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Love and the Problem of Evil

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Abstract

The focus of this paper is the virtual certainty that much of what we must prize in loving any human person would not have existed in a world that did not contain much of the evil that has occurred in the history of the actual world. It is argued that the appropriate response to this fact must be some form of ambivalence, but that lovers have reason to prefer an ambivalence that contextualizes regretted evils in the framework of what we welcome in human life.

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Notes

  1. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Confessio Philosophi, edited with German translation and commentary by Otto Saame, (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), pp. 128–29. This passage from Leibniz, and the example of Helen Keller, discussed below, also figure in my paper, “Existence, Self-Interest, and the Problem of Evil,” Noûs, 13 (1979), reprinted in more definitive form as chapter 5 of Robert Merrihew Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). In that earlier paper, however, they are set in a framework focused much more on ethical issues about God and creating a world.

  2. The point of view from which I think about issues of counterfactual identity has been expounded in a series of papers: Adams, R. M. (1979). Primitive thisness and primitive identity. The Journal of Philosophy, 76, 5–26; Adams, R. M. (1981). Actualism and thisness. Synthese, 49, 3–41; Adams, R. M. (1986). Time and thisness. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 11, 315–329.

  3. The role of biological processes in this reasoning does not, in my opinion, depend on a materialist view of the constitution of human persons. I do not hold such a view, and am in fact much inclined to broadly idealist views of the nature of physical objects; but I am confident that the phenomena of the physiology of human reproduction correspond to important features of the causal nexus in which we came to be. I am indebted to Richard Swinburne for alerting me to the need for comment on this point.

  4. Woodward, J. (1986). The non-identity problem. Ethics, 96, 804–31, particularly pp. 822–24.

  5. Woodward, “The Non-Identity Problem,” p. 824.

  6. Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons (p. 373). Oxford: Clarendon.

  7. Woodward does not explain why this would be so, but we could suppose M’s parents would neither have married nor had children together had it not been for the death of a previous spouse of one of them, who was in fact killed by the Nazis.

  8. Woodward, “The Non-Identity Problem,” p. 824.

  9. Woodward (“The Non-Identity Problem,” p. 824) explicitly contrasts his verdict on his own example with what he (not implausibly) takes to be my conclusions in a paper (Adams, “Existence, Self-Interest, and the Problem of Evil”) in which my example was used. If I am more cautious now, that is partly because I have thought about Woodward’s paper [and also about Matthew Hanser, “Harming Future People,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 19, (1990): 47–70].

  10. Camus, A. (1957). The Rebel [L’homme révolté, translated by Anthony Bower] (p. 305). New York: Vintage Books.

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Correspondence to Robert Merrihew Adams.

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Adams, R.M. Love and the Problem of Evil. Philosophia 34, 243–251 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-006-9036-6

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