Series Editor’s Foreword
Oxford Philosophical Concepts (OPC) offers an innovative approach to philosophy’s past and its relation to other disciplines. As a series, it is unique in exploring the transformations of central philosophical concepts from their ancient sources to their modern use.
OPC has several goals: to make it easier for historians to contextualize key concepts in the history of philosophy, to render that history accessible to a wide audience, and to enliven contemporary discussions by displaying the rich and varied sources of philosophical concepts still in use today. The means to these goals are simple enough: eminent scholars come together to rethink a central concept in philosophy’s past. The point of this rethinking is not to offer a broad overview, but to identify problems the concept was originally supposed to solve and investigate how approaches to them shifted over time, sometimes radically. Recent scholarship has made evident the benefits of reexamining the standard narratives about western philosophy. OPC’s editors look beyond the canon and explore their concepts over a wide philosophical landscape. Each volume traces a notion from its inception as a solution to specific problems through its historical transformations to its modern use, all the while acknowledging its historical context. Each OPC volume is a history of its concept in that it tells a story about changing solutions to its well defined problem. Many editors have found it appropriate to include long-ignored writings drawn from the
Islamic and Jewish traditions and the philosophical contributions of women. Volumes also explore ideas drawn from Buddhist, Chinese, Indian, and other philosophical cultures when doing so adds an especially helpful new perspective. By combining scholarly innovation with focused and astute analysis, OPC encourages a deeper understanding of our philosophical past and present.
One of the most innovative features of OPC is its recognition that philosophy bears a rich relation to art, music, literature, religion, science, and other cultural practices. The series speaks to the need for informed interdisciplinary exchanges. Its editors assume that the most difficult and profound philosophical ideas can be made comprehensible to a large audience and that materials not strictly philosophical often bear a significant relevance to philosophy. To this end, each OPC volume includes Reflections. These are short stand-alone essays written by specialists in art, music, literature, theology, science, or cultural studies that reflect on the concept from their own disciplinary perspectives. The goal of these essays is to enliven, enrich, and exemplify the volume’s concept and reconsider the boundary between philosophical and extra-philosophical materials. OPC’s Reflections display the benefits of using philosophical concepts and distinctions in areas that are not strictly philosophical and encourage philosophers to move beyond the borders of their discipline as presently conceived.
The volumes of OPC arrive at an auspicious moment. Many philosophers are keen to invigorate the discipline. OPC aims to provoke philosophical imaginations by uncovering the brilliant twists and unforeseen turns of philosophy’s past.
Christia Mercer
Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy
Columbia University in the City of New York
Preface
The concept of evil is primordial. Depictions of a malevolent power or a dark force that stands against the good and engenders chaos, suffering, and ruin are found in almost every literary, cultural and religious tradition. Our ancestors typically regarded evil as something with which they had to reckon and cope rather than as something they could abjure or eradicate. Early on, such coping might have involved elaborate ceremonies and myths, as well as various forms of propitiation and fetishism. Later there were sacred texts, epic poems, public spectacles, and private exorcisms.
There was also philosophy. Philosophical accounts of evil—theories about its nature, scope, and source—were a central part of the human effort to reckon and cope. In the western tradition, such theories were prominent from the very beginning all the way through to the high enlightenment. At some point during the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, however, the concept developed an archaic or almost magical flavor, especially in more scientifically minded circles, to the point where literal applications of it became rare outside of liturgical contexts (“and deliver us from . . . ”). This trend remained intact, despite the horrors of the twentieth century and the efforts of some Holocaust theorists to revive the concept. By the millennium’s turn, many people in the west had become accustomed to thinking of “evil” as a term used only for ironic emphasis (see Google’s corporate code of
conduct) or with reference to intensely malevolent individuals (Satan, Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson) and fictions (Iago in Othello, Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, and BOB in Twin Peaks).
