Abstract

The argument from evil claims that the proposition 'God exists' is incompatible with the proposition 'Evil exists'. One response to the argument is to show that there is a third proposition which is consistent with the first, and whose conjunction with the first implies the second, thereby showing that the first and second propositions are compatible. I propose that this third proposition is 'Evil has positive value'. This third proposition is established by the development of a meta-ethical theory, viz., the theory of positive value. The purpose of this paper is to develop this theory and apply it to the existence of evil.