The problem of infant suffering

Religious Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 205-217

  Chignell, Andrew ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 32944470117     PISSN: 00344125     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S003441259800434X     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. See G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Rev. edition, ed. Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
2. Roderick M. Chisholm, 'The Defeat of Good and Evil', revised and reprinted in The Problem of Evil, ed. Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 53-68. This quotation is from pp. 68.
3. P. 49, M. M. Adams, 'Aesthetic Goodness as a Solution to the Problem of Evil', in God, Truth, and Reality: Essays in Honor of John Hick, ed. Arvind Sharma (New York: St Martin's), 1993. 46-61.
4. The full list can be found, among other places, on pages 211-12 in M. M. Adams, 'Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God', The Problem of Evil, 209-21.
5. Adams also offers a formal definition of horrors: 'evils e the participation in which (as either victim or perpetrator) by a person p gives everyone prima facie reason to believe that p's life cannot, given its inclusion of e, be a great good to p on the whole'. Cf. 'Aesthetic Goods as a Solution to the Problem of Evil', pp. 49.
6. Adams conducts her discussion within the framework of an 'unabashed realist' understanding of aesthetic value. This understanding entails, among other things, (1) that aesthetic goods are intrinsically valuable; (2) that there is an aesthetic way of appreciating aesthetic goods for their own sake; and (3) that this aesthetic appreciation of intrinsic goods is itself of intrinsic value (cf. 'Aesthetic Goodness as a Solution to the Problem of Evil', p. 49). I am inclined to work within this general value-theory framework in the present essay.
7. Adams, 'Aesthetic Goodness as a Solution to the Problem of Evil', pp. 48.
8. 'Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God', pp. 217.
9. 'Aesthetic Goods as a Solution to the Problem of Evil', pp. 50.
10. I will take the list from 'Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God' (pp. 218-20) because the scenarios are offered in more detail there
11. In 'Aesthetic Goods', Adams refers to most of these same scenarios, but in a more cursory fashion (pp. 59-60).
12. Adams discusses the redemptive value of martyrdom 'Redemptive Suffering: A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil', Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment ed. Audi and Wainwright (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), pp. 248-67.
13. 'Aesthetic Goodness as a Solution to the Problem of Evil', pp. 59.
14. These claims are bolstered at length by George Mavrodes in Belief in God (New York: Random House, 1970). Cf. pp. 61-2.
15. Stump, 'The Problem of Evil', Faith and Philosophy 2 (Oct. 1985), 392-435.Thequotation is from p.411.
16. Harry Frankfurt makes the case that an individual who lacks second-order desires is not a person in any significant sense - he calls them ' wantons'. My claim here does not hang on whether or not infants are persons - there are many other reasons to hold that they are. I simply mean to note that many of the sophisticated abilities that characterize older human persons are not possessed by infants. Cf. Frankfurt 'Freedom of the Will, and the Concept of a Person', Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971), pp. 5-20.
17. Adams, 'Symbolic Value and the Problem of Evil', Interpretation in Religion, ed. Shlomo Biderman and Ben-Ami Scharfstein (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992, 259-82). These quotations from pp. 277-8.