A minor reversal of conceptual fortune occurred after the attacks of September 11, 2001. “Evil” was suddenly and vociferously in use again—by political and religious leaders, as well as journalists and talk show hosts—to describe various terrorist acts. To some, the term became essential: politicians, in particular, used it (sincerely or not) as a way to project moral clarity and signal their allegiances, often in the hopes of gaining popular support for legislative or military actions. Around the same time, a group of academic philosophers and psychologists (the so- called evil revivalists) began to argue that the concept of evil should be rehabilitated in scholarly circles, too, since it offers the only way to set apart particularly malevolent and intense forms of badness.1
To others, however, this public rehabilitation of “evil” seemed anachronistic, embarrassing, and worrisome. Yes, the terrorist attacks were bad, wrong, atrocious, and even cowardly;2 and, yes, they clearly caused immense misfortune, trauma, and harm. But evil? The concern here is motivated not only by misgivings about magical thinking but also by the awareness that, historically, when cultures publicly denounce
1 See chapter 1 for some discussion of this debate. For more, see Todd Calder, “The Concept of Evil,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 ed.), Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/win2016/entries/concept-evil/; and Luke Russell, Evil: A Philosophical Investigation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
2 Bill Maher’s long-running show Politically Incorrect was canceled (allegedly) in response to his on-air suggestion that Mohammed Atta and the other 9/11 attackers may have been bad people but were certainly not cowards. Slavoj Žižek and Jean Baudrillard likewise faced criticism for suggesting that there was something sublime in the collapse and burn of the twin towers, and that watching it over and over again on cable news made it seem “like snuff pornography versus ordinary sado-maso porno movies.” See Slavoj Žižek, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Reflections on WTC, Third Version,” The Symptom. 2 (2002), http://lacan.com/desertsymf.htm;) and Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002). In that moment of collective shock and lamentation, only very negative assessment terms (“cowardly,” “radical,” and especially “evil”) were acceptable.
something as “evil,” this has often been precursor to scapegoating and even more violence.3
My own ambivalent awareness of this conceptual revival effort in the public sphere, together with (i) my childhood experience of the concept in a traditional religious context and (ii) a sense that the philosophical history of evil is not well understood, made me eager to edit this book. Doing so in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series seemed ideal, since these volumes feature not only a chronologically structured series of philosophical essays but also supplemental, cross-disciplinary Reflections that add variety, context, and depth. The cross-disciplinary part is particularly crucial in the case of evil: much of the imagistic and affective content that we associate with the concept arises from its depictions in ceremonies, literature, art, film, and music.
In the end, I wouldn’t say that Evil was cursed, exactly, but bringing it to press involved an uncanny number of challenges and delays. After a workshop at Columbia (generously funded by Columbia, Cornell, and Oxford University Press) at which around half of the current authors worked through early drafts of their essays, it took years to get the final drafts together. In the process, the volume evolved and expanded, and the list of authors changed somewhat. I’m grateful to those original contributors for their patience, to the new authors for their willingness to join a project already underway, and to Christia Mercer (series editor of the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series) and Peter Ohlin (philosophy editor at Oxford University Press, United States) for their long-suffering counsel and support.
The essays and Reflections published here offer a unique, timely, and (in my biased view) absorbing history of the concept of evil, from its beginnings in the Hebrew, Greek, and Islamic traditions, to its prominent roles in recent debates about evolutionary theory and the Holocaust. Unlike other monographs and multi-author volumes on
3 For evidence of this with respect to Satanic cults, see David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
evil, this one is both philosophical and yet not primarily concerned with the “problem of evil.” Philosophers of religion tend to focus on the “problem,” and value theorists tend to ignore the concept altogether. Histories of the idea of evil, on the other hand, are more likely to be found in anthropology, psychology, religious studies, or even forensic science. A book that features professional philosophers discussing the history of the concept of evil rather than the problem thereof is, as far as I know, unique.
