We explore the problem of the criterion as formulated by Roderick Chisholm and his defense of common-sense particularism. We examine various criticisms of this approach.

This chapter is focused on which moral and epistemic conditions a God-justifying account of evil must meet in order to succeed. The author proposes that such accounts are likely to fail so long as they seek to show that in allowing evil, God has met the Necessity Condition. It requires that to be justified, the evil must be necessary in an absolute sense, i.e., unavoidable, even for God. The author proposes that theists should adopt Roderick Chisholm’s Defeat Condition, instead. It requires that the moral agent “defeat” any evil that s/he allows by integrating it into a valuable whole that both outweighs the evil and could not be as valuable as it is without the evil. In addition, he takes Chisholm’s suggestion that divine moral agency may be better pictured on an aesthetic analogy of God as Artist than on a narrowly ethical one. Further, he adopts Michael Murray’s proposal that a God-justifying account should be at least as plausible as not. In other words, it should be a “case for God” (or causa Dei), in Leibniz’s terms, rather than either a mere logical defense or fully blown theodicy.