Taking responsibility or not: against the problem of evil

ben | 10 Sep 2023, 1:28 p.m.

A person can take responsibility for themselves, and in doing so negate others’ responsibilities towards them. This means that otherwise evident responsibilities – such as preventing an event which would cause harm to a person – no longer exist. In principle there is no reason to think that for the facts that make it true that a person takes responsibility for themselves there do not exist analogous facts which cause a person or persons to take responsibility for another person, and in doing so negate duties that yet other third parties hold towards this person. These analogous facts could plausibly extend to all persons. And if such facts do hold about all persons, they could absolve third parties (non-persons) of duties towards all persons. This possibility could be used as a theodicy to the problem of evil.

 

There are some evident duties that exist. I believe that the duty to prevent easily preventable events whose only morally salient effects are to harm individuals is an evident duty. For example, if my friend is about to stub his toe. We can suppose that him stubbing his toe is a genuine harm (it will be painful, and he has a significant preference against experiencing this sort of pain). We can also suppose that it is easy to prevent this event from happening. If I were to say “you are about to stub your toe!”, then he would realise it and slightly how he was walking so as to not stub his toe. There are also no other morally salient facts that would be differ between the possible world in which he stubbed his toe and the one in which he did not, other than the stubbing of his toe itself; he would soon continue walking as though nothing had happened or been closely avoided.

I think most people would agree with me that in this situation you have a duty to prevent your friend from stubbing his toe. The harm that would come to him is set up in such a way to be a bad thing in itself. If there are no further reasons to change the all things considered duty you have, then you should intervene to prevent the event which would cause the harm.

There are many reasons which could change which duty was (to somewhat abuse Partfit’s terminology) the decisive duty. For example, if your friend was wearing steel toed boots such that a collision with his toe would not have any effect on him, or if for some inexplicable reason your friend had a strong preference towards stubbing his toe. I want to consider yet another reason which might change what our decisive duty is: if your friend has explicitly taken responsibility for the harm of his toe being stubbed.

Suppose that your friend, some day in the past, had taken you aside and told you sincerely that he does not want you to intervene to prevent any minor bodily harm happening to him. You can tell that he is not joking; and he understands the meaning and implication of his statement. He may even bring up stubbing his toe as a hypothetical situation in which he does not want you to intervene. You might want to question his reasons for saying this, but as long as you are confident that he seems mostly rational, I think you should assume that you should give him the benefit of the doubt and treat him seriously in what he is saying now (some might say that wanting to allow genuine harm to come to yourself is a sufficient reason to doubt someone’s rationality; I don’t agree, and will not explore this further).

In saying that he does not want you to intervene to prevent minor bodily harms coming to him, your friend has taken responsibility for his own minor bodily harms. I think this makes it obvious that, in the toe stubbing scenario explained previously, you no longer have a duty to intervene and prevent his toe stubbing. This could be explained in terms of having a duty to respect your friend’s responsibility for his own minor bodily harms, which does not change your other duty to prevent the harm – but instead makes the duty to prevent the harm no longer a decisive duty. It does not make much of a difference to my argument, but I will instead talk about it as though your friend taking responsibility for his own minor bodily harms removes your duty to prevent his minor bodily harm.

 

There is no reason why a group could not remove duties towards all its members by taking responsibility for certain harms in the same way that an individual does for himself only. An only slightly different example from the one above might be a group of friends, who form an agreement that each of them are responsible for each others’ minor bodily harms, but no other third party is responsible. In this situation I think each friend still has a duty to prevent the others from stubbing their toes, but a stranger would have his duty to do so removed by their agreement. Communities within the political sphere often do this sort of thing: although it is somewhat controversial, some people believe that states take responsibility for their own citizens, and by doing so remove most of our normal duties we have towards other members of our own communities (regardless of your beliefs regarding asylum seekers, international aid, et cetera, you probably at least believe that the bin men should not be sent over to France if the French bin men are on strike – whereas you believe that the council does have a duty to send your local bin men to your own house).

There is an important difference between the example of a group of friends and the example of states. In the former example the friend group explicitly and jointly took responsibility. However when states take responsibility it often the unilateral action of the government of the day, maybe with this ability supposedly grounded in authority derived from popular elections, or divine power, or some such reason. I believe that responsibility for certain harms coming to a group can be taken in this unilateral way. I also think that genuine responsibility has certain pre-conditions: I cannot take responsibility for the entire country’s continued existence by merely proclaiming it in my bedroom, but must somehow have this sufficient grounding for my taking responsibility.

