The following article is from Volume 26, Issue 1 of Free Inquiry
Let us rid the world of that dreaded concept evil. If the idea of evil has no place in philosophy, its days in politics should likewise be numbered.
Religion and theology seem to have a
monopoly on the concept of evil. Typically, it comes tightly packaged
as a theological question. The problem of evil finds its classical
expression in the Book of Job, which asks, “Why do the righteous
suffer?” Through its early history, Hebrew thought increasingly saw
the world as a battlefield between good and evil. And Satan later
came to represent all of the different forces of evil combined.
From time immemorial, philosophers have
had something to say about evil; they dealt with the concept before
and after Christians established a monopoly over the subject. The
relatively secular ancient Greeks had difficulties similar to those
that faced the Hebrews in explaining human suffering and misfortunes.
However, the Greeks had views of evil that differed significantly
from those held by Christians. For the Greek philosopher Plato, evil
represented the demiurge’s limitations in trying to create the
actual from the ideal. Christianity moved the locus of the problem of
evil from issues of divine creation (the area where Plato’s
demiurge operated) to concerns about human sinfulness. Within the
dominant version of Christian theology, God could not possibly have
any attributes of evil. Augustine saw evil as the absence of good
that manifested itself as a human and not as a divine limitation.
Evil, for Christians, had an “all too human face.”
The concept of evil often enters into
discussions of genocide and other grave injustices. I propose a
drastic solution to projects that rely on the concept of evil.
Philosophers who study genocide should discard the notion of evil,
since it seldom advances and often hinders an understanding of that
topic. As we have seen, evil most often comes packaged as a
theological problem. However, some scholars have launched a campaign
to (as the manifesto in a recent anthology, Rethinking Evil, states)
“recover the concept of evil for contemporary academic thought.”
I shall treat those contemporary theorists (including Amelie Rorty in
The Many Faces of Evil, Claudia Card in The Atrocity Paradigm, and
most recently and most notably, Susan Nieman in Evil in Modern
Thought) who have focused on the concept of evil as part of an
intellectual movement that I shall dub “Reconstructionism.” Yet,
Reconstructionists are not the primary targets. The real villain is
the commonplace appeal to the idea of evil when discussing genocide
and other injustices.
The so-called Reconstructionists, who
try to offset the religious monopoly of the concept of evil, begin
their project with Kant, the first philosopher to secularize the
concept of evil. Kant saw evil as a human failing, a deviation from
the acceptance of universal moral maxims. Evil arose when self-love
snatched control over moral sensibilities. The Holocaust, however,
radically altered the background conditions that Kant had assumed.
Kant’s sense of evil as a type of immoral maxim failed to capture
the depths of depravity that went under the heading of evil in the
twentieth century. As Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) observed in
Eichmann in Jerusalem, “The men of the eighteenth century did not
understand that there exists goodness beyond virtue and evil beyond
vice.” Arguably, more than any other twentieth-century philosopher,
Arendt boldly confronted the daunting task of reconceptualizing
Kant’s sense of evil to make it applicable to the magnitude of
contemporary horrors. At first, she saw evil as a demonic, systematic
dehumanization. Perhaps at the urging of her mentor Karl Jaspers, she
changed her original demonic definition of evil to a more pedestrian
one (the “banality of evil”). Reconstructionists carry on this
Kant-to-Arendt lineage.
Ideally, philosophical analysis should
clarify the meanings of terms such as evil and provide helpful
distinctions. Until relatively recently, theorists placed a wide
array of harms—from natural catastrophes (such as the 1775 Lisbon
earthquake) to moral failings (Auschwitz)—under the category of
evil. The Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1775, killed about 15,000
people. As Lisbon was a center of the Inquisition, the event stirred
considerable controversy among Catholics, Protestants, and
philosophers (including Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant). According to
the late Judith Shklar in her analysis, The Faces of Injustice, “It
was the last time that the ways of God to man were the subject of
general public debate and discussed by the finest minds of the day.”
Now, instead of one sense of evil to cover all horrors, philosophers
have developed a typology of natural (the 2004 tsunami) and moral
(Darfur?) evils. Arendt added a further distinction by suggesting
that these historical senses of evil differed from an altogether new
and modern sense of radical evil. For Arendt, “radical evil”
meant the systematic dehumanization of human beings first carried out
under the Nazi regime. However, Arendt and the Reconstructionists
placed a telling condition on their analyses of evil.
