THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM T. J. MAWSON University of Oxford Abstract. In this journal Steve Maitzen has recently advanced an argument for Atheism premised on Th eodical Individualism, the thesis that God would not permit people to suff er evils that were underserved, involuntary, and gratuitous for them. In this paper I advance reasons to think this premise mistaken. I. According to Jeff Jordan, 'Th eodical Individualism asserts that God permits human persons to suff er only if "the suff erings of any particular person are outweighed by the good which the suff ering produces for that person."' He suggests the view enjoys 'prominent support' amongst philosophers of religion. Amongst those whom he cites as supporters, Eleonore Stump has given Th eodical Individualism more precise shape in her claim, quoted by Jordan, that "if a good God allows evil, it can only be because the evil in question produces a benefi t for the suff erer and one that God could not produce without the suff ering."'1 I say 'more precise shape,' as Stump's formulation brings out the fact that one sort of suff ering the broader intuition behind Th eodical Individualism suggests 1 Jeff Jordan, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 56: 169-178, (2004), p. 171-172. Th e philosophers he cites in support are Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999): pp. 29-31; William Rowe, 'Th e Empirical Argument from Evil' in Rationality, Religious Belief, & Moral Commitment, pp. 244-245; Eleonore Stump, 'Providence and the Problem of Evil' in T. Flint, (ed.) Christian Philosophy, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990): pp. 65-68; and Michael Tooley, 'Th e Argument from Evil' in J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 5, Philosophy of Religion, (1991): pp. 110-111. Th e quotation from Stump comes from Eleonore Stump, 'Th e Problem of Evil' Faith and Philosophy 2(4) (1985), p. 411. EUROPEAN JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 3 (2011), PP. 139–159 140 T. J. MAWSON God will not allow is that which whilst benefi ting the suff erer more than it harms him or her is nevertheless gratuitous in the sense that the benefi t could have been achieved in another way. More recently, Stephen Maitzen, whilst dropping the notion of non-gratuity from his formulation, has still further specifi ed Th eodical Individualism with the claim that the category of suff ering which it requires God to avoid permitting is only that which is involuntary on the part of the suff erer. As he puts it, 'Necessarily, God permits undeserved, involuntary human suff ering only if such suff ering ultimately produces a net benefi t for the suff erer.'2 Maitzen makes his qualifi cation of the principle because he sees 'nothing wrong with the idea of God's permitting undeserved suff ering that people deliberately choose to endure for, say, the benefi t of others without gaining for themselves a net benefi t from it.'3 According to Maitzen then, God might allow undeserved suff ering that is genuinely gratuitous from the point of view of the individual undergoing it as long as it is voluntarily accepted by him or her and – one presumes4 Maitzen would insist – as long as it is voluntarily accepted for the good reason that it is not gratuitous sub specie aeternitatis. Such justifi ed evils then would be gratuitous vis a vis the individual undergoing them but non-gratuitous vis a vis the set of individuals of which the individual in question is a part. So, some evils ruled out by Jordan's/Stump's understanding of Th eodical Individualism would be allowed by Maitzen's. Th e Th eodicist will have an easier time of it if Maitzen is right. Is he? I think he is. Maitzen's concern to allow voluntariness to play this sort of role and thus deploy a more permissive version of Th eodical Individualism seems wise in the light of examples such as the following. Consider the case of a soldier in command of a platoon of men advancing through unsecured territory. Th e risks faced by the platoon as a whole would be minimised by his having one of his men walking quite a way out in front of the rest. By drawing any enemy fi re that's to be had, treading on any landmines that might be on the path, and so 2 Stephen Maitzen, 'Ordinary Morality Implies Atheism,' European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 1. 2, (2009), p. 108. 3 Maitzen, op. cit., p. 109. 4 Indeed email correspondence with Maitzen on the fi rst draft of this paper confi rms this presumption. 141THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM forth, this 'lead' soldier could reveal the whereabouts of risks prior to the rest of the platoon coming upon them. However, the role of lead soldier is one which, obviously, brings greater risks to the soldier occupying it than would fall on any individual soldier if the commander adopted the only alternative policy, having his men advance as a group. He explains all this to his men and one of them volunteers for the role. Being in full awareness of these facts, this man would, were the commander to take him up on his off er, be understandably more fearful as he advanced than he would be had the commander refused to accept his off er and they all advanced together. Even if in the end there were to turn out to be no enemy, landmines, and so forth and thus all the platoon arrived at their destination safely, that fear would be in itself an evil that the man in the lead position would have suff ered and we may stipulate that it wouldn't bring him any greater good that in any way compensated him for it and that he couldn't have achieved in any other way. (For example, we may stipulate that his fellow soldiers would not applaud him for his heroism, but rather ridicule him for it.) Still, it seems, the soldier is noble in off ering and the commander should accept his off er. Let us suppose that the commander does accept this soldier's off er and the platoon starts on its journey and let us further suppose that in fact there are enemy lying in wait ready to spring an ambush. Th ey act precipitously and shoot the lead soldier, thereby revealing their location; the rest of the platoon is thereby enabled to escape the ambush uninjured and reach their destination safely. Th e lead soldier's wound is painful, but he ultimately recovers from it. Th is soldier's suff ering this wound then, we may suggest, would be an evil of quite a high order, one that would be gratuitous vis a vis him qua individual, though it would have brought a high order of net good – saving the lives of many fellow soldiers – to the group of which he was a part. Nevertheless, even had the commander known infallibly in advance of needing to decide whether or not to accept this soldier's off er that this is what would befall him, surely he would not have been obliged to refuse the off er. Indeed, we might