Remembering the Victims

This chapter engages with Claudia Card claim that we can only ever understand evil by focusing on its victims to insist that evils are reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by inexcusable wrongs. From this, the chapter identifies that her analysis works on two distinct, but related, levels: Conceptually speaking, Card maintains that good and evil are distinct, but evil is distinguished from lesser wrongs, and all are defined by degrees. Experientially speaking, she recognises that agents often find themselves in situations that require actions that are not clearly good or evil. She develops this through Primo Levi’s notion of ‘grey zones,’ which entail the creation of extremely stressful spaces or relationships wherein victims become perpetrators of evil against other victims. This brings her analysis into the socio-political realm, and so is reminiscence of Arendt’s approach, while, by linking grey zones to diabolical evil, she departs from Kant’s rejection of the latter form of evil: for Card, there is an absolute, diabolical form of evil entailing evil done for its own sake. In positing this notion, she returns us to an absolute conception of evil that had long been downplayed by secular theories of evil.

Schelling and the Metaphysics of Evil

This chapter examines Schelling’s 1809 essay Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom to argue that it contains one of the most sophisticated challenges to Kant’s theory. Schelling criticises Augustine’s insistence that evil entails a privation of being by developing an original account of metaphysics and, by extension, evil that maintains that being entails an autopoietic process whereby a dark, chaotic, differentiating abyss expresses itself in actual, empirical being. By associating evil with this dark abyss, Schelling holds that ‘evil’ not only has actual being, but forms the differentiating foundation of actual existence. This brings Schelling to engage with the question of why some individuals choose to actualise this dark abyss while others do not. In contrast to Kant’s appeal to an unknowable noumenal decision orientated to the good that can be subsequently overcome, Schelling suggests that the choice of evil is an unconscious one that cannot subsequently be altered. The chapter concludes by raising two critical questions regarding Schelling’s analysis.

Kant on Radical Evil

This chapter argues that with Kant’s critical philosophy, the metaphysical and epistemological premises of the Christian tradition were severely criticised, which, in turn, led to a new conception of morality and evil based on the decision of autonomous, moral agents. Focusing on the late Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason reveals that Kant’s alternative conception of radical evil refers to the choice of a moral maxim that turns away from the moral law. The chapter outlines the conceptual schema and problematic orientating Kant’s analysis, namely his claim that the individual is constituted by an original natural disposition (Anlage) to the good and an innate propensity (Hang) to evil, before concluding by examining Kant’s claim that overcoming ‘evil’ is possible, despite his recognition that its grounding in individual noumenal freedom means that it is not possible to explain how this is possible.

Descartes and the Evil of Error

This chapter engages with Rene Descartes’s analysis of evil in the Meditations of First Philosophy, in which evil is linked to human error rather than, as Christianity had tended to maintain, being an effect of a malevolent cosmic being. Specifically, Descartes holds that evil emanates from the improper use of human cognition, namely when the infinite will oversteps the finite knowledge that properly belongs to human judgement. However, because the latter is given by God, departing from it is to depart from God, which re-enforces one of the central meanings that evil had for the Judeo-Christian tradition. This chapter concludes that Descartes’s account of evil is important because he links the topic to epistemological questions, while his focus on the relationship between human will and evil develops the Augustinian approach in a way that lays the groundwork for Kant’s thinking on the topic.

Introduction

While Western moral, philosophical, and theological thought has historically privileged the good,1 this privileging has been accompanied by profound, if subterranean, interest in evil. In what follows, I set out to chart a history of evil as it has been thought within this tradition. A number of studies have recently traced different conceptions of evil from the eighteenth century onwards....

The Perpetrators of Evil

This chapter outlines John Kekes’s attempt to develop a perpetrator-based account of evil that holds that evil entails undeserved harms inflicted on others. This leads him to distinguish between different types and degrees of harm, as well as to develop what he calls a ‘character-based’ morality against the historically dominant ‘choice-morality.’ However, he also claims that evil is not simply caused by the actions of individuals but emanates from the conditions of life itself, including contingency, indifference, and destructiveness. Because these induce the harm that Kekes associates with evil, he concludes that evil is in-built into human existence. However, while there is no escaping all forms of evil, Kekes introduces the notion of moral desert to argue that the job of morality is to face evil and ensure that it is suffered only to the extent that it is deserved based on the actions and hence character of the individual. The implication being that some individuals deserve to suffer the evils that befall them whereas others suffer evil without deserving it. The conclusion identifies a number of problems inherent in Kekes’s account.

Castoriadis: Evil and the Social Imaginary

This chapter engages with Cornelius Castoriadis’s analysis of the ways in which the meaning of (moral) concepts is generated. It starts by outlining Castoriadis’s critique of Lacan’s symbolic account of meaning generation to show that he rejects Lacan’s claim that it occurs through anonymous differential linguistic symbolic relations, to instead claim that it happens through the anonymous, collective, social-historical imaginary of each society. With this, Castoriadis suggests that existence and meaning ‘evil’, including the narrative and myths associated with it, depends on the social imaginary of each society. Evil is then part of the ways in which a society and the individuals composing it create a narrative to construct its/their self-understanding.

Nietzsche and the Genealogy of Evil

This chapter demonstrates that Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals argues that, rather than being ahistoric, moral concepts are inherently historical. Focusing on its first essay, this chapter shows that Nietzsche’s approach (1) undercut the histories and thus justifications underpinning the Christian and Kantian frameworks, (2) demonstrates that the moral categories historically used in Western thinking are semiotically heterogeneous, and (3) shows that the meaning of moral concepts generally and ‘evil’ specifically are rooted in dynamic semiotic relations that are determined socially by heterogeneous and ever-changing power relations. ‘Evil’ as a moral category is not, then, an objective, ahistoric category, but one borne from a particular worldview and semiotic system. In turn, this shows that the meaning of this concept is dependent upon changing, heterogeneous, power relations manifested through pre-personal, socio-historical interactions and relations.

Leibniz and Theodicy: Evil as the Good

This chapter takes up Leibniz’s theodicy to show that while he agrees with Descartes that God’s creation is linked to His will, Leibniz claims that God’s will is an effect of His knowledge. This is not arbitrary, which would call into question the notion of ‘truth,’ but is based on the Idea that defines the unchanging essence of each thing. God must, then, create in accordance with the Idea of each particular thing, meaning that there is determinacy to His actions. God is further constrained in what He can create by virtue of His goodness: He must create the best of all possible worlds. Leibniz supports this through the introduction of a number of conceptual innovations, namely the distinction between natural, moral, and metaphysical evils and that between God’s antecedent and consequential wills. The result is a conception of evil that holds it to be a necessary part of God’s plan for existence, which admits the least amount of evil required for God to create the best of all possible worlds.

Aquinas, Privation, and Original Sin

This chapter focuses on Thomas Aquinas’ analysis of evil in On Evil to respond to three questions: (1) how does Aquinas conceptualise the relationship between good and evil? (2) what does Aquinas understand by the notion of original sin? And (3) what role does the body play in Aquinas’ conception of evil? The argument developed shows that, while Aquinas is influenced by Augustine, he departs from Augustine in a number of subtle, but important ways, particularly relating to the relationship between good and evil and, linked to this, his conceptualisation of the body and, indeed, the role that the body plays in his analysis.