Making Sense of Evil

An Interdisciplinary Approach

Melissa Dearey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137308801
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

When it comes to crime, everyone seems to take evil seriously as an explanatory concept - except criminologists. This book asks why, and why not, through exploring a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to evil from the perspectives of theology, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, and the social sciences.

Part I

Evil in Philosophy, Theology and Religion

1

Theodicy: Understanding the Problem of Evil

The first way of making sense of evil that we will consider is distinguished by its attempt to adapt study of evil as much as possible to the classic philosophical principles of rational/logical knowledge and coherence, known as theodicy. More precisely we will look at what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called the onto-theological problem of theodicy, drawing as it does upon the ancient and classical domains of ontology, the philosophical study of being (including metaphysical realities and entities), and theology (the study of God, faith and religious beliefs). From a contemporary modern and secular (or perhaps more properly ‘laicized’) perspective, theodicy can appear to be confounding and archaic. For some, even considering such a theory of evil feels like a recursive step backward to a bygone and primitive age where myth and superstition as opposed to scientific knowledge and reason ruled. In modern times, it seems odd and counterproductive to try to reconcile the basic elements of theodicy together in a coherent whole—God, other transcendent worlds and their (possible) inhabitants and faith on the one hand, with human rationality and knowledge of our physical world with its real-life suffering on the other—but this is precisely what theodicy attempts to do, utilizing the core principles of modern rational thought. But rather than being what is ‘ ... a pale version of itself, a boutique topic’ (Fuller, 2011: 93), theodicy still has much to offer in terms of revealing aspects of the phenomenology of evil in a (post)modern contemporary world. As the sociologist Steve Fuller (2011: 93) puts it, by ‘sociologising’ theodicy we can increase our understanding of evil and learn how to ‘suffer smart’ in the twenty-first century. In a global world that continues to be beset by many and persistent evils, the problems of distributive and social justice, competition for scarce resources and the management and dispersal of risk between and across the human and non-human animal and natural environments, such an engagement with evil becomes a moral and practical imperative. Being able to ‘make sense’ of evil in this regard is all the more pressing in such a complex global world in which the future consequences of our actions and inactions are ever more difficult to regulate, control and predict.

The types of rationality utilized in the panoply of theodicies are themselves hugely diverse, covering a wide range of philosophical, theological and latterly sociological theories and concepts, so for reasons of space we can examine but a few. In this chapter, I will try to provide an overview or map of theodicy as a way of thinking about and trying to make sense of and in many ways ‘discipline’ evil from the perspective of human cognition. This is a mode or model of thinking about evil that has been used in very different and creative ways by some of the greatest minds of the past to test and develop methods of thinking about evil and how we should deal with it as something that is intrinsic to and revelatory of the human condition; evil as something elemental to being human as created and fallible beings. In accordance with the aim of this book, I will explore theodicy from a criminological perspective, that is to say, how it helps explain evils of a criminal type, things that criminal/deviant actors do that cause suffering and harm to victims, and what the implications of theodicy is for the criminal justice system as well as notions of wrongdoing, innocence, culpability, justice and reform more generally. Drawing mainly from Paul Ricoeur’s essay on theodicy (1984), but also considering some of the classic theodicies of Leibniz, Bayle, Saint Augustine and Malthus, this chapter traces theodicy primarily from the rational but also Gnostic and mythic traditions. I will conclude this chapter by taking into consideration other more recent commentaries on theodicy and reflecting upon its potential as a way of analysing the challenge of evil for criminology today.

What is theodicy?

Theodicy or ‘the problem of evil’ has this basic and simple structure:

God is omnipotent, omniscient and all good (and exists!)
God created the universe
Yet evil exists.

How are we to make the first two premises consistent with the last? How are these basic truths to be reconciled? Why would a benevolent, loving God allow the pain and suffering that accrue from evil to exist in the world? And if He is all powerful, all knowing and benevolent, then why didn’t He create us to be all good? Or why doesn’t He do something to prevent it? These are the sorts of questions that have both inspired and dogged theodicy arguments.

