Abstract
In this chapter, I examine Peter French’s account of moral evil and his claim that it ought to be understood as a human action that jeopardizes another person’s (or group’s) aspirations to live a worthwhile life (or lives). In addition, French argues that a person’s life is worthwhile if what he or she really gives a damn about satisfies some condition(s) of value. Although I find French’s definition of moral evil to be correct, his account of what makes a life worthwhile is too demanding. In order to salvage his definition of evil, I offer an alternate definition of a worthwhile life. To this end, I shall examine the definitions of meaningful, ☻, valuable, and good lives while distinguishing each from a worthwhile life. Subsequently, I turn to a discussion of what does not make a life worthwhile and how this understanding helps us clarify the nature of evil.
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Notes
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One might suppose that even though such creatures cannot actually achieve a worthwhile life because they lack the capacity for care or for caring about things of value, they could nevertheless aspire to live a worthwhile life and hence be considered victims of evil on French’s account. However, French’s and Frankfurt’s analysis of caring shows that the capacity to aspire is dependent on the capacity to care. An individual can want or like something in a temporally discrete moment without consideration of the future, but caring about something is inherently prospective. Insofar as an individual’s cares structure her identity and bind together the moments of her life, aspirations for that life are rooted in what she cares about. See Frankfurt (1998, 83). I am grateful to Andrew Khoury for raising this point.
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See also Fuji (2009).
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One wonders whether Eichmann’s performance at his trial was sincere. New evidence has been uncovered to indicate that it was not. Bettina Stangneth challenges Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann as a thoughtless, yet ambitious, bureaucrat. In a compelling retelling of his story she proposes that his actions were the intentional acts of a “fanatical Nazi” ardently committed to the annihilation of the Jews (Stangneth 2015, 7). Despite this revelation about Eichmann’s true motivation, we need not abandon the contention that evil may be caused by banal motives. A significant number of empirical studies support the position that acts of grave wrongdoing begin with ordinary and comprehensible motives and beliefs. The well-known Milgram experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment support this observation. Each set of experiments showed how easily ordinary individuals subject their peers to severe harm. Furthermore, psychologists Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons reveal that when confronted with seemingly inexplicable suffering, people tend to believe that the suffering victim deserves her fate (1966). Similarly, Vicky Wilkins and Jeffery Wenger discovered that individuals who think the world is a just place, that is, those who believe that both suffering and prosperity are deserved rather than in large part a matter of luck, are more likely to oppose social policies aimed at rectifying injustices (2014). Still in another experiment, Zick Rubin and Letitia Anne Peplau discovered that people who believe that evil and injustice has a purpose or justification are more likely to support authoritarian political leaders (1975). These studies indicate that one need not have cruel or malicious beliefs or motivations in order to cause injustice or even evil. See also Imhoff and Banse (2009).
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One way to examine evil is to say that it exists, that it plays a prominent role in human history, and even in philosophy, but that it cannot be defined. See Susan Neiman (2002). Neiman defends this approach by arguing that the problem of evil understood in both religious and secular contexts was the pressing problem from modern philosophy to the present. However she also insists that a precise definition of evil is neither possible nor helpful.
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There are also numerous accounts of evil that attempt to define the concept by reference to features of the perpetrator—specific intentions, motives, desires, or a lack thereof. For example, see Garrard (1998, 2002); or Singer (2004). For a clarifying overview of different kinds of approaches to theories of evil, see Russell 2014. Although perpetrator-based theories are compelling, they also risk limiting evil acts to a single psychological cause. Since my current goal is an analysis of French’s theory of evil, I shall not further evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches to defining evil in this chapter.
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French’s emphasis on the suffering of victims is not limited to physical pain. He acknowledges that “in some of its more dastardlier instantiations, [evil] may be entirely psychological” (2011,62).
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See also French (2001).
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For a psychological analysis suggesting that meaningfulness is subjective, see Hicks and King (2009).
