The moral duality of world actualisation: Proto-moral worlds and the problem of evil

Abstract

This article reformulates the problem of evil through the concept of a proto-moral world: a reality intentionally actualised under determinate evaluative conditions such that privation, disorder, rupture and negation become structurally intelligible within the same teleologically ordered framework. The central claim is not that evil constitutes an independently created substance, but that wherever worldhood is intentionally ordered toward determinate normative ends, the possibility of privation becomes internally available as a parasitic feature of evaluatively actualised reality itself. The argument is developed first through the prelapsarian creation order in Genesis, where divine valuation precedes creaturely disobedience, and then extended comparatively to African ontologies of God in which divine reality is construed as the source or regulator of harmony, vitality, relational balance and communal flourishing. The article further argues that intentional world actualisation under such conditions incurs a prima facie justificatory burden where non-actualisation remained metaphysically available. This burden is intensified by a better-never-to-create asymmetry according to which preventable suffering cannot be straightforwardly justified through goods contingent upon its occurrence. Standard responses, including privation theory, the free will defence, greater-good theodicies, divine timelessness, sceptical theism, and limited-God or harmony-God models, may weaken the classical logical problem of evil, yet they leave intact the deeper proto-moral difficulty generated by evaluative world ordering itself. The article concludes that theism entails not metaphysical dualism in the divine essence, but an irreducible proto-moral duality internal to evaluatively actualised worldhood as such.