The term ‘theodicy’ is probably most commonly associated with the seventeenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646– 1716), presumably because his book on the subject of evil was entitled Theodicy (1709), although the term has been traced back as far as the ancient Greeks and treated by far too many theologians and philosophers to list here. Actually, Leibniz’s interest in evil spanned the whole of his intellectual life, being the subject of his very first and last published works (Murray, 2005). Among his other contributions to the study of evil and philosophy as a whole, which we are really only able to sketch here (there are a wealth of critical commentaries available for further research, some of which are listed in the References), Leibniz is probably most famous for his declaration that this is the ‘best of all possible worlds’, and this basically sums up his argument in relation to the fundamental premises of theodicy outlined above. The philosopher Susan Neiman (2002) describes Leibniz’s theodicy rather cleverly as portraying God to be like a diligent housewife in a market, carefully weighing up the options before choosing only the best for (in this scenario) His cosmic brood (this being us, you and me and everyone who ever did and ever will exist). The main problem with this image is that it implicitly depicts God as somewhat limited in His capacities (what philosophers have labelled the ‘underachiever problem’ (Murray, 2005)) whereby God is for some reason unable or possibly even unwilling to create a world without evil, but is nevertheless caring and compassionate by at least trying to do His best by the creatures He created and (possibly also) creation.

So on this reading, God is possibly not so powerful or putatively benevolent after all. While the implied denial of the perfect attributes of omnipotence or goodness to God here may seem a bit harsh, possibly even heretical or contradictory, a brief consideration of the alternatives might show Leibniz’s theodicy in a better light. Consider, for example, the resolution of the theodicy from other perspectives such as that provided by the seventeenth-century French philosopher Pierre Bayle (for a more detailed sketch of which I would refer readers to Neiman, 2002: 34–35). Philosophers have labelled this the ‘holiness problem’ (Murray, 2005), but we may put it another way, drawing upon a common phrase drawn from contemporary popular culture, ‘It’s all good’. What Bayle means by this is that whatever evil there is in the world, it’s all OK because it is part of God’s plan and, therefore, by definition, good, and it will all be resolved in the end (e.g. by way of messiah appearance, apocalypse, final judgement, eternal reward, whatever). Instead of sidelining the divine attribute of God’s omnipotence in favour of His well-intentioned (if imperfect) benevolence, as Leibniz does, theodicies like Bayle’s rather emphasize God’s eternal power and His inscrutable (from the perspective of human reason) knowledge and will. God is God after all; He can do what He wants for whatever reason He wants, even breaking His own moral laws and allowing, even making, people suffer if that’s what He chooses to do. But in the end, it’s all ‘good’ because the rules don’t apply to God and it will all make sense according to His final purpose, and at the end of the day, that’s all that really matters. Hence, the holiness problem: the God who is, by ‘virtue’ of His own divine powers, actually quite wicked and monstrous, possibly even evil, by condoning or sanctioning human suffering while being able to prevent it but choosing not to do so because He has other purposes in mind. And so, we have our first set of dualities in relation to theodicy reasoning, in this case, about God Himself: is God an underachiever or a power freak? Is this the best of all possible worlds or is it a divine moral free-for-all? Is God a loving if imperfect carer or a wicked monster?

