Introduction
It is not necessary that in order to address evil, we must concern or involve by any means or techniques the concept of religion or Godly existence. A philosophical theory of evil can be expected to address many questions of meaning and value that pertain us to think in multiple dimensions at a time like thinking of “evil” a concept worth preserving or ways to limit the existence of evil beyond the merely bad or wrong. We can also assume those situations that blame a human being to become evil. Whether an intention or a motive, a deed or an institution, nobody is safe from the potentials evil possesses on us.
However in order to distinguish evil from morality, we are bound to obey a supreme universal power which we name as ‘God’. God is our supreme benefactor, we owe our existence from moment to moment, and our powers and pleasures, our knowledge and desires, to his sustaining power. And everything that everyone else does for us they can do only because God sustains in them their power. We owe him so much by way of expression of gratitude and service; and, it is supererogatory good to do more for benefactors than duty requires. And since God, seeking our well-being and theirs, want us to be good, to fulfill our duties to others, and to do things for them and ourselves beyond the call of duty, it will become doubly our duty and doubly good to do so.
What distinguishes good deeds from bad ones is then the satisfaction of fulfilling duties. Many of us even believe that by fulfilling our worldly duties we are able to get rid of evil. The notion ‘service to humanity is the service to God’ is what makes humans think that all human wrongdoing to other creatures is also wronging God. For, first, anyone who misuses a gift from a benefactor wrongs the benefactor. God gives us life and all our powers and knowledge.
If we use them to hurt someone else, we wrong God also. And secondly, just as anyone who wrongs a child wrongs the parent who brought him into existence, nourishes, educates, and loves him, so wronging another creature is wronging God whose creature they are. Wronging God invites evil and from there the problem of evil starts.
The Philosophy of Evil
Philosophical theories address questions of meaning and value in the attempt to clarify fundamental or important concepts. One way to go about this is to identify commonly asked questions, such as these, and use them to develop an analysis. We can start by defining evil with a simple abstract definition, not expected to be controversial, and develop it by amplifying its basic concepts, addressing such questions as these and placing the theory in relation to others influential in the history of moral philosophy.
According to my analysis, evil refers to all the deeds that are either tolerable or intolerable for the purpose of culpable wrongdoing. Philosopher Card (2002) believes that evil in nature upholds the power to cause harm to the nature and severity of the harms, rather than perpetrators’ psychological states, this is what distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs (Card, 2002, p. 4). Evils possess the authority to affect human lives but in a negative manner whenever and wherever possible, he tends to ruin lives, or significant parts of lives and it is not surprising if victims never recover or are never quite able to move on, although sometimes people do recover and move on.
Similarly, it is not necessary that evildoers are malicious. Often it is clear that they are inexcusably reckless, callously indifferent, and amazingly unscrupulous. Evildoers need not put on a label of ‘evil’ on them; it takes time for the evil people to transform.
Basic aspects of Evil
Evil in the aspect of negativity and harm has two basic components: ‘intolerable’ that refers to the deeds that cause harm and ‘culpable’ i.e., wrongdoing, neither reducible to the other. The situations in which we are able to identify evil varies but sometimes we identify evils by the deed, as with the term “genocide” and other times by the harm, as in “mass death”. The nomenclature easily creates the impression that the evil is simply the deed in the first case, or the suffering in the second. But the criteria for classifying neither wrongdoing nor suffering alone is insufficient for defining evil or an evil act.
Historical Significance of Evil
Historically important conceptions of evil have focused on either the harm or the culpable wrongdoing, to the relative neglect of the other component, or have collapsed the two into one. The two intense views of evil influence which can be seen in the history of moral philosophy are those of utilitarianism and stoicism. Utilitarians regard all harm as evil, regardless of its source, and maintain that some evils are justified while Stoics focus on the human will and find all wrongful uses of the will evil.
For stoics, what exceeds the will’s control is neither good nor evil. What I believe is that when evil follows that suffering, insofar as it is beyond one’s control, is not an evil but maybe a consequence of some evil deeds. Therefore as an intermediary theory between the two theories is the combining features of both but is more specific than either.
