A Moral Code

Franklin’s argument in the first part of “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain” uses the fact that God is infinitely wise, good, and powerful to show that there is no evil and therefore all people are esteemed equally in the eyes of the creator. This argument reminds me a lot of something that I read in another class last year, although a completely different conclusion was reached from the premises. In David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, an argument very similar to Franklin’s is used to prove that God does not exist. Basically the argument goes like this: There is a discrepancy between the existence of a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good , and the existence of evil in the world. Hume defines the four types of evil that exist in the world and claims that all four are theoretically avoidable if God chose to exclude them from the world. Therefore the existence of this theoretically avoidable evil cancels out at least one of the qualities ascribed to God. Either He is perfectly good but does not have the power or knowledge to take evil away from the world, or he has the power and knowledge to get rid of evil but chooses not to because he is not perfectly good. Hume thus reaches the conclusion that the traditional Christian image of an infinitely wise, good, and powerful God cannot exist.

Franklin reaches a completely different conclusion because rather than assuming that any of the basic assumptions about God (infinite goodness, wisdom, and power) are false, he suggests that evil does not exist. From there he concludes that everyone is equal in the eyes of God, and goes on to show how everything that anyone does is a response to the stimulus of unpleasantness. Although Franklin, unlike Hume, is a stalwart supporter of the traditional Christian God in his argument, I felt that the conclusion he reached was nevertheless very anti-Christian. Essentially, if there is no evil and everything we do is a response to unpleasantness, it excuses people from any sort of moral code. I am reminded of the Kelleter reading from last week where it is mentioned that Franklin was a deist at one point but decided to abandon deism not because he did not believe it was true, but because it was not useful in living a moral life. He had no reason to be kind to other people, and so he often was not, and he therefore decided to reject deism.