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Evil as Privation: A Conversation with Pierce Alexander Marks
36 Plays27 days ago
What kind of thing is evil?
If all being is good, where does disorder come from?
Can evil have reality without being a substance?
In this episode, we talk with philosopher Pierce Marks about his paper “Evil as Privation: Its True Meaning and Import.” We discuss the Platonic roots of the view that evil is a lack of the good, the distinction between “mere” and “depraved” privations, and whether natural evils like death or predation are genuine evils or part of the world’s perfection.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the Dionysus Circle podcast. In this episode, I'm speaking with philosopher Pierce Alexander Marx about the nature of evil, looking at his article, evil as privation, its true meaning and import.
00:00:14
Speaker
Um, I also recommend his recent book, a new way of seeing meaning in life and the Christian vision of nature. Uh, hope you enjoy the episode. Maybe we could just start with it a little introduction.
00:00:26
Speaker
Maybe like where did you grow up? How did you get into into philosophy? That sort of thing.
Philosophical Journey of Pierce Alexander Marx
00:00:31
Speaker
Yeah, I grew up in Southern California. um I got into philosophy due to my religious background. um I was raised Catholic and then in the middle of like the Catholic sex scandal of the nineties and early two thousands, my family became like fundamentalist evangelicals and tore me away from the Catholic church at about 10. that like caused a lot of like, I look back now like psychological tensions and, uh, it really was unhappy, um in these,
00:01:06
Speaker
evangelical spaces and it kind of made me into an agnostic. But then also as a kid, my health wasn't very good and I always had like death and suffering on my mind on a personal level.
00:01:18
Speaker
And so like from a pretty young age, um I also had OCD really bad. And yeah, And yeah, just from a young age, I was like really heavily invested in asking philosophical questions, but had no idea what philosophy was and had no real...
00:01:40
Speaker
had no real understanding that there's like a thing called philosophy that you'd go study in college or anything. um And so, you know, from like 11 so, i was really thinking about a lot of these different questions kind of on my own and reading like pop level BS online and like the early days of social media. and Then when I became a teenager, I ah learned a little bit more about um theology and philosophy because I went to a private school and they had you know like some crappy but better than nothing classes in theology and like biblical studies. and um
00:02:24
Speaker
yeah i got really interested as a teenager in philosophy and just started devouring whatever I could. had no idea even when I entered college that it was something that I could actually devote myself to maybe work but you know, actually go to college for.
00:02:43
Speaker
So I went to college as like a British literature major because I love poetry as well. And um my professor was like, why are you in this department?
00:02:54
Speaker
You should be in a philosophy department. was you can do that? And he's like, yeah, what? You didn't think you could do that? like, well, I don't know. No one ever told me I could. I'm just figuring things out.
00:03:05
Speaker
So, you know, when I got into college, I decided to devote my entire life to philosophy, um even though at that time everybody was basically like, yeah, but you'll never have a good job.
00:03:19
Speaker
um So do it as like a passion. And so I did. And, yeah, I've been – worried at having existential crises ever since, you know?
Influences of Personal Experience on Philosophy
00:03:32
Speaker
So philosophy for me is like ah very personal, um, spiritual and religious pursuit that kind of like is at the core of who I am.
00:03:44
Speaker
um Am I right that like you feel like your interest in philosophical questions partly sparked by sort of contingencies of your life circumstance, partly like, you know, you were dissatisfied with the the change in church, that sort of thing. And like, so partly there were like these dissatisfying experiences that prompted you into philosophy potentially like,
00:04:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So even before I knew what philosophy was, like just different kinds of suffering and psychological tension, cognitive dissonance, produced these like sorts of questions like about the existence of God, you know the reality of Jesus, um you know purpose in life, those sorts of things. I was asking those because...
00:04:33
Speaker
You know, I really, yeah, in these churches, I really didn't fit in. and they were feeding like a steady stream of like their way of seeing these things. So that kind of brings up the questions.
00:04:45
Speaker
But yeah, I don't know why exactly. um but my whole ah life as a child, I basically felt like the the answers that like fundamental ah Protestantism, fundamentalist Protestantism was giving,
00:05:00
Speaker
wasn't really like what I wanted or felt was beautiful or good. I could not articulate it like that, obviously, as a, as like a tween and teenager, but you know, it really got me um when you pair that with like a kind of neurotic personality, like I have, it really got me like wondering about these things incessantly. And it, you know, it became my whole life um from the age of like, 15, 16, like, fifteen sixteen like It is just everything to me, you know, my existence staked on it.
Marx's Book and Historical Christianity
00:05:31
Speaker
You know, I kind wanted to ask, you know, a little bit about like, what's, what's the topic of, of the book you have a new way of seeing. um But I'm curious, is, is that book dealing at all with your questioning of fundamentalist Protestant evangelicalism? Like, was that, is that related? Are those two things related or is this kind of separate thing?
00:05:53
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. So the book is basically, it's a, um it's a short introduction to like genuinely historical and well-informed Christianity, which um basically, i.e. Neoplatonic Christianity, because that's like, there is no non-Neoplatonic Christianity in history until very recently.
00:06:16
Speaker
um It's a short introduction to that. and particularly how you, the basic teachings of like, you know, God is the being of beings is interpenetrating all being um what omnipresence really means that, you know, what it means to have God within you and within all things, um you know, basics of logos theology.
00:06:42
Speaker
And that comes out of, you know, for me as a child, I had, you know, as a young child, I grew up, um in kind of in the suburbs in Southern California, but in an area that was like still encroaching upon nature,
00:06:58
Speaker
that's gone now, but like we still had woods and streams and old mines from the California gold rush that you could go fall into and die, um cattle ranches. And then I grew up right next to a Catholic monastery, um, like literally a minute from my house.
00:07:14
Speaker
And so I had like a really good intuitive sense of God's presence in creation as a child. And was just filled with wonder. i would spend all my time as much time as I could like birdwatching as a child. Um, and then even as a teenager, like,
00:07:37
Speaker
my place was always like Silverado Canyon in Southern California, which is just like this beautiful last vestige of nature and the endless sprawl of Los Angeles. Um, and Orange County. kid beers Yeah, I cool kid. Um, think I was a cool kid. Um, I think I was a cool kid and then I became really lame because it was beat out of me And i kind of i kind of lost that way of seeing the world, like through the eyes of wonder and love.
00:08:05
Speaker
and felt completely disconnected from God. And then it wasn't until I was older, like really, i was, I was trying to claw that back in a way, um through my studies.
00:08:18
Speaker
And then i realized that everything I believed as a child was better articulated in like this sort of traditional Neoplatonic Christianity and Neoplatonism in general. Um, and,
00:08:31
Speaker
I realized like, oh, okay, now that I kind of have the intellectual framework and and foundations, like I can go back to that, to being like a child. And now I want to give other people that, um, I want to be, I want to give like the common Christian, regardless of their denomination, ah the ability to like see the world in that way. And that's basically what that book is about. Yeah.
00:08:59
Speaker
Beautiful.
Classical and Contemporary Views on Evil
00:09:01
Speaker
Awesome. now turning to your to your article, like I said, it's called Evil as Privation. It's true meaning and import.
00:09:10
Speaker
Maybe to get started, we could just ask kind of a basic question of, you know, what is the classical Christian view of evil? How would you describe it? Well, if you read contemporary literature, it's like this incoherent mess of that, like evil's not real. It doesn't exist. It has no positive reality. Right.
00:09:30
Speaker
And um that's just like the point my papers that that's not correct. Like that's actually really embarrassing that anybody says that at any point. um Classically, the like Christian and Neoplatonic, like non-Christian consensus, you'll find this in like Plotinus too.