go further and say that surely this knowledge would have made it all the more true that he should have done as he did: accept it. In general, whenever the net benefi t that befalls the platoon outweighs the suff ering of the individual who volunteers for the lead soldier position and could not have been achieved in any other way, the volunteer is courageous – not foolhardy 142 T. J. MAWSON – in volunteering and the commander, to the extent that we presume him to know of such things, is obliged to avail himself, and the rest of his platoon, of this man's bravery. In the light of examples such as this, Maitzen seems right to qualify Th eodical Individualism as he does. If we bring these thoughts together, we may therefore give Th eodical Individualism a form which, whilst not being exactly that in which it has been supported by any of the authors of whom we've made mention, is more plausible than any we fi nd in their writings. I therefore defi ne Th eodical Individualism as the following thesis. Necessarily, God will not permit suff ering that is (a) undeserved; (b) involuntary; and (c) gratuitous vis a vis the individual suff ering it, in the sense that it either does not produce a net benefi t for that individual or, if it does produce a net benefi t for him or her, is unnecessary in producing that net benefi t.5 Th ere are a number of grounds on which one might have doubts about Th eodical Individualism even in this form and on which one might have doubts about other versions of it, such as Jordan's, Stump's and Maitzen's versions.6 Jordan and Maitzen give one of these grounds: combining it 5 Careful readers will note that I have dropped 'human' from this formulation too; I presume that any Martians who, whilst not human are signifi cantly similar to us in sentience, freedom, moral worth, and so on would, by Th eodical Individualism, be exempt from suff ering of this sort too. Th e same may not be true for non-human animals such as dogs. Nothing in this paper turns on these issues, so I leave them out of sight in the main text. Gellman points out in discussion that it might be that an evil was gratuitous in my sense, yet still very easily justifi able, through being a necessary condition of a great enough good, whilst not producing it. He uses the following example. 'Th ere could be cases (but not all!) where, for example, God allows a person to be sad so that another can make them very happy and cheer them up, stipulating that the cheer is so great that the person thinks it was very worthwhile to have been sad just to be so much cheered up! But of course the sadness does not produce the cheer but is only a necessary condition of it.' 6 Some of the more general considerations which one might raise about whether God might, aft er all, permit some gratuitous evils could be employed here. See e.g. William Hasker, 'Th e Necessity of Gratuitous Evil,' Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992), p. 44; and Michael Peterson, Evil and the Christian God (Grand Rapids, 1982), chs. 4 and 5. 143THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM (and things like it) with Th eism undermines 'commonsense morality.' Maitzen thinks Th eodical Individualism obviously true and thus uses this incompatibility with commonsense morality as an argument for Atheism. But someone who fi nds Th eism more plausible than Th eodical Individualism would – presuming that they judge the existence of the sorts of evils in question; their incompatibility with Th eodical Individualism; and the substance of commonsense morality as truths no less obvious than Maitzen judges them – simply run Maitzen's argument in reverse, taking him to have given them good reason to reject Th eodical Individualism.7 (Hasker uses a similar incompatibility as an argument for God's allowing gratuitous evils in general.)8 Th at's the direction in which I myself would incline to run Maitzen's argument.9 But, pushing 7 Jerome Gellman has recently replied to Maitzen's paper ('On God, Suff ering, and Th eodical Individualism,' European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 1 (2010), pp. 187-191), accepting Maitzen's Th eodical Individualism for the sake of argument, and challenging instead whether Maitzen's conclusion that 'we never have a moral obligation to prevent undeserved, involuntary human suff ering' (187) follows from it. He advances some powerful arguments to the eff ect that it does not (though see Maitzen's reply in the same issue). Everything said in the current paper is, I think, compatible with Gellman's argument; in other words, it may well be as Gellman suggests, viz. that even if one did grant Th eodical Individualism (which this paper suggests one should not do), one need not think that ordinary morality is threatened in the manner Maitzen and others would maintain (and in which I may seem to be supposing it is threatened in the main text). If that is so, then one doesn't have the 'running in reverse' reason to reject Th eodical Individualism that I suggest in the main text, though of course that's hardly a comfort for Maitzen. 8 Hasker, op. cit. 9 I recall that I had a similar response when fi rst reading Rowe's presentation of his evidential argument from evil. As is well known, Rowe gives a theological premise, that God wouldn't allow gratuitous evils, and a factual one, that there are gratuitous evils, and suggests that the second is the most controversial. He then spends his time in his paper defending the second premise, enthusing about a Moorean 'commonsense' approach, one which has as an element the propensity to run arguments in whichever direction preserves commonsense best, before concluding that (probably) God does not exist. When I fi rst read his paper, it was the fi rst – theological – premise that immediately struck me as the least obviously true, and I can remember being very surprised that he dealt with it in a few sentences. Th e theological premise is highly abstract, concerning how a perfectly morally good being – one signifi cantly diff erent from any of us in power and knowledge – would behave. It seemed far from obviously true to me, far less obviously true to me than at that stage Th eism seemed to me. Th us, in precisely the spirit of Moore that Rowe encouraged, I read his argument as giving me reason to reject that premise. 