Conceptions of evil in philosophy and ethics

¶ … Evil in Judaism and Taoism

(2) How does the answer to the existential "why" given by the karma theodicy differ from the answer given by the eschatological theodicy?

The karma theodicy suggests that the existence of evils upon earth, and of evils within the individual human life, should be understood in two directions -- looking back at a state before a person was born, and ahead towards a state after a person will be dead. Here life on earth becomes a sort of purgatorial existence -- the heaven to be reached is an escape from earthly incarnation. The reward of people for suffering is ultimately a removal from earth itself, and the justice of the universe is manifest in the logic of this process of death and rebirth. Time, in the karma theodicy, is understood as cyclical: souls have been here before and will be here again, and presumably samsara consists not only in an escape from this cycle of rebirth, but also an escape from time itself. The eschatological theodicy has, by contrast, a different relationship to time: suffering will be rewarded by a transformative event, the eschaton, within the future. The reward for suffering here is a future state -- such as heaven, or a millennial state upon earth -- which promises redemption. But redemption has already been provided by Jesus Christ, so Christian eschatology tends to focus on the second coming of Christ. Contrary to the cycle of incarnations as a process toward liberation in karma theodicy, the one incarnation that matters in Christian eschatology is that of Christ, who was God become man. Christ's sacrifice therefore has a specific relation to time (still reflected in the West's system of numbering years) -- the incarnation of Christ now stands as the figure that takes away human sins, and as a result redefines the conception of time. As a result, the eschatology of Christianity hinges on a chiliastic expectation of Christ's return.

(4) Distinguish dualistic theodicies from theodicies of participation.

Dualist theodicy considers this world to be almost horrifyingly fallen -- as Kessler puts it, the world is considered to be "a realm of desolation, sin and darkness, earthly existence is radically devalued -- to the point that moral license and promiscuity are often encouraged as indifferent." As a theodicy, it manages to justify God by redefining his creation as notable chiefly for its worst aspects, thereby making the existence of evil not really a problem -- the difficulty with this style of theodicy is that it risks redefining God as a sort of wicked demiurge, or removing all sense of personal and moral responsibilities from human beings. A mystical participation theodicy by contrast devalues the sufferings of the individual -- here the self is merged with that of the larger community, and the sufferings of the individual are subsumed in the larger life of the community that absorbs it. The "corporate personality" of the family, tribe, community, nation or nature itself is the context in which the individual finds meaning -- and indeed the group identity rewards sacrifices made by the individual with an "objective immortality" whereby the individual's memory lives on in the life of the larger group itself.