00:09:46
Speaker
And I think you can kind of read it into Aristotle's very easily um and plato um is basically that evil has no substantial being evil's not a force in this world evil's not a substance or a kind of substance evil's not a person it has reality only insofar as like um the hole in a donut has reality right it's a privation or a deprivation of something else it's it's
00:10:19
Speaker
you know it really doesn't have an essence or a nature other than as like a concept, a way of thinking about how we failed or about how the world isn't working right. um You know, that would be, ah i think, ah a more robust way of putting the classical view, but to sum up the classical view, you could just say evil is a privation or evil doesn't really exist, right?
00:10:45
Speaker
And, um, that has to contemporary ears, even to Christian ears become absurd because because we've kind of bastardized it, you know? Good. So it's like on the one hand, the view, this kind of deprivation view, uh, or privation view, sorry, is that on the one hand it's like, yeah, evil is real.
00:11:07
Speaker
Um, in some sense, but it's not an entity would be one way of putting it. Maybe it's not, it doesn't exist substantially. um and so maybe connected to that, like you said, is like an idea where, you know, no entity, no thing, no being is going to end up being inherently evil, intrinsically, uh, evil.
00:11:35
Speaker
Um, and so, I guess, why do you think so many figures in the history of Christian philosophy, why were they attracted to this doctrine of evil as a kind of privation? What's kind of the rationale, do you think, like, at the end of the day?
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, so there are theoretical motivations for it to make like different theories um of God and like our belief. And I i don't say theory in a negative way, by the way. um When I say theory, I just mean any sort of reasoning and speculation. So that's not like apparent to the senses, right?
00:12:12
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, our Christian theology kind of demands of us that we make sense of evil and how a God that's absolutely perfect and exists everywhere and can do anything he wants, um, why he would create a world with evil in it, which is, you know, the, the classical problem of evil,
00:12:31
Speaker
um Saying in some sense, and we can unpack this more in a bit, but that evil doesn't really exist. It's not something that God creates as a positive reality kind of gets you one step closer to solving the problem of evil because you're, you know, if God is perfect, if God is perfectly loving, all knowing can do everything, anything logically possible at the very least, um,
00:13:02
Speaker
you By saying evil doesn't have a substantial existence, it's not a being, then you just bypass the need to explain why God creates evil.
00:13:14
Speaker
It becomes simply a question of why would God allow for evil to arise? Why would God allow evil? dysfunctional, as we'll talk about things happening, but it completely um bypasses the problem that other kinds of ancient and medieval non-Neoplatonic philosophy has.
00:13:36
Speaker
Because you know we we don't think of this as a live option today, but many different schools of ancient philosophy, Greek philosophy, ah evil was a specific kind of thing.
00:13:50
Speaker
a kind of substance, you know whether you want to cash that out as a kind of matter where there's different kinds of particles or or matter out there and you're identifying those as evil or a certain kind of force um in the world.
00:14:07
Speaker
and They actually believe that and yet also believed in some sort of divine rational perfection in the universe, even if they wouldn't cash it out in the same way like a theist would. um And so there they're faced with a problem that the Christian tradition actually has to overcome because, you know, their framework their cultural framework.
00:14:31
Speaker
and context, those are live options. you know Those are ways of construing divinity and the foundations of reality that we don't take seriously. But you know i mean, technically even today are actually live theoretical options. They're just not appreciated.
00:14:50
Speaker
So it get it kind of clears the playing field a little bit and makes it easier to come to a conclusion about the problem of evil um on a theoretical level.
00:15:01
Speaker
But there's also, i want to emphasize that like the more important part of it is that when you see with the eyes of Christ, when you are converted to a love of good and beauty and you work to purge yourself of, you know,
00:15:26
Speaker
anthropocentric bigotry and bias um towards the world, you will genuinely have moments where you you begin to see the world system as incredibly beautiful and wonderful, even in it um even if its painful or maybe distasteful parts.
00:15:50
Speaker
And Christ's teachings and the teachings of the scriptures and the apostles, both Old and New Testament, um you know, hint at these things and at times explicitly say this, that this is the goal we should be working for of love, not just of God, but of neighbor and of all things.
00:16:11
Speaker
Um, And you can either, you know, take that from the scriptures or you can, you know I as a child, like I was saying, had a sense of this in my heart. And I think many of the saints did too.
00:16:24
Speaker
And many people who kind of aren't encumbered by a sort of selfish, narrow sighted vision. right you end up seeing that like you really meditate on it for more than a few minutes. and You're like, wow, everything is really amazing.
00:16:38
Speaker
You know, from the trees in a landscape to every leaf on the tree, to every cell in the tree, to an ant, to a a blade of grass, to now with modern science, we know how like, you know, we supposedly know how fundamental particles work or, or, you know, lower levels of atoms. Like it's, it's just, if you weren't looking at that with,
00:16:59
Speaker
dogmatic eyes of self-centeredness, you would just be enthralled by how amazing the world is and how good and beautiful it is. um And so the evil privation doctrine isn't purely theoretical. It's also, um it's a way of codifying and making sense of what I think is like a deep longing in the human heart to believe it, to feel that way.
00:17:25
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I have the thought of like this theory can kind of almost provide a type of philosophical um defense, as it were, or philosophical defense.
00:17:42
Speaker
lead up to a to something that you might associate with mysticism in the sense of like, yeah, this this state of appreciating the totality of creation, appreciating, finding value even in something really minute,
Ancient and Modern Perspectives on Evil
00:18:01
Speaker
seemingly trivial perhaps. I want to just ah go back onto the point of like, so are you kind of thinking that like, You know, when you think about this doctrine of evil, um you know, not being an entity, not substantially existing, no entity being inherently evil, um really evil being more privation of the good. And you're kind of suggesting, well, you know, if you think about the, if you think about more ancient context, in these ancient cultures, you're going to have more privation.
00:18:36
Speaker
it's more common to believe that evil is a sort of real active force, maybe like even a personal entity in conflict with the good. yeah um You know, I don't know. Like, you know, but maybe like an ancient Egyptian religions, they they had a particular deity that is like,
00:18:55
Speaker
the deity of evil, of falsehood, of chaos, which is threatening, like another deity of order, truth, and justice. I'm not, you know, familiar with all that kind of stuff. But like, yeah anyway, point being, is do you think there's a way in which...
00:19:09
Speaker
um still today, are we tempted to conceive of evil as a real active force or personal entity? And then the second question I had or thought I had was like, does this kind of mean that like, you're utilitarian, if you're a Kantian in some sense, you could also be, um,
00:19:26
Speaker
a privation of the good type of theorist like could you be like yeah look like evil it's a privation it's a loss of well-being it's an absence of happiness according to a utilitarian maybe so it's like in other words this is sort of like a deep metaphysical theory and you could subscribe to it and still be either let's say utilitarian or Kantian um anyway that was a lot but I don't know do you have any thoughts about some of the those things I just brought up Yeah, okay, so first question, like, are we starting to fall again into, like, the temptation of a sort of, like, moral dualism?
00:19:59
Speaker
And, um yeah, I think we are. um I don't know, cannot sit here and, like, pretend to say, like, that pop culture is like has some sort of, you know, unified set of philosophical worldviews or theories that they're starting to adopt.
00:20:17
Speaker
um Because in the United States in the West, like, and we are so anti intellectual that people dogs just don't care for the most part. And they're kind of um picking and choosing different parts of various belief systems and, you know, new age things.
00:20:34
Speaker
But, um you know, there is a a kind of resurgence of in Christian fundamentalism, especially ah like in the right kind of conspiracy theory world.
00:20:46
Speaker
I mean, you literally have people thinking that there are like fundamental forces of evil, like working in politics and, And I mean, i I am like way too online and know way too much about QAnon. But a lot of people in those spaces like actually are metaphysical dualists.
00:21:06
Speaker
They really believe in in this cosmic struggle of good versus evil. where like these demonic and satanic forces that are purely just by nature, evil for some reason are fighting just for the pleasure of killing everybody something. Right.