144 T. J. MAWSON those sorts of considerations to one side, one could have doubts about Th eodical Individualism based on grounds quite distant from any commitment to Th eism, and it is some of those which I'll explore in this paper: in short, my argument will be that no principle similar to Th eodical Individualism applies to us, so there is reason to think that Th eodical Individualism does not apply to God. II. Let us go back to the example of the commanding offi cer seeking to get his men through potentially hostile territory with the minimum of loss and let us alter the situation slightly by supposing that, aft er he has explained the situation to his platoon, nobody volunteers to be the lead soldier. Th at seems quite reasonable, aft er all; it seems to be – and can be made obviously so by suitable accretion of detail – above and beyond the call of duty for any individual to put themselves forward for this dangerous role and it seems obviously contrary to each individual's own best interests (ante-mortem at least) for them to put themselves forward. If that is so, perhaps it is even in violation of a duty to themselves, if such things exist, or at least in violation of the demands of prudence, for anyone to volunteer, in which case a peculiar sort of 'impasse' threatens: each individually is only rational if they fail to volunteer, but nobody volunteering would lead to the group as a whole suff ering more than any individual would suff er if he did volunteer. It seems obvious what the commanding offi cer should do: choose one soldier and order him to take the role. Of course there will be moral constraints operating on how the commanding offi cer chooses this soldier. Th ese constraints will forbid him, for example, from choosing Private Uriah Hittite just because he happens to fancy Mrs Hittite and considers his chances with her would be improved were her husband to take this role. But there are morally innocent ways of making this selection: I take it that, failing anything else, one of these would be to get his men to draw lots. Let us suppose then that the commanding offi cer chooses one of his soldiers by this or some other morally innocent method and orders him forward. He will then be subjecting that soldier to an evil, at least the evil of the heightened fear of death or serious injury that inevitably accompanies being out in front. 145THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM And indeed, whilst leaving verisimilitude in our suppositions as to the cognitive capacities of the commanding offi cer behind somewhat at this point, we can stipulate that the commanding offi cer will be subjecting this soldier to an evil of an infallibly-foreknown severe injury that will bring this individual soldier no net benefi t. If we do so stipulate, it becomes all the more starkly obvious that this evil is one that is (a) undeserved, (b) involuntary, and (c) fails to bring a net benefi t to the soldier concerned. Yet, as we make these stipulations it becomes no less obvious that the commanding offi cer should order a man forward. Sometimes indeed – most of us will think – it is a commanding offi cer's duty to send one or more of his soldiers to what he is sure will be painful death, in other words to subject them to the most extreme form of undeserved, involuntary, and gratuitous (for them) evil of which we know.10 And if all of this is so, then there are situations in which human agents are not under a moral constraint such as that which Th eodical Individualism suggests God is under, which in turn suggests that we need positive reason to suppose that God is constrained in this way. Th e 'default,' as it were, would be to assume that he is not. Maitzen does not consider counterexamples drawn from the realm of created agents to principles akin to Th eodical Individualism as undermining Th eodical Individualism11 for he thinks that created agents are only excused from conforming to principles akin to Th eodical Individualism in cases in which they are excused due to limitations of the sort that God would not suff er from. In the case we are imagining, for example, it seems very plausible that it is indeed a metaphysically contingent limitation on the commanding offi cer that excuses him from conforming to a principle akin to Th eodical Individualism. Were the commanding offi cer to be able simply to click his fi ngers and thereby magically transport his platoon safely to their destination, obviously he 10 I have just returned from a short holiday in France and, whilst passing through Normandy, read on an information board beside the burnt-out Sherman tank in Ecouche the words of an Allied commanding offi cer to some of his men just before they went into battle: 'Between you and this nation lies a huge chasm. It is up to you to fi ll that chasm with your corpses.' History does not record whether they found this speech inspiring. 11 I say 'akin to' as Th eodical Individualism, by defi nition, applies only to God. If we are either to support or undermine it, we need to draw from examples of principles that are only 'akin to' it, in applying to created moral agents. 146 T. J. MAWSON should do that and not subject any soldier – volunteer or otherwise – to the risks attendant upon being lead soldier. Maitzen himself considers the example of quarantine and puts the point like this: 'Th ese practices refl ect our imperfection: it's only limitations in our knowledge and power (in this case, medical) that make us resort to triage or quarantine. We regret having to do it; we wish we had the resources to make these practices unnecessary. A perfect God, however, isn't subject to our limitations in knowledge or power, or indeed to any real limitations in knowledge or power. So no perfect God has an excuse for exploitation ['exploitation' is Maitzen's term for violating a principle such as Th eodical Individualism].'12 It seems then that Maitzen is willing to accept the general point that being unable to bring about some net good for a wider group without violating something akin to a Th eodical Individualist constraint liberates one from such a constraint, sometimes at least. But if that general point is granted, then we cannot conclude that Th eodical Individualism is true – that God is under such a constraint – until we know that there are no logical or metaphysical necessities which prevent him being able to bring about some net good for a wider group without violating Th eodical Individualism. Sure, the constraint cannot be a metaphysically or logically contingent one, as it is in the case of the commanding offi cer, but that is no comfort for the defender of Th eodical Individualism. For it is very plausible to suggest that there are metaphysical necessities of the sort that would liberate God. I have argued elsewhere (and I am hardly unique in doing so) that it is metaphysically impossible to create any set of libertarian signifi cantly free creatures whose membership is greater than one whilst necessitating that they do not choose to subject one another to evils that are genuinely gratuitous.13 (Th ere is an easy way of getting this result: defi ne signifi cant freedom in such a way that it requires of those who are signifi cantly free that they can subject others 12 Stephen Maitzen, 'Does God destroy our duty of Compassion?,' Free Inquiry, October/November (2010), p. 52. 