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12.12.15

I thought Schopenhauer took care of the problem of Evil by simply saying human good is not on the agenda of the "Will." And later he had some kind of second thoughts in which he added that the Will has some kind of higher agenda in which the Good is the goal.
Personally I think the Rambam did the best job by having השגחה פרטית "Divine watching out for" be directed towards higher intellects. It is an elegant solution which is Neo Platonic in showing how gaining the higher intellect is important. (This was the basic idea during the Middle Ages and was abandoned I think for poor reasons.)

God and Job obviously agreed with Schopenhauer as is seen from the end of the book of Job. In fact that is teh whole point of the book. Also I saw this in Psalms. I forget where but one obvious place is Psalm 72 [in the Hebrew and English numbering. In Russian and Ukrainian it would be Psalm 73.]







I wrote about this before but I saw a certain Mark Friedman also wrote what looks like a good treatment of this problem so I thought to mention the issue again.

Mark Friedman says: "Many philosophers, especially those working in the Kantian tradition, hold that persons have dignity as a result of their personal autonomy, and that respect for this attribute is a paramount value. At least for them, a world with free will is “better” than almost any possible world without it."
This seems to me to be  a good answer to this question. I think Leah a friend of mine mentioned this answer once when she was talking with her mother in Safed. At the time I did not think much of it but now it makes a lot more sense to me than it did then.