On Evil Men and Evil Ways
MICHAEL MCKENNA
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Late one night in the Curry household after a wonderful dinner party, I was drawn into one of the many debates between Jorge Secada and David Curry. This was perhaps eight years ago or so. David had invited Jorge and me to visit SUNY Potsdam and give talks to the Philosophy Department. I witnessed many of these debates in years long passed, if it was not with Jorge and David, it was with Jorge and Jimmy, Jorge and Charles, or Jorge and Josh. Always Jorge and someone…sometimes me. That was way back in the late eighties when David and I were graduate students at Virginia and Jorge was our beloved ever-present professor. But this more recent one, set in the Curry household, was especially memorable to me. First, because of the topic, the prospect of evil men and their evil ways. Second, because it was one of the few times that I had the strong impression that someone got the better of Jorge. (Sorry Jorge!) And who better than David Curry to do so, one of Jorge’s most beloved students and closest friends?
Here I offer a reconstruction of the two key points that left such an impression on me. I hope I can be forgiven if much of it is more fabrication than truth. It was many years ago, and, well, I was high. In any event, the key salient points are easy to state, and I think are close enough to accurate. It began with a passing remark by David that some political agent, maybe Donald Trump, was an evil man, a monstrous person. To my surprise, Jorge strongly objected. None of us, Jorge argued, is positioned to know the nature of a person, to pass judgment on all that he is. So, Donald Trump might do evil things, but whether he—the person—is evil or not is beyond our reach. Wholesale characterological dismissals of a person’s moral or ethical worth, while tempting, are never justified—or at least almost never justified. Instead, we should reserve our appraisals for a person’s deeds and their attendant motives. Granted, we can appraise their characters too in light of their deeds, but never by way of a categorical dismissal of their overall worth as, say, pure evil. To put a finer point on it, we are never justified in claiming that a person per se is evil, though they might fall under a general kind wherein they are evil in some respect.
David disagreed, and I was with him. People do evil things. Not all who do evil things are evil people. They have flaws. They give into temptations and stray from a path that is largely virtuous albeit imperfect. But some people are evil. Some are entirely evil. Now at this point, I might be putting words in David’s mouth with the “entirely evil” claim, and maybe this is just a reckless rhetorical flourish on my part. Still, David’s central argument was that some deeds are so revealing of who a person is that they supply us with a vivid picture into their nature. Sometimes those deeds are evil, and sometimes they reveal the evil nature of a person.
I remain convinced that David was right about this, but I want to understand Jorge’s position better. Along the way, I also want to visit a topic that more directly concerns my own work, moral responsibility, not just for what one does but also who one is. Here I’ll offer a simple confession: I want it to be the case that a character like Trump is responsible for who he has become, and not just for the awful things he has done. Before turning to my effort to understand Jorge’s claim that evening, I’ll do what philosophers do and start with a few clarifications (that is, with some throat clearing).
To begin, there are various ways philosophers have attempted to characterize evil. I do not want to offer a definition, an analysis, or a theory of what constitutes evil actions, evil motivations, evil character traits, or evil people. But I am prepared to describe a kind of evil that can apply to actions, motives, character traits, or, globally, to a person. To treat the undeserved suffering of a person as a noninstrumental reason to harm a person, to take pleasure in it, to regard it as intrinsically or noninstrumentally good, and to act accordingly is to perform an evil act. To be so motivated is to have an evil motive. To possess a character trait that endorses such actions and motivations is to have an evil character trait. And to be a person who wholeheartedly identifies with such reasons, values, motives, and character traits it is to be an evil person.
Two qualifications bear noting. First, some will balk at the qualification “undeserved” since, it might be objected, the suffering of a person for noninstrumental reasons is never deserved. But at least some desert-based theorists about blame and punishment argue that it might very well be noninstrumentally good for the culpable to suffer for their wrongdoing, at least when qualified as suffering in the right way and to the right degree. (I myself think the thesis merits consideration and should not be quickly dismissed.) Regardless, in cases of the sort of evil I have in mind, the agent of the evil act, for instance, finds good reason to, and pleasure in, causing the suffer of others for reasons that are not (truly) connected to any justification that pertains to desert or justice. Second, the person who treats the undeserved suffering of another as a reason to harm a person need not conceive or her reasons and motives under the description “undeserved suffering”—that is, her self-understanding need not be de dicto, only de re. It is enough that what she takes pleasure in are the pertinent properties in virtue of which some course of action is one that involves undeserved suffering. Many an evil person doing evil from evil motives would reject any description of their motivations in these terms. But no matter that an evil person does not necessarily understand her own conduct as evil.