13 T. J. Mawson, Belief in God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 198ff . Th is isn't, note, the 'hoary suggestion' Maitzen speaks of in his reply to Gellman ('On Gellman's Attempted Rescue,' EJPR 1 (2010), 1, 198), that God never interferes with our libertarian free will; that, obviously, would be too extreme a view. Th e view that is much more plausible and suffi ces here is that God sometimes rightly chooses to preserve the good of libertarian free will even when that free will is being used for bad ends. 147THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM to such evils; any lesser degree of freedom just wouldn't be signifi cant.) If moves of this sort are viable, then one has got reason to suppose that God is liberated from needing to conform to Th eodical Individualism.14 Th is is a point to which we shall have occasion to return later. So far my argument has rested heavily on an example, which – in not being of someone facing a logical or metaphysical impossibility – is not a perfect analogue for the situation in which God plausibly fi nds himself. It may also be objected to it that there are other issues in the background to my primary example which mislead us. For example, we have not yet specifi ed that the soldiers were not volunteers for the army, even if not volunteers for the particular role of lead soldier. If they had volunteered for the army, then plausibly they would have done so knowing that a situation in which they'd then be commanded to take on extra personal suff ering for the good of their comrades would be relatively likely to befall them. (Th at's the nature of army life, indeed corporate life in general.) We may suggest then that there is a sort of 'second-order' voluntariness in play in the example, one which allows the commanding offi cer to order one of them to take on the role of lead soldier. But we can stipulate otherwise – they are all conscripts – and we fi nd our moral intuitions unaff ected by such stipulations. Matters are similar for other features that might be supposed to be disanalogous and morally relevant; we can stipulate them away in our imagination and our intuitions that the commanding offi cer should violate a principle akin to that of Th eodical Individualism remain strong. We have already been doing this by positing that the commanding offi cer has infallible knowledge of what will happen to the lead soldier – a serious injury – rather than just knowledge of probabilities. Such stipulating away seems to make no diff erence to our moral intuitions. It is true that the soldier's constraints will remain contingent ones, but it is that they are constraints not that they are contingent constraints that liberates him from needing 14 It may be that one's starting point with God – as the most perfect being possible – should always be that there is not a limitation of a particular sort, but, even so, precisely as he is the most perfect being possible, impossibilities of a logical or metaphysical sort can impose limitations even on him. Such is the case I am suggesting here – or rather, as to articulate the reasons would require a whole new paper, such is something which we cannot assume is not the case, and we'd need to assume that it was not for Th eodical Individualism to apply. 148 T. J. MAWSON to accord with any principle akin to Th eodical Individualism. But I admit there are 'ineliminable' weaknesses to the analogy. As I have conceded, the relevant constraints are, aft er all, not ones of logical or metaphysical impossibility (they do just stem from his being unable to magic his platoon to their fi nal destination – even the fact that he cannot make a soldier freely volunteer, which is a metaphysical constraint, is only cogent given that he's in the situation where he needs a volunteer). Other wrinkles could be ironed out by further epicycles of this example, but, rather than do that, I shall turn to an analogy even better for our purposes in thinking about the case of God, better in that it is a case where volunteering is more deeply impossible. III. Let us consider two potential parents deciding whether or not to have a child. It seems easy to specify things – e.g. that having a child would not be fi nancially ruinous for this particular couple or prevent them from fulfi lling their other obligations – so as to generate in our imaginations a situation in which the couple in question are neither obliged to have a child, nor obliged not to do so. We probably think that in fact most couples weighing whether or not to have children are not morally obliged in either direction. What is more, we can construct the situation so that we balance off all other goods in ways such that it will be neither overall good nor overall bad by any evaluative criterion for them either to have a child or to refrain from doing so. For example, we may stipulate that their circumstances are such that if they do not have a child, they will have more free time and money to pursue their other pastimes, pastimes which we may stipulate will then bring them exactly the same pleasure as having a child would have brought them. And so forth. Of course we may be worried, especially those of us who have had children, that this second sort of balancing off will be psychologically implausible for the vast majority of humanity, but the important point for our discussion is that it is that sort of worry that stops us from thinking that cases where there are no reasons on balance either to have or to fail to have a child are widespread. It is not the sort of worry I am about to outline, one that would be based on our endorsing a principle akin to Th eodical Individualism. 149THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM Every child born into this world is one whom the parents can be almost certain will suff er evils that are undeserved, involuntary, and gratuitous at the very least vis a vis the individual. (A prime example of such a widespread evil would be bullying, which almost every child suff ers from at some stage in his or her life.) It is very plausible to suppose when contemplating whether or not to have children that any child born will be such as to suff er evils of this sort – ones that are undeserved, involuntary and gratuitous vis a vis the child. But, even so, we do not think that we are thereby more or less universally placed under an obligation not to have children. We then are not under a constraint akin to the Th eodical Individualist one when it comes to our acts of procreation. Why think that God would be under such a constraint when it came to his act of creation? I can't think of any reason. Th e problem with defending any variant of Th eodical Individualism seems to me to lie in the fact that in some cases it just is obviously permissible (parents), indeed in some cases it is obviously obligatory (commanding offi cers), for people to subject other people to undeserved