Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness 2008 Conference Programme Session 5

9th Global Conference
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

Monday 10th March - Thursday 13th March 2008
Salzburg, Austria

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Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Session 5: Evil Martha, Evil Mary: Acting and Listening
Chair: Phil Fitzsimmons

Evil Character and Evil Actions
William Myers
Department of Philosophy, College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA

One of the persistent themes in evil studies is whether we actually need the concept of evil. If the term ‘evil’ has cognitive content and is not simply an emotive expression of horror, what work can it do for us in our attempts to understand the worst that people do to each other? Eve Garrard argues that evil can function as an explanatory concept, and her approach raises a number of intriguing questions about our ascription of the term to human actions or character. For one thing, it seems to render the concept of evil redundant in those cases, probably the majority of instances in which people do serious harm, where an alternative explanation based on empirical analysis is readily available: psychopathy, psychosis, traumatic brain injury. Subtracting these cases from the set of humanly caused serious harms, that is, subtracting those in which there is an alternative explanatory framework available which does not rely on the concept of evil per se, we are left with cases which on the face of it are inexplicable. But are there any such cases? That is, are there cases in which, having applied the various explanatory tools available to us and found them wanting, the only thing left is ‘evil’?
Socrates famously argued that all cases of wrongdoing are instances of cognitive mistakes about what is truly to be desired—mistakes about the Good. For Socrates, to say that an actor knowingly and deliberately did wrong, sought the worse instead of the better, is incoherent. If he is right, then the category of wrongs committed knowingly and deliberately is an empty class. Certainly we have literary examples such as Shakespeare’s Iago and Milton’s Satan, but these are fictional characters. If we can identify an actual person whose harms cannot be readily explained as either a cognitive mistake or as the result of psychological or physical pathology, might evil count as an explanation of that person’s actions or character? Using Claudia Card’s atrocity paradigm and S. I. Benn’s categorization of human wickedness as foundations, I try to make a provisional case for evil being the only explanatory tool available when other frameworks fail, and I offer a real world example in which the concept seems to apply. Further, I look at whether ‘evil’ rightly is to be ascribed to actions, to persons, or to character.

Grey Zone: A Comparison Between Autobiography and Fiction
Bettine Siertsema
Blaise Pascal Institute, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The Netherlands

The ‘grey zone’ is the phrase for those prisoners in concentration camps who were given power by the SS over their fellow inmates, sometimes even the power over life and death. This position can be characterised as that of victim and perpetrator at the same time. In this paper I compare three Dutch texts, in which the main character finds himself in the grey zone: the memoirs of the Jewish doctor Eli Cohen, the memoirs of the political prisoner Andries Kaas, also a doctor, and the non-autobiographical novella Breaking Point by Jacques Presser. This novella deals with the grey zone in the transit camp Westerbork. Both Cohen and Kaas feel responsible for the death of fellow prisoners, knowingly as well as unknowingly. The guilt Cohen feels over his deliberate actions weighs more heavily on him, whereas Kaas tends to explain away this guilt; he is more troubled by the bad consequences of his well intended advices.
The most striking difference between these memoirs on the one hand and the fictional novella on the other is the way in which the obtaining of a position in the grey zone is described, and the way in which a feeling of guilt or responsibility is developed. In the memoirs getting a position in the grey zone is described as a gradual process in which necessity and inevitability plays a large role. The consciousness of responsibility and guilt also develops in stages. In the novella belonging to the grey zone is presented more as a choice, made in one crucial moment. In the same way the main character’s insight in his guilt, and his repentance happen here in one decisive event. Such a ‘breaking point’ may be dramatically more powerful, but is realistically less convincing.

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Narrative Discourse and the Evil Perspective: Does Justice Always Require That We Listen to Both Sides of the Story?
Stephen Hawkins
Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Some forms of conflict seem related to a failure of understanding between opponents. In recent years, democratic theorists (e.g. Iris Young) have proposed the use of narrative as a just way to encourage understanding across divided social groups. The intuitively plausible hypothesis is that by exchanging narrative accounts of the conflict, opposed groups would improve their understanding of each other’s perspectives. Seemingly intractable conflicts could in this way be softened.
An important objection to this narrative approach is that some worldviews (e.g. racist or sexist) are morally evil, do not deserve a hearing, and should not be treated as though they were legitimate ways of conceiving the world. The concern, familiar from debates over censorship in art, is that the narrative presentation of marginal or abnormal perspectives risks normalizing evil and making heroes of villains. Morally questionable actions can seem less objectionable when they are presented in the context of an agent’s life story. However useful stories might be for communicating the contextual background of moral action, they encourage us to identify with the perpetrators of violence, and are therefore dangerous. A severe moral challenge to narrative approaches to political conflict resolution can thus be formulated: the use of narratives would weaken our moral sensibility, undermine justice, and promote moral relativism.
In this essay, I respond to these charges by separating legitimate practical concerns about the implementation of narratives from broader theoretical issues relating to relativism. I argue that we can successfully distinguish between fair (‘just’) and unfair (‘unjust’ or evil) narratives: a fair narrative satisfies various formal criteria (e.g. internal coherence) and also adequately represents the interested perspectives of others. An emphasis on perspective and narrative discourse is therefore compatible with a belief in fairness. I conclude by recommending, with qualifications, the use of narratives in some political contexts.