The world is not without its flaws. Among the worst of the world’s flaws is the suffering and loss that results from human evil. For those who believe in an all-powerful, loving God, reflecting on evil can quickly lead to a crisis of faith. An omnipotent and benevolent God should have both the power, and the desire, to prevent evil. Perhaps, then, God does not exist, or perhaps God is less powerful and loving than many have thought. It is here that theologians intervene by suggesting that the world’s evils are the result of a trade-off, of sorts. God wants a world with moral goodness. But an action cannot be good unless it is freely performed. God cannot create a world with moral goodness – a world with agents who perform morally good acts – without endowing those agents with free will. Free agents, however, are also capable of evil. This means that God cannot create a world with moral goodness without allowing for the possibility of evil. But a world with free agents who do both good and evil things is better than a world that does not allow for any moral goodness whatsoever. At least if there is more goodness than evil overall. So, weighing the options, God made a trade-off, permitting evil for the sake of moral goodness.

What should we think of this trade-off? Is this, the actual world, with all its flaws, truly preferable to a world with neither freedom nor evil? It is instructive to compare this dilemma to Ivan Karamazov’s challenge to his brother, Alyosha, in Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov. In a chapter called ‘Rebellion’, Ivan recounts episodes of cruelty, mostly towards children, in graphic detail. In pursuit of an obsession of his, Ivan has amassed what he calls a ‘fine collection’ of anecdotes from books and newspapers: soldiers who cut unborn children from their mothers’ wombs and spear babies on bayonets, parents who beat their daughter and lock her outside in the bitter cold, a general who unleashes a pack of hounds on a young boy. Ivan then instructs Alyosha to imagine himself in the role of creator, and to suppose that the only way to bring peace and happiness to humanity is to torture ‘one tiny creature’ – a baby – to death. Ivan asks his brother, ‘would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?’ Appalled, Alyosha replies that he would not.

Now Ivan’s challenge may seem contrived. If God is truly omnipotent, one would think God could bring about peace and happiness to humanity directly, without the torture of tiny creatures. God is not like the CIA operative who must rough up a prisoner to avert a terrorist attack. Limited in both knowledge and power, the operative must rely on information extracted from the prisoner, and (let us suppose) cannot acquire the information in any other way. But an omnipotent God need not face such dilemmas. God has the power to prevent terrorism without resorting to torture. Why should achieving peace and happiness be any different? It is therefore unclear why an omnipotent architect should face the constraints that Ivan describes.

Peace and happiness are ostensibly conditions that a sufficiently powerful being could bring about without trade-offs. Our question, by contrast, has less to do with peace and happiness, and more to do with moral significance: is a world with acts of moral goodness worth the evil that comes with freedom? This dilemma is not as easily dismissed, since part of what it is for an act to be morally good is for it to be performed freely, and even an all-powerful God cannot make us freely perform good acts. That is, at least if divine determination is incompatible with free will, as is often thought. The constraints here are not physical, but conceptual. And while God is not constrained by the laws of physics, God is arguably bound by conceptual truths and the laws of logic.

What, then, is so great about acts of moral goodness that it is worth the torture to death of one tiny creature, not to mention all the other horrendous evils in this world? Consider the alternative. God could have created a world without freedom. The individuals in this world need not be unconscious automata, as freedom is not obviously a prerequisite for consciousness. But by determining their behaviour down to the smallest detail, God could ensure they live in harmony, content and free of conflict. Granted, there would be no acts of moral significance in such a world: no acts of heroism, kindness or generosity. But there would also be no cruelty, suffering or misery. Now it is true that many would find such a world to be unbearably dull. If this world were a novel, it would not make the bestsellers list. God, however, is not a novelist, but an architect. A novelist can place her characters in the most dismal circumstances without contributing to the actual suffering in the world. God does not have that luxury. God’s creatures are real, not fictional, and so the factors God must consider are not merely aesthetic.

To begin with, if acts of moral goodness are worth permitting evil, it must be because they are desirable for their own sake, and not simply because they often aim to prevent or alleviate suffering. Consider an analogy. In a world without sickness or disease, we would have no use for medicine. Medicine is not something we desire for its own sake, but only because there are diseases that need curing. Given the choice between a world with both medicine and disease, and a world without either, we would pick the latter in a heartbeat. It would be perverse to bring about sickness and disease simply because it is the only way to give doctors the opportunity to practice medicine. Unless acts of moral goodness are desirable for their own sake, it would be similarly perverse to bring about a world full of suffering just so that people have the freedom to perform acts of moral goodness.

Suppose, then, that acts of moral goodness are desirable for their own sake, and not merely desirable in the context of a world in which bad things happen. Still, one could argue that such acts are not the only things desirable for their own sake. Take, for instance, pleasure, beauty, or the pursuit of knowledge. A world without freedom may lack acts of moral significance, but it would not obviously lack hedonic, aesthetic, or epistemic value. God could direct the creatures in this world to create beautiful works of art, to make scientific breakthroughs, or simply to enjoy the appetitive pleasures of good food and drink. This is all to say, a world without moral value might nevertheless be valuable in other ways. To claim otherwise would require establishing that all value is parasitic on the moral, or alternatively, that nothing can be valuable in a world without freedom.

