Evil

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EVIL

For most twentieth-century philosophers, intent on dividing philosophy into discrete subdivisions, the problem of evil was a matter for philosophical theology, or—more rarely—for ethics and moral psychology. The theological question is as easy to state as it is hard to answer: How is a world full of evil and suffering compatible with the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent creator? The ethical question is altogether different: How can rational beings commit evil acts? The first question has preoccupied theists since The Book of Job; the difficulty of finding a satisfactory answer has served many as a reason for rejecting theism. The second question has been answered in some religious traditions by the appeal to original sin, but in recent years more it has often been viewed as outside the focus of traditional philosophy. The history of modern philosophy reveals that the problems are related, and part of a larger set of questions that precedes both: Can we make sense of the lives we are given? Does human reason have the ability to find or make the world intelligible? These are not questions that are driven primarily by theological or ethical concerns, but that drive those concerns, and arguably philosophy itself.

Aristotle claimed that philosophy begins in wonder; for Schopenhauer the main subject of this wonder is the world's evil and wickedness. Even if misery were visited only on the wicked or completely outweighed by goodness, alone might well question why it should exist at all. Idle curiosity alone might inspire such questioning about why things are as they are in general; but that questioning is likely to become urgent when things go wrong. If the principle of sufficient reason is the claim that nothing happens without a reason, then there are two choices: to seek an explanation for the evils in the world or to abandon the principle of sufficient reason itself.

Orthodox thinkers have often taken the latter route, maintaining that belief is not only a matter of faith but of absurd faith. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), the French philosopher known as "the arsenal of the Enlightenment," took this view to its logical conclusion. He thought that Manicheism, the belief that the universe is controlled by equally powerful good and evil forces, is the scientific explanation that best conforms to the data. Insofar as faith prescribes monotheism, however, Manicheism is precluded—along with any attempt at scientific explanation altogether. After all, Bayle concludes, the new Cartesian philosophy teaches that properties like color are only secondary to mathematical properties, which we do not perceive but infer. With this great a gap between experience and scientific explanation, why take the latter seriously at all?

Bayle's "theory of the incomprehensibility of all things" was the target of Leibniz's Theodicy (published 1710). Concerned to reconcile faith and science by proving that both were based on the principle of sufficient reason, Leibniz argued that anguish over God's seeming tolerance for evil resulted from ignorance of His ways. Ptolemaic astronomy did not challenge the work of the divine creator but rather that of the early cosmologists. Similarly, Leibniz promises, later scientific discoveries will reveal our discontent with the world to be a function of our ignorance. God has reasons we do not yet understand, but if our knowledge were as infinite as the creator's, we too could recognize this world as the best possible one.

Voltaire's Candide ridiculed such arguments, and Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion demolished them. The later Kant found Leibnizian attempts to verge on blasphemy and thought the appeal to God's unknown reasons to be a mockery of suffering that required "no refutation but the abomination of anyone with the least feeling for morality" (1968). What unites their rejection of Leibniz's theodicy is the rejection of a metaphysical tradition extending back to Plato. For this rationalist metaphysics, the appearances we see appear to reflect evil and corruption; the reality behind them is truer and better than what we experience. Against this view, the more empirical outlook of Voltaire, Hume, and Kant can be seen as a moral imperative, for it implies keeping faith with the world's victims by acknowledging the reality of their suffering. But can that reality be acknowledged without entirely capitulating to it? Is it possible to maintain that evil is not essential to the world but rather an unhappy accident?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) adopted just such an approach, and Kant found his solution so extraordinary that he called him "the Newton of the mind" (1942). Rousseau substituted the idea of history for the idea of original sin that had seeped into the most sober discussions of evil. Humankind was created morally neutral; a series of accidents based on minor instances of vanity and greed cascaded into the moral deterioration known as civilized society. At any particular point, we might have stopped the process, which has now gone so far that only the most radical measures hold promise of salvation. The Discourse on Inequality is Rousseau's diagnosis of evil, and his own replacement for the myth of the Fall; Emile is his recipe for a cure and the hope of salvation. The mixture of self-help manual and sacred text, science and literature is crucial: Rousseau argues that the problem of evil was so deep that it could only be approached on all fronts. Different forms of pedagogy, arts, political organization, religion, and metaphysics are all required to respond to it. Small wonder that Rousseau's plans for simultaneously reshaping individual human beings and their societies spurred the French Revolution.

