Evil

• 1. Introduction

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  Evil is the subject Hannah Arendt had in mind after she looked at the practices of Nazi Germany. She concluded that "the problem of evil would be the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life in Europe." By the source's account, that sweeping focus never fully came to fruition. The word did not fade, though. People still use it for the evil of genocide and for the evil of malicious gossip. They use it for a cruel act, for a flood, and for an illness. So what is being named? Is evil a force in the world, or only the empty place where something good should be? Do all cultures recognize the same evils? And is the word still worth using at all?

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• 2. Roots of a Word

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  Old English had a word, yfel, and it is the ancestor of modern English evil. Cousins of that word appear across the Germanic languages. German has Übel and Dutch has euvel. Old High German and Old Saxon had ubil, Old Frisian had evel, and Gothic had ubils. Scholars widely trace them to a reconstructed Proto-Germanic form, *ubilaz. The Hittite word huwapp- is comparable, and the line runs back to a Proto-Indo-European root, wap-.

  The meaning today is far wider than that family tree suggests. Writers describe evil in several forms. Personal moral evil is the one most people picture first. Impersonal natural evil covers disasters and illnesses. Religious thought adds the demonic and the supernatural. Personal evil is commonly linked with anger, revenge, hatred, injustice, psychological trauma, expediency, selfishness, pride, ignorance, jealousy, prejudice, destruction and neglect.

  Modern ethics divides the study of good and evil into three areas. Meta-ethics asks what good and evil actually are. Normative ethics asks how people ought to behave. Applied ethics takes up particular moral issues in private and public life. The first area is where the sharpest dispute begins, because philosophers today hold two rival concepts of evil, one broad and one narrow.

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• 3. Broad and Narrow

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  Dr. Paul Brand was an orthopedist and a missionary to people with leprosy, and his work shows why pain cannot simply be called evil. Leprosy attacks the nerve cells that feel pain. Once the pain stops, damage to the body grows and often becomes catastrophic. Congenital insensitivity to pain leads to fractures, multiple scars, osteomyelitis, joint deformities and amputation. Death from hyperpyrexia comes within the first 3 years of life in almost 20 percent of patients, and few live into adulthood.

  That evidence is aimed at the broad concept, which counts any bad state of affairs, wrongful action or character flaw as evil. Marcus Singer puts the problem in one line: "If something is really evil, it can't be necessary, and if it is really necessary, it can't be evil."

  The narrow concept ties evil to moral condemnation, so only moral agents and their actions qualify. Claudia Card argues that forces of nature, when no moral agent guides them, are neither goods nor evils. In her words, "They just are." Eve Garrard says evil marks a qualitative difference from ordinary wrongdoing. Her example is the remark that an action "wasn't just wrong, it was positively evil."

  A second dispute asks whether any definition holds everywhere. In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis maintained that some acts, such as rape and murder, are universally considered evil. The source pushes back. Nearly every society calls killing murder unless it is done in defense or duty, but each society defines defense and duty differently. It adds that more societies treat at least some forms of rape as normative than treat all rape as a crime. Religions, meanwhile, had been wrestling with the question for centuries.

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• 4. Evil Under One God

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  Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican theologian, defined evil in his Summa Theologica as the absence or privation of good. The Catholic Church draws its understanding of evil from him and from its canonical antiquity. More broadly, the Christian Bible exerts what the source calls the dominant influence on Western ideas about God and evil. In the Old Testament, evil means opposition to God, or something unsuitable and inferior, and Satan leads the fallen angels. In the New Testament, the Greek word poneros signals unsuitability, while kakos signals opposition to God in the human realm. The theologian Henri Blocher calls evil an unjustifiable reality, something that occurs in experience and ought not to be.