This concept is likely to make the two aspects i.e., harm and wrongful willing essential to evils, but finds neither all harms nor all wrongful uses of the will evil. This notion simply elucidates that wrongdoing is not defined simply by the harm that it does or risks, which differentiates it importantly from the utilitarian view. Nor is that that the harm that evil does is accidental or unconscious to Evil, thereby differentiating the atrocity theory from stoic theories, such as that of Immanuel Kant. Kant believes that evil has something to do with ethical perceptions, presupposing culpability (Card, 2002, p. 4). Agreeing in part also with the utilitarian tradition, the theory treats (real or risked) suffering or harm as a necessary element, even the most outstanding element, of evil. Victims are not accidental to it.
Kant, Hegel and Schelling in understanding Evil
In order to smooth the way toward the problem of evil, we analyze evil’s approach by considering the perspectives of philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Schelling. Kant several times has used the perception of ‘radical evil’ in many of his moral philosophical magnum opuses in such a unique manner that has lead other philosophers to think in various dimensions to justify Kant. Kant believes in the notion that humans are free to choose from among two paths, obey or disobey. This is what is dictated by the moral law to test our autonomous freedom of choice (Bernstein, 2002, p. 14).
Kant while highlighting evil proposes human nature to have the possibility of an evil to that extent where it can ruin the foundations of moral maxims. This is both recognized in all its ramifications and foreclosed by Kant in many of his works like the Metaphysics of Morals, when discussing Louis XVI’s murder by the Jacobins, he evokes the possibility that someone could deliberately violate the law, not just exceptionally in order to gain something illegally, but for the sole purpose of breaking with what is right (Morgan, 2000, p. 160). That is to say, that the person himself acquires some seeds of evil which are evident from his acts out of a conscious, diabolical hostility to the form of the Law itself. Having broached this subject, Kant rapidly dismisses it: such extreme evil is, as far as we can see, impossible for humans.
Nevertheless, we do have to entertain the possibility that such a being could exist, but only as a mere idea. Similarly, in Religion within the Limits…, he also denies that anyone can be so wicked that defilement of the law can become a sufficient motive in itself for committing unlawful acts: ‘for thereby opposition to the law would itself be set up as an incentive…and thus the subject would be made a devilish being’ (Kant, 1989, 683-4 In: Morgan 2000, p. 160). This cannot possibly be admissible, as it would be equivalent to acknowledging that the moral law itself can be obscured or even eradicated.
Hegel defines evil in context with the Christian theology of self-consciousness where a human being is aware of his own classification of faith. Hegel associated evil with that of faith and inner self and believes that Christian faith when associates with the Holy Spirit, resurrection, reconciliation, and the community of faith takes place. Hegel observes that ‘absolute being’ would be an empty name if in truth there were an absolute other to it or an irreparable fall from it.
That means that ‘Absolute’ must emphasize upon the fact that there is nothing with which God cannot be related. What I think of defining evil in the context of Hegel’s philosophy is that though God cannot be related to anything, but if I propose that God is comparable to evil that would not be justified and be proved wrong because of the reason that God supports ‘goodness’ while evil supports ‘abhor’. If we relate the two both would conflict as within the divine whole there is genuine otherness and recalcitrant difference, but it is only when essential being is reflected back into itself that it is spirit.
Hegel launches at this point into a complex discussion of the ontological status of good and evil. Evil seems to take two forms, on the one hand, it is a withdrawal into self, a becoming self-centered, in other words a failure to make the move from the first moment to the second but on the other hand, it is a matter of getting stuck in the second moment, reveling in separation and estrangement, failing to come back into self. In both cases, according to Hegel it is a stopping short of spirit, a failure in spiritualization (Hodgson, 2005, p. 39).
Hegel declares that ‘heart’ is a metaphor of feeling which is evident from the fact that what one has in one’s heart belongs to the being of one’s personality, to one’s inmost being.’ Thus it is quite appropriate that we should be expected not only to know God, right, duty, and the like, but to have these things in our feeling. Wherever there is feeling there is a logical question behind that feeling that fills the gap by asking about God or religion.
We thus become physically (not just spiritually) identified with what we believe, and we act accordingly (Hodgson, 2005, p. 110). But there are certain points beyond which our feelings fail to ponder, these are the severe limitations to feeling which are neither good nor evil, neither true nor false. Every content is capable of being in feeling: religion, right, ethics, crime, passions and because of its subjective involvement, feeling has no capacity for making judgments with respect to the validity of its contents.