I do not plan to investigate what a sufficient grounding for taking responsibility is. However, I want to motivate my position by analogy to promises. Taking responsibility for harms coming to a group is a lot like making a promise on behalf of the group. I can take responsibility for, if not all, at least most harms that could possibly come to me. Similarly, I can make most, if not all, promises that would be only on my behalf. I can also make promises on behalf of a group. Making promises on behalf of a group could look very similar to the friend group coming together and taking responsibility for their own bodily harms. They could come together, deliberate, then have a member make their mutual promise. Promises can also be made in a unilateral way. A group can elect a leader to make promises on behalf of the group, without first consulting the group. This is plausibly what happens when a country signs treaties with other countries: two governments are unilaterally making a promise on behalf of two countries. Since governments can make promises on behalf of their countries, I claim it is also plausible that a government can take responsibility for harms that might happen to their citizens.

 

It is possible that all persons implicitly take responsibility for the entirety of all persons. This might sound more natural if I were to use the word “humanity”; claims that we should take responsibility for humanity are made by international groups such as the United Nations, but also by spiritual groups. I avoid this word so as to not talk merely about biological facts, but instead try to talk about what forms our moral community. Some might claim that what makes a person is something to do with rationality, and others might claim it is some psychological facts. This could include intelligent aliens, or sufficiently advanced animals who have gone through some hypothetical miraculous medical procedure. I want to use it to refer to a set of beings who both can have duties towards others and can be the subject of duties themselves.

If all persons take some responsibility for the group of all persons, exactly how much responsibility can they take? I think they could plausibly take responsibility for all duties they do have towards each other, which are not already removed by responsibilities that smaller sub-groups have already taken. This would mean that if I were able to take responsibility for all harms that could come to me, then I would remove all duties that others persons have towards me, and no other persons would have any responsibility for me. Similarly, if I took responsibility for no harms that might come to me, and no other proper subset of persons took responsibility, then all normal duties concerning those harms would remain, and all other persons would jointly have responsibility for all those duties (maybe there are some duties which a person necessarily takes responsibility for themselves, such as duties that would be called duties of self-care).

The implication of this view is that any duty that a person can ordinarily have towards another person is taken responsibility for by all persons jointly, and so any non-person has this responsibility removed towards any and all persons. A non-person does not have a duty to make sure you do not stub your toe, or to make sure your bin collection is on time, or even to be a friend to you in the way that other persons have a duty to be a friend towards you. This seems trivially true of non-conscious beings, such as rocks. I claim that it could also apply to God.

 

There is a key assumption I want to discuss here: that God is not a person. By this I mean he is not a part of our moral community. At the very least the duties we can have towards him are very different to the duties we can have towards other persons. You cannot have a duty to prevent God from stubbing his toe. You also cannot have a duty to be a good friend to God, in the way that you can have a duty to be a good friend to another person. This is further motivated by consideration of the sort of things that people believe ground your membership of a moral community. God’s rationality is plausibly nothing like our own. His psychology is also plausibly nothing like our own, if it even makes sense to talk about the psychology of God at all.

Hence it is plausible to claim that God is not a person in the way I mean it. This means that he would not take responsibility for ordinary duties that persons have towards each other, and instead has these duties removed from him because persons have responsibility for them.

This would mean, in turn, that God does not have a duty to prevent you from stubbing your toe. God also does not have a duty to make sure your rubbish is collected on time. If persons have duties towards other persons to prevent atrocities, and to help rescue other people from natural disasters, then God would also not have a duty to prevent atrocities or natural disasters. God might have other duties, the sort that a person does not have towards another person. Perhaps spiritual duties, or duties that a creator can have towards the created, but it is not necessary for this essay to investigate those.

 

There is something that does not sit right about saying that God might not have a duty towards persons to prevent terrible things happening. There are harms which are supposedly gratuitous. There does not seem to be any sufficient reason for God to have caused these harms, or allowed the harms to come about. Yet if persons jointly take responsibility for these harms, and God is not part of the group taking responsibility, then it would seemingly not matter that there was no sufficient reason for God to have created a universe that would eventually contain these harms, as God would have no duty in relation to these harms at all. Maybe, in finding this suggestion unpleasant, what I need isn’t a better reason, but as Plantinga has suggested in relation to other theodicies for the problem of evil, instead I need pastoral support.

 

I have argued that God might not have a large number of duties towards persons, specifically those which persons ordinarily have towards each other. I have explained this using the positive concept of taking responsibility for harms coming to yourself or others. I explained this in terms of harms, but this can also be argued in such a way as to require mentioning harms. My argument allows for God to have other duties towards persons that persons do not ordinarily have towards others: I have suggested that spiritual duties might be included in this. I have not discussed the nature of God required for my argument to work beyond God being excluded from our moral community of persons. I have also not discussed the exact problem of evil that my argument could be deployed against, although I think that it would counter both the logical problem of evil (as a theodicy), and also counter the evidential problem of evil, as it does not place any requirement on the exact quantity and nature of evil in the world – although there may be some difficult discussion to be had about how to measure how likely it is that persons take responsibility for all duties relating to the quantity and nature of evil in the world.