Moral Monsters
However evil you believe the Nazis were, the reality was worse. When the crematoriums at Auschwitz could not keep up with the gas chambers, they began burning corpses in open pits. To keep the pits going, fuel had to be added at regular intervals. An ordinary evil person would pour, say, gasoline onto the fires. The Nazis used liquified human fat, collected from the bodies in the pits themselves.
The nature of evil is a philosophical problem, and what have we come up with? Luke Russell, in Evil: A Very Short Introduction, says an act is evil if it is “extremely harmful for at least one” victim, and a person is evil if he is disposed to perform evil acts. On this view, evil stands to harm, as hot—or scorching—stands to warm. But this can’t be correct, can it? Evil acts don’t just have more of what makes something wrong, they have something extra, right? (Daniel Haybron: “we cannot get from bad to evil by adding any number of ‘verys’”.)
Russell’s theory of evil uses a thin moral range—harm is the central concept—but his discussions of evil use stronger stuff: those who perpetrate evil are moral monsters; they are morally depraved. This list could be extended: being depraved exists in a circle of similar notions, like being perverted, or corrupted. Russell also says that we are rightly horrified by evil. This is easily explained, by the fact that monsters are horrifying—thus their frequent appearances in horror movies. Of course evil does not inspire the same horror as a viewing of Alien: horror comes in many forms. Horror is an intense dread or dismay, and is an apt response to any “monster,” that is, something so deformed as to be alien, or almost so. Since evil is moral monstrosity, it is apt to cause a specifically moral kind of horror.
In any regard, since one could be disposed to perform extremely harmful acts, without being monstrous or depraved—the disposition could have some other ground—Russell’s theory is false.
Other theories try to do more justice to these features of evil, while still corralling evil in the dry idiom of analytic philosophy. One says that a person is evil if they are “insensitive” to factors that count against doing harm, or doing wrong. A perpetrator of genocide to whom his victim’s suffering means nothing, meets this definition. Another theory says that someone is evil if they are “the mirror image of the morally virtuous person,” this perhaps capturing the idea that evil is the opposite of good. Russell dismisses both of these. Against the first, an evil man may be a little bit sensitive to his victim’s suffering—just not sensitive enough to stay his hand. Against the second, the mirror of perfect virtue is perfect vice, so the theory requires an evil person to lack all virtue and goodness—to never love his children, or hope for the preservation of the wild places of the earth. But evil is not so demanding.
Insofar as these theories fail, it’s because they fail to capture the ideas that inspire them. A moral monster’s character is deformed in the extreme; more, it is deformed in virtue of being depraved. Deformity and depravity, while Very Bad Things, do not entail insensitivity to suffering, nor need they make one a “mirror image” of the morally virtuous. Russell emphasizes the variety of psychologies that can issue in evil: sadistic delight in suffering is a sign of evil, but not essential to it; the same goes for malicious intent, or defiance of morality. This makes sense, for there are many ways of being deformed, even in the extreme.
Can we simply say, as I just did, that to be evil is to be a moral monster, deformed by depravity? Maybe there are counterexamples (please send them!), but some will object for another reason. Philosophers have long operated under a demand that notions like “moral monster,” or “depraved,” themselves be defined, using simpler and more securely understood notions, before one could regard the result as a definition of evil. But similar demands have lately been put to rest in other parts of philosophy (I’m thinking of knowledge-first epistemology); maybe this one should be here, as well. This is not to say that the key notions, monstrous and depraved, cannot or need not be further elaborated—just that their elaborations need not take the form of definitions.
Russell’s theory lacks the virtue of truth, but he also claims for it another: neutrality. The theory is expressed in terms accepted by all, and so if it is true, Christians (etc) and atheists alike can agree on who is evil and why.1 I’ve never been drawn to the idea that if God is dead, everything is permitted: without God there could still be good, bad, right, and wrong. But it’s worth wondering whether a neutral theory of evil could be true; and whether, and if so how, secular conceptions of moral monstrosity and depravity could produce a theory of evil all parties could regard as adequate.
See also: Interviews With Vampires, a series of poems about evil.
“Who” of course restricted to beings they agree exist; they’ll never agree on whether Satan is evil, as only one party thinks he’s out there in the first place.
Perhaps evil is not simply the amount of harm inflicted, but the ability to stop seeing other human beings as fully human. Once that barrier disappears, cruelty can become disturbingly ordinary.