12.2 Evil (SCG 3,4–15)
Aquinas’s discussion of evil in SCG 3,4–15 leads him to present a number of conclusions and to consider and reply to a lot of objections. So it is possible to fail to grasp what Aquinas is fundamentally driving at in SCG 3,4–15 just by working through these chapters consecutively. When proceeding through SCG 3,4–15 it is possible to miss the forest for the trees. For this reason, I shall now try to explain the essential reasoning and conclusions of this section of the SCG before turning to some of its details.
12.2.1 The Big Picture in SCG 3,4–15
In SCG 3,4–15 Aquinas is concerned with what he calls malum. This word can be translated into English as “evil,” but it can also be translated as “badness.” We tend to distinguish between evil and badness by saying that, for example, genocide or cancer is an evil, but a “white” lie or a mild headache is bad. Writing in Latin, however, Aquinas had only one word to cover badness in all its forms and degrees: malum. In SCG 3,4–15, therefore, he is concerned with badness of any kind, whether slight or humongous. His topic is badness in general.
Why so? Because he has previously claimed that God is good and creates only what is good. If that is so, then an obvious question arises when it comes to the view that God acts providentially in the order created by him. We can hardly deny that there is badness in the world since people act badly and since many things suffer or become diminished. There are and have been many moral monsters, and there is and has been a lot of pain and suffering arising from nonhuman agents. So if Aquinas is going to claim that everything that exists derives from God’s will as providential, he is going to have to say something to explain why the fact that there is badness in the world does not count against this conclusion, which is what he tries to do in SCG 3,4–15.
In these chapters he is clearly working with the understanding of “good” that I noted in chapter 6. Aquinas thinks that goodness is what is desirable. Correspondingly, he thinks that badness is what is undesirable. As I have shown, though (see chapter 6, section 6.2 here), Aquinas regards “good” and “bad” as relative in the sense that something might be a good X but a bad Y (a good architect, say, but a bad plumber). Aquinas also holds that goodness exists insofar as something is actual; insofar as a form, whether substantial or accidental, is real; insofar as something is actually a substance of a certain kind; or insofar as it has some positive property or accident inhering in it. So Aquinas thinks that something is good just because it exists and succeeds in having a substantial form. As I have shown, he does not think that God is good in this way. He holds that God does not have his divine form but is it. When thinking of creatures, however, he takes goodness to consist in a form that is not impeded or defective.
How might form in creatures be impeded or defective? Well, I might lose my eyesight, which would obviously amount to a serious and impeding lack of accidental form in me.17 But what if I act badly from a moral point of view? I might be perfectly happy in what I am doing, and I will certainly be aiming at what I take to be good. Yet Aquinas would say that I am failing since I am settling for a good for which I should not settle. For Aquinas, morally bad action is detrimental to a human being since it renders people less good than they could and should be. He thinks that there are ways of behaving that people need to pursue so as to be good or happy considered as human beings.
So Aquinas holds that evil or badness may be divided into two kinds: (1) the badness that is in people (or, indeed, in angels) who choose to act badly, and (2) the badness that arises as material things act on other material things so as to result in a diminishment of goodness in them. You might think that this is a distinction without a difference since you might think that a bad person is just someone who brings about bad effects of some kind. Yet Aquinas thinks that we should not confuse what is bad in itself with what is bad as suffering because of something acting on it.
With the best and most moral intentions, I might inadvertently bring about what is bad. For example, in war I might rush to help a comrade while unintentionally setting off a mine that wounds many of my comrades. Their suffering is a bad thing, but I am not bad for having been the cause, or one of the causes, of it. I was aiming at something good, which would seem to mean that we should not evaluate people morally simply with respect to what they happen to bring about. Yet, of course, I might maliciously will that someone should be in a bad way, and I might deliberately act so as to bring it about that this comes to pass. With an eye on such a scenario, Aquinas would say that I am certainly bringing it about that someone is in a bad way; but, he would add, there is a big difference between my willing evil to people and my inadvertently ending up killing people while trying to save others. In what does the difference consist? It cannot consist in a difference between what is brought about, since that might amount to something bad in both cases. Aquinas thinks that moral evil is only in the agent who is morally evil. It is not in the effects that the morally bad agent brings about. On the other hand, Aquinas also thinks, when things suffer or become bad because of the action of something in or on them, something becomes defective as that which is not defective, or not totally defective, is exerting itself at its expense.
