Dolor hic tibi proderit olim?
The world contains moral evils of various kinds; some are quite horrendous. And there are what philosophers call natural evils — though the Stoics recognized only moral evil and thus denied that suffering associated with the natural realm is evil, precisely speaking. The unmitigated optimist can maintain his sanguinity only by turning a blind eye to the bad aspects of reality. Similarly, the absolute pessimist ignores the goodness of the world. But a sober mind takes seriously the evidence that the world is an axiological combination of goods and bads.
Why the goods? Why the bads? And why are they distributed in the ways they appear to be?
What if the world's evils somehow prepare us for a future of goodness? Dolor hic tibi proderit olim? (Ovid)
In a recent paper, I examine this and other questions: Axiology and the Problem of Evil.