The Meaning of Evil

James Sias

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137568212
• eBook ISBN: 9781137568229
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In this book, James Sias investigates the psychologies of those who have acted in ways widely regarded as evil, and uses this psychological data as a basis for developing his own theory of evil. Sometimes, he claims, an action is so horrific and despicable that a term like "wrong" seems to fall short of capturing its moral status. Likewise, occasionally a person's character is corrupt in such a way that ordinary trait terms like "selfish" or "insensitive," or more general labels like "bad" or "immoral," seem inadequate. In such cases, we often resort to calling the person or action "evil." But what does this term mean? What is it that makes a person or action morally evil? Taking a cue from Hannah Arendt, Sias argues that this sort of evil is essentially a matter of regarding others as "morally superfluous." In other words, evil is a matter of utter moral disregard. In the course of developing and defending this view, Sias also describes and critiques a number of prominent theories ofevil proposed by philosophers in recent years.

© The Author(s) 2016

James SiasThe Meaning of Evil10.1057/978-1-137-56822-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. An Introduction to Evil

James Sias¹

(1)

Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, USA

End Abstract

During the 2008 United States presidential election, Saddleback Church hosted an event that gave voters a unique look into the minds of John McCain and Barack Obama. Basically, the format was this: each candidate would be interviewed by pastor Rick Warren, while the other candidate was waiting somewhere off-stage, unaware of his opponent’s responses to Warren’s questions; and importantly, both candidates were asked the same questions. Combining the virtues of an ordinary presidential debate with those of an episode of “The Newlywed Game,” the event allowed viewers to compare and contrast each candidate’s thoughts on a wide range of issues, but without having to suffer through the discomfort of watching two adult humans trying to talk over each other.

At one point during the interviews, Warren asked each candidate the following: “Does evil exist? And if it does, do we ignore it, negotiate with it, contain it, or defeat it?” McCain answered, “Defeat it”—presumably, an admission that evil does exist—and then promised prospective voters that he would bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Obama answered, “Evil does exist,” followed by a somewhat more careful and nuanced acknowledgment of the different forms that evil might take: from the genocide in Darfur to parents who viciously abuse their children.

Now, for some contrast, consider a recent experience of my own. I was teaching a course on issues in moral psychology, and we were about to begin a unit on psychopathy. Over the next few weeks, I wanted the class to wrestle with questions like: Do psychopaths “know right from wrong”? Are psychopaths morally responsible for their actions? Are psychopathic serial killers evil? So to get the discussion started, I had students write down their answers to a few more general questions: Can a person be genuinely morally evil? If no, why not? And if yes, what would it take for someone to count as genuinely morally evil?

Of the 13 students in the class, 11 answered that there is no such thing as a genuinely evil person. (I address their responses to the “Why not?” question in a later chapter.) And of the two students who allowed that there can be a genuinely evil person, one insisted that the conditions a person must satisfy in order to count as evil are so extreme that probably no one in the real world has ever actually been morally evil.

Looking back, that was the day that I began working on this book. I can certainly understand my students’ reluctance to admit that genuine moral evil exists, but I believed then, and still now, that they are mistaken. Some people really are evil. And while it may sound as if I have a couple of allies in John McCain and Barack Obama, I actually suspect that the two presidential candidates (McCain especially) were talking about something importantly different from what will be my focus in the following chapters. Let me explain.

Four Uses of “Evil”

In practice, we use the term “evil” in all sorts of ways. McCain used it to refer to such serious wrongdoers as Osama bin Laden, while Obama used it to refer both to serious wrongdoers (abusive parents) and to the serious wrongs themselves (genocide in Darfur). But in an immeasurably less serious context, my wife and I might joke that the “dessert guy” at a nice restaurant is evil—a modern-day “serpent in the garden,” slithering through the dining room with his cart of treats, tempting people into making decisions that they may regret later.

Children are introduced to the nature and language of evil at a very early age, in such villainous characters as Cinderella’s “wicked stepmother” and the “evil Queen Maleficent.” In fact, a quick search on Imdb.​com reveals no fewer than 200 movies, television shows, and video games containing the word “evil” in their titles. As you can probably guess, most are in the horror genre, and feature such charming characters as flesh-eating zombies, bloodthirsty vampires, demons, ghosts, werewolves, and other monstrous and supernatural threats to humanity.

The term itself has Germanic origins, and comes to us from the Old English “yfel,” meaning over or beyond. Throughout its history, the word “evil” and its etymological ancestors were used generally to refer to things considered bad, wicked, cruel, ill, or defective. In modern parlance, though, I think we can recognize four distinct ways in which the term is commonly used, only one of which will be the subject of this book.

Political “Evil”

Perhaps the most common way in which the term “evil” gets used these days is also the most problematic, in my view. This is when it is used as part of a more general phenomenon of resorting to extreme moral or evaluative language in order to express our attitudes toward things. Comedian Louis C.K. once joked that we have gotten especially careless with our use of such evaluative terms as “hilarious,” “genius,” and “amazing.” In a stand-up comedy special—appropriately titled Hilarious—he said,

We go right for the top shelf with our words now. We don’t think about how we talk. “Dude, it was amazing! It was amazing!” Really, you were amazed? You were amazed by a basket of chicken wings? Really? Amazing? What are you going to do with the rest of your life now? What if something really happens to you? […] What are you going to call that? You used ‘amazing’ on a basket of chicken wings.

Whatever the reason, it does seem to be popular now for people to resort to unnecessarily extreme terms for what are apparently just rhetorical and expressive purposes. Desserts are not merely tasty; they are “literally the best thing I’ve ever tasted.” The night the power went out was not merely inconvenient; it was “the worst night of my life.”

