Absence of good

The absence of good (Latin: privatio boni), also known as the privation theory of evil,^[1] is a theological and philosophical doctrine that evil, unlike good, is insubstantial, so that thinking of it as an entity is misleading. Instead, evil is rather the absence, or lack ("privation"), of good.^[2][3][4] This also means that everything that exists is good, insofar as it exists;^[5][6] and is also sometimes stated as that evil ought to be regarded as nothing,^[7] or as something non-existent.^[8][9][10] Evil, on this view, is parasitic upon the good whose absence or corruption it presupposes.^[1]

The theory is most closely associated with late antique and medieval Christian thought, especially Augustine of Hippo, who adapted Neoplatonic ideas (notably from Plotinus) and argued that evil is a privation of the goodness that God has created in all things. It was further developed by figures such as Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, John of Damascus, and Thomas Aquinas, and later taken up—often in modified forms—by early modern philosophers like Spinoza and Leibniz.^[11][12][13]

Versions of the privation theory are also found outside historic Christian thought, for example in the Baháʼí Faith, whose authoritative texts describe evil as "nonexistence" or "nothingness".^[14] In contemporary philosophy of religion, the privation theory has been re-developed and defended in detail, particularly within neo-Thomist metaphysics.^[15]

Because the theory denies that evil is a positive reality created by God, it is often discussed as a response to the problem of evil. If evil is a privation of good rather than a thing made by God, then God is said to create only good, and to permit the privations that constitute evil.^[16] Critics argue, however, that the theory struggles to account for the apparently "positive" character of many evils, such as intense pain or sadistic cruelty, and that it provides at best a partial theodicy.^[17][18]

Theory

Evil as privation

In its classical form, the privation theory maintains that evil is not just any absence but a privation: the lack of some perfection, form, or order that ought to be present in a thing, given its nature. A stone's inability to see is a mere absence; the blindness of a normally sighted animal is a privation. Likewise, sickness is understood as a privation of health, and moral vice as a privation of the rectitude proper to a rational will.^[5][15]

Augustine summarizes the view by saying that "what is called evil in the universe is but the absence of good".^[19] Similarly, John of Damascus writes that "evil is nothing else than absence of goodness, just as darkness also is absence of light".^[20] In the Baháʼí tradition, 'Abdu'l-Bahá likewise affirms that "good exists; evil is nonexistent", treating examples such as death as the absence of life, and darkness as the absence of light.^[14]

Contemporary neo-Thomist accounts continue this basic idea. Oderberg, for example, takes evil to be the privation of goodness, where goodness is analyzed in terms of a thing's living up to its nature or fulfilling its proper ends; on this view, "all evil is deviance – a departure from the goodness prescribed by a thing's essential nature".^[15]

Being, goodness and value

The privation theory is often combined with the thesis that being and goodness are in some sense convertible (ens et bonum convertuntur). In article 1 of question 5 of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas concludes that "goodness and being are really the same, and differ only in idea".^[5] For Augustine, whatever exists is good so long as it exists, and evil is a corruption of this goodness; if a thing were stripped of all goodness, it would cease to be altogether.^[11]

Some later thinkers accept a weaker connection between being and goodness while preserving a privation account of evil. Spinoza, for example, identifies reality with perfection, regarding "perfection and imperfection" and "good and bad" as ways of thinking that arise from comparing finite things with one another.^[21] On this view, too, evil has no positive ontological status independent of the goods whose lack it involves.

Moral and natural evil

Classical proponents apply the privation analysis both to so-called "moral" evils (such as vice, malice, or injustice) and to "natural" evils (such as disease or physical deformity). For Augustine, for instance, vices of the soul are "nothing but privations of natural good", just as bodily wounds and diseases are privations of bodily health.^[19] Aquinas similarly treats sin as a privation of due order in the will, while maintaining that the underlying powers and acts of the will, considered in themselves, are good insofar as they are beings.^[5]

Contemporary defenders differ on how exactly to analyze particular cases. Some emphasize a teleological structure: an evil state of affairs involves the frustration or non-advancement of a natural inclination toward its proper end. Others focus on the way in which disordered loves or attachments fall short of the harmony appropriate to rational creatures.^[22]

