Theodicy is Morally Insensitive

Theodicy doesn’t take the evils of the world seriously enough. It’s always trying to downplay and diminish and claim that things aren’t as bad as they seem.

In the construction of theodicy, routine examples are used such as trips to the dentist, cars breaking down, grazed knees, or discordant music. You’ll rarely find a theodicy explicitly discussing the worst evils in the world. Not many theodicists are willing to openly defend the value of child abuse or genocide. They stick to the easy cases.

But there’s no getting around the fact that if theodicy offers a justification for the permission of all evils in the world, then it offers that justification for the hard cases as much as for the easy. In doing so, theodicy draws a comparison between these easy examples and the worst evils in the world, as if they were morally comparable.

Anyone sensitive to the horrors of these ‘hard cases’ couldn’t allow themselves to draw this comparison. Perhaps we can justify sending our children to the dentist and can offer a morally-sufficient reason in defence of the pain suffered at the dentist’s hands, but wouldn’t we hesitate (to put it extremely mildly) to offer a defence of the pain suffered at the hands of the child abuser?

Should we override this hesitation as irrational over-sensitivity, safe in the knowledge that both the evils of the dentist and the evils of the child abuser are morally comparable and justified by the same set of morally-sufficient reasons? It stretches our moral conscience to say so. I would say it stretches it to breaking point. Our moral sensitivity will not allow that comparison to be drawn.

Anyone who draws that comparison reveals themselves to lack this moral sensitivity. And so this is what theodicy stands accused of, since this is what it does. It’s only possible to construct a theodicy if you’re willing to treat all evils as comparable under the same category: raw material for soul-making, or outweighed by the value of free will.

But not all evils are created equal and some are unequal enough to give us reason to pause. Again, I feel I’m putting it extremely mildly. Shouldn’t we hesitate to offer a justification for genocide? What would it say about us if we didn’t hesitate, or else hesitated but then overruled our moral sensitivities? What is it that we’d be trying to be if we were to do this: morally or intellectually virtuous? Is the attempt to justify genocide recognisable as a picture of virtue? Can it be? What genocide-apologist have you ever looked at and thought: ‘There goes a virtuous person.’

The accusation of moral insensitivity becomes clearer if we talk in terms of the morally impossible. In being something that ‘categorically ought not to be’, there can be no justification for it: that is part of its categorical nature. To offer a justification would be to deny its morally impossible status. The answer to the question: ‘Should child abuse be permitted?’ would not be ‘categorically, no’, but ‘it depends’.

The morally problematic status of theodicy is exposed in exactly this way. From a certain ethical perspective, we look at the world and identify some things that categorically ought not to be; we identify the morally impossible. Theodicy corrects our perception and insists that, contrary to moral appearances, nothing is morally impossible. Everything is permissible. But in normal running, if someone were to offer a moral justification for genocide or child abuse, I would think moral insensitivity to be only the most visible of their failings.

Read more: The Problem of Evil as an Ethical Problem