Friday 10 May 2013

University lecturers as border guards

This is the programme of a workshop being run by a private sector organisation to train university staff in how to police the UK's border. I am posting it up not in order to recruit for it, but just to show the extent to which border regulation is being farmed out to other sectors, including the Higher Education sector, and also to note the extent to which the private sector are exploiting this. Be warned -- this is depressing:


As I am sure you are aware, your institution has a responsibility to prevent illegal working, provide evidence of an employee’s Right to Work and comply fully with UKBA regulations. The failure to do so can lead to punitive fines and a removal of your licence to hire migrant workers. It is also vital that academic institutions vigorously check their overseas students documents and academic records. Sponsoring students who hold fake passports, visas and educational certificates opens your organisation to wealth of potential problems that could result following any UKBA audit.

BFI’s Document Verification Workshop for Universities, Schools & Colleges will provide Admissions and HR teams with practical, hands-on training in recognising fraudulent documents; enabling attendees to get to grips with the legal responsibilities surrounding document verification for applicants: staff & students, spotting fake qualifications and ID documents, giving each delegate the chance to handle and compare fake and real examples.

Highlights include:

Legal overview of institution’s responsibilities;
* UKBA regulation
* Discrimination
* Data protection

Combating education fraud;
* What countries and agencies to watch out for
* Real life examples of fake degrees and diplomas

Masterclass in identity checks;
* Passports
* Photo ID and driving licenses
* Birth certificates
* Supporting documents
* Stamps
* Visas

Agenda

0930 Coffee & Registration

0950 Chairman’s welcome & introduction to the day

1000 DOCUMENT VERIFICATION: WHAT ARE YOUR LEGAL RESPONSIBILITIES WHEN EMPLOYING STAFF & SPONSORING STUDENTS?
* What are the consequences of getting document verification wrong?
* Understanding your obligations to prevent illegal working in the UK under the Immigration, Asylum & Nationality Act 2006.
* Right to work – what documents do you need to see and retain?
* What are the responsibilities of the employer regarding ongoing checks?
* Working within the law: avoiding contravention of discrimination legislation
* Issues around recording and storing data that you must be aware of


1100   Coffee Break

1115 COMBATING EDUCATION FRAUD: WHAT MUST YOUR ORGANISATION BE LOOKING OUT FOR?
This hands-on session will allow you to bring your policy questions directly to an education fraud expert and handle example fake documents ensuring that your staff members are fully equipped to recognise fraud.
* Demonstrating compliance: are your staff members able to recognise fraudulent documents?
* Avoiding pitfalls in your admissions policy
* Dealing with particular countries & agencies
* Spotting fake degrees: what red flags should you be looking out for?
* Practical examples of fraudulent documents
* English language requirements
* Which agencies can help you?


1245   Lunch

1345 MASTERCLASS - CHECKING IDENTITY: RECOGNISING FRAUDULENT DOCUMENTS
* Identity; attributed, biographical, biometric and chosen
* Do you know what to look for?
* Common scams to be aware of
* What to do when you spot an irregularity
* Passports
* Photo ID and driving licenses
* Birth certificates
* Supporting documents
* Stamps
* Visas
* Cross-referencing with other data
* How to proceed if you discover inconsistencies
* Addressing concerns directly with candidates – possible pitfalls
* Establishing and integrating secure documents and identity verification processes
* How easy is it to miss a forged document?
* What are the areas we should look at for verification?
* Live examples of fraudulent documentation
* Comparisons of real and fake documents
* Counterfeits and forgeries

Friday 3 May 2013

UKIP and the seductive power of Heimat



UKIP and the seductive power of ‘Heimat’

The surge of UKIP in this week’s local elections, and the influence they may have on where political power lies in the future, has shaken the political establishment. But why are people attracted to the party? What message is being sent out by the voters who support it?

Clearly it is an anti-immigrant vote. It is tempting to dismiss them as Moe Szyslaks: “Immigants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them” (The Simpsons: Much ado about Apu).

But there is something else happening, perhaps, that is reflected in UKIP’s popularity, a mythological element, and UKIP reflect the power of myth. That is not only the power of popular myths about immigration and its effects, but also deeper mythologies, about what lies outside the boundaries of the nation and what lies at its centre.

The mythology of the ‘outside’ focuses on the immigrant is some kind of mythic threat, like a vampire.

That myth can take various forms. For example, we have to protect ourselves from those who want to over-consume liberal resources and drain the liberal state of its ability to supply liberal goods -- the immigrant as a resource-sucking vampire, over here to claim benefits, misuse the NHS, take our jobs and so on.

Or we have to protect our sense of community and identity from those who are so different that they can’t be assimilated, and so would undermine the community solidarity that we need for welfare institutions and democracy. Indeed, they may even have the power to counter-assimilate members and change their identity, with their strange customs and traditions.

Or at the extreme we need to protect ourselves from those who will bring with them disorder and chaos -- the immigrant infects the liberal state with disorder, eventually destroying it, the immigrant as a vampiric disease-carrier. They will bring crime and violence with them, in the shape of gangsters and suicide bombers.

But note that this mythic view of what lies outside the border rests on a mythic view of what lies within it, that which needs protection. So what is it that needs to be protected from the migrant?

On the face of it, our welfare services, traditions and communities need protection, but I think there is something deeper here that UKIP appeal to, and the idea of ‘Heimat’ that we find in much European thought helps us understand this.

The idea of Heimat is found in the German-speaking world. ‘Heimat’ is an extraordinarily complex idea and I can’t hope to do it justice here, but it captures the feeling of being at home, or, more accurately, is a reaction to the experience of not feeling at home.

