Suffering and a slow, painful death are appropriate punishment for all humans, for the rest of time, after Adam and Eve took a bite of an apple.
In fact, suffering and death is only the beginning of our punishment. Many of us will also go to hell after failing to profess a belief in jesus.
(Before I get accused of caricaturing one side: not all christians believe this. But certainly plenty do e.g. From the popular Answers in Genesis site: article)
This seems to go back to the same old argument: God created flawed humans, he punished them because of their flaws, then he also punished the animals because humans were flawed!
What good human parent would give their child (or even an adult child ) a gun or knife, knowing they would use it to harm themselves, or others, because he gave the child a free will and said," here is a gun(or Knife) use it as you wish", What good parent would not stop such an action if it were known ahead of time? Free will is an excuse people use. A good parent doesn’t tell it’s child." You may do such or such, but I do not want you to do it, so if you do I will kill you, as you are going against my will"? If a child or loved one was going to jump off a cliff,bridge or tall bulding, what good parent wouldn’t try to stop them by any means?
There was earth quakes, floods, etc. long before people lived on earth. It is part of earth’s geology; human history is filled with stories of such things.
And the suffering in hell goes on not just for a few years or decades or centuries, but for millenia.
How is that just?
One does not need to have a position to go after the low-hanging fruit. Your lack of position is what sterilizes the debate. The pattern is pretty straightforward: you critique the quality of the debate without taking an actual position and consequently derail it. You then make every effort to evade arguments by people who do actually know something with some conversational chicanery, e.g. you doubt the other person’s motives and claim that you won’t be baited by him. This further undermines actual content and dare I say, the intelligence of the debate.
How would you characterize what you are doing? Are you adding interesting information and refreshing points of view? Are you taking the debate somewhere useful? Are you bringing up the level of discourse around here? Are you contributing specialized knowledge to interested and intelligent people?
Better yet, don’t answer that. I have no doubt that whoever is reading this thread is more than capable of making up his/her own mind as to the utility of your contributions thus far.
The more general point, though, is what do you reasonably expect? This is a generalist board filled with relatively intelligent and only occasionally specialized people. I would hazard a guess that most do not have formal training in philosophy, theology, or formal logic. Yet people here are capable of expressing their opinions pretty cogently and often can revise their beliefs. What more can one really demand? If you want “smart” debate on theodicy, then join a listserv of professional theologians, read a few back issues of a good journal, or better yet, read some Aquinas. Do you think your invective is going to make anyone smarter? Where I sit, it seems that your positionless critique just provokes people into arguing with you for its own sake, even if they end up taking undesirable positions. I suppose you see yourself as some sort of gadfly, going after the collective weak underbelly of the SDMB. But a good gadfly is able to challenge people to examine their assumptions and either change their minds or admit they don’t know. After your ministrations, people just dig in deeper.
We can’t all be Socrates, I know. But the least we can do is follow his example and not tell the Thrasymachoi of the SDMB that they are stupid and that their conversation does not meet our standards.
A little. Stoicism and its logic are extremely systematic. To make a long story short, perhaps the most hotly debated open question in Stoicism today is whether providentia or a universal telos is required to support Stoic ethics. I say no, and I find Lawrence Becker’s arguments in A New Stoicism to be absolutely convincing. I am both an atheist and a positive political theorist myself, so I will admit to my rather large aesthetic preference for atheist ethics and analytical philosophy. So on those grounds alone, provided that the logical operations are correct (and they are), I would be convinced.
So my interpretation of the event is strictly ethical and eudaimonistic. I do not believe in the universal telos nor in ekpyrosis, which some more supernaturally inclined Stoics might argue is the root cause of the earthquake. My eudaimonistic interpretation has no drop of originality or anything interesting really at all, if only because the earthquake is one of many events outside any individual’s control. From the first line of the Enchiridion of Epictetus:
The consequences of the earthquake, while tragic, are dispreferred indifferents and are orthogonal to virtue and thus happiness. The presence of dispreferred indifferents are not logically or practically incompatible with the pursuit and achievement of virtue.
