Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil

Robin May Schott, Robin May Schott

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780253027740
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

"This volume advances philosophical discussions of evil and terrorism in ways that only those working from a feminist perspective would be able to do." —Tracy Isaacs, The University of Western Ontario Any glance at the contemporary history of the world shows that the problem of evil is a central concern for people everywhere. In the last few years, terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, and ethnic and religious wars have only emphasized humanity's seemingly insatiable capacity for violence. In Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil, Robin May Schott brings an international group of contemporary feminist philosophers into debates on evil and terrorism. The invaluable essays collected here consider gender-specific evils such as the Salem witch trials, women's suffering during the Holocaust, mass rape in Bosnia, and repression under the Taliban, as well as more generalized acts of violence such as the 9/11 bombings, the Madrid train station bombings, and violence against political prisoners. Readers of this sobering volume will find resources for understanding the vulnerability of human existence and what is at stake in the problem of evil. "This recent collection is part of the current genre of works that present uniformly well-argued essays by women philosophers on topics that specifically reference women, in this case with respect to the problem of evil... Those who are interested in evil and the moral complexity of the present will find numerous insights in this collection... Recommended." — Choice

1 Evil, Terrorism, and Gender

Robin May Schott

Why Discuss Evil Now?

If anyone should think that evil is a problem of the past and not of the present, a glance at the history of the twentieth century proves otherwise. In that century, the atrocities of war escalated dramatically; between 1900 and 1990, there were over four times as many war deaths as in the preceding four hundred years. In 1990 battlefields included Afghanistan, Angola, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liberia, Mozambique, Peru, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Tibet (Vickers 1993, 2). To these one must add the battles of the Gulf War and the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. And if Americans thought that events that give rise to reflections on evil matter to other peoples but not to them, then they came to a rude awakening on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The Special Issue of Hypatia on Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil, which appeared in the winter and spring of 2003, was conceived well before the terrorist attacks on 9/11. By that time, I had already collected a substantial body of feminist reflections on evil. These essays covered a range of historical and theoretical issues, from the sixteenth-century witch hunts to the genocides and war rapes of the twentieth century, from an analysis of American popular ideology with its belief that every cloud has a silver lining to an analysis of the texts of leading women philosophers.

Five days after the attacks, Laurie Shrage, co-editor of Hypatia, made the suggestion that I expand the special issue on evil to include a forum on terrorism, with short commentaries by feminist philosophers invited to write on the recent tragedies. Given the willingness of conservative intellectuals and politicians to point to the existence of “the radical evil emanating from the Muslim world” (Peretz 2001), the pressing question was whether the term evil could be used in reference to these terrorist attacks. And given the fact that all the suicide attackers were male; that according to reports in the New York Times on September 15, three of the terrorists had spent a few hundred dollars on lap dances and drinks at a Daytona Beach strip club the night before the attack; and that young male Muslim suicide bombers are reportedly promised that they will be greeted by seventy black-eyed virgins in heaven, the question of gender seemed troublingly relevant.¹ On September 11, women and men alike were victims of this terrible tragedy. Can feminist perspectives provide insights for understanding and responding to terrorism?

The urgency of these questions has increased rather than decreased in importance over the last four years. We find ourselves now in what some writers have called the “9/11 syndrome,” in which the events of 9/11 are viewed as a turning point in global politics. The 9/11 syndrome refers to the responses to the terrorist attacks on the United States, including the renewed faith in violence, the resurgence of narrow definitions of nationalism, and the intensification of an us/them mentality with regard to racial, ethnic, and religious differences. Here one can refer to the enlargement of the “zone of mistrust” that extends beyond the usual black/white divide in the United States (Joseph and Sharma 2003, xi–xv).²

The conviction that animates my work on this book is that evil is indeed one of the central issues of our time. Such a conviction is hardly new. The problem of evil is older than the story of Job, a just and faithful man who experienced evil events through the loss of family, health, and property. His story poses the question: Why should any individual or community, especially those who seek to live justly, suffer inexplicably? Job ultimately accepted the voice of God from the whirlwind, recognized that humans are not competent to judge whether God is just, and was redeemed. Many of Job’s successors have followed his example by demanding an explanation of unjust suffering, but have refused to accept Job’s solution. For modern authors, it is not God but human beings who become judges of the significance of evil in human affairs (Cicovacki 2001, 83–94).

