Theodicy Review: Richard Swinburne

contra Swinburne on the rights of God

The problem of evil can be broken into two bits: first, there is the problem of saying which goods — if any — God is plausibly pursuing when he allows us to suffer through this earthly veil of tears; second, there is the problem of saying why God has the right to let us suffer those evils.

The second problem — the deontological problem of evil — is an increasingly hot topic in Philosophy of Religion. I have my own favoured solution to it, but so does Richard Swinburne, who is the most important Christian philosopher alive today.

I think Swinburne’s solution is unmotivated; more than that, I think it’s unmotivated for reasons that, to my knowledge, no one before me has spelled out.

In brief, Swinburne’s solution runs as follows. First, grant that — as Swinburne claims — there are a range of greater goods which are logically tied to various evils we observe, such that if God never allowed the evils we observe to take place, the greater goods would be foregone. (Example: you might think that a greater good associated with free-will — the good of being autonomous mini-creators, whose choices really matter in the world — is logically tied to God’s permission of moral evils, such that if God prevented evil actions or their consequences, that good would be foregone.)

Second, consider that your parents — and the state — have significant rights over you, rights that random strangers lack. (Examples: most people accept that a parent can force their child to go the the dentist and undergo painful tooth surgery, but that a random stranger may not do this; most people also think the state may forcibly tax citizens, even though I may not tax you, however much I might want to.)

Third, according to Swinburne, the reason our parents have a right to impose harms on us for our own good — harms which random strangers may not — is that we owe a duty of gratitude to our parents, for having made us, raised us, and giving us lots of stuff vis-à-vis food, board, material comforts, life lessons, moral correction, schooling, etc. This explanation is neat: the reason your parents have greater rights over you than random strangers is that you owe them a debt of gratitude, a debt in you that gives rise to correlative parental rights in them.

Likewise, when it comes to the state, Swinburne says the reason we ought to obey the State — and the reason, more importantly, the state has a right to tax us, conscript us into just wars, and so forth — is that we owe the state a debt of gratitude (for roads, peace, stability, etc.), which gives rise to correlative rights in our government over our bodies and bank accounts.

In both cases, Swinburne agrees that not all debts of gratitude are created equal: a tyrannical, dysfunctional state is less of a benefactor than a just and well-ordered one. If you are a Black South African in 1960, you owe very little to your state, and your state has very weak rights over you (if any). Likewise, as Swinburne writes, “[i]f the parent gives nothing to the child subsequent to birth, then his right to cause the child to suffer is, I suggest, very limited indeed, if not non-existent.”¹

If God exists, he is responsible for our existence, as well as every other good thing in our lives. As a result, Swinburne thinks, our debt of gratitude to God is hella high, and His correlative rights over us hella strong. So strong, in fact, that they licence God in permitting us to be subject to genocide, rape, pestilence, and all the other evils we suffer through, so long as they are logically tied to the generation of greater goods.

Swinburne’s strategy hangs on the claims that (a) beneficiaries owe a debt of gratitude to their benefactors, (b) this generates correlative rights in the benefactor over the beneficiary, to paternalistically subject them to harm for the sake of greater goods, and (c) that these principles carry over to us and God.

Step (c) might very well be challenged. There is a recent debate as to whether God can be the object of fitting ‘prepositional gratitude’ (i.e., the sort of gratitude that you have towards a person [‘I am grateful to you, dear reader’], as opposed to ‘propositional gratitude’, where you’re grateful that something is the case [‘I am grateful that you’re a subscriber’]). If it’s impossible to be fittingly grateful to God (in the prepositional sense), it’s hard to see how duties to gratitude could apply to our relationship with Him.

Put that question aside. My issue with Swinburne’s theodicy is that (b) — the claim that benefactors have rights over their beneficiaries, including the right to harm them in ways the other people may not — is not well-motivated.

Swinburne’s only support for this claim is that he thinks it gives a good account of parental rights and political legitimacy. I say that it doesn’t.

I. The State

Almost zero political philosophers have defended the gratitude theory of political obligation since A. John Simmons refuted it in Moral Principles and Political Obligations in 1979.

Basically, the attempt to explain why the State can allegedly generate moral duties — “drive on the left”, “don’t serve food after 2 AM” — in terms of gratitude suffers from at least the following problems (two of which are from Simmons, two of which are from me):