Doing good and suffering evil
pp. 209-218
in: Wolfe Mays (ed), Linguistic analysis and phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 1972Abstract
Is it a moral outrage that a man should suffer as a result of, or in spite of, acting justly? Or is it improper to expect that "the way things go' (to use D. Z. Phillips's phrase) should satisfy moral demands ? The thesis of the pointlessness of morality, that virtue is its own reward, may answer the question in his own case for the mature moral agent. But can the just man — even if his own sufferings are disregarded in the light of the importance of acting morally — regard with equanimity the sufferings of the innocent and the morally undeveloped: children, mental defectives ?