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Using an ethical framework constructed out of the two variables of whether an agent causes, permits, or risks horrendous evils, and whether she does so in order to bestow pure benefit or in order to avert greater harm, some of the major theodicies in contemporary philosophy of religion are categorized. This chapter identifies three theodicies that depict God as causing horrendous evils for pure benefit. This structural approach to theodicy is evaluated and a conclusion is drawn that pure benefits are incapable of justifying the causation of horrendous evils. It is argued that this approach is insensitive to relevant asymmetries in the justificatory demands made by horrendous and non-horrendous evil and in the justificatory work done by averting harm and bestowing pure benefit. When moral constraints on the causing of horrors are considered and the justificatory asymmetry of harm-averting and non-harm-averting benefits brought to bear, pure benefit will not do the justificatory work (on its own) of securing God the status of an ethically perfect being.

Using an ethical framework constructed out of the two variables of whether an agent causes, permits, or risks horrendous evils, and whether she does so in order to bestow pure benefit or in order to avert greater harm, some of the major theodicies in contemporary philosophy of religion are categorized. This chapter identifies theodicies that depict God as permitting horrendous evil for pure benefit, risking horrendous evil for pure benefit, and permitting horrendous evil for the aversion of greater harm. Each theodicy is summarized and an evaluation is made as to whether it is structurally promising with respect to horrendous evils, where structural promise denotes that God is ethically in the clear on the assumption that the explanatory story told by the theodicy is true. The conclusion drawn is that the theodicies depicting God as permitting horrendous evils for pure benefit are structurally deficient; they do not depict God as ethically perfect even if they are true. Structural promise is identified in theodicies that depict God as risking horrendous evil for pure benefit and permitting horrendous evil for the aversion of harm. In the next chapter the plausibility of these structurally promising approaches is considered.

This chapter develops Non-Identity Theodicy—that is, theodicy primarily claiming that our existence as the individuals we are depends on God’s policy of evil and suffering allowance. Non-Identity Theodicy suggests that God allows evil in order to create and love the specific individuals who come to exist. This theodicy is unique because the justifying good recommended is neither harm-aversion nor pure benefit. It is not a good that betters the lives of individual human persons (for they would not exist otherwise), but it is the individual human persons themselves. In order to aim successfully at the creation of particular individuals, however, God would need a control of history so complete that it might be argued to be inconsistent with beliefs about human free will that are important to some theologies. In order to avoid this problem, a second version of Non-Identity Theodicy is constructed. This version considers whether God’s justifying motivation could be a desire for beings of our type, even if it could not be a desire for particular individuals. It is suggested that God would be interested in loving those he creates under various descriptions (e.g., biological, psychological, and narrative descriptions) and that a horror-prone environment is necessary for us to be the type of being we are under these descriptions. This second version of Non-Identity Theodicy allows some version of Non-Identity Theodicy to be available to the theist regardless of her views about the existence and nature of human free will.

This chapter assesses the theodicies identified in the previous chapter as structurally promising (i.e. as depicting God as ethically in the clear on the assumption that the explanatory story told by the theodicy is true). Because these fall-based theodicies conceive of humanity as having fallen at some point in history from a much more advanced state, they face a number of plausibility challenges rooted in modern science and theological tradition. Moreover and more decisively, these theodicies are implausible due to their overestimation of the extent to which finite human agents can bear primary responsibility for evils that are horrendous. The conclusion drawn is that the most influential contemporary theodicies fail either ethically or otherwise.

This chapter introduces the problem of evil and then the more specific problem of horrendous evil (that is, the argument that the existence of horrendous evils makes the existence of God impossible or unlikely). First horrendous evil is defined as a technical term. Then, after proposing conditions for successful theodicy, prima facie reasons are given for why two of the most popular approaches to theodicy—a greater goods approach and a blame-shifting approach—are not successful where horrendous evils are concerned. The chapter ends by outlining the rest of the book.

This chapter analyzes the concepts of harm and benefit. There is a tendency in the literature on the metaphysics of harm to assume symmetric accounts of harm and benefit. But there are deep asymmetries between harm and benefit, recommending asymmetric metaphysical accounts. For harm and benefit, in turn, this chapter considers whether counterfactual comparative, temporal comparative, and non-comparative conditions are necessary or sufficient. For harm, the judgement reached is that a non-comparative condition—whereby harm is a matter of being in a bad state even if not in a worse state—is necessary and sufficient. It is further discussed why “non-comparative” is a misleading term for this account, and a more precise terminology of trans-comparative account is recommended. For benefit, the judgement reached is that temporal comparative and counterfactual comparative conditions are individually sufficient and disjunctively necessary; being benefited is a matter of being made temporally or counterfactually better-off. It is shown that this asymmetric metaphysical accounts allow for an important ethical distinction between harm-averting and non-harm-averting benefits. Next this distinction and an analogy between the ethics of human horror-inducement and the ethics of divine creation and sustenance is used to develop an ethical framework for theodicy. A taxonomy is constructed by sketching four cases of human action where horrors are either caused, permitted, or risked, either for pure benefit (i.e. a benefit that does not avert a still greater harm) or for harm avoidance.

This concluding chapter takes a step back to consider the place of Non-Identity Theodicy in the contemporary theodicy literature. It recaps the key areas of overemphasis and underemphasis in contemporary theodicies. These misemphases include a failure to adequately appreciate the distinctive challenges that horrendous evils pose for the moral justification of harm; an overemphasis on the moral distinction between causing and permitting (especially where God is the agent in question); an overestimation of the moral significance of caretaker rights to cause or permit harm; an overemphasis on the role of free will in theodicy (resulting in a tendency towards anthropocentrism); and a questionable focus on general goods which manifests itself in a prioritizing of worlds over human persons, generic human persons over individual human persons, and all-things-considered benefit over more specific interests such as the aversion of serious harm. It is argued that Non-Identity Theodicy corrects for these various misemphases by conceiving of God first and foremost not as a creator of goods but as a lover of persons. This chapter ends by discussing how Non-Identity Theodicy can be combined with other theodicies in the formulation of a cumulative case theodicy.

This chapter considers the implications of Non-Identity Theodicy for divine morality. This requires assessing the extent to which the moral status of a harm inducing action can be affected by the fact that the persons harmed by the action in question would not have existed had that action not been performed. It is argued (against some influential assumptions in the ethics of procreation literature) that the good of a worthwhile human life (lived by someone who otherwise would not have existed) has unique justificatory power, and further that the good of a God-given human life (lived by someone who otherwise would not have existed) has justificatory power great enough to depict God as not violating moral obligations to human persons by his policy of evil allowance. These arguments are aided by an analogy between divine creation and human procreation. Reflection on the morality of human procreation implies, it is suggested, that it is not always wrong to create people in an environment in which you know they will suffer seriously. Further, it is argued that if you think voluntary human procreation is in general morally permissible, you have even more reason to think that divine creation and sustenance is morally permissible; conversely, if you think it would be immoral for God to create and sustain our universe, then you have even more reason to think voluntary human procreation is in general immoral. It is concluded that Non-Identity Theodicy reasonably can be taken to be successful.