To justify evil?
On the axis: The problem of evil · the act of justifying evil
Seeking a reason for the innocent's misfortune, is that not already a fault, an insult to their pain, and before some evils is the only fitting stance not revolt or silence?
Justification
In The Plague, before a child's agony, Rieux refuses to love a creation in which children are tortured. No harmony, no salvation justifies this suffering: a flat refusal of all theodicy, the revolt against an order that would demand it.
The Plague, IV; The Rebel
Justification
The agony of an innocent child is the limit case that ruins every theodicy: no higher order, no final harmony can offset such suffering without becoming complicity with the torturer. Camus dramatizes the argument in by opposing two answers: 's sermon, which urges loving what one cannot understand and accepting suffering as a willed trial, and 's refusal, who declines to love a creation in which children are tortured and chooses instead to heal. Suffering therefore has no redemptive fecundity: the only fitting stance is to fight it, which makes the scandal of evil not a mystery to venerate but a call to and to care.
The Plague (1947)
Anchors: Dostoevsky · Levinas · Camus
leads to: The meaning of suffering (Useless suffering)