The Problems with Evil

Zeitschrift für Ethik und Moralphilosophie

This paper addresses the question of whether the concept of evil is philosophically adequate. It sets out a secular conception of evil that is sufficiently clear to be used in philosophical theorising. Evil, so conceived, is not merely a fiction or an illusion, but is a moral property possessed by some actions and some persons in the real world. While several philosophers have claimed that it is inescapably dangerous to use the concept of evil, the reality is that the concept of evil, when used carefully, is not prohibitively dangerous. Evil actions are not merely the opposite of good actions. Rather evil actions are are a small subset of extreme moral wrongs.

NoFo. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice., No. 4, 2007.

The concept of evil has been an unpopular one in much political and ethical thought of the twentieth century. There are undoubtedly a number of historical reasons for this. However, there has been of late an ever increasing number of articles and books that have once again taken the concept of evil seriously. Is this movement to be applauded or abandoned? One way to justify and argue for the abandonment of such projects is by pointing to the many problems with the concept of evil. It was surely because of some of these problems that the concept of evil fell out of favour in the first place. The standard grievances brought against the very concept of evil include: that it has no proper place in secular political and ethical discourses; that it is too overloaded with metaphysical, cultural and theological baggage to be of any use; that it is a demonising term of hatred that leads to violence; that it is necessarily linked with outdated notions related to body and sexuality; that it only hinders rather than aids our ability to understand; and that it is an ‘irrational’ concept which only ‘mystifies’ and ‘obscures’ discussions of political and ethical issues. In other words, it is either unethical, unpolitical, imprudent, or no longer relevant to use the concept of evil. I shall seek to argue in defence of the concept of evil against these charges. The upshot of this argument is that the language and concept of evil has a justified and important role to play in political and ethical discourses.

2021

This book is an inquiry into particular matters concerning the nature, normativity, and aftermath of evil action. It combines philosophical conceptual analysis with empirical studies in psychology and discussions of historical events to provide an innovative analysis of evil action. The book considers unresolved questions belonging to metaethical, normative, and practical characteristics of evil action. It begins by asking whether Kant's historical account of evil is still relevant for contemporary thinkers. Then it addresses features of evil action that distinguish it from mundane wrongdoing, thereby placing it as a proper category of philosophical inquiry. Next, the author inquires into how evil acts affect moral relationships and challenge Strawsonian accounts of moral responsibility. He then draws conceptual and empirical connections between evil acts such as genocide, torture, and slavery and collective agency, and asks why evil acts are often collective acts. Finally, the author questions both the possibility and propriety of forgiveness and vengeance in the aftermath of evil and discusses how individuals ought to cope with the pervasiveness of evil in human interaction.

The language of evil has recently made a return to our moral and political discourses. This raises the analytic question of what exactly evil is. There are three important senses of the term “evil.” First, there is the axiological sense, where “evil” and “bad” are effectively synonymous. This is the sense in which evil can cover “everything adverse in human lives” from “wars and massacres” to “drought and plague.” It is in this sense that evil takes on its familiar role as the opposite or lack of good. Second, there is the trivial moral sense, where “evil” and “wrong” are effectively synonymous. In this sense, we can speak of both white lies and genocide as evil. Third, “evil” is used in a more restricted sense when we say things like: “What Hitler did was not merely wrong, it was evil.” Here “evil” refers to those acts of moral agents that go significantly beyond the pale of mere wrongdoing. Failing to keep a promise or telling a white lie may be morally wrong, but unlike genocide or sadistic torture, it is not evil. In this sense the term “evil” has no direct moral equivalents. Moral evil, in this restricted sense, is never trivial. It is a term that carries with it an enormous moral gravity and expresses our very strongest moral condemnations. It is the question of how we are to make sense of the specific moral difference between “evil” and “mere wrongdoing” that will be our concern. In order to specify this difference we will defend a specific conception of what acts and which persons should count as evil.

2009

This paper delves into an in- depth exploration of the nature of evil from personal experiences, clinical experiences, to evil as seen in films and as understood through religions and mythology. It examines C. G. Jung's viewpoint on this subject, which was a life-long concern of his.

Moral Evil in Practical Ethics, edited by Shlomit Harrosh and Roger Crisp, London: Routledge.

The term ‘evil’ was viewed with suspicion in philosophy and generally avoided for most of the Twentieth century. In the early Twenty First Century it has been undergoing something of a revival. The philosophers who have contributed to this revival tend to downplay or ignore the religious connotations of the tern ‘evil’. Here I argue for the importance of identifying a religious conception of evil and for the importance of distinguishing this from the secular conception of evil. I also provide a definition of religious evil action. In providing a definition of religious evil action I draw of recent work in the cognitive science of religion which identifies key aspects of natural human religion that are universal. I also consider the relationship between the universal religious conception of evil I seek to locate and particular theological accounts of evil.

The Spanish journal of psychology, 2010

The term evilness started to become popular in social psychology after the publication in 1999 of the special issue edited by Arthur G. Miller, "Perspectives on evil and violence". It is usually used to define behaviors that are extremely and strongly harmful. However, the concept is still imprecise and needs to be empirically delineated. This article attempts to answer the following questions. What is evilness? What is the difference between aggression and evilness? We conducted several studies with three goals: to analyze how laypersons and experts define evilness, to verify whether laypeople distinguish between different intensities of evilness, and to determine the dimensions that predict aggression and evilness. The results offer preliminary answers to the three questions.

2019

Although ‘evil’ has played an important, if subterranean, role in Western philosophical thought, this has not led to agreement regarding its meaning or significance. From this, the book defends four different but related arguments: (1) the problem of evil arose with the rise of Christianity from Judaism, (2) evil has not been defined by a singular meaning, but is heterogeneous, and (3) conceptions of evil are premised on various metaphysics, which, traditionally understood, were understood to create a fundamental cleavage between pre- and post-Kantian conceptions of the topic; the former based on theological Christian doctrine and the latter on non-theological premises. The fourth argument questions this narrative by showing that theological motifs, logic, figures, and ideas continue to implicitly influence post-Kantian, supposedly secular, thinking on the topic. In so doing, I argue that this does not simply point to a failure on the part of those supposedly secular theories, but shows that we have to abandon the notion that pits theology against secularity or that sees the latter entailing the absence of the former. Instead, it reveals that secularity entails an on-going and complex relationship to the theological tradition it emanates from. With this, the book contributes to the so-called theological turn that has marked contemporary theory and specifically the line of critique that disrupts the notion that there exists a straightforward binary opposition between the theological and secular.