A Reply to Ivan Karamazov

 Dear Ivan,

     Your rebellion against Creation and your brother Alyosha’s response to you have long haunted my thoughts. Here I want to make a tentative reply to your devasting reply to my little Summa article.

   Your protest against innocent suffering presupposes that innocence (it matters to me), justice and dignity matter.  But these are not external standards imposed on being; they are goods grounded in the very nature of persons. So to condemn the world in their name is already to affirm that reality contains goods worth defending. His refusal parasitically depends upon the goodness he denies. Or?

     To will that the world not exist is also to will that there be no justice, care, love, redemption, etc. because all of these presuppose a shared reality. Refusal abolishes

not only Auschwitz (standing for all the vast catalogue of human-made horrors) – would that we could! – but justice, mercy, solidarity, resistance, memory, care for the suffering,

the very love you feel for the child. It abolishes love, beauty, goodness, joy, awe. It abolishes not merely the fact of human atrocities but also every act by which these atrocities are condemned, resisted, or remembered as evil. The good whose violation you protest cannot exist in the absence of the world. How would you respond to that?

      To will that the world not exist is to will that the victims never were. Not merely that they did not suffer, but that they never loved, hoped, resisted, or endured. Their suffering is real but so is their courage, their friendships, their acts of care under terror, their friendships. (I think particularly of Primo Levi or Edith Stein not existing. I am sure there were such people whom the Transatlantic slave trade couldn’t break, nameless as they are.)  I am not setting up any kind of accounting, but your rejection abolishes these goods and people along with the evils. That must be said.

     Your rejection seems to undercut moral meaning. The judgment “Auschwitz was evil”

is itself a moral act that presupposes a shared reality, beings capable of dignity (of loving and being loved), and a future in which justice might matter. To abolish the world is to abolish the truth of that judgment. There would be no injustice but also no justice – or love, forgiveness, mercy, and soon.

   The possibility of rectification is also eliminated by your refusal. If the world is not worth affirming, then no future is worth preserving or improving. But moral protest aims toward reform, prevention, remembrance, care – all of which presuppose that some goods remain realizable. Refusal forecloses not only past evils but the possibility of any future good. What about that?

     I think there is something problematic about treating non-being as preferrable to violated being. Your refusal effectively claims that non-being is morally superior

to being that includes injustice. But this assumes that a world without suffering

is better than a world in which suffering is opposed, alleviated, and judged as wrong.

That is a substantive moral claim, and not a neutral one.

      And your outrage is intelligible only if you affirm that people matter, injustice is wrong, and suffering ought not to occur. These are affirmations of goods grounded in being. To refuse the world entirely risks refusing the conditions under which these goods can be realized or defended. So the trade is not simply evil vs. no evil. It is rather evil + justice + love + memory + resistance to evil vs. no evil and none of these other goods. You might still choose to refuse but the cost is not as simple as you made it appear. Your refusal appears as fidelity to the innocent. But fidelity may also consist in refusing to let their suffering be the final word about reality. Affirmation can be a commitment that injustice does not exhaust what is.

     Another argument. If you love the tortured child, you thereby will that the child flourish. But flourishing is a perfection of being, so that the refusal to affirm being risks abandoning the good of the victim along with the evil that harmed her. There is a pattern emerging: your refusal is a double-edged sword.  You treat a real and horrific part as morally definitive of the whole. But evil is parasitic upon the good. To allow evil to determine the final verdict on being is to let privation define reality.

      Here is a more pragmatic argument. If the world is not worth affirming, then no future is worth preserving. But moral protest – indeed loving your children, family, and community – typically aims at things like reform, protection, restoration, cultivation. All this presupposes that some future goods are worth realizing. If that is so, it presses against your withholding your consent to the world. Indeed, your refusal risks becoming a withdrawal from responsibility for the world. To reject the world absolutely is to relinquish the field to those who perpetuate injustice within it. Conversely, moral outrage often includes an implicit hope that things could be otherwise. Hope presupposes that Being is capable of better actualizing its (good) potentials. Your refusal risks extinguishing this horizon.

     You refuse Creation itself in toto. I think the proper object of your refusal should be those distortions of being that violate its goods.

    I don’t imagine these arguments settle the matter. I think they do show that your response to my little quaestio is not a knockdown argument.