1) A Response to the Problem of Evil: Introduction

               The movement most commonly known today as the “New Atheist” movement has developed new and increasingly articulate arguments against theism on the basis of evil.  The argument goes as follows:

                1.  An omnipotent God could stop evil

                2.  An omnibenevolent God would stop evil

                3.  Evil exists

                4.  Therefore, there exists no omnipotent and omnibenevolent God

                It is a strong argument, no doubt.  Yet even the atheists making it have conceded that there is no necessary contradiction here.  Even an omnipotent God may not be able to stop evil without thereby tainting some greater good, such as creaturely free will or the ability to develop virtuous character through resistance to evil.  An omnibenevolent God could very easily have good reason for allowing evil, just as a benevolent mother has good reason for letting her child get jabbed in the arm with a syringe.  Because God is a person, not an immutable principle, we cannot with perfect accuracy say what he can or would do.

                I know full well that these brief defenses stir up a whole host of questions: what of natural evil?  What of gratuitous evil?  If evil is required for the acquisition of good, doesn’t that make good dependent on evil?  Does God exist, yet he is not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent?  There are plenty of sources that can help to answer these questions, but this essay is not one of them.  To answer all of them would be to write an encyclopedia, and I am neither inclined to nor capable of such a feat. 

An additional reason for which I refrain from answering such questions is that I do not believe that they are at the center of the issue.  They are all peripheral, derivative from questions which are much more ultimate; questions that have gone blatantly uncontemplated by those who need to seriously consider them.  They are as follows: what do we mean when we say that something is evil?  What are the implications of believing in evil?  Is the affirmation of evil consistent with an atheistic worldview?  These are the questions that I believe must be answered before any meaningful debate can occur between theism and atheism about evil, and they are the questions which this essay seeks to answer.
  

2) A Response to the Problem of Evil: What Do We Mean When We Say That Something is Evil?

First off, what do we mean when we say that something is evil?  At minimum, it means that we dislike that thing.  At maximum, it means that we think something is really wrong, that it should not be the way that it is, that it is unjust, etc.  Wherever we put evil within this range, one assumption regarding evil remains: a standard.  The minimum end presupposes a personal standard of what one likes.  The maximum end presupposes a standard of what is really right, or how things should be, or justice, respectively.  Regardless of where we place evil on the spectrum, or how pervasive we think it is in the world, the necessary standard for it to fall short of remains.  Injustice implies justice.  Lies imply truth.  Flaws imply a standard of perfection for the flawed thing.  Evil, then, can be broadly defined as anything, any experience, etc. which falls short of a “standard of good”.

Viewpoints such as Manichean Dualism might object.  It is, roughly, the belief that a wholly good God and a wholly evil Prince of Darkness exist eternally, and that the universe is the product of their ongoing war.  In the established view, evil is parasitic on the standard of good; truth can exist without lies, but lies cannot exist without truth.  Dualism denies this – it holds that evil and good are coeternal and coequal, with neither subdued to the other.  Such a viewpoint, however, immediately falls apart when we ask the question, “What or who has decided that the Prince of Darkness is evil?”  With the idea of Dualism, we have not succeeded in metaphysically defining evil – we have only assigned a deity which wholly represents evil.  We still need to know what standard has judged the Prince of Darkness to be evil.  (When I say “judge”, I do not mean it in a verbal sense.  It is not as if the standard is “here” and “judging” something “over there”.  When I say “the standard has judged this thing to be evil”, I mean, more accurately, that the standard has shown this thing to be evil.  The term “judge” will, throughout this essay, be used in this sense).  Does it, pray tell, exist quite apart from God and the Prince?  If so, then why not simply worship that standard, rather than God, since it is more powerful than, and exerting its judgment on, both the God of Manicheanism and the Prince of Darkness?

Thus we maintain that evil is that which falls short a standard of good.  What exactly is this standard?  Isn’t this definition being a little obscure?  That is exactly what I am going to set out to solve – we are going to see what essential qualities must be possessed by this standard in order to make sense of evil.