In other words, ‘Heimat’ is a reactive idea, a reaction against the fluidity and change experienced under conditions of modernity, which result in alienation and a feeling of lost-ness. Heimat is an idea of a place where one really belongs, and so is an imaginary home set up against our experience of alienation. It is essentially backward looking and nostalgic, and so it does not exist in the present. But equally it does not exist in the past.

Although it is a place, and exists in the past in one sense, it is not a place that has ever existed. It is an imaginary place when things were, we are told, more innocent and simple and stable: it is motion-less and change-less.

Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman tell us: “Key oppositions in the discourse of Heimat set country against city, province against metropolis, tradition against modernity, nature against artificiality, organic culture against civilization, fixed, familiar, rooted identity against cosmopolitanism and hybridity, alien otherness, or the faceless mass” (Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman Heimat: a German dream – regional loyalties and national identity in German culture 1890-1990 (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2).

This place of Heimat is not open to rational criticism. When people say things were better in the past, pointing out to them that this past has never actually existed – it is an imaginary reaction to the present -- brings about no change in their nostalgia. And although as an idea ‘Heimat’ has played a role in both right and left politics in Germany, one key element of it is mistrust of the outsider, whose presence is at least one cause of the loss of ‘Heimat’.

Boa and Palfreyman again: “Heimat must always be ultimately bounded and defined through visible or hidden exclusion of the radically different and alien” (p.27). And: “Who must be excluded and who can be integrated are as crucial to a community as who is from the start included: a place is as much defined by its others as by the self” (p. 28).

And Peter Blickle says: “… the idealization of a home ground in Heimat has led again and again to borders of exclusion” (Heimat: a critical theory of the German idea of homeland (Camden House, Rochester, NY, 2002), pp. 157-158).

And so the mistrust of motion and those who move is deeply embedded in the idea of ‘Heimat’. This mistrust certainly extends throughout European thought. Tim Cresswell explains: “…the whole apparatus of state bureaucracy in most countries has long depended on the notion that people should live, work, pay taxes and vote in a fixed location, so that to be of no fixed abode is already to be a suspicious character, and mobility itself comes to be seen as a form of geographical deviance.”

Mobility as deviance comes from “the positive valuation of roots in a place-bound, property-owning society…”, where “mobility…appears to be a kind of superdeviance … [which] disturbs the whole notion that the world can be segregated into clearly defined places … [and] becomes a basic form of disorder and chaos – constantly defined as transgression and trespass.” (Tim Cresswell Inplace/Out of place (University of Minnesota Press 1996) pp. 85-87).


This mistrust of motion certainly informed the anti-semitism of the German fascist movement. Hitler said “…it is impossible that those who are at home everywhere [by which he means the Jews] can know what Heimat is, because they do not have one.” And we need to remember that this mistrust of motion and the mobile extends throughout European thought. We have to keep reminding ourselves that the anti-semitism that led to the Holocaust was European-wide, not confined the Germany.

Although the idea of Heimat is explicit in the German-speaking world and has no simple equivalent in the English-speaking world, I have no doubt that it is present in the way we think.

Patrick Wright’s description of ‘Englishness’ in his article, “Last orders for the English aborigine”, certainly fits the model. This Englishness “…finds its essence in that sense of being opposed to the prevailing trends of the present. It’s a perspective that allows even the most well-placed man of the world to imagine himself a member of an endangered aboriginal minority: a freedom fighter striking out against ‘alien’ values and the infernal workings of a usurping state” (Patrick Wright, “Last orders for the English aborigine”, in Sally Davison & Jonathan Rutherford (eds), Race, Identity and Belonging: A Soundings Collection, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2008), p. 63)

At its heart is an idea of England “…in which the very thought of difference or change is instantly identified with degeneration, corruption and death” (p.69).

What we learn from the idea of Heimat is that this is accompanied by a nostalgia for a lost England which was a purer, more innocent place. The danger is, of course, that people will struggle to restore this mythic purity, this mythic innocence, by cleansing the nation of that which has corrupted it.

All the evidence shows that the mythic idea of ‘Heimat’ is here, like a so-far-undetected black hole, exerting enormous cultural power that can distort ethical and rational principles. It is anti-theoretical, anti-intellectual. The facts will not get in the way.

This presents those of us who wish to confront anti-immigration politics with a very difficult challenge. I have been in rooms of people who I consider to be intelligent and well-informed, but who have been transformed into an irrational rage when it comes to discussions of immigration, and who displayed a stubborn refusal to even consider any empirical evidence on the question, and who replied to my arguments with mythologies.

I have no answer to this challenge here, except to alert those of us who do wish to pursue evidence-based arguments to the seductive power of ‘Heimat’. But Patrick Wright’s description of “an endangered aboriginal minority: a freedom fighter striking out against ‘alien’ values and the infernal workings of a usurping state” perfectly captures what is at the heart of UKIP and their appeal.

The complexity of that appeal lies in the fact that, although the migrant is the object of the hostility, it is because they symbolize change, modernization, globalization, all things that disrupt tradition and the sense of ‘home’ people carry with them, an imaginary ‘home’ which never existed, and yet which must be defended from change.

Friday 19 April 2013

Speak no Evil? A Reply to Garrard and McNaughton




To download this paper:
http://open.academia.edu/PhillipCole




A Defence of Evil Scepticism[i]

“Was I sleeping, when the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?”, Samuel Becket, Waiting for Godot.

