Ethical Inquiry(2)

#3(P. 30) In your view, does evil exist? Is there a difference between being evil and doing evil? Explain.

We are, none of us, righteous in all that we do. We all make mistakes, all lose our temper from time to time, all lack the perfect self-control we'd like. We're human, creatures of great potential, but potential is value-neutral: it is for both benefit and harm, and favors neither. The rule of law, restrictive though it may be, exists precisely as a response to this fact of human nature; to curb our harmful potentials while allowing or encouraging our beneficent ones.

Evil, though, goes beyond the limits of what we acknowledge in our own potentials: one may admit themselves flawed, unsure, prone to error or unintended harm, but never Evil. Evil is a degree of wrongness beyond the pale of simple human moral frailty. It describes that unreachable, unsympathetic Other, the not-like-us outsider who warrants no excuse or redemption. This is a useful label, I admit, because it has facilitated the in- vs. out-grouping, us vs. them mentality which has promoted the growth of cohesive societies and subsequent civilization within the same. But being useful does not make it accurate as a description of the world; while those we deem evil may well be beyond our comprehension or sympathy in some cases, this does not make them simple in the way the word suggests. Creatures of the animal kingdom commit horrible offenses against one another all the time, motivated by instincts which we as humans are largely incapable of understanding, but we do not call these simple animals evil, just inhuman.

Perhaps that's why we judge other humans we can't understand so much more harshly: they invalidate our beliefs about our own potential. An animal that eats one of its children is just doing something animals do; it may be horrible, but not evil, because that's just something animals do sometimes, when food is scarce or winter runs long or some such. A human that does the same, however, scares and enrages us, whatever reasons they may profess to justify themselves, because they are plainly human and doing something we consider inhuman. It becomes important, then, to distance ourselves from them, to make them some other sort of human, imbued with qualities and abilities completely alien to our own. Something we can't ever understand or be. Not an animal, obviously, but not one of us either: in a word, Evil.

This, in my view, is the only sense in which evil exists. It is a social construct we use to protect ourselves from exploring our destructive potential. In action, it is simply something we would never do; as a label for a person, it is someone we could never be.