Inevitably, there is a lingering “Evil Wish List” on my desktop that includes all the other chapters I’d like to have included if there were time and space enough. The really glaring absence (a privation, even) is a set of chapters describing the way evil is conceived in non-western contexts (Indian, Chinese, Shinto, Zoroastrian). We invited some entries in these areas, but each fell through for different reasons, and in the end we decided to go to press rather than delay publication any further. The wish list also includes Reflections on Iago, Milton, Kurtz, money (the root of all evil), the evil eye, exorcism, cannibalism, and even whales (i.e., MobyDick). Life is short, however, and Evil has already taken too long.
For crucial contributions during the early stages of the work, my thanks are owed to Scott MacDonald at Cornell, Alex Madva at Columbia, and Lucy Randall at OUP. Samuel Schechter’s help was essential in the later stages of compiling and copy-editing; his work was sponsored by the Norman Kretzmann Undergraduate Research fund in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. My own contributions were finished while I was a visiting scholar in the Philosophy Department at Stanford University.
This is not a Festschrift, but the volume is nonetheless dedicated to the memory of Marilyn McCord Adams—a friend and mentor to many of the contributors, and a leading scholar of evil who was involved in early stages of the project but who died of pancreatic cancer a year before it was completed. Although she focused on the theological problem of evil more than most of the contributors here, Marilyn also
manifested a combination of historical sensitivity, virtuosity with difficult texts, philosophic rigor, cross-disciplinary breadth, and existential seriousness that is a model for anyone working on the topic. This volume is dedicated to her, in gratitude and in hope.
Berlin, September 2018
Contributors
Wesley Chan was an early product innovator at Google. He founded and launched several of Google’s most successful products, including Google Analytics and Google Voice. He has received fourteen US patents for his work building Google’s advertising system. He was also an investment partner on Google Ventures before leaving the company in 2014.
Andrew Chignell is Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor at Princeton University, with appointments in the Departments of Religion and Philosophy, and in the University Center for Human Values. He has published articles on Kant, early modern philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of religion, and is currently working on Kantian theories of hope. His book Knowledge and Belief in Kant: Making Room for Metaphysics is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Brian Davies is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University and the author of numerous publications in medieval philosophy and philosophy of religion. His books include The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (Continuum, 2006), Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil (Oxford, 2011), and Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa Theologiae”: A Guide and Commentary (Oxford, 2014).
Silvia De Toffoli is a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. She holds a PhD in mathematics from the Technical University of Berlin (2013) and a PhD in philosophy from Stanford (2018). Her research focuses on issues concerning the epistemological and cognitive roles of
visualization and diagrams in different fields of contemporary mathematics. She is also interested in the aesthetic dimensions of mathematics and in the intersection between philosophy and literature.
Jennifer L. Geddes is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Kafka’s Ethics of Interpretation: Between Tyranny and Despair (Northwestern, 2016), as well as numerous works on evil, the Holocaust, and ethics. She is the editor of Evil after Postmodernism (Routledge, 2001) and (with John K. Roth and Jules Simon) of The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Nadja Germann is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her previous publications are chiefly in philosophy of language, epistemology, theory of cognition, natural philosophy, and metaphysics in premodern and Arabic-Islamic thought. She is currently working on a book dedicated to the emergence of medieval logic and philosophy of language.
Matthew C. Halteman is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College and a fellow in the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. He is the author of Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation (Humane Society of the United States, 2010) and co-editor (with Andrew Chignell and Terence Cuneo) of Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments About the Ethics of Eating (Routledge, 2016).
Esther J. Hamori is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Union Theological Seminary. She is the author of Women’s Divination in Biblical Literature: Prophecy, Necromancy, and Other Arts of Knowledge (Yale, 2015) and “When Gods Were Men”: The Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern Literature (De Gruyter, 2008).
George Huxford had a long career in information technology working for a US multinational, after which he returned to study philosophy at King’s College, London. He was recently awarded a PhD for a dissertation entitled “The Scope and Development of Kant’s Theodicy.” His main interests are in the philosophy of religion and Kant’s moral philosophy. His most recent publication is “Evil, The Laws of Nature, and Miracles” in Kant Yearbook (2018).