Abstract
In their paper, “Speak no Evil?”, Eve Garrard and David McNaughton put forward challenging criticisms of the position they describe as ‘Eliminativism’ and others have called ‘Evil Scepticism’, the view that the idea of evil agency  should play no role in moral, psychological or political theory. In this paper I defend Evil Scepticism from those criticisms, and also examine their own positive argument, that a phenomenological approach to the experience of moral horror points away from scepticism and towards the need for a philosophical theory of evil agency. I argue that Evil Scepticism is more robust than Garrard and McNaughton imagine, and that it can give a highly plausible account of the experience of moral horror without the need for a concept of evil agency.


Part 1: Introduction
In their paper, “Speak no Evil?”, Eve Garrard and David McNaughton put forward challenging criticisms of the position they describe as ‘Eliminativism’ and others have called ‘Evil Scepticism’, the view that the idea of evil agency should play no role in moral, psychological or political theory. They select my book The Myth of Evil as the best philosophical statement of that position[ii], and so their criticisms focus on my version of the argument. In this paper I defend Evil Scepticism from those criticisms, and also examine their own positive argument, that a phenomenological approach to the experience of moral horror points away from scepticism and towards the need for a philosophical theory of evil agency – Evil Scepticism is, they argue, an ‘error’ theory. This is because we experience moral horror in the face of evil actions, and there cannot be evil acts without evil agents -- as Evil Scepticism rejects the idea of evil agency our experience of moral horror must always be a mistake. I argue that Evil Scepticism is more robust than Garrard and McNaughton imagine, and that, far from being an ‘error’ theory, it can give a highly plausible account of the experience of moral horror without the need for a concept of evil agency.[iii]
            In Part 2 of the paper I reply to their claim that that I make crucial logical and moral errors in my version of Evil Scepticism. In Part 3, I consider their phenomenological account of moral horror and their argument that it leads us towards a theory of evil agency. I argue that Evil Scepticism can offer a plausible account of our experience of moral horror, and so cannot be an ‘error’ theory in Part 4. And finally in Part 5, I argue that, far from Evil Scepticism presenting us with a limited way of describing the world that leaves out subtle and important detail, instead it presents us with the opportunity to capture the complexities of human existence. It is those accounts of the world of human experience that leave aside the idea of evil agency that reveal its depth.

