Skip to main content

Thinking about evil in history.

 


Thinking about evil in history.

I am currently grappling with how to bring the horrendous events of the twentieth century into the philosophy of history. After doing a lot of reading about recent thinking about the Holocaust , it seems clear that we still have failed to fully comprehend the atrocities of the Nazi period, Stalinist rule before and after World War II, and many other episodes of genocide, mass murder, and enslavement in the past century.

Only the idea of radical evil seems to remotely capture these historical atrocities. I've added two sections to my article on the philosophy of history in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to address this set of problems; . But these lines only serve to introduce the subject; much more remains to be done.

The "problem of evil" has a long history of discussion and debate in theology and in philosophy. However, the perspective I take on atrocities is entirely secular and non-religious, so theological debates are not relevant to my analysis. And much philosophical discussion of the topic of evil occurs at a highly abstract and conceptual level, which is likewise not very helpful to my topic. However, a recent book in philosophy that I have found useful is John Kekes' The Roots of Evil (2007).

Kekes' book is interesting for three primary reasons. First, he provides six case studies of evil events in history, for which he provides fairly extensive historical detail. Second, he focuses the problem on the question of "why" the perpetrators did what they did. And third, he attempts to present and refute a handful of existing theories of evil actions, all of which he finds wanting.

Kekes offers a precise working definition of what he means by "evil", a definition that separates it from a religious or theological context. He argues that the idea comes down to three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions:

The evil of an action, therefore, consists in the combination of three components: the malevolent motivation of evildoers; the serious, excessive harm caused by their actions; and the lack of morally acceptable excuse for the actions. (2)

(Parenthetically -- I'm generally unpersuaded by overly precise definitions offered by philosophers. Most interesting concepts don't have "necessary and sufficient conditions" that define and exhaust their meaning. And that seems true in the case of the concept of evil as well. The working definition that I prefer is less precise: “cruelty on a massive scale, including systematic torture, murder, starvation, and enslavement of ordinary, innocent human beings”.)

The cases of atrocity that Kekes presents make for hard reading, because they involve horrific cruelty and human suffering. But, of course, this is why they represent evil. Here are the cases that he presents:

The Cathar Crusade (1200)
The Terror conducted by Robespierre during the French Revolution (1792)
The actions of Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka
The Manson family murders of Sharon Tate and others
The "dirty war" conducted by the Argentinean army, navy, and air force
The psychopathic violence of convicted murderer John Allen
These cases give Kekes' discussion a specificity and detail that is often lacking in philosophical discussions of evil.

Kekes focuses on the psychological causes of evil-doing -- psychological propensities and motivations:

My aim is to provide a causal explanation of why evildoers do evil. There are excellent recent works giving historical accounts of past explanations, but they are relevant to my aim only insofar as they contribute to the right explanation or illustrate mistakes. The facts I appeal to are psychological propensities familiar to normally intelligent people, not the fruits of research or deep reflection. Common knowledge of them makes it possible for novelists, playwrights, biographers, and historians to write about the character, motivation, and actions of people at places and times other than their own and feel confident about being understood. I have in mind such propensities as desiring a meaningful life, needing to be loved, having conflicting motives, deceiving oneself, wanting to appear other than one is, being ignorant of some of one’s motives, resenting injustice, embellishing the past, fearing the unknown, minding defeat, caring about the opinion of others, and so forth. These propensities are commonplaces of human psychology, but they also have moral significance. (7-8)

He considers a handful of theories of the psychological basis of evil actions, which he finds inadequate. And he considers the theological and quasi-theological theories that have been offered in the past -- e.g. "the world is an inherently good place" -- which he rejects. In place of these traditional theories he offers his own "mixed and multicausal" theory of evil actions:

The explanation of evil has the following general characteristics: it is

mixed because it involves the combination of internal-active, internal-passive, external-active, and external-passive conditions;

multicausal because the conditions that jointly cause it vary with individuals, societies, times, and places;

particular because it involves the detailed consideration of conditions that differ from case to case. (243)

There are two specific points that I find most useful in The Roots of Evil. First, Kekes rejects the relevance of moral relativism in the discussion of evil (as I do):