The problem of evil has haunted modern thought. Susan Neiman writes in Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy that one can read modern philosophy as a story about how to make sense of a world that is ineradicably a place of suffering (2002, 2). The specifically modern conception of evil refers to moral evils, to evils that human beings are responsible for, as opposed to the catastrophes of natural disasters or the suffering implicit in the finitude of the world, which were earlier classified as forms of evil. Joan Copjec observes that Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) enacted a conceptual revolution by which evil “ceases to be a religious or metaphysical problem and becomes, for the first time, a political, moral and pedagogical problem” (Copjec 1996, xi). By situating evil as an effect of freedom rather than of human finitude, Kant opened the way to what María Pía Lara calls a postmetaphysical understanding of evil (2001, 1).

The proposal that the story of evil is the central story of modernity is bound to meet resistance. Typically, we are presented with the story of the Enlightenment as marking the triumph of human reason and the irrepressible march of progress in history in technological, scientific, rational, and ethical domains. Yet a closer look at the work of Kant, who is taken to be the paragon of this position, shows a different story. In his late work on Religion, Kant set out to analyze the “radical innate evil in human nature” ([1793] 1996, 80).³ He explains evil ultimately through the human capacity for freedom: “The human being is evil cannot mean anything else than that he is conscious of the moral law and yet has incorporated into his maxim the (occasional) deviation from it” (79). Kant’s story of radical evil tells us that evil is intrinsic to human existence because we are not transparent to ourselves and because there is always a dimension of self-alienation in human freedom. Kant’s story tells us that evil is fundamentally a collective condition. He wrote, for example, that when he speaks of the human being as good or evil, he means not individuals but the whole species (74). And since evil is a collective condition, the overcoming of evil is a collective historical task. Kant’s essay “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), published just two years after his book on religion, took the collective problem of war as the central problem of evil and the overcoming of all wars as the central historical task of humankind. His view of the collective dimension of evil is eerily prescient of the dilemmas of the present. So is his demand that the world order be reorganized in order to eliminate the conditions that tend to war.

Twentieth-century thinkers had good reason to take Kant’s views about the link between evil and war to heart. But when Hannah Arendt declared in 1945, “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe,” she was wrong (Bernstein 1996, 137). As Richard Bernstein notes, most postwar intellectuals avoided addressing the problem of evil directly. But evil did become a fundamental problem for Arendt’s work, and the last decade has seen a renewed interest in reflecting on the problems of evil.

The current resurgence of intellectual interest in the question of evil in the United States and Western Europe can be explained by at least three factors. The first is the psychological effect of the proximity of the evils that have marked the 1990s. While atrocities in Africa—represented as a racialized other, as Sherene Razack notes in this volume—may not seem threateningly close, the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia do hold that threat. Yugoslavia was, after all, the place for numerous conferences and vacations for Western Europeans and Americans alike, and hence the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia hit close to home. The second factor is connected to changes in historical consciousness that have taken place through the burgeoning of literature and scholarship on the Holocaust, especially the publishing of people’s memoirs after decades of silence. This literature has led to a greater awareness about genocides in general, although philosophers after Arendt have been slower than other researchers in turning their attention to this theme. The third factor is linked to changes in the philosophical discourse of the last decades. Ewa Ziarek notes in the Hypatia “Special Cluster on Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil” that evil is an inherent inspiration of postmodern reflection, which focuses on the irreducible dimension of antagonism and power in discourse, embodiment, and politics (Ziarek 2001, 1).

It hardly needs to be said that developments since 9/11 have intensified public intellectuals’ interest in the problem of evil. Here it is important to distinguish between philosophical concepts of evil and the rhetoric of evil. The political rhetoric of evil has deservedly received a bad name. Recall former president Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars rhetoric denouncing the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire.” Now that the United States and Russia have entered into a new NATO brotherhood, President George W. Bush has found other countries to target as part of the “axis of evil”: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (State of the Union Address 2002). But does this rhetoric mean that the term evil can have no meaning in moral, social, or political domains? Many thinkers have worked to develop definitions of evil that are both conceptually sound and can be guides for assessing the behavior of individual and collective subjects. One example is Claudia Card’s definition of evil as “foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrongdoings” (2002, 3).

