Suffering is a moral, existential, religious, and metaphysical problem that philosophers and theologians have been debating for millennia. People don’t want to suffer, but they also try to find value or meaning in their suffering. Is it possible for suffering to be “made good,” for suffering to be offset by some counterbalancing good that comes later on? Does suffering have value as part of some ethical transaction?
- I am suspicious of the notion of unrequited suffering, in particular, of its inescapable implication that suffering can be “requited”. Suffering is not a debit entry in some ledger, something that can be offset by an appropriate credit on another page. Suffering is intrinsic disvalue. Positive consequences may flow from it, but it cannot thereby be “made good”.
- Jay F. Rosenberg
The idea of suffering have a transactional nation plays an important role in Christianity. According to traditional, orthodox Christian soteriology (study of salvation), humanity is mired in sin and, because of this sin, deserves eternal punishment in Hell. Fortunately, God loves humanity and doesn’t want to see us suffer. To keep us out of Hell, God sent his son to suffer and die in our place, thus paying our cosmic debt and freeing us from sin — but only if we actually believe this story first.
This assumes, however, that the suffering and death of one individual can suffice to replace the suffering (eternal torment in Hell) of any other person or any group of people. Suffering must have transactional value — it must be something that can be traded in exchange for other things that have transactional value, whether other suffering or something different entirely. Work has transactional value. I can do work for you (like chopping wood) for a couple of hours and thereby relieve some debt I owe you because, in the end, you possess something (chopped wood) that you value as much as what I owed you.
Can the same be said for suffering? I don’t think so. If I suffer over the space of a couple of hours, what are you left with that has value such that a debt I owe you can be relieved? At most, one might argue that you gain the value of seeing me suffer and that has value because you hate me and wish my ill — but that would suggest that you are a sadist, not that suffering has transactional value.
Could someone else suffer in my place to pay my debt? Someone else could chop wood in my place, and then I would owe them rather than you. That same does not seem to be true of suffering, though. Even if we take the more extreme case and imagine that you would derive pleasure from my suffering, such that you would accept that in exchange for a debt I owe you, we couldn’t conclude that you would accept the suffering of someone else in my place unless you are a general sadist and would take pleasure in the suffering of any random person.
Thus, if suffering is to have any sort of transactional value, it would only be for sadist who take pleasure in seeing the suffering of others. For everyone else, suffering isn’t something that can serve as “a debit entry in some ledger.” What, then, would that say about a god which required that someone suffer in order to pay off any sort of debt?
Another issue raised by Jay F. Rosenberg’s quote involves the “Argument from Evil” against the existence of God. A common rebuttal to this argument focuses upon the idea that the suffering people endure in this world doesn’t disprove the existence of God because there are other goods, in this world and the next, which offset people’s suffering. Thus, while there might be suffering, there are even more important goods that are achieved in exchange for suffering.
However, if suffering does not have transactional value, then this argument must fail. A person can only claim that suffering is worthwhile in exchange for even more important goods if they can support the idea that suffering is something that can be “offset by an appropriate credit on another page,” but I doubt that such an argument would be successful. I agree with Rosenberg that suffering has intrinsic disvalue that cannot be relieved by some other good somewhere else.
Yes, there might be positive consequences from it (painful surgery might lead to improved health), but that doesn’t mean that the suffering is “made good” as a result. No, the suffering is still bad and no “exchange” can eliminate that. Unfortunately for Christians, if this view is appropriate than important aspects of traditional Christian theology and apologetics are undermined.
