Philosophy



Philosophy

Question 1

After reading the “John Perry's book Dialogue on Good, Evil and the Existence of God”, I concluded that he uses three characters in the dialogue in order to clarify the positions of the three characters (Weirob, Miller, and Cohen), the arguments they provide in support their positions and the “end state” of their discussion. This allows us to examine our understanding of the good, evil and the existence of God. The book deals with the standard problems in the theory of personal identity in the form of a dialogue between a terminally ill university professor, Gretchen Weirob, and her two friends, Sam Miller and Dave Cohen(Ernst 5). The views represented include those of Bernard Williams, John Locke, and Derek Parfit. The format of associating different philosophical positions with different characters in a dialogue recalls David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. In the early part of the work, Gretchen and her friends consider whether evil provides a problem for those who believe in the perfection of God. As the discussion continues they consider the nature of human evil-whether, for example, fully rational actions can be intentionally evil. Recurring themes are the distinction between natural evil and evil done by free agents, and the problems the Holocaust and other cases of genocide pose for conceptions of the universe as a basically good place, or humans as basically good beings(Pinziani 67-77).

Merciful and Just are not polar opposites. If you are just then yes you will punish those that deserve to be punished but if your also merciful and you realize that the person has changed their way and is willing to be a better person because of the wrong they committed, then leniency is given. nother apparent contradiction is between God's mercy and his justice. If God is just, he will surely punish the wicked as they deserve. But because he is merciful, he spares the wicked. Anselm tries to resolve this apparent contradiction by appeal to God's goodness. It is better, he says, for God “to be good both to the good and to the wicked than to be good only to the good, and it is better to be good to the wicked both in punishing and in sparing them than to be good only in punishing them” (P 9). So God's supreme goodness requires that he be both just and merciful. But Anselm is not content to resolve the apparent tension between justice and mercy by appealing to some other attribute, goodness, that entails both justice and mercy; he goes on to argue that justice itself requires mercy. Justice to sinners obviously requires that God punish them; but God's justice to himself requires that he exercise his supreme goodness in sparing the wicked. “Thus,” Anselm says to God, “in saving us whom you might justly destroy . . . you are just, not because you give us our due, but because you do what is fitting for you who are supremely good” (P ...