"Showing sympathy and showing courage are good actions which may be done in the face of the simple natural evil of frustration of desire involved in pain and suffering. But there are good actions of other kinds which can only be done in the face of evil actions of various kinds. I can only make reparation if I have wronged you, or forgive you if you have wronged me. In these cases, while of course it is not overall a good that wrong be done, reparation made and it be forgiven, still these actions do in part compensate for the wrong done. And while the possibility of its misuse provides a reason for God not to create creatures with significant freedom, the possibility of such compensation for misuse reduces the force of that reason. There is some truth, though not as much as the writer of the Exultet supposed, in ‘O Felix Culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem.' There are good actions certain kinds which can only be done in the face of good actions of various kinds—such as showing gratitude, recognition of achievement, and reward; and the possibility of these responses to actions which may themselves be responses to pain and suffering (e.g., showing gratitude to doctors who have worked hard to relieve pain) provides further reason for permitting the pain and suffering.

It is good that some actions, including the actions of animals lacking free will, should be serious actions which involve benefiting despite loss or foreseen risk of loss to themselves... You cannot intentionally avoid forest fires, or take trouble to resque your offspring from forest fires, unless there exists a serious danger of getting caught in a forest fire. The action of rescuing despite danger simply cannot be done unless the danger exists—and the danger not exist unless there is a significant natural probability of being caught in the fire. To the extent that the world is deterministic, that involves creatures actually being caught in the fire; and to the extent that the world is indeterministic, that involves an inclination of nature to produce that effect unprevented by God. Fawns are bound to get caught in forest fires sometimes if other fawns are to have the opportunity of intentionally avoiding fires and if deer are to have the opportunities of rescuing other fawns from fires... Not all evil actions are actions of agents with free will and so to be justified by the free-will defense. Animals sometimes reject their offspring or hurt other animals. Yet these actions, like physical pain, provide opportunities for good actions to be done in response to them, e.g., make possible adoption of the rejected offspring by other animals, or rescue of the injured by other animals, or the animal courageously coping with his injury or rejection...

My opponents usually object to the scale—there are, they claim, too many, too various, and too serious evils to justify bringing about the goods which they make possible.Yet it must be stressed that each evil or possible evil removed takes away one more actual good.

If the fawn does not suffer in the thicket, other deer will not so readily have the opportunity of intentionally avoiding fires; he will not through his suffering be able to show courage or have the privilege of providing knowledge for other deer of how to avoid such tragedies; other deer and humans centuries later will not be able to show compassion for his suffering, etc. The sort of world where so many such evils are removed and which in effect my opponents think that God’s goodness requires him to make, turns out—as regards the kinds of good to which I have drawn attention—to be a toy world. Things matter in the kinds of respect which I mention, but they don’t matter very much. I cannot see that God would be less than perfectly good if he gave us a world where things matter a lot more than that...

Even if an opponent allows the formal point that there is great value for the subject in being of use and being helped, he may fail to see that that has the consequence for theodicy which I commend because of two characteristic human vices—short-term and short-distance thinking. He tends to think of the worth of a sentient life as dependent on things that happen during that life and fairly close in space to the life. But once you grant the formal point that things outside a life, e.g., its causes and effects, make a great difference to the value of that life, it seems totally arbitrary to confine those things to ones near to the life in space and time. The sufferings of the Jewish victims of the Nazi concentration camps were the result of a web of choices that stretched back over centuries and continents and caused or made possible a whole web of actions and reactions that will stretch forward over centuries an continents (and the same goes to a lesser extent for the suffering of the fawn). Such sufferings made heroic choices possible for people normally too timid to make them (e.g., to harbor the prospective victims) and for people normally too hardhearted (as a result of previous bad choices) to make them (e.g., for a concentration camp guard not to obey orders). And they make possible reactions of courage (e.g., by the victims), of compassion, sympathy, penitence, forgiveness, reform, avoidance of repetition, etc., stretching down time and space. In saying this, I am not of course saying that those Nazi officials who sent Jews to the concentration camps were justified in doing so. For they had no right whatever to do that to others. But I am saying that God, who has rights over us that we do not have over others, is not less than perfectly good if he allowed the Jews for a short period to be subjected to these terrible evils through the evil free choice of others—in virtue of the hard heroic value of their lives of suffering."

- Richard Swinburne, Some Major Strands of Theodicy


Among other problems:

If evil is necessary to contrast good with and to incite good reactions (eg sympathy, compassion), could it be good for a human agent to do evil? If the Holocaust made it possible for others to harbor prospective victims and this is good, would it be worse if the Holocaust had never happened? And wouldn’t the agencies responsible for the need to harbor Jews be (inadvertently) good?

Swinburne chides those who have short-term and short-distance thinking. Yet if one sums up value from now to the end of time, one will get an infinite amount of good. Besides being implausible, the flip side is that the evils are also summed up. Just as centuries of anti-Semitism made the Holocaust possible, so too does it justify and undergird modern anti-Semitism. The Holocaust thus will result in infinite evil, which balances out the good across time he is summing up.

Theodicy: praising the Holocaust