Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

166 J.J.C. Smart
create many universes, why not many universes which contain no positive
evils? This thought does not undermine Haldane’s position if one accepts his
view that evil is not something positive but only a privation of good. Now the
death of the mouse may be a privation in so far as it consists in the absence of
the anticipated future life and growing to maturity of the mouse. But what
of the actual terror and painful death throes of the mouse? I find it hard to
think of this as consisting of mere privation.
Haldane distinguishes natural and moral evils. Moral evils consist in the
thoughts and actions of intelligent beings (see p. 137). They arise from
the misuse of free will. Of course from my naturalistic point of view there is
a sense in which moral evils are a species of natural evil. Hitler and Goebbels
were horrible, but for a naturalist there is nothing puzzling about this. There
are more ways for a thing to go wrong than to go right. We inherit atavistic
parts of our brains, and the cortex itself can easily get wired up in peculiar
ways. For the theist there is a puzzle and Haldane tries to resolve this by
reference to freedom of will. Freedom of will, he holds, is a great good but
essentially carries with it the possibility of wrongdoing.
In my main essay I defended, near enough, a compatibilist account of free
will. Haldane disagrees with this, as I think that he must if he is to deploy the
free will defence to account for the possibility of God allowing a universe
with moral evil in it. If the compatibilist position is correct we can go on to
ask why God did not create a universe in which moral beings were given such
strong motives to aim at the right that they would always do so. (They may
fail actually to do the right because of non-culpable factual ignorance or
mistake, but this would not constitute moral evil.) Would we lack free will if
we had a passionate and overwhelming desire to do the right? I find it odd to
answer this question in the affirmative. Is a person’s engaging in symbolic
logic the less free the greater is his or her enjoyment of it?
Thus I hold that even if God had planted in us motives which always
caused us to aim at the right this would not be in contradiction to our having
free will. Let us recall my remarks, in my main essay, about the article by
R.E. Hobart. We need to have at least an approximation to determinism in
the working of our minds (our central nervous systems) for free will to be
possible. Otherwise it would be mere chance what we did. I can concede that
the compatibilist theory of free will, as in Hobart, does not give us everything
that the person in the street wants from the concept of free will, since he or
she wants something logically impossible, both to be determined and not
determined, but I hold that compatibilism can, properly argued, give us all we
should want or need for practical and legal purposes. Haldane proposes to go
between the horns of the dilemma.
‘When a human being acts’, says Haldane, ‘there need be no event in
the agent prior to the action and which is its immediate cause’ (see p. 145).