Franklin Perkins, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and editor of the journal Philosophy East and West, will give a public lecture on “The Problem of Evil beyond Theism.”

Currently Visiting Professor of the Philosophy of Religions in the University of Chicago Divinity School, Perkins is a scholar of the history of philosophy, with particular concentrations in Classical Chinese Philosophy and Early Modern European Philosophy. He is the author of Heaven and Earth are not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy, Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed, and Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light. His most recent book is Doing What You Really Want: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mengzi.

Abstract: The classical problem of evil centers on a question about God: if God is all powerful and perfectly good, why does the world God created seem imperfect? In this talk, I reframe this question as one particular manifestation of a more widespread problem. Across many world religions, one finds the same claim: good people are always rewarded and bad people are punished. This claim has no intrinsic connection to theism, as it can be made in terms of karma or even in terms of natural causality. If we take the empirical basis of the problem of evil to be the fact that that bad things sometimes happen to good people or that bad people sometimes end up with flourishing lives, then this problem exists for many religions and in many cultural contexts. This talk attempts to describe, categorize, and analyze responses to this basic problem across a number of traditions, including Chinese and South Asian philosophies. I argue that the problem of evil is ultimately rooted in the tension between human values and the fact that the world we live in appears to be indifferent to them.

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