Session 13: Considering the Wicked

Session 13: Considering the Wicked
Chair: Charles Nuckolls

Teaching About Evil in History: Demonizing Historical Figures
Robert Butler
Department of History, Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, IL, USA

Evil and its consequences are topics of perpetual interest. Since the days of mankind’s earliest myths and religions, evil has been not simply adjective but identifier: the term by which opponents are known and recognized. Yet little of this interest crosses the intellectual divide into the curriculum; most discussions of evil still limit themselves to philosophical speculation or theological definition. If evil is examined in historical context, what can we learn from it? This paper will discuss the creation and evolution of such a course, History 212: Great Evil Personalities in History.
It has long been a useful tactic in conflict to demonize one’s opponent. Since demons are dangerous adversaries, it was important and praiseworthy to show them and their supporters no mercy. The modern world seems far removed from this belief, but in fact we often use the same analytical structure under different names, and refuse to negotiate with opponents because one must not compromise with evil. The form may change, but evil is presumed to be absolute and its adherents timeless enemies of progress.
History offers an important perspective on this tendency. Focusing on the records of traditionally-labeled great evil personalities (such as Nero, Fredegund, Dracula, and Hitler) enables students learn the contexts of values and debate their importance. They consider insights from theology and philosophy (is evil absolute?), gender studies (why are the great evil figures so rarely female?), and sociology (what influence does social structure have on individual action?) Above all, they engage in close reading, critical thinking, and vigorous, well-informed debate.
Students are fascinated by this unique vision. They ask new questions of the past, and report increased capacity to separate (as more than one student wrote) legend from reality. Such a course offers a significant opportunity for teaching about evil in history, and may be of interest to the conference.

Ethical Aliens: The Challenge of Extreme Perpetrators to Humanism
William Myers Department of Philosophy, College of St. Catherine and St. Paul, Minnesota USA

In Aristotle’s ethics, extremely wicked characters are incommensurable with ordinary ways of treating conduct. He had in mind creatively sadistic characters like the tyrant Phalaris of Acragas, said to be the inventor of the Phalarian Bull, in which victims were roasted alive. For Aristotle such behaviours and the minds they evince cannot even count as vice – excess or deficiency – in our calculations of the mean that constitutes excellence or virtue. He dismisses such persons as bestial, not corrupt, as he believes they lack entirely the part of the psyche that is corruptible in ordinary people. They are therefore outside the scope of moral theory. He stands at the beginning of a long tradition of regarding some people’s behaviour as beyond the scope of our moral and legal norms. The modern world unfortunately has many more examples than his did of perpetrators so vile they challenge our understanding of what it means to be human. Hannah Arendt speaks of the abyss between a normal society’s moral and legal frames of reference and the revelations of Nazi depravity at the end of WWII. “What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the mass production of corpses?” she asks. Indeed most moral theory, not just Aristotle’s and its modern descendants, addresses norms ill suited to say anything useful about, say, the creatively sadistic serial killer or the willing participant in mass murder. While Western moral theory has never been primarily developed to work with extremes, our everyday sense of the extreme perpetrator as ethically alien, perhaps simply insane, makes it easy for the rest of us to dismiss him or her as dwelling more properly within the purview of the forensic psychiatrist. But this dismissal of the extreme perpetrator as absolutely alien has the serious and undesirable consequence of narrowing our understanding of what it means to be human, and does so whether that understanding is religious or secular. I argue that while extreme perpetrators are indeed different from the rest of us (and each other) in important and interesting ways, they are not, contra common usage, inhuman or animal, and are a proper subject both for moral theory and for humane concern. The view developed here has consequences for social policy regarding treatment of offenders, especially for the use of the death penalty, as well as for the development of international criminal laws covering crimes against humanity.

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Punishment AND Treatment: A New Face of Evil?
Veronica Felizardo
Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

The objective of my research is to describe the effect of criminal justice and mental health philosophies (punishment and treatment) from the perspective of those who reside in an environment where these philosophies have become combined. The question of whether one of these philosophies is more dominant than the other and what the implication of this might be is an empirical one that is central to this research.
There has been much research conducted in the field of mental health care and the delivery of such services in a correctional environment. Few studies have examined the experiences of residents (patients/offenders) in these settings. In order to improve the quality of care in “total” institutions, it is essential to obtain data from the residents’ perspective. The differences in the guiding principles between criminal justice agencies and clinical providers can affect the delivery of effective mental health services to mentally disordered offenders. The gap between these two conflicting perspectives must be bridged in order to bring about effective outcomes to the population it serves.
The Correctional Psychiatric Unit (CPU) in Eastern Canada is a facility designed to provide a new approach in the management of mentally disordered persons who become involved in the criminal justice system, with its special designation as a Schedule 1 psychiatric facility within a correctional institution.
Due to the descriptive and thorough nature of this research, a qualitative methodological approach that allows for a comprehensive description of the experiences of residents is required. The approach I will take is informed by critical ethnography and convict criminology. Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge will inform the research. The nature of disciplinary power and dominance and resistance will emerge as the data is analyzed through a grounded theory approach. The configurations of power/knowledge in a correctional psychiatric setting will be examined from the information gathered from the residents. Items for inquiry will include the following: residents’ perceptions of the dual role of nursing staff and the effectiveness of the health care provided to them; residents’ interactions with nursing and correctional staff as well as staff-staff interactions, and the effect of that exchange; residents’ experiences and concerns with respect to involuntary treatment; the effect, if any, the physical layout of the CPU has on residents and their treatment; situate the residents’ experiences, based on their involvement in both systems (Mental Health and Corrections), to determine if the CPU is able to strike a balance between the conflicting perspectives of treatment and punishment.