Ricoeur’s (1984) seminal essay on the onto-theological problem of evil may shine some light on what will be a familiar theme in the study of evil as the questions above suggest. As Ricoeur astutely notes, the first thing that we can see in the constitution of the problem of theodicy is the construction of a stark and recurring duality, that is to say, a polarization of good and evil into two main strands: (1) the power and goodness of God on the one hand; and (2) the persistence of evil and humanity on the other, each in apparent contradistinction to each other. The problem of evil as modelled on theodicy is to make these fit into a single, coherent argument, but nevertheless these dualities persist, often with God on one side and the realities of human wrongdoing and suffering on the other. Ricoeur argues that this approach is consistent with a particularly Western and rationalist view of the nature of the problem of evil: i.e. situating the mutually exclusive and oppositional categories of good and evil. And, indeed, in general cultural discourse we are all familiar with such dualisms and dichotomies regarding the good versus evil binary to this day: black/white; this/that; either/or; one or the other; and ne’er the twain shall meet sort of thing. But while this may be logical, rational and in some respects comforting, it ignores aspects of feeling, action and everyday real-life experiences that are central to both the unfolding, understanding, dealing with, struggling against and seeking to prevent and come to terms with evil. The reality is that such binaries of absolute good on one hand and completely dastardly evil on the other, while certainly not unknown, are relatively speaking quite rare—regardless of whether or not the actors involved or divine, demonic, human or some combination thereof. Usually, there is some contamination by one of the other, some diabolically vexing mix of goodness and wickedness that makes the issue of separating the good wheat from the evil chaff downright consternating to try to sort out and clean up. The reality is that we are often victims and perpetrators in the acts of evil that cause suffering, trauma and harm. And it would seem that this is becoming more the case with the further development of global capitalism and its complex web of technologies and market economies that implicate us in the unintentional commission of human suffering and damage to the natural environment, often on a grand scale, affecting people and places far removed from us geographically as a result of our everyday activities as consumers at home. Consider also the numerous and polarized arguments on social phenomena such as the London riots of 2011, where it is difficult if not impossible to establish clear and stable boundaries in terms of who precisely are the victims and who are the victimized, even in close proximity, despite it being generally agreed that some of what happened was very bad indeed, and is symptomatic of an unfolding moral and social crisis. Somehow just labelling those caught on CCTV as ‘evil’ does not help solve or prevent such instances of crime and harm.

When it comes to trying to make sense of evil in terms of identifying the ‘facts’ and setting out the ‘real story’ of what has happened, this kind of fundamental disagreement and polarization of views is often observable, especially in explanations put forth via the print, broadcast and social media. This is not just a consternating anachronism or conundrum of rational, syllogistic logic that leaves us feeling at our wits’ end and bemused by things that don’t go together and won’t make sense; this is what in philosophical terms is an ‘aporia’—something that requires a new way of perceiving things and of thinking about them. But the issues at stake are not just abstractly philosophical; when evil has occurred, they are deeply emotional and often passionately felt. So who gets to say, who decides what is what and who is who in these axial debates, or is it all destined to descend into a cacophony of conflicting, arguing voices in which one side demonizes the other and exonerates itself from moral responsibility and hence the need for action, punishment or change? Do we accept things as they are as the best that they can possibly be, or resign ourselves to the ethos that in the end it’s ‘all good’?

There are currently many books and articles available that analyse the nature and meaning of evil from philosophical and cultural/media perspectives; rather than restate these, I will turn my attention to evil from the viewpoint of criminology. We take recourse to the kind of thinking and modelling enshrined in the theodicy to underpin and provide a foundation for some very important sociopolitical discourses and also systems and institutions that many millions of people come into contact with and in some ways rely upon, their lives either healed or destroyed as a result: possibly the most important example being the criminal justice system. This dualism at the heart of theodicy accords with a particularly logical-rational and also juridical (and thereby criminological) articulation of the problem of evil. According to these accounts, as Ricoeur (1984) explains, evil in the form of experiences of things like sin, suffering and harm is further bifurcated in other dualisms, this time in evil as:

• wrongdoing (actions that are blameworthy and actor(s) who are prone to guilt); and

• suffering (those acted against who are blameless, those left crying out for justice).

This derivative duality belongs to what Ricoeur calls two further heterogeneous categories that are particularly amenable to and familiar from the prospect of criminology: that of blame and lament. Something bad has happened, someone has been harmed, someone or some group is/are guilty and to blame, and they must be identified, accused, found guilty and punished to express remorse and made not to do it again. And not coincidentally, this is basically the remit of the criminal justice system from the police to the courts to prison and after—to take notice of, find and separate the criminals from the rest of us and deal with them appropriately, punishing first and rehabilitating them after so that they offend no more. Penal law is, as noted by the eminent criminologist Nils Christie (2001), ‘ ... oriented towards finding responsibility of guilt ... ’; penal law is built

... upon dichotomies, either guilty or not guilty. A decision of ‘half guilty’ does not count. Truth-Commissions, they are in a way relieved from the dichotomies. They can think in continuums; it was bad what he did, awful, but certain acts were OK. If the total picture was of a character that made him ‘guilty’, that is not central in the description.