Accordingly, a philosophical analysis of evil should not only produce clear distinctions among types of evil, but it also must preserve a strong sense of moral outrage about evil. Raimond Gaita, in a recent, insightful philosophical study of evil (A Common Humanity), claims that “the moral dimensions are sometimes only adequately represented by a distinctive concept of evil.” This additional moral requirement places the secular theorists in a dilemma: it lands them in the same religious domain that they set out to escape, for moral outrage, historically, typically finds its expression in religious language. Arendt fell back into this religious domain when she tried to clarify the meaning of radical evil. In her study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she conjectured that radical evil implied “something beyond the pale of human sinfulness.” So, to make sense of radical evil, she found herself resorting to religious language by comparing it to sin. Secular theorists of evil, in general, have great difficulty in discarding entirely the historically entrenched religious framework that supports the concept of evil.
Philosophers of evil, at a minimum, should distance themselves from religion and especially from Christianity for three important reasons. First, given its primarily theological roots, use of the concept of evil lends itself to totalizing and determinative judgments. Condemnation of something as evil precludes making nuanced distinctions about it. Judgments become absolute; condemnation, inescapable. Saint Augustine’s (354–430) transformation of the Greco-Roman just-war traditions offers an illuminating example of how religious thinking totalizes secular thought. According to commentator Paul Christopher in The Ethics of War, the medieval period marked a critical juncture in the history of the rules of war. Augustine made a crucial break from Cicero’s just-war doctrine. “Defense and safety” no longer served as the primary justifications for war. A war ordained by God, according to Augustine, was a just one. As Christopher suggests: “Beginning with Augustine, war . . . became more than just a legal remedy for injustice; it became a moral imperative. . . .”
After Augustine, the rules of Christian
morality began to take precedence over legal rules. Augustine
justified war as a way not only to avenge the commission of crimes
but also to punish the commission of sins. The concepts of good and
evil began to taint and to supplant the concepts of the lawful and
the unlawful. According to Frederick Russell in his study The Just
War in the Middle Ages, “[Augustine’s] just war was thus total
and unlimited in its licit use of violence, for it not only avenged
the violation of existing legal rights but also avenged the moral
order injured by the sins of the guilty party regardless of injuries
done to the just party acting as a defender of that order.” In
other words, Augustine’s religious justification for war seemed to
open the door to greater harms and injuries than prior secular
justifications. Religious senses of evil, in general, lend themselves
to sweeping judgments and wholesale condemnations. As long as secular
attempts to understand evil remain tied to religious ones, secular
versions cannot escape the totalizing approach associated with
religious concepts and create a more refined sense of evil.
Second, when philosophers use the concept of evil, they often follow unwittingly and unfortunately a path first carved out by theology. Although the enormity of the Holocaust made a few theologians question God’s existence, most of them dealt with Auschwitz within the framework of the age-old problem of evil. Theologians faced the task of reconciling the evil of Auschwitz with divine creation and providence. While theologians could fit Auschwitz into their religious paradigms, philosophers tried to describe and explain it without having the comfort of a traditional framework that theologians had. Philosophers did not have a powerful secular vocabulary to describe and analyze Auschwitz. Concepts such as “vice,” “wickedness,” and “cruelty” seemed wholly inadequate. The concept of evil gave philosophers a way to deal with Auschwitz, for the term evil seemed to capture the extreme moral outrage needed to describe it.
Most important, the application of the
concept of evil seemed to make the incomprehensible comprehensible.
To admit that evil in the form of the Holocaust is incomprehensible
is, as Kenneth Seeskin conjectures, to deny that we have a general
theory to answer to the most important questions: “How could people
with outward signs of rationality drive the trains or drop the
crystals into the gas chambers? How could millions of other people
look on as they did?” In essence, the concept of evil allows us to
make the categorical judgment that the Nazis world was “a universe
without redeeming value.” So we have come full circle, back to a
label that seemingly captures our utmost moral indignation.
Calling Auschwitz incomprehensible
trades on an ambiguity. Auschwitz and other incidences of grave
injustices are not incomprehensible, if we mean that they defy any
rational explanation. Certainly, Auschwitz calls for a continuing
investigation into the causes and conditions that led to it, and that
task falls easily within the gambit of reason. If by incomprehensible
we mean that Auschwitz defies justification, then that shows the
power of ethical reasoning, not its limitations. No plausible ethical
system could justify Ted Bundy killing scores of women. So, in that
sense, his actions remain in a certain sense incomprehensible. Yet,
we have no trouble trying to comprehend Bundy’s deeds in the sense
of trying to understand their etiology.
Further, finding a grave injustice
incomprehensible potentially undercuts investigations into its
causes. Although they both use the concept of evil, philosophers and
theologians approach the issue differently. While the recognition of
the horror as an evil signals the start of the analytic process for
theologians, it marks, in a sense, the end of it for philosophers,
with the acceptance of the label of “evil” for Auschwitz
establishing an end point. This ready incorporation of the concept of
evil into philosophy stops conceptual analysis and stifles political
action at just the places where they should begin. Category words
such as evil often substitute for analysis by fostering the pretense
that to label a phenomenon is to explain it.