An earthquake is a particularly useful example in Stoicism because it is “natural”. There was absolutely no element of human agency. The Stoics enjoin us to “follow nature”, identified by Chrysippus as conformity with the rational ordering and pattern of the universe. Seneca says:
It’s in one of his Epistulae Morales. I don’t have an English copy handy, so I just googled it. I don’t even remember which letter it’s from.
I do not accept “follow nature” as conformity to the will of the preordained universe but, following Becker, as following “the facts”. Becker writes:
Here Becker really speaks to the experiences of what ancient Stoics have endured, from slavery, torture, suicide, and occasionally some more preferred indifferents, too.
The facts ultimately tell us that there is an underlying probability of natural events with an enormous scale. The sage accepts this and recognizes that it is in the sphere of things outside his control. He will endure this event himself or witness its effects on others. In the former case, he will endure it with dispassion because he has already accepted the outcome as something outside his sphere of control and because he knows his health, wholeness of his body, etc. are dispreferred indifferents. They are required for life but not for virtue. If he witnesses the event occurring on others, he will respond with sympathy and assistance. For the sage is a member of the great city of gods & men, as Epictetus says. He knows that other people suffer and he will do what he can to alleviate this suffering. But his response to this, too, will be tempered. He cannot control the outcome, only his beliefs about the outcome and its results. So he will fine tune his emotions such that they do not in any way interfere with his project of alleviating suffering.
I have my own somewhat eclectic opinions about the problem of evil in general (i.e., not just events with shitty consequences) that uses a rational choice framework with the Stoic theory of preference formation (oikeiosis).
I do not want to derail this thread completely with an excursus on Stoicism, since it is probably not something that most people are all that concerned about. I cut out the theodicy in my discussion because to be honest, I don’t find it convincing and I do not feel entirely comfortable rehearsing the arguments. For that, I really suggest anyone interested just read the Consolation of Philosophy. Texts are available online, and the Penguin edition is certainly cheap if you buy it from a college English major forced to take a Chaucer class or something.
Evidently, God is not what caused the devastation in Haiti. An activist, who also seems to be a Seismologist and Climatologist, has identified the true cause. (Perk up your ears for the answer in the last 20 seconds or so.)
Never have I seen a summary of Seneca’s De Providentia take on such a turgid and desultory form. You need to get into a remedial writing class stat.
You figure it out, you let me know, OK?
Outside edit window: I suppose it is more contra Seneca really than a summary. Nevertheless, it is awful writing. But we’re all very impressed that you know what providentia, telos, and eudaimonia mean, even though each of these terms have quite serviceable English counterparts (“eudaimonia” is tougher than the other two, but “leading the good life” or “human flourishing” or even “felicity” all work).
Anyway, it was pretty tedious and reminds me of nothing so much as a pretentious second-year, second-rate philosophy student trying to blow the prof’s skirt up after having taken a crack at the Cambridge Dictionary of Classical Thought.
But, all that said, I suppose it does count as a Stoic interpretation of the event. So you have that.
And again you make no argument, take no overt position of your own; you just sneer at other people’s style.
Nevermind.
Still a critique of style.
ETA: And what’s too bad about all that is that your post, if you put in less effort to show off jargon, and more effort to communicate the ideas effectively, could have been exactly the kind of quality-of-the-discussion-raising post that I have been asking for. But you didn’t do that. Instead you opted to shit out a mystifying cloud of words (as Cardozo put it) because…well, I have no idea.
I’m sorry you are so easily confused, but I suppose that happens when you confront the confines of your understanding as often as you do. Rather than admit that everything you know you got from wikipedia, you just forge ahead with puerile invective.
Whom do you think you are kidding?
When I say that I do not believe in or argue from providence, the word not is very important. I would expect that even a subliterate moron would be able to identify from the title of Seneca’s book that it is about providence. Yet somehow you do not even meet that standard.
I waste my time with you because you and people like you are a curse. You are afflicted with semi-rationality, probably good intentions, and no doubt a toxic dose of Dunning-Kruger. You’re just like Ayn Rand: with a wave of your hand you dismiss books you have not read, presume expertise in areas in which you have none, and belittle those with the temerity to disagree with you by insulting them. You don’t even contribute the vague, self-indulgent philosophizing of a Rand. As usual, aside from your reflexive, sophomoric critique of whatever you think SDMB orthodoxy is, you’ve got nothing.
