Bennet:

Recall…

Three characters

Huckleberry Finn

Heinrich Himmler

Johnathan Edwards

Illustrations of a general problem: it seems that doing what you think is right can be evil.

Sometimes, the greater your ability to do what you think is right, the greater the evil.

Huckleberry Finn

Fictional character, living in pre-civil-war Missouri (a slave state) along the Mississippi river.

According to Mark Twain,

Idle, and lawless, and vulgar, and bad

Travels with his friend, Jim (a slave) down the missippi, trying to get away from his abusive father.

Huck has a bad morality.

Bad Morality

“A morality whose principles I deeply disapprove of”

Not because Huck steals (though he does) or any of that.

Huck knows those things are wrong!

Huck's morality consists of what Huck believes to be right.

And Huck is pretty conventional in what he believes.

Convention, for white people in Missouri, circa 1830, was that some human beings could be property.

The consequences of that belief are unspeakably horrifying.

Huck, nevertheless, accepts that what people say about morality is more or less true, and that by helping Jim, he is doing something wrong.

His conscience tells him to do what he thinks is right:

I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him. My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says to it: ‘Let up on me—it ain’t too late, yet—I’ll paddle ashore at first light, and tell.’ I felt easy, and happy, and light as a feather, right off. All my troubles was gone.

But ultimately, Huck's sympathetic emotions for Jim are stronger than his deliberate will. He can't do it.

Huck tries again later, writing a letter to Miss Watson to inform her that Jim has been captured.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.

And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing.

But again, he can't do it.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I'll go to hell’—and tore it up.

Huck literally, knowingly, deliberately, rejects morality and salvation in order to stand by his friend.

Hienrich Himmler

Controlled the Waffen-SS (combat units), one of the main architects of the Nazi “Final Solution”.

Established the first concentration camp, at Dachau.

Chief of the CCI, concentration camps inspectorate, reported only to him.

Hienrich Himmler had a bad morality.

Himmler apparently suffered physical symptoms as a result of his work.

In 1941, attended a firing squad execution of 100 Jewish people, in Minsk.

Vomited at the sight of the gore.

In response, ordered that the regime develop easier, more impersonal methods of mass murder, leading ultimately to development of gas chambers.

Arranged for mental health services to be provided for Einsatzgrupen members experiencing traumatic guilt

Himmler, unlike Huck, enacted the morality that he accepted, even when basic human sympathy made that difficult.

As a result, unlike Huck, Himmler was a prototypically evil person.

Johnathan Edwards

General theological doctrine: because of the fall, all human beings are born depraved.

God's choice to save some, but not others, is not based on any feature or belief of the person saved.

Rather, because no one is good enough to deserve salvation, it is an arbitrary choice.

Manifestly unjust?

If you think it is, here's Edwards' reply.

Now by this it is evident that you are not willing to accept of Christ as your Saviour; because you never yet had such a sense of your own sinfulness, and such a conviction of your great guilt in God's sight, as to be indeed convinced that you lay justly condemned to the punishment of hell. You never was convinced that you had forfeited all favour, and was in God's hands, and at his sovereign and arbitrary disposal, to be either destroyed or saved, just as he pleased. J. Edwards, The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners

Bennet claims that Edwards has a bad morality.

Compare Huck, who was willing to go personally to hell for the love of one person, and Edwards, who says he would be happy to see everyone burn.

Crucial point: Edwards, unlike Himmler, is entirely integrated behind this morality.

Evaluation

How much of this is true?

In this case, does it matter?

Huck Finn is a fiction, and he can still be used to make Bennett's point.

Real question: how much of this is possible?

Are these real relationships that someone can have to a bad morality?

Is there even a theory here?

Not really. Sympathy corrects Huck, but Bennett knows that sympathy isn't always the best guide.

Implications

Not good for the Socrates/Protagoras theory.

Choosing hell to save Jim is probably not the best balance of short-term and long-term interests.

Not good for the Plato/Republic theory.

The person here with the least conflict in their soul is probably Edwards.

How does Augustine's theory fare?

Augustine's Theory of Evil

Evil is the product of an uncaused free decision to embrace what is wrong.

Did Huck make the decision to embrace what was wrong?

Did Himmler?

Certainly in a sense he did.

But in a sense he didn't.

Huck willed the right thing, while believing it to be the wrong thing.

Himmler the reverse.

Not the psychology of evil that Augustine describes.

Maybe what matters isn't the idea you choose, but the thing you choose?

Example

Suppose I secretly poison a marshmallow, and leave it on a table.

Somebody eats it.

Did they choose to eat a poison marshmallow?

In a sense yes: That thing, that they chose to eat, was a poison marshmallow.

In a sense no: The idea they had was just to eat a regular marshmallow.

Philosophers sometimes call the first sort of choice De Re (latin for "about the thing") and the second sort of choice De Dicto (Latin for "about what is said").

Huck wanted the good De Re, so much that he rejected the good De Dicto.

Himmler wanted the good De Dicto, but wanted horrible evil De Re.

Maybe wanting “to be good”, or “to do good”, isn't worth very much at all.

Maybe what matters is wanting certain things - the right things - no matter what you're told about them.