It is assuredly correct to assume that someone who is deaf from birth is unable – and, we may suppose, never will be able – to experience personally that a Mozart symphony is performed badly, for such an experience implies the faculty of hearing. Let us suppose, furthermore, that nothing in his immediate surroundings allows him to deduce that the performance is bad. Rosenbaum, who accepts experientialism, concludes that the performance therefore could not be perceived as an evil for “N.”: it does not affect him at all; he does not experience it in any way. Generalizing from this example, Rosenbaum makes a logical leap to conclude: “If a person cannot experience a state of affairs at some time, then the state of affairs is not bad for the person. Dead persons cannot experience any states of affairs.”

Let’s look again at the example of the deaf person, focusing our attention on his condition as a state. We can certainly admit that if no one drew the deaf person’s attention to the fact that he is deaf, he would not know that he is affected by an evil. Nevertheless his ignorance does not prevent us from having good reason to speak of an evil in this context – that is, where “N.” experiences his state neither directly nor indirectly through the consequences brought about by his state. We are dealing with an evil of privation, since being deaf is the privation of an ability that “N.” ought to have possessed as a member of the human species. This example shows that the evil of a state of affairs does not necessarily depend on the experience that a subject has of it, but rather on the privation of a good that ought to be his.