Slavery, clitoridectomy, blood feuds, assassination, terrorism, mutilating criminals, persecuting religious dissenters, torturing captives, holding innocent people hostage, dooming children to life as prostitutes or castrati are also culturally conditioned practices, but they are evil. The toleration of such evils, the implausible attempts to excuse them, and the reluctance to condemn them endanger civilized life by countenancing the violation of the physical security of their victims. Morally committed people ought to be intolerant of such evils. Those who mouth the catch-phrases of toleration avert their gaze from evil. (214)

The way I would put the point about relativism goes along these lines: In considering terrible events in the past, it is necessary to acknowledge the two perspectives (participant and observer). As became evident in an earlier discussion of the Athenian massacre of the Melians (link), the authors and perpetrators of horrific acts in the past sometimes choose to perform these acts within a moral worldview that they believe justifies their actions. However, we can dispense altogether with the question of moral relativism. It is perfectly reasonable for us in the present to judge that these practices and actions in the past were wrong and unjust (slavery, genocide, deliberate starvation, mutilation, ...), whether or not participants at the time found these practices morally acceptable. Their moral frameworks were defective and corrigible.

And second, Kekes places "decency" and "moral imagination" at the center of what is needed if we are to learn from the historical experience of evil.

It is reasonable to conclude, then, that if moral imagination had enabled evildoers to understand better their victims and their own motives and to realize that they had attractive alternatives to evildoing, then they would have been less likely to become or to continue as evildoers.... Moderately intelligent people have the capacity of moral imagination, but like other modes of imagination, it has to be cultivated. (237)

We can cultivate moral imagination by paying attention to the realities of the experience of other human beings -- through our personal experience, through literature, and through the horrors of the histories of the Cathar Crusade or the Argentinian "dirty war". Human beings are not fixed in their moral capabilities; rather, we can gain compassion and resist the impulses towards participating in evil actions.

The cultivation of moral imagination in this way provides not only personal enrichment but also a moral force that can help make lives better and cope with evil. By increasing self-knowledge, presenting attractive alternatives to evildoing, and providing a basis for the comparison, contrast, and criticism of one’s own way of being and acting, moral imagination helps to avoid the falsifications involved in unintentional evildoing. (238)

This observation about the cultivation of moral imagination points in the direction of a view of how it is possible to learn from history. Learning and confronting the horrific circumstances of the massacres of the Cathars, the torture of Argentine leftists, or the deliberate starvation of Ukrainian peasants, unavoidably brings us to a more vivid understanding of the moral evil of those events: the pain, suffering, and loss that these actions created for human beings much like ourselves. The strongest impression I took away from Hannah Arendt's account of the trial of Eichmann is the utter lack of sympathy, pity, or compassion he showed for the victims of his activities. Atrocities often depend on the total dehumanization of the victims, and compassion makes it more difficult to accomplish that trick.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Sims acquired a total of eleven women slaves with vesicovaginal fistula from their masters by promising to lodge, board, and treat them, and he built a spartan wooden building, where he conducted surgical experiments on them for the next four years.

"Sims acquired a total of eleven women slaves with vesicovaginal fistula from their masters by promising to lodge, board, and treat them, and he built a spartan wooden building, where he conducted surgical experiments on them for the next four years.  During the Victorian period, layers of dress signaled sexual chastity, and doctors were not in the habit of viewing women's unclothed bodies; not even their professional stature gave them license to gaze at women's genitalia. When Sims undertook his fistula experiments, even the term 'gynecology' was a few years in the future. Instead, 'women's doctors' averted their eyes in a chivalrous fashion as they knelt to tend to the modestly clothed ladies of their class, relying upon their sense of touch beneath voluminous Victorian skirts.  However, Sims, working with enslaved blacks, was constrained by no such delicacy. He made the women undress completely, then kneel on hands and knees while he and several phys...

Jong Sang Thaek’s brutal execution: Stripped naked and eaten alive by Dogs

Jong Sang Thaek’s brutal execution: Stripped naked and eaten alive by Dogs North Korea, Jan 03:  Unlike previous executions of political prisoners, the execution of Jang Song Thaek on December 12 was reportedly one of the most brutal ones ever conducted by the North Korean regime. According to a detailed account published in Wen Wei Po, a Hong Kong based Chinese newspaper, Jang Song Thaek, Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-Un’s uncle and the second most powerful man in North Korea, was stripped naked and thrown into a cage of 120 hounds who had been starved for three days. During the brutal execution, which was reportedly personally overseen by Kim Jong Un, the hounds were allowed to prey on Jang Song Thaek and five of his closest aides who also had been stripped and thrown into the cage. According to the report, the entire process lasted for about an hour by the end of which they were completely eaten up. This is called "quan je" or "execution by dogs". Political...

A graduate in Biology was having difficulty in finding a job. He saw an advert in one of the daily newspapers for a job at a zoo.🗞️👀

  A graduate in Biology was having difficulty in finding a job. He saw an advert in one of the daily newspapers for a job at a zoo.🗞️👀 In the interview, the manager told him that their gorilla🦍, which had been a tourists attraction has died so they needed someone to dress up and pretend as a gorilla🦍.  The graduate was embarra$$ed, but since the salary was okay, he accepted the job. The first day, he put on the gorilla skin and entered the cage, he started jumping up and down, beating his chest and roared like a gorilla.  The next day, he put on a gorilla skin and started moving around the zoo again and mistakenly entered another cage and found himself staring at a lion🦁.  The lion r0ared and rushed towards him. The scared graduate quickly forgot that he is a g0rilla and started shouting like a human, 🗣️"Help! Help!" The lion leaped onto him, knocked him to the ground and whispered in his ear👂*Dennis*, it's me Mike, your course mate." My brother, No job in thi...

Man s-xu#lly A$$@ults homeless woman in Brazil. Another demonstration of a shitty third world country.

  Man s-xu#lly A$$@ults homeless woman in Brazil. Another demonstration of a shitty third world country. Man sexually assaults homeless woman in Brazil. Another demonstration of a shitty third world country. NEWS: In the video images obtained this Saturday – May 4, 2024 – it is possible to see the man touching the private parts of a homeless woman who apparently sleeps on the street. Didn’t she feel touched? The Public Secretariat of São Paulo, Brazil, analyzes the images and asks for public help in identifying the attacker. Rape is a serious violation of human rights and a devastating crime that affects individuals, families, and communities worldwide. To put a stop to rape, we need to address its root causes and work together to create a society that values and respects consent, equality, and the dignity of all individuals. Here are some steps we can take: 1. *Educate and raise awareness*: Teach children and adults about consent, healthy relationships, and gender equality....

World War II as you've NEVER seen it before! Light-hearted photos of nude British and Allied soldiers revealed in eye-opening new book

  World War II as you've NEVER seen it before! Light-hearted photos of nude British and Allied soldiers revealed in eye-opening new book From the horrors of the Blitz to kamikaze attacks in the Pacific, World War II inflicted terrible suffering on troops and civilians alike. But as these photos reveal, soldiers fighting the war, whether in the Far East or Europe, did enjoy some more light-hearted moments. Hidden away in the attics of former servicemen for more than 60 years, the pictures, which show soldiers from the UK, Australia and the USA among others, shed fresh light on the friendships fostered between the men who fought. His extensive collection includes snapshots of soldiers and sailors from Australia, the UK, France, Italy, Poland, Russia, and the USA, cavorting on the sand in the South Pacific, shivering in the snow of Eastern Europe, posing solo in the barracks, and in great happy groups. Many are barely out of boyhood, at their physical peak and are responding to...