and involuntary suff ering which is gratuitous vis a vis the individual. Clear cases are those where that suff ering is known to be non-gratuitous vis a vis some larger group and relatively small in comparison to the benefi ts that befall that larger group as a result and that could not have been achieved in any other way. Th e 'could not have been be achieved in any other way' is – for created agents – oft en in part a result of limitations that they suff er from and which God would not suff er from, e.g. being unable to magic soldiers over potentially hostile territory by clicking one's fi ngers. But if the 'could not' was generated by a logical or metaphysical impossibility, e.g. being unable to force a particular soldier to volunteer, for volunteering needs to be done freely in a libertarian sense, that does not seem to alter its cogency: it is still a 'could not' that may liberate one from needing to accord with a principle akin to Th eodical lndividualism. In cases where the suff ering is known to be non-gratuitous vis a vis some larger group, such suff erers will then perhaps15 be being used by whomever subjects them to the suff ering as means to an end, but, even if so, they need not be used merely as means to an end, i.e. used as means 15 I say 'perhaps' as it may be that the relevant suff ering is foreseen but unintended in the mind of the person subjecting them to it, which perhaps stops them using the other even as a means. 150 T. J. MAWSON in a way which is morally problematic. (We all think it is permissible to use people as means. E.g. when phoning one's credit card company, one uses whomever – eventually – picks up the phone as a means to the end of rectifying their latest error. What is not permissible is using someone merely as a means, e.g. venting one's anger on that hapless employee for the failings of some unidentifi able co-worker by swearing at him or her.) One way in which one can avoid using people merely as means, i.e. as means in a way that is morally impermissible, is by those people volunteering for the role of means in advance of being put in it (thus, the cases on which Maitzen focuses). But that – it seems to me – is only one way. Consider the following situation. A couple's fi rst child suff ers from a disease which is such that he needs a bone marrow donation if he is to survive into adulthood; otherwise, he will die a premature and painful death. Th e only sort of person who could be, even in principle, a suitable donor would be another child born to the same parents, though any other child conceived by them would be suitable for being a donor. Th e process of donating bone marrow is a painful one for the donor and would have to be undergone by the donor child within a few months of his or her birth for the marrow to be suitable for transfer into the fi rst child. Th e parents had been considering having another child anyway and had found all other considerations, pro and con, balanced against one another. Th ey now know that if they have a second child, he or she could be valuable as a means to the end of healing their fi rst child. Is it morally permissible for them to add this reason into the balance in their thinking? Is it even obligatory for them to do so?16 In my experience, intuitions diff er on these questions. Personally, I think that the situation can be fi lled out in such a way that it becomes very plausibly obligatory on the parents to try to conceive another child. 16 If you think that any consideration of how the second child could be a means to some good end for the fi rst child is morally impermissible, then you should in consistency think that parents who know that if they have children past the fi rst, these subsequent children will provide playmates for the fi rst act impermissibly when they bear that in mind in deciding whether or not to have subsequent children. But that seems absurd. In most non-Western cultures, the idea that it was morally impermissible to consider, when deciding how many children to have, how one's children might help one in one's old age would strike people as equally absurd. 151THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM But what is less controversial and suffi cient for our present purposes is that it be at the least permissible for them to have a second child in part so as to be able to use this second child as a means to the end of saving the life of their fi rst. Let us add in some further details to suggest this then. Th e parents know that they will love this second child for his or her own self, not merely as a means to the end of saving their fi rst child. Th ey know that, acting from their love (and being fortunately circumstanced in other ways), they can and will give this second child a life that is much better than simply overall good; they will give the second child a superfl uity of goods in the widest sense of 'goods.' Th ese goods will be such that they more than provide adequate compensation for the pain that the child would undergo during the operation, which is to say that they'll be such that were the child to have been presented with the choice of no operation but none of these goods or this amount of suff ering plus these goods in advance of being subjected to the operation (as was of course impossible), he or she would have been acting against his or her own self-interest if he or she had not chosen to undergo the operation. Of course they intend to subject this second child to a painful operation at a stage in the child's life where it cannot understand what is happening to it; the suff ering they intend knowingly to bring on the child17 will be undeserved, involuntary, and bring the child suff ering it no benefi t at all (the goods they later give it – those which are in fact more than adequate compensation – they do not give just because they are compensation; they give them unconditionally, because they love this second child and are able to give him or her these goods; so the second child would have got these goods anyway). But the parents intend, when the second child is old enough to understand, to explain why it is they allowed him or her to be subjected to this suff ering. And we may posit that the parents know that this point of time will more or less coincide with one from which the child, looking back, can see that he or she has a life which is overall more than merely good; by that time enough of those compensating goods will have been given to him or her (though, as just mentioned, not given to him or her just because they compensate 17 Again it is a 'nice question' whether they intend the suff ering or merely foresee it as an inescapable feature of what they do intend and whether this makes a diff erence. 