Evil and Moral Psychology

Peter Brian Barry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135119799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

This bookexamines what makes someone an evil person and how evil people are different from merely bad people. Rather than focusing on the "problem of evil" that occupies philosophers of religion, Barry looks instead to moral psychology—the intersection of ethics and psychology. He provides both a philosophical account of what evil people are like and considers the implications of that account for social, legal, and criminal institutions. He also engages in traditional philosophical reasoning strongly informed by psychological research, especially abnormal and social psychology.

In response to the popularity of phrases like "the axis of evil" and the ease with which politicians and others describe their opponents as "evil, " Barry sets out to make clear just what it is to be an evil person.

1 Preliminary Matters

Whoever begins at this point, like my readers, to reflect and pursue his train of thought will not soon come to the end of it—reason enough for me to come to an end, assuming it has long since been abundantly clear what my aim is, what the aim of that dangerous slogan is that is inscribed at the head of my last book Beyond Good and Evil—At least this does not mean “Beyond Good and Bad.”¹

THE EVIL, THE BAD, AND THE NASTY

Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems Les Fleurs du Mal—or, The Flowers of Evil—was admired by Marcel Proust, applauded by Victor Hugo, and led T. S. Eliot to describe Baudelaire as one of the great poets of the nineteenth century. It was also condemned as an offense to public morals, and six poems were banned in France, a ban that was not lifted until 1949. It is a rich and heady work, filled with references to wine, silk, satin, large-breasted women, love, beauty, and still more wine. But it is also a macabre work, filled with images of vampires, poison, skeletons, dread, despair, and death—and it frequently unites sex with death and sadism. Here is one representative poem, “Posthumous Remorse”:

Ah, when thou shalt slumber, my darkling love,

Beneath a black marble-made statuette,

And when thou'lt have nought for thy house or alcove,

But a cavernous den and a damp oubliette.

When the tomb-stone, oppressing thy timorous breast,

And thy hips drooping sweetly with listless decay,

The pulse and desires of mine heart shall arrest,

And thy feet from pursuing their adventurous way,

Then the grave, that dark friend of my limitless dreams

(For the grave ever readeth the poet aright),

Amid those long nights, which no slumber redeems

’ Twill query “What use to thee, incomplete spright

That thou ne'er hast unfathomed the tears of the dead”?

Then the worms will gnaw deep at thy body, like Dread.²

All of this led Henry James to object that the title of Baudelaire's opus “is not altogether a just one.” James remarks that “evil,” for Baudelaire, is “an affair of blood and carrion and physical sickness—there must be stinking corpses and starving prostitutes and empty laudanum bottles in order that the poet shall be effectively inspired”—a “ludicrously puerile view of the matter.” Ultimately, James concludes, “This is not Evil; it is not the wrong; it is simply the nasty!”³

Presumably, James's complaint is that Baudelaire is in the grip of a child's view of evil, one that confuses what is nasty with what is evil. But no small number of societies and cultures have terms translatable as ‘evil’ that denote what is physically rotten or misshapen or ugly—what is nasty.⁴ Many African cultures have special terms for individuals who are moved by especially grave malice to perform especially heinous acts: The Gussi of Kenya refer to the “abarogi” who have an incorrigible tendency to ill or disable by use of magical means and run naked at night while indulging in necrophagous consumption; the Kaguru of Tanzania fear the “wakindi” who delight in incest and cannibalism and dancing naked at night; the Gisu of Uganda speak of the “balosi” who eat the corpses of their victims and use human arms to stir their beer.⁵ Generally, witches and sorcerers are seen as embodiments of evil par excellence in African religion.⁶ Indeed, it is sometimes thought that witches are no longer human and that, if caught, they must be killed.⁷ A conception of evil that equates it with nastiness or putridity suggests that the concept of evil is a “thick” concept in Bernard Williams's sense, one that “involves a descriptive element expressive of the values of an individual or society.”⁸ On this basis, philosopher-anthropologist Paul Ricœur defends a conception of evil tied up with defilement, of staining what was clean or pure.⁹ So, James's complaint against Baudelaire is somewhat unfair; our actual use of the term ‘evil’ does sometimes track nastiness.

