Love and the Problem of Evil

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is the virtual certainty that much of what we must prize in loving any human person would not have existed in a world that did not contain much of the evil that has occurred in the history of the actual world. It is argued that the appropriate response to this fact must be some form of ambivalence, but that lovers have reason to prefer an ambivalence that contextualizes regretted evils in the framework of what we welcome in human life.

This article originally appeared, in a slightly different form, in Philosophia (2006) 34, 243–51, © Springer Science + Business Media B. V. 2006.