Robert Anton Elisher

Kierkegaard’s commentators tend to deny the application of his criticism of preferential loves to forms of love involving mutual accountability to the good or friendly care supervenient on essential qualities like virtue, such as Aristotelian virtue friendship. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s insights, however, I argue that virtue friendship too is characterized by the sort of self-love that reduces the object of preference to “the other I,” thereby failing adequately to respect his or her “otherness” or “alterity.” First, loving a friend only as a member of a collective or “we” self threatens to engulf the friend’s independent identity. Second, preference as the sole or authoritative determinant of love is inconsistent with the human good understood in terms of God-relatedness. Finally, though Aristotle corrects the preference of pleasure and utility friendships, virtue friendship does not constitute a radical enough correction of preference since it does not go to the core of personhood.

I argue here that God, as Molinism conceives Him, is complicit in moral evil. This is of course a problem because complicity in evil undermines divine perfection. I argue, however, that it is a problem that Open Theism, as a theory of “general” (as opposed to “meticulous”) providence, avoids. This claim opposes that of Neal Judisch, who has recently (2012) argued that theories of general providence (e.g., Open Theism) are in no better position to answer the problem of gratuitous evil (i.e., the evidential problem of evil) than theories of meticulous providence (e.g., Molinism or Calvinism). Here, Judisch draws on important insights about just what these theories involve in terms of gratuitous evil to diffuse what he calls “the argument for divine complicity.” In response, I offer a reformulation of this argument that is immaterial to the question of gratuitous evil. I then explain why my argument does not convict an Open Theist God and, in the course of doing so, I consider whether an application of the doctrine of double effect exonerates a Molinist God as well.