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A Problem for Theodicists

One of the pegs in the theodicist's attempt to reply to the problem of evil, usually put forward to account for what is called physical evil, consists of the claim that the existence of physical evil in the universe is a logically necessary condition of the existence of certain moral virtues. The evils in question include such things as earthquakes, disease, floods, volcanic eruptions, and other natural occurrences, often disastrous, which cause pain and suffering to many, often innocent, human beings. (It is sometimes argued that it is not the natural occurrences, but the pain and suffering that they produce, which constitute the physical evils with which the problem of evil is concerned;1 this point need not detain us, however, for this is not the aspect of the theodicist's reply that I am concerned with.) The following example of the kind of reasoning that the theodicist employs will be helpful to us here. Imagine a universe with the following states of affairs: