Evil

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1:17Welcome to Overthink. The podcast where things are not always beyond good and evil. I'm Ellie Anderson. And I'm David Peña-Guzman. As always, for an extended version of this episode, community discussion, and a lot more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack. Today, we're going to be talking about the heavy topic of evil. But before we get into the heaviness of it, David, I have a question for you. As children, we usually encounter evil first through villains in our favorite movies,

1:53TV shows, other forms of media. Do you have any favorite villains or a villainous character that stuck out to you from when you were a kid? Yes. So obviously, there are the villains from Disney movies. But being a Mexican child, my model of villain that I grew up adoring actually came from telenovelas. And there is no greater villain in the history of Mexican TV than Soraya Montenegro, who was this, like, evil brunette who was always going after the good, beautiful protagonist,

2:25going so far as to try to murder her, murder her family. And even though it was a telenovela for adults, it actually played on a lot of the tropes of the villain from Disney movies. She went so far as to use black magic and was revealed at the end of the telenovela to be the daughter of a witch. And so, yeah, I grew up kind of loving her more than the protagonist, like many other people in Latin America did who watched that telenovela. So that's your villain origin story. You identified with the villain.

2:56It is. I will say, I don't think the trope, they didn't take it from Disney movies. The trope pre-exists the Disney movies. No, no. No, yeah. But, like, what I associated as a kid with what it means to be a villain, it included, like, Scar from Lion King. It included Jafar from Aladdin. And it included Soraya Montenegro from Mariela del Barrio. Okay. So quick question about Ms. Montenegro. Or is it Senora or Senorita Montenegro? Senorita, because she was young, beautiful, and powerful. So this was actually going to be my question, is how old was she?

3:28She was the same age as the protagonist whom she persecuted? Yeah, they were in their early 20s, and they were looking for a husband. They were competing for a man. One was fundamentally good. The other one was fundamentally bad. And it also mapped onto a class distinction. The good one was Spore. The evil one was Filthy Rich. Interesting. Well, so there's a big difference there between Disney villains and Senorita Montenegro, which is that I have found... I found this when I was doing a class project in my freshman year of college, and it's really

4:02stuck with me ever since, that there's a bunch of sociological research on Disney villains. And Disney villains, when they are women, are usually in their kind of sexual prime, not ingenue age and premenopausal, but let's say in their 40s. Like, they're not quite mothers, and they're not quite crones, but they're also definitely not ingenues. So it's interesting that Senorita Montenegro was an ingenue.

4:34No, she definitely fits that. And I guess the counterexample that I can think of is, like, the old witch figure in some Disney films. Yeah, but that's not a counterexample, according to this research, because think about Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, Ursula from Little Mermaid. Those women are coded premenopausal. They're coded as, like, say, in their 40s. They're not the crones. They're not the old... The old ladies in Disney movies are usually the sweet, nice ones.

5:04And also... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and some listeners may be familiar with the fact that also a lot of Disney villains are drag or queer-coded. So Maleficent and Ursula both have this, like, really intense makeup. Cruella de Vil, same thing. I don't know. I probably had a better argument around what that means for villains back when I was studying this as a freshman in college. But I think some of the sociological research was making a connection between women's sexuality as being threatening and them being empowered as threatening, as opposed to the virginal ingenue or the old postmenopausal crone.

5:35Yeah, and them representing a threat not just to male dominance, but to systems of power. Because in the case of Ursula, the reason that she is first and foremost excluded from the palace under the sea is because she wanted the throne. It's not just because she was a woman who was embracing her sexuality and her power in, like, an individualistic sense, but because she was making a bid for the seat of power. And aside from the queer coding and this sexuality point that you're bringing in, I also cannot help but note that many of these villains are heavily racialized and they are

6:11presented in ways that remind the viewers that they are foreigners or minorities. So, for example, Jafar in Aladdin is, like, the only character in the film that looks like a person from the Middle East, but in a caricatured way, right? With, like, the big nose, the accent. And you also get this, for example, with Scar in The Lion King, where he is the darker one compared to the lighter complexion of the good lions. And also, for some reason, he has a British accent. You know, so, like, the presentation of this kind of aristocratic, queer, brown subject who

6:45is a threat to the family unit that is, like, I forget the names of the main Lion King characters. Oh, Simba. Simba and his father and mother, yeah, and so on and so forth. And the way that villains are marked as other goes so far beyond Disney movies or even telenovelas, studies of folklore, I think, would really speak to this as well, the way that the villain is kind of coded dark and the protagonist is often coded light in a variety of cultures. And that doesn't mean that there's, like, something natural to that or defensible in terms

7:19of, like, how we actually treat people in the real world. But the villain's evil badness or otherness is often signaled through those markers of difference, whether literal darkness or, you know, in the case of more recent depictions like queerness. Well, and the darkness in question, I think, is not just external. It doesn't just have to do with the look of the villain. It also has to do with their internal psychic economy, right? It has to do with their motivations. A villain is somebody who is moved by dark emotions like jealousy and envy.

7:52And that's always contrasted with the motives and the reasons for action of their good counterparts. And so we do have this association of evil with not just an evil look, but also an evil inner climate.

8:09Today, we're talking about evil. If God exists, why is there evil in the world? Are some people born evil or are we all capable of evil actions? And is evil a useful concept for a secular ethics?

8:32If there's any debate in medieval theology that you're familiar with, it's probably the problem of evil. Very early on in the development of religious orthodoxies, theologians had to answer an important question. Given their view of God, how could they explain the existence of evil? This is known as the problem of theodicy. And this problem of theodicy took on a special role for the monotheistic Christian tradition because of the specific definition of God that we get out of Christianity as omniscient,

9:05meaning all-knowing, omnipotent, all-powerful, and omnibenevolent, meaning all-loving. And a God with all of these features is really hard to reconcile with the obvious existence of evil all around us. And this creates a problem for the Christian account because either God allows evil to exist and lets it happen, which means that he's not all that benevolent, or evil exists and God just can't stop it, even though he would want to, which would mean that he's not omnipotent,

9:40or the final configuration here is that God doesn't want evil to exist and he can stop it, but he magically just doesn't know that there is evil in the world. You know, it's just like this blind spot in God's vision of reality. But in that case, then God is not omniscient because he doesn't know all that there is to know. And so however you cut it, it becomes problematic. And the question then emerges, if God really is all of these things, why didn't he create

10:12a world without any evil in it? I think that way of putting it is so right in order to show how the all-benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent three characteristics all come up against this problem in one way or another. You kind of can't have all three and explain evil, at least not very easily. And I will say, I don't think I'd be a philosopher if it weren't for grappling with this debate as a Christian. Oh, really? Yeah. Like, I don't work on this topic at all now, but I definitely was fascinated by it when I

10:46was young. And it was something that we would talk about at church and try and offer explanations. And so I've talked elsewhere about how I think the debate and intellectual tradition of Christianity that I grew up with has been really important for my development as a philosopher. And I'm by no means that original in that sense. Like, a lot of philosophers have similar stories. But yes, now it feels behind me, but it had an important role to play in my personal development. And so a person who does now work on this and is an actual expert is the philosopher Samuel

11:20Newlands. And he points out that we have to be careful to distinguish how we think about the problem of evil today from how it was thought about in previous periods of history. So, I mean, maybe I just did this by saying, like, I used to think about this debate a lot. But he is careful to note that in medieval theology, the stakes were just very different. Nowadays, with the rise of atheism, the problem of evil is often framed in terms of the belief in God's existence. How can you believe in God when there is so much evil in the world?

11:53But in the medieval period, as well as in the ancient and even early modern period, God's existence was never questioned outright in the Western world. So instead, the problem of evil was a challenge for theologians. Given God's existence, how can we explain evil? And if God created everything, did he also create evil? Yeah. And I think of the times where I've taught the problem of evil in classes and my students respond like a younger Ellie, precisely in this way where they're like, this challenges

12:27my belief in God. Does that mean that I have to be an atheist now? Which then rattles their belief system. And I think the important thing to underscore here, of course, is that, yeah, these questions were really important in theology, but at the time, they really didn't challenge people's belief in the existence of God. And that's because the assumption was that there is clearly a satisfying answer to the problem of evil. Our best theologians just haven't actually gotten there yet.

12:58You know, it's kind of like how we talk in science today of like, we will find all the answers to physics. We were like almost there. We'll get there eventually. So this was the assumption also in theology. And one of the earliest influential answers to this problem actually came from outside of Europe, from a belief system known as Manichaeism. Manichaeism was founded by the Iranian prophet Mani in the third century BC, and it was a religion on its own right that was somewhat eclectic.

13:28It was a hybrid of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and a number of other Mesopotamian religious traditions. But it really drew heavily on Christian scripture and Christian figures because the founder, Mani, saw himself as an apostle of Jesus. And so he built this whole religion by taking elements from all of these traditions, including the Christian faith. Yeah, and Manichaeism has such an interesting answer to the problem of evil.

14:01The story goes something like this. At its core, the universe is an ongoing battle between God and Satan, or the father of light and the prince of darkness. This has taken us back to the beginning with talking about representations, you know, in folklore. God created the good and the light, whereas Satan created the evil and the dark. And humans come in here because they were first created in the war between God and Satan. This then resulted in a mixture in the universe that has never been resolved.

14:36So God and Satan duking it out, Marvel movie style. This is, you know, also where we get a lot of our interpretations that have filtered in the millennia since. So it's not like a coincidence, right, that we're talking about God as light and Satan as dark in Manichaeism and then also talking about it in Disney movies. So thanks, Manichaeism, for at least part of this legacy. So we've got them duking out. And our job becomes to help free the light from its mixture with evil.

15:07But neither side has won. And the war is ongoing, according to Manichaeism. You and I have unfinished business. We all have unfinished business. We've got to free the light. Yeah, no, exactly. Like metaphysically unfinished business. And in this doctrine of Manichaeism, good and evil are distinct substances. And because of the war, as you mentioned, Ellie, there is this logic of mixing where the substances are mixed everywhere. And even we as human beings are a reflection of their intermingling with one another.

15:42Because we as humans, we are made up of two things, right? We have a soul, which is light and good. But that soul is also trapped inside of this dark, fleshy body, which was created by the forces of evil in order to trap and control the light within us. And so our soul is good, but our body is bad. Here you clearly see maybe the influence of Christianity on Manichaeism. And philosophically, this resolves the problem, actually.

16:16God is all good, all loving, but he can't stop evil from being created because it's created by a competing force of equal power, that is, Satan. And so Manichaeism, in resolving the problem of theodicy, also gives up a key element of Christian doctrine, which is the omnipotence of God. God is no longer all-powerful, nor even the sole creator. And so I guess if you really want to hold on to the omnipotence point, you would say this doesn't solve the problem. But I think the idea is that it does solve the problem if you give up one of these features

16:49of God that is usually associated with Christianity. Because of this trade-off, this view wasn't that persuasive for Christian theologians, and they then developed their own answers to the problem of evil. The most popular one, which you find in thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas, was the idea that evil is not a substance, but a lack of goodness, or technically speaking, a privation of goodness. This is the view that I was sitting in my high school library reading about as a 14-year-old, and probably not understanding very much because Thomas Aquinas isn't exactly a juicy read,

17:21you know, no shade. So according to this view, evil is nothing in itself. It is simply a lack. And that has been so influential in Christian theology because that seems to better solve the problem. You don't have to get rid of the benevolence, omnipotence, or omniscience. You just say evil is nothing in itself. It's nothing positive. And so on such a view, for instance, disease is an evil because it is a lack of health. Disease is not something positive in itself.

17:52It is a mere lack of this positive state health. Yeah, another metaphor that I like to use is cold is just the absence of heat, but it's nothing positive on its own that also captures this privation view. Darkness is the absence of light. Yeah, exactly. And so you can see how this is way more appealing than Manichaeism for Christians and for theologians more generally. But we lose the fun war between God and Satan. Yeah, which I mean, the Christians don't want anyway, so no harm, no foul.

18:23Philosophically more satisfying or theologically more satisfying, but not as fun. Yeah. And I mean, the benefit here is that it allows you to hold on to the idea that God created everything, right? Whereas under Manichaeism, God is just like half of the room. It's like there's a line where half of the things are evil and God did not create them. And so under this view, evil is not a substance. It is not an entity in its own right. And that means that God did not create it. Nobody created it.

18:54And so we don't need to blame God for the existence of evil because evil is a non-entity. And moreover, we can also maintain the belief that God only creates good things. Now, the answer then to why is there evil in the world is that in some way, all those good things that God created sometimes can be lacking in various ways. So it tries to thread the needle between those two alternatives. Yeah. And I should clarify that on this view, it's not evil that like, I don't have wings and

19:28can't fly. You know, I could have this, but I don't. Instead, evil is specifically tied to what theologians called the great chain of being. That idea is that there is a hierarchy with God at the top, followed by angels, then humans, then non-human animals at the bottom. And the lack here is both how far away from the top you are and how far you are from your own natural place in it. So qua human, you know, a being that doesn't have wings, like it's not an evil that I don't

20:03have wings. It would be an evil if I didn't have certain features that are taken to be human. And so this view is very ableist and very problematic in some ways. But I think that caveat is important here. So evil on this view is any deviation from one's rightful place in the chain of being, whether that's an animal losing a limb that it should have had or a person failing to live up to the virtues that they embody in their actions. I think somebody who would want to defend this but say it's not ableist would say, yeah, no, that is an evil that this animal doesn't have a limb.

20:35And ideally, it would be remedied. Yeah, well, and this is how sin is explained, right? Where sin is a turning away from God, a creation of a distance and a gap between ourselves and God. And at the same time, when we sin, we go down in that chain of being, right? We act animalistically. So you see what the privation there is, that I start lacking goodness because I start putting distance between myself and the source of all goodness, which is God. And again, this privation view is certainly an improvement on the Manichaean theory of there

21:10is God and there is evil and they both are equal partners in this battle. But does this privation view really explain the problem of evil? How successful is it at addressing this fundamental concern that many of us might have that we need a substantive account of the existence of evil if the world truly is ruled by a God who is good? And the biggest issue in thinking about evil as a form of privation is that it only pushes

21:41the problem one step back. So, yeah, we can say God didn't create evil because evil is just a privation. But if privations exist, you know, like imagine like a human not having some human making quality or maybe an animal not having a limb that it should have in order to fit in its natural type. Who allowed those privations to exist in the first place? Right. Why is there that deviation from the norm at all? And you could say, well, maybe those privations are the result of human activity.

22:16It's humans or animals who make a choice to produce this privation. But even that makes us wonder, well, why would God give us the power to create those privations in the first place? And so if he gave us the capacity, then he is ultimately the source of evil. And this is where you get the whole history of debates and theology about free will. Yeah. This is always what I bumped up against when I was considering these debates as a teenager. It was like, why would he give us that power at all?

22:50And so I actually don't think this argument works very well. Although, like I said, I've moved away from this and I haven't really gone back to this in a while. But so again, I'll maybe defer to an expert here. Another potential issue that the philosopher Todd Calder points out is that it's unclear that all kinds of evils can be considered privations. Pain and torture, for instance, don't seem to be the absence of anything. They rather seem to be the presence of something such as a negative state. So is it really fair to say, you know, that they are privations?

23:24And I'm reminded of some of the views of, say, Schopenhauer would say, actually, pleasure is just the absence of pain. So I think there are some philosophers who would just sort of turn the tables. I mean, obviously, that's kind of a difference between pessimism and optimism at the end of the day. But I think pain and torture, yeah, those are hard to explain as just a lack. That's right. And even the metaphor that you used earlier of disease as a lack of health, you know, some people who specialize in the philosophy of medicine would say, no, disease is its own reality and we need to theorize it as such. And we talked a little bit about this in our episode on illness.

23:57So to bring us up to date in terms of how the debate unfolds, you get the Manichaean view of there are these two fundamental forces that are separate substances, each with its own reality caught in a perpetual war against one another, then you have the answer of, no, evil is not a reality. It is not a positive fact of the universe. It's just a privation. Now, later in the early modern period, we get a third way of thinking about the problem

24:29of evil, which I do think is the most complete and ambitious answer that we get up until this point in the history of philosophy and theology. And that is the view of the German philosopher and polymath, Leibniz. Leibniz only published one book in his entire life, and it's his text on the problem of evil. The title of that book, Theodicy, is a term that he actually coined, and the term is associated with his name. And it comes from the combination of two Greek roots, the Greek word theo, which means God,

25:05and the Greek term dike, which means justice. And if you put those two together, it creates theodicy, which is a defense of God's justice by seeking to explain the existence of evil in this world. So it's Leibniz coming to the defense of God when it comes to the problem of evil. And Leibniz's Theodicy tries to improve upon the Manichaean and the medieval conceptions of evil by preserving all the aspects of the Christian definition of God, the omniscience,

25:38the omnipotence, and the omnibenevolence, while at the same time recognizing that, yes, in fact, evil does exist in this world. And the famous slogan for this attempt at reconciling those two facets of our reality, according to Leibniz, is that we live in the best of all possible worlds. So God is all-powerful. He is all-knowing. He is all-loving.

26:10But the reason that the world has evil is because there are just some glitches in the universe, and the universe that we ended up with is as good as it was possible for a universe to be. So to be clear, God really maximized goodness and harmony. Like God is the ultimate maxer when it comes to metaphysics. And he gave us the best of what was metaphysically possible to give us. And some of you might remember that this motto, the best of all possible worlds,

26:44is the inspiration for our podcast motto, the best of all possible podcasts. I do love that. We're Leibnizians at core. We know there are some glitches, but we gave you the best that we could. I know. Although for me, like the glitch, I don't know, the glitch idea, it's not totally satisfying either, but I don't know. Maybe that's just me. Yeah. Well, Ellie, I guarantee you, it's not just you. Maybe it's just me who has had this thought about philosophy that was written hundreds of years ago and has been extraordinarily influential.

27:16Yeah, about what is arguably one of the most fundamental theological problems in human history. But one issue here that we need to talk about, of course, is that every single evil that exists, however small or large, is absolutely necessary for the overall maximum goodness of the universe. And the problem is that we as human beings are just too small and finite. We're too limited to really understand the fact that these evils that we hate are metaphysically

27:51necessary in order to get the best of all possible worlds. And so in a sense, in Leibniz's account, the evil in the world is real, but it will always remain completely inexplicable to our limited minds. Our minds are not big enough to comprehend the logic of the universe. Hence my claim. I just don't get it. And this aspect of Leibniz's philosophical system has been mocked in Voltaire's novel Candide,

28:22which includes a character who is meant to embody Leibniz and his philosophy more generally, Dr. Pangloss. And Pangloss is a character who spends basically the entire book telling the protagonist, Candide, just how lucky he is to live in the best possible world, despite the fact that everything around him is absolutely horrible. And there are all these unjustifiable things happening to him left and right. And so Voltaire is alluding to the fact that it's very easy to just justify everything that is if you convince yourself that the status quo is the best possible world that we can have.

29:04Totally, totally. This was a book I read as a teenager. And, you know, I'm sure a lot went over my head, but it didn't really help me resolve the problem of theodicy. But there's a great quote from this book, which I think expresses how unhelpful this philosophical system is at the end of the day. As I lean into my post-tenure era, I'm trying to think about classic, cool professor looks for inside the classroom and out.

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31:27Rula can help you feel better, with 93% of patients reporting symptom improvements. So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to Rula.com. That's R-U-L-A dot com to find a therapist the easy way. The 20th century philosopher whose theory of evil has perhaps been most influential across the board is Hannah Arendt. In 1945, she wrote that the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe.

32:01Now, that's a really strong statement. Because the concept of evil had been largely left behind by European philosophers in the Enlightenment, largely because it had all of these religious associations. And so as we moved to a more secular age, the concept of evil was collateral damage in a lot of philosophical theories. It was just not used all that much. Leibniz, last word. Then, you know, kind of the topic goes underground, except for Christian theology for a while in Europe. Yeah, and, you know, I don't know that Arendt was right about this.

32:35In fact, it doesn't seem like the concept of evil really became the central concept of contemporary philosophy, as Arendt predicted. But her work certainly helped revive it in secular ethics and in political theory. So it has made a comeback. It's just not the dominant concept that we tarry with these days. Yeah, and so if you're coming from the previous discussion of the episode being like, well, if I don't believe in God, then what does the concept of evil have for me? That's where we're going to be going in this part of the episode.

33:08And I think you're right that Arendt was wrong, that evil was, like, going to be the big intellectual question of post-war Europe. But Arendt was right to think that evil would have a surge in popularity, at least. And as a German-Jewish woman, Arendt was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933. The philosophical problems that the Holocaust and National Socialism posed alongside the rise of Stalinism in the USSR were central to her thought and, of course, have been central to life on Earth in the past hundred years or so.

33:42Yeah, and it's not as if she was unaware of the religious baggage of the concept, because even though she is trying to use the concept of evil to think through this new modern context of the 20th century, she was well aware that it has a history of associations and interpretations in theology. And, in fact, in the essay from which I took that quote about evil being the question of post-war intellectual life, she discusses the theological problem of evil, and she basically wants to give that concept a moral and political twist.

34:19And that quote came from a review she wrote of a book called The Devil's Share by the cultural theorist Denis de Rougemont. And basically, she criticizes in this review the author of the book for being too simplistic in his understanding of evil. Basically says that this is a modern-day version of Gnosticism that returns us to a hyper-simplified Manichaean conception of evil. So, the book, according to Arendt, sees the world as this eternal battle between good and evil, and all you have to do as a modern subject is sanctify yourself and join the right side of the battle, and that good side of the battle will inevitably prevail.