Let us call the badness or evil present when we have moral evil “evil done.” And let us call the badness or evil present as something fails due to the operation of something acting in or on it “evil suffered.”18 In that case, Aquinas’s view is that evil done is only in the agent willingly intending some evil, whether one that merely affects the agent or one that affects something other than the agent.19 And he thinks of evil suffered as badness coming about in something that is acted on by something else in a way that diminishes it. So Aquinas takes evil done to be present in an agent willing, aiming at, or tending to what is morally bad, or bad for some special theological reason. And he takes evil suffered to be in a patient; he takes it to be what is brought about as one thing adversely affects another thing. Sometimes, of course, and as Aquinas is aware, both kinds of evils can come about simultaneously. Thus, for example, there can be evil done and evil suffered as I choke someone to death so as to steal her money.
Yet what is evil or badness? As I have just been saying, Aquinas thinks that there is both evil done and evil suffered. But does he also think that they have something in common? At one level he does, though at another level he does not.
As I noted in chapter 6, Aquinas thinks of evil or badness as a matter of privation. His view is that, just as something is good insofar as it possesses form in some way, something is bad insofar as it somehow lacks form. So, for example, he thinks of living things as good, or as having goodness, just because they are alive, even if they are also ailing in some way. And he thinks of living things as bad or as displaying badness insofar as they lack form of some kind. I should stress that it is not Aquinas’s view that evil amounts to a lack of any form you care to mention. He does not think that a spider is in a bad way because it cannot suckle its young like a mammal. Nor does he think that my cat is in a bad way because it cannot fly like a bird. His view is that there is badness in something insofar as it lacks what it needs considered as what it naturally is. So he thinks that blindness is an evil in people since by blindness they lack sight, which is desirable in people but not, say, in tulips. Again, he thinks that willing immorally is an evil in people since he thinks that it renders them less good than they ought to be. In other words, Aquinas takes all evil to amount to an absence of goodness (privatio boni), an absence that can be reasonably lamented, an absence that amounts to something achieving less than what is desirable for it considered as what it is.20
On the other hand, however, Aquinas also thinks that there is a critical difference between evil done and evil suffered. He is clear that both of these amount to privation of goodness or being in some way.21 Yet, he maintains, while evil done has no concomitant good, evil suffered always has such a good. Aquinas’s view is that if, say, I willingly murder you, then nothing benefits from this except accidentally. Of course, my murdering you might hypothetically lead someone to recognize the evil of murder and to devote themselves to preventing murders occurring. But that would be an accidental spin-off from my actually going about the business of murdering you. If I do this, thinks Aquinas, there is nothing but failure or privation. I display privation since I fail to act as I should; and you display privation by being acted on by me as I am killing you.22 In the case of evil suffered, however, Aquinas thinks that there always has to be an explanation in terms of something that by being good in its way is bringing it about that something else is bad in its way. He thinks that all evil suffered involves badness + concomitant good.
It is not very difficult to offer a simple example illustrating what Aquinas has in mind here. If a cheetah jumps on a zebra so as to feed on it, the zebra is in a bad way immediately and is soon likely to become a corpse. Yet the cheetah is clearly flourishing and doing just what you would expect a healthy and thriving cheetah to do. Here we have badness or evil + concomitant good. One thing is flourishing at the expense of something else. One thing is suffering privation while another is being all that we expect it to be. A cheetah that succeeds in feeding on a zebra might be ailing in some way. But a cheetah that succeeds in feeding on a zebra is still doing well to some extent, an extent from which the zebra is doing badly.
