On evil
By Mark Vernon on Saturday, October 29 2011, 17:14 - General - Permalink
Was speaking on evil at the Battle of Ideas this morning, in favour of keeping the concept. I agree it can risk obscuring, not diagnosing, the common complaint against it. Though it's very expressivism - 'pure evil' - is useful, keeping the horror of what might be called evil in view, and reminding us that trying to understand is not the same as entirely explaining: there is something unspeakable about evil.
That said, the Christian tradition, drawing on Aristotelian ethics, does have much to say on the subject, namely that evil is the absence of good, the privatio boni doctrine of Thomas Aquinas.
It might be a lack of values, and so nihilistic. It might be a lack of virtue, or the practical intelligence that allows life to flourish. It might be a lack of appropriate early attachments between mother and child - the empirically well supported analysis from psychotherapy. It might be a lack of meaning, which as Joseph Brodsky points out, is what is exposed in 'turning the other cheek':
‘The other cheek here sets in motion not the enemy’s sense of guilt (which he is perfectly capable of quelling) but exposes his senses and faculties to the meaninglessness of [evil].’
All in all, the nothingness of evil gathers a lot of understandings together, scientific, moral and theological. It is nothing, almost as in Burke’s ‘It is only necessary for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.’
I argued that it is also important to see that this account of evil is not evil as the opposite of good, but as the absence of good. This is not a Manichean view of the world, the approach much modern ethics assumes - the utilitarian idea that there is pleasure and pain, or that there is right and wrong.
Rather, evil is a concept that is best at home in virtue ethics: good and evil are related not as north is to south, but as north to not-north - or even better, as hot is to cold, as one member of the audience pointed out to me afterwards.
With evil, life is not as it is supposed to be. Or more strongly, life is as it is supposed not to be in some basic, fundamental way.
Comments
I liked this piece and it chimed with an idea that's been floating around my head lately: that is, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's rejection, or, in the language of this piece, not-love.
The opposite of love is... indifference.
You're right. Anybody who has had an evil person in their life knows that to think straight, we have to "keep the concept."
Good: use taxpayer bailout money to pay bank CEOs $20 million per year, and have police trash tents and survival necessities of homeless families with small children;
Evil: steal a crust of bread to feed a starving child (hat tip to Vic Hugo) --
Yep, real easy to think straight about OWS and capitalism.
This analysis is flawed by sentiment. First of all, there are plenty of active forms of evil; stuff that someone has to go to trouble and thought to achieve; in short, evil that requires presence of mind. Second, 'pure evil' as a moral concept is worse than useless; for it misleads and tempts its thinker into self-righteousness. In reality, most evil is committed by ordinary people for banal reasons, and moralistically rationalized by self-serving excuses - such as the illusory pure evil of the other. And third, evil is entirely thinkable and speakable; and indeed the thought has often been thought, and the word spoken; it is merely disreputable. People publicly perish the thought for fear of seeming to privately endorse its logic.
On the other hand, this analysis is partially correct. 'Pure evil' is a myth, an illusion, in fact a destructive one; and in that sense it is nothingness. That recognition makes forgiveness possible. It's the impure, but all-too-real, evil of ordinary people that makes forgiveness necessary.
and what if there are no such ideas/things as 'good' and 'evil'?
I disagree with some of your response, paradoctor: A) the analysis above does not ask us to consider evil actions as passive, it asks us to consider the idea of evil itself as the absence of action against it. According to the argument, action would be evil when it does not have at least a neutral meaning. B) This point has value, but I think relies on the false notion that evil is in opposition to good, which again is not the argument being made. C) Tautologically, this is true - evil is thinkable and speakable because we can think and say the word. But that's not what is being argued. The author is suggesting that there is something literally unspeakable about evil in the same way that nothingness or absolute zero degrees are.
Love of the self to the exclusion of others is evil. Any time we are willing to let another suffer so long as we are not discomforted, we are indulging in evil, whether it be refusing to give a seat to an elderly person on a bus or screwing over millions of people by gaming the economic system.
I have moved against evil people and to the extent of exposing them and their methods. In reaction they have declared war against me. So in the last ten or twelve years I have learnt a lot about evil people's methods. To say that ordinary people do evil or even commit evil action is really a misnomer. There is an unspeakable and unthinkable quality about evil but in practical terms "to be evil is to be involved in doing harm to others, and mostly innocent people or animals, ie who have done nothing to offend against the evil doers, and to do that harm for the sake of power, but even more so for pleasure." There is a proliferation of evil people in the world today owing to the methods used to adversely influence children, to recruit them and then to aggressively train them in what are known as "procedures", ie., the methodology of how a toxic mob works together to adversely and seriously harmfully affect an unsuspecting person. Unfortuantely evil people are 2-faced and not easily recognized by good, ie humane people. Partly too because the actions of evil people are covered by medical misinformation. The harm that they do is not straight forwards and obvious. The harm results in stress and that stress is pushed until there is damage of some sort in the body of the unsuspecting person, damage that appears as disease. The medical industry makes profits from disease. It is in their interests to have diseases spiral out of control, which is what is happening in the last fifty or so years. I have started a blog at http://kyrani99.wordpress.com/ and a website at http://kyrani99.doodlekit.com/home to give people the benefit of my discoveries and the information about how to reduce their risk of suffering serious diseases to zero and enable them to investigate these matters for themselves to arrive at the truth for themselves. It is most certainly true to say that "It is only necessary for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph". We cannot afford to sit back and do nothing because every one of us will die an untimely death if things continue as they are, let alone if they get worse.