The worry fueling debates about the difference between appearance and reality was not the fear that the world might be different than it seems, but rather the fear it might not. By acknowledging the reality of evil while maintaining that reality could be changed, Rousseau dislodged the problem of evil from the theological context in which it had been embedded.

That context is exemplified in Christian Wolff's work, which still divides evils into metaphysical, natural, and moral evils. The first evil was the imperfection in the substance(s) of which the world is made; the second was the suffering we experience through earthquakes, floods, plagues, and the like; the third was the cruelty and injustice we visit upon each other. After the mid-eighteenth century the two former evils were viewed as natural limits and natural catastrophes, devoid of significance. The only remaining evil is the moral evil committed by intentionally acting human beings. This absolves God of responsibility for evil while turning our attention to questions of ethics, psychology, history, education, and economics. With these issues in the forefront, nineteenth-century philosophy carried on the discussion of evil. While theistic discourse receded ever farther to the margins, modern thinkers remained preoccupied with the meaning of life and the intelligibility of a world full of evil. This was true not only for philosophers sometimes considered peripheral to the canon (for example, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Schopenhauer) but also for those central to it (for example, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Hegel). Nor it is a matter of national heritage: the sober Briton John Stuart Mill could write about the problem in terms almost as vehement as Nietzsche's.

The problem of evil was no longer central in twentieth century philosophy, but it persisted in different forms, retaining the bond between ethics and metaphysics. No one would take up Hegel's project of "theodicy, a justification of the ways of God (such as Leibniz attempted in his own metaphysical manner, but using categories which were as yet abstract and indeterminate)" (1975, p. 43). In the wake of Auschwitz, every form of theodicy was viewed with suspicion. But thanks to the work of two very different twentieth-century philosophers, the problem of evil remained a major concern of philosophy. Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was criticized for deflating the gravity of Eichmann's crimes by calling them banal. In fact she sought to justify a world in which criminals like Eichmann are possible, by showing they are not the result of deep or demonic impulses but of mindless and not entirely intentional behavior. With this work Arendt takes up a project going back to Rousseau: Explaining the existence of evil allows us to show that it does not belong to the essence of the world, and that it may be at least partially eradicable. In thereby reducing the role of intention in moral evil, Arendt challenged a conception of evil that had dominated modern thought.

The other twentieth-century philosopher in question, John Rawls, is known for his insistence that political philosophy is independent of metaphysics, but in later works and conversations he made clear that the problem of evil was a major concern behind his work. The author of the first major English book of substantive ethics since Mill, Rawls wrote in response to two metaphysical and moral problems that ground the problem of evil: the problem of contingency and the problem of reconciliation. In Justice as Fairness he invokes Hegel to stress political philosophy's role in providing reconciliation. Rawls's goal is to show that a realistic utopia, in which greatest evils are eliminated, is possible; without that hope "one might reasonably ask, with Kant, whether it is worthwhile to live on earth" (1999, p. 128). Such passages encourage renewed attention to his main work, A Theory of Justice, the two principles of which show that human beings need not resign themselves to fate but can meet "the arbitrariness of fortune" with measures of their own (p. 102). If the problem of evil is evident in the work of two such different contemporary philosophers, it is likely to occupy major philosophers, whether theist or not, for the foreseeable future.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963

Bayle, Pierre. Historical and Critical Dictionary. Translated by J. J. Knapton and P. Knapton, 1738. Reprint, New York: Garland, 1984.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Theodicy, edited by Austin Farrar. Translated by E. M. Huggard. La Salle: Open Court, 1985.

Kant, Immanuel. Reflexionen. Kants Gesammelten Werken, Band 20. Berlin: Akademie Ausgabe 1942.

Kant, Immanuel. "Über das Mißlingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee." In Werke, Band 8, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt/Main: Shirkamp, 1968.

Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Rawls, John. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Richardson, Henry, and Paul Weithman, eds. The Philosophy of John Rawls. New York: Garland, 1999.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse concerning the Origins of Inequality, edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. J. Payne, Dover, 1966.

Voltaire, Francois-Marie Arouet. Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories. Translated by Donald M. Frame. London: Penguin, 1981.

Susan Neiman (2005)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy