The second objection to the concept of evil which I want to look at is the claim that it's an unsatisfactory or defective concept because it's not explanatory. Since it explains nothing, there's no point in using it, on this view: it's vacuous, and though it may reveal something about the prejudices of the speaker, it tells us nothing about the actions to which it is applied, because it doesn't help to explain them. This is an interesting objection: it implies that firstly, respectable moral concepts must be explanatory; and secondly, that the concept of evil can't play that explanatory role. But neither of these implications is obviously true. There are plenty of moral concepts which aren't on the face of it explanatory. What's explained when we call an action arrogant, for example? Not very much, at first glance; but then if arrogance is an acceptable moral concept even though it's not very explanatory, then so will evil be. Of course if we dig deeper, reflect further, we'll probably come up with an answer to this question about the explanatory force of arrogance: it will turn out that we're explaining certain kinds of action - the arrogant ones – with reference to the particular character traits of the agent. But we can do this with evil too. Just what explanatory work the concept of evil can do depends on what account of the nature of evil we find convincing, and that will draw on theoretical work much of which is still to be done. But there's nothing so far that rules out the possibility of doing that work, and of using the concept of evil to explain aspects of our moral behaviour. Of course, the concept won't explain everything about the acts to which it applies, but that's nothing special about evil. Appeal to the concept of wrongness doesn't explain everything about wrong acts, but that doesn't cast doubt on the legitimacy of that concept. And using the concept of evil to capture the nature of torturing children in front of their parents, for example, enables us to give that hideous practice a special, distinctive, place in the moral scheme of things, as many would wish to do.
Johann Hari, in a very interesting piece on this topic, raises what seems to be exactly the opposite objection – he suggests that it's the uses of evil which do set out to be explanatory that are the objectionable ones. I think this is because he feels that the putative explanation cuts off too much. What he seems to have in mind are cases of explaining an evil action in terms of the evil nature of the person who committed it, and then supposing that there's nothing further to be said by way of explanation of the act. If that were all there is to the concept of evil, then Hari might be right; its apparent explanatory power would be too shallow. We would seem to be saying that evil acts are just the product of evil characters, and that's the end of the matter; no further explanation is needed or available. That's clearly wrong, since so many other questions crowd in. How do evil characters get that way? Is there anything we can do about it? What's the contribution from the genes, from the environment, from the political context? Hari is right to want to leave room for all these questions. And he suggests we should use what he calls a descriptive conception of evil. But this distinction between descriptive and explanatory concepts can't be sustained. Most of our explanations, of all phenomena, involve the use of descriptions. Why did the car skid? Because the road was icy. That's a description, playing an explanatory role. We explain events by providing more detailed descriptions of various aspects of them and their context. Description and explanation don't involve distinct kinds of concept, and aren't in fact sharply different kinds of intellectual activity.
Where does this leave us with evil? Well, we can identify an act as evil, while leaving open the explanation of what makes it so. Some people may think that it's because the agent was an evil character; others may explain its being evil in terms of the terrible consequences of certain acts. And then there's the question of how the acts, and their agents, came to be this evil way - some will talk about the genes, others about the wider socio-political contexts, and so forth. But all our moral concepts are like this: we disagree quite widely about many aspects of them. Some people think that morally right actions are made so because they're done by people with good motives; others think that what makes them right is a matter of their consequences. And there are many quite profound disagreements about how people come to act rightly (or wrongly). This kind of disagreement doesn't cast doubt on the legitimacy of the concept of rightness. Similar disagreements shouldn't cast doubt on the concept of evil, either. There's a lot we still have to find out about the nature and causes of evil actions. But that doesn't make the concept any more problematic than our other disputed moral concepts.
The final objection to evil that I'm going to discuss is the view that it's too judgemental. Who are we, after all, to say that Saddam Hussein is evil? He doesn't think he is, and neither do his supporters - what gives us the right to impose our moral judgments on them? This is my very favourite objection to evil. It's so richly confused, and so illuminating about the objector's picture of morality. It displays such an efflorescence of double standards. It deserves a post all to itself, and I'll give it proper space next time. (Eve Garrard)
[Part 1 appeared on Monday.]