3) A Response to the Problem of Evil: the Subjective Evil Argument

We pose what is often the first question asked regarding this standard by which evil is judged: is it objective or subjective?  In other words, is the standard something quite apart from what we think about it, so that people can be right or wrong in their conceptions of it, or are we the ones who personally judge evil based on our own standards, so that all judgments are equally right?  The atheist, when given the option between the two, is like to select the latter, since the affirmation of some objective metaphysical standard is difficult to affirm in the context of an atheistic worldview (we will observe whether or not atheism allows the existence of such an objective standard in detail later).  However, the atheist often does this without recognizing that, if the world is only subjectively evil, then their contention against God’s existence on account of evil crumbles.  The atheist who launches an argument against God on account of subjective evil is, in essence, modifying the original argument that I quoted in the beginning of this essay as follows:

1.  An omnipotent God could make the world good for me

2.  An omnibenevolent God would make the world good for me

3.  The world is not good for me

4.  Therefore, an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God does not exist

Though it is a valid argument in that the conclusion logically follows from each premise, the atheist refrains from really adhering to it because, frankly, it seems to us founded on utter complacency and immature thinking.  Apart from our subjective aversion to the argument as a whole, though, the logic upon which each premise is founded is clearly lacking; specifically (1) and (2).

4) A Response to the Problem of Evil: a Challenge to Premise (1)

I first challenge (1).  But before I do, I need to properly establish a definition of “omnipotence”.  Now, most people have it in their heads that when a Christian says God is “omnipotent”, we mean that he can literally do anything imaginable.  Most Christian theologians and philosophers, however, have realized that such a broad definition needs to be brought under control.  It is now largely accepted that God cannot do what is logically impossible – for instance, he cannot create a square circle or a married bachelor.  We say this not as a limitation of God, for most Christians will contend that the laws of logic stemmed from God in the first place.  Even the Bible puts a few limitations on God; the gospel of James contends that God cannot tempt nor be tempted.  And, of course, we must conclude that God cannot create something more powerful than himself, since there is no such thing as something more powerful than himself.  When we say that God is omnipotent, then, we mean that God can do everything which can be done, not that he can do every single nonsensical that we can possibly imagine.

With this definition in mind, we return to an analysis of (1).  Consider the following scenario:  let’s say that Bob’s personal standard for his life is getting a promotion to a particular position where he works.  Suppose that Sarah’s personal standard for her life is getting a promotion to the exact same position at the exact same company.  Assuming that circumstances are static and will not seriously fluctuate, if Bob’s personal standard is met, then Sarah’s personal standard is at that same moment forsaken, and vice-versa.  The two standards are “x” and “not-x”; you cannot logically have both.  Thus we see that God cannot uphold both of these standards, since he cannot do what is logically impossible.  To uphold both standards would be a logical contradiction, something which God cannot do.  It follows that we have good reason for saying that God, in fact, may not be able to make the world good according to your personal standards on the matter.  What if your standards contradict another man’s standards?  God would have to forsake one or the other.

Now, I suppose that it is true that God could create a new opening for a new promotion in that company, thereby appeasing Sarah in the event that Bob got the promotion and she didn’t.  Notice two things about this, though.  First, Sarah would technically have to change her personal standard in order for God to fulfill it.  We assume that Sarah would be satisfied with a different promotion simply because it would be highly irrational of her to be discontent with a promotion which is just as good.  But there is no guarantee, though, that she would be content with this different promotion.  If after Bob got the promotion, Sarah refused to change her personal standard even after God had opened up that new promotion for her, then God still could not fulfill her personal standard without thereby forsaking Bob’s standard by demoting him.  If God is to give Sarah and Bob the free will to have their own standards, then he cannot force them to change their standards without thereby infringing upon their free will.  And if they are hell-bent on making their standards mutually exclusive from each other, then God can either appease one and forsake the other, or force both of them to change their standards (and thereby infringing upon their free will).

Second, it is unlikely that God could open up that position for Sarah at all without forsaking someone else’s personal standards or infringing upon free will.  In order to open up that promotion, James might have to be demoted; and it is almost certain that demotion is not congruent with James’s personal standards for his life.  God might, perhaps, create some circumstances whereby the company requires a new position for Sarah to fill, but who else might those circumstances affect?  The God who fulfills everyone’s personal standards is looking a lot less like a divine Father and more like a divine Micromanager.  The possible reasons why God would not want to micromanage his creation stack from here to the moon and beyond.  Thus the affirmation of (1) crumbles, for there are demonstrable instances wherein God, though being omnipotent, is incapable of fulfilling a personal standard of good here without forsaking a personal standard of good there.

5) A Response to the Problem of Evil: a Challenge to Premise (2)

I would next like to challenge (2): if God was omnibenevolent, then he would fulfill your personal standards.  There are a host of examples within the immediately observable world which challenge the validity of this premise.  We will consider only one out of these: let us consider parents.  For the vast majority of us, parents are, or once were, inconvenient.  They not-so-infrequently forbid us from doing thing which we really want to do – they are, in other words, constantly forsaking our personal standards.  But I doubt if any of us would say that our parents were anything but benevolent, regardless of their forbidding us to do as we pleased.  In fact, it is those parents that constantly appease their children which we consider far less than benevolent.  That child is certain to become bratty, entitled, and unable to function in a world of mature adults.  The fact that parents constantly forsake our personal standards makes them benevolent. 

It is also fruitful to ask ourselves why parents have to forsake the personal standards of their children.  When you are a child, you think, reason, and emote like a child.  You have little experience, and far less capacity for making good judgments than your parents.  Thus, when you devise a personal standard as a child, it is based on faulty and limited cognition.  Your parents, in comparison, are far more competent to know what is best for you.  They must necessarily curb your personal standards because they are not based on the reality of things.

If parents know more than you, and thus have to forsake your personal standards, and are considered benevolent for it, how much more would God, if he existed!  If there was a God, he would necessarily know a lot more than you.  Your personal standards would be immature in comparison to him.  In favor of the objective goodness of the world, God would have to annoy a lot of people, simply because they are people and less than him in terms of cognition and reasoning.  Clearly, as demonstrated through the example of parents, a benevolent being does not have to fulfill the personal standards of those over whom he rules in order to qualify as benevolent.  Often times, it is required of a benevolent being to forsake the personal standards of his inferiors.  Premise (2) is void.

To undo the subjective evil argument against God, we would only need to demonstrate one of the premises as false.  But we have gone above and beyond that, demonstrating that two of the premises are false.  Thus, the subjective evil argument against God crumbles.  If the standard which judged evil was subjective, we would not be able to object to God’s existence on account of evil.

6) A Response to the Problem of Evil: is the Standard which Judges Evil Objective or Subjective?

But is the standard which judges evil subjective or not?  Thus far, we have only demonstrated that God’s existence cannot be disproved on the basis of subjective evil.  We have not yet discussed whether or not evil is actually subjective.  We now return to the original question posed several paragraphs up: is the standard by which evil is judged objective or subjective?

I begin by asking my readers a question: are any of you perfectly good?  That is, have any of you succeeded in never telling even a single lie, or stealing a single thing which belonged to someone else, or losing your temper even once?  No?  Very well.  You have just conceded yourself as an unworthy judge of evil.  We note that the standard, whatever it is, which judges evil must itself contain no trace of evil.  For if it did, then what standard should we say had judged that standard to have evil in it?  If the standard has evil in it, then that means it has been compared to another standard and found wanting.  So it is with you.  When you say that you are imperfectly good, you imply an objective standard of goodness outside of yourself against to which you have been compared and found wanting.

“When I say that I am imperfectly good, I mean that I have fallen short of my own personal, subjective standards of goodness.”  Why not, dare I ask, simply lower your subjective standard so that your actions can meet it?  If moral goodness is truly subjective in that every decision on the matter is a legitimate one, then why deal with the guilt of doing something “wrong”?  Why not simply lower your standards and wipe away the guilt?  “I do not want my standards of goodness to be too low.”  But you must realize that this contention implies an objective standard of “high-ness” and “low-ness” which is pressing itself upon your own personal moral standards.  Your personal moral standards can only be “low” if there is some moral standard apart from it which is “high”.  Objectivity, it would seem, cannot be evaded when it comes to the standard which measures “goodness”.

