I argued a while ago that being and goodness were the same thing. There, I posited as an assumption that evil was a privation. Today, I will give a rough defense of and explanation of that claim.
The definition of what, exactly, evil is goes back centuries. Many people, including philosophers, think of good and evil as alternate poles of reality which compose most (or all) beings. Thus, on this theory (or really a whole family of theories), evil and goodness are two different ways for something to exist, and most things exist with different amounts of good and evil.
For a theist, however, this has a problematic, even disastrous, consequence. God, who is supposed to be all-good, would then be the creator of the opposite of himself. That seems both impossible and ridiculous to many. In fact, Augustine frames this as one of his core intellectual struggles in The Confessions. As a Manichee, Augustine had a theory that explained evil. Once he converted, he had trouble coming up with a good one on Christianity’s model of God.
That is, until he discovered one of the most influential philosophical ideas in all of Catholic philosophy: the idea that evil is nothing.
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How the Model Works
Okay, okay, that was a dramatic (and, honestly, kind of misleading) way of putting it. Let me flesh out the theory a bit before you walk away mocking me. Here is the idea. God creates and is the source of all things. But God is all-good, so it seems plausible, even necessary, that those things that come from an all-good God must be good. But while God is the source of all things, it seems obvious that many things are bad, or evil, in some meaningful sense. Human beings commit a whole variety of crimes. Children grow sick and die. Animals suffer tremendously.
So what gives? What is all this evil? Did God create evil? How could he, if he is all good?
One reason to be especially concerned with this question is the scholastic idea that a being cannot cause something that it does not already have in some respect. So, for example, if I move a ball, perhaps by throwing it to my brother, it is only possible for me to do so because I already had the ability to move something myself.
That leaves us, seemingly, with two alternative possibilities: a) God is the source of evil or b) God is not the source of all things. Both are problematic for different, but related reasons.
In response to this, Augustine proposed the idea that evil, far from being an alternative kind of thing, is actually just a privation: it is a lack of something that should be present. A hole in a cheese grater is not a privation. A hole in a swimming pool is. A hole in Swiss cheese is not a privation. A hole in an argument is. Having only two legs is not a privation for human beings. It is for dogs.
Obviously, there are different kinds of evil that we are discussing here: specifically, there are natural evils, and moral evil. But Aquinas thinks that both have, in at least one sense, the same explanation. In the case of sickness, it is not the case that there is some kind of metaphysically distinct “sickness” that is pervading the body. Rather, what we are seeing is a body that has lost a function that it is supposed to have. This may be caused by a bacteria or virus, but the problem, metaphysically speaking, is not the bacteria or virus; it is the lack of function that is prompted by the presence of that bacteria or virus.
When a person is selfish, rather than there being a human being with a distinct quality that is pure evil, we are actually seeing a human being who is good, but lacking in a quality that he should have, charity. The desires that the human being has, for good things, success or health, for example, are all good. But there is a privation in the way that the selfish person desires them.
Here a distinction made by Aquinas must be remembered: there are evil things and evil itself. When a thing is evil, it bears a privation, but it exists as itself. And in these cases, often even the good things that that evil being possesses are turned to immoral ends. Thus you could say that the evil “borrows” the existence of the goodness that is actually present in the being. For example, a burglar uses intelligence, organization, personal skills, athleticism and even patience to rob a bank. All of those things are good of themselves. But because each skill lacks a just end in the burglar, they are evil traits, but not evil itself.
It is only evil itself that is a privation. To realize what the nature of evil is, we need to consider evil without its presence in any being—scholastics called this process “abstraction.” So when we consider evil itself rather than evil in any particular being, that is where we get the definition of a privation.
There are a lot of strengths to this theory: it provides a relatively tidy metaphysical answer to an otherwise puzzling question, and allows us to maintain several otherwise-plausible, maybe even necessary, premises, such as God’s being the source of everything and all-goodness.
However, even within the Catholic tradition, there have been several philosophers, especially in the last 30 to 40 years, who have objected to this account on the basis that there are a lot of evils that really seem not to just be privations: pain and moral evil are just two examples. One such example is a teacher and mentor of mine, personalist philosopher John F. Crosby. In future posts, I will examine some of these objections, and see what responses could be made. See you then!
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I really appreciated how you laid out Augustine and Aquinas’s view that evil is a privation—it made something I’ve always felt intuitively and from what Ive studied in school, that evil isn’t a “thing” in itself. t also made me reflect on suffering and moral failings differently, seeing them less as separate forces and more as gaps in the goodness that God created.
These short form posts are really great.