Yet Aquinas does not try to make his case for evil suffered as involving concomitant good by providing examples of things doing well at the expense of other things doing badly. He does not offer an extensive inductive argument. His line is that there has to be a natural explanation for all cases of evil suffered, that instances of evil suffered should not be thought of as so many miracles, as events lacking causes in the world. And, with this thought in mind, he suggests that every case of evil suffered has to derive from something in the world that is at least good enough to inflict the evil in question, something that displays the goodness that it has as it brings about this evil.23 My sick cat might yet be well enough to pounce on a mouse and to feed on it. If it manages to do so, then, Aquinas thinks, defect in the mouse comes about because of flourishing of a kind in my cat; and he thinks the same for comparable examples. If you believe in miracles, you might suggest that evil suffered could come about as God brings it into being without employing any creaturely and secondary cause. But Aquinas would not agree with you here, largely because he does not think that evil suffered has being that can be brought about by God. Indeed, he does not think that any evil or badness is something that God can create.
Why does Aquinas think along these lines? Because he does not think that evil is a substance with an essence, or a real accident in a substance having an essence. You might say that he therefore denies that evil exists. Yet that would be a misleading way of expounding his take on evil. If I were to assert that evil does not exist, you would likely take me to be mad. For how can one plausibly deny the reality of evil or badness, whether great or small? There have been philosophers who have denied all sorts of things that most of us take to be obviously true. Yet did any of them really believe that they never had a headache? And can anyone speaking in good faith seriously deny that people suffer from diseases? And is “Nobody ever acts badly” a credible belief? At any rate, Aquinas is confident that evil is real in that various things are now, and in the past have been, in very bad ways. He does not want to commit himself to the thesis “Evil does not exist.”
Yet he does want to commit himself to the thesis that evil does not have an essence. He thinks that evil or badness can only be attributed to substances that fail in some way. He does not deny that bad things can successfully bring about badness in other things or in themselves, or that things that are good in various ways can bring about badness in other things. Yet he does not countenance the idea that there is such a thing as badness, considered as an independently acting substance with an essence. He thinks that there is subsisting goodness since he thinks that God exists and is goodness itself (see chapter 6 here). But he only holds that there is goodness itself because he thinks that there has to be a source of all that is good, a source that is not just a good thing of a kind but the source of all creaturely goodness. As I have shown, though, Aquinas thinks that what exists is good, and I have now shown that he maintains that evil does not exist as a substance or accident having esse.
When he speaks of creaturely esse (being), Aquinas is talking about what actually exists as a substance or a positive accident had by a substance. So he finds it unproblematic to say that God, whom he takes to be subsisting esse and the cause of esse in creatures, is not a substance that has esse. Yet he finds it equally unproblematic to say that evil is not a substance that has esse. He thinks of evil or badness in substances as what can be attributed to substances insofar as they lack something that makes for well-being in them. In thinking in this way, Aquinas is not denying that evil or badness has one or more causes. He thinks, for example, that someone can be morally bad (evil done) by acting with some end or ends in mind (final cause). He also thinks that something can be a victim of evil suffered because one or more things are acting on it so as to bring about harm in it (efficient or agent causality).
But how is God causally related to evil done or suffered? Aquinas does not deal with this question in SCG 3,4–15, though he turns to it later in SCG 3. Given what I have now shown him arguing, however, he must surely think that God causes all the good in evil suffered and none of the bad in evil done, which is exactly what he does think. Since he holds that God accounts for the sheer existence of things and their various positive features, as opposed to their lack of certain positive features, he thinks that God causally accounts for all that is good in creatures. So he maintains: (1) God causally brings about all that is good in me insofar as I act well; (2) God is not causing the evil in me as I act badly, even though he is causing me to exist as I choose to act badly; (3) God causes all the concomitant good in evil suffered, and causes none of the evil except indirectly, as one thing fails because of the well-being of another; (4) only good is the cause of evil, and that indirectly; (5) evil does not wholly destroy good.