DOZENS OF MEN SAY SRI LANKAN FORCES R*P£D AND TORTURED THEM – ABC NEWS

  DOZENS OF MEN SAY SRI LANKAN FORCES R*P£D AND TORTURED THEM – ABC NEWS One of the men tortured in Sri Lanka said he was held for 21 days in a small dank room where he was raped 12 times, burned with cigarettes, beaten with iron rods and hung upside-down. Another man described being abducted from home by five men, driven to a prison, and taken to a “torture room” equipped with ropes, iron rods, a bench and buckets of water. There were bl00d splatters on the wall. A third man described the prisoners as growing accustomed to the sound of screaming. “It made us really scared the first day but then we got used to it because we heard screaming all the time.” R*ped, branded or beaten repeatedly, more than 50 men from the Tamil ethnic minority seeking political asylum in Europe say they were abducted and tortured under Sri Lanka’s current government. The previously unpublished accounts conjure images of the country’s bl00dy civil war that ended in 2009 — not the palm-fringed paradise...

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Rape Scene), 1973

 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Rape Scene), 1973 "Untitled (Rape Scene) is the documentation of an action that the artist performed in her apartment in Iowa City, while she was a student at the University of Iowa on the innovative Intermedia art course run by the German artist Hans Breder (born 1935).  It was created in response to a brutal and highly publicised rape and murder of a nursing student, Sara Ann Otten, by another student in March 1973. The following month Mendieta invited her fellow students to her apartment where, through a door left purposefully ajar, they found her in the position recorded in this photograph, which recreated the scene as reported in the press.  Some time later, Mendieta recalled that her audience ‘all sat down, and started talking about it. I didn’t move. I stayed in position about an hour. It really jolted them.’ (Quoted in Ana Mendieta, p.127, note 11.) In 1980, she commented that the rape had ‘moved and frightened’ her, elaborating: ‘I think ...

The Effurun POLICE STATION, Wado City, Delta State found four h3ads in a student's bag last night around 11pm.

WHAT A SAD NEWS  😭 😭😭😭😭 The Effurun POLICE STATION, Wado City, Delta State found four h3ads in a student's bag last night around 11pm. A young man, about  30 years, with a large handbag, got into a KEKE NAPEP lastnight. The vigilant driver smelled a strong odor coming from the youngster's bag. The horrible smell made the driver to suspect something. When the driver arrived at Effurun POLICE STATION area , he set off the alarm, held the young guy and alerted  the police to search the young man's bag. Many people were afraid.  One of the Police was shocked when he opened the young man's bag and found four heads in the young man's bag. After examination of the heads, it was found that the heads were well known. It was TECNO CHARGER HEAD,  SAMSUNG CHARGER HEAD, ITEL CHARGER HEAD and ORAIMO CHARGER HEAD and iru (locust beans).  Thank God IPhone Charger head is not there.   I appreciate your efforts to read this.  You can continue with what yo...

This is the Mitsubishi Dialtone D160, the largest subwoofer ever built, with 60 inches in the 1980s.

This is the Mitsubishi Dialtone D160, the largest subwoofer ever built, with 60 inches in the 1980s.  Weighing 800kg, it can easily shatter windows and produces small earthquakes that can be felt like ground vibrations within a 2-kilometer range. At the Koriyama factory, the test was conducted at first in the measuring room, but was stopped because the ceiling lamps fell due to vibration. The outdoor test appeared to have a negative impact on the neighborhood. At a distance of about 100 m from the speaker, the sound was felt, but at a greater distance, it was transmitted as vibration and noise on the earth instead of an audible sound.  Within a 2-kilometer radius of the factory, damage such as vibrations, small earthquakes, as well as noises from walls and windows occurred

My Shocking Experience With Patient In A Hospital

  My Shocking Experience With Patient In A Hospital I once cared for a middle-aged patient who presented to emergency with a dildo-related very embarrassing situation. He purchased the toy for one of his sexcapades. Curiosity hit. And he shoved the damn thing in his pooper, high-high up! “Me first” attitude didn’t do him much good. Funny feelings subsided fairly quickly and the horror struck when he couldn’t get it out. His drainage was jammed, the toy was slipping further up and after about 24 hours of wishfully waiting for it to naturally pass, it hurt bad enough to seek medical help. The official party line, that he vehemently iterated, was I just fell onto it, how else do you think it got up there! Needless to say, emergency surgery was necessary and he landed in the ICU with sepsis related post-op complications. It took him loooong before being able to use the toilet normally! Google ** NOT the patient’s X-ray, but it looked similar** Though I have seen some really absurd stuf...