Part 2: The Logical and Moral Objections
In The Myth of Evil I ask how we can explain why people do terrible things to other people? I argue that the idea of evil agency fails to explain this, and that it carries with it grave danger. It does so because it has its source in mythology where the evil character has a narrative function, to block the progress of the hero. Because such characters only have a narrative function, they have no history, no motivation, and are not open to reason – they are purely malignant monsters. This ‘monstrous’ conception of evil is to be found in fiction, but has often erupted into human affairs causing enormous damage. Garrard and McNaughton argue that there are two serious mistakes in my account, the first logical, the second moral. The logical mistake is that I focus on cases where the threat to the community is clearly imaginary – the vampire epidemics in Eastern Europe, the witch trials in Western Europe, the persecution of the Jews throughout European history but especially in Germany in the first part of the 20th century. But Garrard and McNaughton say nothing follows from this regarding genuine threats to people or communities: “…we can’t take the fact that there are wrongful attributions of a property to show that there are no rightful ones.”
            However, it is wrong to suggest that I focus exclusively at this ‘weakest point’ of the discourse of evil. I do discuss many cases where there is a genuine threat. The book is filled with torturers and murderers as well as their victims. I devote a whole chapter to Jon Venables and Robert Thomson, the killers of James Bulger, as perpetrators of a terrible act. Throughout the book I discuss the threat of ‘terrorism’, facing up to the realities of 9/11, 7/7, Madrid and the Bali bombings. The argument is that placing that threat within the discourse of evil agency leads to it being represented in ways that mislead and distort. There is clearly a distinction between real threats and imaginary ones, but to the extent that both are framed within the discourse of evil, they are both misrepresented, and that misrepresentation can lead to a response that is itself extremely dangerous and destructive. In the case of the ‘War on Terror’, that response did, indeed, result in the destruction of a great many innocent people, but there is nothing in the book to suggest that I was unaware of the real threat posed suicide bombers of the type that hit New York, London, Madrid and Bali. They, and other ‘terrorist’ groups, are very much to the fore in the discussion.
Most importantly there is a long chapter on the Holocaust in which I face the most difficult challenge, of how we can understand the Nazis in the absence of the idea of evil agency, and so to say that I focus only on cases where evil is attributed to groups that clearly pose no threat is simply not true. My argument is not, as Garrard and McNaughton suggest, the obviously false claim that wrongful attributions of the idea of evil show that there are no rightful ones. It is that the discourse of evil leads us to fail to understand the genuine threats, and that is one of the most dangerous things about it. I therefore do not accept that I make the logical mistake Garrard and McNaughton describe. I can only leave it to readers of the book to judge which of us is right about its content.
I have a similar concern with the claim that I make a moral mistake. Garrard and McNaughton argue that I “say nothing about the … view that the Nazis themselves were evil.” Worse, my account reduces all threats to the imaginary, such that there is a “cognitive and moral equivalence between the hostile beliefs and concomitant fears experienced by the perpetrators of murderous oppression, and those of their victims…”. This means my account “trivializes and degrades the rational and justified apprehension felt by those who foresee a terrible future.” All this could be avoided if I addressed cases of “genuine and deadly threats…”, but then my account would be implausible since “fears of those who genuinely wish to kill us cannot be understood as projections of purely inner distresses.”
But, as I pointed out above, I do clearly address cases of genuine and deadly threats in the book. The point, again, is that to understand these threats in the context of the discourse of evil is to misrepresent them, in some cases to mythologize them, and so to misunderstand them. There is nothing that I can detect in my account that means I cannot distinguish between genuine and imaginary threats. Both cases, real and imaginary, are misrepresented within the discourse of evil. To suppose this compels me to hold that all threats are imaginary seems to me to be a logical mistake.
Garrard and McNaughton claim I say nothing about the view that the Nazis were themselves evil. However, I discuss that view at length in the chapter on the Holocaust. The majority of that chapter is about how we should understand the perpetrators, not how the perpetrators understood the victims. There is a lengthy discussion of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil and how it could apply, or fail to apply, to the arch-Nazis; a similarly lengthy discussion of the Browning/Goldhagen debate about the role of the willing executioners; of Robert Jay Lifton’s account of the concentration camp doctors who carried out the most appalling experiments on their victims, including Joseph Mengele; and, most importantly, of Arendt’s discussion of ‘radical’, as opposed to ‘banal’, evil. The whole thrust of that chapter is to put my theory to its most serious test. I argue that it is only by learning to do without the idea of evil agency that we can truly grasp the full horror of the Holocaust. Time and time again, it is accounts of terrible events that avoid a focus on evil agency that reveal the true depth of those events.
The charge seems to be that I make my position plausible by focusing exclusively on cases where evil has been attributed to agents who are obviously entirely innocent, and completely ignore those hard cases where the attribution of evil strikes us as eminently and urgently sensible. But I don’t read the book in that way at all. It is run through with precisely those hard cases. I think I test my theory at the limits of human conduct. Garrard and McNaughton may feel that my theory fails those tests, but I find the claim I do not face up to them curious. The discourse of evil constitutes people as threats where they pose none, but also constitutes people who do pose real threats in a misleading and distorting way. Both of these aspects are dangerous and I explore both fully in the book.
Garrard and McNaughton suggest that I end up in the alleged ‘moral equivalence’ position because of my reliance on psychoanalytic theory to account for our fear of others.[iv] However, I don’t claim in the book that inner ‘psychic dreads’ account for all fear of others. I do say that they contribute to us constructing ‘monstrous’ conceptions of others in particular cases, in other words a particular kind of fear. This is a complex story and in the book I’m careful about what follows from it. I do conclude, though, that this story can shed light on how we project certain fears upon the world, perceiving dangers where none exist, and perceiving the dangers that do exist in misleading ways. It doesn’t follow from my discussion that all fears are the result of this kind of projection. This isn’t to do with whether the fear is based on a genuine threat or not, but whether we construct ‘monsters’ out of those fears. It is specifically around this construction of ‘monsters’ where I claim some aspects of the psychoanalytic story can help. There is nothing in my arguments to suggest that, in fearing others, we always construct monsters because of inner psychic dreads. Sometimes, indeed often, we get it right: we correctly fear others because of the genuine threat they pose, and we correctly identify them and their motivations.
But does the ‘moral equivalence’ charge still follow? If we take potential victims and potential perpetrators who see each other as evil agents then Garrard and McNaughton argue that I hold them as morally equivalent, each being equally, in a sense, reprehensible. Rather, Garrard and McNaughton point out, they are morally very different. The victims’ perception of the perpetrators as evil agents is based on genuine and well-founded fear, and may well be helpful in enabling them to take action to defend themselves. The latter point, though, is odd, in that it suggests my argument is that if the victims don’t see their potential attackers in terms of evil agency, they won’t be able to see them as a threat at all. In fact, we can correctly see our potential attackers as extremely dangerous without understanding them in terms of evil agency, and that may place us in a better position to protect ourselves (in a sense, the basic message of the book). Again, we very often get it right.[v]
But the first point, that my account necessitates seeing both perceptions of ‘evil agency’ as equally morally reprehensible, is more worrying for me. Are victims of extreme violence doing anything wrong if they understand their attackers as evil agents? This is a very difficult challenge. I hope I am as sensitive as possible to the perspective of the victims of violence. I am not charging them at all with immorality, but if the victims do characterize the aggressors as evil agents in the sense that their evil character explains why they are carrying out the attack, then they are making a mistake, under many circumstances a perfectly understandable one. Ethically, it is not the same mistake as that of the perpetrators, but conceptually it is. To perceive anybody in terms of the myth of evil agency is a conceptual mistake (and sometimes an ethical one). So if we’re taking a case of the victim of a potential or actual attack who perceives that threat in terms of the myth of evil, and perpetrator of the attack who perceives their victim in terms of that myth, then I’m not claiming that there is a moral equivalence here. I am saying there’s a conceptual equivalence, but I think that is defensible. If the myth of evil leads to a mistaken characterization of others as evil agents, in the sense that their evil agency is an explanation of their acts, then it doesn’t make any conceptual difference who is making the mistake. The United States and United Kingdom were victims of horrendous attacks, but it is still important to point out that characterizing their attackers in terms of the myth of evil agency was a serious mistake. And that conceptual mistake could, and in the case of the United States and the United Kingdom did, have serious ethical consequences.
Steven de Wijze has put an objection to me that I take very seriously.[vi] What do I say in reply to people who have suffered terribly, such as Jewish people under the Nazis, who describe what happened to them and the people who did it to them as evil? Am I really going to say they have made a mistake of any kind? I think this objection is different to that put forward by Garrard and McNaughton – here we’re considering the concept of evil as a moral judgment not an explanatory concept -- and my response is to it here is very quick and does not do justice to the depth of de Wijze’s argument or his own account of ‘evil’. I hope to respond more fully elsewhere. But that response is to recognize that they have identified an important moral truth. I discuss this in the book when I explore Hannah Arendt’s thoughts about radical evil, drawing on Richard Bernstein’s important work.[vii] So far as I have understood him, de Wijze argues for the validity of this kind of judgment recognizing that there are actions which move “beyond a set of moral boundaries which we have for … normal social interaction” in some extreme form. I don’t think there is a great conceptual distance between us here. Where I would urge caution is when people, in making that moral judgment, also claim that this gives them an understanding of what has happened to them and an understanding of the agents that made it happen. I am walking a tightrope in recognizing the force of the moral judgment but resisting the claim that what we have here is ‘understanding’, but I think I keep my balance.
In a sense, of course, describing acts and their agents as evil does give us understanding of a sort. But, in another, crucial, sense, it is not to understand them all – the judgment that the act or the agent was evil, does not help us to understand the act or the agent in any deep and valuable way. It is this failure to understand that is the basic message of my book, and it is, in my view, centrally important, morally and politically, that we grasp this failure, which is why the arguments in the book are so urgent. To think that, through using the concept of evil, we have characterized the agent, or given a psychological account of them, is a mistake, and a profoundly dangerous one.
If there’s an overall moral message in the book, it is that we need to find ways of describing the world that do without the concept of evil agency, because if we do include it we are misconceptualizing the world and so misunderstanding it, and that misconceptulization and misunderstanding can have deeply serious moral consequences. Again, the basic message is that we can prevent or guard against these terrible events if we understand them more clearly, and the concept of evil agency prevents us from doing that.