If something is perfectly relative to everything around it, then it does not exist.  Translated into goodness, what I mean to say is that if everyone’s say on the matter was a legitimate – that is, if goodness was perfectly relative to whoever decided it – then there would not be such a thing as goodness in the first place.  I conduct the following thought experiment to help demonstrate the point: consider a mirror.  What color is it?  Now, some of you may be aware, from the brilliant YouTube channel Vsauce, that mirrors technically have a slight green tint in them.  However brilliant such an insight is, and however credible the information, I would like to waive this fact about mirrors for the sake of argument.  This slight green tint aside, what color is a mirror?  The obvious answer is that its color is relative to whatever colors surround it – that is, its color is perfectly subjective.  Now imagine a world consisting entirely of mirrors.  What color is such a world?  Boggling as it is, we are forced to conclude that such a world has absolutely no color.  The color of a mirror is relative to the colors around it; if there are all mirrors and no colors, then there are still no colors.  In order for there to be color in this world, there must be some objective color introduced.

It’s the same way with goodness.  If goodness is perfectly relative to whatever we decide it to be, then there is no goodness.  There has to be at least some objectivity to goodness for there to be a conception of goodness in the first place, just like there has to be at least a fleck of objective color in a world of mirrors for there to be any color.  Clearly, the standard which judges evil to be evil is objective and not subjective.

7) A Response to the Problem of Evil: the Self-Comparison Argument

The next question we ask is this: does the standard which judges evil exist in nature or does it exist outside of nature in the supernatural?  This question is pivotal.  Its answer will once and for all determine whether or not an atheist can even affirm the existence of objective evil.  By virtue of his own worldview, the atheist would have to conclude that the standard which judges evil can be found within nature, since the atheist largely denies the supernatural (I say “largely” because, while the New Atheists unilaterally deny the supernatural, it is technically not necessary of an “atheistic” worldview).  But is such a conclusion possible?  Can the standard which judges evil be found within the realm of nature?  We will soon see if this contention stands up to close scrutiny.

The atheist contention that “evil exists” is more concisely translated to “evil exists in the natural world”.  This implication is crucial.  It means that the entire natural world has been compared to a standard of good, and those parts of it which are below the standard are what we call “evil”.  Now, the atheists also contend that the standard to which the natural world is compared is itself in the natural world.  What interests us at present is that, put together, we see that these two contentions lead us to the bizarre conclusion that the standard is, in fact, being compared to itself.  My argument, premise by premise, looks like this: 

1.  The standard is in the natural world

2.  All of the natural world is being compared to the standard

3.  Therefore, the standard is being compared to itself

This conclusion is an absurdity.  Something cannot be compared to itself simply by definition of comparison.  Comparison occurs between two separate, objective realities; they cannot be each other or they cannot be compared.  You cannot compare something to itself.  Empirical support: consider a corrupt tooth.  We know that this tooth is corrupt because we know what a healthy tooth looks like; the healthy tooth is the standard to which the corrupt tooth has been compared and found to be corrupt.  We notice in passing that the standard that judged the corrupt tooth to be corrupt cannot itself be found within the corrupt tooth.  We might be able to infer, from the non-corrupt parts, that the rest of the tooth should be white instead of yellow and black, or we could use mathematics to determine the most effective shape for the rest of the tooth, and so infer that that was its original shape.  But, again, in these instances the corrupt tooth is being compared to our inferences, not anything actually within the tooth.  There is no objective reality within the corrupt tooth which demonstrates what the tooth should really look like.  

8) A Response to the Problem of Evil: is the Standard which Judges Evil Natural or Supernatural?

To escape holding to an absurd conclusion, the atheist would have to demonstrate one of the first two premise to be false (or they could demonstrate that the conclusion does not logically follow, but clearly that is not an option).  They could not deny premise (1) without thereby denying their own worldview.  If the standard exists outside the natural world, then it would exist in the supernatural.  Denial of premise (1) would prove the supernatural, and thus prove the atheist to be wrong in his convictions, since the atheist denies the supernatural. 

Can the atheist deny premise (2)?  Perhaps.  The keyword in (2) is all.  The atheist might say that not all of the natural world is being compared to the standard.  They could also say that the standard is within the part of the natural world which is not being compared to it.  Thus, the standard is not being compared to itself.  The ability of the standard to be within the natural world is saved.  But is such a contention – that not all of the natural world is being compared to a standard of good – able to be made?  Can it be amply supported by evidence?

