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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:
- The fundamental fact of the
existence of extreme human suffering in the world.
- The causes of that suffering,
which are either natural causes such as disease earthquakes and floods, or
human actions.
- The human agents who carry out
those actions (setting aside the natural causes).
- 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.