See No Evil
You know what strikes me as pure nonsense and superstition?
(No, not the claim that wearing my lucky shirt helps the Steelers win; that’s been proved empirically.)
No, what seems to me to be one of the silliest, but most pervasive ideas around is the one alluded to today in William Kristol’s column in the Times: the notion that something called “evil” exists, and that—even less coherently—it can be defeated.
Evil isn’t a thing or a force—it’s not like French toast or gravity—it’s a term that refers to certain actions or outcomes we judge to be morally wrong. I don’t even think it should be a noun; the term “evil” is better understood as an adjective that modifies agents, behaviors, and states of affairs, like an “evil twin,” or an “evil smirk,” or an “evil dinner party.”
I get the impression from Kristol that someone like McCain construes evil as something like a virus that can infect people and if we could just find a way to kill off the virus, then nobody would ever do bad things anymore. (I guess I would buy this if the root cause of the “virus” is poverty, hopelessness, dogmatism, and so on; if we could eradicate those things, then probably fewer people would be “evil.”)
My assumption is that this misapprehension about the ontological status of evil has its roots in theology; religions that ascribe evil to an entity like the Devil would naturally tend to see it as something with an independent existence.
But the problem with this is that then, evil acts are no longer necessarily the responsibility of the person who commits them. If we think of evil as something that sort of moves around on its own, something that can be stamped out like smallpox or whatever, then we’re going to spending a lot of energy fighting something that isn’t there and so fail to defeat actually evil things—like evil 43rd Presidents of the United States.
(No, not the claim that wearing my lucky shirt helps the Steelers win; that’s been proved empirically.)
No, what seems to me to be one of the silliest, but most pervasive ideas around is the one alluded to today in William Kristol’s column in the Times: the notion that something called “evil” exists, and that—even less coherently—it can be defeated.
Evil isn’t a thing or a force—it’s not like French toast or gravity—it’s a term that refers to certain actions or outcomes we judge to be morally wrong. I don’t even think it should be a noun; the term “evil” is better understood as an adjective that modifies agents, behaviors, and states of affairs, like an “evil twin,” or an “evil smirk,” or an “evil dinner party.”
I get the impression from Kristol that someone like McCain construes evil as something like a virus that can infect people and if we could just find a way to kill off the virus, then nobody would ever do bad things anymore. (I guess I would buy this if the root cause of the “virus” is poverty, hopelessness, dogmatism, and so on; if we could eradicate those things, then probably fewer people would be “evil.”)
My assumption is that this misapprehension about the ontological status of evil has its roots in theology; religions that ascribe evil to an entity like the Devil would naturally tend to see it as something with an independent existence.
But the problem with this is that then, evil acts are no longer necessarily the responsibility of the person who commits them. If we think of evil as something that sort of moves around on its own, something that can be stamped out like smallpox or whatever, then we’re going to spending a lot of energy fighting something that isn’t there and so fail to defeat actually evil things—like evil 43rd Presidents of the United States.
posted by Professor Dave at 10:45 AM
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