The absence of good (), also known as the privation theory of evil, This also means that everything that exists is good, insofar as it exists; or as something non-existent. Evil, on this view, is parasitic upon the good whose absence or corruption it presupposes.
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". In contemporary philosophy of religion, the privation theory has been re-developed and defended in detail, particularly within neo-Thomist metaphysics.
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. 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.
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. Similarly, John of Damascus writes that "evil is nothing else than absence of goodness, just as darkness also is absence of light". 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. 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.
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. However, the first systematic formulation is usually attributed to the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, chiefly in the eighth tractate of his First Ennead. 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". Later Neoplatonic commentators and Christian Platonists drew on this account in developing privationist views of evil. 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". John of Damascus explicitly defines evil as "nothing else than absence of goodness, just as darkness also is absence of light".
Medieval Jewish thought
Maimonodies and Saadia Gaon were of the opinion that no evil can be attributed to God and evils originate from human free-will. Judah Halevi however believed occurrences of evil are brought around by divine either directly or through intermediar and are the actual happening in the world.
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, which Bertrand Russell interprets as agreement with the privation theory. 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".
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.
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).
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. See .
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.
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. 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.
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.
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".