We do this with moral language as well and perhaps most often in heated political contexts. As political divisiveness in America continues to heighten, so does the tendency to label one’s opponents using the most extremely negative of moral terms. If two or more people disagree over some political matter, and the matter itself—as these things often do—happens to strike at some very deeply held values, then it is only a matter of time before one party to the disagreement assures the rest of us that its opponents are a lot like the Nazis. And in these contexts, labels like “despicable,” “monstrous,” and “evil” become common rhetorical currency.

At the time of writing this, a Google search of the phrase “Adolf Hitler was evil” reveals fewer than a million hits. By contrast, a search of the phrase “George Bush is evil” brings up more than 15 million hits. In fact, opposition to Bush got so irrationally fierce here in the United States, comparisons of Bush to Hitler so ubiquitous, that the term “Bushitler” actually became a thing. And of course, divisiveness in American politics is no less acute today than it was a decade ago, so we should expect to find—and in fact, do find—the same thing happening with respect to Bush’s successor. Googling “Barack Obama is evil” will give you a list of over 10 million related links, and he is still in office!

For better or worse, though, one does not have to be the president of the United States in order to be considered evil by one’s political opponents. To many who are pro-life, abortion and its defenders are evil; but to many others who are pro-choice, opposition to abortion is evil. To many who oppose homosexual marriage, gay pride parades are celebrations of evil; but to many defenders of gay rights, it could only be evil to try to prevent two loving adults from marrying. And which is the more evil economic system, capitalism or socialism? Care to guess what many capitalists and socialists will say?

Rather than going on and on with more examples of this politically oriented use of the term “evil,” I will simply make two critical remarks before moving on to discuss another common use of the term. First, whatever such extreme language has in terms of its ability to enable the expression of one’s attitudes, it lacks in terms of its ability to enable rational and responsible public discourse. Quite the contrary, in fact, terms like “evil” often have the effect of shutting down such discourse—after all, if someone is not just wrong or misguided, but evil, then we have no more reason to seriously consider his beliefs and values than we have for those of any other madman or inhuman monster. Just as it would be a waste of time—and perhaps even a moral misstep in itself—to try to “see things from Hitler’s point of view,” it could only be similarly useless (and maybe immoral) to even entertain the ideas of those on the other side of the abortion debate, or debates about gay rights, or whatever. Whether or not people who resort to such extreme language intend to imply such a thing about the targets of terms like “evil,” it is an implication of the language nonetheless.

My second point can be framed as a kind of philosophical dilemma. As the term “evil” is commonly used in these heated moral and political contexts, its meaning is either purely expressive—in the sense that speakers use it only to express their disdain or disapproval of moral and political opponents—or else it is (at least partly) descriptive—in the sense that speakers use it to report or describe some moral fact of the matter. Now, this book takes for granted that there are objective moral facts of the matter, and sets out to discern what those facts are—specifically those to do with the nature and reality of evil. Since this is the case, if there are contexts in which the term “evil” is used for purely expressive purposes—as often seems the case with respect to moral and political disputes—then those uses of the term are of no interest to us here. (Used in this way, “evil” functions more like a pejorative or slur than the name of an actual moral property.)

On the other hand, if people actually do mean to be reporting or describing some moral fact of the matter when they apply the term “evil” to George Bush or Barack Obama, opponents or defenders of abortion, capitalists or socialists, and so forth, they are almost certainly misusing the term in the vast majority of these cases. There just are not any plausible theories of evil according to which someone counts as evil simply for opposing or defending abortion, or gay marriage, or free markets, or for doing any of the things that Bush and Obama have done. (If you disagree, stick around until at least Chap. 6, where I discuss some of the more prominent theories of evil.)

So, as the term “evil” is popularly used in heated moral and political contexts, its meaning is either expressive—in which case it has nothing whatsoever to do with the aims of this book—or else it is descriptive—in which case it is being misused far more often than not, and so we would do well to simply ignore these uses of the term. Either way, my focus from this point forward will be on a much more careful and restricted use of “evil.”

Religious “Evil”

For some, the term “evil” really only applies to figures or entities of a distinctly religious or supernatural nature. Used in this way, the category of evil might include such characters as the Devil and demons, ghosts, zombies, vampires, and perhaps even a few Disney villains, but it would apparently not include any actual human beings. Is there any reason to think that evil might be an essentially religious or supernatural concept?

Philosophers sometimes distinguish between pure and impure evil. ¹ To understand the difference, think of the distinction between means and ends. I want to get into better shape—that is my end. So I begin exercising and dieting—these are both means to that end. Now, nobody doubts that human beings cause each other to suffer all the time, and in all sorts of ways. But whenever we do so, it always seems to be done as a means to some further end. We might cause others to suffer for the sake of revenge, for instance, or for financial gain, or even just for pleasure. In fact, the end might even be something in itself positive—for example, if I were to steal from the wealthy (thereby causing them some suffering) in order to benefit the poor. Either way, the mark of impure evil is supposed to be that suffering (or the causing of suffering) is a means to some further, different end. Obviously, human beings are capable of impure evil.

Pure evil, on the other hand, is when suffering is both the means and the end—that is, when suffering is caused not for things like revenge, financial gain, or even pleasure, but rather only for its own sake. When you think about what this would involve, it is actually very difficult to even comprehend the frame of mind someone would have to occupy in order to engage in pure evil. Remarking on this idea of causing suffering for its own sake, Phillip Cole writes,

[T]his verges on the incomprehensible, to such an extent that many thinkers have argued that mere human beings are incapable of it. Human agents can only be evil in the impure sense, while pure evil, it if exists at all, belongs to the supernatural. ²

And from here, some might argue that pure evil is the onl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. An Introduction to Evil
• 1. The Psychology of Evil: Some Case Studies
• 2. The Philosophy of Evil: Puzzles, Problems, and Theories
• Backmatter