In The Problem of Pain (Fontana 1957, pp. 203-204, first publ. in 1940), C. S. Lewis writes,
We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.
I think that Lewis is right that felt pain is not additive across different subjects. Your pain and my pain cannot be summed. This holds for both physical and psychological pain. Pain is additive only in a given subject and not across subjects. "There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it."
So far, so good. It is equally true, however, that two people being tortured to death is worse than one person being tortured to death. Both states of affair are evil, but the first is more evil than the second. The quantity of felt pain is the same, but in the first there are twice as many evils than in the second.
I conclude that the question of the quantity of pain in the world is distinct from the question of the quantity of evil in the world. This is relevant to the problem of evil faced by theists. Lewis has shown that "the maximum that a single person can suffer" is "all the suffering that there ever can be in the universe." And that includes all the suffering of the non-human animals who suffer. But the problem of evil faced by the theist is precisely a problem of evil and not a problem of felt pain. And this despite the fact that many pains are evil (all those, I should think, the suffering of which does not lead to a greater good.)
My tentative conclusion is that the considerations adduced in the passage quoted above do little to alleviate the severity of the problem of evil faced by traditional theists.
Recent Comments