Let us try a different tack. We have been imagining an alternative world in which God determines all behaviour down to the smallest detail. This is a world free from evil, but also a world in which moral concepts simply do not apply. But consider what its inhabitants would be like. As I said before, there is no obvious reason to think they would lack consciousness. Nor would they be constitutionally unable to partake in at least some of life’s pleasures. And yet there seems to be something deeply alien about them. To understand why, consider Peter Strawson’s discussion of the ‘reactive attitudes’ in his seminal paper, ‘Freedom and Resentment’. Reactive attitudes are attitudes, such as resentment, gratitude, indignation, contempt, and forgiveness, that we adopt in the course of our direct interactions with one another. Maybe you resent an inconsiderate house mate for leaving dishes in the sink or feel grateful when a neighbour waters your plants while you’re away. Without reactive attitudes, normal human relationships would not be possible. We occasionally suspend reactive attitudes towards those who are very young, mentally ill or cognitively impaired. We correct a toddler who snatches a toy from a sibling, but we do not resent the child in the way we would resent an adult. We might, from a policy perspective, consider how to treat those suffering from mental illness, to prevent them from harming others or themselves. In doing so, we consider them with detachment, suspending feelings of animosity. Still, a wholesale suspension of reactive attitudes is not something we could pull off, and still be recognizably human.

Reactive attitudes are indispensable to human relationships. But they require that we regard each other as moral agents who are responsible for what we do. This is why the inhabitants of the alternative world seem so strange. Lacking freedom, they are not responsible for any of their behaviour. Reactive attitudes simply have no place in such a world: it is never appropriate to feel anything like resentment, anger, contempt or gratitude. And so the world we are attempting to imagine – where all behaviour is determined by God – is not one we can see ourselves inhabiting. With this in mind, let us return to our question: why did God give us the freedom to do both good and evil things instead of creating a world with neither freedom nor evil? It is tempting to characterize this as a decision to create us with freedom or without, to create a world in which our acts are voluntary or a world in which our behaviour is determined down to the smallest detail. This characterization assumes that God could create us just as we are, except without the freedom required for our behaviour to be morally significant. But it turns out that we, as human beings engaged in interpersonal relationships, cannot intelligibly view ourselves as lacking freedom. So God’s choice is more aptly described as a choice between creating us and creating individuals we cannot identify with at all.

The position we have arrived at bears some resemblance to Robert Merrihew Adams’s claim in ‘Existence, Self-Interest, and The Problem of Evil’ that ‘we owe our existence to evils’. Adams takes up Leibniz’s point that if God had removed sin from the world by replacing Adam and Eve, then due to the ‘different combinations of circumstances and people and marriages’, we would not have been born. Past evils, according to Adams, have shaped the course of history in such a way that, had they not occurred, our ancestors would have married different people, resulting in the procreation of different progeny. Let me offer my own existence as an example. When the Japanese invaded China during the Second World War, the three top universities in the country temporarily merged and relocated to a remote area in Yunan province to escape the fighting. It was there that my paternal grandparents met and fell in love. If my grandparents had not met, I would not have existed. And it is unlikely they would have met if the Japanese had not invaded China. So in that respect, I owe my existence to the Japanese invasion, an invasion that caused catastrophic suffering and loss. Adams claims that since we owe our existence to evils, God has not wronged us by permitting them. That is, at least if our lives are on the whole worth living.

Adams is relying on a common, though somewhat controversial, assumption about personal identity: namely, that you could not have originated from a different sperm and egg than the actual sperm and egg you came from. Anyone originating from a different sperm or egg would not be you. So a world without the evils to which we owe our existence, as Adams conceives of it, would not contain us, but it would at least contain people who are more or less like us. They would just originate from different genetic material. Our discussion of the reactive attitudes suggests, however, that the difference is not merely genetic. If a world without evil is a world without moral significance, then its inhabitants are not just genetically distinct, they also lack qualities we take to be essential to a fully human life. Embedded as we are in a rich network of interpersonal relationships, we must take each other to be moral agents to which reactive attitudes properly apply. The reason we cannot see ourselves in a world without evil is not so much that such a world would have ‘different combinations of circumstances and people and marriages’, but that it would be a world without anyone we can relate to at all.

Does this let God off the hook for all the evil in this world? Does it explain why an omnipotent and benevolent God would permit evil for the sake of moral goodness? It is not obvious that it does. Even if Adams is right that God us not wronged us by permitting evil, we still lack an explanation of why creating a world with us in it is worth the horrendous evils we will inevitably inflict upon each other. Even if God has not wronged us, this does not mean that God has not done something wrong. In Non-Identity Theology: A Grace Based Response to the Problem of Evil, a recent development of Adams’s theodicy, Vince Vitale appeals to the ‘particularity of love’, and suggests that God’s creative decisions were motivated by a desire to love us as the individuals that we are. We are under no obligation to love the best people possible, and so, Vitale argues, it is compatible with God’s benevolence for God to love us, despite our many imperfections. But Vitale seems be replacing one mystery with another. It seems no less mysterious that God should prefer to love us over other possible beings than it is that God should prefer a world with moral significance over a world without suffering.

As Adams notes, the question of why God should care about us specifically is captured in a famous line from Psalm 8, ‘What is man that thou art mindful of him?’ I have read this line countless times, for it is carved into the side of Harvard’s Emerson Hall, which houses the Philosophy Department where I work. Many take the line to be an expression of our insignificance. Out of all the possible beings God could create and care about, why choose us? But what puzzles me is not so much why God should choose to care about insignificant creatures. What puzzles me is why a perfectly benevolent God would deem it worthwhile to create a world with so much evil and suffering, just so there could be creatures around to care about. Our problem is not our insignificance, but rather our capacity to inflict horrific evils. If such evil is the price to pay for the existence of creatures to love, it is difficult to understand why a benevolent God would make such a trade-off.

If reflecting on the problem of evil leads you to doubt the existence of God, then you might draw a different conclusion from the claim that we owe our existence to evil. Adams, as we saw, argues that God has not wronged us by permitting evil, since we would not have existed otherwise. But if the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God is incompatible with the existence of evil, then we owe our existence to God’s non-existence. In that case, perhaps we should regard God’s non-existence, if not with gratitude, then at least with ambivalence.