Rachana Kamtekar is a professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, where she specializes in ancient philosophy but also takes
an interest in contemporary moral psychology. She has published numerous articles on ancient ethics, politics, and psychology, and a monograph, Plato’s Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, the Divided Soul, and the Desire for Good (Oxford, 2017).
Peter King is Professor of Philosophy and of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He has published many translations, critical editions, and articles on medieval philosophy; his current research is on the history of the philosophy of psychology.
Christy Mag Uidhir is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. He is the author of Art and Art-Attempts (Oxford, 2013) and editor of Art and Abstract Objects (Oxford, 2013). He also edits the blog “Aesthetics for Birds.”
Avishai Margalit is Israeli Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011, he served as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is author of numerous articles and books in philosophy and public affairs, including The Decent Society (Harvard, 2006) and On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton, 2010).
Eric Martin is an assistant professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Baylor University. His main interests lie in the philosophy and history of science, with a special focus on life sciences. In addition to working on evolutionary theory in the twentieth century, he is also focused on biological organization, classification, and the use of heuristics in biological research, such as the notion of “continuity.” Other areas of expertise include environmental philosophy, naturalism and religion, and the history of philosophy of science.
Gabriel Motzkin is the former Director of the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem and Emeritus Ahad Ha’am Chair in Philosophy at Hebrew University. He has published numerous works on the philosophy of history, secularization theory, memory theory, and Heidegger. He is co- editor (with Y. Fischer) of Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe (Alliance Publishing Trust, 2008).
Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, and the author of numerous books, which have been translated into nine languages. They include Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin (Schocken, 1992), The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (Oxford, 1994), Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, 2002; revised Princeton Classics Edition 2015), Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists (Princeton 2009), Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015) and Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019). She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften and the American Philosophical Society.
Samuel Newlands is William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Collegiate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely on early modern philosophy, including his recent Reconceiving Spinoza (Oxford, 2018). He also co-directs the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame.
Carol A. Newsom is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Old Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She is the author of scores of articles in biblical studies and seven books, including The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imagination (Oxford, 2009).
Dominic J. O’Meara is Professor Emeritus at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and an expert in ancient Greek philosophy and Platonism. His books include Pythagoras Revived. Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford 1989), Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads (Oxford, 1993), The Structure of Being and the Search for the Good: Essays on Ancient and Medieval Platonism (Ashgate, 1998), Platonopolis: Political Philosophy in Late Antique Philosophy (Oxford, 2003), and Cosmology and Politics in Plato’s Later Works (Cambridge, 2017).
Derk Pereboom is Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University, with expertise in philosophy of mind, free will, Kant, philosophy of religion, and existentialism. His books include Living without Free Will (Cambridge, 2001), Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (Oxford, 2011), and Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford, 2014).
Sarah K. Pinnock received her PhD in philosophy of religion from Yale University. She is Professor and Chairperson of the Religion Department at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and received a Fulbright fellowship for Latvia in 2006-2007. Her publications include “Atrocity and Ambiguity: Recent Developments in Christian Holocaust Responses” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2007) and Beyond Theodicy: Jewish and Christian Continental Thinkers Respond to the Holocaust (SUNY, 2002).
She is also the author of “Atrocity and Ambiguity: Recent Developments in Christian Holocaust Responses” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2007) and Beyond Theodicy: Jewish and Christian Continental Thinkers respond to the Holocaust (SUNY, 2002).
Antonia Ruppel received her PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge. She was the Townsend Lecturer in the Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit languages at Cornell University for nearly a decade, and is currently involved in a research project on Sanskrit syntax at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Absolute Constructions in Early Indo-European (Cambridge, 2012) and The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (Cambridge, 2017).
Elaine Sisman is Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University and has published numerous studies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. She was elected to Honorary Membership in the American Musicological Society in 2011 and became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.
