The Moral Progress Approach allows that moral progress can take place on different levels, from different perspectives. (…) Just as individuals can become morally better individuals, the world can become a better world and the human species can become a better species. In this way, the Moral Progress Approach can make at least a degree of sense of most if not all instances of evil. (…) The more meaningless an instance of evil from the perspective of other ‘greater good’ approaches, the more valuable any change for the better from the perspective of moral progress.”

Seyyed Mohsen Eslami & Dan Egonsson, “Progress on the Problem of Evil”, 6.

In this short post, I offer some thoughts based on my reading of “Progress on the Problem of Evil”, a recent article by Seyyed Mohsen Eslami and Dan Egonsson.[1] If you are interested in the problem of evil you may also want to check out my post Evil and Omnipotence. As I indicate in that post, there are goods which require the (prior) existence of evils to exist. But there I don’t give any specific examples. Well, some plausible candidates for such goods are specific forms of progress or improvement. Think, for instance, of forms of cosmic progress / improvement which involve a world becoming less evil and more good over time. Obviously it is a good thing if a world is characterized by such a development. But a world can only become less evil if it contains evil in the first place.

It is important to speak of forms of progress or improvement, for, it seems, not all sorts of (moral) progress require the existence of evils. Something that is already completely good could, it appears, get better (e.g. by simple addition of good features). In light of this, one might have questions about what Eslami and Egonsson say in the conclusion of their article: “If moral progress has final value, one must accept a God who is unable to create a world containing that value without also allowing evil.” Why would God favor a world, W1, which has a mixture of good and evil and gets better and less evil over time, over a world, W2, that contains only good and simply gets better over time? Wouldn’t any W without some evil, e, be better than any W with e?

Well, it may of course be that W1 contains so much more goodness than W2 that it is the better option. The reduction of evil could be one of the goods that tips the scales in favor of the former world. Further, perhaps W1 has a greater diversity of goods and that makes W1 better than W2. After all, W2 contains no goods which require the existence of evils (since it is a world without evils), but W1 could in principle contain goods which require goods as well as goods that require evils. But wouldn’t God always prioritize the minimalization of evils over the maximalization of goods? Well, that seems a bit simplistic. It seems more plausible that God would prioritize the minimalization or prevention of certain kinds of evils over the actualization of certain goods, but would decide to actualize very great goods even if this meant actualizing some minor evils.

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[1] Seyyed Mohsen Eslami and Dan Egonsson, “Progress on the Problem of Evil,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2021): 1-16, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09672559.2021.1918748.