This was enjoyable as hell. Thanks.

Ol' C. B. is wrong in that he appears to appeal continually to something like a slippery slope. So, saying gratuitous suffering is wrong objectively doesn't mean that all kinds of suffering are suddenly able to be called 'gratuitous'.

Sure, the edges of what counts as gratuitous will be blurry at times. But, to quote the late and incredibly great Stanley Rosen, 'Our success in making such identifications is not invalidated by our encountering problems in our analysis of how we identify things' like gratuitous suffering to begin with ('Elusiveness', p. 276).

C. B. also seems--very strangely, I might add--to be a staunch verificationist, in that if I can't 'prove' an intuition (not a 'gut feeling' here but an activity of looking at the world) that I have about gratuitous suffering, then it means that that intuition is valid for no one but me, or at most valid only for others who share it)

Of course this can't be quite right either, because C. B. cannot 'prove' his intuition that verificationism is itself correct. (And to ape Ray Tallis now, just because an objection--namely, performative contradiction--is raised often and even by undergrads, doesn't mean that that objection is useless.)

Nothing I've said here means I know what the just city looks like, nor what the right thing to do at every step of my life is; but it does suggest that C. B., though interesting rhetorically, is closer to a sophist than to a philosopher.