Eleonore Stump is Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. She is also Honorary Professor at Wuhan University and at the Logos Institute, St. Andrews, and a Professorial Fellow at Australian Catholic University. She has published extensively in philosophy of religion, contemporary metaphysics, and medieval philosophy. Her books include Aquinas (2003), Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (2010), and Atonement (2018). She has given the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen (2003), the Wilde lectures at Oxford (2006), the Stewart lectures at Princeton (2009), and the Stanton lectures at Cambridge (2018). She is past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and
the American Philosophical Association, Central Division; and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Eric Watkins is Professor of Philosophy at University of California, San Diego, and author of articles on Kant, modern philosophy, and the philosophy of science. He has translated and edited numerous volumes, including Kant’s own published work in natural science (Cambridge, 2012). He is also the author of Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge, 2005).
Clark West did his doctoral work in Religion at Syracuse University on the medieval resignatio ad infernum doctrine. He is a writer and photographer living in northeast Ohio and was most recently employed as the Episcopal chaplain at Cornell University.
Allen Wood is Ruth Norman Halls Professor of Philosophy at University of Indiana, Bloomington. He is the author of Kant’s Moral Religion (Cornell, 1970, reissued 2009), Kant’s Rational Theology (Cornell, 1978, reissued 2009), Karl Marx (Routledge, 1981, 2nd expanded edition 2004), Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge, 1990), Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge, 1999), Unsettling Obligations (Stanford CSLI, 2002), Kant (Blackwell, 2004), Kantian Ethics (Cambridge, 2008), The Free Development of Each: Studies in Reason, Right and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy (Oxford, 2014), Fichte’s Ethical Thought (Oxford, 2016), and Kant and Religion (Cambridge, 2019). He is also general editor (with Paul Guyer) of The Cambridge Edition of Kant’s Writings in English Translation, for which he has edited, translated, or otherwise contributed to six volumes.
Introduction
Andrew Chignell j
Those who inquire concerning where Evil enters into beings, or rather into a certain order of beings, would be making the best beginning if they established, first of all, what precisely Evil is.
1. Evil Questions
“Evil” and its semantic relatives in the Germanic branch of Indo-European have referred, over time, to suffering and wrongdoing as well as to latrines, bowel movements, spoiled fruit, diseases, prostitution, and (oddly enough) forks. The first two meanings survive in English, but the nonironic use of the term is rare outside of ceremonial and literary contexts. In fact, speaking of evil often feels like an odd exercise in anachronism— like speaking of wickedness, abomination, or iniquity.
The Oxford English Dictionary explains:
In modern colloquial English “evil” is little used, such currency as it has being due to literary influence. In quite familiar speech the adjective is commonly superseded by bad; the noun is somewhat more frequent, but chiefly in the widest senses, the more specific senses
being expressed by other words, such as harm, injury, misfortune, disease, etc.1
This trend is visible in other modern languages too, though not in all. In her illuminating “kakology” in this volume, Antonia Ruppel notes that “das Übel ” declined in German-speaking lands, just like “evil” did in Anglophone regions, but was soon replaced by “das Böse,” which is still alive and well.2
The slow erasure of “evil” and its cognates from many European languages, which began (according to Ruppel) in the seventeenth century, was due in part to the rejection of the concept by elites. Medical doctors, moral philosophers, natural scientists, psychologists, and even theologians shied away from using the concept—preferring more anodyne notions like badness, harm, and misfortune, or quasi-quantifiable ones like pain, suffering, trauma, and disutility. Traditional views of evil as ontologically substantive or even supernatural—something able to possess a body or terrorize a soul—came to seem quaint, unscientific, embarrassing. Philosophers of religion are a half-exception to the rule. They did and do continue to speak of evil, at least when discussing the “problem” of it. If pressed, though, they will admit that this is because the great framers of the problem—Aquinas, Leibniz, Bayle, et al.—used the Latin or French versions of the term; they will then go on to gloss it generically as, in Michael Tooley’s words, “any undesirable states of affairs.”3
1 “evil, adj. and n.1,” OED online, June 2017 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
2 I follow Ruppel in resisting any speculation (or jokes) about why “das Böse” is still alive and well in Germany and Austria. It is worth noting, however, that “das Übel” is etymologically closer to the English “evil.” For more, see Ruppel, present volume.
