How can evil be good

In order to produce anything good, I must first be freed from everything that is the opposite of good — from evil. If I am to overcome the evil in this world, I first have to overcome the evil within myself. Everything good in this world has its origins in a good spring, and everything evil comes from an evil spring.

Galatians Goodness promotes growth, enjoyment, and creativity; evil brings stagnation, isolation, unpleasantness and apathy. The heavenly message Jesus brought transforms the entire tree from evil to good. The good fruits come because the tree has tapped into a good spring from which it draws moisture and nourishment.

We could ask: Do words spoken in anger and bitterness have any positive effect whatsoever in a marriage or any other relationship? Bitter words create a heavy, oppressive atmosphere; they result in nothing good, and they do not bring a solution to the problem.

The reason for the problems is that you yourself are not free from the evil. By acknowledging the truth, you discover that it is your own lusts and demands that hinder you.

When you are set free from your own self-love, the love you get becomes a positive power that thaws frozen hearts, tears down walls, unites those who are separated, builds relationships and openness, and inspires confidence and trust! Christian apologist Walter Martin used to say that some people will not look up to the Lord until they lay flat on their back. Evil and suffering can shock people out of their lives of diversion and indifference to spiritual things and sometimes out of their false sense of control.

God may use the results of evil and suffering to build the moral and spiritual character of His people or to express fatherly discipline Romans ; Hebrews ; For faith to grow, it often has to be tested by fire. God expresses more concern for His children than for their comfort. The Apostle Paul, who endured much evil and suffering, explains the causal relationship between suffering and character Romans A loving earthly father disciplines his children.

God similarly allows evil and suffering to bring about discipline in the lives of His children. Does God Allow Suffering? Did God Create Evil?

Are Desires Inherently Evil? Why Does God Test Us? Dave Jenkins is happily married to Sarah Jenkins. He is a writer, editor, and speaker living in beautiful Southern Oregon. Share this. Dave Jenkins Blogger 21 Jan.

See also, Bernstein and Goldberg In his Confessions , Saint Augustine tells us that one day he stole some pears for the sole sake of doing something wrong Augustine, Confessions , II, v-x. Kant rejects the idea that human beings can be motivated in this way Kant , Bk I, sect.

For Kant, human beings always have either the moral law or self-love as their incentive for acting. Only a devil could do what is wrong just because it is wrong. For more about Kant and diabolical evil see Bernstein , 36—42; Card and , 36—61; Allison , 86—; and Timmons , — Secular analyses of the concept of evil in the narrow sense began in the twentieth century with the work of Hanna Arendt.

Instead, Arendt uses the term to denote a new form of wrongdoing which cannot be captured by other moral concepts. For Arendt, radical evil involves making human beings as human beings superfluous. This is accomplished when human beings are made into living corpses who lack any spontaneity or freedom. Her analysis does not address the character and culpability of individuals who take part in the perpetration of evil.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , Arendt turns her attention to individual culpability for evil through her analysis of the Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann who was tried in Jerusalem for organizing the deportation and transportation of Jews to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. For a discussion of the controversy see Young-Bruehl For instance, social psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo have attempted to explain how social conditions can lead ordinary people to perform evil actions.

Some theorists focus on evil character, or evil personhood, as the root concept of evil See, e. These theorists consider the concept of evil action to be a derivative concept, i. But just as many theorists, or more, believe that the concept of evil action is the root concept of evil See, e. These theorists consider the concept of evil personhood to be a derivative concept, i. Some theorists who believe that evil action is the root concept believe that only one or two component properties are essential for evil action, while others believe that evil action has a multitude of essential components.

This section discusses different views about the essential components of evil action Zachary Goldberg has recently argued that there is more to understanding the nature of evil actions than knowing their essential components [See Goldberg forthcoming].

This position will not be discussed in this entry. Most philosophers, and laypeople, assume that wrongfulness is an essential component of evil action See e. It seems that, to be evil, an action must, at least, be wrong. However, this claim is not universally accepted Calder The central question for most theorists is: what more is required for evil than mere wrongdoing? One controversial answer to this question is that nothing more is required: an evil action is just a very wrongful action Russell and This position is resisted by most evil-revivalists who claim instead that evil is qualitatively, rather than merely quantitatively, distinct from mere wrongdoing See, e.