What of responsibility for evil? Most who protest the evil that others do, and who find some people to be evil, believe that these agents are responsible for what they do, and also are responsible for becoming the evil people they have become. But at the limit there is a puzzle. In many cases, an evil act is surely something a person can be responsible for. Flawed people who are not, so to speak, fully evil people do awful things sometimes. There is no reason that they cannot be regarded as accountable for what they do. They can be deserving candidates for blame and punishment and so forth. But go to the limit. Go to the person I have characterized as entirely evil. Can we make sense of the thesis that such a person is responsible for the evil she does and for being the evil person she is? I wish to argue that we can. But two prominent philosophers working on the topic of moral responsibility have raised skeptical concerns about this. Consider each briefly.
In “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility” (1987), Susan Wolf has argued that a condition for being a morally responsible agent at all is that a person is morally sane. By this she means that a person is able to modulate her behavior in terms of what she characterizes (with capital letters) as the True and the Good. But the truly evil person, one might worry, does not actually see the moral order for what it is. They are in this respect morally insane. As such, they are not morally responsible agents at all. Wolf’s fictional example is the case of Jojo, the son of a ruthless dictator who was raised by his father to appraise the world through an evil lens.
In a similar vein, in “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme” (1987), Gary Watson argues that those at the very limits of evil reject the bonds of moral community and so stand outside what PF Strawson (1962) understood as membership within the moral community. Watson focuses on the real-life case of Robert Alton Harris who murdered two boys in order to use their car in another crime. Attention to Harris and his life paint a picture of a person who reveled in the terror he caused in the two boys he killed. Since according to the Strawsonian a condition for the possibility of being responsible for what one does is being a candidate for one who can be held accountable from within the moral community, extreme evil looks to be its own excuse. How so? Extreme evil seems to be a disavowal of any commitment to the moral community. Agents who are and who do extreme evil stand outside the moral community. Watson was particularly concerned about the absurd implications this appeared to have for Strawson’s own conception of responsibility. But more generally he took it to be a challenge to the idea that the extremely evil, the Hitlers, the Pol Pots, the Stalins, the Mussolinis are responsible for what they do and who they are. If they are not, then were we to hold them to account, were we to punish them, we would do so unjustly.
Space does not permit a proper answer to these skeptical worries about responsibility for those at the limits of evil. I will note that both Wolf and Watson seem to move far too quickly from the fact that someone fails to recognize the True and the Good, or that someone acts outside the boundaries of the moral community, to the conclusion that such a person is incapable of recognizing the True and the Good, or that a person is incapable of membership in the moral community. My own view is that those who retain those capacities and abilities remain responsible for what they do and who they are. Mere extreme evil is not its own free pass from accountability. Only an inability to grasp evil for what it is, or an inability to participate in the moral community yields that result.
In any event, the preceding discussion does seem to me to suggest that certain descriptions of extremely evil actions and people are in tension with the conviction that these agents are responsible for their evil deeds. In particular, it is so tempting to describe the extreme cases in terms of the monstrous. This is a turn of phrase Jorge often uses to describe certain people or courses of action. Indeed, not long ago, on February 5th, he posted the following on Facebook to describe a meeting between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu:
Yesterday I saw two monsters propose, smiling as if it were an act of boundless generosity, the culmination of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Hamas’s murderous terrorism pales by comparison with the evil inhumanity of Zionism. [This is the AI-generated English translation from Jorge’s Spanish.]
In no way do I mean to object to Jorge’s choice of words here. I find them so appealing. Admittedly, his language seems in tension with his disagreement with David, but set that aside. All I wish to point out here is that despite our understandable impulse to describe a person as a monster and their action as monstrous, there is a risk. The monster, on at least one construal, is indeed not a morally responsible agent, is not one we can properly hold to account. Like Frankenstein’s creation, the monster needs to be managed and manipulated, not reasoned with. No doubt, a rich range of our ethical language remains perfectly applicable: cruel, venal, disgusting, repulsive, and so on. But not responsible, and so not really reachable by reason from the shared terrain of the moral landscape, what Wolf calls the True and the Good, and what Watson calls membership within the moral community. Perhaps it is unfair to take Jorge in his recent remark to be straightjacketed by this construal. I do not think he understood his use of the term ‘monster’ that way. Nevertheless, there is a risk in the use of these sorts of descriptions—of monsters, scumbags, lowlifes, and such—since the less-than-human or less-than-person association is so strong. Of course, this sort of description might after all be accurate. But in these cases what we are describing are beings who are not really candidates for genuine accountability for the evil they do.
Now, finally, with all that I have said, what of Jorge’s thesis? Why think that we should not give into categorical rejections of a person as entirely evil? One thing surely to be said on behalf of this ethical injunction is that it can be seen as an expression of faith that any person is capable of moral reform, and so of redemption. Of course, there are explicitly religious expressions of this cast in terms of the prospects of the salvation of any flawed person. It might be thought that it is only God’s place to see through to whether a person is entirely evil, and even then, it is only God’s place to elect mercy or harsh judgment. For a heathen atheist like me, this is too much of a stretch. But what is not is a general stance whereby we try our best to refrain from global indictments of the character of a person as evil—or as monstrous—and we adopt a kind of humility in our limited understanding of the internal life of even the most egregious agents of evil acts. We do not know their entire internal nature any more than anyone else knows ours. To hope that anyone is reachable—that anyone might come to see the intrinsic worth of any fellow creature—is surely a laudable ideal. It is an admirable way to try to arrange one’s own life.