00:21:23
Speaker
And again, I'm um describing incoherent belief systems as if they're coherent. So there's not that much depth I can go into there, but ah you know, so in sort of the Christian fundamentalist and like the weird synthesis of new age and Christianity that's happened, but also,
00:21:40
Speaker
um also in sort of like this neo-pagan revival that's happening with younger people right now, um including certain forms of like theistic Satanism, they are like, I i have personally met people who believe essentially like a sort of pagan Gnostic synthesis who believe that there are like a bunch of elemental spirits that they're in communion with.
00:22:12
Speaker
that are like good or at least neutral. They're basically just like people without bodies and they're powerful, but that there are actual evil deities like the Christian God who are trying to suppress, you know, true knowledge of these spiritual realities. Um, you know, I can't point to any actual concrete work about this.
00:22:34
Speaker
right But I encounter this a lot with people I know and have had long conversations with. So yeah, I think within Christianity and outside of Christianity, like there is a reemergence of dualism.
00:22:47
Speaker
It's not coherent. It's not very... you know philosophically deep, but it's there, you know. It's important to think about, you know, what are, know, thought trends, intellectual trends that are, you know, permeating more or less our society and thinking about what they are, even if they're, you know, not yet at the level of, um yeah, rigorous philosophical discussion or theorizing, you know, it's still obviously important to think about.
00:23:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For your second question, i i think I actually hadn't connected it with evil as privation in particular, but I've thought this about other and there aspects of like my ethical views and meta-ethical views. Yeah, I think a utilitarian or a Kantian could hold to evil as privation. i think Kant is is pretty much explicitly...
00:23:41
Speaker
um
00:23:43
Speaker
committed to that. Um, Oh, interesting. Not that he explicitly says it, but I mean, for Kant, the basis of all ethics and normativity is rationality. Right.
00:23:55
Speaker
Um, and for sort of like a neo Kantian, like Christine Korsgaard, who I'm very fond of, um, even though i disagree with her on a lot of stuff, um, her whole thing is cashing out what normativity is, is like having reasons to do something, which is similar to my view.
00:24:13
Speaker
Um, Reasons to respond in a certain way, reasons to act in a certain way. And basically all evil or immorality would be on that sort of Kantian or Neo-Kantian view would just be like a failure to live up to reason.
00:24:28
Speaker
A failure to value reason and reasons and to respond to reason correctly. you know How they might differ is what they ground – how they differ from someone like myself or a Neoplatonist would be how they ground the good, what they think of the good is. But they still have a deprivation view of evil as a sort of failure of rationality, you know a deprivation of rationality.
00:24:53
Speaker
Good. Yeah. And so maybe maybe I could try to – at this point, like just so that the listener kind of has a feel for – your article as a whole, I could try to just describe like my understanding, roughly speaking of kind of what you're doing in the article.
Teleological Understanding of Evil
00:25:07
Speaker
And, you know, if you you know just kind of get your response, just so the reader can kind of ah a general or listener can have a general appreciation of what you're doing in the article. So basically you're kind of arguing this article for like a teleological reading of the privation doctrine. So in other words, so evil,
00:25:29
Speaker
is real and action states and processes, but only as like a privation of failure of proper function. So you're gonna kind of anchor it in the proper function, the proper end, the teleology of a creature.
00:25:44
Speaker
um And so it ends up, you know, evil doesn't end up being an entity, it's not a substance. And you also point out that, you know, not every lack is is a genuine evil. There are certain just mere privations and we'll get in that in a moment.
00:25:59
Speaker
And then so you kind of, are first off, yeah, so the first thing is like you kind of argue for this teleological reading of um ah this idea of, you know, evil ah being a privation of the good. And then you also look at um some standard objections to to the doctrine and you kind of show that, look, they don't really work, you know,
00:26:23
Speaker
with respect to the the more teleological version of the doctrine. and ah But then you do add like a fifth problem, which you're kind of like, this is really more of a serious problem, hard to resolve and has to do with like, um has to do with the natural evil stuff like predation, disease, disasters.
00:26:43
Speaker
At any rate, I mean, just high level, is that, you know, roughly speaking? Yeah. Anything you want to yeah add or comment on? Yeah, no, no, that's absolutely right. Um, Like i said before, I'm flattered that you've actually read it.
00:26:56
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, the one thing I'd add that I think is really crucial piece of all of my work in general is that like, I'm trying to disabuse my readers of like faulty notions and naive controls of these things. So the,
00:27:12
Speaker
You know, I originally wanted to write a paper like this um purely out of spite because I read this book. um That's actually a really great book. You know, i study kind of like the paranormal and demonology.
00:27:24
Speaker
as a hobby on the side. And I read this book called Satan by, um, Oh man, what is his name? I have a side of my paper. I'll look up. But, um, it's basically like a survey of like different church fathers on like demons and Satan.
00:27:40
Speaker
And at just a part of this book, this guy, this author, is it Richard Jeffries? Man, I'm embarrassed. I can't remember. Whatever.
00:27:51
Speaker
is resume. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, it's Satan. It's Jeffrey Russell, um written in 1987. And it's a really good survey of like the history of Christian demonological teachings and teachings on Satan and how different they are and how they evolve over time.
00:28:08
Speaker
ah Really great book. But all of a sudden, just halfway through the book, he's just like, yeah. And Augustine believed this weird thing about evil is privation. And Christians don't believe that anymore because it's stupid and incoherent.
00:28:19
Speaker
And I mean, he literally says that like people don't believe this anymore because it's dumb. Right. yeah And he gives, he cites a couple articles that then I picked up and I was like reading them. I was like, Oh my God, ah these people are complete ignoramuses on like, these are PhDs in philosophy, publishing in decent journals. Like they have no idea what the actual tradition says about these things.
00:28:44
Speaker
So like a huge part of my paper was i I'm very annoyed at that. And I want to like set the record straight. That um about these things and those sorts of objections that you said I bring up.
00:28:59
Speaker
Essentially, when you actually look at the primary sources advocating for an evil as privation view, they're just basically completely irrelevant. And um all of the objections are built on ah a sort of straw man.
00:29:14
Speaker
And then because I'm a genius, um I have the right objection. know, I have a significant objection at the end of the day. There go. Of course. Yeah. Good. So, I mean, maybe we can kind of get a little bit into those misunderstandings. I mean, where would you want to start? I mean, um I guess like one way into the teleology is we could just talk about this idea of like,
00:29:38
Speaker
Some people have the idea that any lack of goodness, any um reduction of goodness, any lack of perfection, that enough, that alone is sufficient for evil.
00:29:51
Speaker
um So that seems to be one kind of misunderstanding that you've run into in the literature. yeah Can you talk about that and just kind of the solution to it?
00:30:02
Speaker
Yeah, so the first problem that results from this misunderstanding is that, um well, okay, on the surface level, if I say evil doesn't really exist, all evil is is a lack of the good or a privation of the good, right?
00:30:17
Speaker
ah Like the hole in a donut is a lack of the doughy substance of the donut, right? Right. Well, if you take that in a very naive, straightforward way, immediate conclusion is, well, none of us are perfect.
00:30:33
Speaker
And what it is to be a thing, any anything other than God, is to not measure up to complete perfection and goodness, which is God, right?
00:30:46
Speaker
Well, then everything that exists in virtue of existing maybe you want to say it's good, but it's it's also proportionally evil, right?
00:30:57
Speaker
In proportion to, it doesn't measure up to the perfection and infinite goodness of God. It is actually evil and not just evil and like, Oh, this is a way of talking and using the term evil in a metaphorical way or in a weaker way, but no normatively evil, disvaluable, something we should to some degree shun, right?
00:31:20
Speaker
So like if you like a genuine flaw is something a genuine flaw that deserves to be negatively evaluated. sean disliked something that ideally we would prevent. These are some of the things you mentioned for, for what, you know, a true evil is going to be something like that. Something that deserves to be negatively evaluated. and And, and so basically you're saying, look, you know, if, if any lack, if any kind of deprivation, any privation,
00:31:50
Speaker
um of the good were to be evil, then I guess, you know, that, that beautiful tree behind you would be, you know, kind of evil. Cause it can't, you know, solve, it can't do any algebra.