To determine whether evil is qualitatively distinct from mere wrongdoing we must first understand what it is for two concepts to be qualitatively distinct. According to some theorists two concepts are qualitatively distinct if, and only if, all instantiations of the first concept share a property which no instantiation of the second concept shares Steiner ; Garrard , ; Russell, Todd Calder disputes this understanding of what it is for two concepts to be qualitatively distinct, arguing instead that two concepts are qualitatively distinct provided they do not share all of their essential properties.

Thus, evil actions are qualitatively distinct from merely wrongful actions provided the essential properties of evil actions are not also the essential properties of merely wrongful actions but had to a greater degree.

Calder argues that on plausible theories of evil and wrongdoing, evil and wrongdoing do not share all of their essential properties, and thus, evil and wrongdoing are qualitatively distinct.

For instance, Calder argues that it is an essential property of evil actions that the evildoer intends that his victim suffer significant harm while it is not an essential property of wrongful actions that the wrongdoer intend to cause harm.

For instance, cheating, lying, and risky behaviour can be wrongful even if the wrongdoer does not intend to cause harm Calder Hallie Liberto and Fred Harrington go even further than Calder in arguing that two concepts can be non-quantitatively distinct even though instantiations of the two concepts share properties Liberto and Harrington According to Liberto and Harrington, two concepts are non-quantitatively distinct provided one of the concepts has a property which determines the degree to which that concept is instantiated that does not determine the degree to which the second concept is instantiated.

For instance, Liberto and Harrington suggest that both altruistic and heroic actions have the following essential properties: 1 they are performed for the sake of others, and 2 they are performed at some cost or risk to the agent. However, the degree to which an action is altruistic is determined by the degree to which it is performed for the sake of others and not by the degree to which it is performed at some cost or risk to the agent while the degree to which an action is heroic is determined by the degree to which it is performed at some cost or risk to the agent and not by the degree to which it is performed for the sake of others.

Importantly, if Liberto and Harrington are right that two concepts can be non-quantitatively distinct by being quality of emphasis distinct, then Calder is wrong to think that two concepts can be non-quantitatively distinct only if they do not share all of their essential properties.

Liberto and Harrington argue further that evil and wrongdoing are non-quantitatively distinct in the sense of being quality of emphasis distinct. Liberto and Harrington argue that using this theory we could say that degrees of evil are determined by degrees of harm, while degrees of wrongdoing are not.

If so, evil and wrongdoing are non-quantitatively distinct by being quality of emphasis distinct. Most theorists writing about the concept of evil believe that evil actions must cause or allow significant harm to at least one victim see, e. However, three sorts of arguments have been used to contest this claim.

First, some theorists argue that evil actions need not cause or allow significant harm because we can perform evil actions by attempting or seriously risking to cause harm, even if we fail.

For example, on this view, it would be evil to attempt to detonate a bomb in a room full of innocent people, even if the attempt is thwarted by the police See Kramer , —; Russell 52— Some people would call this act of sadistic voyeurism evil even though it causes no additional harm to the victim we can imagine that Carol is not aware that Alex takes pleasure in her suffering so that the witnessing of her suffering does not aggravate the harm.

Paul Formosa suggests that sadistic voyeurism is only evil because the voyeur allows the harm to occur and thus is partly responsible for the suffering Formosa , If so, evil actions need not cause or allow harm.

However, others dispute this contention. These cases constitute the third sort of argument against the claim that evil actions must cause or allow significant harm. For example Eve Garrard has suggested that schoolyard bullies perform evil actions even though they do not cause very much harm Garrard , 45 , while Stephen de Wijze has argued that torturing and killing what you know to be a lifelike robot would be evil even if the robot has no conscious life De Wijze , Two sorts of responses can be given to these sorts of cases.

