Being Evil by Luke Russell

Author:Luke Russell [Russell, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192606631
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

5

An Evil Person

We began this investigation into the nature of evil by engaging with a sceptical challenge. The sceptics believe in the reality of moral right and wrong, but they think that evil does not exist outside the realm of fiction, and hence they conclude that the concept of evil should have no place in contemporary moral thinking. In the preceding chapters I have set out what I hope to be a defensible secular account of evil action, according to which many real-world actions count as evil, including the atrocities committed by serial killers and war criminals. While this does address the question of whether evil is real, I have not yet engaged with another kind of objection raised by the sceptics; namely, that it is morally damaging and dangerous for people to think in terms of evil. In this chapter we will explore this particular sceptical challenge. I will try to show that it is connected to the question of what it would take for someone to be an evil person. As we shall see, there is a big difference between judging that someone has performed an evil action and judging that someone is an evil person. The latter judgement has additional implications, and is often made too quickly, without proper consideration of the evidence. I will claim that the genuine danger lies in this rush to dismiss wrongdoers as evil persons, rather than in the use of the concept of evil per se.

You may already be familiar with the idea that it is morally dangerous to use the category of evil. The knee-jerk condemnation of one’s opponents as evil—thinking that ‘Everyone who disagrees with me is Hitler’—is regularly mocked online, and rightly so. This kind of dysfunctional knee-jerk hostility shuts down debate, and blocks our ability to learn from disagreement. You may also be familiar with a more serious political criticism of those who use the language of evil to characterize social outsiders, including refugees and members of racial or religious minorities. According to this line of thinking, when we use the language of evil we demonize our opponents; we treat members of the out-group as if they were malicious beings who are scheming against us. We dehumanize them, holding them to be monsters or vermin. We write them off as things to be destroyed. Given that it is morally wrong to treat people in these ways, perhaps we have good reason not to use the language of evil. Some philosophers and historians, including Philip Cole and Inga Clendinnen, also claim that people use the category of evil as a pseudo-explanation of wrongdoing. When we look at someone who participated in the Rwandan genocide and say, ‘He did it because he was evil’, we may falsely believe that we have identified the cause of his wrongdoing, and that no further explanation of the atrocity is needed. Thinking in terms of evil may prevent us from identifying the social and historical contributing factors that often lie behind extreme wrongdoing. It threatens to make us reactionary, exclusionary, vengeful, and cold-hearted.

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