Moral Evil

Andrew Michael Flescher

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781626160118
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia etica e morale

The idea of moral evil has always held a special place in philosophy and theology because the existence of evil has implications for the dignity of the human and the limits of human action. Andrew Michael Flescher proposes four interpretations of evil, drawing on philosophical and theological sources and using them to trace through history the moral traditions that are associated with them.

The first model, evil as the presence of badness, offers a traditional dualistic model represented by Manicheanism. The second, evil leading to goodness through suffering, presents a theological interpretation known as theodicy. Absence of badness—that is, evil as a social construction—is the third model. The fourth, evil as the absence of goodness, describes when evil exists in lieu of the good—the "privation" thesis staked out nearly two millennia ago by Christian theologian St. Augustine. Flescher extends this fourth model—evil as privation—into a fifth, which incorporates a virtue ethic. Drawing original connections between Augustine and Aristotle, Flescher's fifth model emphasizes the formation of altruistic habits that can lead us to better moral choices throughout our lives.

Flescher eschews the temptation to think of human agents who commit evil as outside the norm of human experience. Instead, through the honing of moral skills and the practice of attending to the needs of others to a greater degree than we currently do, Flescher offers a plausible and hopeful approach to the reality of moral evil.

CHAPTER ONE

Evil versus Goodness

Satan and Other “Evildoers”

“If I’ve learned anything through these many years of research, it’s that Carolyn’s choices were a bit like the choices a tree on a windy shoreline has in deciding how tall and how bent to grow. Sure, others, as for example, George Washington and Mahatma Gandhi, were probably able to produce real changes in their neurobiological makeup through their conscious choices— strengthening their top-down control even if they were unable to adjust their bottom-up passions…. But what of those, like Carolyn, who don’t seem to have the requisite neural apparatus to understand that there is a problem, not with drinking, or with others, but rather, with themselves? What motivation could such a person have to even attempt a change?”

—BARBARA OAKLEY, Evil Genes
(commenting on her sister’s apparent lack of free will)

The Standard View of Evil

THE IDEA OF MORAL EVIL has always held a special place in philosophical and theological systems of thought because the existence of evil has implications for the dignity with which and the limits within which we act. Moral culpability is made possible by our ability to choose to do terrible things or to refrain from doing good things. Philosophically, the categories of moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness depend on the prospect of our being able to act or not act one way when we have the capacity to act otherwise. Theologically, the whole point to being humans made in God’s image is that we are neither beasts enslaved to act on appetite alone nor automatons whose actions are exhaustively predetermined by mechanisms of which we are not aware. This means that among the things implied in the standard view of free will is the notion that when we act we also create. Through our own volitional force we change the world in important, if small, ways. Were it not for our decision making, the course of human history would have proceeded differently, according to an endless chain of events begun long ago and beyond anyone’s capacity to alter. All human dignity is bound up with the human ability and human desire to make that little difference. Clearly, regardless of whether we in fact have free will, we are motivated to acknowledge free will. With free will come independence, responsibility, and dignity. Because these are features of creaturely existence that elevate us, they have become important aspects of how evil is recognized and understood. In the standard view, the concepts of moral evil and moral agency therefore go hand in hand. When we talk about moral evil in the standard view, we are also talking about personal responsibility, which depends on our being able to make meaningful choices about how to act and live.

The standard view recognizes that at times we are helpless. At such moments we lack the moral resources to overcome the default course of events. On these occasions we encounter evil from the outside as the advent of horrific circumstances for which we are not morally responsible, and of such an overwhelming magnitude that we are simply unable to interpret our encounter as something any milder. When this occurs, our freedom is limited and we are at our most like the other animals. According to the standard view, however, our encounter with evil is not exhaustively characterized by such encounters. Evil so great that every time we encountered it we also succumbed would impinge on human freedom and dignity too extensively for us to afford a recognizably human picture of ourselves. The upshot of the standard view, which embraces a robust notion of free will, is a “thesis of containment” according to which evil exists but can also be fought. Evil is not so debilitating that we become impotent to respond to it, or so overbearing that we cannot survive it. Rather, in the standard view, evil is understood as a character-defining test that pushes human virtue and resilience to their limits. A world in which evil is mere nuisance is as pointless as a world in which evil inevitably destroys everything in its path.

