Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”

[Mudhammam]

What if it's not guaranteed? What if, for example, killing a few suspected terrorists who are very possibly responsible for recent communications chatter about an imminent threat (but are not guaranteed to be: let's say it seems a 50/50 chance they are the ones) might save a city of millions? Is it more moral for me to commit the evil of killing a couple guys, not knowing but strongly suspecting they are the ones?

It seems to me that in the case of credible terror threats, almost any evil is worth committing, even if it changes the odds by a few percent either way. In other words, my killing act is probably a purely evil act-- maybe the guys weren't going to do it, maybe they were just goofing off and never had the means, etc., and I'm killing innocent people in the prime of their lives. However, the relative value of the million seems to skew any calculus I could make about it.

It sounds to me like the previous posts I was responding to and your remarks speak to three different questions altogether:

(1) Whether or not evil can be said to actually exist, (2) whether or not it can be meaningfully qualified and quantified in a universal sense, and (3) whether or not a lesser evil is sometimes necessary to avoid a greater evil.

I'd say yes to all three.