Abstract

Does God bring good out of evil? More specifically, does God defeat the suffering experienced by the victims of horrendous evils by making it the case that each victim's suffering contributes to some great good—a good that could not be obtained without such suffering, and that results in the victim enjoying greater total well-being than would be expected had no such evil occurred? Call the thesis that God does defeat evils in this way the defeat thesis. A commitment to the defeat thesis can be discerned in many prominent treatments of God's relation to evil. But the defeat thesis is subject to the following objection: If the defeat thesis is true, so that horrendous evils ultimately lead to greater total well-being for the victims than would be expected without such evils, then it is not the case that we should hope that our loved ones escape the experience of such evils; but when we are faced with the prospect of a loved one being afflicted by some horrendous evil, we clearly should hope that our loved one does not experience the evil; so the defeat thesis must be false. In this paper, I attempt to defend the defeat thesis against this objection. I do so by contending that the norms that govern hope and other related attitudes are “non-consequentialist.” Non-consequentialist “norms of hope” hold that in some situations, one should hope (for the sake of subject S) that some event occurs even though one knows that this would lead to S having less total well-being. If the correct norms of hope are non-consequentialist, then one can appropriately and reasonably hope that some horrendous evil does not occur (and appropriately grieve if it does) even while acknowledging that if an evil occurs, God will use the evil to bring about more well-being for the victim than there otherwise would have been.