Benevolent machine gods and the problem of suffering

A commenter suggests that the Culture's “theodicy”—a justification for why a good higher power permits suffering—is liberalism with some interventionism: people are mostly free to pursue their own conceptions of the good, even when those diverge from a more “objective” view of their welfare. In a follow-up reply, they qualify that idea: perhaps it works in a just world, but without a stronger justification, they find it hard to imagine genuinely good machine gods allowing despotic regimes or factory farming to persist.