To put this in perspective, let us consider what such a sector of the world would be like.  If there is no standard of good, it then follows that there is no evil in such a world, since evil is dependent on an objective standard of good.  Moral evil cannot exist unless there is an objective standard of moral good, etc.  I ask you to imagine such a world – where good and evil do not exist.  Difficult, isn’t it?  The fact of the matter is that humanity has never bothered to entertain such a notion, any more than they have bothered to entertain the notion that there are parts of the natural world where there are no natural laws, such as gravity and laws of thermodynamics.  Science fiction affirms our intuition that good and evil are universal – there is no part of the world where injustice, malice, and suffering could not potentially exist.  If we lived on Jupiter, there would still be murders and disease and whatnot.  Same as with any planet infinities away.  There is no good reason for us to think otherwise.

I do not necessarily say that it is impossible for there to exist a sector of the observable universe where good and evil do not exist.  But, as of now, there is no “model” for understanding how this might work, and such a notion is still juxtaposed with powerful inductive reasoning.  In short, the burden of proof is on the atheist.  We assume that good and evil are universal until we have good reason to think otherwise.  If someone came forth claiming that the law of gravity was not universal throughout nature, surely we would not believe such a person unless he presented irrefutable proof of such a conclusion.  I ask the same from the atheist.  If he wishes to deny that all of the natural world is compared to a standard of good, and thus escape (2), then he would have to bring to the table proof of this amoral swath of nature.  Until then, the conclusion that not all of the world is judged by the standard remains counterintuitive, defiant of induction, and thus invalid.

So.  We cannot deny premise (2), except by evidence which does not yet exist.  We cannot argue that the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises.  We cannot accept that the conclusion is true, since it is absurd.  It seems that we have only one option here – we must deny premise (1).  Placing the standard of good outside the natural world avoids the complication of self-comparison; the standard is here, the natural world is there, and we’re perfectly entitled to this conclusion by logic.  But this simultaneously brings us to terms with a grasping truth; the existence of evil has just proven the supernatural.  We have seen that affirming the existence of evil requires us to affirm the existence of a standard of good.  We have seen evidence that such a standard is objective rather than subjective.  We have seen that an objective standard of good cannot exist inside of the thing which it is judging, and since it is judging the natural world, it must exist apart from the natural world in the supernatural world.  Well, there’s no use denying it now.  If evil exists, there exists some objective, supernatural standard of good.

9) A Response to the Problem of Evil: Further Evidence and a Grasping Truth

The philosophical thinkers that I know of are content to stop here.  But it seems evident to me that there is at least one last property about this objective, supernatural, good standard that we have yet to establish.  Let us turn our attention, for the moment, to one particular kind of evil; namely, moral evil.  Now, when we say that someone has performed a moral evil, we are making a critical assumption about that person: he could have done other than he did.  If we found out that his brain had been hi-jacked by an evil scientist who forced him to perform a moral evil, we would not credit the evil to him but to the scientist simply because the victim could not have done any differently than he did.  It follows that in order for someone to perform a moral evil, he must be capable of choosing not to perform a moral evil.  Moral agents must have self-will or else they are not moral at all.

Our lovely standard-in-the-sky has judged this, too.  When we say that moral evil exists, we mean that there is a standard of moral good that man has fallen short of.  When a man says that he is morally evil, he has discovered this by comparing himself to that which is morally good.  We can thus add a new property to our objective, supernatural standard: it is also morally good.  But hold a moment – what does it take to be morally good?  Surely, if someone mechanistically did something good, we could not call that action morally good.  If a scientist took charge of someone’s brain and forced them to give to charity, we would say that that was charitable on the scientist’s part, not the victim’s.  In order for someone to be morally good, then, that someone must be self-willed.

This brings us to the rather startling conclusion that the standard has a will of its own.  If it did not, then it could not be morally good.  And if it is not morally good, then there is no standard by which we have judged our own actions to be morally evil.  If the contention that we are imperfect moral agents is to make any sense, there must be some objective standard of the perfect moral agent.  So, what we had been thinking all this time was an impersonal set of supernatural laws has actually turned out to be much more like a law giver.  Now in possession of a self-will, the standard which has judged the world to be evil is much less a “what” but a “who”.

