The Manifestation Account of Evil

This article defends a novel definition of evil. An action is evil if (1) a pro-attitude (or complete indifference) towards severe harm to a sentient being is (2) manifested in the action. The manifestation can take either of two forms: expressing the pro-attitude or attempting to realize its object. In order to exclude cases where the pro-attitude is the result of a positive attitude and the action does therefore not count as evil, the pro-attitude (3) must be generated from a morally reprehensible attitude such as greed or sadistic pleasure. As an implication of this definition, not every evil action is extremely bad, and some ‘merely’ wrong acts might be worse than some evil acts.

Dying Badly

This chapter traces how arts of dying migrate from devotional texts into homiletic dramas and finally to the commercial playhouse between 1570 and 1590, around the same time that anti-theatrical condemnations of the stage as inherently blasphemous come to cultural prominence. Theater constitutes an important site of religious instruction and theological investigation not despite, but rather because of, its blasphemous potential. William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience, and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus all employ parodies of ars moriendi ideas to represent evil action. Parody arts of dying help dramatize a predestinarian cosmos where distinctions between the elect and the reprobate are fundamental, yet invisible to humans. The bad deaths in these plays function like negative theologies, manifesting and explicating divine will through attempted departures from it. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe brings the reprobate parodist into focus alongside the divine parodied and makes the magician’s vicious death a site for analyzing human agency. As practices of dying are inverted into theatrical arts of dying badly, Elizabethan dramatists discover occasions to explore the nature of action and the forms of agency available in situations of extreme constraint or privation.

Was ist eine böse Handlung?

What is the nature of evil action? My thesis is that perpetrators and victims of evil inhabit an asymmetrical relation of power; the strength of the more powerful party lies in its ability to exploit the other’s fundamental vulnerability, and the weaker party is vulnerable precisely insofar as it is directly dependent on the more powerful party for the satisfaction of its fundamental needs. The fundamental vulnerabilities that are exploited correspond to features essential to our humanity (ontological), moral personhood (personal), and individuality (characteristic). These kinds of vulnerabilities are both constituted by and engender fundamental needs and give rise to direct dependencies on others to satisfy or to refrain from interfering with the satisfaction of fundamental needs. The unambiguous exploitation by the more powerful agent on whom the vulnerable directly depend is characteristic of evil action. Although I do not claim that the exploitation of ontological, personal, and characteristic vulnerabilities necessarily results in evil, it does typify it.

Rethinking the Thin-Thick Distinction among Theories of Evil (and Then Rereading Arendt)

According to a standard interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s remarks about evil, she had a psychologically thin conception of evil action. This paper has two aims. First, I argue that the distinction between psychological thinness and thickness is poorly conceived, at least as it commonly applies to theories of evil action. And second, I argue that, according to a better conception of the thin-thick distinction, Arendt is being misinterpreted.

KETIKA MEMBUNUH MENJADI SEBUAH PENYELESAIAN: SEBUAH TINJAUAN FENOMENOLOGIS MENGENAI TINDAKAN SESEORANG MELAKUKAN PEMBUNUHAN

Murder is an evil action to take the soul of others. Everyone can be a murderer. Sociocultural background such as: age, sex, socio-economic, ethnic, and religion is not the reason for someone to kill others. Many factors make someone decide to kill others. One of the factors is known as killing motive. This qualitative research used the primary data. The subject were 5 people. There were 4 motives to kill, they are polygamy, money, debt, and frustration.