The problem of evil and too much freedom

Even if there is free will, using it to justify evil arguably gets the moral weights wrong

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1. The Problem of Evil and the Existence of God

There is a good deal of suffering in the world: war, famine, disease, rape, drought, the Holocaust, hurricanes, the Crusades, terrorist attacks, etc. Some people suffer horribly, others don’t, and it seems you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it. This is precisely what you would expect if, underneath it all, the universe were just indifferent.

This suffering poses a serious problem for the belief that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly benevolent God. The problem might be stated as follows: if God can do anything, and He has perfect love for us, then why would He allow such suffering? Imagine someone who claims to love their children, but constantly neglects them—e.g., they’re never home, their children are always hungry, etc. One would rightly be skeptical that they cared for their children at all. This is because it looks like they don’t actually care. So too with God: it seems that with all the suffering in the world, there couldn’t be any such person as God. If there were a God who could do anything and loved us perfectly, He would have prevented this suffering. For centuries, philosophers have grappled with this problem. It’s called the problem of evil.

The problem of evil is perhaps the most popular atheistic argument in the history of philosophy. It can be stated as:

If there were an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly benevolent God, He would have eliminated or prevented the tremendous amount of suffering in the world. However, it’s obvious that He hasn’t eliminated or prevented the amounts and kinds of suffering around us. If He had, we wouldn’t observe it. Thus, there isn’t a God who is all-powerful, etc.

Why would a loving God allow such suffering? The Holocaust is a prime example of the problem of evil. If there is a God who allows incredibly horrendous suffering, He must either lack the capacity to prevent or stop it, or He is not perfectly benevolent. But if there is a God, He must have all of those qualities essentially. Thus, there can be no such individual as God. There should be no doubt that this argument poses a significant obstacle to belief in God.

2. The Free-Will Defense

There is a response to the problem of evil that is, undoubtedly, the most popular among theists and their defenders. It is wisely known as the Free-Will Defense.

The free-will defense is a popular approach to reconciling suffering and the existence of God. This is so for several reasons. First, it shifts the blame for evil—at least in some cases—onto those who act freely to bring about suffering. If Bob freely chooses to kill his wife, it would be unfair to put blame for his actions onto God, when Bob freely chose to do what he did. Second, freedom is valuable independently of how it’s used. If people occasionally choose to do bad things, this is supposedly morally outweighed by the moral good of people choosing to do the right thing—of having the opportunity to choose, while having the capacity to cause suffering. Consider the following example:

Suppose Jones has suffered a series of financial setbacks. He is so bad off financially that he considers robbing his local bank. After thinking about it, he decides against it.

Surely, Jones deserves moral praise for his decision not to rob the bank, in part because he chose not to rob the bank. If he had already been biologically programmed to do the right thing, there would be no good reason to praise him. For instance, we don’t think Chevy trucks deserve moral praise for not robbing banks. That’s just because they aren’t the sort of thing that could choose to rob a bank. On the other hand, we do think people are the sort of creatures who deserve moral praise—at least in certain contexts (e.g., when they’re in a desperate financial situation)—for choosing not to rob a bank. Now consider a similar example:

Suppose Smith finds himself in a desperate financial situation. He thinks about robbing a bank and decides to go through with it. But just as he makes this decision, a device installed in his brain prevents him from doing anything wrong.

Clearly, Jones deserves moral praise, but Smith does not—even though neither of them robbed the bank. The difference is this: Jones might have freely robbed the bank, while Smith could not have. That is, it was impossible for Smith to choose to rob the bank (no matter what he did, the device would have prevented him). Simply put, we praise people—not robots—for a good reason. The former have free will (i.e., they choose to do the good, rather than the bad, freely), while the latter do not. Call this the value of choice.

