No Progress in Philosophy?

This is an interesting article by Chris Daly. The article concerns the progress of philosophy as a discipline. Daly makes important points about the difficulty of philosophical questions, the problem of disagreement between competent philosophers, and the differences between scientific and philosophical methods.

I suggest a counterexample to one of Daly’s claims. He writes: “Philosophy displays increasing ingenuity without an emerging consensus.”

There is a consensus among contemporary philosophers that the logical problem of evil (LPoE) fails and that the live issue concerns the probabilistic version(s) of the problem. This is no insignificant development in the discipline. Here, arguably, progress has been made, notwithstanding Daly’s claim that philosophy has made no progress.

What counts as philosophically acceptable progress? I suspect this question is open to disagreement among competent philosophers. Perhaps we can look to the LPoE as a guide.

The LPoE presupposes that the existence of God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil, thus also presupposing that it is logically impossible for God to have a morally sufficient reason for permitting evil. But it has been demonstrated that the existence of God is not logically incompatible with the existence of evil. It is possible that God has a sufficient reason to permit evil. As Plantinga has shown, the very possibility of creatures with libertarian free will indicates that it is at least logically possible that God and evil coexist, since the possibility of creatures with libertarian free will entails the possibility that those creatures freely choose evil actions. And it is possible that God has a morally sufficient reason for creating creatures with libertarian freedom, since it is possible that such freedom is necessary for greater goods that justify the moral evils human beings freely commit.

The LPoE is a plausible example of what counts as progress in philosophy: demonstrating to the wide agreement of competent philosophers that some deductive argument concerning a substantive issue in philosophy fails to prove its conclusion.