Part 3: Moral Horror
Garrard and McNaughton’s second criticism places moral horror at the centre of their account. They argue that my account of Evil Scepticism is a kind of error theory: given that there is no such thing as evil agency then there cannot be evil acts, and therefore the moral horror we experience at the actions of people who do terrible things must be an error, because moral horror as an experience is closed tied to the concept of evil. But given the terrible things people do, to claim that moral horror is always a mistaken response is extremely implausible. My position would create a moral blindness, a moral insensitivity, a cognitive as well as affective deficit. What a philosophical theory of evil will do is make sense of this phenomenological experience of moral horror. This is the useful work that a philosophical concept of evil contributes to our understanding of the world: “it categorises together those acts to which we respond with moral horror; the pressing task of a theory of evil is to provide an account of what features it is of such actions that justify our horror, and explain why they do so.”
On their account, part of the role of a theory of evil is to make sense of our experience of moral horror. That is, of course, make normative sense of it, not psychological sense. Basically, the theory can tell us when that response is appropriate or inappropriate: that is, when we are genuinely confronted by something evil. The point is that we can make mistakes – we can experience moral horror when we shouldn’t, and we can fail to experience it when we should. That’s why the role of the theory is normative, not psychological. For Garrard and McNaughton it is the theory of evil that fills in the detail of the experience – the theory tells us that this is an evil: without it, there would be no experience of moral horror. Moral horror is a response to the evil that our theory identifies. “What the phenomenology delivers is not that acts are evil because we find them horrifying; rather, it’s that we find them horrifying because they are evil.”
That makes a lot of sense, and we can see some kind of reflective equilibrium at work here as we work between our experiences of moral horror and our theory of evil and make adjustments either way. Of course, the adjustment can be radical. It may be that a whole range of things we experience moral horror at are inappropriate – not evil. And it may be that our whole theory of evil is wrong and we move to a new one. My thoughts go to the philosophy of science and the relationship between theory and observation, and some kind of constructive feedback loop between the two. Neither is dominant.
Two claims seem to follow from this: first that we will not experience moral horror without a theory, or at least a concept, of evil; and second, that we cannot make normative sense of our experience of moral horror without a theory of evil. The first claim may be too strong, and may not be one that Garrard and McNaughton hold. The second claim, though, is the central core of their approach. I take it, then, that they would hold that Evil Scepticism does have space for the experience of moral horror, but can never make normative sense of that experience – it is always some kind of ethical mistake. But I want to suggest that not only do we not need a theory of evil in order to experience moral horror, we don’t need a theory of evil to make normative sense of it either. To make that claim I need to provide a short account of what I take to be Evil Scepticism.
Garrard and McNaughton pick out three different ways in which we use the term ‘evil’: first, to refer to any bad state of affairs that exists in the world; second, all wrongful actions whether serious or trivial; and third, “a specially objectionable sub-class of wrongful actions…”. I would offer a slightly fuller schema of ‘evil’ – it is used to refer to:
  1. The fundamental fact of the existence of extreme human suffering in the world.
  2. The causes of that suffering, which are either natural causes such as disease earthquakes and floods, or human actions.
  3. The human agents who carry out those actions (setting aside the natural causes).
  4. The reasons, motivations, character, dispositions to act, etc., which we take to explain why those human agents carried out those actions.
So first we have the evil of human suffering, second we have evil causes of suffering including human actions, third we have evil agents, and fourth we have evil characteristics or dispositions. It is at this fourth level we have evil as explanation, and it is here that Garrard and McNaughton and others believe we must construct our philosophical theory of evil: the focus of a philosophical theory must be upon the characteristics or dispositions that lead agents to carry out evil actions. It is important to note that the idea of evil as an explanatory concept makes no sense at the first two levels, and only makes philosophical sense at the fourth level. If we were to apply it as an explanatory concept at the third level alone, with no reference to characteristics, dispositions, etc., we would be trapped within the mythological discourse of evil agency, where people do terrible things for no reason. Of course, if we do not take ‘evil’ to be an explanatory concept, it can make philosophical sense at all four levels, but we need to be clear in what sense we are using it.
            I take the position that it is the presence of human suffering in the world that is the basic sense of evil: this presence of suffering, specifically the suffering of innocents, is the classic problem of evil that theologians have been struggling to account for throughout history. If we apply the concept of evil at any of the other levels this use can only be derivative. It is that derivation that Evil Sceptics object to – they would want to restrict the concept of ‘evil’ to the basic sense. But philosophers of evil want to extend the concept of evil to take in actions, human agents and their dispositions and character, and they see this extension as legitimate, helpful, illuminating and explanatory.
But the Evil Sceptic sees illumination and explanation coming from elsewhere. Their focus would be on the second level of my schema, but adding a more sophisticated account of the causal conditions that help us understand how dreadful events happen, what Garrard and McNaughton describe as social, psychological, historical and neurological conditions, and I would add political, economic and cultural conditions. This is to widen the second level beyond a simple distinction between natural causes and human actions to take in the social, political, economic, historical, cultural and psychological complexities of the human condition – this is to take, if you like, a ‘realist’ position on social structures and their powers, and to recognize that they can be the cause of human suffering and therefore sources of evil in the world.
Once we have this more sophisticated understanding of the conditions of suffering it is very hard to see what work the idea of ‘evil’ is doing anywhere beyond the basic sense I described above. Garrard and McNaughton provide an example from the conflict of the Congo: “a combatant who disembowelled and dismembered his adversary, and forced the dead man’s wife to gather up the dismembered body parts into a heap, on top of which he then raped her.” How can something so dreadful happen? How can a human being do something so dreadful to another human?
Their example comes from a report by Adam Hochschild, ‘The Rape of the Congo’.[viii] Towards the end of that report, Hochschild asks precisely that question, and provides an account, talking of brutalized and exploited soldiers as well as the complex and longstanding chaos in the Congo. He says: “… looking at people I meet, even an entire encampment of gold miners who are almost all ex-combatants, do I see those who look capable of killing hospital patients in their beds, gang-raping a woman like Rebecca Kamate, jabbing a young man’s eye with a bayonet? I do not.” He asks: “What turns such people into rapists, sadists, killers? Greed, fear, demagogic leaders and their claim that such violence is necessary for self-defense, seeing everyone around you doing the same thing—and the fact that the rest of the world pays tragically little attention to one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of our time.” The word ‘evil’ does not occur anywhere in the article. All I would add is the horror arising from the use of child soldiers in the Congo.
So what do we say about this soldier? What does calling him ‘evil’ add to our understanding of what he did? Even in this extreme case, one that fills me with moral horror, I am baffled as to what work the idea of ‘evil’ does here. What light does it shed on this awful event? What do we learn from applying the concept of evil anywhere here? For Garrard and McNaughton, and other philosophers, the key point is that it plays an explanatory role – not an exclusive one, but alongside the other factors I’ve mentioned. But my suggestion is that this explanatory sense of evil is both derivative and parasitic. It is derivative because the fundamental sense of evil as the condition of human suffering does all the conceptual work. It is parasitic because character or motivations or reasons have explanatory force, along with the other background conditions, but the suspicion is that the concept of evil is being given explanatory force by attaching it to something else that has explanatory force. This parasitic concept of evil adds nothing here. We can eliminate it from the explanation. So my suggestion is that some of the philosophical accounts of evil agency may be using the concept in this derivative and parasitic way.
Garrard attempts to show that the concept of evil is explanatory in an earlier paper.[ix] There she argues that the evil agent suffers a severe cognitive defect such that they are blind to reasons against the action. They cannot see them. This explains how an agent can perform an evil action.  What we have is an “… account of evil … which identifies the evil act as one in which the agent is impervious to reasons of the most conclusive kind against his act, is therefore apt for figuring in an explanation of the act in question.”[x] Saying the act is evil will “amount to saying that the agent acted as he did because he was blind to the reason-giving force of (for example) the suffering of his victims – he just couldn’t see that as a reason for him to desist.”[xi] This explains why he performed this act – “because he couldn’t see that there were overwhelming reasons against it…”.[xii] “Because the proposed account of evil locates it in the agent’s motivational state (that is, in the reasons he saw and failed to see), attributing evil to an action will always partially explain why the agent performed the act, since it will always reveal something about what the agent saw as reasons for acting, and about what reasons he failed to discern altogether.”[xiii]
But this seems to me to be a derivative/parasitic account. We might want to say: “This person is evil because they have a cognitive structure which leads them to perform evil actions,” but while this is an interesting thing to say, the concept of ‘evil’ in this sentence plays no explanatory role. The cognitive structure has been identified as evil because of the actions and their consequences that flow from it, and describing that cognitive structure as ‘evil’ does not give the concept any degree of explanatory power. Garrard, and others, offer sophisticated psychopathological accounts explaining why people do dreadful things, but the concept of evil, despite their assertions of the opposite, plays no useful role in their accounts at all.
Garrard and McNaughton argue that other moral concepts play an explanatory role, and that the concept of evil “takes its place among the other moral concepts, both those which are features of actions and also those which are features of character.  And these moral concepts all figure quite naturally in our explanations of human actions and reactions; indeed, we will be unable to adequately understand how our fellow humans are behaving without some reference to virtues such as courage, generosity, and honesty, or vices such as selfishness, cruelty, and hypocrisy.” However, there are ways of understanding the role these moral concepts play in our explanation without making them causal concepts. Julia Tanney makes a distinction between reason-explanation – to which these moral concepts belong --  and causal-explanation, and argues that we shouldn’t expect reason explanation to fit a psychological/scientific model we expect of causal explanation. It is not an explanation of how an event came to happen, but one that characterizes it as a particular kind of action, a context-placing explanation. This is part of a Wittgensteinian approach that says we are not looking for psychological depth when we use those terms as explanations, and if we are talking about concepts such as courage, honesty, generosity, etc., I think this must be right. We are certainly not looking for deep cognitive structures that correspond to these moral characteristics, such that they can act as explanations for action in that causal sense.[xiv]
If reason-explanations are not meant as causal, and if the explanations the philosophers of evil are using the concept to construct are not meant to be causal, then my objection falls. But I read Garrard in particular as putting forward a causal account and looking for psychological depth, as she works the concept of ‘evil’ into a complex psychopathology.  The question, then, is whether we can do both things: have ‘evil’ as an explanatory concept like the other moral concepts Garrard and McNaughton refer to, and have it play a causal role in a deep psychopathological account of the type Garrard offers in her other work. My intuition here is that we cannot.

