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Natural evil is the result of any event perceived to be morally negative and that is not caused by the action or inaction of an Agent , such as a person. EXAMPLES An example of a natural evil might be an Earthquake , or any other evil event for which no one can be held responsible or culpable. It is contrasted, particularly in discussions relating to the Problem Of Evil , with Moral Evil which occurs when a morally negative event occurs due to the actions of a moral agent. A historical example of Natural evil that greatly influenced Enlightment thought is the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake . Voltaire famously argued that a God which would allow such a natural evil to occur could not be called Benevolent . He criticized the Optimist s such as Leibniz who viewed the universe through the lens of Theodicy and believed their accommodation of the problem of evil was simply naive. The character of Pangloss in Candide was meant to parody such sentiments. Jean Jacques Rousseau responded to Voltaire's criticism of the optimists by pointing out that the Value Judgement required in order to declare the Lisbon Earthquake a natural evil ignored the fact that the human endeavor of the construction and organization of the city of Lisbon was also to blame for the horrors recounted. It was, after all, the collapsing buildings, the fires, and the close human confinement that led to much of the death. DETERMINATION The question of whether Natural Disaster s such as Hurricane s might be natural or moral evil is complicated by new understandings of the effects, such as Global Warming , of our collective actions on events that were previously considered to be out of our control. |
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