00:32:05
Speaker
yeah exact work yeah We're kind of evil. Cause we're, we don't have, you know um we're not omnipresent like God. yeah Anyway. So it's like just our nature would be kind of,
00:32:18
Speaker
Evil simply in virtue of it being limited. There are limitations to what we can do. The the tree is limited in that the tree cannot solve math problems.
00:32:30
Speaker
We're limited in that we're, you know, you know, we can't be everywhere at one time, you know, stuff like that. that Yeah. Basically. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, and it's especially problematic for a genuine theist, right? Because like how a classical theist conceives of what it is for something to exist is that it is, you know, God is, is the being of everything.
00:32:58
Speaker
He's fundamental reality. He's infinite being. And what a particular creature is, is a limitation opposed upon the infinity of God's being.
00:33:09
Speaker
It's a way of delimiting and making finite what is infinite. And so in the very definition, if that's how you conceive existence, which is like the classical all the way through the Renaissance until like 200 years ago, how people thought about that stuff.
00:33:25
Speaker
Um, the what it is to be would actually just necessarily involve genuine evil. And some people, especially some sorts of Thomists, you know, give it an analysis of like, well, it's not actually evil. It's an analogical way of talking and using the term evil, which fine, but then it's not really evil in a genuine sense, right?
00:33:47
Speaker
But people like Leibniz actually seem to believe this was a necessary consequence of evil as privation. That anything with a limit, anything that's not God is actually evil, negatively valuable, worthy of some sort of scorn, you know?
00:34:05
Speaker
um And that's just... Interesting. Yeah.
Critiques and Clarifications on Evil as Privation
00:34:09
Speaker
The fact that Leibniz believes it makes me think it might be right, but it doesn't sound right. Yeah, it it definitely, you know, i love Leibniz. um I think Leibniz holds the key to like solving a lot of our theoretical problems and metaphysics in the current moment.
00:34:26
Speaker
um But I think he was reading the tradition a little bit differently than I was, you know, um than I am. ah and And I think that he thought that that was a real um ah real constraint put upon being.
00:34:44
Speaker
Although, you know, there is, I could talk ear off all day about um the evolution of Leibniz thought. he He tried to do away with teleology when he was younger and then had to bring it back in towards the end of his life um and was just became an Aristotelian idealist, basically.
00:35:05
Speaker
um And so I wonder if his thoughts on that changed over time, but I'm not aware of anything in the in these actual texts that address that specific thing as as his thought evolved. Yeah.
00:35:18
Speaker
Um, because, and I think that's relevant because like what you're, you're ultimately, your questions ultimately leading up to is, is that, well, if, if you're not going to take this naive reading, how do you avoid that implication?
00:35:32
Speaker
Right. Right. And it's by positing that, well, it's not just any privation of the infinite good. It's a dysfunctional or um lack of a good that God intends to be there or which should be in the nature of the thing.
00:35:52
Speaker
And that's what the teleological view is. It it says that well it's not just a privation of God's perfection. It's a, there's a nature and a telos, a final cause, a purpose of, of each kind of being, or maybe even each particular being.
00:36:07
Speaker
And what evil is, is a lack of that. Right. So to go back to the tree, it's like the tree isn't evil in so far as it can do a math problem because that wasn't part of, that's not part of its telos as a tree.
00:36:23
Speaker
You know, yeah the end of the tree, the kind of, the nature, sorry. Yeah, the end that is sort of determined by the nature of the tree, it doesn't include doing math problems and that's okay.
00:36:34
Speaker
Yeah. It's not, yeah, it's not a ah defect. It's not a blemish. There's nothing we should um negatively evaluate. um Instead, you know, it's it's sort of like,
00:36:50
Speaker
I don't know, like let's say the human being is a rational animal. Okay. So like part of our telos is going to be include thinking rationally.
00:37:02
Speaker
And so, you know, if I just, you know, don't know, do too many, you know to do a bunch of drugs and like lose my mental capacity, like that would be evil because, you know, I'm basically, um,
00:37:19
Speaker
Yeah, making i'm I'm depriving myself of a capacity that I should be exercising. Yeah. Why should I be exercising? Because it's like it's like built into the nature kind of thing. built into your nature, yeah.
00:37:33
Speaker
And again, you know – I could also talk you off about how weird it is just from a purely neutral perspective, why the wellbeing and the health and the spiritual and mental wellbeing and the good of the whole cosmos, why these all converge to that your virtuous fulfilling of your individual nature or specific nature or purpose telos why it also helps guarantee the good of and the well-being and health of the whole cosmos and of your neighbor and of everything around you yeah maybe that's like on theism being ordered well ordered sorry right yeah no and no you're good yes it's not just that you're in your own sphere it's that by being in your own sphere and functioning properly you're also helping heal the rest of the cosmos and help it it function properly bring order into other people
00:38:26
Speaker
And, um you know, from a purely just from like the eyes of a naturalist or like someone who's just like a total soft skeptic where you're like, you don't know what you believe, you're open.
00:38:36
Speaker
It's like, well, why would that be true? Why would your individual virtue have these rippling downstream effects? Well, luckily, we have the insights of like, Neoplatonic thinkers and the saints and Christian teachings, you know, from the Bible.
00:38:52
Speaker
And it literally says that, right? And that's kind of what my book does. But, and there is ways to argue and build up from the bottom up to get there. It's just complicated.
00:39:04
Speaker
But, um, But yeah, the the your fulfilling your individual telos, what evil is, is a disharmony in you that also creates a disharmony in the entirety of the cosmos and can you know invite chaos into things. you know So it's not just like some deontological, this is right just because.
00:39:28
Speaker
It's right because you know, it's, it's a good that ought to be there because that's, what's good for you and for everyone else, you know, that's great. Fantastic. Um, you know, i don't know if you've, there's a philosopher, Scott McDonald at Cornell or something. yeah And, um,
00:39:47
Speaker
You know, he he kind of has this interesting thing about what we're, you know, reading the history of philosophy talks about, like, you know, there's a couple ideas about the relation to the relationship between being in goodness. And, you know, he talks about there being a participation approach where, you know, goodness, the goodness of an entity is really sort of relational in the sense that you achieve goodness, as something is good in so far as it participates in something else. So whether that's the good or God,
00:40:20
Speaker
um it's it's it's really goodness through participation. And then he talks about, you know, and then there's another approach where it's sort of like, well, actually, you know, the good of an entity is kind of intrinsic in that a being is good by attaining the end or goal, which is characteristic of a being of that kind of nature. So the yeah end or goal that's going to be characteristic of a human being of something of that kind of nature, you know, say, let's say has to do with a rational activity or something like that.
00:40:50
Speaker
at any rate, what's interesting is that like in one case is sort of like, it seems like, um, the good is sort of relational by participating in something else like God or the good.
00:41:02
Speaker
and then in And then in the nature approach, the good is sort of intrinsic insofar that you're good by attaining the end of your particular being. and But what's interesting about this is that, and I kind of feel like you would probably subscribe to this is my impression, is that you can you can unite the two approaches. And so McDonald talks about like, for example, in Aquinas, and I think,
00:41:25
Speaker
you know Dionysus the Areopagite probably too um there's a you there's a way of unifying the participation approach in the nature approach where it's like but you by attaining the end or goal characteristic of your kind of being also participate or that is your mode of participation in this um external being but anyway I just wanted to kind of float that, see if you have any thoughts about that. I mean, ah my impression is like you would also subscribe to that kind of unifying of the participation in nature. approach
00:41:57
Speaker
Yeah, you know, because like I said, I'm very neurotic OCD person. I really like fine distinctions. And I was trained not as like an ancient philosopher. Like I i was trained like purely analytic philosophy of science, logic, mathematical logic. And I got into this mostly on my own.
