Fifth Global Conference

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Session 5a: Subverting Binaries and Identifying Evil
Chair: Susanne Chassay

Darkness Visible
Nursel Icoz
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

Like all of William Golding's novels Darkness Visible is concerned with the prevalence of evil in the world. As in his first novel, Lord of the Flies, fire evokes the generic hell of the human condition in the particular hell of World War II. The setting is England from the 40s to the 70s. The two protagonists, Matty and Sophy, seem to live primarily in a spiritual dimension, but at the opposite ends of it. Although they are symbolically linked by their initial killings, they move further and further apart as the novel progresses owing to Matty's selflessness, altruism and faith as contrasted to Sophy's self-absorption, sexual excesses, and wanton destructiveness. Their behaviours appear to ally Matty with the powers of goodness and Sophy with the powers of evil. However, since in Golding's work moral issues are never clear-cut, Darkness Visible is extremely ambivalent from a moral perspective and deeply disturbing. It destroys the binary opposition that is assumed to exist between good and evil, shows that they are interdependent, the one incapable of existing without the other. Thus, the novel explores the difficulties of judgement in moral matters, the extremes of behaviour of which men are capable, human beings' paradoxical saintliness and sinfulness. Some minor characters are also scrutinised from a moral perspective. Is the pederast Pedigree, to save whom from slavery to his obsession Matty sacrifices his life, any more guilty than Sim, who hankers after young girls, but has not transformed his illicit desires into action? Is Edwin Bell, who admits, “We are worse than guilty” after their spiritual séance is broadcast on TV, any better than Matty or Pedigree? What about the spiritually uncommitted residents of Greenfield whose alienation has led them to spiritual depravity? And is Stanhope, who has shamelessly neglected his daughters, not to be held responsible for the deplorable behaviour of the twins? These are the issues the paper hopes to deal with.

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Blowing Up the Binary: A Critique of Evil as Ethical in Pat Barker’s Regeneration
Maria Chiancola Glade
University of Rhode Island, Newport, Rhode Island, USA

With the rise of discussion regarding “evil” and “ethical” practices in nearly every facet of our daily lives from the big screen to the academy, it is growing increasingly difficult to discern the distinction between the two. It is as if there is a continuum upon which both remain fixed and, yet, overlapping. In his book Ethics, Alan Badiou's argues that we have discursively produced ethical behaviour, or a definition of ethics, as that which acts in opposition to evil, and certainly President Bush's war is easily read example of this binary thinking that permeates our culture; however, this is problematic, as is any binary.
In this paper, I will problematize Badiou's simplification of ethics, by offering examples of behaviour, specifically pacifism and acts of war, that are, at once, both evil, or unethical, and ethical by cultural standards. Primarily, I will draw my examples from Pat Barker's 1993 novel, Regeneration . In the novel, Barker presents us with a challenge of discerning the difference between evil and ethical, though not surprising the novel is a testament to the inherent contradictions in attempting such a distinction, collapsing the binary, proving the impossibility of the task, and generating its own aporias as well.

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Beyond Blame: Evil and Moral Revulsion
Chris Pliatska
Department of Philosophy, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA

What is the appropriate moral response to perpetrators of horrific evil? The answer that naturally suggests itself is one that invokes the familiar concept of blame. Though I have no wish to deny that blame is entirely appropriate in many situations, I shall argue in this essay that it would be a mistake to suppose that blame is the only or indeed even the most fundamental form of moral response to which such perpetrators are subject. Drawing on the work of Gary Watson among others, I shall argue that there is another form of moral response, which I refer to as moral revulsion . Moral revulsion expresses the recognition that the humanity of a person can be corrupted by the evil acts he or she performs. Thus understood revulsion is a form of moral response that is distinct from that of blame. While the latter focuses on what the agent has done, the former focuses on what the agent has been revealed to be in doing it. Moreover, while blame necessarily implies that the agent was culpable for her acts, moral revulsion carries no such implication. In addition, the latter sort of response can bring with it a sense of existential sorrow arising from the realization that a unique opportunity for a life well lived has been irretrievably lost. Indeed, I shall suggest that both the sorrow and the revulsion we may feel when confronted with perpetrators of evil can be partly explained by a realization of the ease with which our humanity can be corrupted.