively affects some good. So that's true.
01:01:13
Speaker
But I don't think it follows from that that there are no intrinsic evils. Because it seems to me that there are some things which are which which are destructive of goods but purely contingently.
01:01:25
Speaker
um you know some Something might cause some good to be damaged or diminished, but it might not have. right it might be you know it might have It might have failed to damage that good.
01:01:39
Speaker
Whereas there are other cases where it seems that the thing is evil, not just contingently, but necessarily or essentially. It seems to me there are some evils which, you know, in every possible world in which they exist, they damage some good. So if you take you know something that's pretty plausibly evil,
01:02:00
Speaker
intrinsically evil, a good, you know, malevolence seems pretty, you know, any, any kind of malevolent attitude, be it spite or envy or murderous rage or sadism and so forth. It seems to me that in every world in which those things exist, you are going to have some good that's going to be damaged, even if it's just kind of preemptively destroyed or something like that. So, um,
01:02:20
Speaker
um You know, every world in which there's malevolence is going to be a world in which um there's less, perhaps less friendship that there're ah than than there than there there otherwise would be.
01:02:31
Speaker
um Less benevolence or less um fewer meaningful relationships. um Yeah, go ahead. Could I just ask, I mean, so would you want to say in terms of...
01:02:44
Speaker
um
01:02:47
Speaker
Well, so yeah, just to, just to reiterate what you just said, you know, it's like, it's like, okay, some things can contingently damage a good and and that would be sort of instrumentally evil. yeah Whereas it seems some things are essentially or necessarily destructive of a good.
01:03:03
Speaker
And then that would be intrinsically evil. So for example, you know, maybe you might think hatred, intrinsically evil, why necessarily destructive of friendship? And I wonder, would you, would you,
01:03:17
Speaker
when we when we try to analyze or explain what we mean by necessarily destructive of a good, would you allow that it's like necessarily has the tendency? Because I was just thinking of something like, okay, here's an example of a contingent, you know, instrumentally evil act.
01:03:34
Speaker
Let's suppose, um i don't know if this is a good example, but I was thinking, suppose someone has a really bad peanut allergy and I put peanuts in the food, you know, there, it sort of seems putting peanuts in the food is sort of instrumentally evil, i suppose, because it happens to be the case that it damages someone.
01:03:57
Speaker
Whereas with poison, it seems like maybe that's more necessarily destructive, but I guess you could think, oh, well, what if someone happens to be,
01:04:09
Speaker
you know, the, what's that movie? can't remember the Prince's bride where the person has been taking, poison a little bit their whole life so they they happen to be inoculated against the poisonous effect and so they're anyway i guess my thought is well you could still say that's like necessarily destructive of the good because putting poison in someone's food maybe is tens necessarily toward you're talking about the action of putting poison in it yeah
01:04:40
Speaker
um Yeah, so I think i think that's right. and i think I think you're right that i need to I need to say something about tendencies here. I need to say it might not have the desired effect, um but it tends towards it's aimed at it in a way. um Yeah, because i mean maybe maybe another kind of example would be like you could imagine a person commits murder and in intent. fails right But maybe right but yeah maybe God miraculously preserves the victim's life.
01:05:10
Speaker
at the instant of, you know, the, the weapon striking. So there he's like, Oh, no life is lost. No injury occurs. No good is ultimately destroyed because of this miraculous intervention by God. But still it's like, you want to say still evil, something about still evil. And then and maybe you could say necessarily intention of murder is tens toward.
01:05:35
Speaker
Yeah. Sort of by its very nature, it's sort of oriented towards the destruction of a good. Right. And I think you're right that I, that I should, I should be clear about that. Although I suppose with murder, I mean, even even if you fail to to murder someone because God rescued the person at the last minute, wouldn't you have like damaged yourself like spiritually, morally?
01:06:00
Speaker
See, it seems as though murder can attempt to murder someone is going to be, is going to be self damaging in terms of virtue in every possible world. right um yeah Yeah, I think that's that's ah that's right. I think there's a way of probably finding.
01:06:18
Speaker
but i mean But if not, if I can't do that with every evil, i can just I can just resort to tendencies, it seems to me. I think I left that kind of ambiguous at the end of the paper, and you're right to point it out.
01:06:32
Speaker
Great. Well... This has been awesome. So, I mean, thanks so much for for joining me,
Guest's Current Work & Future Projects
01:06:38
Speaker
Chris. I really enjoyed the conversation and maybe just reiterate that the article's name is Corruptio Boney, an alternative to the privation theory of evil. Recommend everyone to check it out. It's a really a fascinating paper.
01:06:52
Speaker
And I'm just kind of curious, you know, do you want to tell us a little bit about what you're working on now? Sure. I mean, various things. um So
01:07:02
Speaker
one thing that Yeah. various Various things that I'm working on, um, various kind of projects that are kind of interrelated and sort of all within the theme of kind of Platonism and the good.
01:07:18
Speaker
Um, one paper that's under review right now is a defense of a version of the guise of the good theory. Uh, meaning, which is that the, the, which theory of, um, uh,
01:07:32
Speaker
a theory of desire, about the nature of desire. So the thought there is that, you know, um desires are essentially such as to present their objects as good.
01:07:42
Speaker
So one way to think about it is, yeah, so whenever you want something, whenever you desire an object, um that desire involves that object seeming good to you. And so I'm defending, i want to defend a version of that.
01:07:58
Speaker
And it's in a way, it's a pretty controversial version of that, because the version I'm defending is the version that you find, I think, in Aristotle and probably Plato as well, um such that the good in question is what's good for you.
01:08:15
Speaker
Um, so you want, whenever you want something, it's because that's, that thing seems to be good for you in a way you can see why that would be controversial. Um, but I think it has more to it than meets the eye.
01:08:26
Speaker
that's one thing, one project. Another project is just, I guess, something that I've been moving towards for the last three or four years, more than that, perhaps, um, which is a kind of defense of the convertibility of being in goodness.
01:08:41
Speaker
Um, You can see how that's related to privation theory. You know, people often connect those two things together. So the convertibility thesis, least the version that I'm defending, says that, you know, for something to for something to be, in other in other words, to exist, just is for that thing to be good to some degree.
01:08:59
Speaker
So I'm working on that now. And I'm i'm all excited about it because um I have this hunch that um that that particular thesis is...
01:09:12
Speaker
i don't know, maybe a kind of master principle, something from which you can derive all sorts of interesting things. Maybe it's, I'm even inclined to think, although I can't demonstrate this rigorously, but I'm inclined to think that it's, I suppose, the the ultimate principle, the ultimate philosophical principle of the classical Christoplatonic tradition.
01:09:35
Speaker
And so that's where I want to go.
01:09:39
Speaker
Awesome. Sounds fascinating. Well, we we really look forward to reading those when they come out. and And yeah, thanks again so much, Christopher. Thank you so much for having me.