Colloquia Speaker professor Mike Zhao (Notre Dame) will give his talk on Friday, April 5, 2024 at 3:00pm in DeBartolo Hall, room 136.
Talk Title: The Problem of Good
Abstract: Some highly valuable things—like certain virtues and their exercise, the ability to value many things, and natural sources of a meaningful life—depend for their existence on the existence of various evils. If the value of these goods can outweigh the disvalue of the evils that are their conditions, then the best world may be one in which there is some evil, perhaps even serious evil. This raises normative questions about whether we should want some evil to persist, and whether we should prevent ourselves from abolishing evil, if we are ever in a position to do so. I argue that there may be no good answer to these questions.
