[Today, Eve Garrard begins a three-parter on the concept of evil, to be completed over the course of this week. It is in the series of guest posts she is kindly contributing to normblog. Her previous posts here have been: What’s wrong with capturing vile tyrants?; Double standards (old site, December 9); and Root causes (ditto, November 28). The ‘vile tyrants’ post aroused a lot of interest on other blogs, but rather disconcertingly it was taken by a few people who commented on it to have been written by me – despite the fact of having been clearly marked as by Eve Garrard. Let me therefore emphasize that Eve is a real person; and the real person she is is a quite separate one from the real person I am, or at least aspire to be.]
Evil is a concept which is very widely used, but it is also very widely criticized as illegitimate in some way, and it’s these criticisms which I want to examine. But we might reasonably start by looking at what’s right with the idea of evil, at why we might find it useful to deploy such a concept. The world is full of terrible things, but some acts strike us as peculiarly dreadful, strangely chilling, horrifying, alien in some way (which is not of course to say alien in all ways, or necessarily incomprehensible to us, or even very unusual.) Forcing live human beings into industrial shredders, feet first so as to increase the suffering, is a current example which can stand in for all such nightmare actions. These are the kind of acts which we’re inclined to call evil.
Why we respond in this way is a very interesting question. Do we regard these acts as evil because they all produce this horrified response in us, or do we respond with horror to them because we recognise that they all share some feature which makes them evil? Such questions, and others like them, are ones addressed by those interested in the nature of evil, or of morality in general, but even people who don’t have this theoretical interest can find it valuable to use a term which marks out just these specially horrifying acts. If we want our language to capture the more terrible of our moral possibilities, and to help us think about them, then the term ‘evil’ is going to find a place in our moral discourse. It marks off a qualitative difference from those acts which are merely wrong, or even very wrong. Not all very wrong acts are evil, as the example of murder shows: killing people, by and large, is very wrong, but not all murders, still less all murderers, are evil. Just what it takes for an act to be evil is a difficult and interesting question, and not one I’m going to address right now. What I’m interested in are the objections to the word ‘evil’, the claims that there’s something wrong with the whole concept, and hence that we shouldn’t use it. It seems to me that the idea of evil marks a significant distinction within morality, and without it our moral awareness is simpler, blander, and more impoverished than it needs to be. So it’s worthwhile trying to see if objections to the concept are really convincing. For the fact is that people with no theoretical interest at all in these matters do regularly appeal to the idea of evil in the face of certain kinds of dreadful acts, and this suggests that the concept may be doing some useful work.
However, there’s no doubt at all that other people do have very serious reservations about the use of this concept. They think (or at least they say they think, though their actual practice doesn’t always bear this out) that we should abjure it altogether. The reasons they offer for saying this vary, but on closer investigation, as I hope to show, the objections all seem to collapse: each proffered reason turns out either not to apply to evil at all, or where it does apply, it also applies to other concepts as well, concepts which we don’t normally regard as suspect. The concept of evil seems in fact to be robust enough to survive all the usual charges that are levelled at it.
Over this series of posts, I’m going to look at four main objections to the use of the concept of evil: that it’s too religious; that it’s not explanatory; that it’s too explanatory; and that it’s too judgemental. I’ll consider each of these in turn.
Firstly, it’s too religious. It assumes the existence of a personal Devil, and very few of us believe in that any more.
Right enough, not so many of us in the liberal West believe in a personal (or any other kind of) Devil – this is part of the general decline in religious belief of all kinds. And there’s no doubt that the concept of evil had its original home in a theocentric view of the universe. But then, so did several other moral concepts – forgiveness is one example, and we seem to have made a satisfactory transition to a secular use of that important moral concept. We’ve done the same with the concept of evil: entirely secular people reach for it when they want to describe something for which the usual moral terms of condemnation – bad, wrong, very wrong – just seem too weak. We feel that there’s something bathetic about saying that the Holocaust was wrong, or that amputating the arms of the little children of your enemies is a bad thing to do. We reach for the term evil to express our sense of special horror at certain human propensities and activities. And we understand each other when we deploy this concept – we may disagree about its precise application, but everyone knows that the plastic shredders are at least candidates for being evil, and dropping litter isn’t. The concept’s religious origins have been outstripped, and it has found a place in a secular understanding of our moral experience. That it’s needed for reflection on that experience is strongly suggested by contemplation of the last century’s bloody horrors, and no doubt for this one’s too.
In the next post in this series, I’ll look at a different kind of objection to the concept of evil: the interesting and sophisticated claim that what’s wrong with it is that it isn’t explanatory. And alongside that, I’ll look at the mirror image of that objection – the claim that what makes at least some uses of the concept of evil objectionable is precisely that they are explanatory. (Eve Garrard)