Fifth Global Conference

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Session 11: Individuals, Groups and Evil Actions
Chair: Luca Follis

Personal Evil, Systemic Evil and Collective Responsibility
Bill Wringe
Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

The aim of this paper is to make sense of a notion of systemic, non-personal evil in a way that does not detach such evil entirely from notions of agency and responsibility. I do so by appealing to and defending notions of collective responsibility and collective agency.
When thinking about evil, it seems plausible to make a distinction between personal evil - evil that can be attributed to the character actions and intentions of particular individuals - and systemic evil - which cannot be so attributed. With this kind of distinction in hand some forms of skepticism about the use of the notion of evil can be disarmed: such skepticism typically rests on an unstated assumption that evil has to be personal rather than systemic.
Unfortunately, the notion of systemic evil seems problematic. The problem arises when we try to combine the idea that there is systemic evil with two other plausible claims. The first is that we cannot make sense of a notion of evil which is entirely detached from concepts such as agency and responsibility. The second is that individuals cannot be regarded as responsible for things which they could not have prevented.
I try to resolve the problem by drawing on recent work on the notions of collective action and collective responsibility. I start by arguing for the initial plausibility of such a notion and addressing the objection that properly speaking only individuals can be regarded as responsible agents. I then consider a range of views about the scope of collective responsibility and conclude with some reflections about the implications of these views for our thinking about war crimes and bystander responsibility.

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Harm and Transgression in International Criminal Justice
Stephen Riley
Law School, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

Social science maintains that genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes are qualitatively different crimes. They reflect (universal) fault-lines in humanity or (wide-spread but localised) ruptures in social and moral consciousness. Two philosophers, working within the phenomenological tradition and responding to the legacy of the Second World War (WWII), are representative. Arendt's ‘banality of evil' claim implies that the Holocaust was an extreme but localised rupture. Jaspers' ‘metaphysical guilt' thesis implicates a universal fault-line, a fallen-ness, in humanity as a whole.
I will defend the assumption that these crimes are qualitatively different, but that both philosophers fail to offer a hermeneutic that is adequate to crimes outside the context of the Holocaust and WWII. Specifically, that they wrongly characterise these events as creating an aporia, i.e. a lack of grounds for judging.
I will seek to defend a ‘transgression' based hermeneutic by looking at the hierarchy of crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, then war crimes) in the International Criminal Court (ICC) Statute. Problematically, in terms of loss of life, war crimes can potentially outstrip genocide; in terms of abhorrence, crimes against humanity may be comparable to genocide. In fact, the hierarchy reflects, on the one hand, historical developments in international law post-WWII, and on the other, an implicit determination of levels of transgression. In the former sense the hierarchy is no longer adequate, but in terms of transgression it offers a challenge to Arendt and Jaspers' aporia . Transgression encompasses both patterns of agency where mores are suspended, allowing orchestration of massacre and mass complicity in crime, and patterns of harm, where not only physical harm is sustained but where social structures providing security and identity are destroyed. As such, I would argue, the international hierarchy treats the notion of transgression as a significant, qualitatively distinctive but non- aporetic, factor.

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Team Spirit: Doing Bad Things in the Cause of Good
Daniel J.H. Greenwood
Professor of Law, SJ Quinney College of Law, University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Some people are just bad: Jeffrey Dahmer, serial killer and cannibal, comes to mind. But a strikingly large part of the evil in the world is committed by people trying to do the right thing.
Competition for power is a zero-sum game. As Hobbes said, those who seek power (which he took to be everyone) must have “a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death.” In this competitive mode, anything good for you is automatically bad for me.
Hobbes, however, missed that we live in families, tribes, companies, communities, nations. We are not in a “war of all against all,” but rather a war of teams against teams.
Within teams, a different ethic applies. When I help my children, partners, or country, I help myself. No Hobbesian war, what is good for my team is good for me.
The rules of morality within teams are clear and accepted: love thy neighbor as thyself, or a mother’s love for her child. Team members sacrifice for one another: they don’t worry about equality or relative status.
The rules of inter-team competition are clear too: fair play, but if they won’t play fair, beat them by any means available. Not every competition ends, moose-like, in antlers too large for survival, nor is the commons usually a tragedy, nor does every state preemptively attack its neighbors lest they, cheating, attack it. Justice’s requirements are relatively clear, even if violations easily spiral into disaster.
But the teams themselves are unstable, undefined, and constantly controversial. Who is “us”: me alone, my family, party, religion, ethnicity, race, region, country; or the proletariat, an imagined community of predecessors and successors, humanity, or biosphere; all creations of a single God or only a particular subset? Are “they” the scary people in the shadows across the street, across the sea, or Martian invaders?
On macro and micro levels, self-sacrifice in the cause of the team is both the highest form of human morality – and the source of its worst crimes. The evil done in the name of team spirit and for the greater glory of God, country and family is evil done by heroes to prevent the victory of evil. Violence without crime, evil without evildoers, does more damage than Dahmer and his ilk: the teams we live by also generate the behavior we abhor.