  The Baháʼí Faith takes the privation idea to its limit and says evil does not exist. Cold is only the lack of heat, darkness the lack of light, and ignorance the lack of knowledge. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, the son of the faith's founder, raised the obvious objection in Some Answered Questions. Scorpions and serpents are poisonous. He answered that a scorpion is evil in relation to man, but not in relation to itself, since its poison is its weapon. The faith also points to Genesis 1:31, where God calls creation good.

  Islam has no concept of absolute evil standing beside good as an equal. The Quran mentions the forbidden tree but never calls it the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Believers hold that everything comes from God. What looks evil is either a natural event or the result of human free will. Al-Ash'ari, the founder of Ash'arism, taught that an action is neutral in itself, and God supplies its qualification.

  Rabbinic Judaism links evil to free will. If humans were made perfect, being good would mean little. So humans must be able to choose goodness despite temptation and the yetzer hara, the inclination to do evil.

  Sikh thought bends with the believer's spiritual position. Guru Arjan reasoned that because God is the source of all things, what people call evil must come from God. Yet God is also the source of absolute good, so nothing truly evil can originate there. Sikhism still lists five vices called the Five Thieves: Moh, Lobh, Karodh, Kaam and Ahankar, meaning attachment, greed, wrath, lust and egotism. Someone who yields is a Manmukh, and the Gurmukh rises above vice through Sewa, selfless service, and Nam Simran, meditation upon the divine name.

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• 5. Order and Disorder

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  In ancient Egypt, the serpent god Apep routinely tried to kill the sun god Ra, and nearly every other deity had to stop him. Apep embodied the non-existence that threatened Ra. Evil took the name Isfet, meaning disorder or violence, and it stood opposite Maat, meaning order. Isfet was not a primordial force. It was the consequence of free will and of an individual's struggle against Apep's non-existence. The source's evidence is that Isfet was born from Ra's umbilical cord, not recorded in the creation myths.

  Chinese moral philosophy also treated evil as a breach of cosmic order. The duty of the emperor and his officials was to restrain it. Offenses against the Five Constants drew special abhorrence. These covered the proper bonds between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger, and friend and friend. Heaven and ghosts were thought to answer violations through legal punishments on earth. Judging the degree of evil meant weighing both the harm done and the relational distance between offender and victim. Violating family and kinship order was considered especially heinous.

  The Ming Legal Code gave this view a concrete form in the Ten Abominations. They were categories of conduct so heinous that ordinary pardon did not apply. They included plotting rebellion, great sedition, treason, parricide, great irreverence, lack of filial piety, discord, unrighteousness and incest. Depravity meant the murder of three or more innocent persons or the use of magical curses. One Chinese source adds that good and evil could be known through natural faculties, without revelation, but only by examining "the nature and reason of things."

  Hinduism draws a clear line through the world with the concept of Dharma, or righteousness. Wars to establish and protect Dharma are sometimes necessary, and these are called Dharmayuddha. The division matters in both great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Hinduism puts its emphasis on bad action rather than bad people. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of a balance between good and evil. When that balance slips, divine incarnations arrive to restore it.

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• 6. Beyond Good Versus Evil

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  "Desire is the root of evil, illusion is the root of evil." That line is attributed to Gautama Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism, who is dated here to 563-483 BC. In the same passage he lists killing, lying, slander, abuse, gossip, envy, hatred and clinging to false doctrine as evils. Buddhism's primal duality is suffering against enlightenment, so good against evil has no direct analogue. The causes of suffering take evil's place. In practice these are the three selfish emotions of desire, hate and delusion, and the words and deeds that express them. Evil is whatever obstructs happiness in this life, a better rebirth, liberation from samsara, or the complete enlightenment of a buddha. In cultures shaped by Buddhism, the good and evil pair is itself a duality to be overcome by reaching Nirvana.

  Confucianism and Taoism have no direct analogue either, though Chinese folk religion often refers to demonic influence. Confucianism is mainly concerned with correct social relationships and the conduct of the learned or superior man, so evil corresponds to wrong behavior. Taoism centers on dualism but still does not map onto good and evil. Its analogue of evil can be inferred as the opposite of its cardinal virtues of compassion, moderation and humility.