00:42:13
Speaker
um But so i I really love dividing things up. And I can divide up several senses of goodness being, you know, so for instance, I talked about, um, you have goodness as a participation in the good.
00:42:31
Speaker
Well, that really puzzled me when I was younger and didn't have kind of the background and in ancient medieval philosophy I do now because I'm like, well, but then the goodness is external to whatever is good. Right.
00:42:42
Speaker
And there's certain passages in Augustine, for instance, where he says that like, you shouldn't love creatures for their own sake. You should love them because they're, you know, their relationship to God. And when you read it straightforwardly like that, sounds like, well, nothing's really good. They're all just kind of parait parasites and parasitically taking the good from the good, right? Borrowing it.
00:43:04
Speaker
um But then you also like, well, but it's also good. Things are good in themselves. So how do you unify those two? And then there's also the sense of like you read Aristotle. It's like, well, being a good horse is what's good for the horse and fulfilling its nature.
00:43:17
Speaker
So how do you unify things? that there's a good transcending ah all individual particular goods that they participate in and in virtue of which they are good with fulfilling your nature purpose with, um, fulfilling,
00:43:35
Speaker
you know your actual physical well-being and growth trajectory to get health with then you know everybody's always been a consequentialist in some way caring for things outside yourself and trying to maximize the good in the world um how it then also has this external kind of consequential thing how do you unify all these things well You know, from our modern perspective, you can't because they're all completely different things. But Aristotle had no problem with this. Um, he, because he says, you know, the nature of a thing and it's telos, it's final cause are one it's form or figure is identical to its nature in a sense, even though the two different concepts and its participation in the good is its nature and form.
Interconnectedness of Individual and Cosmic Harmony
00:44:26
Speaker
And so you have, you know, when you get into, I could talk for a couple hours about how on like an Aristotelian metaphysics, you can you can make sense of this.
00:44:38
Speaker
um And it's also the sort of thing Plotinus would accept. um But it's because all of those metaphysical realities of well-being, the good, and participation in the good, the well-being of the cosmos, that The universe is put together in a way that it truly counts as one cosmic whole.
00:45:01
Speaker
And the health of it and its parts, what it is for that thing to flourish is to participate in the divine.
00:45:13
Speaker
And so you have all these, you know, these are all different conceptual ways of cutting up a fundamental reality that is in some sense one of you know, the convertibility of being and goodness and beauty and truth and health and wellbeing and happiness and pleasure, you know, uh, and all in God.
00:45:35
Speaker
That's fantastic. I mean, I guess maybe at this point we could kind of shift like, cause what you just said makes me think about the whole issue of like different things. kinds of evil and like the whole issue of certain things seeming evil, uh, then maybe not being evil.
00:45:56
Speaker
Um, basically this is what thinking is, when you talk about, this cosmic hole, you know, in each sort of being in nature, sort of playing its role in the cosmic hole and them all kind of fitting together to create this like harmonious tapestry, right? Like,
00:46:17
Speaker
you know, my problem is that I start thinking about like Komodo dragons and just being like, those things are terrible. What do you, you know, like, they just seem so bad, right? Like that's like my, you know, I'm not, I'm just saying that that's like what pops into my head.
00:46:30
Speaker
You're saying you hate Komodo dragons. you you say i I have, yeah, I ah normatively evaluate them ah negatively. Anyway, um you know, I've watched the videos of Komodo dragons.
00:46:44
Speaker
eating and killing water buffalo. And it's just, you know, it's, it's so bad. And you're just kind of thinking, you know, thankfully the Bible tells us, tells us the lion is going to lay down with the lamb, you know, this is not going to go on forever.
00:46:59
Speaker
And so it's like, there's a part of me that wants to be like, look, like there seems to be parts of creation that look like, It's just bad by nature. Like the nature is messed up of a Komodo dragon. Like I'm sorry to be, you know, singling the Komodo dragon out. and ah And I'm sure they're going to cancel you be luckily coming for you. Exactly. They don't, they don't, they don't make up the audience of this.
00:47:25
Speaker
so Oh, that's good. I'm being so mean to them. Yeah. anyway So anyway, can you just want to talk about that? like Some people are just going to be like, oh, what? like Some natures, aren't they just kind of messed up? like it doesn't Doesn't the Komodo dragon, its predatory nature, the way it kills water buffalo and such, like isn't it just kind of evil? or so so yeah Yeah, yeah. Okay, so so given everything I've said, the...
00:47:52
Speaker
I think the correct reading, and when I say I think, I'm being humble. I'm correct in saying this because you know I could literally point to explicit passages in Aquinas that have the teleological view. And it's pretty much consensus among people who have studied this, right?
00:48:09
Speaker
Right, right. On the teleological view that Aquinas and many of the other Neoplatonic Christian tradition have, they say that evil...
00:48:23
Speaker
consists in a failure to live up to your telos, right? To your final cause, to your nature. Well, the consequence of that seems to be, well, a snake or Komodo dragon, what that thing is...
00:48:40
Speaker
is a, it's an organism that's bred for war, right? It's bred for, it's created in some sense to kill and, and not just kill and consume, but like rip, like a Komodo dragon is like poison with a disgusting bacteria in your mouth with a bite. Right.
00:49:00
Speaker
Let the animal, waste away from that, follow it for miles and then rip it to shreds while it's still kind of alive. Exactly. A snake is like, you know, and i I, personally have snakes. You can actually see a snake by my hand right now because my vicious snake bit me last night.
00:49:16
Speaker
But, um, a snake is like a crazy thing. If you think about it, like, um it takes a rat or a mouse or something and and strangles it to death brutally with it its whole body and then swallows it, sometimes semi-alive, many times dead. But... um You know, those are it's brutal. And when you think of the teot the teleological arguments, like, well, those things are living up to their nature, right?
00:49:45
Speaker
If you think that God intended and the evolutionary process to result in a snake and ah that snakes have a specific nature, well, the snake doing all these brutal things that we normally are revolted by and disassociate with God, with the divine, who is perfect love, harmony, peace, tranquility, supposedly.
00:50:07
Speaker
um Well, then it seems like the teleological view just like would say, well, you're wrong for doing that. And you have to choose. Well, do i preserve my conception of what God wills of that? Like he ultimately, like scripture says, the lion will lay down with the lamb.
00:50:25
Speaker
There'll be no more predation. Do I go with that and and basically abandon the teleological view? Or do I accept the teleological view and revise my, not just my moral intuitions and emotions, but my conception of God?
00:50:40
Speaker
And that's where, you know, we find ourselves. at And again, Augustine is, I feel like people talk about him as if he's like some sort of contemporary with Aquinas. They're always paired together in my work, citizen and but you know, and they're paired together in a lot of people I talk about, but, um and talk with, but he's a really early Christian writer, right? Yeah.
00:51:00
Speaker
Um, he grappled with this explicitly and he came to the conclusion that basically most evils are illusory, natural evils like this.
00:51:11
Speaker
So he chose a side of, you know he, he accepts the teleological evil as privation. The snake being brutal, the commode dragon being brutal are, that's not really evil.
00:51:22
Speaker
That's actually a beautiful, good thing. yeah. um And he just says it's you know it's human bias. that um It's a sort of anthropocentric bias that we have against these things, and we need to have our conception of God and integrate that.
00:51:41
Speaker
God is not... a God of like perfect, what you might consider platonic harmony of perfect proportionality and sterility.
00:51:52
Speaker
God is a God of organic living beings, um, which have this platonic, harmony and beauty aspect i mean no one that understands even the basics of modern biology could look at an organism and not go like it's an amazing nearly infinite harmony of of parts and proportion but it's not in a sort of you know if you're to talk in like an augustinian way it's not in the sense of
00:52:23
Speaker
you know what a human might prefer and think of as white robes, divine in heaven. So we're faced with that sort of choice on the teleological views. like It's a significant thing.
