for building its whole account on the "fact (sic!) that the world contains neither justice nor meaning." Is that a fact? Is it the whole truth and nothing but the truth?I agree with many things Neiman says. Every time we make the judgment this ought not to have happened, we are stepping onto a path that leads straight to the problem of evil. Note that it is as little a moral problem, strictly speaking, as it is a theological one. One can call it the point at which ethics and metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics meet, collide, and throw up their hands. At issue are questions about what the structure of the world must be like for us to think and act within it. But (you know what I'm going to say) is the world composed only of indifferent events interrupted by evils? I trace Neiman's question back to Schopenhauer, who thought that all
the deepest religious and philosophical traditions determined that the whole world "ought not to be."Most people think Schopenhauer was a crank - why have readers accepted Neiman's pessimistic assumptions, indeed praised them for their moral seriousness?
What I want to say - tell me if this just sounds wrong - is that we sometimes also think something very like this ought not to have happened at goods: the child pulled safe from a well, the parents who adopt the killer of their child, the story told in "Amazing Grace," etc. Perhaps we throw up our hands here, too, along with ethics and metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics, but to wave our clap our hands in delighted disbelief and gratitude. Certainly: "ought" means something different here. (It would be interesting to pursue how different - it may in some cases be less different than you'd suppose.) But isn't it in fact (sic!) the case that our expectations - including our expectations of what by all rights should have happened - can be upset by good things as well as evil?