You must be pretty easily mystified. I mean, on the one hand you are trying to signal that you know what the “jargon” means. On the other hand, you claim that it is somehow mystifying. I am sure the rest of the SDMB appreciates your crusade for the common man here. But really, it’s just more evasion and distraction on your part. Par for the course.
OK, let me see if I can rework Maeglin’s post, or at least usefully comment on it.
In De Providentia, Seneca writes a dialogue that addresses why good people suffer, which seems to undermine the notion that living life by following an intelligently-operating nature will allow one to lead a good life. That is to say, by providence, following nature will lead to eudaimonia—a word sometimes tranlsated as “happiness,” but not happiness in a hedonistic sense, but rather, as in the sense of happiness because one has led a good life. So that’s sort of a backgrounder on “providentia.”
Now, telos just means “end” or “objective.” In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously (if also fallaciously) asserts “Because all actions aim at some end, there is some one end at which all actions aim.” In the course of that work, Aristotle identifies that one end at which all actions aim as “happiness” (again in the eudaimonia sense, not in the hedonistic sense). That is, Aristotle identified a “universal objective” (or “universal telos” as some say).
I am not up to date on modern Stoic theory, so I do not know how these two are jockeying for the position as the foundational value of Stoic ethics. Perhaps this means that Stoic ethics only make sense if (1) nature has been providently designed so that by following it we will flourish, or (2) the universe is not providently designed, but there is a goal which objectively is universally valued and that striving for this goal will lead us rationally to adopt Stoic ethics. But, to be certain as to what Maeglin meant here, you will need to ask him.
A good gloss on “positive political theory” would be that it is rational choice theory applied to actors within the political realm. It is far and away the dominant school of thought in modern public policy theorizing. It is not particularly pertinent to talk about natural disasters (although, it would be relevant to talk about how political-power-wielding actors respond to natural disasters). I think the gist of these last couple sentences is to say that Maeglin prefers a strictly rational way of analyzing issues without the presence of the supernatural. You might protest that everybody on this board would say that, but one useful distinction to be mindful of is that humanism is not strictly rational and so there are some people who are mistrustful of Maeglin’s well-oiled analytical modes and prefer a less elegant but more historically or psychologically informed way of looking at issues.
And that’s the first paragraph! Let’s see what kind of responses I get before proceeding.
Ok, this is a good enough start. I will certainly cop to the fact that I use jargon as shorthand when I talk to others who share an interest in this sort of thing. It’s uncommon that anyone else actually does. All the same, I strive to avoid complacency.
We don’t even need to go into Seneca to find sufficient background on providentia, or the divinely ordered intelligent nature. This was identified with Zeus by Chrysippus. Meijer published a book on Stoic theology a year or two ago. I confess that I have not yet read it, but here is a quick word on Providence:
And again:
There is a lot more to it than Seneca. I don’t have the depth to really dig into how the understanding of providence changed from the old stoa over time, so I’d rather keep this somewhat fast and loose.
Yes. Though I would read “purpose” here more heavily into telos than just end or objective. Some Stoics believed that the universe had some purpose that people need to attune themselves to. To the extent that you are in sync with the universe, you practice virtue. There’s a great analogy of this in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio. It’s too long to quote at length. Scipio’s dead grandfather, inconveniently named Scipio, tells him to listen to the music of the spheres. Because it is all around you at all times, you become so used to it that it is very difficult to hear. Likewise, the purpose of the universe is all around you but is very difficult to discern and takes a great deal of practice.
I believe that Stoic ethics are useful in the absence of both a universal purpose and a universally desired goal.
I just mentioned this because I talked about an individual’s response to a natural disaster. But I have some semi-formed thoughts about the evil that people commit in the world, too. Stoicism plays a role here because it contains useful theories about how people acquire preferences. Rational choice helps us understand how people transform preferences into actual decisions with consequences. Rational choice is absolutely silent on how people actually end up liking what they like, so it really does not help us talk about why people do evil things.
I did say I was an atheist, so I would hope at least that much is clear. But I am a little less comfortable with the word “rational” here just because it has such a strong everyday, even normative use that really does not do the trick. I’d just prefer “logical”, “empirical”, or some such.
