The moral status of some particularly horrendous actions cannot be adequately captured by the concept of wrongdoing.See Daniel Haybron, “Moral Monsters and Saints,” Monist, Vol. 85 : p. 260; Paul Formosa, “Evil, Wrongs and Dignity: How to Test a Theory of Evil,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 47 : pp. 235–253; Eve Garrard, “The Nature of Evil,” Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action, Vol. 1 : pp. 43–45; Hillel Steiner, “Calibrating Evil,” The Monist, Vol. (...) 85 : pp. 183–185. For instance, sadistic torture and genocidal mass murder are not just wrong, or very wrong, or very very wrong. We need the concept of evil to make sense of the moral status of these actions. But what is evil? And how is it distinct from mere wrongdoing?In recent years, several theorists writing about the concept of evil have argued that the best way to proceed is to think reflectively about evil’s opposite. Call this the mirror methodology. .. (shrink)

Almost everyone allows that conditions can obtain that exempt agents from moral responsibility—that someone is not a morally responsible agent if certain conditions obtain. In his seminal Freedom and Resentment, Peter Strawson denies that the truth of determinism globally exempts agents from moral responsibility. As has been noted elsewhere, Strawson appears committed to the surprising thesis that being an evil person is an exempting condition. Less often noted is the fact that various Strawsonians—philosophers sympathetic with Strawson’s account of moral responsibility—at (...) least appear to have difficulty incorporating evil persons into their accounts of moral responsibility. In what follows, I argue that Strawson is not committed to supposing that being evil is an exempting condition—at least, that he can allow that evil persons are morally responsible agents. (shrink)

In this journal, Luke Russell defends a sophisticated dispositional account of evil personhood according to which a person is evil just in case she is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions in conditions that favour her autonomy. While I am generally sympathetic with this account, I argue that Russell wrongly dismisses the mirror thesis—roughly, the thesis that evil people are the mirror images of the morally best sort of persons—which I have defended elsewhere. Russell’s rejection of the (...) mirror thesis depends upon an independently implausible account of moral sainthood, one that is implausible for reasons that Russell himself suggests in another context. Indeed, an account of moral sainthood that parallels Russell’s account of evil personhood is plausible for the same reasons that his account of evil personhood is, and that suggests that Russell himself is actually committed to the mirror thesis. (shrink)

It is plausible that being an evil person is a matter of having a particularly morally depraved character. I argue that suffering from extreme moral vices—and not consistently lacking moral vices, for example—suffices for being evil. Alternatively, I defend an extremity account concerning evil personhood against consistency accounts of evil personhood. After clarifying what it is for vices to be extreme, I note that the extremity thesis I defend allows that a person could suffer from both extremely vicious character traits (...) while possessing some modest virtue as well. By contrast, consistency theses rule out this possibility by definition. This result does not suggest that extremity accounts are flawed, however, since, as I argue, the thesis that evil people must lack moral virtue altogether effectively defines evil people out of existence and prematurely privileges skepticism about evil personhood. Ultimately, I contend that an extremity account is most consistent with common intuitions about putative evil persons as well as plausible assumptions about aretaic evaluations of character quite generally. (shrink)

A commonly accepted claim by philosophers investigating the nature of evil is that the evil person is, in some way, the mirror image of the moral saint. In this paper I will defend a new version of this thesis. I will argue that both the moral saint and the morally evil person are characterized by a lack of conflict between moral and non-moral concerns. However, while the saint achieves this unity through a reconciliation of the two, the evil person does (...) so by eliminating moral concerns from her character. (shrink)

The Evil-god challenge attempts to undermine classical monotheism by contending that because belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omni-malevolent God (the Evil-god hypothesis) is similarly reasonable to belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God (the Good-god hypothesis), the onus is on the classical monotheist to justify their belief in the latter hypothesis over the former hypothesis. This thesis explores the Evil-god challenge by detailing the history and recent developments of the challenge; distinguishing between different types of Evil-god challenge; responding to several (...) prominent objections to the challenge; and applying the challenge to philosophical arguments for the existence of God. I also evaluate the efficacy of parallel arguments as a whole, with a view to determining the parameters of the Evil-god challenge by laying out exactly which theistic positions are irrevocably undermined by it. I conclude that the Evil-god challenge effectively damages several arguments for the existence of God and, in cases where it does not straightforwardly do so, it nevertheless reduces the Good-god theist’s belief to one or more intuitions. (shrink)