There is one delicate issue that might help to show that there is not as much distance between Jorge’s view on the one hand and David’s (and mine) on the other. This has to do with what is involved in the appraisal that one is an evil person, a wholly or entirely evil person rather than just evil in some respect. Here is a recent remark by Jorge sent in written correspondence, addressing my characterization of an evil person:
Again, I agree with you but want to say, in qualifying this tendentiously, can you imagine someone who fits this description but has a history and background where being a victim was perverted in such a way that it was close to inevitable that the person end up doing these things? One could then say he was made into an evil person and I could agree with that, but would then raise issues as to whether we are judging the whole person or the person at some time and whether we want to deny redemption and the like. Now, note that you don’t want your (and David’s view) to collapse into a trivial one, that doing a certain class of evil acts, which I allow we can know and judge on, entails or is identical with being an evil person at that point. I would then agree with the valid argument that starts from judgement of the act to judgement of the agent.
This is an especially insightful and telling challenge. Interestingly, Jorge’s description fits exactly Watson’s (1987) use of Robert Alton Harris as a real-life case study. After focusing on the extreme evil of Harris’s actions, and after making a strong case that Harris foreswore membership in the moral community, Watson then attended to the awful history that forged Harris into becoming the person he was. This was a history of pervasive sexual and physical abuse, incarceration in childhood, and a mother who showed him no affection. In his youth, his mother would not permit him to touch her. Now, unlike Jorge, Watson did not suggest that this was in any way a basis for qualifying the sense in which Harris was evil. Instead, Watson argued that learning of Harris’s history tended to quiet our blaming emotions so that such a history might count as an excusing consideration. That is, Watson thought this history did not defeat the global assessment of Harris as an evil man; it defeated his candidacy for being responsible for the evil he did and for the evil man he became.
Key to the way that Watson conceptualized the possibility of an evil person as in contrast with Jorge’s proposal is that for Watson, a person might be wholly evil at a time while having had a history wherein she was not always evil. Whereas for Jorge, it seems that a person-stage, so to speak, could be evil, but the person is not if there were other aspects of her history that were not evil, that were innocent. Interestingly, Jorge’s remark suggests that when we assess a person as evil per se, or wholly evil as I would put it, we should think four-dimensionally. Whereas I am thinking, and I suspect Watson was thinking, that a person wholly present, three-dimensionally at a time, can be fully evil even if her history is such that she was previously not wholly evil but simply became evil. I favor the latter way of conceiving of the evil person. But I do not wish to deny that Jorge’s conception has appeal. What is perhaps illuminating is that it might well be that much of the disagreement here is rooted, so to speak, in the metaphysics of the nature of a person, and of what can be unqualifiedly true of her at a time. Both conceptions, it seems to me, have some purchase on our thinking.
And yet, I want to say, with David, some people simply are evil. Moreover, I want them to be accountable for their evil. This ideal that I find in Jorge’s position has a limit—that is the ideal of faith that any person is capable of moral reform and so we should refrain from global assessments of them as fully evil. Were it that we had the good fortune to live outside the worst moments in the unfolding of human affairs, it would be easy to live this ideal. And no doubt some have the strength of character to live by this ideal despite facing the worst. But as the fallible moral agents that most of us are, we have good reason to invoke the language of the evil person and their evil ways. Of course, this does not get us very far. Accurately describing the moral order is no sort of solution, but I cannot see how any solution is possible without a clear understanding of it. So, I say, David was right to hold his ground that evening. There are evil men in this world, and they do evil things. My hope is that they are not monsters but actual morally responsible agents accountable for what they do and who they are. But maybe this is just wishful thinking.*
* Thanks to Jorge Secada for helpful comments on an earlier draft. This essay is written for my friend David Curry in celebration of all the years he has given to philosophy and the life of the mind. I am grateful to his children, Tess, Devin, and Galen for inviting me to participate in this festschrift in honor of their father. When I began graduate school way back in 1986, I arrived insecure and surely very poorly trained. Coming from a meager rural blue-collar background, I was at sea. I felt totally out of place, not just in the classroom, but in pretty much any social setting with all of these incredibly erudite and articulate people. David invited me into the life of our department, forgave me for much of my foolishness, and saw the best in me. And he also served me up many a fine cocktail as the coolest bartender in Charlottesville (including Dave Matthews!). I’ve always admired his grace and generosity, and his love for philosophy. Congratulations, David, and thank you!
References
Strawson, P. F. (1962). Freedom and Resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 187–211.
Watson, Gary. (1987). Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme. In F. Schoeman, ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 256–86.
Wolf, Susan. (1987). Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility. In F. Schoeman, ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 46–62.