The problem of evil

Abstract

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as ‘the problem of evil.’ There are responses to evil experienced as something awful that is thrown in one’s face, and these divide into the phenomenologically distinct categories of blame and lament; and there are also arguments from evil, framed in individual ways, not all of which have the same end in view. There is no one ‘evil.’ When the Psalmist recoils in the face of wickedness (Ps. 10), or when William Cowper cries out in pain in his “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” or when Paul Celan speaks of the “Schwarze Milch der Frühe” in “Todesfuge,” each is answering to a separate thing: the persecution of the poor by the unrighteous, a dramatic breakdown of mental health, and the murder of Jews in the Shoah. ‘Evil’ is a notoriously slippery word: it can denote moral evil (sin as it is known in Judaism and Christianity) or mental and physical evil (suffering); and some philosophers would wish to add to these one or more of metaphysical evil (original imperfection), intellectual evil (error, ignorance and even mistakes) and aesthetic evil (ugliness). [excerpt]