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Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

Friday 19th - Wednesday 24th March 2004
CERGE-EI,
Prague, Czech Republic

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Mephistopheles Revisited: the Case of Dr. Emmenberger in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Der Verdacht
Vera Profit
Department of German & Comparative Literature, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

Prior to the 1983 publication of M. Scott Peck's People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, the diagnosis of evil had never entered the psychiatric lexicon. In an attempt to allow for this designation within the medical sphere (68), Dr. Peck's treatise attempts to explicate the characteristics of both individual and group evil. As a result in the course of his landmark study, the then practicing psychiatrist offers a host of insightful observations concerning the nature of evil. Given however the parameters of this investigation, I intend to concentrate on only one of them. How might we recognize evil? Dr. Peck suggests a proven method: "If one wants to seek out evil people, the simplest way to do so is to trace them from their victims."(107)
No one can deny that Dr. Fritz Emmenberger, the protagonist of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Der Verdacht, epitomizes evil; he had after all participated willingly in the endless killings, taking place in the Stutthof concentration camp. Yet how many of us can presently identify with such radical evil perpetrated in a different time and a different place? But all of us relate to others on a daily basis. Consequently these pages focus only on Emmenberger's relationships and their significance for him (and ultimately for us).  How does he treat those with whom he surrounds himself? How does he select and subsequently control them? Just how does he detract from the efficacy of their lives? And does he do so repeatedly, over extended periods of time? A single misguided act rarely condemns an individual.(104)
The case histories to be examined are those concerning three staff members employed in Emmenberger's Zurich hospital: Dr. Edith Marlok, Emmenberger's medical assistant, the dwarf and the deaf-mute.

Attica as the Exception
Luca Follis
Department of Sociology, New School University, New York, NY, USA

Carl Schmitt argued that in times of public emergency, the monopoly of the sovereign to decide released him from the restraint of legal norms. Thus, according to Schmitt, because of a credible danger to the state, the rule of law could be bracketed and the sovereign was free to decide both when there was a real emergency and what could be done to resolve it. Legal norms were neither capable of codifying the emergency (since no norms can apply to chaos) nor where they able to retroactively judge the course of action the sovereign took. Hence an important aspect of Schmitt's logic is that actions performed by the sovereign, or his delegated agents, are beyond any moral, ethical or juridical evaluation and the only criteria on which they can be judged is whether they are effective and efficient in restoring order. Thus by expanding Schmitt's position one can argue that it is only because the stakes in the exception (emergency) are so great that the bracketing of legality, the diminution or dispersal of human rights, the right to put individuals to summary death (or the use of military tribunals in the battlefield) and the use of unrestrained violence is permitted and justified.
Despite the deep controversy and indignation that Schmitt's theories provoked and continue to provide, the basic elements of his exceptional logic (the emphasis on sovereign decision-making, the necessity of diminished legality, and the question of judging the means solely by the ends they seek to achieve) continue to appear within state justifications of actions performed during emergencies. Nowhere is this more evident than in the events surrounding the Attica prison riot of 1971. The retaking of Attica prison by an uncoordinated ensemble of state troopers, correctional officers, park police, and deputy sheriffs was perhaps the bloodiest response to a prison riot in US history with the retaking force amassing a body count of 49 dead (29 inmates and 10 hostages) and 89 wounded. In the days that followed, inmates were repeatedly beaten, tortured and terrorized at the hands of police officers, correctional officers and prison guards. In this paper, I intend to argue that the Attica case study provides a telling example of the vicious and heinous actions such exceptional logic can legitimize when invoked by state officials and the legal difficulties (much like Schmitt points out) that its victims encounter in trying to push a moral/ethical accounting of their grievances in the court of law.

The Unbearable Brutality of Being: Casual Cruelty in Prison and What this Tells us About Who we Really Are
Diana Medlicott
Professor of Teaching and Learning, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University, United Kingdom

In the apparently “advanced” systems of criminal justice in modern societies such as the U.S.A. and UK , there has been an enthusiastic return to respectability of cruelty as a penal value, and, in some ways, this mirrors an enthusiastic engagement with cruelty in popular culture, such as that exemplified in reality television shows. In terms of tolerating or justifying cruel treatment as a normal part of everyday life, the principle of deservedness is commonly held to apply to prisoners, or what Nietzsche called an “entitlement to cruelty”. In the course of research inside prison over many years, the researcher becomes aware of the ubiquity of casual cruelty practiced by staff on those in their charge, as well as between prisoners themselves. In this paper, I give examples from both the US and UK systems, and attempt to distinguish casual cruelty from less normalised acts of wilful and perverted cruelty. I show how significant it is when this routinised cruelty is visited by the relatively stronger on weaker and more vulnerable members of a prison society.
In trying to explain the prevalence of this kind of brutality, it is helpful to understand how, in a particular occupational culture, staff cope with the strains of the job by “othering” the people in their charge, with whom they have frequently far more in common than in difference. But this kind of routinised brutality is not just a tale of an unpleasant occupational culture and milieu: it has lessons for all of us: it tells us something significant about who we really are, and the inherent plasticity of our nature and identity. The question is: can we bear to hear this message, or can we only cope with thinking of it as part of the Other?

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