Abstract
The question, “What is evil?” may be an inquiry into what sorts of things are evil or it may be a request to clarify what is meant by the term “evil.” This chapter analyzes the concept of evil, a necessary propaedeutic for identifying and classifying types of evil. Before the analysis of evil is undertaken, the notions of bad and wrongdoing are examined, a necessary step in order to avoid confusion with evil.
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Notes
- 1.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, David Ross translator (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 38.
- 2.
Michael Stocker, “Desiring the Bad: An Essay in Moral Psychology,” The Journal of Philosophy, 76 (1979): 738–753.
- 3.
A prohibition not to step on the lines on the pavement because these are a thing of beauty, as opposed to a prohibition not to step on these lines because it will detonate a bomb in a crowded theatre. See Ronald Milo, Immorality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 197. Milo states “Moral considerations …must include considerations of harm and benefit….” 195.
- 4.
See Marcus Singer, “Moral Rules and Principles,” in Essays in Moral Philosophy, edited by A. I. Melden (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1958), 160–197. Also, P. R. Foot and Jonathan Harrison, “Symposium: When Is a Principle a Moral Principle?” Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 28 (1954): 95–134.
- 5.
The three principles favored here are the Kantian universalization principle, the respect for persons principle, and the kingdom of ends principle. It is to be noted in Chapter 4 on care and hospitality that a consequentialist principle can be used as an auxiliary principle in the case of imperfect duties such as benevolence.
- 6.
S. I. Benn, “Wickedness,” in Doing and Being, Selected Readings in Moral Philosophy, Joram Graf Haber editor (New York and Toronto: Macmillan Publishing, 1993), 378; First published in Ethics 95 (1985), 795–810.
- 7.
See the excellent article by Shaun Nichols, “How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism,” in The Monist, 85, #2. Evil (2002), 294–295. This tells against Benn’s view that psychopaths lack the capacity to empathize.
- 8.
George E. Valliant, Adaptation to Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977). Also Carl Goldberg, The Evil We Do: The Psychoanalysis of Destructive People (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2000).
- 9.
“Moral indifference has been called, appropriately, the ‘modern sin.’” Warren K. Thompson, “Ethics, Evil and the Final Solution,” in Echoes from the Holocaust, Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, edited by Alan Rosenberg and Gerald Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 188.
- 10.
Milo, Immorality, 236–237: “Perhaps the agent desires to torture someone because the sight (or even the thought) of someone in pain gives him a certain thrill….[he] prefers to get this thrill (or to feel dominant and powerful)…, 236; also, 237, 7, 8n. It is a mystery how he construes this as moral indifference.
- 11.
Benn, “Wickedness,” 386. Quoting Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea in The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Irwin Edman editor (New York: Modern Library, 1928), 293.
- 12.
Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1945), 205–213.
- 13.
A brief but excellence account of Mao’s fanaticism in instituting the good is Chapter 30, “Mao’s Utopian Project,” in Jonathan Glover, Humanity, A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 283–298.
- 14.
Dale Jamieson, “The City Around Us,” in Morality’s Progress, Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 244–281.
- 15.
Quoted by Glover, Humanity, 328.
- 16.
Ibid., 361.
- 17.
Carl Goldberg, The Evil We Do: The Psychoanalysis of Destructive People (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2000), 72–74. This book is full of fascinating insights from his case studies.
- 18.
Eric Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1973).
- 19.
Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1984).
- 20.
Benn, “Wickedness…,” 374.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
A person would be a victim of wrongdoing if someone intentionally gave that person a disease; Likewise, a builder who knowingly violated building codes resulting in damaged buildings and injured people (and animals) would be a wrongdoer.
- 23.
Joel Feinberg, Harmless Wrongdoing (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 18.
- 24.
Gaita, Good and Evil, 22.
- 25.
Ibid., 65.
- 26.
Laurence Mordekhai Thomas, Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).
- 27.
Thomas, Vessels…, 76–77. Colin Ginn also claims that evil-doers take pleasure in their acts. See his Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 74ff.
- 28.
Ibid., 81.
- 29.
Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). This book reworks some of the claims made in her earlier The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- 30.
Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer eds. Facing Evil: Light at the Core of Darkness (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1988).
- 31.
Confronting Evils, 5.
- 32.
Ibid., 9.
- 33.
Ibid., 8.
- 34.
Ibid., 19.
- 35.
Ibid., 29.
- 36.
Harm to Others: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 31–35.
- 37.
Defended by J. Baird Callicott, Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2007).
- 38.
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 418–465. His five characteristics of doubling are: necessity of a second self that functions to do evil contrary to one’s everyday ethical self as father, husband, professional; second self is inclusive of all things related to evil-doing; second self enables one to survive in an environment of evil-doing; avoidance of guilt, which is pinned on the second self; finally, an alteration of conscience which is numbed by the second self. Laurence Thomas, Vessels of Evil, 99, points out that doubling differs from multiple personality disorder and common compartmentalization in that the agent doubles in an environment of silence. The SS and others were ordered never to speak about the camps or the activities of the Einsatzgruppen.
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DeArmey, M.H. (2020). Bad, Wrong, and Evil. In: Cosmopolitanism and the Evils of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42978-2_6
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