Recall

Held and Cole's Conceptual Engineering Challenge

Claim: we don't need a special category for evil.

Thinking in terms of evil doesn't add anything to the conversation.

Furthermore, thinking in terms of evil does harm.

The concept of evil is associated with:

1. Monstrousness, something to-be-fought-against
2. Alienness, unintelligibility
3. Irredeemability

That makes it easy for the concept of evil to be abused.

It's a kind of “turnkey” conceptual framework for oppressing, excluding, and dehumanizing people, and groups of people.

Furthermore, the concept of evil is a “thoughtstopper”. By offering a pseudo-explanation for actions and (and even natural phenomena), it keeps us from understanding their real causes.

Cole's final account

Cole claims that when we think about evil, when we try to use the concept, we're not tracking anything useful.

Instead, our ascriptions of evil have more to do with us, and our fears, than they have to do with the things we ascribe evil to.

Eliminitivism

Eliminitivism about some concept is the idea that you shouldn't think in terms of that concept, because the concept doesn't do anything useful, or is incoherent.

Cole is an eliminativist about evil.

Garrard's reply

Garrard thinks that Cole is focusing on the cases where the concept of evil has been misapplied, but is ignoring the cases where it has been applied correctly.

It's pretty easy to say that the evil of witches, the demonically possessed, and politically stigmatized groups is a myth.

A little too easy.

But for Cole to convince us, he needs to persuade us that quintessentially evil actors really were not evil, in a genuine sense (using his arguments about evil motives).

Furthermore, consider:

On the one hand, victims of genuine violence and oppression, who understand their situation by using the concept of evil.

On the other hand, perpetrators of genuine violence and oppression, who understand their situation by using the concept of evil.

Are these two groups really the same? Or is one using the concept of evil “more correctly” than the other?

If there's a more correct way to use the concept, that suggests it has some proper purpose.

The Purpose of the Concept of Evil

Garrard suggests that the purpose of the concept of evil is to describe those things that produce a feeling of Moral Horror

Evil helps us communicate out our phenomenology, our subjective world of experience.

[response to evil] differs from our standard reactions to ordinary wrongdoing, where we may find ourselves responding with differing degrees of dislike, disapproval, dismissiveness, sometimes with disgust and contempt. In contrast,there are some cases in which we have a phenomenologically distinct response: moral horror, revulsion, sometimes a kind of incomprehension, often a sense of moral diminution, defilement, and even despair.

Primo Levi:

Such acts ruin the world, irreparably; they can never be redeemed.

Evil feels like it punches a hole in the fabric of the moral universe.

(in a big way, or a small one)

Objections

Isn't that kind of subjective?

Some people find all sorts of weird things horrifying.

Other people find nothing horrifying.

Possible Reply

Consider pain.

Pain is subjective in the sense that different people can feel it in response to different things.

A sunburn, or neuropathy, can make the lightest pressure intolerable.

Feeling pain in response to wearing a t-shirt, though, is a malfunction.

Feeling pain in response to resting your hand on a hot stove, on the other hand…

The second reaction is fitting, appropriate. The first reaction is not, the sensation is there but it's not really doing its job.

Garrard thinks that feeling horror in response to seeing a spider, or a suspected witch, is an unfitting reaction.

Evil is a concept that we use to communicate about feelings of moral horror, and like pain, moral horror can be fitting or unfitting.

But those feelings are real.

To ignore that experience, or to take away our language for communicating about it, would mean losing track of an important part of actual human morality.