The first explanation looks fairly plausible to me. We live in a hostile universe where pretty much everything is trying to kill or maim us, including our own bodies which eventually die of old age. That’s a lot of suffering, right there, and we have barely begun to develop technologies which mitigate a small portion of it. If that is true, then we should not be surprised to find suffering throughout human history.
I didn’t understand TimS to be only saying that there has been a lot of suffering in history. I understood him to be saying that the cause of this suffering was “unwillingness and inability” (by “society”) to prevent it.
Now perhaps it is true that if society was willing and able to prevent suffering, there would have been less of it. But it’s equally true that if society was willing and able to prevent hurricanes or sunrises there would have been less of them. These are bad explanations.
I took his statement to mean society was, on some occasions, (a) able but unwilling to prevent suffering; (b) willing but unable to prevent suffering; or (c) both unwilling and unable to prevent suffering; and, therefore, suffering was (and still is) present. My point was that, regardless of (a), (b) and (c) happen all the time, since our technology simply isn’t at a quasi-godlike level yet.
The first explanation looks fairly plausible to me. We live in a hostile universe where pretty much everything is trying to kill or maim us, including our own bodies which eventually die of old age. That’s a lot of suffering, right there, and we have barely begun to develop technologies which mitigate a small portion of it. If that is true, then we should not be surprised to find suffering throughout human history.
I didn’t understand TimS to be only saying that there has been a lot of suffering in history. I understood him to be saying that the cause of this suffering was “unwillingness and inability” (by “society”) to prevent it.
Now perhaps it is true that if society was willing and able to prevent suffering, there would have been less of it. But it’s equally true that if society was willing and able to prevent hurricanes or sunrises there would have been less of them. These are bad explanations.
I took his statement to mean society was, on some occasions, (a) able but unwilling to prevent suffering; (b) willing but unable to prevent suffering; or (c) both unwilling and unable to prevent suffering; and, therefore, suffering was (and still is) present. My point was that, regardless of (a), (b) and (c) happen all the time, since our technology simply isn’t at a quasi-godlike level yet.