Sure. But well-oiled models are not reality, they are just hopefully useful tools that you can use to understand how things interact at some deep level without unnecessary detail. Good models can certainly be historically and psychologically informed. But skepticism of any tool when confronting a hard problem is usually justified, so I certainly don’t mind. For what it’s worth.
Well, better would be to make an argument, or take an overt position of your own.
My only regret is that there is nowhere where I could’ve bet that you were not going to provide any arguments.
I could tell from your first post that all you were going to do was claim that we are too theologically ignorant to be worth sharing your wisdom with; I’ve seen the type before.
Here’s the next chunk (drafted before seeing the responses to my earlier post):
As I mentioned above, in De Providentia the Stoic philosopher wrote a dialogue precisely on the topic at hand: Why, if the world is providentially designed to promote human flourishing if we correctly conform our actions to it, do good people nevertheless suffer?
Now, as we have discussed at length above, there are some common gambits in resolving POE, and Seneca and the Stoics are no different. One of these is to reject the claim that the suffering is bad: suffering disciplines the actor and gives him a chance to forge and exercise his virtue (this is the gambit of rejecting the existence of unmerited suffering premise of the standard POE argument).
A gloss: suffering leads to the cultivation of a character that will produce eudamonia
I think we’ve all been exposed to this idea. But we should query whether we believe it. Do the victims of the Haitian earthquake or of the genocides really get something out of their suffering. The standard response to this standard gambit is that it simply does not take the suffering issue seriously. Bad things happen to people, and those things are so bad that nothing good comes out of it for them.
The Stoics also divided up things into three classes: virtues, vices, and things indifferent. Temperance, wisdom, courage and the like were virtues. Their opposites, lack of self-control, inattention/incuriosity/unwisdom, cowardice were vices. All other things were things indifferent: permissible and striven for according to one’s own personal and peculiar tastes. A comfortable lifestyle, so long as it didn’t lead to complacency or decadence, was a thing indifferent.
I think these is what Maeglin is referring to by “dispreferred indifferents that are orthogonal to virtue and happiness” (Yikes!). To the extent that the earthquake has laid waste to the comforts of Haiti, but as to their character, it is unfortunate, but not actually a case of visiting evil on Haitians. We all have our crosses to bear, and we don’t feel sad that we all face some toil in this life.
This is, I think, a similar rejection of the existence of unmitigated and unmerited suffering that forms the last premise of the POE trilogy. And again, you may ask yourself whether you genuinely are convinced by the doctrine of things indifferent. The Stoic says, “Virtuous Haitians will not have their characters debased by this earthquake, and as such, they remain as eudaimonistically happy as before. In fact, they will be improved by this crucible of character.” I would not fault anybody for having some misgivings about this way of thinking.
Sure, but what do you think about it?
We are going very astray here. I certainly don’t believe this. Neither did Solon: the happiest man is the man who has never been born. Only slightly less happy is the infant who dies before experiencing suffering.
Suffering is not a requirement for happiness, or more specifically, virtue. I am not going to do justice to Stoicism in general here, so please try to take this precis in the spirit that I give it.
There are some ways to get to virtue. Wiki doesn’t do a terrible job summing them up in a neat way.
Virtue requires constant flexing of your practical reason. The important thing here is that whatever condition you find yourself in, nothing save the destruction of your mind can stop you from doing your duties and refining your reason. You can suffer miserably or you can live a privileged life; neither actually matter.
We have another cocktail party word for this: adiaphora, or “indifferents”. It’s fine to have preferences for indifferents, like wealth, fame, power, health, whatever, as long as you recognize that these things won’t make you happy. There’s been a lot of Stoic ink spilled on this over the millennia, but it’s enough to mention that over time a hierarchy emerged. There are things that help your life, preferred indifferents, or things that hinder it. A massive earthquake is a dispreferred indifferent.
The earthquake itself does not forge one’s character in the crucible of suffering. It quite frankly sucks. It is not necessary nor sufficient for people to suffer to be happy.
So close. We can feel sad when bad things happen, and even the sage will feel sad from time to time. The question is whether these are good emotions or bad emotions (something the ancients worried about a lot), or whether these emotions interfere with your projects and practical reason (something many modern stoics worry about).
I wouldn’t fault anyone for having misgivings about this, either.