Hegel believes that such feelings of the heart must be purified and cultivated, and this involves precisely thought and concentration deep in us. When we think, consciousness has made its entrance, and with it a parting or division that was not yet in feeling.… Consciousness is the ejection of the content out of feeling; it is a kind of liberation. Moreover, contents such as a God, right, and duty do not belong to feeling in the sense of having been produced by it; they are determinations of the ‘rational will’ and hence products of thought that are effective enough to protect oneself from the hazards of evil. They may be and in fact are also in feeling, but in an ‘inadequate mode’; ‘thought is the soil in which this content ‘God’ is both apprehended and engendered alike’.
Schelling’s philosophical efforts had always been directed almost exclusively toward the ‘ideal’, the ‘real’ to which nature can be seen as nothing but without the ‘ideal’ or the spirit. The existence of the ‘real’ however, had not yet been schematized explicitly and in detail except for the notion that Schelling believed it to be related with human beings. His reflection on the real took place within a reflection on human beings and was obvious to Schelling that the human being was definitely marked by the ‘ideal’.
The question he asked himself was exactly what was ‘real’ in human beings. To Schelling, it was not enough to identify the ‘real’ in human beings with the corporeal, in the sense of a material, spatial being, but rather the vital force, the impulse of desire, which expresses something dynamic, a force of will that provides human beings with the essence of their action (Lara, 2001, p. 106). Hence, while spirit and understanding give human beings the ideal form where the real is provided by mobility and force. That ‘real’ only appears in human beings when they only choose the freedom to obey Mother Nature or whatever religion they follow.
Nietzsche’s Perception of Evil
Nietzsche’s denial of evil in the Genealogy is a skeptical inquiry that has more to do with morality generally, than to have been concerned with any other notion, not just evil. Still the concept of evil according to him seems to fulfill the basic criteria of what Nietzsche finds distinctive and troubling about morality. Among the moral issue an important difference between a common approach to evil and his is that his paradigms of evil are aggressive and predatory agents, whereas mine is atrocities, understood as culpably produced, foreseeable, and intolerable harms. He believes that atrocity perpetrators need not to be aggressive or predatory, but it must be able to consider Nietzsche’s rejection of evil as a challenge, challenges which make judgments of evil as they are rooted in the perspectives of victims.
In the Genealogy’s first essay Nietzsche calls into question the value of “good” when it is opposed to “evil”, similar to distinguishing “good” in that sense from an earlier “good” that is opposed to “bad” rather than “evil” he calls for a rejection of the negative valuation of evil and for an appreciation of the positive value of what has been rejected by European culture for the past two thousand years as evil (Card, 2002, p. 28). Nietzsche believes it to be of no moral value if judgment is based in terms of evil.
To deny evil is not an easy task and has become an important strand of twentieth-century secular Western culture. Some philosophers or critics even find evil as such a fantasy whose blessing, like Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, is but a dangerous one that calls forth disturbing emotions, such as hatred, and leads to such disturbing projects as revenge. Therefore they don’t think it an easy task to deny the notion of evil as not peculiar to ethical relativists or value skeptics as many reject the idea of evil because, like Nietzsche, they find it a bad idea, one that demonizes rather than humanizes “the enemy”.
Nietzsche’s critique on evil on one hand helps us to make a shift from questions of what to do to prevent, reduce, or redress evils to skeptical psychological questions, while on the other hand it ponders about what inclines people to make judgments of evil in the first place and what functions such judgments have served.
Other Philosophies about the existence of Evil
Philosophers believe that various positions can be pointed out regarding evil and its relationship with good. Some of the most relevant ones in Western thought are found in Plato and especially in Neo-Platonism, where good is identified with the eternal and harmonious principles that are the basis for unity of ideas and which in turn constitute the being. According to this position of philosophy the phenomena of space and time with their inherent imperfections lack reality. Another dimension seldom noticed by philosophers is that evil possesses no real autonomy, but originates in the absence of good, that is to say, from a deficiency, a lack.
Hence, evil is considered something not real, which is the consequence of the manifestation of Ideas in space and in time (Lara, 2001, p. 103). We find another interpretation of evil in Christianity, where good is personified in the figure of God the Creator; and evil, in turn, is considered not so much an immediate consequence of the creation of a spatial-temporal world as it is in Neo-platonism but rather, as a consequence of original sin.
