| dc.description.abstract | Privation theorists think that there are no evil entities, that is, that there are no entities which are positively and intrinsically evil. But then what is it that the privation theorist is talking about when citing an evil? If there are no evil entities, then what does she quantify over in statements such as, "There are many evils which people suffer from"? Or, since, after all, a privation is a certain kind of lack, what kinds of properties are such that lacking them would result in an evil? The privation theorist must ontologically account for evils in some way. As a provisional statement, on the account I propose, privative evils are understood in terms of dispositional properties, or powers, which a being that suffers the evil lacks but ought to have: a privative evil is the absence of such dispositions or the prevention of such dispositions from properly manifesting. | en |