152 T. J. MAWSON for his or her earlier suff ering), for him or her retrospectively to endorse his or her parents' decision to use him or her so as to benefi t the brother who by then he or she will love every bit as much as the parents do. It seems to me that it is at the least permissible for parents of whom all of this is true to have the second child in part for the reason that he or she will be able to benefi t the fi rst; this is so even though the benefi t which the second child provides to the fi rst is not necessary for that second child to achieve some net benefi t – the goods which, as it is, if the parents do subject the second child to the operation, may be spoken of as more than adequate compensation, would have come to him or her had the parents conceived him or her but then decided not to subject him or her to the operation necessary to save his or her sibling's life (though they would not then have come to him or her as compensation). Th us, parents who knew they were in such a situation would not be required to avoid subjecting an individual, the second child, to suff ering that is (a) undeserved by the individual undergoing it, (b) involuntary for that individual (at least at the time he or she undergoes it), and (c) gratuitous vis a vis that individual. Th us, a fortiori given that God would know with all the more certainty in virtue of his omniscience that he was in a similar situation were he ever to be so, we cannot conclude that God is required to avoid subjecting an individual to suff ering that is (a) undeserved by the individual undergoing it, (b) involuntary for that individual (at least ante-mortem), and (c) gratuitous vis a vis that individual. Th ere may well be some goods which can of metaphysical necessity only be achieved by subjecting individuals to suff ering of this sort and which are good enough to justify God in doing so.18 Maitzen considers by contrast the following case: 'Imagine that I clone a child into existence . . . and imagine that I treat the child splendidly for all but the fi nal minute of his or her life. But during that fi nal minute, I allow someone to abuse the child to death in order to show onlookers just how revolting child abuse is and thereby deter them from ever abusing a child . . . . I behave imperfectly, to say the least'19 Here, Maitzen is surely right; it would be impermissible for one to use one's clone in this fashion. 18 As already mentioned, I discuss this further in my Belief in God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 198ff . 19 Maitzen, 'Does God destroy our duty of Compassion?,' p. 53. 153THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM However, I would suggest that something along the lines of Maitzen's cloning case might be morally permissible. It seems to me that for such exploitation, to use Maitzen's term, to be morally permissible, it would need to involve oneself (as exploiter) having knowledge of the fact that the exploited will volunteer (even if only retrospectively [which point may only be reached post-mortem in the case of God, of course] and only aft er compensation has been paid to him or her [which point again might be only post-mortem for God]) to be exploited in this way. In addition, it seems to me that it would need to involve oneself having the ability and intention to provide that compensation (and knowledge of the fact that one will provide it [again, this might be post-mortem for God]). Maitzen's case doesn't meet these conditions. But cases along the lines of Maitzen's where created agents meet these conditions can be constructed, even if, in constructing such cases, one has to stipulate – somewhat implausibly – that the participants have been given knowledge of a higher degree of certainty than we usually have. And I don't have the same response to them as to Maitzen's. Suppose, for example, you generate a clone in the manner Maitzen suggests. It now transpires that you could allow this clone, whilst a child, to be used in the horrible way Maitzen mentions; he would be tortured severely (albeit not to death) so as to make the point about how bad it is to torture children more vividly than it would be possible to make that point in any other way. Suppose further that you know that net good of a high order can only come from your making this point this vividly. But you also know that this high-order good will come from your making this point this vividly. We may posit, for example, that you know that if and only if you do so exploit your child, will it be that three other children will not be tortured to death (and tortured in an equally painful way). Th is then is to posit that you know that the torture will be non-gratuitous from this wider perspective. Finally, you know that you'll thereaft er – when your child grows up into adulthood – be able to explain to him why you had to use him in this way if you were to bring about this high order of net good; and you know you'll by then have given him what he regards as compensation (i.e. goods which he'll rightly judge outweigh in goodness the badness of what he suff ered), so that his life is overall a good to him (though the torture segment of it wasn't of course; it was genuinely gratuitous vis a vis himself). It seems to me that in such a circumstance it would be morally permissible for you 154 T. J. MAWSON to exploit your clone in Maitzen's sense.20 In fact, my intuitions suggest that it would be obligatory, but I shall not push that stronger claim for it is unnecessary in this context. In correspondence Maitzen suggests that we ask ourselves when considering such cases the following question; "In ideal circumstances, would we use the means that these agents are using?" [and suggests that] the answer is "No, but these agents aren't in ideal circumstances.'" He says that he would 'need to be convinced that God also faces unavoidably non-ideal circumstances, and for reasons I give in the original article I don't think that the libertarian freedom theodicy is convincing on that score.' However, were the 'non-ideal' circumstances that God was in circumstances of logical/metaphysical necessity, then there would be no more ideal circumstance even possible. Th us again we may return to the point that we cannot conclude that Th eodical Individualism is true – that God's under such a constraint – until we know that there are no logical or metaphysical necessities which prevent him being able to bring about some net good for a wider group without violating Th eodical Individualism, a modality of a diff erent order – not just some physical impossibility, for example, but a metaphysical one – but one that nevertheless places him in a situation akin to his only being able to stop three children being tortured to death by allowing one to be tortured severely. And it is very plausible that there are metaphysical necessities of this sort. For, as already mentioned, it is very plausible to suggest that it is metaphysically impossible to create any set of libertarian signifi cantly free creatures whose membership is greater than one whilst necessitating that they do not choose to subject one another to evils that are genuinely gratuitous and that libertarian signifi cant freedom is a signifi cant good. In this connection it is helpful to look at Alston's position as discussed in a footnote to Maitzen's original article and described by Maitzen there as 'a bit complicated.'21 Maitzen suggests that Alston's view involves 'a combination of willingly borne undeserved suff ering and adequately 20 Interestingly, Gellman reports that his intuitions are precisely the reverse. One might say that one thing is for sure then: supposing various charitable things about the virtues of Gellman, Maitzen, Swinburne, and myself, intuitions in this area are not reliable. Even if that were so, it would obviously be of no help to Maitzen-type arguments, as they rely on our intuitions being reliable. 