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I exclude money since only on very rare occasions will an individual evaluate the worthwhileness of continuing her life based upon money. It is not unheard of to do so, but it is not the norm for determining whether continuing one’s life is worth one’s while.
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“Subjective determination” means that there are no standards independent of the individual’s desires, beliefs, or mental states to determine whether her life is worth her time and effort to continue. Of course a person may determine her life to be worthwhile because it is meaningful, valuable, significant, or good, but she need not do so on these grounds. For a discussion of subjective and objective theories of meaningfulness, see Metz (2013).
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See also Camus (1991).
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I am indebted to Richard Taylor for this example, although Taylor employs this example to arrive at a different conclusion. See Taylor (1970).
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Although the martyr-case shows this conceptual division most clearly, we do not need to appeal to such dramatic cases to support the thesis that a meaningful life is not necessarily worthwhile. There are individual examples that also support this claim. For example, George Eastman, the founder of Eastman-Kodak, was a major philanthropist and helped popularize amateur photography. He also committed suicide. He shot himself twice in the chest and left a note that read: “To my friends: My work is done, Why wait? G.E.” (Etkind, 12). The actor George Sanders, who has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, swallowed five bottles of barbiturates and left a suicide note that read: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.” (Etkind, 67).
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To name two prominent examples: The authors Jean Amery and Tadeusz Borowski committed suicide years after surviving the Holocaust.
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The definitions of a valuable or significant life are important in their own right and deserve further scrutiny. However, given the scope of this chapter, my current goal is to show that these kinds of life are conceptually and substantively distinct from a worthwhile life, not to provide a robust analysis of their defining characteristics.
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Almost all lives impact others. Therefore, most lives are significant for at least one other person. For a life to be significant for human history or for all of us it must surpass some threshold of impact. Further, if a life is valuable it may be necessarily significant since by engendering good for others one impacts them. I leave this discussion for another time.
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For example: Plato The Republic 508e2, Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a7-1099a12, Epicurus Letter to Monoeceus, Epictetus Enchiridion.
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It is not that I do not think that philosophical reflection is an important ingredient to a good life. Rather, I think that good lives can be reached in many ways. Further, being excellent in rationality or virtue is no guarantee of attaining a good life. See also, Kekes (1990).
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See also Flanagan (1996). Here he discusses meaningfulness while referring without distinction to worth, value, meaning, and wellbeing.
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See also: McDermott (1991), Cottingham (2003); Bortolotti (2009); Smuts (2013); and May (2015). Although Smutz argues that worthwhileness and meaningfulness are distinct, he conflates worth/worthiness and worthwhileness. Notable exceptions are: Metz (2012), where he explicitly distinguishes the meaningful and the worthwhile; Trisel (2007), where he distinguishes among different ways of testing whether a life is worthwhile before concluding the best test is whether an individual would choose to be born into this world and continue her life.
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French may be open to the suggestion that one can live a worthwhile life even if one gives a damn about something that does not satisfy external conditions of value. See French (2011, 192). However, I make the further claim that one can live a worthwhile life even if one does not give a damn about anything at all.
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By definition wantons do not care about their cares and therefore would only care about things of value by mere luck. Also, I am assuming for argument’s sake that animals do not care about things of value, but I readily acknowledge that this may not be the case. If it is not, then they already belong to the class of moral persons that French has argued can be victims of evil.
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Hobbes famously describes the summum malum as fear of a violent death. I would extend this notion to include not only that which makes death unbearable, but that which makes life unbearable as well.
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Paul Formosa characterizes evil in terms of “life-wrecking harm”. He defines this harm as that which interferes “with a person’s ability to live a full and complete life” (2008, 229). This definition is similar to French’s and is likewise too strong.
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Goldberg, Z.J. (2017). Evil and a Worthwhile Life. In: Goldberg, Z. (eds) Reflections on Ethics and Responsibility. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50359-2_10
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