Let’s recap.  The existence of evil communicates to us the existence of a standard of good.  We have seen the evidence that this standard is objective rather than subjective.  We know that the standard cannot exist in the thing which it judges, and since it judges the natural world, it must exist outside the natural world in the supernatural world.  Finally, we know that we could not have decided that man was morally evil unless the standard was morally good.  And in order for the standard to be morally good, it must have a will of its own.  To say that evil exists affirms an objective, supernatural, self-willed standard of good.  Does this not describe God perfectly?  Someone apart from us, existing in the supernatural, always using his will to do what is morally right?  Far from being a problem for theism, evil has just proven that God exists!

10) A Response to the Problem of Evil: Conclusion

One problem of evil has been solved: the logical problem.  That is, the idea that there is a logical contradiction between affirming evil’s existence and the existence of a perfect God has been laid to rest.  But that is not the only problem which evil presents; it also presents to us a distinct emotional problem, which is almost certainly more potent than its logical opposite.  Often times, it doesn’t matter how much one rationalizes that evil affirms the existence of God.  Evil, by its own nature, entices us to reject that fact, even if we can be convinced of its truth.  If we don’t want to believe that there is a God, we won’t.  And often times, evil makes the affirmation of God’s existence outright unacceptable.  That is the emotional problem of evil – it makes us want to reject God.

I regret to announce that I have no solution to such a problem.  Only the one suffering such a problem can solve it within himself.  Others can help, but they cannot solve it for him; they cannot make him want to accept God, despite the fact the evil points right to him.  If this is you – if you yourself suffer from such restlessness – a few words.  If you believe that God created the universe, you must believe that he had good reason for allowing evil.  Why so?  If he did not, then he could not be considered omnibenevolent, and so he would have fallen short of a standard of benevolence.  Why not simply call this standard “God”?  God must be perfect, and perfection must be God.  Who knows his reasons for allowing evil?  Perhaps it’s free will.  Perhaps it’s the development of character.  Perhaps it’s a boggling mixture of both and more.  The fact of the matter is that he has his reasons.  If he did not, then he wouldn’t be perfect.  And if he wasn’t perfect, then he wouldn’t be God.

It’s not a question of whether or not God thinks that evil is worth it.  It’s a question of whether or not you think that evil is worth it.  Well?  Do you?

1) A Model for Understanding Justice: Introduction

               Ever since I was very young, I have thought long and hard about the concept of justice.  What, pray tell, was the difference between a serial killer and a war hero?  Was there some measureable, metaphysical principle which had judged one to be morally justified and the other to be morally culpable?  Or was it all cultural dictation, entirely relative to the times?  Intuition favored the former, and pursued an answer to its question.  I believe that I have found that metaphysical principle, or at least one of the many available, and in a more obvious place than anticipated: intent.

                It is through the lens of intent that I have devised a sort of “model”, so to speak, through which one can well understand justice.  I do not contend that it is the model, however.  There may well be more ways of understanding the concept of justice, with none being perfectly right or wrong.  This model will not tell you, for instance, exactly what justice is.  It is merely a medium of understanding how justice operates; if it does not help you, you can always drop it.  Now, if that is well understood, let us begin.  

2) A Model for Understanding Justice: Establishing the Model

             We know that intent is important legally.  I argue that it is important morally as well (you’ll often notice that what we know and agree on regarding morals is portrayed by the legal process of the United States), and that it provides a way in which we can decide whether or not a questionable action is morally justified.  But besides the affirmation of intuition, is there any practical, rational reason we should think that intent is so important?  I think that there is.

                You’ll notice that, if a man intended to do what he did, then he can be counted on to do it again.  If a man intended and succeeded in tripping you, it would not be far-fetched to think that he would do it again, to you or anyone else.  But, if someone tripped you simply by accident, you could not count on him to do it again.  It is circumstance, not the man, who is at fault; he did not know that stretching out his leg at that precise moment would lead to what it actually lead to.  If he was careless, then he is guilty of carelessness.  But he remains morally excused on the count of tripping a perfect stranger for no good reason.