It follows that theodicy is compatible with the standard view. Within the framework of theodicy, evil is the means by which meaning is affirmed within human existence: Our dignity accrues in proportion to our wherewithal to endure a trial whose advent is beyond our control, but whose duration we have the capacity to outlast. William James captures the optimistic flavor of the thesis of containment at work within most religious worldviews in a passage from The Varieties of Religious Experience: “In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan’s neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend’s figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there—that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”¹ Religion’s secret, James asserts, is its ability outwardly to accept evil as a perennial condition of human existence but inwardly to provide practitioners with the faith that this evil is to “be permanently overcome.”² Secularized theodicies come more in the form of accessible aphorisms such as “everything happens for a reason,” or “without pain we would not know pleasure,” but retain the prophetic character of traditional theodicies. In both cases, faith in a future “both here and not yet” trumps a present characterized by suffering and rampant injustice. Indeed, suffering is redemptive. According to James, we are in the big picture better off with a world that has evil, as long as the forces of evil do not gain too much control. The extent to which what I have called the thesis of containment does empirical justice to the range and depth of suffering human beings experience in this world is a matter of considerable debate and will become a primary issue in chapter 2. However, the thesis already needs to be underscored, to emphasize the counterintuitive observation that under the right parameters evil not only is not necessarily conducive to despair, it also actually reinforces the idea that this world ultimately has meaning. What this, in turn, means is that in spite of the multiple times we will as a matter of course stumble upon evil, we also have a motivation to model and remodel evil—to introduce it—as problematic within our religious traditions and as a recognizable obstacle within the larger cultural milieu.

This process of modeling evil is not without its dangers. David Frankfurter, a historian of religion examining the phenomenon of satanic cults (which he suggests the media and others helped create), argues that our drive to participate in the extermination of evil is so powerful that we actually create conflict where there previously was none.

Evil is a discourse, a way of representing things and shaping our experience of things, not some force in itself. The most horrible atrocities … can and must be rendered sensible as human actions with proper contexts…. If there is an irony, then it lies not in my having to describe the experience of evil in its extreme but rather in the fact that, in every one of the historical cases I address, it was a myth of evil conspiracy that mobilized people in large numbers to astounding acts of brutality against accused conspirators. That is, the real atrocities of history seem to take place not in the perverse ceremonies of some evil cult but rather in the course of purging such cults from the world. Real evil happens when people speak of evil.³

Frankfurter seeks to expose “demonic conspiracies” whose participants are obsessively preoccupied with cults and heretics. Their understanding of evil, he argues, deflects attention from the cumbersome, ongoing burden of self-reflection and regards our existing norms as beyond reproach.

Frankfurter’s criticism of the way in which the word evil is so often rhetorically deployed leads to a second key feature of the standard view central to the project of modeling evil. This is the assumption that evil pertains to something that exists substantively, apart from the self, prowling with impunity and without permission as an uninvited intruder on the human scene. Some thinkers’ term of choice for this referent is the “Gothic,” wherein evil is understood to be a grotesque, suprahuman force whose candidate for membership among human beings qua human beings is out of the question.⁴ To us, the evil other is as a cancer whose reasons we neither fully manage nor care to understand. Like cancer, it attacks without explanation. It paradigmatically manifests itself in the faceless terrorist or the serial rapist. We cannot get through to the evil other, but we do not need to do so, for what is essential is to protect ourselves from its impingement on our world.

No doubt it behooves us to recognize that some individuals and groups are so given to cruelty that they relinquish their potential to be gripped by any appeal to empathize with their victims. Still, it is instructive that once the Gothic model as a template for our understanding of evil takes hold, it easily gives way to a set of binaries. These binaries are reflected in the familiar slogans of our headlines. Columbine is recast as a battle between believers of Christ and an underground that has forsaken him; the war on terror is characterized as a matter of the defenders of freedom versus freedom’s deniers. Often this dichotomizing results in a simplified ideology of essentialism, which, in the political sphere, translates into what freelance writer Danny Postel has termed an “ontology of alterity.”⁵ Postel uses this phrase in a review of John Gray’s book Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, in which he criticizes Gray for treating certain ethnic and religious entities as monolithic, and for dismissing out of hand ecumenical hopes of peaceful coexistence among diverse cultures and civilizations. Gray’s diatribe against universalism reminds Postel of Samuel Huntington’s controversial but popular thesis about the belief in the incommensurability of Arab culture and the West.⁶ Postel takes both authors to task for suggesting that we are long past the era of trying to grasp one another in our particularity, and for insisting that today the stakes are too high not to accept that groups of human beings are ineluctably given to divergent, clashing values. An upshot of such othering is the shunning of nuance and self-examination.⁷ Evil remains a linguistic weapon used to demonize whatever the current “them” is with which “we” happen to be concerned. Evil, runs this criticism, is rhetorically deployed to help avoid the burden of turning inward and engaging in genuine self-judgment. The concern, then, is that the Gothic view of evil is both descriptively false and normatively evasive.