History

Ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy

The privation theory is sometimes traced back to Plato, whose dialogues occasionally suggest that evil is related to ignorance, disorder, or a failure to participate fully in the Good.^[23] However, the first systematic formulation is usually attributed to the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus,^[24] chiefly in the eighth tractate of his First Ennead.^[25][26] The scholarly view is that Plotinus’ doctrine of evil is monist rather than dualist. In the eighth treatise (Ennead I.8) of his Enneads, Plotinus describes evil as "non-being", associated with matter as formless and indeterminate. Evil is not an independent principle opposed to the Good or the One, but "the incidental consequence of there being a universe at all".^[27] Later Neoplatonic commentators and Christian Platonists drew on this account in developing privationist views of evil.^[12]

Ancient and medieval Christian thought

Neoplatonism was highly influential on Augustine of Hippo, with whom the privation theory is most closely associated in Christian theology.^[11][28] In Confessions VII.12.18 he argues that all things that exist are good insofar as they exist, that corruption presupposes an underlying goodness which it diminishes, and that if a thing lost all goodness it would cease to exist. Evil, therefore, "is not any substance; for were it a substance, it would be good".^[11] In the Enchiridion he illustrates the doctrine with examples: diseases and wounds are privations of bodily health; when health is restored, the evils "altogether cease to exist" rather than moving elsewhere.^[19]

Augustine's formulation shaped much of later Western Christian reflection on evil. In Book III of his Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius presents an argument that "evil is nothing", on the grounds that God, who is omnipotent, can do all things but cannot do evil.^[13] The Eastern theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite likewise maintains in The Divine Names that all being is good, and that evil has no positive existence of its own.^[29] John of Damascus explicitly defines evil as "nothing else than absence of goodness, just as darkness also is absence of light".^[20]

Within the scholastic tradition, Thomas Aquinas gives a systematic privation account of evil that builds on Augustine and Neoplatonism. In the Summa Theologiae he treats good and being as really the same, argues that every nature considered in itself is good as a creation of God, and explains evil as a privation of the order or perfection due to a nature.^[5] This framework was later developed by other scholastic theologians and philosophers, including Francisco Suárez, whose metaphysics of good and evil has attracted renewed attention in recent scholarship.^[30]

Early modern philosophy and poetry

The privation theory continued to influence early modern thought. In Part II of his Ethics, Spinoza writes that by "reality" and "perfection" he means the same thing,^[6] which Bertrand Russell interprets as agreement with the privation theory.^[31] Leibniz accepts a privative conception of evil and incorporates it into his theodicy in defense of the claim that the actual world is the "best of all possible worlds".^[32]

The theory also influenced Christian poetry and literary criticism. In his commentary on Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis argues that John Milton assumes a broadly Augustinian view according to which evil is a parasitic privation of good, and later critics such as John Leonard have used this framework to interpret Adam and Eve's loss of original righteousness in the poem.^[33][34]

Modern and contemporary religious thought

In the Baháʼí Faith, 'Abdu'l-Bahá explicitly endorses a privationist view. He argues that "there is no evil in existence: whatsoever God has created He has created good. Evil consists merely in non-existence", giving examples such as death (absence of life), darkness (absence of light), and poverty (absence of wealth).^[14]

Modern Christian theologians and philosophers have also revisited the privation theory. Neothomist authors and analytic philosophers such as Oderberg have given detailed defences of a privation account of evil, including treatments of the metaphysics of "negative" truths and of causation by privations.^[15] Contemporary work has also explored how the privation theory bears on debates over divine goodness, theodicy, and the so-called evil-God challenge.^[35]

Theodicy

Because it denies that evil is a positive reality created by God, the privation theory has often been invoked as part of a response to the problem of evil faced by classical theism. In broad outline, the response runs as follows:

• God, who is perfectly good, creates only good things.
• Evil is not a thing that God creates, but a privation in created things—a falling short of the goodness proper to them.
• God permissively wills that creatures be free and mutable, and evil arises when created wills or natural processes fail to realize the good toward which they are ordered.^[16][17]

On this view, God is not the author of evil in the sense of producing any positive reality that is evil; rather, God permits the lack or loss of due order in finite creatures. Augustine, for example, links moral evil to a disordered love of lesser goods over greater ones, and natural evils such as disease to the corruption of an otherwise good nature.^[11][19]

Critics of this theodical use of the privation theory argue that even if evil is privative in a metaphysical sense, there remains a question why an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God would create or sustain a world in which such privations occur, rather than preventing them or creating only impeccably ordered creatures. Some commentators therefore regard the privation theory as, at best, only part of a larger theodicy rather than a complete solution to the problem of evil.^[17][18][36] See § Criticism as theodicy.

