Editing Problem of evil (section)

===Evil as necessary===
According to [[Michel de Montaigne]] and [[Voltaire]], while character traits such as wanton cruelty, partiality and egoism are an innate part of the human condition, these vices serve the "common good" of the social process.<ref name="Rorty"/>{{rp|xiii}} For Montaigne, the idea of evil is relative to the limited knowledge of human beings, not to the world itself or to God. He adopts what philosophers [[Graham Oppy]] and [[Nick Trakakis|N. N. Trakakis]] refer to as a "neo-Stoic view of an orderly world" where everything is in its place.<ref name="Oppy and Trakakis">{{cite book |last1=Oppy |first1=Graham |last2=Trakakis |first2=N. N. |title=Early Modern Philosophy of Religion: The History of Western Philosophy of Religion |date=2014 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=9781317546450 |page=69}}</ref>

This secular version of the early coherentist response to the problem of evil, (coherentism asserts that acceptable belief must be part of a coherent system), can be found, according to Rorty, in the writings of [[Bernard Mandeville|Bernard de Mandeville]] and [[Sigmund Freud]]. Mandeville says that when vices like greed and envy are suitably regulated within the social sphere, they are what "spark[s] the energy and productivity that make progressive civilization possible". Rorty asserts that the guiding motto of both religious and secular coherentists is: 'Look for the benefits gained by harm and you will find they outweigh the damage'."<ref name="Rorty"/>{{rp|xv}}

Economic theorist [[Thomas Malthus]] stated in a 1798 essay on the question of population over-crowding, its impact on food availability, and food's impact on population through famine and death, that it was: "Necessity, that imperious, all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds{{nbsp}}[...] and man cannot by any means of reason escape from it".<ref name="Malthus T.R.">Malthus T.R. 1798. "An essay on the principle of population". Oxford World's Classics reprint.</ref>{{rp|2}} He adds: "Nature will not, indeed cannot be defeated in her purposes."<ref name="Malthus T.R."/>{{rp|412}} According to Malthus, nature and the God of nature, cannot be seen as evil in this natural and necessary process.<ref>Thomas Malthus (1798), [http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf "An essay on the principle of population"], Oxford Classics, p. 123</ref>