Part 4: The Phenomenological Objection
But the phenomenological challenge remains. Can Evil Scepticism make normative sense of our experience of moral horror, or is it really an ‘error’ theory? I will offer a strong response to that challenge but will acknowledge that there is a weaker one available. The strong response is that, not only do we not need a theory of evil to experience moral horror, we do not need one to make normative sense of it. Evil Scepticism is therefore not an error theory and can make normative sense of our moral horror. The moral horror I experience is two-fold: first that such dreadful suffering is possible at all, and second that it lies beyond our powers to prevent it. It is our failure to prevent it that horrifies me most, a failure that fills me with the moral despair I take to be a part of the phenomenological experience of moral horror. Such an account is not, as Garrard and McNaughton seem to imply, a logical impossibility – and more than that, it strikes me as being a plausible possibility.
Some might be happier with a weaker response: that while we do not need a theory of evil in order to experience moral horror, we do need one to make normative sense of it. Notice, though, that there is space within Evil Scepticism for such a theory. Garrard and McNaughton make it clear that what Evil Sceptics are concerned with is the extension of the concept of evil to human agency. But that means the basic concept of evil remains, and it may be possible to construct a theory of evil around the existence of dreadful suffering and the conditions that make it possible. Such a theory that can do all the work that Garrard and McNaughton want from a theory of evil without extending the concept to human agency. Again, this is not a logical impossibility, and has some degree of plausibility.
In fact there is not that much of a gap between the strong response and the weaker one, if we allow that all we might need in order to make normative sense of the world is not a ‘theory’, but a concept of evil, an idea of what it amounts to. I go back to the basic idea of evil as the presence of human suffering in the world. With that basic idea and our understanding of the social, political, economic, historical, cultural and psychological complexities of the human condition that make such suffering possible, we may have all we need. What a philosophical theory of evil then amounts to is an ethical account of those conditions and their relationship with human suffering, and a political programme for making sure that those conditions do not occur, or if they do that we respond to them appropriately. What we have abandoned here is any claim that the concept of ‘evil’ explains why suffering exists in the world or why people do the dreadful things they do. It does not have a role to play in a philosophical illumination of the world. If the role of philosophy is to illuminate, not obscure, the world, this amounts to the abandonment of the philosophy, as well as the mythology, of evil.