Theists who use the free-will defense as an explanation for why God would allow much of the evil we see around us are implicitly relying on the value of choice. The rationale goes as follows: If God allows suffering, it must be because there are greater moral goods that could only be had if we allow certain kinds of evils. For instance, if there’s never any danger, then there’s no way anyone could exhibit robust courage. Courage without actual danger lacks moral value. Likewise, there’s little moral value in being forced to make the right choice. Just like we think everyday freedom is valuable, says the theist, there’s value in having the capacity to perform terribly evil acts—but refraining. There’s no sense praising someone for doing something if they couldn’t have done otherwise. An automaton is not worthy of moral praise.

The value of choice, the theist argues, is determined by the depth and kinds of evil acts we could perform. If we could only do minor evil (e.g., pinching someone), and were deprived of the capacity to commit horrendously evil acts, we wouldn’t deserve much praise for refraining. If we want people to be robustly praiseworthy for refraining from horrendous evil—especially in desperate situations—they must have the capacity to do it. Although granting this kind of freedom will result in people like Hitler from time to time, it’s a necessary evil if we are to have people capable of great evil who choose not to do it. If God allows moral goods like the value of choice, He must allow the capacity for horrendous evil—hoping that we’ll choose otherwise.

3. Freedom Canceling and the Wrong Moral Weight

Here’s a problem with the free will defense. If you could either choose to feed thousands of hungry people or kill them, the former is obviously morally preferable. The reason we prefer it has little to do with your capacity to do otherwise. Rather, it’s because people have moral worth. Denying this takes you outside the realm of moral discourse altogether—which is not a place the theist should go when trying to defend a perfectly loving God.

Though it might not seem obvious, this cuts deeply against the free-will defense. Choosing to do good while having the capacity to do evil is indeed a kind of moral good, but there are plenty of cases where it’s not nearly good enough to justify the potential consequences. Consider a historical example: while the capacity to do evil provides a chance to freely do the right thing, are we really prepared to say Hitler’s freedom to choose horrendous evil was morally justified by the possibility that he might have done otherwise? It’s hard to see how the suffering he unleashed could ever be outweighed by that chance.

No matter how valuable the general capacity for choice is, it’s not clear that it has greater moral weight than the flourishing and well-being of those who suffered. Granting people the freedom to do terrible things comes at a steep cost. The victims of the Holocaust didn’t just suffer and die—they had their futures taken from them. Their freedom to make their own choices was destroyed. The freedom of some cancels the freedom of others. That’s the problem. Call this the freedom-canceling worry.

And now for the most damning problem. In any other context, we reject reasoning like the free-will defense. Suppose the police know Jones is about to rob a bank and kill innocent people in the process. They also have enough evidence to arrest him for another serious crime before he carries out his plan. What should they do?

They can either let him go through with it (Freedom), or preemptively arrest him (Safety). The free-will defense says they should choose Freedom. But that’s absurd. We would all agree that the police should stop him. We think protecting innocent lives is more important than preserving his freedom to choose murder. If that’s true, then we already reject the free-will defense in practice. Safety is morally preferable to Freedom. The value of innocent life outweighs someone’s ability to freely commit atrocity.

But apparently, God disagrees. If there is a God, He knows everything and could prevent a lot of suffering. And yet, He doesn’t intervene. But surely, some intervention would still leave us with plenty of freedom—just not the freedom to do the absolute worst things. That seems like a better balance.

Now imagine a device that prevents people from acting on violent intentions—rape, genocide, etc.—except in self-defense. You could still intend evil, but the device short-circuits your ability to act on it. Would it be ethical to install such a device? It seems so. After all, we don’t seriously think people should have the unchallenged freedom to rape and murder.

To be clear, I’m not advocating this device for real-world use. I’m using it to show that God had other options when creating the universe. If we can imagine it, surely God could have created it—and had the moral obligation to do so. The free-will defense doesn’t explain why He didn’t take basic preemptive measures.

While it’s good to have the freedom to choose between right and wrong, the free-will defense misjudges the moral stakes. It places too much weight on freedom, not enough on the lives of innocents. It just gets the moral facts wrong. That’s why the free-will defense fails to reconcile the existence of God with the problem of evil.