The Evil Demon Inside

This paper examines how new evil demon problems could arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. I start by arguing that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued—we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. I then argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use them to defend a properly formulated internalist view about our access to our minds. The overarching lesson is that general epistemology and the specialized epistemology of introspection need to talk—each has much to learn from each other.     

The Nature of Evil

Abstract

We readily claim that great moral catastrophes such as the Holocaust involve evil in some way, although it' not clear what this amounts to in a secular context. This paper seeks to provide a secular account of what evil is. It examines what is intuitively the most plausible account, namely that the evil act involves the production of great suffering (or other disvalue), and argues that such outcomes are neither necessary nor sufficient for an act to be evil. Only an appeal to distinctive patterns of motivation, so it is argued, will allow us to accommodate our intuitionsabout which acts are evil, and hence will provide an adequate account of the nature of evil.     

The Political Psychology of Evil

Fifty-eight subjects were interviewed about their concepts of evil. They include students, retirees, white collar workers, and 18 prison inmates. Many defined evil not as a moral category but as an experience of impending doom. This definition reflects and affects how many subjects experience evil as an ethical problem, leading them to "privatize" evil—experiencing it in terms of their own terror. Many have considerable difficulty connecting this experience with issues of morality and goodness. An education about evil must respectfully confront this private dimension. The same conclusion applies to how we study evil on a larger scale, such as the Holocaust. This is revealed by subjects' responses, some quite troubling, to questions about the Nazis.     

妖雾又重来

不是说“理解万岁”吗?对。就说办报吧,很不容易,靠印数是赚不了钱的,得靠广告。这就得订户多多,读者多多,发行量多多,不然就没人来做广告。而要做到这几个“多多”,报纸上就得多些稀奇古怪的东西,以吊读者们的胃口——于是猴     

邪恶的两张面孔:根本的邪恶和平庸的邪恶——汉娜·阿伦特对极权主义制度下的邪恶现象的批判

汉娜.阿伦特对极权主义制度下的邪恶现象有两种表述方式,即“根本的邪恶”和“平庸的邪恶”。前者的根本特征表现为破坏了人类发展和和进步的概念,致力于把人变成多余的人的事业,以及消灭了人的法律人格、道德人格以及作为个体的人;后者的特征体现为无思想和肤浅性。阿伦特为思考极权主义专制制度下邪恶现象产生的根源以及个人应该担负何种道德责任提供了一种全新的视角,从而为建立一种以思想为核心的个人责任伦理提供了理论上的可能。     

After Evil

Books reviewed: Geoffrey Scarre, After Evil, Responding to Wrongdoing Ashgate. Aldershot. 2004 pp. vii + 202 Price 42.50
Reviewed by R. A. Sharpe, University of Wales, Lampeter     

Evil Revisited

Books reviewed in this article:
Stephen T. Davis (ed.), Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy
William L. Rowe (ed.), God and the Problem of Evil
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspectives     

The Role of Evil in Kant's Liberalism

Carl Schmitt distinguishes between political theories in terms of whether they rest on the anthropological assumption that man is evil by nature or on the anthropological assumption that man is good by nature, and he claims that liberal political theory is based on the latter assumption. Contrary to this claim, I show how Kant's liberalism is shaped by his theory of the radical evil in human nature, and that his liberalism corresponds to the characterization of liberalism that Schmitt himself offers. My discussion of this issue will be shown to have certain implications with respect to the view that for Kant evil is the product of society. I show that this view is mistaken insofar as it fails to recognize that Kant's political philosophy implies that human beings require the type of society that best suits their radically evil natures, namely, a commercial one in which the “vices of culture” largely have free play, while the state's role is limited to that of preventing the antagonisms found in society leading to the mutual destruction of its members.