There
was also an intriguing response to an assertion that atheists don’t believe in
evil. Apparently I am wrong in that.
I
certainly don’t believe in evil, but perhaps I am being too literal or
philosophically rigorous about the term.
Or I am just misusing it.
I
seriously don’t think that an agent can be inherently evil. Evil (as I
understand it) is associated with acts, specifically deliberate acts which are contrary
to what is known and understood to be “good” or “right” where there is no
overriding justification (such as a higher good). Conceptually, you could have a person whose
acts are preponderantly evil and, for convenience, you could label that person
as “evil”, but I don’t think that person is inherently evil since their “evil”
derives from their actions.
The
question that then arises is “Are there people who commit evil acts under this
definition?”
I’d
say no. Not even a violent psychopath is
literally evil. For a psychopath, the suffering of others doesn’t register
particularly highly or he simply doesn’t care.
Note that most psychopaths
aren’t actually violent, despite their poor rap in popular culture. It’s quite likely that more than a few
princes of industry are psychopaths, along with politicians in general.
Remember that to commit an evil act (at least in my conception of the term), you must know
and understand that there is a good or right way to act, within a broad
context, and must act deliberately in a way that is contrary it. Perhaps examples might help explain.
When
it comes to examples of evil, most people like to use events like the Holocaust
or perhaps Jonestown. Not me, so let’s
look at “Who Shot Mr Burns?”
(Spoiler warning!)
There
are two acts that are worth considering as potentially evil: the stealing of
candy from a baby and the shooting of a person.
When
Mr Burns tries to steal a lollypop from Maggie, it’s not an evil act. It’s a purely selfish act, he considers that
his well-being is more important than the child’s. Many acts which we might be tempted to brand
as evil are, in fact, just very selfish.
The person involved counts the good involved with the act as overweighing
the bad, for example if I were intensely selfish then a moment’s peace for me would
be worth a lifetime of suffering for you.
This certainly isn’t nice, but it’s not evil.
Burns
often seems clueless about human motivations, which would also indicate that
his act was not evil. Particularly
ignorant, perhaps, but not evil due to a lack of intent.
When
Maggie shoots Mr Burns, it’s not an evil act either. As an infant, one could say that Maggie could
not properly comprehend the consequences of her actions. That said, there is a hint that she might
have deliberately shot Burns. If she did
so, then again, it would have been a selfish act if Maggie calculated that the
benefits of having a lollypop outweighed the costs of shooting Burns.
We
could take a Sam Harris type of position, arriving at a humanist and atheist
conception of evil: “An evil act is one that intentionally increases overall
balance of suffering”.
But
does anyone actually do that? Really?
Perhaps
there is some twisted person out there who gets a kick out of making people
suffer. A few politicians come to mind …
The
thing is that such a person would cause suffering in proportion to the amount
of satisfaction she got out of it (I’m thinking of Ann Coulter here). It returns to selfishness again: my
satisfaction is more important than yours and is served by your suffering.
So, is evil really just selfishness? I don’t think so, I think that when people invoke the term “evil” they mean something more. And if it does mean “selfishness”, then we’ve already got a perfectly serviceable word for that phenomenon.
