Session 14: Wherefore Evil?

Session 14: Wherefore Evil?
Chair: Amy Lee Bell

Metaphysics of Evil: A Response to Claudia Card
Andrew Hryhorowych
York University, Toronto, Canada

Most contemporary moral philosophy is secular.  As a result, many ethicists do not use the term “evil” in their work.  Instead, they label actions as good, bad or neither good nor bad.  Recently, the use of the term “evil” has become increasingly common in the literature.  In my paper I argue against an aspect of a particular theory of evil.
The most complete contemporary theory of evil is Claudia Card’s The Atrocity Paradigm.  In her book of the same name, Card defines evils as “Foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrongdoing.” (3)  Card defines evils as events; intuitively, moral weight should be placed on actions, not events.  Card emphasizes events because she feels it is important to focus on the victims, not the evildoers.  Although her intent is admirable, I believe it is problematic.  An example can clarify why this is so.  If a person falls asleep at the wheel and hits and kills a pedestrian, the driver is culpable but the result is a tragedy, not an evil.  If a person who is driving intentionally hits and kills a pedestrian, the person is not only culpable but also guilty of committing an evil act.  Using Card’s definition, both events would be considered evils.  I argue that this line of reasoning is confused.  A person’s intention should play a role in whether or not her action is evil.  In the first example, the driver does not intend to fall asleep at the wheel and as a result the action is merely bad (more specifically, driving while sleep deprived is bad: falling asleep is neither good nor bad).  In the second example, the driver decides to murder the pedestrian: the action is evil.  I believe emphasizing the actions that lead to the event is the correct way to understand evil

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Motivational Accounts of Evil: The Missing Element
Nigel Leary
Philosophy Department, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdon

Adam Morton’s recent book On Evil offers an account of evil as a morally significant term by linking it to types of act that explicitly produce certain consequences (harm and humiliation), and the motivations driving them (the intentions of the agent).  By assessing these two elements in unison Morton devises his ‘barrier theory of evil acts’ defining evil acts as acts that intentionally traverse (psychological) barriers to harm or humiliate others that ought to have been in place. My paper first identifies the key elements of Morton’s account, dividing it into two separate constituents: a specific kind of psychological structure and a specific kind of intentional content, thereby making the intuitive claims explicit. I move on to question how the account might work in practice, and assess whether the conditions are necessary and jointly sufficient.  Then, via some pragmatic, examples, I argue that there is a fundamental missing element, and that Morton’s hypothesis only identifies i) necessary conditions for evil acts and ii) candidate actions for the morally significant label ‘evil’. I then present an intuitive additional historical element, taking into account the agent’s mental life to date, and assert that not only does it apply to all motivational accounts of evil in general, but that if anything will allow us to apply the term ‘evil’ effectively, in practice, it will require an informative account of an agent’s mental life. The consequences of this view, presented in the paper, are that a) (almost) anyone can commit an evil act, b) evil acts take into account both motivation and consequences, c) many acts that we might not have thought evil turn out to be, and finally d) that the whole view rests on the need to develop a defensible notion of ‘ought’ that can be validated as a morally evaluative notion.

Reconsidering Theodicy
Jennifer Baldwin
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, USA

Defining and understanding evil can be extremely difficult.  One must take care to narrow the definition sufficiently without excluding anything.  For instance, if “evil” is broadly understood as anything that causes human suffering then “evil” can become trivialized.  On the other hand, one does not want to conceive of “evil” too narrowly thereby excluding experiences or actions that are beyond the scope of “bad.”  In part, this is an exercise in aesthetic semantics that I will largely leave to the linguists; however, language is vital to our naming and understanding our experiences in the world and relationship to the divine.
For the purpose of this project, I will define “evil” as any experience that leads to the fragmentation of the human person in relation to God, self, and community (please note, this is a working definition and will potentially change).  Experiences of evil disrupt relationship with God, self, and community and lead a person and/or community to question the very ground of their existence and faith in the divine.  These experiences are the bedrock of theodicy.  Theodicy is stated as “If God is all good and all powerful, why is there evil in the world?”
Thus far, traditional theodicies have been insufficient in acknowledging the depth of evil and providing a meaningful framework for living in and through evil because they have retained theological categories of omnipotence, creatio ex nihilio, and redemption.  In this paper, I will examine the recent scholarship of John Caputo, Catherine Keller, and Flora Keshgegian in which they deconstruct traditional notions of omnipotence, creatio ex nihilio and redemption, respectively, and provide an alternative theological response to experiences of evil that rupture relationships.  I will then apply the alternative response to an experience of abuse to determine its potential to mend the fragmentation caused by evil.