Part 5: Conclusion
As philosophers we have to be aware of the origins of concepts. Evil is a concept that has its roots in mythology. There it has a narrative role in story-telling that we can still see in fiction – the character who has no history, no motivation, no background story, but who desires our destruction for its own sake and for no other goal, and against whom the only protection is their destruction. This gives us a way of understanding what is happening in the fictional story. The danger is that this narrative role can move from myth and fiction into reality, and so give us the illusion that we have understood actual events and people in the world. This, I have argued in my book, is extremely dangerous but also extremely common. Throughout human history it has been used to mark out people for destruction.
            This leads me to ask why moral theorists would want to conserve the concept of evil. The answer has to be because they believe it helps us to illuminate the moral universe, but they are profoundly wrong about that. It darkens and distorts that universe. It is those accounts that set aside the idea of evil agency that reveal true moral depth and meaning. Of course, moral theorists don’t want to conserve the concept in the destructive, mythical sense, but in that case they have to understand that they are doing something new – they are not, in their theories of evil, simply reviving a concept that has been around in our moral conscience, or clarifying an idea that people have used throughout history. They are creating new concepts of evil, changing the meaning of the term, presenting ideas of it that people have never held before. The fact is that when the vast majority of people use the concept of evil, they mean it in the mythological sense that I warn against in my book. That is, of course, not unusual, but we as philosophers need to be aware that we are walking in the hinterland between philosophy and mythology here, and those of us who wish abandon the idea of evil agency want to do so partly because we want to set ourselves free from mythology and do philosophy.
The question, in the end, is the one asked by Nietzsche: why do people want to categorize others as evil?[xv] Of course, Nietzsche’s answer is a psychological one based around the idea of ressentiment, that grudge-filled hatred that leads us to want to see others destroyed. I don’t attribute that motive to moral theorists, but we still have to ask them why they want to develop a theory that enables us to categorize other human beings as evil? Of course we have already heard the answer: because this will illuminate the world for us. But there is a supplementary question here which is this: once they have a theory that enables them to characterize other human beings as evil agents, what do they want to happen to them? One answer may be that they don’t want anything to happen to them – it’s not for moral theorists to answer that question (perhaps like the scientists who helped create nuclear weapons). But moral theory is all about what happens to people. It can’t be about anything else. So the question they have to answer is: what should happen to ‘evil’ people? To suppose that we as philosophers can construct moral theories that categorize people as evil and set aside the question of what society should do to these people strikes me as morally irresponsible.[xvi]
Of course, we may not want their destruction, but how do we avoid it? I described the contents of moral horror as I understand it as two-fold: first, how can one human being cause such suffering to another? Second, how can we allow this degree of suffering to happen? It is that second aspect that is important to us. We are saying, with all our moral conscience, that such events should not be allowed to happen and that we must do everything in our power to prevent them. That is why evil is an apt description of extreme human suffering, suffering we can’t imagine enduring. But in a sense, our concept of ‘evil’ here is still destructive, in that we want to abolish the conditions that make such suffering possible. We want to stamp them out.
When it comes to the natural, political, economic and social conditions that make such suffering possible, that destruction is a noble aim – we want to eliminate disease, poverty, oppression. But what happens when we extend this idea of ‘evil’ to include human agents? Human agents who, some argue, have a character that cannot be changed? We can still say we want to abolish the conditions that make such characters emerge, but what of those who have emerged with those characteristics, and who, we think, are beyond reform and redemption? What do we think should happen to them? We do not want them to exist, but there are two ways of ensuring that they don’t, and the second way brings us right back to the destructive, mythological aspect of the idea of evil. We cannot escape it. Or rather, we must escape it.