  In Europe, Baruch Spinoza reached a surprisingly similar conclusion by mathematical method. In part IV of his Ethics, Proposition 64 states that "The knowledge of evil is inadequate knowledge." The corollary follows, that a mind with none but adequate ideas would form no notion of evil. Proposition 68 goes further: "If men were born free, they would form no conception of good and evil so long as they were free." Yet Spinoza did not discard the idea in daily life. Proposition 65 holds that reason tells us, between two evils, to follow the lesser.

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• 7. Ordinary People

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  In 1961, Stanley Milgram began an experiment to understand how thousands of ordinary, non-deviant people could accept a role in the Holocaust. Participants believed they were assisting with an unrelated study. Their task was to give another person electric shocks. Most could be led to administer shocks that would have been fatal if real. They were uncomfortable and reluctant. Nearly all stopped at some point to question the experiment, but most continued once they were reassured.

  A 2014 reassessment offered a different reading, called "engaged followership." On this model, people were not simply obeying. They wanted to support the scientific goals of the leader, and they did not identify with the person receiving the shocks. Thomas Blass argued that the experiment explains how someone can be complicit as "the dispassionate bureaucrat who may have shipped Jews to Auschwitz with the same degree of routinization as potatoes to Bremerhaven." Blass and James Waller both argue it cannot explain the Holocaust itself. The participants were told their actions caused little harm and had little time to reflect.

  In 2007, Philip Zimbardo proposed that people may act in evil ways because of a collective identity. He drew on his earlier Stanford prison experiment. His book is titled The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

  Carl Jung approached the problem from another direction. In Answer to Job and elsewhere, he depicted evil as the dark side of God. People think evil is external to them, he held, because they project their shadow onto others. He read the story of Jesus as God facing his own shadow.

  The American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck described evil as a kind of personal militant ignorance. His evil person deceives themselves and others, projects evil onto specific targets, abuses power and lies incessantly. Such people cannot see from the victim's viewpoint. Peck separated them from sociopaths, because he believed they are hiding from a conscience they do have. He also argued that institutions can be evil, and he used the My Lai massacre as his illustration.

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• 8. Is the Word Worth Keeping

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  Some critics call evil a useless term, because they say it lacks any real power to explain what it names. It is often tied to spirits and the devil. They also see real danger in the harm that being labeled evil can do in moral, political and legal contexts.

  Defenders reply that a secular view of evil exists, with plausible analyses that need nothing supernatural. Eve Garrard and Luke Russell argue that evil explains as well as any moral concept. Garrard adds that evil actions grow from a distinct motivation, such as taking pleasure in the suffering of others. That gives a partial explanation, even if not a complete one. Garrard and David McNaughton hold that the term captures a real part of our moral experience, the response of moral horror. Claudia Card argues that only by understanding evil can people preserve humanitarian values and prevent future evil. Naming certain practices as evil helps people avoid answering evil with more evil, and it can "interrupt cycles of hostility generated by past evils." Most theorists agree that the word can do harm. They disagree on the remedy, and some say it is more dangerous to ignore evil than to try to understand it.

  Theorists also split on whether anyone is evil. One school says only acts can be. Luke Russell requires both evil actions and evil feelings to call a person evil, while Daniel Haybron requires evil feelings and evil motivations.

  A last question is whether evil is ever necessary. Martin Luther urged his readers to seek out their boon companions, drink, play and talk bawdy, since one must sometimes sin out of contempt for the Devil. His aim was to deny the Devil a chance to make anyone scrupulous over mere nothings.

  Niccolò Machiavelli, a 16th-century Florentine writer, gave the realist schools of political philosophy their most famous form. He advised autocrats that they should be able to commit political immorality when necessary. He warned that something that looks like virtue may bring a ruler's ruin, while something that looks like vice may secure his state.

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