12.2.2 SCG 3,4–15: Some Details
1. SCG 3,4–15 begins with a bold thesis: “Evil occurs in things apart from the intention of the agents.”24 What unintentionally comes about as the result of an agent acting, says Aquinas, “clearly happens apart from intention,” while every agent intends what is good.25 Aquinas obviously takes this conclusion to be bound up with his previous claim that every agent acts for a good (SCG 3,3). Defect in action, he says, arises from defect in the power of acting had by an agent. He continues:
An agent acts in keeping with the active power that it has, not in accord with the defect of power to which it is subject. According as it acts, so does it intend the end. Therefore it intends an end corresponding to its power. So, that which results as an effect of the defect of the power will be apart from the intention of the agent. Now this is evil. Hence, evil occurs apart from intention.26
You may wonder whether people might not sometimes have evil as an intended end. But Aquinas is not at this point meaning to say that it is impossible for freely acting agents deliberately and successfully to will what is, in fact, evil. He is not denying that, for example, people can sometimes be hell-bent on revenge and doing wrong to people whom they hate. He is stressing that agents strive for what seems good to them and that if what they strive for fails to come about, or if something suffers because of their action, that is not because of what they intend or aim at in acting. “That which terminates in a privation,” says Aquinas, “is apart from intention.” He continues: “It terminates in a privation inasmuch as it attains the form which it intends, and the privation of another form is a necessary result of this attainment.”27 Here Aquinas seems primarily to have evil suffered in mind. But he quickly goes on to consider what might result from the action of things with understanding. We read:
All intelligent agents tend towards something in so far as they consider the object under the rational character of a good …. So, if this object is not good but bad, this will be apart from their intention. Therefore, intelligent agents do not produce an evil result, unless it be apart from their intention. Since to tend to the good is common to the intelligent agent and to the agent that acts by natural instinct, evil does not result from the intention of any agent, except apart from the intention.28
In other words, even if I aim at what is objectively bad, I am aiming at what I take to be good, not at what I take to be bad.
2. In SCG 3,5 Aquinas notes some arguments against what he has been claiming in SCG 3,4; and in SCG 3,6 he replies to these arguments. Here are the arguments noted in SCG 3,5:
a. What does not come about by virtue of intention must come about by chance, which is rare. Yet evil is not rare and is explicable in terms of what agents, whether intelligent or otherwise, aim at.
b. People sometimes willingly perform acts that are wicked.
c. Corruption, which involves privation, occurs in the natural world and is intended by nature. So nature intends privation.
And here is what Aquinas says in SCG 3,6:
a. Evil can exist in a substance or in its action. It exists in a substance if what it ought to have is lacking in it. So, for example, it is bad or evil for a human being to lack hands, while it is not bad or evil for a bird to lack hands.
b. If evil exists in a subject, then it is evil in an unqualified way. And evil in an action is also unqualifiedly evil.
c. “Not everything that is apart from intention is necessarily fortuitous or a matter of chance.”29 People who end up with hangovers due to alcohol consumption do not intend or aim at the pain of the hangover; they aim at enjoying drinking alcohol. Yet hangovers do not happen by chance.
d. So corruption in natural things, though not something aimed at by anything in nature, is “an invariable consequence [sc. of agents in nature acting in certain ways], for the acquisition of one form is always accompanied by the privation of another form.”30 It does not occur by chance.
e. There can be badness in the action of natural agents because of some defect in their power of acting. So, for example, I might limp while trying to walk because my power to walk is affected by a leg injury. But I am not intending my limping as I try to walk, and my limping will not come about by chance unless it happens to have come about because of chance events bringing it about that I am someone who ends up having to limp while trying to walk.31
f. Voluntary agents aim or intend with a view to a particular good. If they choose to act so as to deprive something or someone of well-being in some way, they do not do so by chance. Adulterers know what they are aiming at when having intercourse, and adultery is not something that happens by chance, though, of course, someone might, say, inadvertently kill someone while aiming to shoot a bird.
