Slides
Evil and Forgiveness
Primo Levi says that evil acts can never be redeemed. Can they be forgiven? In order to answer that question, we're going to need to think more about what it really means to forgive.
4/20/2023
Evil and Alcohol, Ctd
The explanation for why alcohol changes our behavior is fascinating, and it seems to teach us something about moral judgement. But can it actually teach us about moral action? What if there's more to being ethical than just doing the right thing?
4/18/2023
Evil and Alcohol
To learn more from psychology, it's helpful to study common and reproducible phenomena. One reproducible phenomenon that seems to go along with moral misbehavior is alcohol intoxication. Why? And what does this tell us about the nature of moral judgements?
4/13/2023
The Psychology of Evil, Ctd.
We continue to investigate whether Science can answer philosophical questions, by considering a number of ways to understand the idea of “scientific objectivity”.
4/11/2023
Milgram: The Psychology of Evil
Can science settle the debates about human nature? Some scientists have tried to shed light on ethical questions using experimental methods. Is this Science? Is it Philosophy? We look at one case study - Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, in search of an answer.
4/6/2023
Sartre: Against Human Nature
If evil is real, where does it come from? Sartre forcefully rejects a presupposition shared by Xunzi and Mengzi: that there is such a thing as human nature. He argues instead that we have no “essence” beyond what we actually do and how we actually live.
4/4/2023
Xunzi: The Origin of Evil
If evil is real, where does it come from? Xunzi argues against Mengzi, claiming that human nature is not good, but evil. Human beings naturally develop into violent and dangerous creatures, unless restrained by moral education and ritual - a product of conscious effort, rather than human nature.
3/30/2023
Xunzi: The Origin of Evil
If evil is real, where does it come from? Xunzi argues against Mengzi, claiming that human nature is not good, but evil. Human beings naturally develop into violent and dangerous creatures, unless restrained by moral education and ritual - a product of conscious effort, rather than human nature.
3/28/2023
Mengzi: The Origin of Evil
If evil is real, where does it come from? The confucian philosopher Mengzi argues that human nature is good - we all have certain innate virtues that, when correctly nutured, develop into benevolence, rightousness, wisdom and propriety. Evil, then, is the result of a failure for human nature to develop properly.
3/23/2023
Speak No Evil II
Eve Garrad defends against the Cole/Held challenge that Evil is a useless concept. She argues that, in fact, the concept of evil allows us to think and communicate about a certain important category of human experience: the experience of Moral Horror.
3/21/2023
Speak No Evil
Phillip Cole and Virginia Held offer critiques of the idea that evil should be held apart from ordinary wrongdoing as a special conceptual category. Such a category, they claim, is dangerous, potentially incoherent, and serves no useful purpose in our thinking.
3/7/2023
Eagleman: The Brain on Trail
Another reason to doubt the reality of evil is this: Evil deserves blame and punishment. That makes it different from bad behavior that is caused by illness or brain injury, which deserves medical treatment. One way of thinking about this is that your actions only count as evil if they come from YOU, and not from the condition of your brain. Neurologist David Eagleman argues, however, that because all of our behaviors flow from the condition of our brain, this way of thinking (and everything that goes with it, like the concept of evil) is confused.
3/2/2023
Pojman: Who's to Judge?
One reason for doubting the reality of evil would be this: you think that there's no such thing as “normal moral functioning”, and so no such thing as a failure to function morally. After all, different people have believed different things about right and wrong across the world and throughout history. Pojman analyzes this argument, and finds a few problems.
2/28/2023
The Reality of Evil
We've now thought quite a bit about the nature of evil. In this lecture, Graham describes some common themes that we've seen throughout all the different theories of evil, and points towards how we'll use those themes to think about our next big question: Is Evil real?
2/23/2023
Arendt: The Banality of Evil
Or could true evil be found in ordinary, boring, thoughtlessness? An older Hannah Arendt argues that the most disturbing things about Adolph Eichman—of one the architects of the Holocaust—is that he is not a cartoon villian, but instead a banal clown.
2/17/2023
Arendt: Totalitarianism
Could true evil be a 20th century invention? A younger Hannah Arendt argues that something like what Augustine theorized came into actual existence under totalitarian regimes.
2/9/2023
The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn
Is willpower what matters? Or are we sometimes at our best when our will to do what we think is right is defeated, and at our worst when we force ourselves to do what we think is the right thing?
2/2/2023
Augustine: The Evil Will
Augustine rejects the idea that our actions are determined by different parts of our souls. Moral responsibility, he says, requires that YOU, freely choosing, are the cause of your actions. But what does this mean?
1/31/2023
Plato on the Soul
Plato thinks evil is bad for your soul. What does it mean for something to be bad for your soul?
1/26/2023
The Ring of Gyges
Plato's Ring of Gyges thought experiment: can evil be rational?
1/24/2023
The Protagoras
Plato's Dialogue the Protagoras—how does Protagoras think about evil, and how plausible is this theory?
1/19/2023
Welcome to Class
Our first day of class - all the rules, plus a theory of what this class is about.