Of all the mysteries of reality—and there are many—it is the starkest: Why does evil exist? This video is the beginning of a series exploring the different answers philosophers have given to this most existentially forceful of all questions. I enumerate the different kinds of answers and briefly gesture to their assumptions, but I save an in-depth consideration for videos of the near future.
NOTES
- Four kinds of answers:
- Possibility 1: there is some purpose for evil
- Big assumption: intelligent agent with control over everything (i.e., God)
- Big question: Is such a purpose even possible?
- Possibility 2: the existence of evil is always an effect of prior, often seemingly unrelated evil actions
- Big assumption: law-like connection between a person’s actions and what they suffer
- Big question: How do we explain seemingly undeserved suffering?
- Possibility 3: the existence of evil is absurd
- Big assumption: absurd things are possible
- Big question: How can we accept that evil is absurd if we don’t accept that answer for anything else in the universe?
- Possibility 4: evil doesn’t exist
- Big assumption: absence of explanation proves nonexistence
- Big question: How do we explain the phenomenology of evil (i.e., the way evil appears real to us)?
- Possibility 1: there is some purpose for evil
- It seems like there should be a corresponding question of why good things happen, though we don’t usually ask it
- Evil is a one kind of existential shock that begins us philosophizing