"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am." - Joseph Baretti

***

"It has sometimes been suggested... while we should embrace deontological principles, God is a consequentialist. He has a general duty of care for the whole of creation, while we have more limited responsibilities. But consequentialism is generally held to produce very counter-intuitive results when tested against our moral intuitions. In particular, it seems to license harming one person to produce good for others. Consequentialists try to mitigate this by various well-known ruses which suggest that consequentialist agents will behave, and perhaps even think, much more like us than might at first appear. Since these stratagems all depend on the agents in question being imperfectly informed and motivationally limited in some way, it is doubtful if they would apply to God. A consequentialist God would thus appear to be a morally unattractive figure... these constraints [on Him] put virtually no limits on God’s freedom of action. To all intents and purposes God is morally free to act to promote the general good, even at terrible cost...

I begin by sketching in the main features of a deontological system. It will standardly have the following four broad categories of duty.

(1) Duties of beneficence.
(2) Duties not to harm (non-maleficence).
(3) Duties of justice or fairness.
(4) Duties arising from one’s relationship with particular people – family, friends, benefactors etc. (positional duties)...

Swinburne certainly takes the view that humans have a variety of duties not to harm other humans and (to a more limited extent) animals... he suggests, only some of these obligations apply to God. In some of his earlier writings (1993, 185; 1994, 203) he expresses this by saying that God is under a more limited set of obligations than we are. In particular, Swinburne claims, God has the right to end our lives and the right, within limits, to impose very serious harms, not only for our own good, but for the good of others. Since He has these rights He can, by extension, authorize another agent, such as a human, to kill or to steal, even though it would otherwise be wrong for a human to do this. But there are certain things that it would be wrong for God to do. These include lying, breaking a promise, and systematically misleading His creatures. He has no right to order genocide, or the torture of children...

The limitation that God ‘remain on balance a benefactor’ would impose some limitation if it were not for the fact that there is an afterlife. Swinburne recognizes that there may be people whose lives on earth are not good overall. To fulfil His duty to them, however, God can and will compensate them in an afterlife. He is thus not restricted by having to arrange things so as to ensure that no-one’s earthly life is not worth living...

The intuition is that one ought not to bring about the suffering of the innocent to make a good state even better... Classically, we have certain natural rights not to be treated in certain ways. These rights stem from our natures (hence ‘natural’). Each agent is worthy of individual respect, and the duty to respect those rights is incumbent on all moral agents, irrespective of their social role. On this view, if God creates agents then, as a moral agent Himself, He must respect the natural rights of His creatures... they standardly include rights not to be physically and psychologically damaged in serious ways. That the person abusing our rights is acting in a good cause is not sufficient to justify the abuse.

... Swinburne... is happy to talk the language of rights, and even of absolute human rights (1998, 228). How then can God have the right to act in ways that, were a human being to act thus, would constitute abuse of human rights ? Swinburne’s reply appears to be that all rights not to be harmed (except the right to be given a life that is overall good) are contingent on the social roles occupied by the respective parties, especially on whether they stand in the relation of dependent to carer. Carers have rights over dependants that non-carers lack... God, as the total carer, has the right to subject us to many things that no human carer has...

Carers, as Swinburne acknowledges, have duties to their dependants, as well as rights over them. They have responsibilities to do more for their dependants than do others who have no duty of care. We would expect them, therefore, to be obliged to treat their dependants at least as well as a non-carer ought to treat them, in terms of respecting their natural rights. Indeed, carers typically have the duty not only not to harm their dependants themselves but to protect them from being harmed by others... Swinburne claims that there are natural evils that God puts in the world as part of His plan. And some natural evils, such as diseases, which cause prolonged agonizing pain and disability, are horrendous evils. Thus the issue of God’s right deliberately to inflict these evils on His creatures would remain. To put it more bluntly, creating a world in which children suffer long, painful, and crippling diseases is to torture children. We will need powerful arguments to show that God has the right to do that...

Swinburne’s argument appeals to the parent–child analogy... But God is much more our ‘source of being’ than any human parent, since He supplies everything that supports and nourishes us. Correspondingly, both His rights and His duties are much larger than that of any human parent. ‘The greater the duty to care, the greater (if the duty is fulfilled) the consequent rights ’ (1998, 224)... If I chose not to carry out one of these duties, say the duty to educate, I could not escape criticism by claiming (supposing we could evaluate the claim) that the package I had given the child benefitted her overall... If the duties of ordinary carers are best understood as fulfilling a number of obligations to their charges, rather than as securing an overall balance of benefit, then the analogy between human carers and God which Swinburne is pressing suggests that God’s duties to us are best understood in the former way and not the latter...

I have the right to expose my child to some dangers and difficulties for her own good. I may allow and even encourage her to take some risks so that she can learn courage. Once again, this right is limited bymyduty not to abuse the child. It would be monstrous, as Swinburne agrees, for me to handicap the child so as to give her the chance to learn fortitude...

This has been a long and even tortuous discussion... Our human rights limit what even those in authority over us may legitimately do... If it is wrong for us to harm others for good ends, how could God make it permissible and even obligatory by His commands? The answer is that for Swinburne the only reason why we may not do these things for good ends is that we lack the authority. Since God has that authority, He can authorize us. So the underlying structure of Swinburne’s moral theory is much less deontological than might at first appear. This is made clear in his proposed amendment to Kant’s famous second formulation of the Categorical Imperative: ‘ It is … permissible to use someone for the good of others if on balance you are their benefactor, and if they were in no position to make the choice for themselves’ (1998, 233).

I conclude that Swinburne has not shown that God has the right to impose serious harms to bring about the good for, while he has addressed the argument from authority, he has not addressed the argument from human rights... The model of parent and child is central to the Christian understanding of our relation to God, and for good reason. But God does not appear to treat us like a parent treats a child. No loving parent would treat their children according to Swinburne’s ‘modified’ Kantian dictum, and deliberately inflict serious harm on her child for the good of others... God, as the governor of the universe, is unfettered in what He may do to us provided we are net beneficiaries. This is not a relationship which seems aptly characterized as that which exists between a loving parent and child. Yet the great message of Christianity is that God is love. Any solution to the problem of evil has to leave that central pillar intact."

--- Is God (almost) a consequentialist? Swinburne’s moral theory, David McNaughton

(All bold my emphasis)

Swinburne in response:

"I must admit that whenever I write sentences like the above and
then watch some of the world’s horrors on TV, I ask myself, ‘Do I really mean this ?’ But in the end I always conclude that I do."

Hurr hurr.