Naming evil, judging evil

247 Pages·2008·0.99 MB·English

by  Ruth W. Grant

Naming Evil, Judging Evil

Naming Evil
Judging Evil
Edited byRuth W. Grant
With a Foreword byAlasdair MacIntyre
The Universityof Chicago Press I Chicago & London
RUTHW. GRANTis professor of political science and philosophy at Duke University and
a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. She is the author of John Locke’s
Liberalism andHypocrisy and Integrity,both published by the University of Chicago
Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2006 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2006
Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30673-5 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-30673-9 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Naming evil, judging evil / edited by Ruth W. Grant ; with a foreword by Alasdair
MacIntyre.
p. cm.
Revisions of papers presented at a conference held Jan. 27–29, 2005 at Duke
University. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-30673-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Good and evil—Congresses.
2. Judgment (Ethics)—Congresses. I. Grant, Ruth Weissbourd, 1951–
BJ1401.N36 2006
170—dc22 2006010697
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Contents
Foreword byAlasdairMacIntyre vii
Preface xi
Introduction 1
Part1: Speaking AboutEvil
Chapter 1 Where Did Allthe EvilsGo? 15
Michael Allen Gillespie
Chapter 2 Seeing Darkness, Hearing Silence:
Augustine’sAccountofEvil 35
Stanley Hauerwas
Chapter 3 The Rousseauan Revolution and the Problem ofEvil 53
Ruth W. Grant
Chapter 4 Inequalityand the Problem ofEvil 75
Nannerl O. Keohane
Part2: Making Judgments, Passing Judgment, Taking a Stand,
Biting Your Tongue
Chapter 5 The Butler Did It 103
J. Peter Euben
Chapter 6 Eviland the MoralityofConviction 121
David Wong
Chapter 7 Combining Clarityand Complexity:
A Layered Approach to Cross-CulturalEthics 139
Elizabeth Kiss
Chapter 8 LiberalDilemmasand MoralJudgment 175
Malachi Hacohen
Chapter 9 Between Bigotryand Nihilism:
MoralJudgmentin PluralistDemocracies 191
Thomas A. Spragens, Jr.
Bibliography 219
Name Index 231
v

