Theodicies aim at explaining why an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God might enable the existence of evil and the suffering it causes. I draw on an idea from eighteenth-century Italian Jewish philosopher and kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto to develop a ‘world-building theodicy’. The main idea is that God wanted his creatures to participate in the creation of the world and manifest themselves as godlike mini creators. Therefore, God created an unfinished world full of natural dangers and evil-doing people, leaving creatures to develop the world into a utopia through their own hard work. This theodicy is designed to account for all types of worldly evil and any finite amount, all without controversial doctrines about free will.
How Nudging Upsets Autonomy / David Enoch
Everyone suspects that nudging offends against the nudged’s autonomy. But it has proved rather difficult to say why. In this paper I offer a new diagnosis of the tension between even the best cases of nudging and the value of autonomy. Relying on the distinction between autonomy as sovereignty and autonomy as non-alienation, I show that nudging need not offend against either. But it does sever the tie between them, it undermines the possibility of achieving non-alienation *in virtue of* having sovereignty. Analogies to common themes in virtue epistemology help to establish this point. If true, this diagnosis improves our understanding of nudging, of course, but it also improves our understanding of the value of autonomy—the full value of autonomy has the structure that is shared by many other achievements—that of an objective element, a subjective one, and the appropriate relations between the two.
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