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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing
New York: Cambridge University Press (2005)
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Evil acts strike us, by their very nature, as not only horrifying and reprehensible, but also as deeply puzzling. No doubt for reasons like this, evil has often been seen as mysterious, demonic and beyond our human powers of understanding. The question I examine in this paper is whether or not we can (or would want to) overcome this puzzlement in the face of evil acts. I shall argue that we ought want to (in all cases) and can (in at (...) |
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Can sociology comprehend evil? The contemporary relevance of Kurt H. Wolff’s sociology is his lucid, critical vision of modernity which does not shy away from understanding what evil is. This is accompanied not by pessimism, but by trust in human beings and their positive ability to appeal to the moral conscience. Read today, Wolff’s pages must be placed in the category of a new understanding of the human subject and the diagnosis of our time, the request for which threads in (...) |
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Most contemporary research on disgust can be divided into “disgust advocates” and “disgust skeptics.” The so-called advocates argue that disgust can have a positive influence on our moral judgment; skeptics warn that it can mislead us toward prejudice and discrimination. This article compares this disagreement to a structurally similar debate in the field of genocide studies concerning the phenomenon of “perpetrator abhorrence.” While some soldiers report having felt strong disgust in the moment of committing or witnessing atrocity, scholars disagree on (...) |
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The concept of evil has been an unpopular one in many recent Western political and ethical discourses. One way to justify this neglect is by pointing to the many problemswiththe concept of evil. The standard grievances brought against the very concept of evil include: that it has no proper place in secular political and ethical discourses; that it is a demonizing term of hatred that leads to violence; that it is necessarily linked with outdated notions of body and sexuality; and (...) |
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Progressive family policy regimes typically aim to promote and protect women’s opportunities to participate in the workforce. These policies offer significant benefits to affluent, two-parent households. A disproportionate number of low-income and impoverished families, however, are headed by single mothers. How responsive are such policies to the objectives of these mothers and the needs of their children? This chapter argues that one-size-fits-all family policy regimes often fail the most vulnerable household and contribute to intergenerational poverty in two ways: by denying (...) |
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There are important studies that have directly focused on how, in times of conflict, it is possible for previously law abiding people to commit the most atrocious acts of cruelty and violence. The work of Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman and Ernest Becker have all contemplated the driving force of aggression and mass violence to further our understanding of how people are capable of engaging in extreme forms of cruelty and violence. This paper specifically addresses these issues by focusing (...) |
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What is the nature of evil action? My thesis is that perpetrators and victims of evil inhabit an asymmetrical relation of power; the strength of the more powerful party lies in its ability to exploit the other’s fundamental vulnerability, and the weaker party is vulnerable precisely insofar as it is directly dependent on the more powerful party for the satisfaction of its fundamental needs. The fundamental vulnerabilities that are exploited correspond to features essential to our humanity (ontological), moral personhood (personal), (...) |
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Recent debates in psychopathy studies have articulated concerns about false-positives in assessment and research sampling. These are pressing concerns for research progress, since scientific quality depends on sample quality, that is, if we wish to study psychopathy we must be certain that the individuals we study are, in fact, psychopaths. Thus, if conventional assessment tools yield substantial false-positives, this would explain why central research is laden with discrepancies and nonreplicable findings. This paper draws on moral psychology in order to develop (...) |
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This article takes issue with Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that physical exclusion depends on the hindrance of cognitive associations, emotional quandaries, and moral inhibitions, hence victims and their lot remain out of sight. It is counterargued that conscious engagement in directly physical forms of exclusionary behaviour is possible insofar as victims are known in ways that provoke emotional disdain and moralise violence. Such knowledge consists in the relegation of others to the status of morally lesser human beings, and is produced via (...) |
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Most contemporary action theorists deny the possible existence of intentionally evil actions or diabolic agency. The reason for this is a normative interpretation of agency that appears to be motivated by action theoretic concerns, where agents are conceived as necessarily acting sub specie bonie or under ‘the guise of the good’. I argue that there is nothing in human agency to motivate this view and that diabolic evil is not at odds with inherent features of our nature. |
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In normative ethics there has been a long-standing debate between consequentialists and deontologists. To settle this dispute moral theorists have often used a selective approach. They have focused on particular aspects of our moral practice and have teased out what consequentialists and deontologists have to say about it. One of the focal points of this debate has been the morality of promising. In this paper I review arguments on both sides and examine whether consequentialists or deontologists offer us a more (...) |
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Following the rise of virtue and character education, educational philosophers have recently given much attention to questions relating to virtue and the good. This, however, has not been paralleled by a similar interest in vice and evil, which, in this context, are examined only rarely. In this article, I use the work of the American philosopher John Kekes as a backdrop for discussing the role coping with vice and evil should play in virtue and character education. I show how Kekes’ (...) |
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Violence presents a paradox. There is evidence that violence is universal in all in human societies. However, in writing mostly from the standpoint of relatively peaceful social spaces, violence often appears exceptional, and a product of the breakdown of integrating social institutions and conventions. Norbert Elias persuasively identified growing thresholds of repugnance towards violence with the transition to modernity, although understanding the balance between formalization and informalization poses some critical questions about his thesis. The discussion begins with these as a (...) |
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In this article I seek a more complete understanding of evil action. To this end, in the first half of the article I assess the conceptual strengths and weaknesses of the most compelling theories of evil action found in the contemporary philosophical literature. I conclude that the theories that fall under the category I call ‘‘Nuanced Harm Accounts’’ successfully identify the necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept. However, necessary and sufficient conditions are not coextensive with significant features, and Nuanced (...) |
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Hiroshima was the first sign of the possibility of the human-inflicted devastation of the natural as well as the human world. But the potential for destruction is greater than it was in August 1945. It is now incumbent upon philosophy and critical though to consider the contemporary destruction of the non-human species and ecology upon which continued human life depends. This paper uses Hiroshima as a point of entry into consideration of the need now to think beyond anthropocentrism and instead (...) |
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"Forgetting" plays an important role in the lives of individuals and communities. Although a few Holocaust scholars have begun to take forgetting more seriously in relation to the task of remembering—in popular parlance as well as in academic discourse on the Holocaust—forgetting is usually perceived as a negative force. In the decades following 1945, the terms remembering and forgetting have often been used antithetically, with the communities of victims insisting on the duty to remember and a society of perpetrators desiring (...) |
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This paper explores how to theoretically transcend the division that exists between nonautonomous and autonomous evil. Evil in the context of this paper is a social action that harms others against their will. Traditional social theory has explained the evil in modernity as a pathology or as the result of the organizational and bureaucratic structures of society that was beyond the agency of individuals. The concepts of nonautonomous and autonomous evil developed by John Kekes are used to clarify the types (...) |
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This essay argues that critical realism provides a philosophical perspective from which to talk about good and evil. It draws on dialectical critical realism’s meta-ethics of freedom and solidarity, and the different grades of freedom identified there: from the basic spontaneity in agency to the possibility of a fully flourishing, eudaimonic social condition. It argues that evil acts can be understood as those which fundamentally deny basic human freedom (spontaneity) and solidarity, and that good acts are those which affirm human (...) |
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Partiendo de la pregunta clásica por el origen del mal y sus determinaciones, se trataría aquí de analizar las representaciones del mal en la obra de aquellos escritores (Littell, Amis, Sebald) que, en nuestros días, mucho después de Adorno, recurren a la categoría filosófica del mal y a cierta estética del horror como motivos genuinos del impulso literario. |
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