Taking Evil Seriously

S. Pihlström

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137412652
• eBook ISBN: 9781137412669
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

While moral philosophy has traditionally been understood as an examination of the good life, this book argues that ethical inquiry should, rather, begin from an examination of evil and other 'negative' moral concepts, such as guilt and suffering.

1

Evil and Negativity: Sharpening the Pragmatic Method

Abstract: This chapter explains why the approach through ‘negativities’ is important in ethical inquiry and how this follows and ‘sharpens’ the pragmatic method briefly discussed in the Introduction. Hence, this chapter deepens the very preliminary discussions of the introductory chapter. The concept of evil is also explored. An analysis of evil in terms of Charles Peirce’s doctrine of ‘real generals’ is offered. It is also argued that ‘theodicist’ views, according to which the reality of evil can somehow, either theologically or secularly, be justified, are ethically unacceptable.

Keywords: evil; negativity; limits; the pragmatic method; real generals; theodicy; anti-theodicy

Pihlström, Sami. Taking Evil Seriously. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137412669.0004.

Moral philosophy has, since antiquity, been understood as an examination of the good life,¹ while metaphysics, another key area of philosophical inquiry, has been regarded as a theoretical study of what exists or what is real at a basic or fundamental level (or what existence, reality, and related concepts mean). These fields of inquiry have thus been considered ‘positively oriented’ in the sense that they seek to characterize how goodness or existence (or related concepts) function in our thought or worldview(s), and which phenomena fall under these (or related) ‘positive’ concepts. As already preliminarily indicated in the introductory chapter, I will, contrary to this received view, argue that we should approach the kind of fundamental issues in philosophy that fields like ethics and metaphysics have been thought to address – and related issues of individual and social life, to the extent that philosophy is expected to be relevant to human life – not primarily in terms of what is ‘positively’ real or good but ‘through negation.’ Our primary conceptual orientation in these inquiries should be sought from finitude, non-existence, evil, and other negative notions. This via negativa methodology, as it might be labelled, can serve both metaphysical and ethical purposes, with applications in other fields of philosophy, including philosophy of religion.

For example, it can be argued that (human) life is best understood in terms of, or by paying close attention to, death; (moral) goodness in terms of evil; moral responsibility in terms of guilt and remorse; health in terms of illness, and more generally normality in terms of abnormality; happiness in terms of sorrow or grief; and existence (or presence) in terms of non-existence, loss, negativity, emptiness, or absence. Similarly, central human practices such as science and religion can be philosophically illuminated by drawing attention to their corrupt forms, such as pseudo-science or superstition or, possibly, to what happens in a loss of one’s religious convictions. Furthermore, moral action and agency can be approached through a certain kind of passivity, that is, focusing not only on our capacity to act but also on what can be called ‘moral vision,’ the capacity to perceive some facts or events as ethically relevant, even if there is very little we can do about them (for example, because they are temporally/historically or geographically distant). Taking such moral passivity seriously entails that we view morality not only as a matter of action or acts but also as a matter of seeking the right or proper kind of attitude to what goes on around us. All these phenomena are, furthermore, cases of human limits and finitude. They lead us to acknowledge that there are many things between the heaven and the earth to which our actions and ‘difference-making’ powers do not reach.²

The philosophical literature on ‘negative’ topics such as evil and death has been growing over the past decade or two, with leading thinkers such as Richard Bernstein and Mark Johnston devoting volumes to such topics.³ The systematic connections between the metaphysical and ethical dimensions of negativity in terms of their existential significance have not been worked out, however. This is what I propose to do through broadly Jamesian pragmatism. I will also argue that our negative approach in moral philosophy leads to an understanding of human beings’ place in the world that might be described as ‘melancholic,’ or an understanding that acknowledges the ‘tragic sense of life.’

The negative task of pragmatist philosophy

Don’t get me wrong. As pointed out in the introduction, I am, of course, not saying that a field like anthropology which is concerned with the different ways people live in different cultures and societies should not study, comparatively, the different notions of goodness, or the good life. Anthropology is largely about people’s ideas concerning what makes human lives good and about how people in different cultural contexts behave in relation to those ideas. There is no universally accepted content to the notion of ‘the good life.’ Not only according to cultural anthropology but also according to classical pragmatist philosophy of life, there is no universal key to the good life. Rather, there is an irreducible plurality of conceptions of the good life, both within and across human traditions and other commitments. Accordingly, our philosophy of (the good) life must be deeply pluralistic, in order to avoid being dogmatic, suppressive, and discriminatory.

