Evil acts not evil people: their characteristics and contexts

Abstract: The problem of evil has vexed philosophers and theologians for centuries and anthropologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists in more recent times. Numerous theories have been proposed but there is still little agreement on such basic questions as the nature of evil, what constitutes and motivates an evil act, and how we resolve conflicts between individuals and groups in which evil acts are being committed. I am proposing that evil should be used as an adjective, and not as a noun. As such it should be employed to qualify acts of persons rather than their character. This change would enable us to eschew foundational explanations of evil and, therefore, to examine evil acts in their contexts and so better discern their nature and motivation. I will contend that evil acts begin when an individual makes, or members of a group make, assertions about the ‘naturalness’ of their own acts and, correspondingly, the ‘unnaturalness’ of the acts of others. I will suggest that this results from the anxiety that ensues when they cannot adequately signify their experience of these acts. When this occurs, those so treated are dispossessed of their ‘personhood’, allowing members of the ‘natural’ group to violate their ‘boundaries' with impunity. These violations can range from the relatively innocuous such as being ignored to the extreme such as genocide. I am asserting that all these acts should be termed evil as they derive from the same semiotic process of ‘naturalizaton’. I will discuss ways of preventing individuals or groups from embarking on the process of ‘naturalization’ and describe the types of contexts that might reduce or eliminate the commission of evil acts by those already engaged in their perpetration. To demonstrate these ideas I will use examples from my personal experience, from analytic theory and from the ‘troubles' in Northern Ireland.     

Making a Virtue of Evil: A Five‐Step Social Identity Model of the Development of Collective Hate

In the first part of this paper, we re‐examine the historical and psychological case for ‘the banality of evil’– the idea that people commit extreme acts of inhumanity, and more particularly genocides, in a state where they lack awareness or else control over what they are doing. Instead, we provide evidence that those who commit great wrongs knowingly choose to act as they do because they believe that what they are doing is right. In the second part of the paper, we then outline an integrative five‐step social identity model that details the processes through which inhumane acts against other groups can come to be celebrated as right. The five steps are: (i) Identification, the construction of an ingroup; (ii) Exclusion, the definition of targets as external to the ingroup; (iii) Threat, the representation of these targets as endangering ingroup identity; (iv) Virtue, the championing of the ingroup as (uniquely) good; and (v) Celebration, embracing the eradication of the outgroup as necessary to the defence of virtue.     

Anti-Luminosity: Four Unsuccessful Strategies

Adam Morton, Stephen de Wijze, Hillel Steiner, and Eve Garrard have defended the view that evil action is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. By this, they do not that mean that evil actions feel different to ordinary wrongs, but that they have motives or effects that are not possessed to any degree by ordinary wrongs. Despite their professed intentions, Morton and de Wijze both offer accounts of evil action that fail to identify a clear qualitative difference between evil and ordinary wrongdoing. In contrast, both Steiner's and Garrard's accounts of evil do point to qualitative distinctions between kinds of action, but it is implausible that either account correctly characterizes evil. The most plausible accounts maintain that evil actions have a necessary connection to extreme harms, and this suggests that evil is not qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing.     

Me, myself, and us: salient self-threats and relational connections

Guided by their own amoebic self theory (C. T. Burris & J. K. Rempel, 2004), in 6 studies the authors explore the impact that involvement in an intimate relationship has on how a person appraises and responds to threat. They first show that people in relationship feel less constrained by their physical bodies compared with single people. In 3 subsequent studies involving physical size, blood/body donation, sexual activities, and responses to evil, they show that generalized sensitivity to bodily threat predicts self-protective reactions to specific physical threats among singles, but not among people in relationship, suggesting that intimate relationship involvement decreases the salience of the physical body. In the final pair of studies, they show that the salience of the physical body rebounds when people in relationship are primed, either subliminally or supraliminally, to think of themselves as distinct and separate from their partners. Thus, the present research shows how conceptualizing the self as "us" rather than "me" can transform an individual's response to the outside world, and highlights how physical cues in particular are affected by this process.     

Theism and other minds: On the falsifiability of non-theories

In this paper I consider three necessary conditions for a proposition counting as a theory: that the proposition be posited for its explanatory power; that it derive its feasibility from the extent to which it provides such explanatory power; and that it be empirically falsifiable. I then argue that some propositions might fail as theories because they do not satisfy the first two conditions, yet still satisfy the third condition. Such propositions I label falsifiable non-theories. I offer folk psychology (the proposition that beliefs, desires, and other intentional phenomena exist and play essential motivational and causal roles in many human actions) as a paradigm example of a falsifiable non-theory. I then argue that theism is in an analogous position. Like folk psychology, it fails to satisfy the first two conditions above for most theists. However, the empirical implications that theism has do make it susceptible to falsification. I demonstrate such falsifiability by an extreme scenario from Keith Yandell. Then I argue that recent work by Paul Draper demonstrates how a well articulated empirical argument from evil might threaten just such falsification.     