g. Moral evil is the result of voluntary action since it comes about as someone wills a good that results in privation in some way, either in the agent or in something else. “Though evil [sc. evil as wickedness] be apart from intention, it is nonetheless voluntary. … People will to do a disorderly action for the sake of some sensory good to be attained; they do not intend the disorder, nor do they will it simply for itself, but for the sake of this result.”32
h. “Privations are not intended by nature in themselves, but only accidentally; forms, however, are intended in themselves.”33
i. “What is evil in an unqualified sense is completely apart from intention in the workings of nature. … On the other hand, that which is not evil in the unqualified sense, but evil in relation to some definite thing, is not directly intended by nature but only accidentally.”34
3. Is anything essentially evil? In SCG 3,7 Aquinas argues that nothing is essentially evil; and, having, in SCG 3,8, noted arguments against this position, he continues to defend it in SCG 3,9.35 Evil, he maintains,
is simply a privation of something which a subject is entitled by its origin to possess and which it ought to have. … Now, privation is not an essence; it is, rather, a negation in a substance. … What is evil in itself cannot be natural to anything. For it is of the very definition of evil that it be a privation of that which is to be in a subject by virtue of its natural origin, and which should be in it. So, evil cannot be natural to any subject since it is a privation of what is natural. Consequently, whatever is present naturally in something is a good for it, and it is evil if the thing lacks it. Therefore, no essence is evil in itself.36
Aquinas goes on to note (1) that a substance has being by virtue of its essence, (2) that being is good, (3) that everything is good insofar as it possesses being, (4) and that good and evil are contraries. So, Aquinas concludes, “nothing is evil by virtue of the fact that it has an essence” and “no essence is evil.”37 Again, he reasons, “everything is either an agent or a thing that is made”; yet evil is not an agent or something made since a thing acts insofar as it is good in some way, and since what is made possesses form and, therefore, goodness.38 Yet again, he argues, every being intends a good when acting (see SCG 3,3), so “no being, as being, is evil.”39 In addition, Aquinas notes: (1) what has an essence is or has form, and form is good since it is a principle of action; (2) being is actual or potential, and actuality is good since something is good to the extent that it is actual, while potentiality is good since it tends toward actuality; (3) every act of being comes from God (see SCG 2,15), and God is perfect goodness (see SCG 1,28 and 41); yet evil cannot be the product of what is good; so no being, as a being, is evil.
4. So what causes evil? In SCG 3,10 Aquinas insists that both evil in evil suffered and the evil in evil done are “caused only by the good,” but caused only “accidentally.”40 He says that what comes about has to proceed from what is good since it comes from a real and acting agent, which evil is not. “What does not exist,” he observes, “is not the cause of anything. So, every cause must be a definite thing. But evil is not a definite being, as has been proved [see SCG 3,7]. Therefore, evil cannot be the cause of anything. If, then, evil be caused by anything, this cause must be the good.”41
When it comes to evil suffered, Aquinas argues, this can be either in an agent or in what an agent brings about. It is in an agent if the agent is somehow defective in power and, therefore, defective in action, this resulting in bad effects. Yet, says Aquinas, the bad effects here are spin-offs from an ability to act, which is, in and of itself, good. When it comes to evil suffered and what an agent brings about, Aquinas goes on to say, this may come about either because what is being acted on is “not well disposed to the reception of the agent’s action on it” or because it is rendered defective by the goodness in what is acting on it.42 When it comes to the second possibility, Aquinas claims that “from the point of view of the form of the effect, evil occurs accidentally because the privation of another form is the necessary concomitant of the presence of a given form.”43
Yet, Aquinas goes on to say, this analysis of evil does not work when it comes to the evil in evil done. Those who do evil, he thinks, are not suffering from a defect of power, and “moral fault is noticed in action only, and not in any effect that is produced. … Moral evil is not considered in relation to the matter or form of the effect, but only as a resultant from the agent.”44 “The root and source of moral wrongdoing,” Aquinas claims, “is to be sought in the act of will.”45 He takes this conclusion to mean that beings with intellect and will, while always aiming at what they take to be good, can choose to ignore other possible goods that they might and ought to pursue. He writes:
When the will inclines to act as moved by the apprehension of reason, presenting a proper good to it, the result is a fitting action. But when the will breaks forth into action, at the apprehension of sense cognition, or of reason presenting some other good at variance with its proper good, the result in the action of the will is a moral fault.46
So, says Aquinas, “a defect of ordering to reason and to a proper end precedes a fault of action in the will.” This defect in ordering is, he claims, voluntary, “for to will and not to will lie within the power of the will itself.”47 He goes on to say that something with will is able to reason or not reason, or to pay attention or not pay attention to what might properly be considered when reasoning concerning an action. Aquinas therefore seems to think that people acting badly are voluntarily aiming at goods, implying, so he thinks, that their being morally bad springs from a good source in them that allows them to refuse to pay attention to what right moral reasoning requires. Their being morally evil results from them positively aiming at what they take to be good while not thinking rightly when it comes to their actions. In this sense, Aquinas thinks, the evil in evil done comes about accidentally since it results from an inappropriate good being sought.
5. The thesis of SCG 3,11 is that evil is always based on some good. Since it lacks an essence, says Aquinas, it cannot exist independently and must be in a subject. Yet, he reiterates, every substance is good just by existing, and “the privation which is evil is present in a good thing, as in a subject.”48 Again, he argues, evil causes injury, but only as injuring what is good and only because it is, therefore, in what is good. Also, he says, since evil is only caused accidentally by what is good, and, since what is accidental is reducible to what exists by itself, “with a caused evil which is the accidental effect of the good, there must always be some good which is the direct effect of the good itself, and thus this good effect is the foundation of the evil” since “what exists accidentally is based on that which exists by itself.”49 Aquinas acknowledges that someone might find it improper or unreasonable (inconveniens) to say that good is the subject of evil, that evil is grounded in goodness. Yet he thinks it proper to say that nonbeing can be present in a being as in a subject. He notes that any privation amounts to nonbeing grounded in what is to some extent good.
6. Can evil wholly destroy good? In SCG 3,12 Aquinas argues that it cannot since it always exists in what is to some extent good.
7. SCG 3,13 and 14 return to the notion of evil having a cause. Here Aquinas offers the following conclusions, which he takes to be inferable from what he has previously been saying: (1) since what exists in something must have some cause, and since evil does exist in subjects, evil has some kind of cause; (2) since evil is always a privation of a certain kind, it must have a cause; (3) since evil is always a privation of a certain kind, it exists in things as foreign to their nature, as not due to what the things essentially are; so it must have a cause; (4) every evil is a consequence of a good; yet every good other than God has a cause; so “every evil has a cause”;50 (5) “Evil, though not a direct cause of anything by itself is, however, an accidental cause” since its presence in an active cause amounts to its being present accidentally in what that cause causes;51 (6) defects in causes lead to defects in effects, yet a defect in a cause is an evil, even though it is not an independently existing (per se) cause as is an existing substance.
8. Aquinas thinks that God is the highest good and the source of all created goods. In SCG 3,15, however, he denies that there is any highest evil that is the first source or principle of all evils (a position he ascribes to Manicheans). A highest evil, he observes, would have to be entirely disconnected from goodness, as God is entirely separate from evil; yet evil depends on there being goodness of some kind. Again, he says that a highest evil would have to be evil by essence; yet evil has no essence (see SCG 3,7). Yet again, he argues: (1) first principles do not have causes, but every evil is caused by a good; (2) first principles act through their own power, but evil acts only through the power of what is somehow good; (3) first principles cannot be accidental; yet evil arises only accidentally; (4) all evils have accidental causes, while first principles have no cause; (5) first principles are genuine beings acting causally, yet evil is only an accidental cause.