[i] This is a response to a paper presented by Eve Garrard and David McNaughton, “Speak No Evil?”, presented at “The Idea of Evil: Secular Approaches” Mancept/Mancev conference, University of Manchester, November 22-23, 2012. I would like to thank Steven de Wijze for inviting me to reply to the paper, and Eve Garrard and David McNaughton for their challenging paper. That paper appeared in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 36.1 (2012), pp. 1 -- 17. My response here is to the paper that was presented at the Mancept/Mancev conference. Thanks also to Gideon Calder and Steven de Wijze for reading this paper and their helpful comments, despite their disagreements with its contents.
[ii] Phillip Cole, The Myth of Evil (Edinburgh and New York, Edinburgh University Press and Praeger, 2006). It is worth observing that theoretical positions are often named by their opponents and the fact is that I know of no ‘Eliminativist’ or ‘Evil Sceptic’ who has described themselves in those terms. I do not use them anywhere in my book. The danger of these labels is that the focus of concern is upon the idea of evil agency as an explanatory concept, and that leaves a great deal of work for the concept of evil to do. For the purposes of this paper I will accept ‘Evil Scepticism’ as a description of my position as it is a clearer identifier than the term ‘Eliminativism’. But one challenge for ‘Evil Sceptics’ is to come up with a more accurate, but equally catchy, name for their position.
[iii] Their paper and this one can be seen as a debate between Evil Scepticism and another approach that has been described as ‘Evil Revivalism’. The latter points to a body of recent work that argues that the concept of evil must be reclaimed by moral theory. The best examples of Evil Revivalism are Garrard and McNaughton’s paper, and also see Eve Garrard,  “Evil as an Explanatory Concept”, Monist, April, Volume 85, Issue 2, 2002, pp. 320--336; Luke Russell, “He Did It Because He Was Evil”, American Philosophical Quarterly  46. 3, (2009), pp. 267-82,
”Dispositional Accounts of Evil Personhood”, Philosophical Studies, Volume 149 (2009), pp. 231-250, and  Evil, Monsters and Dualism”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Volume 13 (2010), pp. 45-58; and Paul Formosa, “A Conception of Evil”, Journal of Value Inquiry 42.2 (2008), pp. 217-239,  and “The Problems with Evil”, Contemporary Political Theory 7, no. 4 (2008), pp. 395-415. I do not wish to place all philosophers who discuss the idea of evil in either the sceptic or revivalist camp, and other important works in philosophical debates concerning evil that transcend this distinction are Adam Morton, Evil (New York and London, Routledge, 2006), and Richard Bernstein (2002), Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2002). Other important scholars working in the field are Stephen de Wijze, “Defining Evil: Insights from the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands’”, The Monist 85 (2002), pp. 210-38, and “Recalibrating Steiner on Evil” in Stephen de Wijze, Mathew H. Kramer and Ian Carter (eds.), Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice (London, Routledge, 2009), pp. 214-232; and Gideon Calder whose work, at the time of writing, has not yet been published. There is, therefore, a highly interesting field of work developing around the philosophy of evil. I do not address the general field of ‘Evil Revivalism’ here, but have the narrower aim of giving a convincing statement of Evil Scepticism against the highly interesting and challenging objections presented by Garrard and McNaughton.
[iv] See Cole, op. cit., chapter 5.
[v] The implication of Garrard and McNaughton’s argument here seems to be that we can only recognize others as threats through the concept of evil agency, an implication I’m sure they would reject.
[vi] In personal correspondence.
[vii] See Cole, op. cit., pp. 239-241, and Richard Bernstein (2002), Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Polity Press), pp. 209-211.
[viii] Adam Hochschild,  ‘Rape of the Congo,’ New York Review of Books, July 15, 2009: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/aug/13/rape-of-the-congo/?pagination=false [accessed April 19, 2013].
[ix] Eve Garrard, op. cit.
[x] Garrard, op. cit, p. 332.
[xi] Garrard, op. cit, p. 332.
[xii] Garrard, op. cit, p. 332.
[xiii] Garrard, op. cit, pp. 332-333.
[xiv] See Julia Tanney, “Reasons as non-causal, context-placing explanations,” in Constantine Sandis, ed, New Essays on the Explanation of Behaviour (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
[xv] See my discussion of Nietzsche in Cole, op. cit., pp. 77-84.
[xvi] An honorable exception here is Mathew H. Kramer, The Ethics of Capital Punishment: a Philosophical Investigation of Evil and its Consequences (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011). However, his ‘purgative’ theory of punishment, where society has the right to purge itself of those identified as evil through executing them, also serves as a warning to those of us opposed to capital punishment, and shows why philosophers of evil must address this question.