Within penal law it has also to be a personalized guilt.

Christie (2001: online)

Aside from newer developments like Truth Commissions, that’s the central idea that more or less shapes the institutional plan of the modern criminal justice system, however that is articulated and put into practice, and it is one fundamentally based on theodicy as a philosophical model and the individual as a culpable (and potentially redeemable) moral agent.

To briefly summarize then, in theodicy, evil first distinguishes itself as the opposite of absolute goodness (personified by God) and second manifests itself in human reality as suffering, further dividing into what Ricoeur calls the heterogeneous categories of blame and lament, guilt and punishment, reform and healing, each pair of which are two sides of the same coin, as it were, different and discordant but deeply interconnected in the delivery of justice (as discussed below). A consequence of these derivative dualities that spin off from the original theodicy duality of good and evil is that the focal point is very much on moral evil or the evil that is or pertains to the human as a primary source—as offender and victim. The effect of theodicy is that God starts to fade into the background a bit, and becomes distanced from His creation in many respects, and certainly from the evil that humans experience and are responsible for—a feature of theodicy that will be even more in evidence in the rationalist theodicy of Rene Descartes (discussed in the next chapter). And in many ways, this is understandable from a common-sense perspective, if only because the task of trying to understand God’s role and purpose in this whole problem is frustratingly speculative, and a matter that over the course of modernity will become more recalcitrantly theological and removed from the other scholarly disciplines. So, while ‘the God question’ doesn’t totally disappear, it does become somewhat devolved into the realm of religion, theology and (occasionally) metaphysics, distanced from the evil that humans are morally responsible for and that human beings do.

As God recedes into the background, any reliable absolutes that can help anchor and orient the system of (modern) rationalist ethics go with Him. What we then get is a proliferation of new and increasingly unstable dualisms founded in world of human agency and morality— the choices we make and the things that we do—originating, as we have seen, with the dualism of blame and lament.

• Blame is specifically linked to the realm of human action, being a violation of a prevailing code of conduct and thus attracting the declaration of guilt and the assignment of punishment. In the face of human suffering, blame is the beginning of how we assign culpability to one or more (human) agents who are responsible and ultimately answerable for the evil that has taken place.

• Lament takes place where suffering has been endured by a person or group upon which evil has befallen, where they were not responsible for making it happen—whether through the intentional or unintentional actions of someone else, natural disaster, accident, illness, death or some other affliction.

Lament is where we typically expect to find victims. Throughout this book we are interested primarily in human (as opposed to natural) evil, that which takes place as a result of the intentional action of one or more actors; but it is important, nevertheless, to note that evil is not solely the preserve of human activity. Certainly, the issue of natural disasters, as a genre of human evil, which result from human activities that can be traced to things like climate change puts the distinction between natural and human evil into a new and challenging light. But for now, we will mark and generally observe the distinction between natural and moral evils as more or less distinct.

The point being made here by Ricoeur (1984) in his discussion of blame and lament is that both philosophy and theology have tended to think of evil as the common and singular root of both wrongdoing and suffering. Hence, the polarity of wrongdoing and suffering, and of blame and lament have become in our way of thinking intimately linked. This is epitomized in the notion of guilt, which in most Western societies bridges the gap existing between the dualisms of blame and lament, wrongdoing and suffering, the evil that is committed and the evil that is undergone. The apportionment of guilt (to one or more human agents), therefore, becomes the key dynamic in making sense of and dealing with evil, and in many ways, the sole factor, from a practical standpoint and from the subjective point of view of many victims and other bystanders.

This bridging of guilt can be observed in the intentional infliction of pain in the form of punishment (e.g. deprivation of liberty, shame, humiliation) on the wrongdoer, which is in itself not evil. To reiterate, the intentional infliction of pain by one or more human beings upon another and the production of lament (remorse) is not in itself evil, not according to theodicy. In fact, based on this model, it is good, because (depending upo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I: Evil in Philosophy, Theology and Religion
• Part II: Evil and Narrative
• Part III: Evil and the Social Sciences
• References
• Index