Dispositional accounts of evil personhood

It is intuitively plausible that not every evildoer is an evil person. In order to make sense of this intuition we need to construct an account of evil personhood in addition to an account of evil action. Some philosophers have offered aggregative accounts of evil personhood, but these do not fit well with common intuitions about the explanatory power of evil personhood, the possibility of moral reform, and the relationship between evil and luck. In contrast, a dispositional account of evil personhood can allow that evil is explanatory, that an evil person can become good, and that luck might prevent evil persons from doing evil or cause non-evil persons to do evil. Yet the dispositional account of evil personhood implies that some evil persons are blameless, which seems to clash with the intuition that evil persons deserve our strongest moral condemnation. Moreover, since it is likely that a large proportion of us are disposed to perform evil actions in some environments, the dispositional account threatens to label a large proportion of people evil. In this paper I consider a range of possible modifications to the dispositional account that might bring it more closely into alignment with our intuitions about moral condemnation and the rarity of evil persons. According to the most plausible of these theories, S is an evil person if S is strongly disposed to perform evil actions when in conditions that favour S’s autonomy.     

Large Group: A Brief Historical and Personal Account

ABSTRACT

Large Group (LG) developed in a postwar period searching for answers about the effects of group membership on the individual. If individuals perpetrating evil in World War II were “banal,” a group effect was suspected of eliciting their extreme brutality. Following Bion’s ideas, group psychoanalysis explored this using free association in a public setting. Later generations systematized his ideas out of context. They sought to professionalize and extend his and other psychoanalytic group theories yet they still worried that the group effect was regressive. After the Cold War, faith in democracy increased and likewise optimism about the effect of group on the individual. Sociotherapy and therapeutic community could furnish the social context missing in individual psychotherapy. LG could also examine relationships between inside and outside – individual mind and social structure. More recently, however, concern about negative group effects has returned. LG theorists have drawn from relational psychoanalysis, a model based on the intimacy of the individual session. However, personal encounter with “the other” is ideal in a small group setting where members feel they belong. What LG offers is understanding the experience of being in a crowd. Meanwhile, LG is popular at group therapy conferences, but we do not know what draws attendees. If leaders and members harbor different aspirations, they may not work constructively together. It would be helpful to understand what participants seek and how setting and format interact. This article begins with a naïve account of exposure to a crowd and then LG.     

Judging a Book by its Cover: The Influence of Implicit Self‐Theories on Brand User Perceptions

Do people judge others based on the brands they use? Prior research finds evidence to this effect, yet we argue this phenomenon is far from universal. Drawing on research on implicit self‐theories, we find that only entity (but not incremental) theorists are prone to judging people based on their brand use (Studies 1 and 2). We show that entity theorists infer that people use brands to signal who they are to others, thereby forming perceptions of these people based on the personality of the brands they use, but incremental theorists are reluctant to make inferences about brand users’ signaling motives (Studies 3, 4, and 5). When tendencies to make signaling inferences are reduced, entity theorists no longer judge people based on their brand use (Studies 3 and 4). Furthermore, even incremental theorists judge people based on their brand use when given the information that their brand use is not driven by situational forces, but is potentially driven by a signaling motivation (Study 5).     

Philosophical Methodology and Conceptions of Evil Action

There is considerable philosophical dispute about what it takes for an action to be evil. The methodological assumption underlying this dispute is that there is a single, shared folk conception of evil action deployed amongst culturally similar people. Employing empirical research the authors undertook, this article suggests that this assumption is false. There exist, amongst the folk, numerous conceptions of evil action. Hence, the authors argue, philosophical research is most profitably spent in two endeavours. First, in determining which (if any) conception of evil action we have prudential or moral (or both) reason to deploy and, second, in determining whether we could feasibly come to adopt that conception as the single shared conception given our psychological make‐up and the content of the conceptions currently deployed.     

Intuitions about situational correction in self and others

People's attributional phenomenology is likely to be characterized by effortful situational correction. Drawing on this phenomenology and on people's desire to view themselves more favorably than others, the authors hypothesized that people expect others to engage in less situational correction than themselves and to make more extreme dispositional attributions for constrained actors' behavior. In 2 studies, people expected their peers to make more extreme dispositional inferences than they did themselves for a situationally constrained actor's behavior. People's expectation that they engage in more situational correction than their peers was diminished among Japanese participants, who have less desire to view themselves as superior to their peers (Study 3), and among participants who were led to view dispositional attributions more favorably than situational attributions (Study 4).     