Criticism

Pain and suffering

A common line of criticism holds that many evils seem to have a "positive" or substantial character that is not plausibly analyzed as mere privation. Todd Calder, for example, argues that "the evil of pain" cannot simply be equated with the absence of pleasure or of some other feeling, since pain has a distinctive phenomenology that appears intrinsically bad rather than merely not good.^[1]

Adam Swenson develops this worry in detail in Privation Theories of Pain, distinguishing several ways in which a privationist might attempt to locate the badness of pain in a lack or absence, and raising difficulties for each.^[37] More recent work by Parker Haratine defends an Augustinian privation account in light of such objections by arguing that the evil of pain is grounded in a failure of created nature to exhibit the harmonious order it ought to have, even if the experience of pain itself has a robust phenomenology.^[22]

Proponents of the privation theory often respond that the "positiveness" of painful experiences is compatible with their being privative at a deeper level: the disvalue lies in the disordered state of the organism, or in the absence of health or well-functioning, rather than in some independently existing "substance" of pain. Critics disagree about whether this move is adequate.

Cruelty and moral wickedness

Another cluster of objections concerns moral evils such as cruelty, malice, and sadism. Bertrand Russell, for instance, criticizes the doctrine in The Elements of Ethics by insisting that "pain and hatred and envy and cruelty are surely things that exist, and are not merely the absence of their opposites", suggesting that the privation theory is motivated by an unwarranted optimism about the world.^[38]

Peter M. S. Hacker similarly argues that there is "nothing privative" about taking pleasure in the agony of others or feeling joy at their torment, and that, while attributions of badness sometimes simply register the lack of good-making qualities, they often instead pick out positively vicious traits and actions.^[39][18] On this view, the privation theory risks obscuring the reality of moral wickedness by redescribing it as mere absence or deficiency.

Defenders of privationism typically reply that such cases still involve a falling short of the good for rational agents: cruelty, on this analysis, is a disordered orientation of the will and affections that lacks the charity and justice appropriate to human nature. Whether this explanatory strategy does justice to the intuitive "positiveness" of such evils remains disputed.

Opposition between appearances

Immanuel Kant famously criticizes the Leibnizian version of the privation theory in the "Amphiboly" chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. He grants that, at the level of pure concepts of the understanding, "realities (as simple affirmations) never logically contradict each other", but argues that in the world of appearances there is real opposition, where one positive causal factor can cancel out the effects of another (as with opposed forces in mechanics).^[40]

According to Kant, Leibniz and his followers mistakenly extended a purely logical principle about concepts to the realm of empirical reality, leading them to treat all opposition, including that between good and evil, as merely privative. On Kant's view, moral evil cannot be adequately accounted for as the simple absence of good; instead, he locates radical evil in the adoption by the will of a self-centered maxim that positively subordinates the moral law to inclination.

Criticism as theodicy

Some criticisms focus less on the metaphysics of the privation theory and more on its theodical role. Even if evil is privative rather than substantial, it remains to explain why a perfectly good and omnipotent God would create a world in which such privations occur or are permitted. Hacker, for example, questions why describing evil as like darkness (an absence of light) should "relieve God of the responsibility of allowing it — after all, he could presumably have created a universe of light or not have created the universe at all".^[18]

Calder similarly argues that the privation theory, understood theodically, provides at most a partial solution: it might show that God creates no evil, strictly speaking, but it still leaves open the question of why God allows privative evils of various kinds to exist and afflict creatures.^[17][1] Contemporary debates therefore often treat the privation theory as one element among others in a broader Christian or theistic response to the problem of evil, rather than as a stand-alone theodicy.