While there are undoubtedly various competing “thick” conceptions of evil, comparatively “thin” conceptions are similarly available. The Oxford English Dictionary offers “The antithesis of good in all its principal senses” as the primary definition of ‘evil,’ noting that it is the most comprehensive adjectival expression of disapproval in English whose use in familiar speech is commonly superseded by ‘bad.’ Equating evil with mere badness suggests a comparatively thin conception of evil, one consistent with using ‘evil’ to describe just anything that one disapproves of. But other definitions of ‘evil’ are also surely available, as evidenced by Dan Haybron's observation that if you

… call Hitler or the Holocaust evil … you are unlikely to arouse much disagreement. On the contrary: you will have better luck generating dissent if you refer to Hitler or the Holocaust merely as bad or wrong: “Hitler was a bad person, and what he did was wrong.” … such tepid language seems terribly inadequate to the moral gravity of this subject matter. Prefix your adjectives with as many “verys” as you like; you still fall short. Only ‘evil,’ it seems, will do.¹⁰

Similarly, the French ‘mal’ can be translated variously as simply ‘bad’ or as something closer to the especially grave sense of ‘evil’ that Haybron gestures at. So with the Sanskrit ‘papa.’¹¹ No two ways about it, ‘evil’ is ambiguous: It admits of both thick and thin senses, and multiple different definitions abound. How to proceed?

In his discussion of the traditional problem of evil, Peter van Inwagen allows that ‘evil’ connotes something like “the extreme reaches of moral depravity” but insists that the ordinary meaning of ‘evil’ equates it with ‘bad’ and nothing more.¹² Following van Inwagen, distinguish the ordinary sense of ‘evil’ from its extreme sense. The ordinary sense is consistent with exercising only mild opprobrium, while in the extreme sense, ‘evil’ is “the worst possible term of opprobrium imaginable.”¹³ Given the ordinary sense, it is perfectly legitimate to describe two people as evil but insist that one is more evil than the other, just as it is perfectly legitimate to suppose that two things can be bad and that one is worse. Given the extreme sense of the term, it makes little sense to suppose that two people are both evil but that one is more evil than the other, and it is similarly odd to speak of “lesser varieties” of evil and evil people.¹⁴ ‘Evil,’ so understood, is a superlative, and the difference between evil and the merely bad is a qualitative difference.¹⁵

I stipulate that the sense of ‘evil’ under investigation is the extreme sense. Other philosophers have similarly understood conceptualizing evil in the extreme sense that I commend. Andrew Delbanco commends the suggestion that “we should not try to connect in a single concept the gas chambers of Auschwitz and a father who slaps his child” presumably because genocide is an especially terrible and event uniquely worthy of the title “evil.”¹⁶ In her penetrating study of evil, Claudia Card commends a heuristic that calls for focusing on, not just any morally dubious events, but atrocities— paradigmatically evil events like genocide, slavery, torture, and rape—partly because “the core features of evils tend to be writ large in the case of atrocities” and because atrocities are “uncontroversially evil.”¹⁷ Card, too, commends focusing on events that are qualitatively different (and worse) than merely morally bad events because “in defining evil, it is necessary … to distinguish evils from other horrors.”¹⁸

Insofar as I am interested in understanding what evil people are like, I want to understand what we mean when we use ‘evil’ in its extreme sense to describe other human beings. But it is one thing to insist that there is a qualitative difference between evil people and merely bad people and another to identify just what that difference consists in. Where to start?

CHARACTER STUDIES

Anton Szandor LaVey founded and served as High Priest of the American Church of Satan and is often enough described as evil in popular media.¹⁹ The Satanic Bible, authored by LaVey, is divided into four books: The Book of Satan, The Book of Lucifer, The Book of Belial, and the Book of Leviathan.²⁰ The latter two include some silly diversions into ritual and ceremony while the first two articulate the ethical theory advocated by Satanists, a somewhat messy blend of ethical egoism and hedonism and retributivism. Satanism is described as a form of “controlled selfishness,” and its adherents are encouraged to “indulge their natural desires” and eschew “psychic vampires” who make them feel indebted without cause. Some passages mimic imperatives found in the biblical book of Leviticus, calling for returning “blow for blow, scorn for scorn, doom for doom.” Satanists are encouraged to indulge in the seven deadly sins but within limits; followers are encouraged to gratify their lust but never thereby hurt anyone else, for example. Some passages are positively puritanical: The fourth of “Nine Satanic Statements” calls for showing “kindness to those who deserve it.” LaVey himself was an advocate of animal rights and condemns the agen...