The Concept of Evil

Nick Cohen has an interesting piece in today’s Observer on the question of evil. I see that Norman Geras over at normblog has already mentioned this, and is not happy about Cohen’s conclusions, which are basically along the lines of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” formulation – that evil is “pure selfishness and pure thoughtlessness”.

My own feeling about evil is that it’s useful to distinguish between an evil action, and an evil person. Evil actions are relatively easy to define. “Evil” is at the end of the negative scale when it comes to moral judgements so we’re talking here about major moral infringements. There are always going to be disagreements about where we draw the line, with in general those of a religious persuasion applying the concept fairly liberally while those of us who are secularists would tend to restrict our usage to the more repulsive and cruel crimes, but at least we can, as it were, agree to disagree.

An evil person, at first take, is someone who is perfectly well aware of normal moral considerations, but deliberately ignores them. We’re talking, paradigmatically, about someone who commits grave sins like murder in full awareness of the magnitude of that sin, and who even derives a certain pleasure from the fact of the transgression; a feeling that they’re above such considerations, that morality is for the weak. This is the flamboyant villain of melodrama, with all the Nietzchean overtones. But the whole “banality of evil” stuff came about when Arendt saw that Eichmann by no means fitted this stereotype. He was unintelligent and conventional, a dull bureaucrat. Yet he had committed acts which were by any definition evil. So was he an evil person? Well in a sense he had to be: a person who commits evil acts is surely by definition evil. But was he evil in the sense of being a moral monster? Well, no – he was just following orders.

But having said that some evildoers are banal, thoughtless, selfish, doesn’t then mean that we’ve uncovered a new, modern Arendtian definition of evil. Some are like that, some aren’t: some people commit evil because they’re thoughtless and selfish, but there really are people who are monsters. We call them both evil because they both do evil things. Some, like Eichmann, would in different circumstances no doubt be model citizens; others are the sort of people who would always end up doing evil. We could decide to restrict the term “evil” to the monsters, the psychopaths, and say that Eichmann wasn’t really evil, but that seems to conflict with way the term is generally used, which is that evil actions are done by evil people. In that case we have to acknowledge that there’s no common formula for evil people. It’s the actions which define the evil.