First, we can argue that, while the action in question is evil, it does, in fact, involve significant harm. This sort of response seems appropriate for the bullying case See Kramer , This sort of response seems appropriate for the robot case. Furthermore, in response to all three arguments for the claim that evil actions need not cause or allow significant harm i.

For example, we can argue that failed attempts seem evil because attempting to perform an evil action is an indication that the agent performing the action has an evil character and not because the action itself is evil See Calder a, Similarly, we can argue that given their intentions, motives, and feelings, sadistic voyeurs and robot torturers are evil persons even though they do not perform evil actions for more about evil character see Section 4.

Assuming that harm is an essential component of evil, the question then becomes how much harm is required for evil? In the Roots of Evil John Kekes argues that the harm of evil must be serious and excessive Kekes , 1—3. Claudia Card describes the harm of evil as an intolerable harm.

By an intolerable harm, Card means a harm that makes life not worth living from the point of view of the person whose life it is.

Examples of intolerable harms include severe physical or mental suffering as well as the deprivation of basics such as food, clean drinking water, and social contact Card , For further discussion of the harm component see Russell , 64— Most theorists writing about evil believe that evil action requires a certain sort of motivation. Once again, this claim is somewhat controversial. In the Atrocity Paradigm , Claudia Card makes a point of defining evil without reference to perpetrator motives.

She does this because she wants her theory to focus on alleviating the suffering of victims rather than on understanding the motives of perpetrators Card , 9. However, while Card claims that the atrocity paradigm does not have a motivation component, part of the plausibility of her theory comes from that fact that it restricts the class of evil actions to those that follow from certain sorts of motives. While this account of evil allows for a wide range of motivations, it does specify that evildoers must foresee the harm they produce and lack a moral justification for producing the harm.

In other words, for Card, evildoers are motivated by a desire for some object or state of affairs which does not justify the harm they foreseeably inflict. Other philosophers have suggested that evildoers desire to cause harm, or to do wrong, for more specific reasons such as pleasure Steiner , the desire to do what is wrong Perrett , the desire to annihilate all being Eagleton , or the destruction of others for its own sake Cole When evil is restricted to actions that follow from these sorts of motivations, theorists sometimes say that their subject is pure, radical, diabolical, or monstrous evil.

This suggests that their discussion is restricted to a type, or form, of evil and not to evil per se. While some philosophers argue that certain motives, such as malevolence or malice, are necessary for evil, others focus instead on motives or desires that evildoers lack. For instance, Adam Morton contends that evildoers are crucially uninhibited by barriers against considering harming or humiliating others that ought to be there Morton , A metaphysical silencer is a reason which is so weighty that, objectively speaking, it takes away the reason-giving force of some other consideration.

When this happens we say that the less weighty consideration has been metaphysically silenced. By contrast, a psychological silencer is a reason which is so weighty for an individual that, subjectively, it takes away the reason-giving force of some other consideration.

When this happens we say that the consideration has been psychologically silenced for the individual. If we came across a child drowning in a shallow pond, the need to rescue the child would be so morally important that it would metaphysically silence the desire to keep our clothes clean as a reason for acting or not acting.

That is, when a child is in urgent need of rescue, considerations about keeping our clothes clean lose all of their reason-giving force. They cease to be reasons for acting or not acting. For many people, especially for virtuous people, considerations about keeping their clothes clean are also psychologically silenced by the urgent need to rescue a child drowning in a shallow pond.

In other words, virtuous people are completely unmoved by considerations about keeping their clothes clean when presented with children in urgent need of rescue. According to Garrard, the evildoer has a particularly despicable motivational structure. She psychologically silences considerations that are so morally weighty that they metaphysically silence the very considerations which move her to act Garrard , For instance, it would be evil to psychologically silence the urgent need to rescue a drowning child as a reason for acting because we desire to keep our clothes clean.

Yet it seems that John would do evil by allowing a child to drown for those reasons. Some theorists believe that to do evil we must feel a certain way or have certain emotions at the time of acting. For example, Laurence Thomas believes that evildoers take delight in causing harm or feel hatred toward their victims Thomas , 76— Hillel Steiner goes even further by contending that there are just two components of evil: pleasure and wrongdoing.

Critics argue that it is not necessary to take pleasure in doing wrong to perform an evil action since it is sufficient to intentionally cause significant harm for an unworthy goal such as self-interest Calder Imagine that a serial killer tortures and kills his victims but that he does not take pleasure in torturing and killing.

It seems that this serial killer is an evildoer even though he does not take pleasure in doing wrong. It is universally accepted that to perform an evil action an agent must be morally responsible for what she does. Although hurricanes and rattle snakes can cause great harm, they cannot perform evil actions because they are not moral agents.

Furthermore, moral agents only perform evil actions when they are morally responsible for what they do and their actions are morally inexcusable see e. It is particularly controversial whether these conditions are met in three sorts of cases: 1 serious harms brought about by psychopaths; 2 serious harms brought about by individuals who have had bad upbringings; and 3 serious harms brought about through ignorance.

Psychopathy is a syndrome that consists in lacking certain emotional, interpersonal, and behavioural traits and having others Hare Some of the defining characteristics of psychopathy include shallow emotions, egocentricity, deceitfulness, impulsivity, a lack of empathy, and a lack of guilt and remorse. For instance, a delusional schizophrenic who believes that her neighbour is a demon is not responsible for harming her neighbour since she does not understand that she is harming an innocent person; she believes she is defending herself from an inhuman malicious agent.

Motivational internalists believe that it is conceptually impossible to believe and thus to know that an action is morally wrong and yet be completely unmotivated to refrain from doing the action. That is, for the internalist, there is a conceptual connection between believing that an action is wrong and having a con-attitude toward the action. The internalist believes that one may be able to knowingly do what is wrong because, all things considered, she cares more about something that is incompatible with refraining from wrongdoing, provided she is at least somewhat inclined to refrain from doing what she knows to be wrong.

Since psychopaths seem to be completely indifferent to whether their actions are right or wrong, motivational internalists believe that they do not truly believe, or understand, that what they do is morally wrong. At most, they might believe that their harmful actions break societal conventions. But it may be one thing to believe that one has broken a societal convention and quite another to believe that one has broken a moral rule.

Philosophers who reject the internalist thesis, i. According to motivational externalists, moral knowledge only requires an intellectual capacity to identify right and wrong, and not the ability to care about morality. Since psychopaths are not intellectually deficient, motivational externalists do not think there is any reason to believe that psychopaths cannot tell the difference between right and wrong. For more about how the internalist and externalist theses relate to the moral responsibility of psychopaths see Brink , 45—50; Duff ; Haksar ; and Milo See also Rosati It is beyond the purview of this entry to survey this literature.

The degree to which deviant behavior is caused by bad upbringings rather than genetic starting points or individual choices is a difficult empirical question. Assuming that there is a strong causal connection between bad upbringings and deviant behaviour, there are two main arguments for the claim that we should not hold perpetrators morally responsible for behaviour that has resulted from bad upbringings.

The first argument contends that since we do not choose our upbringings we should not be held responsible for crimes which result from our upbringings See, e. Susan Wolf offers a variant of this argument. According to Wolf people who have had particularly bad upbringings are unable to make accurate normative judgements because they have been taught the wrong values.

Wolf likens people who have been taught the wrong values to people suffering from psychosis because like psychotics they are unable to make accurate judgements about the world. For example, Wolf has us consider the case of Jojo, the son of Jo, a ruthless dictator of a small South American country. Jo believes that there is nothing wrong with torturing or executing innocent people. In fact, he enjoys expressing his unlimited power by ordering his guards to do just that.

Jojo is given a special education which includes spending much of his day with his father. Wolf argues that we should not hold Jojo responsible for torturing innocent people since his upbringing has made him unable to judge that these actions are wrong. The second argument for the claim that we should not hold people morally responsible for crimes that result from bad upbringings begins with the supposition that we are morally responsible for our crimes only if we are appropriate objects of reactive attitudes, such as resentment Strawson According to this argument, perpetrators of crimes who have had particularly bad upbringings are not appropriate objects of reactive attitudes since there is no point to expressing these attitudes toward these perpetrators.