On the other hand, something about evil is strange and life-stultifying, in that encounters with evil interrupt the rhythm and comfortable dependability of normal existence. Also, hypothetically, reflections about evil that result from our fear of it do not have to devolve into a dichotomization between an us and a them. Indeed, evil could be conceived as a dark, unwelcome, substantive intrusion within the self. As the psychologist Terry Cooper notes, it is plausible that we have a shadow self, our own Mr. Hyde who corresponds to a more recognizable Dr. Jekyll, who, the more we suppress and try to quarantine him or her, hates us back the more and manifests in rebellious and self-sabotaging ways.⁸ In Cooper’s account, evil is essentially a “hatred of others that may very well begin with a hatred of ourselves.”⁹ According to Cooper, we are all susceptible to this shadow self, which becomes increasingly diabolical and inhuman the more we ignore it.¹⁰ Cooper’s observation suggests, without identifying explicit perpetrators and victims, the possibility of a depoliticized understanding of evil along Gothic lines in which evil is understood to attack human beings ubiquitously, from without. In this case evil might lose its tribal dimension but nevertheless retain an impenetrable and unalterable character. Evil would still not be collapsible into the good, but neither would it be easily dismissible by critics as mythologization.

Is this more charitable view of a Gothic understanding of evil intellectually sustainable? What are the advantages of construing evil as the opposite of good, as the presence of badness, as I characterized the Manichean view in the introduction? With what system of thought did such a model gain traction and why does it continue to hold such an appeal today?

Manicheanism and the Idea of Satan

Attempting to guide the healing of Asclepius, god of medicine, the ranking deity Hermes Trismegistus prophetically warns,

You must not then, my pupils, speak as many do, who say that God ought by all means to have freed the world from evil. To those who speak thus, not a word ought to be said in answer; but for your sake I will pursue my argument, and therewith explain this. It was beyond God’s power to put a stop to evil, and expel it from the universe; for evil is present in the world in such sort that it is manifestly an inseparable part thereof…. I will say that there are daemons who dwell with us here on earth, and others who dwell above us in the lower air, and others again, whose abode is in the purest part of the air, where no mist or cloud can be, and where no disturbance is caused by the motion of any of the heavenly bodies. And the souls which have transgressed the rules of piety, when they depart from the body, are handed over to these daemons, and are swept and hurled to and fro in those strata of the air which teem with fire and hail. The one safeguard is piety. Over the pious man neither the evil daemon nor destiny has dominion; for God saves the pious from every ill. Piety is the one and only good among men.¹¹

In this passage Hermes Trismegistus forecasts the conditions under which evil was meant to be countered according to second-century BCE Gnostic cosmology: as something from which to flee or as something to eradicate, but in either case something we are fundamentally unable to alter.¹² Existing independently of and correspondingly seeking always to undo the good, evil, in the Gnostic view, justified a culture of fear that inspired the narrow remedy of obedient cultic observance. Once firmly in the grip of the King of Darkness, there was nothing for a mortal to do, the Gnostics believed, but languish. Salvation for most mortals remained available via consultation with specialized ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction “Evil” and Evil
• Chapter One Evil versus Goodness: Satan and other “Evildoers”
• Chapter Two Evil as the Good in Disguise: Theodicy and the Crisis of Meaning
• Chapter Three Evil as “Evil”: Perspectivalism and the Construction of Evil
• Chapter Four Evil as the Absence of Goodness: Privation and the Ubiquity of Wickedness
• Chapter Five Evil as Inaction: Augustine, Aristotle, and Connecting the Thesis of Privation to Virtue Ethics
• Bibliography
• Index