Editing Most Noticeable Evil

<br><br><br>Autonomy-favoring conditions are conditions in which anevildoer is not "deceived, threatened, coerced, orpressed" (Russell 2014, 173), and thus, able to do what shetruly wants to do. According to Russell, although most of us arestrongly disposed to perform evil actions in Milgram scenarios, sinceMilgram scenarios are not autonomy-favoring conditions, most of us arenot evil persons. A potential problem for dispositional accounts is that they seem toconflict with the intuition that evil persons are rare since most ofus are disposed to have evil-making properties in certain sorts ofsituations (Russell 2014, 159). Milgram’s research suggests thatmost of us are disposed to  perform evil actions when influenced,manipulated, or pressed to do so by authority figures, as many peoplewere in Nazi Germany (Russell 2014, 170–173).<br>Given this ambiguity, it might beunclear whether an attribution of evil attributes despicablepsychological attributes to an evildoer, and this ambiguity mightresult in an overly harsh judgment. Some theorists argue for more than one sort of evil-making property.For example, Luke Russell argues that both evil actions and  [https://chinaexchange.gb.net/ BUY XANAX WITHOUT PRESCRITION] evilfeelings are evil making properties (Russell 2014, 292), while DanielHaybron argues that evil feelings and evil motivations are evil-makingproperties (Haybron 2002b, 269). Other philosophers have suggested that evildoers desire to cause harm,or to do wrong, for more specific reasons such as pleasure (Steiner2002), the desire to do what is wrong (Perrett 2002), the desire toannihilate all being (Eagleton 2010), or the destruction of others forits own sake (Cole 2006). When evil is restricted to actions thatfollow from these sorts of motivations, theorists sometimes say thattheir subject is pure, radical, diabolical, or monstrous evil.<br>And to be able to recognize (and change) the combination of things that can create risk for someone to commit them. Ultimately, to create a world in which we are safe and treat each other well requires the humbleness of knowing we are on the same continuum of humanity as most everyone else. The discussion changes from abstract to tangible, and even emotional, when we are talking about actual people and acts they’ve committed. After World War II–and the exposure to the heinous crimes committed by the Nazis–psychologists in the US became very interested in whether or not there was something about the German psyche and/or culture that was behind the commission of so many terrible acts by so many people, or if it was something more generalizable. It seems that even ordinary Americans, under the "right" circumstances, might also be induced to cause the suffering of others. One of the most famous studies was the Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 1971) in which ordinary, psychologically stable participants ended up committing abusive and dehumanizing behaviors within just a few days.<br>To determine whether evil is qualitatively distinct from merewrongdoing we must first understand what it is for two concepts to bequalitatively distinct. According to some theorists two concepts arequalitatively distinct if, and only if, all instantiations of thefirst concept share a property which no instantiation of the secondconcept shares (Steiner 2002; Garrard 1998, 2002; Russell, 2007). Forinstance, Hillel Steiner claims that "evil acts aredistinguished from ordinary wrongs through the presence of an extraquality that is completely absent in the performance of ordinarywrongs" (Steiner 2002, 184). According to Steiner, the extraquality shared by all evil actions and lacking from merely wrongfulactions, is the perpetrator’s pleasure; evil action consists intaking pleasure in doing wrong.<br>Explore properties<br>Caldercontends that if the relational component is not satisfied theconnection between a perpetrator’s actions and theirvictim’s harm is too tenuous to support a charge of evil actionand can, at most, support a charge of complicity in evil (Calder 2022,474–475). Imagine that a serial killer tortures and kills hisvictims but that he does not take pleasure in torturing and killing.It seems that this serial killer is an evildoer even though he doesnot take pleasure in doing wrong. Critics of Garrard’s theory of evil argue that it is toorestrictive since it does not count as [https://pixabay.com/images/search/evil%20actions/ evil actions] which cause, orallow, significant harm for no good reason when the agent is slightlymotivated by morally important considerations (Russell 2007, 675;Calder 2015a, 118). For instance, on Garrard’s theory it wouldnot be evil for John to allow a child to drown in a shallow pond if hewas slightly motivated to rescue her but not motivated enough to dirtyhis clothes. Assuming that harm is an essential component of evil, the questionthen becomes how much, or what type of, harm is required for evil? Inthe Roots of Evil John Kekes argues that the harm of evilmust be serious and excessive (Kekes 2005, 1–3).<br>3.1 Nietzsche’s Attack on Evil<br>For instance, it is likely that bycalling terrorists ‘evildoers’ and Iraq, Iran, and NorthKorea ‘the axis of evil’ former U.S. President George W.Bush made it more likely that suspected terrorists would be mistreatedand less likely that there would be peaceful relations between thepeoples and governments of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and the peoplesand government of the United States. Eve Garrard and Luke Russell also point out that even if the conceptof evil cannot provide a complete explanation for the performance ofan action, it can provide a partial explanation. For instance, Garrardargues that evil actions result from a particular kind of motivation.Call this an E-motivation. Thus, to say that an action is evil is tosay that it has resulted from an E-motivation. Furthermore, Garrard hasargued that if evil actions result from particularly unsavorymotivational states then the concept of evil is able to explain why wereact with horror in the face of evil actions.<br>Secular analyses of the concept of evil in the narrow sense began inthe twentieth century with the work of Hanna Arendt. Arendt’sthoughts on the nature of evil stem from her attempt to understand andevaluate the horrors of the Nazi death camps. This isaccomplished when human beings are made into living corpses who lackany spontaneity or freedom. According to Arendt a distinctive featureof radical evil is that it isn’t done for humanly understandablemotives such as self-interest, but merely to reinforce totalitariancontrol and the idea that everything is possible (Arendt 1951,437–459; Bernstein 2002, 203–224).<br>So thequestion becomes, are there persons who are comparable to broodingspree killers in that they have evil feelings or desires sporadicallyor infrequently rather than on a regular basis? It seems that theremight be cases of this sort when opportunities for evil feelings anddesires are scarce. For example, we can imagine that an evil personmight fail to have evil feelings and desires because she has beenstranded on a deserted island. After many years without potentialvictims and needing to focus all of her attention on survival, shemight lack evil feelings and desires due to a poverty of stimulus.This would mean that she is no longer an evil person on affect andmotivation based regularity accounts. However, it seems that we shouldsay that she is still an evil person if she is still disposed to haveevil feelings and desires in the sense that her evil feelings anddesires would immediately return if she were presented with a victim.If so, we should reject affect and motivation based regularityaccounts. Most theorists writing about evil personhood hold action-basedaccounts (See, e.g., Barry 2013, 87; Kekes 2005, 2; Thomas 1993, 82;Russell 2014, 180).<br>Season 1 Season 2 Season 3 Season 4 Season 1<br>Or else, a proponent of a motivation-based account couldinsist that judgments of evil character look inward to anagent’s psychology and not to the effects (or likely effects) ofher actions (See Calder 2007b for a similar view about virtue andvice). Other theorists have developed mixed accounts of the motivationalcomponent of evildoing. According to these theorists, some forms ofevildoing are partly constituted by lacking motivesthat ought to exist while others are partly constituted by havingbad motives.<br><br>