Brief Remarks on Sterba’s Moral Argument from Evil

Abstract

We pose two challenges to Sterba’s position. First, we show that Sterba fails to consider alternative historical positions such as Leibniz’s (who argues that God knows that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds) or Kant’s (who suggests that God does not necessarily know what free agents would choose or would have chosen, had God not intervened), both of which bear direct relevance to some major aspects of Sterba’s argument. Second, we show that Sterba neither rules out the possibility that God has always intervened in history when his not intervening would have led to significant and horrendous evils, nor the possibility that every immoral action (and its consequences) might have led to significant and horrendous evils.