00:52:34
Speaker
Yeah, although i mean you know when I'm watching these Komodo dragon videos and like you know people in the comments, humans in the comments are are like, man, I love this Komodo dragon. and I'm kind of like, that seems anthropocentric. Like, yeah think about the water buffalo here. Like, right like have have some compassion for this water buffalo.
00:52:53
Speaker
you might think that, like, it's, like, in virtue of our compassion for the water buffalo that we're going to negatively evaluate the Komodo dragon. Because it's kind of like, yeah, to me, like, all right. Like, it's like gladiatorship. It's just like, yeah. like yeah All I'm caring about is human interests. Like, you know Have at it.
00:53:12
Speaker
Yeah, have at it. Let's let's bring back the arenas. So that's a really interesting point that i bring up in my paper because certain Thomists have tried to solve this without getting rid of the teleological view and also without having to revise our moral concepts, right?
00:53:27
Speaker
And what they say, because Thomists love analogy, they – They say that, well, it's evil in an analogical sense for the Komodo dragon to murder the water buffalo, right?
00:53:41
Speaker
Um... Which solves everything, by the way. Yeah, it solves it all, right? um And basically what they say is, well, evil is based on the nature of things, a deprivation of the nature.
00:53:54
Speaker
So the Komodo dragon fulfills its nature. So in relation to the Komodo dragon, it's a good that it kills the prey. But in relation to the prey, because its nature is being violated by being brutally killed,
00:54:10
Speaker
It's evil for that animal. And my the point in my paper is, say come on, guys. Really? You're not using it in a normative sense then. You admit that you're using in an analogical kind of relative sense.
00:54:23
Speaker
It's a way of talking. It doesn't get us to normative reality. And as a meta-ethicist primarily, that's what I care about. I care about normativity, not... philosophy of language for the most part. Right.
00:54:36
Speaker
And um I, so I just think that frankly, that that's a facile um way to try to sidestep the issue is to say, well, we can talk about it as if it's evil. and It's like, yes, there is sense, but I can also arbitrarily define any word as any concept I want.
00:54:54
Speaker
Right. Right. sure That's the point of symbolic logic, you know? um yeah So I kind of want to bring up, yeah, another worry related to the teleological theory in a second. I'm also kind of thinking about like our time, because I think we've only talked about one problem. Yeah. yeah So, so I don't know, like maybe what we could do is like, you can kind of like,
00:55:21
Speaker
Or maybe I could like try to quickly like, yeah, mention the three three of them and then we can talk about the fifth problem, which is like kind of the more significant. and We might actually be already touching on this. Yeah, this is the fifth problem. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So we're touching on it.
00:55:32
Speaker
Okay. So we'll kind of circle back
Distinctions in Evil: Inherent vs. Consequential
00:55:34
Speaker
to that then. mean, the only thing I was thinking is like one issue I have with a teleological one is like if it's saying um necessarily if something is evil, then it's going to be a deviation from something's nature.
00:55:47
Speaker
What it seems to be saying is that necessary that it's it's it's it's impossible. It's literally impossible for something to be evil in its nature. But it seems like you can... Okay, maybe... Fine. if you If you want to say that the water buffalo... Or, sorry, the Komodo dragon. right If someone wants to like give me this... Oh, they get into the details of ecology and they start telling me about how like oh actually the Komodo dragon is doing these sorts of good things. It's like, okay, fine.
00:56:13
Speaker
If you want to actually defend... the the commode dragon that's totally fine but can't i conceive of a nature that is evil essentially right and it's like it seemed like maybe one just off the top i'm just this is just off the top my head but like my thought is like it seems like in one reading the teleological thing it's saying necessarily if something is evil then it's a sort of deviation from nature whereas this it seems like look that But that would seem to imply that you can't even conceive of a nature that's that's evil. in Right. And it seems like you can. Like, okay, here's a being that like it exists for two seconds and all it does is just like kill everything in the room. you know And it's just like, okay, that seems messed up. Anyway, so. ah Yeah, no, no, you're completely correct. This is something that I think is really interesting and I didn't include in the paper.
00:57:05
Speaker
Or I only kind of hinted at. But. The teleological view assumes that any nature, at least any God-created nature, is inherently good and beautiful and that it's worthy of being pursued.
00:57:23
Speaker
That's like a fundamental assumption that without it, the privation theory does not seem to be able to work. So then as a necessary consequence, well, there's no evil natures and thus any being that exists, even an artificial being that we humans or an alien imposed the nature onto can't actually be evil in and of itself.
00:57:44
Speaker
And I think, yes, that is a necessary consequence. And I agree with that. And I don't see any problem with that because once we make the fine distinction that I am so anally fond of making, make it yes yeah, is that there are, you know, there are intrinsic and extrinsic or inherent and consequential ah ways of talking about evil.
00:58:11
Speaker
And, you know, you have to be really clear on what you're asking. Is it actually per our intuitions problematic to say that inherently no nature can even possibly be evil?
00:58:28
Speaker
I think we don't actually have a problem with that because like what you just says, isn't it possible to bring about a thing that all it does in its short life and existence is just like cause chaos and suffering?
00:58:40
Speaker
Well,
00:58:43
Speaker
That seems to be and consequential, instrumental evil. It's not it's its inherent makeup and an act of existing that's actually evil. It's what it does to put things in disharmony.
00:59:01
Speaker
And so we can say that it is evil in the sense of, one, it probably should have never existed. But that's different from saying given that it exists, its act of existence is evil in and of itself.
00:59:15
Speaker
The thing itself is disvaluable because there's plenty of really good things that probably shouldn't exist. I have two dogs. I fully am convinced that they should have never been born because they exist you know as a result of like very abusive breeding practices because Americans love dogs and just let them mate.
00:59:36
Speaker
However, and it results in like so much animal suffering and euthanasia at these shelters. So ideally, it's an evil thing that my dogs exist.
00:59:48
Speaker
But it's not... They are not evil, right? So what we're predicating evil of, we have to be really careful of. The fact of their existence, the state of them existing and its consequences, or the being itself, the nature embodied itself.
01:00:07
Speaker
um And it might, you know, that might even be, unless you're fatalist, it might even be true about people. There are certain people in this world that cause, basically in their life, 99% suffering.
01:00:21
Speaker
And are just agents of evil and chaos. But I would still say that someone like that is inherently good. It's just a shame that they're so um screwed up, you know? Right, right. And so we have to really finally divide um predicating evil of the the act of being, predicating evil of the fact of being, and predicating evil for its kind of external or or consequential um features, right?
01:00:51
Speaker
yeah And those are three different things. And I think that's actually, to toot my own horn, I think that's actually fairly novel in this approach. like I haven't found that in the literature, even though it seems obvious to me because I'm an OCD insane person that like just makes spreadsheets of these divisions, right? Yeah, that's beautiful. um Good. Okay, well, um maybe, yeah, again, just in the interest of time, we could just...
01:01:19
Speaker
but Yeah, I'm going to just try to like, okay, so like I said, in your paper, you're- I'm not in any rush, so as long as you have whatever you want to do, right? Sure, sure. I appreciate it Yeah, I mean, I think let's just kind of quickly we try to like say, okay so we've talked about the first problem.
01:01:36
Speaker
and It's basically, there's this misunderstanding that um evil- simply means lack of any perfection. And so then the idea would be like, you know, it's sufficient to be evil just to lack any perfection. And we kind of corrected that with the teleological conception.
01:01:53
Speaker
um A second problem has to do with like, you know, some people are like, wait a second, um you know, evil, it's not just the absence of good. It's a real like sweet, generous property of disvalue.
