Components of Evil: An Analysis of Secular Moral Evil and its Normative and Social Implications

• Applicant: Dr. Zachary Goldberg
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 320754925

The secular moral concept of evil purports to have ontological and normative priority; it describes an extant category of agential action and affords apt normative judgments of acts falling under that category. This project seeks to analyze and redefine the ontological and normative features of evil. The first section will identify the essential features of an evil act. I first ask whether the Kantian theory of radical evil can be saved from established criticisms. This analysis uncovers Kantian insights concerning the nature of evil that have been previously dismissed in the philosophical literature and leaves us with a more nuanced view of Kantian arguments. Subsequently, I offer a hypothesis regarding which aspects embody an evil act in contradistinction to a merely wrong act. While extant theories claim that either a psychological feature of the perpetrator or severe harm is distinctive of evil, I provide a relational theory that explains evil through a specific concomitance held between victims and perpetrators. Severe harm is representative of evil due to victims of evil inhabiting a status of extreme vulnerability in relation to agents who are in a unique position to exploit this status. The second main section is normative in focus and investigates moral responsibility for evil acts. While I concur with prevailing views that argue that perpetrators of evil often do not satisfy the necessary cognitive and volitional conditions of individual moral responsibility, I dispute the conclusion of many contemporary philosophers that these perpetrators in fact lack moral responsibility. In contrast, I suggest that individualistic theories of moral responsibility inadequately capture relevant features evil acts and agents. Next, in order to answer the challenge posed by the preceding section, I demonstrate that evil acts are either inherently or de facto collective. While the current literature focuses on individual moral responsibility and evil, I shift attention to collective responsibility for evil. Evil occurs due to asymmetrical power relations that provide unique opportunities for collective agents to exploit the extreme vulnerability of others. The third section is practical in focus. First, I examine the conflict in some democratic societies between the duty to protect the freedoms of expression and association and obligations of moral repair following historical evil. Through an analysis of the EU ban on genocide denial, I examine the challenge of balancing these two political/societal commitments through a consideration of extreme vulnerability and collective agency and responsibility. In the final subsection, I investigate the question of how one ought to react to the prevalence of evil in human interaction. I argue that accepting evil without attempts at its rationalization is itself a normative stance that prepares the individual to respond to evil in an appropriate way.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Monika Betzler