We would do well to bear this definition in mind when evaluating the decision of U.S. officials to ignore the Geneva Convention. Recent instances of abuse are reported by Human Rights Watch, which described soldiers’ accounts of abusing Persons Under Control (PUCs) in Iraq by “smoking” detainees—exhausting them with physical exercise to the point of unconsciousness or forcing them to hold painful positions for extended amounts of time—and by “fucking” detainees—beating or torturing them severely. One sergeant reported, “Everyone in camp knew [that] if you wanted to work out your frustration, you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport….” The officer quoted in the Human Rights Watch report believes the abuses he witnessed in both Afghanistan and Iraq were caused by President Bush’s 2002 decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions to detainees captured in Afghanistan: “We knew where the Geneva Conventions drew the line, but then you get that confusion when the Sec Def [Secretary of Defense] and the President make that statement [that Geneva did not apply to detainees]…. Had I thought we were following the Geneva Conventions, as an officer I would have investigated what was clearly a very suspicious situation” (Human Rights Watch 2005). The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported on the pattern of abuses at Abu Ghraib—the prison formerly used by Saddam Hussein’s forces under his regime and now run by the American military. Abuses occurred at every stage, from arrest to final internment, and included handcuffing with tight (plastic) flexi-cuffs; threats of imminent executions and reprisals against family members; being held naked in solitary confinement with insufficient sleep, food, or water; being paraded naked before other prisoners; exposure to loud music; and prolonged sun exposure. Coalition Forces intelligence officers told the ICRC that between 70 and 90 percent of detainees were arrested by mistake (Randall 2004).

These actions by the American military violate international human rights conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners in wartime, as does the CIA’s secret use of prisons outside of the United States to interrogate suspected terrorists (Carr 2005). Hence, these actions are unjust. Are they also evil? The answer to this question, I think, is yes. These physical and psychic abuses are instances of foreseeable intolerable harm. And the convictions of seven soldiers at Abu Ghraib point to their culpability.⁴ But why is the language of injustice inadequate to characterize these abuses? Why should we turn to a moral language that goes beyond the language of social and juridical relations? The post-metaphysical approach to evil focuses on the human origin of evil, but so does a juridical approach. What does the language of evil do that the language of injustice does not? Does the term evil provide an emotional intensification of discourse linked to a sense of revulsion? And does this emotional shock help us develop the ability to make judgments? I agree with María Pía Lara that the language of evil can shock us with new meanings and stimulate a reorientation in our thinking. Narratives of negative examplaries, such as the story of Adolf Eichmann or the stories of the American inquisitors in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo Bay, can be linked to what Jürgen Habermas calls learning by catastrophes (Lara 2007). Some individuals, such as the American interrogator in Iraq who later admitted to the helplessness, rage, and sadism that was unleashed in him when he was instructed to get harsher with the prisoners, do learn from their wrongs. When you feel that you are entirely in control of other human beings and they refuse to do what you want, he explained, you will do anything do get your way—even unleashing dogs on them while they are blindfolded or breaking their bones. Other perpetrators of evil actions, such as the Nazi head of the Einsatzgruppe responsible for the mass murder of civilians, who never admitted that he committed atrocities, never learn from their wrongs. But we who read their stories learn by holding ourselves and our leaders to account.

Hannah Arendt caught sight of another important function of the concept of evil in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Radical evil, she argued, “has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.” For Arendt, what was at stake in the Nazi death factories was not the well-known evil motives of “greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power and cowardice.” She wrote, “human nature as such is at stake” (1951/1973, 459). What is at stake in totalitarianism, and when democratic governments employ abuses known under totalitarian regimes, is the annihilation of the co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Evil, Terrorism, and Gender
• Part One: Feminist Perspectives on Evil: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
• Part Two: Forum on September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives on Terrorism
• List of Contributors
• Index