Philosophers could choose to break free
completely from the theological stranglehold. A rejection of the old
theologically laden vocabulary opens a door for creating a new way of
talking about global horrors. Yet this would be a Pyrrhic victory,
since it would be tantamount to accepting the cosmic and totalizing
dimensions of the concept of evil without using the word evil itself.
The philosophical analysis would be a theological one in
philosophical clothing. Arendt tried to blaze a middle path between
relying on the old religious language and creating a new one. She
refused either to accept the traditional way of talking or to create
neologisms. Instead, she encouraged new ways of thinking about evil
by associating it with contorted versions of ordinary words like
banality. Arendt’s work stirred a great deal of controversy.
However, these debates focused more on her use of the word banality
and less on her analysis of the evil.
Despite Arendt’s inventiveness, the
concept of evil serves the same function in her analysis as it does
in other theological and philosophical ones. The concept of evil,
under the guise of making the incomprehensible comprehensible, stops
the analysis at just the point where it should begin. By itself, this
refurbished concept of evil still leaves us with important unanswered
questions about the nature of the horror and its relationship to
other horrors, the nature and responsibility of the perpetrator, and
the designation of the victims.
Overall, theological and philosophical
theories of evil represent noble efforts to make the incomprehensible
comprehensible, to tame a beast—a creature so horrific that its
existence challenges the bounds of human understanding. Theology has
approached this challenge burdened by a sanitized, divine conception
of the good that makes worldly occurrences of the bad inherently
problematic. Philosophers who attempt to secularize the concept of
evil follow the trail blazed by theologians, but they repeatedly run
into barriers when they try to deviate from the theological track and
try to chart their own paths. These difficulties highlight the need
for a new paradigm to grapple with the problem of how to deal with
Auschwitzes, past and future.
A third reason that philosophers should
avoid using the religious idea of evil is so that they can escape the
tangles of theological conundrums and formulate new goals. The
religious paradigm contextualizes evil in the form of a puzzle
embedded, quite naturally, in religion. Within Christian doctrine,
evil presents a phenomenon that needs to be explained away. How can a
world created by a benevolent God contain so much evil? The
philosophical Reconstructionists also think of evil in the context of
a puzzle. How can some humans be so deplorably cruel to other humans?
Reconstructionists set out to establish a (nonreligious) moral and
political philosophical foundation for judging evil acts and
evildoers.
Reconstructionists extrapolate from
individual psychology to social psychology and from individual ethics
to political philosophy. Only after they have delved into social
psychology and political philosophy do they entertain any legal
questions. In Rethinking Evil, Maria Pia Lara expresses the task,
order, and hope of the project: “If we can construct moral and
political concepts that best comprehend the meaning of evil deeds,
and the agency and responsibility of cruelty, then legal institutions
must proceed to translate these meanings into the realm of positive
law. . . .”
Often, philosophers uncritically accept
a conceptual hierarchy within their discipline. In value theory,
political philosophers build on a prior foundation of ethics. Only
after these philosophers have laid a foundation of moral theory and
then constructed a first floor of political philosophy do they issue
permits to build a second floor of legal philosophy. I want to use a
somewhat reversed “natural” disciplinary order of importance by
placing legal philosophy at the center of a philosophical approach to
the study of genocide and other injustices.
If a critical component of any approach
to evil is to establish grounds for judging evil acts and evildoers,
then legal philosophy should play the central role in the analysis. A
much more nuanced analysis should result when we situate the problem
within the context of legal institutions. Legal codification has
produced refined distinctions, such as that between genocide and
crimes against humanity. In effect, a different puzzle requires a
different paradigm than the ones provided by theologians and
Reconstructionists. If the challenge is not to explain evil
theologically or philosophically but to ascribe legal responsibility,
then we need an entirely different paradigm. To position themselves
to make contributions to international justice and global ethics,
philosophers should not only distance themselves from religious
senses of evil, but also, they should abandon the idea of evil
entirely and focus on injustices.
Politicians should heed that advice as well, for the concept of evil makes them see dangers when there are none and to ignore injustices where they are rampant. Further, politicians should turn to the complexities of international legal codes rather than to the oversimplifications of theological pronouncements.
Thomas W. Simon teaches philosophy at Illinois State University, where he also chaired the department. He was the ISU College of Arts and Sciences Scholar of the Year in 2002. He holds a doctorate from Washington University and a law degree from the University of Illinois. His research focuses on global injustices and on minority issues. He regularly consults for the United Nations (Working Group on Minorities) and the American Bar Association (Central/Eastern European Law Initiative).
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