Affirmative ethics claims the givenness of a certain essential Evil in the world – bound up with that very endowment with freedom definitive of human beings – while never envisaging the alternative: namely, a negative ethics for which the presence of freely acting beings in the universe does not represent a value of the highest order. (See on this topic Julio Cabrera) All ethics legitimates (though it mostly only does so unconsciously or tacitly) the facilitation of infringements, apt to cause pain and suffering, of its own norms, inasmuch as it posits Freedom as the highest of all values, even though freedom is always also the freedom to act contrary to ethical values. Whoever, striving after an Anthropodicy, exalts the value of freedom is open – since he tolerates, thereby, evil – to a similar accusation to that which can be levelled against the theological ethicist who attempts to provide a theodicy by pointing to the fact that God has given Man the freedom also to do good, even though he uses this freedom, often enough, to do evil.