                Now we relate these concepts to justice.  Consider the following scenario: an armed robber breaks into a man and his family’s home.  The husband, after the robber threatens his wife, shoots and kills the intruder.  Is the husband justified in his actions?  To find out, let us analyze the intentions involved.  In this particular scenario there are, in fact, two intentions: intent to kill and intent to protect.  He intended both to kill the robber and to protect his wife.

                It can be further discerned that there is a hierarchy to these two intentions.  There is, what I like to call, a virtuous intent and a circumstantial intent.  The virtuous intent is almost completely independent from external events, and will not be changed by the mere drop of a hat.  A cold-hearted killer intent on killing someone is not going to have that intent swayed in the slightest by circumstances of any kind; except, perhaps, in the rare event of extensive rehabilitation.  His intent to kill is a virtuous intent.  A circumstantial intent, on the other hand, is wholly dependent upon external, rather than internal, factors.  A driver does not intend to swerve over to the right until the circumstances show him that he must do so in order to avoid a collision.  The intent to swerve over to the right is a circumstantial intent.

                Virtuous intent and circumstantial intent are always paired together; in the case of the driver, his circumstantial intent to swerve to the right is paired with his virtuous intent to avoid a collision (since he would always intend to avoid a collision regardless of the circumstances).  It is also notable that virtuous intent dominates circumstantial intent in that only virtuous intent can tell us what someone can be counted on to do.  In the case of the driver, you could not count on him to swerve to the right for no good reason.  On the other hand, you could, within reason, count on him to avoid a collision, and you could count on him to serve to the right insofar as it was necessary to avoid a collision.  The circumstantial intent is overshadowed by the virtuous intent.

                With this information in mind, we return to the husband shooting the robber scenario.  We know that he has two intents, but which is the virtuous intent and which is the circumstantial intent?  In order to uncover the answer, we ask the man a simple question, “If circumstances had allowed, would you have protected your wife without killing the robber?”  It he answers “yes”, and his answer is truthful, then you have just found out which intent is which.  Notice in passing that, if the circumstances had been different, the man would not have intended to kill, but he still would have intended to defend his wife.  The intent to kill was dependent upon the circumstances; the intent to defend was not.  Thus, the intent of the man to defend his wife was the virtuous intent, and the intent of the man to kill the robber was the circumstantial intent. 

So the man can be counted on only to protect his wife, and only to kill people insofar as it is necessary to protect his wife.  He cannot be counted on to kill any more than the driver mentioned two paragraphs up can be counted on to swerve to the right at the drop of the hat.  Since what he can be counted on to do is ultimately good, and he cannot be counted on to do evil, he is ultimately a hero (though that sounds a bit exaggerated).  This is one way, then, through which we can decide on the justification of a morally questionable action: if the virtuous intent of an action is itself morally commendable, whatever else occurred or whatever other intents are involved, that action is itself morally justified.

3) A Model for Understanding Justice: Necessary Annexations

Brief reflection shows us that, while this model is on the right track, it is still incomplete.  Consider the following scenario: a father kills a boy for teasing his son at school.  Is this action morally justified?  Certainly not.  The problem is that the established model cannot condemn it.  After all, the father’s virtuous intent is inherently good: he intended to protect his son from further vexation.  And it is probably true that he would not have intended to kill the boy if he had not teased his son – the intent to kill was circumstantial.  Because the virtuous intent is good, and the bad intent is merely circumstantial, the model cannot condemn this counterexample.  We see that it needs more work.

For what reason might the father be condemned?  For starters, we know that, while his virtuous intent is morally commendable, his circumstantial intent is blown out of proportion.  Its intensity is not scaled to the intensity of the actual circumstances.  A crucial insight can be gleaned from this observation: the circumstantial intent of a man is not guaranteed to match the actual circumstances with which he is faced.  It is precisely this potential mismatch that makes this action unjustified; the father was clearly reacting in a way that the actual circumstances did not warrant.  Thus we see that, given that the virtuous intent of an action is good, lack of justification results from the gulf between the scale of the actual circumstances and the scale of the circumstantial intent. 