21 Maitzen, 'Ordinary Morality Implies Atheism,' p. 109. 155THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM compensated undeserved suff ering. Because the suff ering willingly bears her suff ering (at least retrospectively), I don't believe that Alson's position confl icts with TI [Th eodical Individualism] as formulated here.' So, it seems that Maitzen would count any suff ering which in some postmortem state is 'retrospectively willingly borne' as being voluntarily assented to and thus not a sort of suff ering which God is, via Th eodical Individualism, compelled to avoid anyone suff ering. Maitzen's seems like an odd use of the notion of voluntariness to me. In the case of a second child being conceived so as to be able to save a fi rst, the fact that the second child will at some later stage 'retrospectively willingly bear' the suff ering that accompanies the operation by which he or she saved his or her sibling's life does not make the suff ering that the second child undergoes at the time of that operation any more voluntary. I would incline then to say that suff ering that is not voluntarily assented to at the time it is suff ered is not voluntary. Some of it may yet not be strictly involuntary (if we take involuntary to be contrary to the will), for it may be simply non-voluntary in that it is so minor that the person suff ering it doesn't form a will to avoid it. But some of it will be genuinely involuntary at the time in that it will be contrary to a formed will at that time; it stays an instance of genuinely involuntary suff ering even if in retrospect one 'willingly' bears it. However, I would maintain, contra Maitzen I take it, that at least the sort of involuntary suff ering that is later voluntarily consented to rationally is morally justifi able. And I'd have read Alston as suggesting something along these lines too. If we do stick with Maitzen's extended notion of 'voluntary,' such that something is voluntary just if it is at some stage (any stage, however fl eetingly? / in a 'fi nal analysis'/ at an all-things-considered stage?) voluntarily consented to, then it becomes obvious that we are never (prior to the Eschaton that is) in a position to judge that the world does contain instances of suff ering that are involuntary. For any instance of suff ering to be involuntary, on Th eism it'd have to be the case that at the end of time it wasn't 'retrospectively willingly borne' by its resurrected bearer and who would wish to suggest we can see this fact with any clarity? Indeed, a Universalist about salvation might contend that on Th eism we know in advance that there will be no cases of involuntary suff ering in this sense.22 And this would be a result 22 As I put it elsewhere, 'On Th eism, as we have seen [I have previously argued 156 T. J. MAWSON very undesirable from Maitzen's point of view as he requires it to be the case that instances of suff ering of the sort Th eodical Individualism rules out do indeed knowably occur. Maitzen's argument then is at that stage best served by the sense of voluntariness that I prefer, where it is suffi cient for something to be involuntary that it is unwillingly borne – in the sense of contrary to the will – at the time it is borne (and which hence enables us defi nitely to know that some instances of suff ering are involuntary prior to the Eschaton). However, what this gives Maitzen's argument with one hand it takes away with the other, in that it is then – I would contend – not at all obvious that underserved involuntary suff ering of the sort that brings the suff erer no net benefi t is always impermissible, as Th eodical Individualism suggests. Indeed, cases of commanding offi cers choosing one of their soldiers for roles that result in their severe injury or death; parents having children; parents having children in part so as to use those children as means to other worthy ends; and so on, suggest to me that we are sometimes obligated to subject individuals to suff ering that is undeserved, involuntary and brings the individual concerned no net benefi t (indeed sometimes no benefi t at all, other perhaps than the dubious 'benefi t of being of benefi t to someone else'). In order to drive the moral home, I want to labour a little bit more a variation of the thought experiment concerning parents deciding whether or not to have a second child in part to save the life of their fi rst. Let us suppose then that the parents conceive a second child in part with the intention of using this second child so as to be able to save their fi rst. And they give birth to a healthy girl, someone who would be a suitable donor. However, when the time comes, the parents choose not to go through with subjecting the girl, the second child, to the operation. Perhaps they are impressed by the fact that they cannot get her voluntary assent to the procedure in advance of subjecting her to it and think that this disbars them from subjecting her to it. So it is that the two Th eism entails Universalism], aft er our fi nite lives here an infi nite life awaits us hereaft er. For every creature who suff ers, there will come a day when they say that as individuals their suff ering has been more than adequately compensated for and on which they will be able to see how their suff ering fi tted into a greater whole that was overall worth it. On that day, even those who were broken on the wheels of the machine as they turned will thank God for it.' Th at, I take it, is their 'retrospectively willingly bearing it'. T. J. Mawson, Belief in God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 215. 157THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM siblings grow up together, the fi rst in increasingly bad health, the second receiving all the goods that would have come to her had she undergone the operation and then would have been in part truly described as compensating goods. Th e second child is thus the net benefi ter – she didn't in the end have to undergo the suff ering of the operation and she has a life which is in all other respects as good as she'd have had if she'd had the operation. Th e fi rst child is obviously the net loser and a net loser by a larger amount than the second child benefi ts – he dies an early and painful death. As the boy heads towards his premature and painful death, the parents explain to the girl how it is that she would have been able to save her brother had she been operated on at an earlier stage and they explain how it is that they chose not to subject her to such an operation and how it is that it is now too late for any such operation to be eff ective; they must just all watch this fi rst child die. In such a case, it seems to me that the second child could truly say to the parents that they had failed in their duty to the fi rst child. But, what is more, it also seems to me that the second child could maintain that the parents had failed in their duty to her. Th e parents ought to have subjected the second child to the operation for the fi rst child's sake in part because the second child had a right to be of use to her brother, which right the parents have not dutifully honoured and, in not dutifully honouring it, they have wronged the second child. At the time the decision had to be made, the second child was too young to know about it, so only the parents could have made it the case that she would save her sibling's life; the parents denied the second child the honour of saving her sibling's life and thus as well as wronging the fi rst child the parents have wronged the second child. Th is is perhaps slightly puzzling. How can the parents have wronged the second child by failing to impose upon her an evil that in itself would bring her no benefi t? One way of resolving this puzzlement would be to acknowledge that the very fact of being of value to someone else (at least signifi cant value to someone one loves) is itself a benefi t to the person who is of value. Swinburne speaks in this vein more generally of the benefi t of 'being of use' and it may be that one characterizes this situation best by saying that in this case a benefi t of being of use would have been so great for the second child as to make the second child actually – contrary to our supposition in setting the situation out – a net benefi ter from her undergoing the 158 T. J. MAWSON operation. Be that as it may, we can see, I suggest, that sometimes one actually honours an individual more by doing that which brings them no benefi t (other than the 'benefi t of being a benefi t to somebody else,' if we may speak of such) and certainly no net benefi t, and that sometimes people would have more to complain of on their own behalves were one not to so honour them, even in situations where they would be the net benefi ters of one's not so honouring them. IV. In conclusion, examples of situations which, even if not everyday, are ones the elements of which are hardly beyond the bounds of our experience suggest that agents may, without deviating from morality's demands, permit or indeed knowingly cause suff ering that is (a) undeserved by the individual undergoing it, (b) involuntary for that individual (at the time it is being suff ered), and (c) gratuitous vis a vis that individual. Th e examples concern created agents, agents then who – by the nature of the case – will be under limitations that God is not under and it is oft en plausible that they are justifi ed in behaving as they do only because they are under these limitations. However, God's omnipotence is not usually thought of as allowing him to do the logically or metaphysically impossible, so 'limitations' (the word now needs scare quotation marks as these are not really limitations at all) arising from these areas would similarly mean that he was not morally constrained in the way Th eodical Individualism suggests. Th at is to say that, contrary to Th eodical Individualism, God may well permit suff ering that is (a) undeserved by the individual undergoing it, (b) involuntary for that individual (at least ante-mortem), and (c) gratuitous vis a vis that individual. A clear case of permissible suff ering that meets these conditions would be one where the suff ering, whilst undeserved by the individual undergoing it, would nevertheless be one that it would be rational for the individual to acquiesce to (even if only post-mortem, aft er adequate compensation had been provided to him or her and the place of this suff ering in a wider scheme of things that was overall good and in which it was not gratuitous had been made clear). From that post-mortem vantage point, the suff erer might regard his or her being subjected to this suff ering as an honour in the way 159THEODICAL INDIVIDUALISM that it is an honour to be chosen to lead one's platoon through enemy territory or to undergo a painful operation that saves one's brother's life, even if such honours might not be capable of being regarded as such ante-mortem. Even if the suff erer did not regard the suff ering as being a 'benefi t' (the benefi t of being of benefi t to someone else) which outweighed the suff ering and thus did regard it as something that he or she would have net-benefi tted from God's having prevented, the suff erer may, in consistency with this judgement, regard it as something which God would have wronged him or her in preventing, for honour is more important than maximal benefi t in such cases. We all recognise the childish error of the 'Whoever dies with the most toys wins' approach to life. What I am suggesting is that it may be as erroneous to suggest that 'Whoever has maximal goods over his or her total (anteand post-mortem) life has done best.' (Were that to be so, then perhaps a person who received less goods than he or she could have got would have a cause for complaint against any person who could have arranged for him or her to get more.) But if what makes a life go well for the person living it is in part that they be of use to others, a life in which they are so of use – even if by being of use they are not the net benefi ter – could be a better life for them than the alternative and they'd then have more reason for complaint if someone denied them the opportunity to be so of use so as to maximise their goods. Sometimes at least, having the honour of being of use makes one's life better for oneself than it would have been had one got the greater goods that one would otherwise have received at the expense of being of use. Th us Th eodical Individualism is false and any arguments which utilize it are unsound.23 23 I am grateful to Steve Maitzen for his comments on a draft of his paper and for his discussion of various wider issues, not all of which I have been able to address in the fi nal version of it. I am also grateful for the comments of Jerome Gellman and Richard Swinburne on the penultimate draft .