What a good God owes a mosquito

Most responses to the problem of evil are built to handle human suffering, where appeals to free will, soul-making, or moral responsibility have at least some purchase. Animal suffering strips those appeals away. A mosquito, or a mouse dying slowly in a predator's grip, is not exercising moral freedom and is not being built into a better person by the experience.

This pushes the discussion toward a narrower question: does the amount and kind of suffering built into the natural order, predation, parasitism, drawn-out death, tell us something about the character of whoever or whatever is responsible for that order? Both guests took the question seriously rather than deflecting it into human-centred territory, which is more than the topic usually gets.

One line of response leans on the idea that suffering has to be weighed against a wider ecological and evolutionary good that isn't visible from the vantage point of any individual creature. The other guest was skeptical that this fully answers the question, rather than simply relocating it: a good outweighing bad in aggregate still has to explain why the bad had to be distributed the way it was, down to a level of detail, like the specific mechanics of a wasp paralysing its prey, that seems gratuitous rather than necessary.

Nobody built the wasp's strategy for a reason a mosquito could ever benefit from, and that's the part the systemic answers keep skating past.

Guest · 41:30

The exchange did not resolve into agreement, but it clarified where the real disagreement sits: not over whether animals suffer, which neither guest denied, but over whether an explanation has to be given for each instance of that suffering, or only for the system that produces it in aggregate.