Whoever begins at this point, like my readers, to reflect and pursue his train of thought will not soon come to the end of itâreason 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 EvilâAt least this does not mean âBeyond Good and Bad.â1
THE EVIL, THE BAD, AND THE NASTY
Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems Les Fleurs du Malâor, The Flowers of Evilâwas 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 deathâand it frequently unites sex with death and sadism. Here is one representative poem, âPosthumous Remorseâ:
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
â Twill query âWhat use to thee, incomplete spright
That thou ne'er hast unfathomed the tears of the deadâ?
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 âis not altogether a just one.â James remarks that âevil,â for Baudelaire, is âan affair of blood and carrion and physical sicknessâthere must be stinking corpses and starving prostitutes and empty laudanum bottles in order that the poet shall be effectively inspiredââa âludicrously puerile view of the matter.â Ultimately, James concludes, âThis is not Evil; it is not the wrong; it is simply the nasty!â3
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 âevilâ that denote what is physically rotten or misshapen or uglyâwhat 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 âabarogiâ 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 âwakindiâ who delight in incest and cannibalism and dancing naked at night; the Gisu of Uganda speak of the âbalosiâ 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 âthickâ concept in Bernard Williams's sense, one that âinvolves a descriptive element expressive of the values of an individual or society.â8 On this basis, philosopher-anthropologist Paul RicĆur 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 âevilâ does sometimes track nastiness.
While there are undoubtedly various competing âthickâ conceptions of evil, comparatively âthinâ conceptions are similarly available. The Oxford English Dictionary offers âThe antithesis of good in all its principal sensesâ as the primary definition of âevil,â noting that it is the most comprehensive adjectival expression of disapproval in English whose use in familiar speech is commonly superseded by âbad.â Equating evil with mere badness suggests a comparatively thin conception of evil, one consistent with using âevilâ to describe just anything that one disapproves of. But other definitions of âevilâ 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: âHitler was a bad person, and what he did was wrong.â ⊠such tepid language seems terribly inadequate to the moral gravity of this subject matter. Prefix your adjectives with as many âverysâ as you like; you still fall short. Only âevil,â it seems, will do.10
Similarly, the French âmalâ can be translated variously as simply âbadâ or as something closer to the especially grave sense of âevilâ that Haybron gestures at. So with the Sanskrit âpapa.â11 No two ways about it, âevilâ 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 âevilâ connotes something like âthe extreme reaches of moral depravityâ but insists that the ordinary meaning of âevilâ equates it with âbadâ and nothing more.12 Following van Inwagen, distinguish the ordinary sense of âevilâ from its extreme sense. The ordinary sense is consistent with exercising only mild opprobrium, while in the extreme sense, âevilâ is âthe worst possible term of opprobrium imaginable.â13 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 âlesser varietiesâ of evil and evil people.14 âEvil,â 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 âevilâ 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 âwe should not try to connect in a single concept the gas chambers of Auschwitz and a father who slaps his childâ presumably because genocide is an especially terrible and event uniquely worthy of the title âevil.â16 In her penetrating study of evil, Claudia Card commends a heuristic that calls for focusing on, not just any morally dubious events, but atrocitiesâ paradigmatically evil events like genocide, slavery, torture, and rapeâpartly because âthe core features of evils tend to be writ large in the case of atrocitiesâ and because atrocities are âuncontroversially evil.â17 Card, too, commends focusing on events that are qualitatively different (and worse) than merely morally bad events because âin defining evil, it is necessary ⊠to distinguish evils from other horrors.â18
Insofar as I am interested in understanding what evil people are like, I want to understand what we mean when we use âevilâ 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 âcontrolled selfishness,â and its adherents are encouraged to âindulge their natural desiresâ and eschew âpsychic vampiresâ who make them feel indebted without cause. Some passages mimic imperatives found in the biblical book of Leviticus, calling for returning âblow for blow, scorn for scorn, doom for doom.â 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 âNine Satanic Statementsâ calls for showing âkindness to those who deserve it.â LaVey himself was an advocate of animal rights and condemns the agen...