God and Deontology

A Theodicy in Five Minutes

Since the dawn of time, philosophy students have prefaced their papers on the problem of evil with “Since the dawn of time. . .”, before going on to explain what the problem is and why it’s so intractable. The problem—in a nutshell—is one of explaining why God, if there is a God, would allow the kinds, distributions, and intensities of evils we observe in the world, and have reason to think existed ever since the dawn (sorry!) of sentient life.

One type of response is a Greater Goods Theodicy. According to that approach, we’d expect God to allow the types of evils we observe because they’re necessary to produce greater goods, or stave off greater evils. (Examples include the value of earned virtue, the value of helping others, and the value of having impactful, morally significant choices.)

A mainstream objection to this approach is that even if we grant that evils make our world better axiologically, that wouldn’t justify God using people as a mere means to that end.

If that’s an objection you endorse, here is what I recommend: be a little Mormon. Not fully—you don’t want that—but just enough to solve the problem of evil.

According to Latter Day Saints, we pre-existed our earthly lives, choosing to come down here for a time so we could advance spiritually. The thought that human persons pre-existed their births crops up not only in Mormonism, but in every theistic religion that affirms reincarnation—Jainism, Hinduism, fragments of Islam and Judaism, various Pagan traditions, and so on. It’s also plausibly compatible with Christianity, arguably even Catholicism.¹

The way pre-existence helps solve the deontological problem of evil is simple: if someone consents to suffer something, so long as their consent is valid, it’s no longer a deontological infraction to cause or allow them to suffer that thing. Thus, if each of us consented to our lives and their contents, then God does no deontological wrong in letting what happens to us happen.

Now, we need to be careful here. Philosopher James Spiegel—in his account of the pre-existence response—supposes that: “for any given person, […] all of the pain and suffering she experiences in this world was chosen in advance, prior to her soul’s union with her earthly body, and thus was a result of the exercise of her own free will.”²

But if that’s what we consented to—namely, the all the pain and suffering we experience—then it will turn out that, objectively speaking, no one has ever had their rights, nor any other waivable deontological claim, violated by anyone, since whatever claims would’ve been violated were already waived in a pre-mortal life.

Happily, the pre-existence theodicist doesn’t have to say that. All she has to say is that, in a pre-mortal life, people consented to God allowing various evils to befall them—but not to the evils themselves. This idea is perfectly coherent. Compare: a prison documentarian could refuse to consent to being cannibalized by a criminal, but give his camera-man permission to stand back and not intervene if she starts getting eaten.

Here are some other objections you might have:

Objection #1: Pre-existence is metaphysically impossible because there are no souls. Also, if you had your memory wiped, you would cease to exist, and the resulting person would not be you.

Reply #1: I am assuming that souls exist, and that they are sufficient for personal identity over time. If you deny that, you won’t find this theodicy plausible.

Objection #2: The lion’s share of the problem of evil lies in the problem of animal suffering. But animals can’t validly consent to suffer as they do, so this theodicy doesn’t work for them.

Reply #2: No, it still can. We just have to suppose that animal souls either have the inherent capacity to validly consent to suffering—a capacity that’s hemmed in now by their having more limited brains, in the way a person’s capacity to validly consent to things is reduced when they suffer brain damage—or else they don’t have that capacity inherently, but God can supernaturaly enhance the powers of their souls so that they can. The first possibility, at least, can’t be independently motivated and definitely isn’t predicted by theism—so it is, admittedly, an auxiliary hypothesis that weighs down the likelihood of this theodicy a bit. (But not by much!)

Objection #3: If we pre-existed our births, our past-life memories must have been wiped. But you can’t validly consent to something if it will happen to you after the memory of you consenting has been erased.

Reply #3: Can’t you? Surely you can give advance consent—let’s say—to painful medical treatments that are to be administered long after the onset of an advanced memory loss condition.

Reply #4: Pre-existence is just an auxiliary hypothesis that theism doesn’t predict. Thus, even if this theodicy works, the hypothesis that there is no God and that the universe is indifferent to suffering wins out on simplicity grounds.

Reply #4: Even if the Hypothesis of Indifference is simpler, theism could still win out on explanatory power, being the better explanation of psychophysical harmony, consciousness, moral knowledge, and so forth. But more to the point, it’s not clear that pre-existence isn’t predicted on theism, given that it might be God’s only way to actualise various evil-induced greater goods in a deontologically permissible way. As a theist, you might think: If God permissibly could, then God permissibly would. Since God permissibly can actualise various evil-dependent greater goods—namely, by securing our consent in a pre-mortal life—, and since theism predicts that God would want to actualise these goods if he were able to, the doctrine of pre-existence just falls out of the hypothesis of theism.

1. See Jimmy Akin’s discussion of the Church’s statements here: https://jimmyakin.com/2023/10/announcing-dreams-unborn-children-pre-birth-communications-related-experiences-jimmy-akins-mysterious-world.html

2. Spiegel, James. (Forthcoming). “The premortalist free will defense”. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.