Positive skeptical theism and the problem of divine deception

In a recent article, Erik Wielenberg has argued that positive skeptical theism fails to circumvent his new argument from apparent gratuitous evil. Wielenberg’s new argument focuses on apparently gratuitous suffering and abandonment, and he argues that negative skeptical theistic responses fail to respond to the challenge posed by these apparent gratuitous evils due to the parent–child analogy often invoked by theists. The greatest challenge to his view, he admits, is positive skeptical theism. To stave off this potential problem with his argument, he maintains that positive skeptical theism entails divine deception, which creates insuperable problems for traditional theism. This essay shows that Wielenberg is mistaken. Although positive skeptical theism claims that we should expect the appearance of gratuitous evil (when there is no actual gratuitous evil) given Christian theism, this does not entail divine deception. I maintain that God is not a deceiver on positive skeptical theism because God does not meet two requirements to be a deceiver: (1) God does not intend to cause people to believe any false propositions and (2) God does not provide evidence for someone to justifiably believe a false proposition. Consequently, Wielenberg’s new argument from evil fails and positive skeptical theism remains a viable response to the evidential argument from evil.     

Skeptical theism,moral skepticism,and epistemic propriety

Respondents to the argument from evil who follow Michael Bergmann’s development of skeptical theism hold that our failure to determine God’s reasons for permitting evil does not disconfirm theism (i.e. render theism less probable on the evidence of evil than it would be if merely evaluated against our background knowledge) at all. They claim that such a thesis follows from the very plausible claim that (ST) we have no good reason to think our access to the realm of value is representative of the full realm of value. There are two interpretations of ST’s strength, the stronger of which leads skeptical theists into moral skepticism and the weaker of which fails to rebut the argument from evil. As I demonstrate, skeptical theists avoid the charge of moral skepticism while also successfully rebutting the argument from evil only by embracing an equivocation between these two interpretations of ST. Thus, as I argue, skeptical theists are caught in a troubling dilemma: they must choose between moral skepticism and failure to adequately respond to the argument from evil.     

Extreme Outcomes Sway Risky Decisions from Experience

Whether buying stocks or playing the slots, people making real‐world risky decisions often rely on their experiences with the risks and rewards. These decisions, however, do not occur in isolation but are embedded in a rich context of other decisions, outcomes, and experiences. In this paper, we systematically evaluate how the local context of other rewarding outcomes alters risk preferences. Through a series of four experiments on decisions from experience, we provide evidence for an extreme‐outcome rule, whereby people overweight the most extreme outcomes (highest and lowest) in a given context. As a result, people should be more risk seeking for gains than losses, even with equally likely outcomes. Across the experiments, the decision context was varied so that the same outcomes served as the high extreme, low extreme, or neither. As predicted, people were more risk seeking for relative gains, but only when the risky option potentially led to the high‐extreme outcome. Similarly, people were more risk averse for relative losses, but only when the risky option potentially led to the low‐extreme outcome. We conclude that in risky decisions from experience, the biggest wins and the biggest losses seem to matter more than they should. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Countering the Vices: On the Neglected Side of Character Education

Following the rise of virtue and character education, educational philosophers have recently given much attention to questions relating to virtue and the good. This, however, has not been paralleled by a similar interest in vice and evil, which, in this context, are examined only rarely. In this article, I use the work of the American philosopher John Kekes as a backdrop for discussing the role coping with vice and evil should play in virtue and character education. I show how Kekes’ assumptions that people have natural inclinations towards both virtue and vice and that evil and vice are an inevitable part of human existence lead to the idea that character education should explicitly discuss not only the virtues but also the vices, that it should promote self-control and that it should bring people to recognize that they have mixed moral inclinations. I then argue that even if we reject Kekes’ key assumptions, embracing these three ideas that attempt to provide means to counter the vices might still have marked benefits for character education. The article concludes by suggesting that while the ideas that stem from Kekes’ approach should not necessarily be embraced, the themes that they raise call for greater consideration and further analysis.     

A New Quasi‐Transcendental Approach to Kant's Theory of Radical Evil

How to make sense of Kant's theory of radical evil is a controversial problem, for the solution of which three approaches have been attempted: (1) the anthropological, (2) the transcendental, and (3) the quasi‐transcendental. This article aims at developing a new quasi‐transcendental approach to radical evil, and its main innovation consists in reinterpreting the propensity to evil as a potential for moral evil, whose nuanced modality (i.e., potentiality) lies between full actuality and logical (empty) possibility. This evil potential inherent to our species' nature can be actualized by individual Willkür in one's evil Gesinnung. Thanks to this reinterpretation, not only the compatibility of radical evil with individual freedom will be convincingly demonstrated, because the potential for evil only strongly pushes rather than necessitating individuals to do evil, but also Kant's bold statement “the human being is by nature evil” becomes easily confirmable, because even a single individual's illegal action provides sufficient empirical evidence to a regressive argument for the transcendental precondition for evil in his species' nature.     

