He begins with the problem of gratuitous evil: "(1) If God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil. (2) There is gratuitous evil. So, (3) God does not exist" (442). Mooney notes that while most traditional theodicies try to deny (2), Mooney will join a small crowd in denying (1)--a strategy that I think we must take since (2) is obviously true. Mooney considers "an evil [to be] gratuitious [iff] it is either (i) not tied to a good that outweighs it [conditionally gratuitious], or (ii) impermissible regardless of whether it is tied to a good that outweighs it [unconditionally gratuitious]." (i) can be seen in stubbing one's toe; both (i) and (ii) can be seen in the Holocaust. Mooney considers three possible responses to this issue, and he ultimately affirms the third one, which is a synthesis of the first two.
First is the restriction strategy (Eric Reitan): "Just because an agent can prevent an evil without sacrificing a greater good, that doesn’t mean she is permitted to. Arguably, agent-centered restrictions sometimes require agents to permit conditionally gratuitous evils, such as when one agent is not permitted to interfere with the poor and even destructive choices of another agent..." (446). For example, if God were to categorically prevent every person from immorality, he appears to be overriding human dignity in its ability to make free choices. Mooney ultimately finds this view to fail because it seems like there is a much stronger force behind pro tanto obligations upon God to prevent gratuitious evil than permitting it.
Second is the prerogative strategy (Mark Murphy, Michael Rea, and Brian Davies): "[L]ike us, God has an agent-centered prerogative to pursue God’s own projects instead of always preventing the world’s suffering. After all, even God will have projects that can be pursued—e.g., certain worlds that can be created—only at the expense of permitting conditionally gratuitous evil.31 So, if morality gives us some wiggle room to pursue such projects, maybe it does the same for God." (452). While advancing several objections, the main one Mooney lands on is that "it seems seriously conceptually strained to suggest that a being who permits people to suffer gratuitously and horrendously over long periods of time loves those people in any sense even distantly analogous to our notion of love" (457).
Therefore, Mooney advances the restriction-prerogative strategy: "[I]t could be the case both that God is not obligated to prevent the gratuitous suffering in the world, as the prerogative strategy claims, and that God is obligated not to prevent that suffering, as the restriction strategy claims…God has a prerogative to create a world with gratuitous evil, but there are restrictions on how God can run it" (457). Mooney relies heavily on the commonsense moral intuition that, while it's good for persons to do what they can to solve suffering, there is no pro tanto obligation on them to solve all of them. He then concludes: "If I’m right that agents often do not have even a pro tanto obligation to do these things, then it should be easy to generate an all-things-considered obligation not to prevent the suffering in these cases" (459).
Overall, I think this is a powerful response to the problem of gratuitous evils in the world, and Mooney provides insightful revisions to other responses that reject (1) and affirm (2). One part of Mooney's proposal that I'm confused on is this moral intuition that human persons are not required to solve all of the world's evils. Mooney borrows from Michael Rea's appeal to personhood for this argument: "“The rough idea is that a full or natural expression of personhood requires the moral freedom to pursue personal projects with some amount of independence from their overall moral value, and morality secures this moral freedom for people by permitting them to sometimes choose lesser goods" (452).
But how sound is this principle? It seems like a large part of this principle's intuitive appeal is that we also intuitively side with Kant (and more contemporarily, Bart Streumer) on the principle that 'ought implies can.' If I cannot do x, then there is no possible moral obligation upon me to do x. The way this principle would be transposed on Rea's argument is this: solving some evil is a good thing to do, and it's also a thing that most anyone has the ability to do--but what about solving all evil? This seems impossible, for all of us have limited concrete (and existential?) resources. Therefore, while we can be obligated to solve for some evil, we cannot be obligated to solve for all evil because it's not possible for us to do.
However, things are different with God: he's am omnipotent being, and surely he has the capability to solve for gratuitous kinds of evil. So, Kant and Streumer's 'is-ought' principle does not apply to God here unless there is some other pro tanto obligation upon God that outweighs his pro tanto obligation to prevent gratuitous evil. I'm not really sure what that obligation would be, especially since Mooney dismissed Swinburne's 'a world that really matters' obligation early on in his consideration of prerogative solutions. So, the question is what this pro tanto obligation would be--and I'm not sure there is one.
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