Abstract
In his book The Myth of Evil, Phillip Cole claims that the concept of evil divides normal people from inhuman, demonic and monstrous wrongdoers. Such monsters are found in fiction, Cole maintains, but not in reality. Thus, even if the concept of evil has the requisite form to be explanatorily useful, it will be of no explanatory use in the real world. My aims in this paper are to assess Cole’s arguments for the claim that there are no actual evil persons, and, in so doing, to develop a clearer framework in which to think about evil personhood. While Cole is right to claim that there are no actual evil monsters or supernatural demons, he underestimates the extent to which ascriptions of demonic monstrosity are figurative rather than literal. Hence, a lack of actual monsters does not imply a lack of actual evil persons. More plausibly, Cole suggests that the concept of evil implies an unrealistically dualistic worldview, with purely evil people on one side and ordinary people on the other. Since no one is purely bad, Cole claims, the concept of evil fails to refer to actual persons. Cole is wrong to think that the use of extreme moral concepts is incompatible with fine-grained moral evaluations across a broad spectrum between the extremes. Nor is Cole sufficiently careful in unpacking the various ways in which a person might be considered purely bad. I will argue that some actual persons are extremely bad, that it is very likely that some actual persons are fixedly bad, and that quite possibly no actual persons are thoroughly bad or innately bad. It is plausible that a person is evil only if he is extremely and fixedly bad, but Cole is wrong to suppose that a person is evil only if he is thoroughly and innately bad. Thus, even if we accept Cole’s claim that no actual person is thoroughly or innately bad, it still seems very likely that some actual persons are evil, and hence that evil can be an explanatorily useful concept.
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Notes
It is important to note that Haybron, unlike Cole, provides a theory of evil action that allows for evil actions to be performed by agents who are not evil. Thus, while Cole takes the non-existence of evil persons to be grounds for rejecting the concept of evil altogether, Haybron does not.
Haybron’s primary motivation for claiming that thoroughness of vice is a necessary condition for evil personhood is his intuition that there must be a sharp and strong distinction—indeed, a qualitative difference—between evil persons and merely bad persons (Haybron 2002, 262). Yet there is good reason to reject the claim that evil action is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing, and similar reasons apply to the distinction between evil and merely vicious persons (Russell 2007; Russell 2009b). Once we reject Haybron’s intuition, we no longer have any reason to depart from ordinary ascriptive practice; we can allow that evil persons need not be thoroughly bad.
A possible exception might be made for people who do not have such a behavioural disposition but have unrepudiated evil attitudes, such as a sadistic voyeur who does no harm but joyfully wallows in the extreme suffering of others. If such a person could be evil, then the specified disposition to perform evil actions when in autonomy-favouring conditions would be sufficient but not necessary for evil personhood. Cole does not discuss this kind of example, so for the sake of this argument I will set it aside.
It is not clear what we would say if there were a dramatic change in our technological abilities such that we were able cheaply and easily to mould the behavioural dispositions of everybody via neurosurgery or drugs. In such circumstances, we might say that henceforth no one has a highly fixed character because now every person easily can be made good or made bad, and thus that now no one is virtuous and no one is evil. Yet it would be odd to claim that every virtuous person could suddenly cease to be virtuous due to the creation of a new technology, whether that technology has been applied to them or not. Alternatively, we might fix upon what were the ordinary means for manipulating character when our concepts of virtue and evil were developed, and maintain that a person is virtuous or evil only if their character cannot easily be changed by those means.
Thanks to Daniel Star, Jeanette Kennett and Ben Fraser for comments on this paper.
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Russell, L. Evil, Monsters and Dualism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 13, 45–58 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9164-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9164-8