On the science of Rorschach research

Wood et al.'s (1999b) article contained several general points that are quite sound. Conducting research with an extreme groups design does produce effect sizes that are larger than those observed in an unselected population. Appropriate control groups are important for any study that wishes to shed light on the characteristics of a targeted experimental group and experimental validity is enhanced when researchers collect data from both groups simultaneously. Diagnostic efficiency statistics--or any summary measures of test validity--should be trusted more when they are drawn from multiple studies conducted by different investigators across numerous settings rather than from a single investigator's work. There should be no question that these points are correct. However, I have pointed out numerous problems with specific aspects of Wood et al.'s (1999b) article. Wood et al. gave improper citations that claimed researchers found or said things that they did not. Wood et al. indicated my data set did not support the incremental validity of the Rorschach over the MMPI-2 when, in fact, my study never reported such an analysis and my data actually reveal that the opposite conclusion is warranted. Wood et al. asserted there was only one proper way to conduct incremental validity analyses even though experts have described how their recommended procedure can lead to significant complications. Wood et al. cited a section of Cohen and Cohen (1983) to bolster their claim that hierarchical and step-wise regression procedures were incompatible and to criticize Burns and Viglione's (1996) regression analysis. However, that section of Cohen and Cohen's text actually contradicted Wood et al.'s argument. Wood et al. tried to convince readers that Burns and Viglione used improper alpha levels and drew improper conclusions from their regression data although Burns and Viglione had followed the research evidence on this topic and the expert recommendations provided in Hosmer and Lemeshow's (1989) classic text. Wood et al. oversimplified issues associated with extreme group research designs and erroneously suggested that diagnostic studies were immune from interpretive confounds that can be associated with this type of design. Wood et al. ignored or dismissed the valid reasons why Burns and Viglione used an extreme groups design, and they never mentioned how Burns and Viglione used a homogeneous sample that actually was likely to find smaller than normal effect sizes. Wood et al. also overlooked the fact that Burns and Viglione identified their results as applying to female nonpatients; they never suggested their findings would characterize those obtained from a clinical sample. Wood et al. criticized composite measures although some of the most important and classic findings in the history of research on personality recommend composite measures as a way to minimize error and maximize validity. Wood et al. also were mistaken about the elements that constitute an optimal composite measure. Wood et al. apparently ignored the factor-analytic evidence that demonstrated how Burns and Viglione created a reasonable composite scale, and Wood et al. similarly ignored the clear evidence that supported the content and criterion related validity of the EMRF. With respect to the HEV, Wood et al. created a z-score formula that used the wrong means and standard deviations. They continued to use this formula despite being informed that it was incorrect. Subsequently, Wood et al. told readers that their faulty z-score formula was "incompatible" with the proper weighted formula and asserted that the two formulas "do not yield identical results" and "do not yield HEV scores that are identical or even very close." These published claims were made even though Wood et al. had seen the results from eight large samples, all of which demonstrated that their wrong formula had correlations greater than .998 with the correct formula. At worst, it seems that Wood et al. (199     

恶“德”——一种特殊的道德现象

人类竭尽所能 ,在最大的限度上去减少各种罪恶 ,其中 ,包括恶“德”的手段在内。为了更好地运用恶“德”这种手段 ,加强对它的研究和运用是十分必要的。     

从儿童道德发展初探人性本源的论题

关于人性善恶的问题一直有争议,本文从行为实验的角度对这一问题进行探讨。结果发现:3岁以前的儿童表现出人之初性本善的特征,对他人比较宽厚;3岁到4岁之间随着心理理论的增长,表现出道德水平下降,心理理论和道德水平两者之间出现交互作用。5岁以后的儿童由于心理理论的逐步完善,显现出越来越明确的“镜子行为”,即:谁对我好,我就对谁好;谁对我不好,我就对谁不好;原有的善性被外界恶性刺激掩蔽。     

What do differences between own,admired, and attributed choices have to do with group induced shifts in choice

Two studies examined certain discrepancies which have been considered important evidence in support of interpersonal comparison (value-adherence) explanations of group induced shifts in choice. These are (a) the differences between a person's own choice and the choice he predicts others would make and (b) the difference between the former and the choice he admires. Findings from the first study indicate that own choices are more extreme than those a person predicts others would make because he is more certain and confident about the former than the latter, not because he wishes to appear to outdo others as interpersonal comparison theories of choice-shift effect would have it. The second study strongly suggests that extreme choices are admired not because they display maximal adherence to a social ideal but because they imply that the person's solution to a problem involving choice is well-founded, that he has persuasive reasons for the choice. On the whole the evidence bodes well for explanations of choice-shift effects based on persuasive argumentation and poorly for those relying on interpersonal comparison processes.