01:02:05
Speaker
um Being evil, it's a genuine positive feature. So, you know, evil can't be a mere lack. That's like another problem that's often lobbed. um Another idea is like, wait second, you know, if evil is defined,
01:02:18
Speaker
as a lack within what exists, then it seems like annihilation, the total loss of existence seems like that is never going to be evil. So that's the third problem. And then the fourth problem is like, um oh, you know, you're, you know, it appears you've you've revised the theory, the the privation theory so much that, you know, this is not the genuine privation theory anymore. It's it's now trivial. um So anyway, I just want to,
01:02:47
Speaker
could Can you comment on any of those, kind of any thoughts about those? you know Maybe one useful thing would be to talk about like with that that fourth problem. like yeah like If you had to describe like the the various refinements you make to the theory, um maybe you could kind of hit the main ones and then just quickly like explain why you you include those refinements.
01:03:12
Speaker
Yeah. um Okay. So i can really quickly discuss problem two and three because i mentioned those to be thorough but i actually think they're just kind of like stupid and i and i'm like i don't like being so harsh but like some of these papers the contemporary papers on this stuff are just so bad that it's hard not to be flipping um evil is a sui generis normative property basically says um I think it was Crosby who you check my footnotes um for whoever reads my paper. think that's right. Yeah. um
01:03:48
Speaker
He basically said that, ah well, wait, evil as privation can't be right because you're saying evil is nothing but a privation, but the metaphysical property, the moral property of evil that we predicate of object clearly is a genuine moral property.
01:04:06
Speaker
And thus it in some sense has positive being. And i mean, frankly, like ah i primarily work in meta ethics and what but you might call meta aesthetics, where I like think a lot about what moral properties actually are.
01:04:21
Speaker
And I just rolled my eyes like this person has no idea on the vast literature. Right. It's one sort of very straightforward moral theory about what moral language and properties are and refer to that a moral property like good value, evil, disvalue are properties of a thing in the same sort of sense as colors are a property, right? In a in a similar but –
01:04:53
Speaker
immaterial sense that it's like a property attached to an object. Right. And that comes out of the analytical modern tradition being obsessed with talking about properties because that's a linguistic structure, but property can be analyzed into many different types of metaphysical realities. I mean, this everybody should just read Aristotle's categories. Like that's the point of the categories, right? Is that we talk about properties just like we talk about existence or being in many different ways.
01:05:31
Speaker
And the idea of a property and of even, you know, putting an existential quantifier and saying this thing exists and it has this property. Linguistically, it has the form of asserting a positive reality.
01:05:46
Speaker
But you can't read off metaphysics from linguistics, right? And logical structure. um So it's just like the suegesist moral property thing. It's just like, yeah, I guess if you were committed to the view that evil is actually a a moral property that attaches to objects similar to how a color would attach to an object, then I guess you couldn't technically say that evil is privation because then there's this moral property out there called evil
01:06:21
Speaker
But none of the church fathers held to that. Plato and Aristotle didn't hold to that. blank Plotinus didn't hold to that, right? I don't know of basically anyone but like the most naive sort of like 19th and twenty early 20th century Platonist that holds that there's just like universals or ones and many exist just in... You can infer from that there's a universal to it existing on its own in some way. Like that's just not what...
01:06:50
Speaker
anybody thinks. So this, this, this quote unquote problem kind of depends on a straw man yeah of the, of the theory. um So what, about but what about the third problem? Non-being cannot be evil. You know, if evil is defined as a lack, then the total loss of existence, annihilation seems like that wouldn't count as an evil since so um yeah, there's no subject in which the lack would obtain. So, you know, yeah. What's, what's the deal with that one?
01:07:17
Speaker
Yeah, on an interpretive level, Crosby and some other authors just basically, like, literally say, if you if you end up saying that this is a... ah If you end up saying that non-being can be evil, you've just completely revised the theory.
01:07:37
Speaker
right And it's like, well, you're not clearly not actually reading like Thomas Aquinas or Augustine or any of the tradition because all of them recognize the you know untimely destruction of beings as being a type of evil.
01:07:54
Speaker
Murders evil because it partly because it robs the world of something good, you know, um depriving yourself and taking away like a cognitive capacity is a classic one. Like you said, but doing drugs earlier.
01:08:09
Speaker
Well, so, um, You know, on an interpretive level, it's just like, it's hard to get off the ground why you even feel the need to bring this up. But not you, but the authors I'm responding to, right? um But on on like ah if I'm actually going to take it seriously and deal with the philosophy going on in it is, well, one way to bypass that is to just conceive of existence as one big organism with many parts of which we are parts of an organism.
01:08:42
Speaker
That's a consensus view from Plato to, you know, to Leibniz to mention, like he saw the cosmos as an organism. This is, we don't think of it this way, but like the Christian Neoplatonic consensus is that, you know, all of creaturely existence is one big cosmic organism that God wishes to function properly.
01:09:11
Speaker
And they, you know, authors explicitly say that. And so when you, when do you, when, when a being disintegrates or is killed or predated predated preyed upon in a dysfunctional way, it's evil because it deprives the cosmos of its proper health and functioning. Right.
01:09:36
Speaker
And that's the consensus view. And I give a lot of citations of it, but I can list off the top my head. Pseudionysus, Maximus the Confessor, St. Isaac the Syrian, Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Aristotle, Plato explicitly says it. Plotinus explicitly, you know. It's a deviation from the cosmos is telos.
01:09:55
Speaker
Right. and Yeah, yeah. And maybe you could also make sense of it in the analogical sense we were talking about earlier of like, well, it's bad for the individual nature. Although I, I just don't think that works for various reasons, but um yeah. So there's ways of responding to it.
01:10:12
Speaker
And um it's really interesting. I don't know a whole lot about this, but you should, everybody should start to get interested in the idea of like um astrobiology Because what a lot of findings and like when you're talking about like the existence of life on other planets, from just a layman's perspective looking in on that field, it's really interesting that like people talk about each planet as like an organism.
01:10:42
Speaker
with its own evolutionary history. And so I don't know why you couldn't scale that up to, you know, the entire cosmos, but even just in terms of like earth, like something dying in an untimely way here would, would affect the entire organism.
01:10:59
Speaker
You know, um we just don't have the perspective or vantage point to see how it does that. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So problem three solved, check it off. Right. I mean, if you want to If you want to be a Neoplatonist like we are, guess. Yeah. Yeah, we're safe.
01:11:17
Speaker
um Well, what about – maybe we – I don't know. Can we skip four? Maybe like to kind of close things out, we can – Sure. Yeah. I think we can skip four. Yeah. I mean so –
01:11:30
Speaker
Because we've been talking about – four is like – well, with the refinements I've made and the nuances, isn't it all just trivial? And I think everything we've talked about here shows it's like how is this trivial?
01:11:41
Speaker
How can you talk about trivialities and in this way for this long and talk about the ethical and like emotional consequences like we did at the beginning of the show? Yeah, yeah. No, it's it's really cool. Yeah.
01:11:54
Speaker
what you talk about in this section of the paper, just in terms of like kind of the subtle or not so subtle, whatever, but various ramifications, various upshots of ah holding to this view.
01:12:05
Speaker
um So I do yeah recommend listeners to check out that section of the paper it's super interesting. But yeah, we kind of touched on it the beginning. um But basically, I mean, you know, when it comes to the fifth problem, it kind of, yeah, it has to do with natural evil stuff like predation, disease, disaster,
01:12:23
Speaker
Um, and i mean, is it the, is the question whether they are genuine evils? Cause if they're genuine evils, it seems like God is directly willing them.
01:12:35
Speaker
Um, if they're not genuine evils, uh, then do we have to deny the evil of kind of immense suffering and destruction? um And then maybe is like the issue, like, you know, is the teleological account really going to help us with this? Is it going to tell us whether,
01:12:58
Speaker
yeah, whether such events are really like, are they, are they violating some nature? Are they fulfilling some nature? So anyway, yeah. you just kind of want to touch on the fifth problem? How would you describe it? Yeah. We've started touching it a little while ago and it's again, you know, if you make the good,
01:13:19
Speaker
parasitic on fulfilling your nature and evil as, as failing to do that, then all the brutal things we see in nature, it seems to be that the rational logical conclusion is that they're actually good.
