Ad Walls-Alvin Plantinga

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International Phenomenological Society

Ad WallsAuthor(s): Alvin PlantingaSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Sep., 1991), pp. 621-624Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2107882

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Philosophy ndPhenomenologicalesearchVol. LLNo. 3, September1991

Ad WallsALVIN PLANTINGAUniversityof Notre Dame

Professor Walls asks whether Plantingamust be committed to libertarianfreedom, given his view of God's goodness. 'Here 'libertarian reedom'hasapproximately the following meaning: a person has libertarian freedomwith respect to a given action if and only if he is free with respectto that ac-tion, and furthermore t is not possible both that he is free with respect tothat action and thatall of his actions are determined. (To assert that some-one has libertarian reedom with respectto some action, therefore, s to denycompatibilism.) And the question at issue is not whether Walls presents agood argumentfor the conclusion that human beings have libertarian ree-dom, but whether I am committed to the view that they do. More exactly,the questionis whethermy view thatGod is essentially or necessarilygood,together with what I have said about the free will defense, commits me tothe view that humanbeings have libertarian reedom.

Walls proposesan argument or the conclusion thatI am so committed;acentralpremiseof his argument s

(2) In every possible world in which persons are not free or are freeonly in the compatibilistsense, God could properlyeliminate allmoral evil.

(Here 'properlyeliminate' is as in Walls' paper;and moral evil is evil due tothe free activity of significantly free creatures.) But if the conclusion ofWalls' argument s thatI am committedto humanbeings having libertarianfreedom, then what his argumentreally seems to require s not just the truthof (2) but the propositionthatI am committed o (2).There is an initial difficulty here: I am inclined to think the notion ofmoral evil implies the notion of libertarian reedom;that is, it is necessary,I think, that anyone who commits moralevil, has or has had libertarian ree-dom with respect to at least one action. If that is so, then (2) is vacuously1 Jerry L. Walls, Why Plantinga Must Move from Defense to Theodicy, Philosophy and

PhenomenologicalResearch 51 (June, 1991), p. 375.

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true: there aren't any possible worlds in which persons are not free or arefree only in the compatibilist sense, and in which there is moral evil. Forpurposesof argument,however, suppose we ignorethis caveatandconsider itpossible that therebe moral evil even if there is no (creaturely) libertarianfreedom.Now I have never, so far as I know, affirmed 2)-for the reasonthatI amnot at all sure it is true. But then how could it be thatI am committed to it?Under what conditions is someone who has never affirmed a given proposi-tion, neverthelesscommitted o it? This is a questionof considerable nterestandgreatdelicacy.2It isn't enough,of course, that (2) be true,or even neces-sarily true. Realism with respect to universals is (I believe) necessarilytrue; it doesn't follow that nominalists are committed to realism aboutuniversals. (And if I am wrong and it is nominalism that is necessarily true,it doesn't follow that realists are committed to nominalism.) Still, it isclear that you can be committed to a proposition to which you have neverassented. Suppose, for example, I propose the theory that there are twouniquely tallest men. You point out that according to my theory, there ismore than one uniquely tallest man;I demur, replying that on my theory, itis not true that two is greater than one. What I have said nonetheless com-mits me, I think, to the proposition that there is more than one uniquelytallest humanbeing.

So you canbe committedto a propositionp even if you never assertit;andyou can be committed to a proposition q that follows from what you explic-itly say only with the help of another premiss r, even if you do not assertrand indeed reject it. Perhaps t is sufficient thatr be utterlyobvious to everynormal human being, in the way in which it is utterly obvious to every nor-mal humanbeing that two is greater hanone.

But of course Walls' (2) is not like that: it isn't utterly obvious to anynormal humanbeing who thinks about it. At least it isn't utterlyobvious tome. For all I can see, (2) might be true;but also, for all I can see, it mightbefalse. Accordingto (2) it is necessarilytrue thatif humanbeings do not havelibertarian reedom, then God could properly eliminate every case of moralevil; so necessarily,if God is necessarily good and humanbeings do not havelibertarianfreedom, there is no moral evil. Equivalently, the claim is thatthere is no possible world a good God would actualize in which there ismoral evil but no libertarian reedom., So if God is necessarily good, it fol-lows that thereare no possible worlds at all in which there is moralevil butno libertarian reedom.)But is this really obvious? Maybe a certainamountof evil is necessaryto every really good possible world. Perhapsamong the2 See my Two Concepts of Modality: Modal Realism and Modal Reductionism in

Philosophical Perspectives, 1, Metaphysics, 1987, ed. by James Tomberlin(Atascadero,California:Ridgeview PublishingCo., 1987), pp. 221 ff.

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really good possible worlds, there are some in which there is no creaturelyfreedom, but there are creaturescapable of knowledge. Perhaps it is a goodthing that those creaturesbe able to appreciate the great value of the worldin question; but perhaps they couldn't appreciate ts great value unless therewere some evil with respect to which to contrast that value; and perhapsthat evil could be of several kinds, includingevil due to the free (in the com-patibilist sense) activity of creatures.If all this is so, and for all I know, itis so, then(2) wouldbe false.

Accordingly, I am not committed to (2). Furthermore, n arguing thatthe existence of a wholly good, omniscient and omnipotent God is compati-ble with evil simpliciter, I am not committed to our actually having liber-tarian reedom, although,of course,I do believe that we do.

When it comes to some of the terrible evils that in fact disfigure ourworld, however, things are different. It might be plausible to hold thatsome evil is necessary for creatures properly to appreciate good; it isn'tplausible, however, to think that the appalling evils we do in fact find arenecessary for us to appreciate the world's good, and it isn't clear that thoseevils wouldn'tin any event be too heavy a price to pay for the value involvedin creatures'being able to appreciate hat good. Perhaps some evil is organi-cally requiredby some great goods; but it is certainlyhardto see whatgoodsmight organically require some of the horrifying evils the world in fact dis-plays. With respect to those appalling evils, therefore,I am inclined to agreewith Walls (more exactly, I think it likely that the analogues of (2) involv-ing reference to those horrifyingevils are true). The only reasons God couldhave for those evils, one is inclined to think, must involve creaturely free-dom of one sortor another.

To put this in terms of the free will defense: the free will defender ar-gues that

(1) God is omnipotent,omniscient and wholly goodis compatible with the existence of evil (where, following the tradition, wethinkof evil as including pain and suffering). He does this by finding someproposition r that is compatible with (1) and together with (1) entails thatthereis evil. Where the effort is just to arguethat (1) is compatiblewith theexistence of evil simpliciter (nevermindhow much or of what kinds) then itseems to me that a large variety of r's-can plausibly play this role. But thefree will defender may also try to rebut the claim that the quantity of evil(however one tries to specify it) the world displays is inconsistent with (1),by arguing that the quantityof evil we find is in fact consistent with (1).And he may also try to argue for the consistency of (1) with a propositionspecifying thatthere is some special kind of evil: naturalevil, for example,

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Ad Walls-Alvin Plantinga

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