Foreword
There are these days all too many not quite good enough academic con-
ferences and all too many not quite good enough books manufactured
from papers delivered at such conferences. What a pleasure then to be
asked to write a foreword to a book of papers from a conference that,
unlike most, I wish that I had attended, a book that poses questions as
interesting as any that there are! Yet, although I am delighted, I am not
surprised. For the papers in this volume are by a group of colleagues at
Duke University who have sustained an admirable tradition of collegial
friendship among those in Duke’s various departments and schools—
Political Science, History, Philosophy, the Divinity School—who engage
with central issues of political philosophy. They represent a range of
viewpoints, and they have different projects and concerns. But over time
their work has been informed by their shared reading, by extended inter-
disciplinary conversations and arguments, and by learning from each
other’s work. I was privileged to be part of this for a number of years.
This particular conference was the outcome of a set of discussions that
had gone on for over two years, and the final versions of the participants’
papers, now published in this volume, benefited significantly from com-
ments presented at the conference by scholars from outside Duke. This
has been a collective enterprise in a way that has too few parallels, at
least in the humanities. It was and is of course important that conver-
sation and enquiry about the subject matter that the participants
addressed, which is inexhaustible, first opened up, at least according to
the author of Genesis, in words exchanged by God, Adam, Eve, and the
serpent, and is still carried on in our own day by Hannah Arendt and
her numerous successors. So it would be ludicrous to expect anything
like a conclusive treatment of the issues raised, either by our various and
often incompatible understandings of the nature of evil or by our con-
frontations with evil in our own lives. Yet why speak of evil at all? Why is
it not enough to speak of good and bad rather than good and evil? The
contributors to this volume suggest several possible answers. Let me add
to their suggestions one more but begin with a warning of dangers to be
avoided. One such arises from the current climate of political incivility in
the United States, which permits both liberal and conservative agitators
vii
viii Alasdair MacIntyre
to employ types of rhetoric that debase the linguistic currency and make
it easy to use the word “evil” lightly, promiscuously, and irresponsibly.
This kind of corruption of speech is itself a great evil.
A second danger derives from what Wittgenstein called an unbalanced
diet of examples. By allowing one or two examples to engross not only the
mind but also the imagination, we may give to striking features of those
particular examples a significance that may obscure the character of evil.
It is impossible now to think about evil without thinking about the
Holocaust. And part of the horror that thought of the Holocaust elicits is
the sheer number of murders. But what made the Holocaust a very great
evil was not the number of deaths. With evil, quantity is not the issue.
And so it is not the issue either over massacres in Bosnia or in Rwanda.
A third very different type of danger arises from putting too great an
emphasis upon choice, so that evil is taken to consist in the making of
bad choices. But evil can arise from inaction as much as from action,
from failures to will as much as from willing. Some evils result from our
not having learned what it was our responsibility to learn and from con-
sequent failures to recognize where and when we may have a duty to
intervene. A failure by myself or by others to enquire, a lack of any
impulse to enquire, about the oppression and exploitation that is occur-
ring close at hand, but in disguised forms—a failure rooted in our desire
to go on leading comfortable and undisturbed lives—can be quite as
much an evil as oppression and exploitation are.
Yet these warnings, just because they draw our attention to a variety
of evils, may themselves point us in the wrong direction, by tempting us
to conclude—prematurely—that there is after all no such thing as evil,
but only evils, and that evils have no one thing in common but resemble
each other in an indefinite variety of ways. After all, we may ask, what do
the corruption of language, the massacres of innocent people, and the
negligent failure to unmask and confront oppression and exploitation
have in common? And, looking for an answer, we may follow Susan
Neiman’s lead and began to think of these examples as members of a very
much larger class. Stanley Hauerwas quotes Neiman’s remark that “noth-
ing is easier than stating the problem of evil in nontheist terms” (Evil in
Modern Thought [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002], p. 5). She
goes on: “Every time we make the judgment this ought not to have happened
we are stepping onto a path that leads straight to the problem of evil . . .
For what most demands explanation is not how moral judgments are
justified, but why those that are so clearly justified were disregarded in
the past.” But this is to confuse the problem of evil with the problem of
evils and both with the problem of bads—if I may use a rare, but badly
Foreword ix
needed word—and they are, so I am going to suggest, not at all the same.
The problem of evil is a much narrower and more particular problem.
For evil, as Ruth Grant points out, is one particular kind of badness,
yet it differs strikingly from most other kinds. A starting point for enquir-
ing what it is might be by considering further questions that Grant and
Nannerl Keohane open up in their essays. Both examine claims advanced
by Rousseau, who connects the origin of evil with on the one hand
inequality, on the other amour-propre. So Keohane in her paper focuses on
aspects and types of inequality that are a source of evil. Yet we have to
remember—pace Rousseau—that not all inequality is bad, let alone evil.
All government, including the best of governments, necessarily involves
inequality in respect of authority and power. All military organizations,
including the best of armies fighting in the best of causes, requires such in-
equality. The inequalities that corrupt are of a different kind: inequalities
of respect that result in inadequate recognition for someone’s qualities
as a human being, inequalities that violate the norms of justice in respect
of need and desert, inequalities that are arbitrary and imposed for no
good end.
Such types of inequality bring us to the threshold of evil, because they
are apt to involve just that thought that informs the intentions of an evil
will: “I / weare going to impose my / ourwill. This may be a matter of my / our
visiting affliction upon you—whether there is one of you or six million of
you—to achieve what it pleases me / usto achieve, no matter what the cost
in pain, humiliation, and death to you, no matter what norms and values
may be violated, and for no sufficient reason except that it is my / ourwill
to do so. Or it may be a matter of my / ourwill and pleasure in securing a
tranquil and pleasant existence for me / us, no matter what evils are being
visited upon others. But, either way, let my / ourwill be done, just because
it is mine, just because it is ours.” This is the voice of pride. It is a voice that
we may fail to recognize because its utterances can be and often are high-
minded and moralistic. So it may on occasion speak in the vocabulary of
a relentless benevolence, telling those upon whom it visits affliction that
it is only doing this for the sake of their own good but omitting to add
that what makes the achievement of that good its motivation is just that
it is its own will and pleasure to do so, irrespective of what those others
may need or desire. It was of course one of Nietzsche’s insights that
morality can be the mask worn by this kind of pride. And Nietzsche had
been anticipated in this by Augustine.
Have we by identifying the part that pride so understood plays in
human life also understood the nature of evil? Have we arrived at a uni-
tary core conception of evil? If I am tempted to say “Yes,” as I am, then the