What possible flaws can occur in a circumstantial intent?  There are two: I call them the problem of arrogance and the problem of ignorance.  We have already looked at a situation in which the circumstantial intent was founded on arrogance; the circumstantial intent of the father defending his son was arrogant.  In the case of arrogant intent, the moral agent in question knows the circumstances completely, yet reacts in such a way that the circumstances do not warrant.  Let’s apply this to our central situation: the case of the husband defending his wife from the robber.  Let’s say that the robber was unarmed and, upon having a gun pointed at him, immediately put his hands up and began walking towards the nearest exit of the house.  If the husband had shot him then, his circumstantial intent – the intent to kill – would be an arrogant one.  There was clearly no need to shoot the robber after he was clearly and submissively walking away (assuming no other special circumstances were present besides these).

In the case of ignorant intent, the moral agent in question does not know all of the circumstances involved, or else misinterprets them, and so may act in a way that the actual circumstances do not warrant.  Suppose that the husband did not put his glasses on before going to engage the criminal.  The criminal points a water gun at the man in an attempt to intimidate him.  The husband mistakes it for a real gun and shoots him.  Had the husband known that it was merely a water gun, he surely would not have shot the criminal.  Nor should he have done so, since clearly the amount of danger posed by a water gun does not warrant murder as retaliation.

We hasten to point out, however, that in the instance of ignorant intent, the moral agent is not morally culpable for their actions.  Not unless they are responsible for being ignorant, in which case they are guilty of carelessness, and that is about it.  In this case of the husband, he is not responsible for his own ignorance; we should not expect him to be properly informed about what the criminal was holding because he was not wearing his glasses, it was nighttime, etc.  We could fault him for forgetting his glasses, but since it is not immoral to forget one’s glasses, the husband remains morally justified.  That said, people have a responsibility to inform themselves about the circumstances involved before making a moral decision.  If there is reason to believe that they did not do their best to inform themselves about the circumstances they were facing, while we would not consider them guilty specifically for what they had done, we would consider them guilty of carelessness, negligence, etc.  Consider a man on a subway who accidentally trips someone upon stretching his legs out.  If, at some point in the near future, he stretched his legs out again and tripped someone again, while we would not consider him guilty of tripping that man, we would probably consider him guilty of carelessness.

So we see two possible flaws in the circumstantial intent which might overturn the justification of a given morally questionable action.  Annexed to our old model, this new model now looks something like this:

4) A Model for Understanding Justice: Conclusion

            So there you have it.  If there is some further annexation required of this model, I do not know of it.  If ever I find it, rest assured that I will promptly add to it. 

One final note, before I go.  It is useful to point out that when it comes to judging the justification of a given action, our own intuitions are surprisingly accurate.  Suppose that a man murders another man in cold blood.  We all seem to know of-the-bat that this man is guilty.  Suppose that a baseball player hits a ball which flies into someone’s head and kills them.  Tragic as that may be, we all seem to know inherently that this person is innocent.  Suppose that a man killed an intruder to protect his wife.  Most of us are divided over this: some say he is justified, some are on the fence, some say he is guilty.  What does this mean?  Are we all right?  Clearly the answer to that is no.  He couldn’t be both justified and unjustified – that would be moral absurdity.  So what, then?  Why are our intuitions all over the place when it comes to this situation?

The answer is simple: there is no guarantee that the husband was justified.  Recall the question mentioned near the beginning of this essay through we can pry at his intent: “If the circumstances had been different, would you have protected your wife without killing the man?”  There is every possibility that his answer is “no”; in other words, he would still have killed the man even if it was not necessary to defend his wife.  In such an instances, surely he would be considered arbitrary and unjustified.  If he answered “yes”, then he would be justified, and we have already analyzed several reasons why.

In other words, if intuition is distinctly divided over the justification of a given action, it is probably due to the fact that it could go either way.  It is when that happens that we need to closely scrutinize the situation (here it is done via intent, but such scrutiny might be possible in a number of ways), and make a right judgment about the morality of it.  That way, we neither condemn the innocent nor pardon the guilty.  We, by properly judging the morality of a situation, are better equipped to respond in a way that is itself morally upright.