Central question for the next few weeks: what's wrong with us? Why does human life and action always fall so far short of the ideal?
Diagnosing the problem is the crucial first step toward developing and carrying out solutions.
1. Fallibilism (Aristotle). A certain amount of malfunctioning is inevitable in any concrete system. It is impossible for finite, material systems to perform flawlessly all the time. However, most of the time, human beings do quite well.
2. Manichaean dualism. Human nature is inherently evil and, along with the rest of the natural world, in need of radical reform. There is an enormous gap between how things actually work and the ideal, which is based on some transcendent standard. It's up to the enlightened few to change things, in light of their vision of the good.
3. Libertarianism (Pelagius, Pico della Mirandola, Sartre). Humans have no fixed or determinate nature. We are free to make of ourselves whatever we will. Evil is an unavoidable by-product of this radical freedom.
4. Augustinianism. Human nature as created is wholly good. However, we have suffered a constitutional corruption (original sin) which makes evil inevitable. Two versions:
4a. Historical fall (Augustine, C. S. Lewis) At some specific point in the past, the ancestors of humanity misused their freedom, producing an inherited, congenital flaw in all of their descendants.
4b. Existential fall (Kant, Kierkegaard, R. Niebuhr) The fall of Adam and Eve is a representation of a universal phenomenon. Each of us falls individually, and yet the falling is both inevitable and guilt-procuring.
5. Sociologism (Rousseau, Marx, Freud) Evil is the result of a specific set of social conditions arising in the course of human history: either the formation of society (Rousseau, Freud), the organization of religion and feudalism (Enlightenment), capitalism (Marx), etc. There is a mismatch between the natural needs of human beings and the artificial needs and desires produced by society, resulting in crime, vice, misery.
6. Developmentalism (Hegel). Evil is a necessary and inevitable phase in the development of the human personality. It represents a step up from the innocence of nature and a necessary prelude to the achievement of virtue and wisdom. Sin results from the necessary and inevitable assertion of the individual against the universality of morality.
7. Immoralism (Nietzsche). The moralistic distinction between good and evil is fundamentally false. Acts of proper self-assertion by the strong and healthy are labeled "evil" by the weak and sickly as an expression of envy and spite.
1. Is human nature the basis for objective value?
No -- libertarian or Manichaean
Yes -- others
2. Is "evil" good, bad or mixed?
"Evil" is good -- immoralist
"Evil" is mixed -- developmental
"Evil" is bad -- others
3. Is evil exceptional or widespread?
Exceptional -- fallibilist
Widespread -- others
4. Is evil inevitable, or due to changeable social conditions?
Inevitable -- Augustinian
Changeable social conditions -- Sociological
Augustine's reasoning:
1. Human nature as created is wholly good-- its tendencies are the standard of goodness (for us)
2. Evil is wholly bad -- the privation or absence of a corresponding good.
So -- ignorance is the absence knowledge, sickness the absence of health, vice the absence of virtue, and evil is the absence of moral/spiritual goodness.
3. There is a universal tendency toward evil among human beings, and this is not due to changeable social conditions.
Paradox: the natural tendencies of human nature are all good, evil is not good, and yet all humans have a fixed tendency toward evil.
Augustine's solution: the Fall.
The Fall is an event at which all of humanity acquired an unnatural but irreversible tendency toward evil.
Augustine uses the story of Genesis 3, and Paul's statement in Romans 5: "in Adam, we all sinned."
The Augustinian position doesn't depend on taking Genesis literally -- C.S. Lewis.
Problems:
1. Adam's sin is supposed to be the first in a series -- it propagated itself somehow.
Yet, Adam's sin is utterly unique, since he sinned in a state of innocence, whereas all subsequent humans sinned in a fallen state.
2.How is this tendency toward sin transmitted to new generations? Why couldn't God prevent the transmission?
3. How can we reconcile responsibility for evil with its inevitability? If we have lost the power not to sin, can we be held accountable?
Eastern Orthodox view: somewhat different. (Athanasius)
Sees a self-perpetuating cycle:
1. Human death is unnatural -- the product of human sin. (God's judgment introduced death, in order to put a limit to the scope of human evil).
2. The fear of death is responsible for the universal tendency toward sin.
3. Only the hope for immortality can break the cycle.
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