PhilosophersJean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Man is born good; society corrupts him.

Enlightenment · Social contract1712 – 1778 SwitzerlandPolitical thinkerCritic of civilisationTheorist of educationBeliever without a Church

Overview Arguments · 4 Works Quotes Lineage

Letter to Voltaire, 18 August 1756

Providence after Lisbon

What it claims

The whole is good, and the misfortunes of a human life are not the last word.

Why

A perfect God, wise, powerful and just, makes the whole good, and makes the soul immortal to make up for suffering.

Valid

On 1 November 1755, an earthquake destroyed Lisbon and killed tens of thousands. Voltaire wrote a poem against the idea that "all is good". Rousseau answered him. He does not claim to prove that God exists: he admits that reason cannot settle it. He shows that if one believes in God, one must also believe that the whole is good and that our misfortunes are not the last word.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.

The argument is valid and every premise is essential. Rousseau says so himself: "If one grants me the first proposition, never will one shake those following." So all the weight rests on P1, which he admits he cannot prove. Critics also target P3: shouldn't a wise and powerful God prevent Lisbon?

Analogy. You see a single scene of a long film: a character suffers for no reason. If you trust the director, you think the scene makes sense in the whole and the story is not over. The whole question: is there a director?

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Voltaire 1756 · attacks premise 3

If an all-powerful God exists, he could have prevented all our ills. Saying "all is good" before the dead of Lisbon insults their suffering.

Rousseau replies

Rousseau

Moral evil comes from free man, who has corrupted himself. And most physical ills are our own doing: it was not nature that piled up twenty thousand houses of six or seven storeys in Lisbon. Had the inhabitants been more spread out, the disaster would have been far smaller.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Voltaire says that "all is well" insults the victims; Rousseau answers that moral evil comes from man, that many physical ills are of our making, and pleads for "the whole is good". Voltaire put the discussion off (letter of 12 September 1756). The core disagreement: can one speak of the good of the whole in the face of each person's suffering? An open point.

Objection anticipated by Rousseau attacks premise 1

Everything rests on the existence of God, and reason does not prove it. The argument will convince only those who already believe.

Rousseau replies

Rousseau

Rousseau grants it: for him it is a proof of sentiment, which cannot become a demonstration for an unbeliever. But the unbeliever should not attack the consequences without attacking the principle either: the real debate is about God, not about Lisbon.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Rousseau grants it: this is not a demonstration but a conviction of sentiment. The disagreement is about what one expects of an argument: to show that a belief is coherent, or to convince someone who does not share it? The discussion moves to the existence of God itself (see the arguments on God).

Voltaire, Candide 1759 · attacks the conclusion

At the time, Voltaire replied in a few lines that he would leave such discussions aside. Rousseau later said, in the Confessions, that the real answer was a novel: in Candide, the philosopher Pangloss keeps saying that "all is for the best" while disasters pile up, the Lisbon earthquake among them. Optimism becomes ridiculous in the face of real misfortune. Rousseau says he never read Candide.

no reply

We have not yet found a direct reply by Rousseau in the texts.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Candide is a satire rather than a free-standing argument: its underlying idea, that real misfortune makes optimism ridiculous, is taken up in the threads of Voltaire and Ivan Karamazov. Rousseau, who says he never read Candide, did not answer it.

Hume 1779 · attacks premise 3

Epicurus's old dilemma: if God wants to prevent evil but cannot, he is not all-powerful; if he can but will not, he is not good; if he both can and will, whence evil?

Rousseau replies

No reply possible: objection raised in 1779, after the author's death (1778).

Alvin Plantinga 1974

Plantinga does not defend Rousseau's "all is good", but he answers the dilemma: he argues that evil does not contradict an all-powerful and perfectly good God. In his view, every person God could create may do wrong at least once: God then could not create free beings without evil, which remains compatible with a very good world. The full thread is in Hume's argument from evil.

see the argument

Where the debate stands (our summary)Epicurus's dilemma is discussed in detail in Hume's argument from evil. Many philosophers, atheists included, judge that Plantinga's defence removes the logical contradiction between God and evil; the debate today is mostly about the probability of evil given God's existence and about natural evil. An open point.

Dostoevsky (Ivan Karamazov) 1880 · attacks premise 3

Even if the whole is good, even if everything is set right in the end, that harmony is not worth the tears of a single tortured child. Ivan refuses to enter a good of the whole paid for by the suffering of innocents: he "returns his ticket". Dostoevsky's character targets exactly the idea that "all is good for the whole".

Rousseau replies

summary: their text is not yet in our corpus

No reply possible: objection raised in 1880, after the author's death (1778).

Marilyn McCord Adams 1989

Adams, a believer, does not defend "all is good for the whole": she accepts Ivan's demand, a good of the whole is not enough to justify one person's suffering. She argues that God must be good to each person, so that even the most horrendous evils are overcome within that person's own life, through an intimate relationship with him, so that this life is on the whole a great good for her (Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, 1989).

Where the debate stands (our summary)Ivan refuses that the good of the whole should justify a child's suffering; Adams accepts this demand, leaves the good-of-the-whole answer behind and asks that God be good to each person. Her answer rests on a life beyond death, which its opponents refuse to grant without proof. Rousseau too holds to the immortality of the soul (P4). An open point: no widely accepted answer.