Davies on evil suffered

In The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, Brian Davies draws a distinction between “evil suffered” and “evil done.”  Evil suffered is badness that happens to or afflicts someone or something.  Evil done is badness that is actively brought about or inflicted by some moral agent.  A reader asks me:

Do you agree with Davies in saying that God does not directly bring about what he calls “evil suffered”?  I want to agree, but yet I don’t know how to reconcile Davies’ position (and what seems to be Aquinas’ position) with God apparently directly willing the end of Ananias and Sapphira’s life in Acts 5, which obviously is an evil suffered.  It doesn’t seem there is causality per accidens like Davies describes God’s causal activity when it comes to evil suffered (e.g., good of one thing curtailing the good of another).

Before I answer the question, let me do some stage-setting by summarizing the views of Davies alluded to here.  (See especially pp. 176-83 of Davies’ book for his own exposition.)  Davies makes two relevant points about evil suffered.  First, it is a privation rather than a positive reality.  Second, it is not willed by God as an end in itself, but only as a concomitant of some good. 

By way of illustration of these ideas, let’s suppose that in the course of giving a philosophy lecture, I begin to draw a circle on the marker board but do not complete it, so that the resulting figure looks like a C.  The circle is a bad or defective circle, and insofar as I am the cause of it, what I have caused is therefore something that exhibits badness or defect.  But strictly speaking, the badness does not amount to some positive feature I have put into the circle.  Rather, it amounts to the absence of some feature that I could have put into it and that a complete circle would have had.  The badness is a privation rather than a positive reality. 

Strictly speaking, then, I have not caused any badness to exist.  Rather, what I have done is simply refrained from causing all of the goodness that I could have caused to exist.  The circle is good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go all the way. 

So, in that sense I have only caused what is good.  But wouldn’t it have been better still to cause the rest of the circle to exist?  All things being equal, it would have been, but suppose that the reason I refrained from completing it is that I judged that doing so was necessary in order to explain to my audience the notion of a privation.  Then there would be an overall good situation – the generation of philosophical understanding in my audience – that was brought about in part precisely by my refraining from putting into the circle all the goodness that could have been in it.  The defective circle, though bad, was an essential part of some larger good.  And that is why I willed to refrain from completing it, rather than willing the defect in the circle for its own sake.

Now, for Davies, the instances of evil suffered that we find in the natural order of things are analogous to that.  When a lamb is eaten by a lion, the damage to the lamb amounts to a set of privations – for example, the absence of a limb, flesh, or skin that is torn away.  Though bad considered in itself, the damage also plays a necessary part of a larger good, namely the flourishing of the lion.  Lions of their nature can’t be the kinds of things they are without hunting prey like lambs, so that having the good of there being lions presupposes the bad of lambs being killed.  In causing a world in which lambs are eaten by lions, then, God does not cause evil as such.  Rather, he causes a world in which certain goods (namely the good of lambs having all their limbs, flesh, etc. unmolested) are absent, and these privations are not willed by him for their own sake, but rather as a concomitant of the good of there being lions in existence.

So that’s the background to the reader’s question.  And the question, again, is how the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira fit into this account of the nature of evil suffered.  Recall that Davies’ main points about evil suffered are, first, that it is a privation rather than a positive reality, and second, that it is not willed by God as an end in itself, but only as a concomitant of some good.  These deaths would, as the reader says, be instances of evil suffered.  So do they fit Davies’ account?

It’s not hard to see how they fit the privation part of the account.  Presumably the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira were simply a matter of the absence of continued divine concurrence with the operation of their vital processes.  After all, nothing can operate for an instant unless God imparts causal power to it; hence to cause the death of a person, God need do no more than cease causing the person to live.  The badness in this case (the deaths) amounts, as in the other cases, to the absence of a good (continued life). 

Apparently the reader’s main concern is with how the scenario fits in with Davies’ second point, to the effect that an evil suffered is not willed by God as an end in itself.  For didn’t God in this case will death precisely as an end in itself?  After all, there does not seem to be in the case of Ananias and Sapphira (as there is in the case of the lion and the lamb) some other natural substance that flourished, and thus attained its own good, by way of causing their deaths.

I would answer, however, that there was a larger good for the sake of which God willed this particular case of evil suffered.  Ananias and Sapphira were, after all, being punished by God for a grave sin.  And punishment, as I argued in a post from not too long ago, is a good thing.  It is the correction of a disorder, a restoration of the natural connection between evildoing on the one hand and the suffering of a harm on the other.  God willed the evil suffered by Ananias and Sapphira as part of this larger good of securing retributive justice, as well, perhaps, as part of the realization of one of the secondary ends of punishment (deterrence). 

To be sure, the case is unlike the lion and lamb example insofar as it does not involve a substance flourishing or realizing its good by way of the bad suffered by some other thing.  All the same, punishment is a good which of its nature necessarily involves the suffering of an evil as a concomitant – namely the harm inflicted on the evildoer, which remains a harm even though it is deserved.  So, the case does fit Davies’ overall account of evil suffered. 

(For more on the nature of punishment, see By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.  For more on the nature of divine action and the problem of evil, see the forthcoming Five Proofs of the Existence of God.)