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Secular Responses to the Problem of Evil

 While the problem of evil is usually considered to be a theistic one, Peter Kivy says there is a secular problem of evil that exists even if one gives up belief in a deity; that is, the problem of how it is possible to reconcile "the pain and suffering human beings inflict upon one another" with humanistic views of the nature of humankind. Kivy writes that all but the most extreme moral skeptics agree that humans have a duty to not knowingly harm others. This leads to the secular problem of evil when one person injures another through "unmotivated malice" with no apparent rational explanation or justifiable self-interest.

There are two main reasons used to explain evil, but according to Kivy, neither are fully satisfactory. The first explanation is psychological egoism - that everything humans do is from self-interest. Bishop Butler has countered this asserting pluralism: human beings are motivated by self-interest, but they are also motivated by particulars - that is particular objects, goals, or desires - that may or may not involve self-interest but are motives in and of themselves and may occasionally, include genuine benevolence. For the egoist, "man's inhumanity to man" is "not explainable in rational terms," for if humans can be ruthless for ruthlessness sake, then egoism is not the only human motive. Pluralists do not fare better simply by recognizing three motives: injuring another for one of those motives could be interpreted as rational, but hurting for the sake of hurting, is as irrational to the pluralist as the egoist.

Evil as Necessary

According to Michael de Montaigne and Voltaire, while character traits such as wanton cruelty, partiality, and egoism are an innate part of the human condition, these vices serve the "common good" of the social process. For Montaigne, the idea of evil is relative to the limited knowledge of human beings, not to the world itself or to God. He adopts what philosophers Graham Oppy and N. N. Trakakis refer to as a "neo-Stoic view of an orderly world" where everything is in its place.

This secular version of the early coherentist response to the problem of evil, (coherentism asserts that acceptable belief must be part of a coherent system), can be found, according to Rorty, in the writings of Bernard de Mandeville and Sigmund Freud. Mandeville said  that when vices like greed and envy are suitably regulated within the social sphere, they are what "spark[s] the energy and productivity that make progessive civilization possible." Rorty asserts that the guiding motto of both religious and secular coherentists is: "Look for the benefits gained by harm and you will find they outweigh the damage."

Economic theorist Thomas Malthus stated in a 1798 essay on the question of population over-crowding, its impact on food availability, and food's impact on population through famine and death, that it was: "Necessity, that imperious, all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds ... and man cannot by any means of reason escape from it." He adds, "Nature will not, indeed can be defeated in her purposes." According to Malthus, nature and the God of nature, cannot be seen as evil in this natural and necessary process. Malthus argued, "Nothing can appear more consonant to our reason than that those beings that come out of the creative process of the world in lovely and beautiful forms which should be crowned with immortality, while those which come out misshapen, those whose minds are not suited to a purer and happier state of existence, should perish and be condemned to mix again with their original clay. Eternal condemnation of this kind may be considered as a species of eternal punishment, and it is not wonderful that it should be represented, sometimes, under images of suffering.

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