Rope, it is not altogether clear what parts of your article you are covering by your points A-C. I will therefore barrel ahead on my best guess.
Does that mean categories such as suffering due to predation, etc? If so, I am not at all sure that they make a difference. Yes, predation is necessary both to ensuremaintain average fitness and to prevent overpopulation, but that does not make it a “good” thing. Similarly, if a scientist discovered a process whereby killing one in ten people would ensure that the remaining nine would lead healthier lives, it would not be considered moral to use the process.
This appears to be the issue I was covering under “the lives of individual animals, on average, contains more good thing than bad”.
The problem being that the support for this you present appears to be (i) more by assertion than by evidence, and (ii) by writers who, although famous, do not seem to have any subject-matter expertise on the issue of animal life-cycles and suffering. E.g:
Here and elsewhere, Augustine seems to assume that the existence of mortal animals is a good thing, and that animal death is an intended part of God’s good creation.
While Paley’s picture of nature as a “happy world” has been ridiculed, he did acknowledge the existence of predation, suffering, death and disease. But he believed the good in nature outweighs the bad, and thus provides us with powerful evidence of the Creator’s goodness.
This would appear to be relating to the follow paragraph:
Nevertheless, Seachris and Zagzebski go on to argue that behind Lewis’s argument is the plausible “principle of repeatable reasons”: “If person A has a sufficient justifying reason to permit p in situation s, then A has a sufficient justifying reason to permit states of affairs relevantly similar to p in situations relevantly similar to s.” For example, if a nurse has the right to cause pain when vaccinating one person, it is likely that the nurse’s justifying reasons will be repeatable with another person, and then an- other, and then yet further to millions—as long as the cases are sufficiently similar. These additional cases of vaccination provide no increase in the severity of the nurse’s moral conduct. Similarly, if God has the right to allow one living being to suffer amount X, then why not two? Why not a million or a billion?
I’m sorry, but I see no similarity. A “right” is not a “reason” (nor a “reason” a “right”), let alone a “sufficient justifying reason”. I may have a “right to $10,000” in the form of that amount in a bank account in my name. I may have a “reason to spend $10,000” in the form of a large medical bill for that amount. Neither entails the other.
Additionally, although I have had God’s absolute right over to his creation asserted to me, generally by a theist who is shocked that I didn’t accept this as self-evident, this argument has never remotely convinced me.
Yes, I saw ‘The Problem of Evil for Atheists’ referenced in your article, and read it yesterday. I’m afraid that I was hard-pressed to find any substantial points of agreement with his claims.
The core of the problem is the apparent incompatibility between the following two points: (i) the scientific fact that our existence depends fundamentally on a violent, cruel, and unfair biological system which guarantees pain and suffering for many people and other sentient animals; and (ii) existential optimism, according to which the world is overall a good place and we should be grateful for our existence in it.
I’m afraid I see no incompatibility, as I see humanity (including myself) as often contradictory and irrational. Particularly, observed “existential optimism” can be explained by the fact that mentally-healthy people are, on average, slightly irrationally optimistic – depressed people have been found to have more realistic expectations.
Holding (ii) while acknowledging (i) is like expressing our happiness about and gratitude for living with smiley faces while, at the same time, recognizing that we are standing on the corpses of countless people and sentient animals that have died painfully and miserably, allowing us to survive. The quantity and quality of the costs that these people and animals had to pay for our survival seem unjustifiably high.
I likewise see no ‘likeness’ here. The start of life was billions of years ago, a timespan too enormous for me to feel any personal tie to it. What happened thereafter was broadly inevitable, whether it contingently led to my existence, or to that of a self-aware parrot named ‘Jim’. I had no more choice in my existence than Jim had in his non-existence. I feel no more moral culpability for this than I feel the need to apologise to Jim for his non-existence, or to the dinosaurs for being wiped out to allow for the rise of mammals. Likewise, my ceasing to exist would seem to right no moral wrong, so I cannot see my existence as “morally wrong”.