A proponent of this argument must then explain why there is no point to expressing reactive attitudes toward these perpetrators. As a child, Harris was an affectionate good-hearted boy. Family members say that an abusive mother and harsh treatment at corrections facilities turned him into a malicious cold-blooded murderer. Sometimes ignorance is used as an excuse for putative evildoing Jones , 69— The argument goes something like this: if an agent has no good reason to believe that she causes significant harm without moral justification, then she is not morally responsible for causing this harm because she has no good reason to act otherwise.

In this way ignorance can be a legitimate excuse for causing unjustified harm. However, since Aristotle, theorists have recognized that ignorance is only a legitimate excuse for causing unjustified harm when we are not responsible for our ignorance, i.

One sort of culpable ignorance which has received a fair bit of attention from philosophers writing about evil is ignorance that results from self-deception. In self-deception we evade acknowledging to ourselves some truth or what we would see as the truth if our beliefs were based on an unbiased assessment of available evidence. Some tactics used by self-deceivers to evade acknowledging some truth, including 1 avoiding thinking about the truth, 2 distracting themselves with rationalizations that are contrary to the truth, 3 systematically failing to make inquiries that would lead to evidence of the truth and 4 ignoring available evidence of the truth or distracting their attention from this evidence Jones , Several theorists writing about evil have suggested that self-deception plays a significant role in the production of evil actions and institutions Calder and ; Jones ; Thomas This entry will follow this convention.

For example, John Kekes holds an action-based regularity account Kekes , 48; , ; , 2 , while Todd Calder holds a motive-based dispositional account Calder , 22— According to regularity accounts, evil persons have evil-making properties habitually, or on a regular basis.

According to dispositional accounts, evil persons need never have evil-making properties. It is sufficient to have a disposition to have evil-making properties.

Action-based accounts contend that evil-making properties are certain sorts of actions—evil actions. Affect-based accounts contend that evil-making properties are certain sorts of feelings—evil feelings. Motivation-based accounts contend that evil-making properties are certain sorts of motivations—evil desires. Some theorists argue for more than one sort of evil-making property. For example, Luke Russell argues that both evil actions and evil feelings are evil making properties Russell , , while Daniel Haybron argues that evil feelings and evil motivations are evil-making properties Haybron b, Most theorists writing about evil personhood hold action-based accounts See, e.

According to action-based accounts, evil persons perform evil actions often enough, or are disposed to perform evil actions.

Critics argue that the problem with action-based accounts is that it seems sufficient for evil personhood to have evil feelings or motivations, and thus, evil persons need not perform, or be disposed to perform, evil actions.

For instance, it seems that a harmless sadist who relishes in the suffering of others but who is not disposed to perform evil actions, could still be an evil person. Similarly, a cowardly or incompetent sadist who strongly desires to cause others suffering but who is not disposed to perform evil actions, is still an evil person Calder , 23; Haybron b, According to affect-based accounts, evil people have certain sorts of feelings or emotions.

There is some initial plausibility to this view since sadism and malicious envy are paradigms of evil. However, while it is undoubtedly true that some evil people are sadistic or maliciously envious, there is reason to believe that feelings of pleasure in pain or pain in pleasure, or any other sorts of feelings, are neither necessary nor sufficient for evil character.

The problem with thinking that certain sorts of feelings are necessary for evil character is that an evil person might routinely cause serious harm to her victims without any accompanying feelings. For instance, someone who routinely runs down pedestrians out of indifference for their well-being, and without any accompanying feelings, seems to qualify as an evil person Calder , He should be pitied rather than condemned. According to motivation-based accounts, to be an evil person is to be motivated in a certain sort of way.

For instance, Todd Calder argues that to be an evil person it is sufficient to have a regular propensity for e-desires. According to Calder, significant harm is desired for an unworthy goal if a state of affairs consisting of the achievement of the goal together with the harm would be less valuable than if the goal was not achieved and the harm was avoided Calder and See also Card, , 21 for a similar view.

A problem for motivation-based accounts is to explain why we should judge someone as evil based solely on her motivations.