However, it does not follow from the mere denial of, say, Aristotelian essentialism about eudaimonia and the denial of teleology generally that philosophers (as distinguished from anthropologists) should primarily explore comparatively different conceptions of the good (though, again, don’t take me wrong by supposing that I would propose any clear division of labor between philosophy and anthropology). My approach in this entire book can, I suppose, be legitimately regarded as ‘philosophical anthropology,’⁴ but my basic point is that philosophy should consider the world, human beings, and human beings’ thoughts about the world primarily from the point of view of negative concepts such as evil. More precisely, what I am saying is that philosophy should focus on such negative concepts. This is not to say that philosophy should be restricted to them, or to claim that goodness is unimportant or trivial – of course it isn’t. Obviously, philosophy should continue to address ‘the good life’; I am merely suggesting that turning attention to evil is a necessary – and certainly not sufficient – element of this project, if it is to be seriously carried out in the world we live in.

In this sense, I am drawing attention to what may be regarded as a necessary condition for a philosophical inquiry into goodness or the good life. Far from denying the importance of such inquiry in ethics – indeed, ethics could be defined as a field of philosophy investigating the good life – I am hoping to illuminate the philosophical context it needs to be successful or even possible. Hence, my argument for the priority of evil to goodness should not be taken to presuppose any binary opposition or essentialistic dichotomy between these notions. Clearly, there are also forms of ethical inquiry that work with concepts falling in between the two poles.⁵ For instance, examining basic human needs and capabilities may lead to either a positive theory of human flourishing (where flourishing refers to a situation in which basic needs are satisfied and relevant capabilities are in maximal use) or a more negative theory of what happens when those needs fail to be satisfied. The latter, I claim, is necessary for developing the former, but the former may not be necessary for developing the latter. Even Aristotelian virtue ethicists need to pay attention to what happens, or may happen, when the virtues are violated. And conversely, as Albert Camus noted in a talk given in 1946, immediately after World War II, by saying no to the absurdity of the world and the ‘civilization of death,’ we are actually saying yes to human life, hope, and struggle.⁶ In this sense, all my reflections on evil are also (I hope) ultimately in the service of the good.

In more than one way, then, my focus on evil and other negativities is exactly that – a focus. Furthermore, I am not relying on any specific moral theory; rather, I am inquiring into the nature of ethics or of the moral point of view itself. Note that it does not follow from the reasonable pragmatic anthropological pluralism about the good that our conceptions of ‘the negative’ – of evil and suffering, in particular – should or even could be as pluralistic and interpretation- and conceptualization-dependent as our conceptions of the good inevitably are. Rather, evil is the shocking reality taking us beyond the plural schemes of the good, and here lies its ‘metaethical’ significance (although I should also note that I am opposed to a dichotomy between metaethics and normative ethics; this inquiry should not be directly categorized as exclusively belonging to either). There is a sense in which nothing is more real than the suffering of the innocent victims of the concentration camps of the twentieth century.⁷ On the other hand, there is no universal evil, either; evil itself takes many forms and spreads to ever new areas, like a fungus.⁸ Yet, evil, as will be suggested later in this chapter, is something general. It also shows us a reality more robust than the varying and relative conceptions of goodness. It is only against a full recognition of this dark and tragic background of life, a recognition that must wear a human face, that our conceptions of the good can shine brightly.

Nor am I saying that any (moral) philosophy of evil should or even could offer a final, absolute definition of the concept of evil (‘the essence of evil,’ as it were), or adopt an ahistorical point of view on historical evils, or solve the theological problem of evil (the ‘theodicy’ problem), or neglect the anthropological, historical, political, and many other empirical particularities of evil. Yet, a philosophy of evil in our times may reflect on evil drawing both from classical philosophical works (for example, Kant’s Religionsschrift, which contains Kant’s theory of ‘radical evil’) and more modern ones (for example, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which introduces the famous ‘banality of evil’), together with any relevant empirical work on the psychology, sociology, and history of evil.⁹

Certainly I am not alone, or the first, in defending these ideas. Avishai Margalit argues in his rightly acclaimed book, The Ethics of Memory (2002), that we should focus on what he calls ‘negative politics,’ seeking to examine those phenomena (for example, humiliation) that threaten to collapse the entire moral community. (The analogy, of course, is n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Evil and Negativity: Sharpening the Pragmatic Method
• 2  The Moral Luck, Reward, and Punishment of a Sick Soul
• 3  A Suffering God and Post-Holocaust Pragmatism
• 4  A Metaphilosophical Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index