The next question that arises here is that how much explanation leads to the theodicy problem, the question of how it is possible for God, all-powerful and all good, to have allowed evil to arise. In these positions Platonism and Christianity come up with the supreme real conclusion that is identified with the idea of good, or with God the good creator. In contrast, Manichaeanism conceived good and evil as two metaphysical principles of equal dignity, finding themselves in a perpetual battle in which human beings must constantly decide between one or the other.
Finally, we might also mention that interpretation deriving from the sophist tradition, and reappearing later in thinkers such as Hume and Nietzsche, as well as in philosophers of the most diverse schools, such as positivism or existentialism, where good and evil are no longer viewed as metaphysical principles of equal rank, but rather as human interpretations of reality or reactions to it. In this perception, the goodness or badness depends upon human’s belief as to how he takes it.
One important aspect of the interpretations offered here is that at the bottom of the concept of evil we find the basic experience of an impediment, an obstacle to the realization of life, a harming of happiness and salvation. We must also recall that the concept of evil is differentiated at times into situations which are followed by pain and sufferings, the imperfection of creation, evil as a deficiency, as a lack of being, and related to the evil and the guilt arising from human action (Lara, 2001, p. 104). This division of meaning gives rise to a question regarding the origin and significance of evil, which is intimately linked to the question about the meaning of human life and the order of the world itself.
Goodness and Evil
Despite the discussion which is often carried out by philosophers, it is difficult to establish a relation between the negative and the positive emphasis in morality. For example, it is difficult to concern about how basic prohibitions are to morality, and when people think of absolute value they often think of universal prohibitions or of actions that are not permitted whatever the consequences. Therefore that remorse is internal to the deepest of the ways we speak of the ‘reality’ of evil. If that is so, then evil cannot be an independent focus of fascination for us to follow and how it could be when such an idea through which evil could be clear-sighted desired for its own sake and that its enactment could be clear-sighted celebrated is based upon a confused conception of the nature of its reality.
Apart from the fact that thinking about good or evil betrays a melodramatic moral sensibility, someone might think that the capitalised records only the sense that moral good is good. Philosophers like Kolnai possess the notion where one argues and record that our sense of the irreducibility of evil to bad is by the special word ‘evil’, but that we do not have a special word for a moral good because of the kind of unity between all things that are good (Gaita, 2004, p. 190).
Why is there a Concept of God wherever is evil?
According to Cooper (2007) “Man and nature are understood aloof from the existence of God and his creation and providence, therefore in order to understand the most ordinary and simplified form of human being, it is essential to measure him in the criteria devoid of God or spirituality” (Cooper, 2007, p. 18). The traditional theist, who believes that there is a God who is all-powerful and perfectly good, believes that God created and sustains all this, for supremely good purposes. Some of these good purposes, he believes, have already been realized or are now being realized by many philosophers and psychologists who present a good scientific reason for believing.
But most of the traditional theists somehow contradict this notion that there are good reasons for man to believe in theism, and among them Christian theists, believe that other good purposes are yet to be realized in this Universe or in another one; and that what is happening in the Universe now is a necessary step towards the realization of these other purposes. These good purposes include the perfecting of this Universe in all its aspects and the worship of God in the life of Heaven by those humans who have freely chosen that sort of life. If we consider a particular religion to be followed in order to prove the existence of evil, the world is according to Christian theism, the object of God’s providential care he foresees and meets the needs of his creatures.
The Concept of God as is given by Timaeus in Larrimore (2001) The Problem of Evil: A Reader refers to a simple theory that is realistic to be understood. Timaeus believes that bad is evil and in order to distinguish good from bad, the notion of a supreme creator is essential that we have named as “God”. It is God who desired that everything should be good and pure and nothing should be bad (Larrimore, 2001, p. 5). Now that clearly indicates that good and evil have some limitations to follow.
How evil relates to us?
For humans to have a choice between doing good and doing bad can be a turning point of choosing between evil and well provided we need to have true beliefs about the effects of our actions, for the goodness or badness of an action is so often a matter of it having good or bad effects. Evil is attracted to an individual in many situations and conditions of which one is to annoy people intentionally in order to acquire some fun or to kick people because it will hurt them, good to give the starving food because that will enable them to stay alive and so on.
