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Satisfied Pigs and Dissatisfied Philosophers: Schlesinger on the Problem of Evil
Author(s) -
Graver Stephen
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
philosophical investigations
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.172
H-Index - 14
eISSN - 1467-9205
pISSN - 0190-0536
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9205.1993.tb00462.x
Subject(s) - happiness , hierarchy , degree (music) , state (computer science) , philosophy , epistemology , psychology , mathematics , social psychology , law , political science , physics , algorithm , acoustics
I argue that George Schlesinger's proposed solution to the problem of evil fails because: (1) the degree of desirability of state of a being is not properly regarded as a trade‐off between happiness on the one hand and potential on the other; (2) degree of desirability of state is not capable of infinite increase; (3) there is no hierarchy of possible beings, but at most an ordering of such beings in terms of preferences; (4) the idea of such a hierarchy is anyway morally repulsive. Schlesinger is right that the problem of evil disappears, but what makes it vanish is a recognition of the limits of our concepts of satisfaction and happiness, not the incoherent claim that satisfaction or happiness is capable of unlimited increase.