The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

124 The Sufferings of Beasts
What I have said so far is, or purports to be, a defense, a response
to the global argument from animal suffering, to the argument whose
premise is the fact that animal suffering exists. Let us now turn to the
local argument, to the argument (to any argument) whose premise is
the existence of some particular episode in which a beast suffers.
Let us begin by noting that two patterns of suffering may be morally
equivalent even if they are comparable and one of them involves less
suffering than the other. That this is so can be shown by reflection on
some considerations having to do with vagueness, reflections similar to
our reflections on vagueness in the previous lecture. As I pointed out
in that lecture, there is no morally decisive reason to prefer a prison
term of 10 years less a day as a penalty for armed assault to a term of
10 years, despite the indubitable facts that these two penalties would
have the same deterrent effect and that the former is a lighter penalty
than the latter. And it may well be that for any amount of suffering
that somehow serves God’s purposes, some smaller amount of suffering
would have served them just as well. It may be, therefore, that God
has had to choose some amount of suffering as the amount contained
in the actual world, and could, consistently with his purposes, have
chosen any of a vast array of smaller or greater amounts, and that all
the members of this vast array of alternative amounts of suffering are
morally equivalent. (Similarly, a legislature has to choose some penalty
as the minimum penalty for armed assault, and—think of penalties as
prison terms measured in minutes—must choose among the members
of a vast array of morally equivalent penalties.) Or it may be that
God has decreed, with respect to this vast array of alternative, morally
equivalent amounts of suffering, that some member of this array shall be
the actual amount of suffering, but has left it to chance which member
of this array is the amount of suffering that actually exists. 17
In the previous lecture, we saw that it may be morally necessary for
God to draw a morally arbitrary line through the set of threatened or
possible or potential evils, a line that divides those evils that are actually
to occur from those that will be averted. And we saw that if this is so, it
opens the way to a reply to the local argument from evil to anyone who
has a satisfactory reply to the global argument from evil. The logic of the
case is the same whether our subject is the sufferings of human beings
or the sufferings of beasts. If theists know of a story that explains why,
in general, God allows beasts to suffer (I have offered such a story), they
may reply to any local argument from evil that is based on a particular
case of suffering in the subhuman world in the following way: Even