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I have been suggesting that it is good for God to allow men to have deep responsibility for other men, particularly their children; and for animals, who in turn have responsibility for their own offspring; and that it is good for God to allow men and animals to suffer for the sake of the knowledge provided to themselves and others, and for the sake of the opportunities provided for performing good actions and deepening knowledge. But even if this is correct, does God have the right to inflict harm on us for the sake of this greater good? Surely no one has this right to inflict harm on an agent for his greater good, let alone for the greater good of another, without the agent's consent. We judge that doctors who use people as involuntary guinea-pigs for medical experiments are doing something wrong.
However there are three crucial differences between the doctors and God, which have the consequence that God has the right to make choices for men which they do not have the right to make for each other. The first and most important difference is that the doctors could have asked the patients for permission; and the patients being free agents of some power and knowledge could have made an informed choice of whether or not to allow themselves to be used. God's choice is not about how to use already existing agents, but about the sort of agents to make and the sort of world into which to put them. In God's situation there are no agents to be asked. Thus in the last chapter I argued that it would be good that one agent A should have deep responsibility for another B who in turn would have deep responsibility for another C. Ought not God to have asked B if he wanted things thus? But this is not possible, for if A is to be responsible for B's growth in freedom, knowledge, and power, there will not be a B with enough freedom and knowledge to make any choice before God has to choose whether or not to give A responsibility for him. The creator has to make the choice independently of his creatures, and he has a reason for choosing to make them deeply interdependent. Again, God has reason, we saw, to create a world in which some suffer, to give others knowledge. But men cannot choose in what sort of a world by what route they are to acquire knowledge, for until they have acquired knowledge they cannot choose anything. God has to make the choice for them. Secondly, God as the author of our being would have rights over us which we do not have over our fellow men. To allow a man to suffer for the good of his or someone else's soul one has to stand in some kind of parental relationship towards him. I do not have the right to let some stranger, Joe Bloggs, suffer for the good of his soul or of the soul of Bill Snoggs, but I do have some right of this kind in respect of my own children. I may let the younger son suffer somewhat for the good of his and his brother's soul. I have this right because in small part I am responsible for the younger son's existence, its beginning, and continuance. If this is correct, then a fortiori, a God who is, ex hypothesi, so much more the author of our being than are our parents, has so many more rights in this respect. The third consideration is that a God knows exactly how much men will suffer and what the effects of their suffering will be. Part of the reason why we rightly hesitate sometimes to inflict suffering is that we do not know how much suffering we are inflicting and what its effects will be. These latter two considerations also suggest that a God has a right to allow animals to suffer for the benefit of men under circumstances where men would not have that right. Clearly many men who have not created animals judge that nevertheless they have the right to cause animal suffering, in order to alleviate human suffering and to give men knowledge. Presumably they judge that animals have fewer rights than men in these respects, since they are not moral agents, having no free will and limited power and knowledge. In this connection it must be borne in mind that, as I claimed in Chapter 9 , animal suffering is presumably far less intense than human suffering. For if man suffers and inanimate matter and plants do not, then suffering presumably increases with mental and nervous complexity. Animals in general are far less intelligent and have a far less developed nervous organization than men; one would expect their suffering to be correspondingly much less. Further there is the point that surely for many animals, as for many men, the good which they enjoy compensates for the harm which they suffer; a God in creating them compensates for that harm—which animal-experimenters who are not their creators do not. So then God without asking men or animals has to choose for them between kinds of world in which they can live—basically either a world in which there is very little suffering, and correspondingly little creative opportunity; and a world in which there is suffering but there is also great benefit, and where the sufferers are not always those who benefit. How shall he choose? There are clearly reasons for both choices. But it does not seem to me that God would be immoral to presume that if (per impossible) the agents were able to choose, they would make the heroic choice. God's choice in that case is the choice which allows some to benefit others, although the latter can choose either to do so or not to do so. Of course in giving existence at all to an agent, God is in most cases giving him an immense benefit which is not outweighed even if harm comes with it. Although human parents are far less responsible for the existence of their children than is God, they sometimes find themselves in analogous situations. One which many parents of good education and comfortable background have recently faced is the choice of whether to send their children to the local comprehensive school or to send them to a paid private school. They may make that choice in the belief that their own children will be harmed by the local comprehensive (education will be bad and hostility shown towards middle-class children) but also in the belief that other children will benefit through the healing of divisions between communities. In such a case the parent will rightly be influenced by the relative amounts of harm and good which would be done, but where the amounts are not too slight, it would be hard to condemn either action as immoral. And God, as we have seen, has far more rights than parents in such a matter, just as his choice can sometimes be far more serious.
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