Session 10: Experiencing Evil With Children

Session 10: Experiencing Evil With Children
Chair: Ann-Marie Cook

After the Spider Comes Along: Understanding Responses to Evil
Christopher T. Burris and John K. Rempel
Department of Psychology, St. Jerome’s University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Notwithstanding cultural and individual variability in the ways that evil is conceptualized, people’s responses to whatever they regard as evil can be mapped onto two orthogonal, unipolar dimensions: Virulence (the extent to which evil is regarded adversarially as a threatening, destructive force) and Engagement (the extent to which evil is confronted directly). The intersection of these two dimensions yields four distinct response quadrants – that is, evil may be avoided (high virulence, low engagement), attacked (high virulence, high engagement), embraced (low virulence, high engagement), or ignored (low virulence, low engagement). Guided by this conceptual model, we developed the Responses to Evil scale and demonstrate its predictive utility in two studies.  In the first, 73 undergraduates viewed the trial documentary film Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and made judgments regarding the guilt of the three teenaged defendants accused of triple homicide. Avoidance – feeling threatened by evil and consequently not wanting to think about it too deeply – uniquely predicted greater guilt judgments, suggesting that evil-avoidant respondents were attending more to superficial evil cues – such as the prosecution’s assertion that the teens were motivated by Satanic beliefs – than to substantive evidence. To test this possibility further, 135 undergraduates read a case summary of a soon-to-be-paroled repeat sex offender with an interest in occult, inspirational, or unspecified reading material. Extending the results of the first study, those who desired to avoid evil saw the occultist offender as evil, as deserving of total annihilation, and as incapable of doing anything to placate them, whereas avoiding evil was unrelated to these when the offender’s reading material was inspirational or unspecified. Thus, the mere appearance of evil may be sufficient to evoke powerful, sometimes destructive, reactions among those with a chronic, fearful avoidance of it.

Perhaps nothing defies explanation more than the horrendous suffering of infants and young children. How could a “benevolent” God impose or allow such hardship? In making sense of the suffering of innocent persons, we might: 1) Deny their innocence. 2) Deny their suffering. 3) Deny their personhood (and hence their status as beings who “deserve” a rational explanation).
Andrew Chignell argues that “children are not the sort of entities whose suffering God can or should redeem.” The suffering of children does not have to be made meaningful. He claims that for suffering to be meaningful, beings have to be sufficiently cognizant of their selves to recognize the suffering and react to it. (It has to be possible for the suffering to become meaningful to them.) Only a being with such capacities can suffer in such a way that we would call it horrendous (and hence evil). This is not to say that the pain of children is not worth striving to prevent, only that it should not make us doubt the existence or benevolence of God.
I disagree on two points. I argue that benevolence is a response to not just rational beings, but to any creature vulnerable to pain. A person who relieves the suffering of a puppy is benevolent even though the puppy does not recognize it as such. Why is a benevolent God not expected to show the same compassion towards children?
Second, I challenge Chignell’s conception of “horrendous” suffering. I will suggest that it is not necessary to be fully cognizant of one’s situation to suffer “horrendously” and hence to be a victim of evil.  Hence the suffering of children continues to pose a serious challenge to the claim that God is benevolent.

When a child dies, the unending unfolding of silence – the emptiness of the space where something which should have been and now will never be – ruptures, fractures and evades attempts to make sense of what has happened.
It also drives a wedge between personal and professional life, in light of which we need to recognise one vitally important thing. We need to let evil be evil. What what happens cannot be anything other than what it is – and this thought betrays all quests for explanation. Explanations take us away from the personal and particular nature of evil into the realm of something more general. In the process they run the danger of becoming immoral by justifying the evil they try to explain and alter the facts of what has happened.
To love a child, a partner or a parent is to suffer when they are gone; people suffer because they love, and because they are unwilling to surrender or give up that love. What is important is that we should hear the silence, allow it room to be, and in recognising its presence, stick to the facts of what has happened.