So if God is to give us the choice between good and bad, he must give us, or allow us to acquire, true beliefs about the effects of our actions beliefs in which we have enough confidence to make it matter how we choose. We need a whole sheaf of strong true beliefs with respect to many different actions, about what effects will follow from them (Swinburne, 1998, p. 177)
Sartre (1944) No Exit is the example where man is free to choose from among many tortures but what he chose is the sin of torturing other humans. Therefore in this perception evil resides within the man. So how would it be possible that a man fights within except for the way that he denies his ego and self-perception? If our true beliefs depend generally for their justification on false beliefs it is most unlikely that they would often be other than false, barring the institution of a system designed to prevent this.
For example, it is most unlikely that erroneous reports of observations of the past would allow us to infer to a conclusion about the future which turned out to be true, unless reporters were programmed to give exactly those erroneous reports which allowed justified inference to true beliefs about the future. But if God created a world in which that sort of thing normally happened, that massive deception would violate the Principle of Honesty.
Suppose, for example, that God created a world in which so far no one has taken heroin, yet, by making it the case that many observers erroneously report cases of taking heroin leading to death, allows us to reach a strong justified true belief that taking heroin leads to death. These observers would need to be systematically deceived if this sort of thing was to happen on a regular basis. Further, we will only have justified beliefs as a general rule (as opposed to being the result of an accident in particular cases) if there is a mechanism in place for ensuring that; that is, beliefs must be correctly ‘based’. So if God is so to give us the strong true beliefs we need to make our serious choices, choices that lead us towards God, rather than towards evil.
Does Religion matter?
In order to analyze the extent to which religion matters in ‘evil’, consider different religious individuals who believe in different concepts of monotheism or atheism. In fact I believe whatever be your religion, this doesn’t matter as long as an individual is true to himself, and as being human fulfills the criteria to the extent where he proudly calls himself as a human. If they all are pure from inside, if they are well aware of their inner selves, they are never lead by evil because evil is part of the vocabulary of abhor, hatred, dismissal, or incomprehension.
God could perhaps implant in us strong true beliefs about the effects of our actions; or make us such that we gradually find ourselves with more and more such beliefs as time goes by, beliefs that open up more and more possible actions for us. We could start life with beliefs that crying causes adults to feed one, and kicking the bedclothes off causes one to be cooler (and perhaps we do start life with those beliefs. And then as we get older we could find ourselves with more and more complicated beliefs about the effects of actions. Since humanity requires morals, love and faith, and has nothing to do with deeds of hatred, we call acts or people evil when they are so bad that we cannot fit them within our normal moral and explanatory frames.
To those of us who believe what Hitler did ‘wrong’ seems to understate its nature almost to the point of error, so we pull out a special term of beyond-the-pale condemnation and call them ‘evil’. Morton (2004) believes that we do the same for many rapists or abusers of children: our horror drives us to a special terminology in which we signal to the world our horror (Morton, 2004, p. 4).
My Theology of Evil
My perception of evil does not allow me to negate evil, the truth that evil is there is in its place worth believing just like the truth that God exists and represents goodness. It is us who find it difficult to believe in God but easier to believe in evil.
Therefore I believe evil and God to be true and present with all their features that present goodness and badness, but the unique notion that I propose is that since evil is powerful, powerful but negative and bad, therefore it is better not to indulge in the affairs which are not sure about evil participation or not. I believe in what I consider true. Just like whether moral judgments are true or false usually depends upon our vision how we take it as the notion presents our seriousness of morality. Therefore it is all about the moral judgment who analyzes the consequences of skepticism about whether moral judgments are true or false believes those consequences are reasonably inferred from such skepticism.
Works Cited
Bernstein J. Richard, (2002) Radical Evil: A philosophical Interrogation. UK.
Card Claudia, (2002) The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil: Oxford University Press: New York.
Cooper D. Terry (2007) Dimensions of Evil: Contemporary Perspectives. Fortress Press.
Gaita Raimond, (2004) Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception: Routledge: London.
Hodgson C. Peter, (2005) Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Larrimore Mark, (2001) The Problem of Evil, A Reader. Blackwell Publishing.
Lara Maria Pia, (2001) Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives: University of California Press: Berkeley, CA.
Morton Adam, (2004) On Evil: Routledge: New York.
Morgan Diane, (2000) Kant Trouble: The Obscurities of the Enlightened: Routledge: London.
Sartre Paul Jean, (1944) No Exit and Three other Plays.