3 See Michael Tooley, “The Problem of Evil,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Continental philosophers of religion are less likely to assimilate evil to the more anodyne concepts in this way. Some of the more creative (albeit turgid) recent work on the concept of evil itself, as opposed to the problem of evil, has come out of that tradition. See in particular, Richard Kearney, “Evil, Monstrosity and the Sublime,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, T. 57, Fasc. 3, Desafios do Mal: Do Mistério à Sabedoria (Jul.−Sep. 2001), 485–502 and Martin Beck Matuštík, Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
However, in spite of this queasiness about “evil” in both scientific culture and common speech, there are moments when we still feel the pull of the ancient lexicon—expressively, at least, in the mode of both condemnation and lament. Premeditated mass shootings aren’t just bad or traumatic, they are something else—here we reach for “evil.” The years-long imprisonment and rape of children by their parents is a misfortune that produces disutility, to be sure, but our transfixed horror in the face of it can only be captured by the invocation of “evil.” The same is true of most instances of genocide, sex-trafficking, torture-slaying, chemical bombardment, terrorism, serial killing, and slavery: these are one and all bad, harmful, and traumatic activities, but they are also something else—something excessive, mesmerizing, and revolting all at once. In the face of such acts, we—along with our spiritual leaders, newscasters, and politicians—are still willing to speak, preach, and tweet about “pure evil.”4
But when we do this—when we speak of evil, das Böse, il male nowadays—what is it that we mean?
There are two main camps on this issue. When pressed, many people (philosophers included) will revert to the more tractable terms. Of course what we are really talking about (whispering about, tweeting about, shaking our heads about) in those moments of condemnation and lament is an extreme instance of suffering or disutility. Of course “evil” is to “bad” what “wicked” is to “immoral”: a conceptual vestige of a prescientific, credulous past that we occasionally invoke for the sake of solemnity, empathy, or emphasis. A concept that—outside of
4 Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) tweeted on February 2, 2017, that “we must keep ‘evil’ out of our country.” Despite the quotation marks, it was clear that he meant evil the entity and not “evil” the word. After the Las Vegas mass shooting in October 2017, Trump and many others in leadership referred to the event as “an act of pure evil.” Ali Vitali, “Trump Calls Las Vegas Shooting ‘Act of Pure Evil,’ ” NBC News, October 2, 2017,. Likewise, Barack Obama referred to the Paris shooting of journalists in January 2015 a “cowardly, evil attack” (https://www.cbsnews.com/video/presidentobama-calls-paris-terror-crisis-a-cowardly-evil-attack/). More famously, George W. Bush referred to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as the “axis of evil” in a State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, and Ronald Reagan repeatedly characterized the Soviet Union as “the evil empire,” most famously at the Berlin Wall March 18, 1983.
horror films and fiction—is best analyzed in terms of nature’s frustration of the basic needs of sentient beings or as the effects of illness or ill-parenting. Yes, evil acts and events have an excessive, egregious quality that makes them notable, even transfixing. But they are not, in the end, sui generis or ontologically mysterious. Neuroscience, medicine, and psychology have domesticated evil.
People in the second camp focus less on conditioning, damage, and disease—preferring instead to speak of evil in terms of choices and will. For them, evil consists in malevolent intentions, malice with forethought, self-conscious cruelty; it also typically leads to suffering and tribulation. They will allow that there are contributing factors and preconditions, of course, but they ultimately hold the agents themselves responsible for evil.5 This appeal to agency may seem mysterious to people in the first camp, but it is no more mysterious than human free will generally. It suggests that people in the second camp, too, are in the business of domesticating evil—of making evil explicable in terms of familiar concepts, of setting it on a continuum with other, familiar acts and events.
I said these were the two opposing camps. But in truth there is another one—one that used to be the most populous of all but now has fewer partisans. People in this third camp eschew all efforts to explain away or domesticate evil; for them, what we mean by “evil” is not equivalent to what we mean by “bad” or “wrong” or even “very, very, very bad” or “very, very, very wrong.” In other words, evil is not just illness, misfortune, or poor choices by another name, but rather a positive, substantial rottenness in the universe. Some thing substantive, oomphy, robust, out there (“in them woods”). But what, exactly? Is evil just the shadow side of good—an impersonal supply of the bad yang to every good yin? Or is it a positive force that is mortally opposed to
5 In the lamentable moments on a global scale, the debate between these two camps plays out on cable news stations and op-ed pages. The people in the second camp (who tend to the political right) make a show of using “evil” because they think that people in the first camp (who tend to the political left) are uncomfortable with the ideas of individual free choice and personal responsibility.
the good in a Manichean/Star Wars kind of way? Or, most unnerving of all: Is evil grounded in something personal and agential but also nonhuman—a malevolent, striving will that makes the universe tend not just to entropic winding down but also to outbreaks of genuine, targeted hellishness?
These are some of the main ontological questions that philosophers, past and present, raise about evil. They are questions about its substance and essence, its being or nonbeing, its intrinsic features and its ways of manifesting in nature.
There are related epistemological questions: How and what can we know about evil? As we will see, one of the leading accounts of the ontology of evil says that it is an absence of being or a privation of the way things ought to be.6 But what does that imply about our ability to understand its nature, when to expect it, and how to prevent it? Can we know something that is no-thing?
It’s clear in any case that we can know about evil—for instance, when we hear reports of a sadistic torture-murder or a genocidal massacre. But does a victim know evil in a way that is entirely different from the way that we know it, or that a witness knows it? Can the perpetrator know evil as evil at all—or does he, at least in the moment, inevitably view his action as good in some way (good for him, good for his cause, good for his people, good fun)? Does an eyewitness or someone watching on television acquire “what it is like” knowledge of evil, or is such access reserved solely for victims and perpetrators? More farfetched: can a nonhuman animal know evil? Can a Martian? Can a god?
A third kind of question is broadly psychological: What could motivate some agent—human or otherwise—to intend, perpetrate, or permit evil? It is hard to imagine how great evils such as Satan’s rebellion, Iago’s machinations, Stalin’s genocides, or Dick Cheney’s
6 See the pieces by O’Meara, Davies, King, and Newlands in the present volume.
vice presidency could be psychologically understood in the ways we understand ordinary actions—i.e., in terms of intelligible reasons, intentions, beliefs, and desires. But what about more banal evils: Can we make sense of how a one-time vacuum oil salesman named Adolf Eichmann might have regarded himself as an able bureaucrat, meticulously doing his job however unpleasant the consequences, and hoping for a promotion? And what about corporate, structural, or systemic evils— can they be explained in terms of actions on the part of individuals?
More broadly, does talk of “evil” make sense without referring to some psychology or other—someone who acts with intention? Can nature—a law of nature, or a karmic principle—be evil? What about a hurricane or an all-destroying asteroid? We are reluctant to ascribe full-fledged moral agency to nonhuman creatures, so why are we so often willing to depict them as arch evil in literature and art (goats, whales, serpents, crows, dark angels) and film (The Blob, The Birds, Jaws, Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, etc.)?7
In the lamentable moments, we still speak and think in terms of evil, and so these metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological questions inevitably arise.
Some people choose to sit quietly with these questions. Others make the effort—intrepidly, quixotically—to offer answers. Many of those try, explicitly or implicitly, to push back to the anodyne, domesticating, tractable concepts. Others quote texts or proverbs from religious traditions. Still others write novels or poetry, give sermons, create memorials, compose music, or produce documentaries.
This volume focuses on how philosophers in the broadly western tradition—the tradition that includes Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought—have responded to these questions. From Hebrew wisdom writers to Greek sages, scholastic theologians to enlightenment
7 See Christy Mag Uidhir, “Cinematic Evil,” present volume.