Conflicts with Moral Intuitions on Natural Evil
01:13:34
Speaker
And we are just wrong.
01:13:36
Speaker
Our moral intuitions about like animals killing each other are wrong. But I mean, like I talked about planet wide things. so It seems to be like delivering the wrong verdict. Yeah, yeah.
01:13:46
Speaker
If we can trust our moral intuitions, which on some level we have to, um then, yeah it seems that this theory has a ah wrong consequence that violates our intuitions. So we have a choice.
01:14:01
Speaker
Revise our intuitions because we believe in the theory or drop or, you know, substantially change the theory. There are ways to do it.
01:14:13
Speaker
Even like Protestants who I would not consider Neoplatonists have tried to do this. Alvin Plantinga talks specifically about like fallen angels um messing with natural systems on a cosmic level.
01:14:29
Speaker
And that results in different evolutionary lineage lineages that causes unnecessary suffering. So you could potentially say something like – Hey, the snake in front of you, actually, its nature is kind of screwed up.
01:14:42
Speaker
God didn't intend it to be like that. God intended evolution to go in different ways with less suffering. That is especially true of things like viruses. And we know this is true on some level, right? We know this is actually an explanation for some natural evils.
01:14:58
Speaker
We as human beings have screwed up the world in ways that are fundamentally changing not only our bodies, but but the bodies of other animals and how they're developing.
01:15:10
Speaker
And also things like viruses, like we invented, not in a lab, but by led by certain actions that we can't even comprehend ah virus gets into our body, maybe unnecessarily because we went to work, you know, with a cold when we should have stayed home or something.
01:15:31
Speaker
And, um, or we are more likely forced to do that when we shouldn't have been. And that virus, because we have a slight immunodeficiency, mutates and becomes more potent and kills a bunch of people and then changes you know the course of history in some subtle ways, or even just viruses continue to mutate. COVID was ah an eye-opener in this way because that's exactly what was happening.
01:15:55
Speaker
um that's where mutations of viruses come from. And viruses themselves, there's a lot of theorization um in virology that like they had a lot to do with like evolutionary trajectories.
01:16:10
Speaker
The cosmic organism stuff is really, really like hard to wrap your head around because you know maybe the natures of the animals and the world around us are in some way inherently different.
01:16:25
Speaker
um dysfunctional that God didn't intend it that way. That's one way out you could take. Do I think that's correct? No, not really. um Because, know, kind of prefer the mystical illusory view that Augustine seems to take.
01:16:43
Speaker
He zooms out and he says, even if there's something that can be considered evil, when you look at it from our point of view,
01:16:56
Speaker
you'll see that the fact of its existence is actually a good thing that God allowed. and And that it's, again, making that fine distinction between are we predicating evil of the fact of it existing, its existence, or its consequences?
01:17:15
Speaker
ah if we When we are unified with God, we will see that everything was for the best. And that just doesn't that doesn't just mean that you know consequences were true. evil God created true evils to bring about the greater good in the end.
01:17:30
Speaker
What Augustine seems to be saying is that what we take to be evils, if we had a better perspective, we would actually see, we would endorse them existing.
01:17:42
Speaker
We would say they're not really evils, they're goods. And that's a really hard pill to swallow. but i And I don't necessarily think you can get that to cohere with scripture, which I can talk about in a second.
01:17:57
Speaker
um But that's kind of where I lean. e lean that we just really don't understand God and want to make him like we think God is Thomas Kinkade.
01:18:09
Speaker
um which, you know, the painter of light who paints these really kitschy, yeah pleasant scenes. um But God is actually, um God is a weird, weird thing, ah very beautiful and wondrous, but weird thing. And that's kind of the view I take.
01:18:28
Speaker
God is not Thomas Kinkade. Yeah, right? And that's not what beauty is either. like David Lynch talked about like the beauty of a wound on your hand. um The beauty and one consequence is like you have to believe that pain is itself um actually a good thing.
01:18:51
Speaker
And that's a very controversial stance, but like i I actually have gotten myself to believe that. Like I think suffering and pain are separable and pain is a good thing. Like I take this, i hope that this very broad kind of mystical vision will one day be validated when I am hopefully unified with God. You know, that's my preference. um And I think part of that comes from like, you know, I have predators as pets and I love them.
01:19:22
Speaker
It's sad, but I love my snakes a little bit more than I love my dogs. I don't know why. Like, i love I love these animals, and I love even being bit by them and seeing their power and kind of like their brutality. Like, it's it's an amazing thing.
01:19:37
Speaker
and it also breaks my heart at the same time. Like, when I feed them a... their dead rat that's in my freezer. Like ah get really sad looking at the rat, but at the same time I have this, a genuine sense of, yeah, this is right.
01:19:56
Speaker
Like this is good. And I think that maybe my solution is that these things are goods that are temporary, that it would be better for God to proliferate as many beings, even if it in their natures involve a certain brutality, that God as infinitely creative and infinitely charitable and giving his being and beauty to us, proliferates as many creatures as he can, gives them an allotted time to be themselves, and
01:20:35
Speaker
And then maybe even for some of the animals, resurrects them into a new state in a new eon, right? A new age, a resurrected age where the lion will lay down with the lamb and there'll be no more death and suffering.
01:20:52
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that the period of death and suffering was bad to exist, right? Or that these things were genuine evils, right? And on the point of like the scriptures, if you read the scriptures straightforwardly, they just contradict themselves.
01:21:07
Speaker
And it's it's sort of, I don't mean that they contradict themselves in a bad way. I think it's very good that they do. you know Some passages in scripture say that death is an evil thing and a result of sin. There are other passages in scripture that flat out deny that death is an evil thing and what's evil is spiritual death.
01:21:30
Speaker
There are some passages in scripture that say that the lion will lay down the lamb. And then there's other passages in scripture that say um God gives the food to the hungry lions. Well, what does that mean? it means that God is literally giving, you know, these innocent animals to be torn apart by the mouths of predators.
01:21:51
Speaker
And he's in scripture says that he's ordained that. Certain of our saints don't agree on this either. Like Athanasius and Pseudodionysus straight up say that the natural order around us is not fallen. And we are the ones that fell.
01:22:05
Speaker
And to the extent that there's dysfunction in nature, it's because of us, right? um It's because of interference, but the animal natures like that aren't themselves evil, but they also believe, especially Pseudodionysus, that there will be an age without these things, you know?
01:22:25
Speaker
um So I don't know if that makes sense, but that's that's my view.
Reevaluating Suffering and Pain Through a Mystical Lens
01:22:33
Speaker
Although I don't think I'll ever in this life be comfortable with it because I still do cry when I see, you know, and my freezer has like 90 dead rats in it right now for my snakes.
01:22:45
Speaker
And every time I thaw one out, I'm like, this is so sad. But then I'm like, this is also so great.
01:22:54
Speaker
You know? Yeah, i think i think generally speaking, when it comes to The Odyssey, you know, you want to push evils into the illusory category as much as you can.
01:23:07
Speaker
um Because...
01:23:12
Speaker
Yeah. Then it's not something we have to figure out why God is responsible for it. You know, instead it's more of a misperception and misunderstanding. Yeah. Um, but, but anyway, this has been awesome. Uh, Pierce. I mean, so thanks so much for coming on. Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. know, um, everyone who's listening, please, you know, search, check out, um, Pierce's article. It's called evil as privation.
01:23:36
Speaker
It's true meaning and import. And yeah, thanks so much again for coming on Pierce. Yeah. You're welcome. Um, Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to listening to this podcast more. It's great. Absolutely. Thanks. i appreciate it.
01:23:49
Speaker
All right.