Three criticisms of the concept of evil have been examined thus far and, so I've tried to argue, have been found wanting. The final objection I'm going to look at is quite a common one: it's the view that calling somebody or something evil is too judgemental. Who are we to sit in judgement on others? They don't think that what they're doing is evil, and what gives us the right to impose our particular moral standards on others?
Well, the concept of evil is judgemental, no two ways about it. Calling an act evil certainly amounts to passing judgement on it. But then, so does calling it wrong, or right, or good or bad. If we want to abjure judgementalism, we'll have to abjure the whole of morality. This is easier said than done - people who claim to rise above morality normally end up by making judgements that look exactly like moral ones, since it's very hard to go through life without finding some things good, some bad, some acts right, some wrong. Morality is not a bolt-on optional extra in life, it's absolutely central to it: everything we do is saturated with evaluations. Furthermore, if we really want to avoid being judgemental, we'll have to give up on saying that we ought to avoid judgementalism, since that itself is a highly judgemental statement. Why should we believe that first order judgements are to be avoided, but not second order ones? And why should we adopt a view that so readily leads to paradox, such that if the view is true, we shouldn't endorse it?
At this point a supplementary consideration is often called into play, namely that we only call others and their actions evil as a way of distancing ourselves from them, as a device to let us pretend that we aren't like the evil-doer, that we're different and better. The evil-doer is excluded as Other from our circles of acceptance.
Again, there is some truth (a little truth) in this: by and large we do, rightly, think that the evil-doer is different from us. Certainly if any reader of this blog really believes that he's morally on a par with Saddam, then he should lock himself up at once, since if he's right he's a highly dangerous person. But of course people who make this 'we're all desperate sinners together' pitch don't normally believe it, and would be absolutely outraged if we took it at face value and really did treat them with horror and ostracism on account of their supposed evil-doing. What they generally do believe, and rightly, is that we all have bad elements in our characters, so that we have something in common with evil-doers which may help us understand them, and see that they're not entirely different from ourselves. This is quite true, and always worth saying. But it can be said without any inconsistency by someone who does believe that there's such a thing as evil. When we call Saddam, or Hitler or Pol Pot evil, we can perfectly well recognise that we have something in common with them, something morally in common, and that we have the seeds of evil in ourselves. But that's a far cry from saying that we're all sinners of equal magnitude, and hence that none of us can legitimately judge another. (Even if we were sinners of equal magnitude, it wouldn't follow that we must refrain from passing judgement on others. Why can't I say that he's an evil-doer, and so am I, and he's to be condemned, and so am I? Only the belief that I can't condemn myself, and hence in consistency mustn't condemn others like me, could rule this out. But that's a hopelessly implausible view - most of us condemn ourselves quite frequently, especially in private, and especially at three in the morning).
What about the other claim implicit in this objection to the concept of evil, that we can't judge others because their scheme of values is different from ours? This is a version of moral relativism, a view which has so many problems that it's hard to know where to begin with it (and even harder to know where to stop). One major objection is this: if others have a different scheme of values from us, and if there's no way of saying that one scheme is better than another, then it really doesn't follow that we ought to avoid making moral judgements about them. If their scheme is as good as ours, then ours is as good as theirs, and by our values, people who stuff their enemies into industrial shredders are doing something evil. Relativism alone gives us exactly no reason to refrain from making this kind of judgement. People often embrace moral relativism because they think that it supports greater tolerance of others. But this is a mistake: the claim that we ought to tolerate difference is just one more value, and can't, if relativism is true, have a privileged non-relativistic position outside all particular value schemes. (If we want a view of morality which supports tolerance of those who differ from us, we'll be a lot better off with some form of commitment to moral objectivity.)
Where does this leave us with evil? Well, the great evil-doers are different from most of the rest of us, and only a sham pseudo-modesty denies it. So there's nothing objectionable about passing a judgement which implies that there's this difference. But they're not entirely different from us, and we do well to remember this and to be vigilant about our own impulses to evil. The fact that evil-doers wouldn't agree with our assessment of them doesn't by itself provide any reason whatever to alter that assessment, even for moral relativists, let alone for moral objectivists. So it looks as if the concept of evil survives this objection too.
The purpose of these posts on evil has been to see if the concept can be defended from some standard criticisms of it, and I've been arguing that it can. But that's a fairly negative (though necessary) project; all the positive work of providing an account of what evil actually amounts to still remains to be done. Until we have such an account, our understanding of it remains extremely fragmentary, partial, incomplete (not that we can reasonably expect ever to have a complete understanding of this or any other of our great moral concepts). And in the case of evil, things are perhaps more comfortable that way. But some further understanding of this concept - and hence of the terrible phenomenon to which it applies - might be valuable to us, since occasions for using it are not likely to run out any time soon. (Eve Garrard)
[This series is now concluded. Parts 1 and 2 appeared on Monday and Wednesday.]