35:04And in her review, Arendt calls this metaphysical opportunism. And she says that when we think about there being fundamental good and fundamental evil and them being absolutely separate and extraordinary, it allows you to ignore and escape the harsher reality, which is that we are all capable of evil us. So, in a minute, we'll talk about her most famous concept, which is the banality of evil.

35:36But before she articulated that in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt actually had a different account of evil. So, we're going deep here with the book review and this earlier account, which she calls radical evil. For Arendt, radical evil is defined by a political process of making human beings superfluous. Take the concentration camps in Nazi Germany or the gulags in the Soviet Union. They were produced by a whole sociopolitical structure geared toward complete indifference to humanity itself.

36:08They cannot be explained by the motivations of the individuals who worked there. It's not like everybody who worked there was a bad guy. They can't even be explained by the masterminds behind it. This is not a supervillain narrative. This is a narrative of indifference to humanity itself. That, for her, is radical evil. Yeah, and the sociopolitical structure that you just mentioned obviously is totalitarianism itself, right? Because totalitarianism seeks to secure total power over every facet of the lives of its citizens.

36:41And so, in so doing, totalitarian regimes eradicate individuality, and they destroy the spontaneity that is essential to human nature. Now, the philosopher Gavin Ray has launched a criticism of Arendt on this point, on this concept of radical evil, that I think is worth mentioning here. Because he says that Arendt doesn't actually define radical evil very well. In particular, it's really unclear whether the radical evil, when she's talking about totalitarian regimes, is the totalitarian regime itself.

37:17Like, their regime, by its very existence, is evil. Or the acts that they commit. So, like, you know, like genocide, ethnic cleansing, etc. And Ray suggests that this ambiguity is actually why Arendt eventually gave up the concept, which she did. She moved away from it and then developed the concept of the banality of evil. But I want to hear, let Arendt speak for herself. I want to read you a quick paragraph from a famous letter in which Arendt explains why she gives up the concept of radical evil.

37:53She says, I change my mind and do no longer speak of radical evil. It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never radical, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like fungus on the surface. It is thought-defying, as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots.

38:25And the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its banality. Only the good has depth and can be radical. So we love to see a thinker change their mind and write about why they change their mind. So I find that very powerful. For her, this alternative concept of the banality of evil, once she moves away, as you mentioned, from radical evil, was confirmed when she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1960.

39:00And she writes about this in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. So Eichmann was an official of the Nazi party and a member of the SS. And as such, he managed the logistics of transporting millions of Jewish people to concentration camps. After the war, he escaped to Argentina, where he was captured by the Israeli intelligence agency and taken to Israel to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. And after observing the trial, Arendt argued that despite the severity of his crimes, Eichmann was not motivated by monstrous motives.

39:31He wasn't even an ideological fanatic. He thought of himself as an ordinary good guy. He was what Arendt called a desk murderer. And this has been so influential on thinking since because, Arendt, is saying, like, evil is not housed in the mind. It's not a feature of your values that you reflectively espouse. It operates through the everyday actions that you take. And in that sense, can actually be very surface level, as we saw in that quote, or banal.

40:04Yeah, so first semester of college in undergrad, I took a class on Arendt where we read this book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. And my 19-year-old, I forget, 18-year-old self just could not accept that this guy was just like me. Okay, I don't think Eichmann is just like you, David. Well, like, I mean, but, like, he is a banal individual following normal orders. And I really wanted to maintain the theory of the greatness of evil, that it's exceptional, that it takes this particular distortion of the human spirit in order to get you there.

40:42And so for understanding why Arendt wants us to move away from that, we have to understand the flaws of Eichmann on Arendt's account. So what were Eichmann's flaws? According to Arendt, there are two, a lack of empathy and a general thoughtlessness. So how do we make sense of this? Eichmann couldn't consider the perspective of the people that he sent to death. He couldn't put himself in their shoes. He couldn't see the world from their perspective.

41:14He couldn't imagine their feelings. And whenever he was forced to speak about his actions and his beliefs at the trial, his language was very interesting because he would only use the stock phrases of the official party language and the cliches of Nazi ideology when talking about Jewish people. And at one point, he even admitted that officialese is my only language. Officialese. Weird. Yeah. And so it's clear that he sees Jewish people through an institutional and ideological lens.

41:50And, you know, he continued to claim that Jewish people really wanted to emigrate and that he was just there to help them out. And so he positioned himself as somebody who was serving two masters. He was giving Jewish people what they wanted. They wanted to leave Germany. And he was helping the Nazi party eradicate the Jews by sending them to their death. And so there is this deep incoherence in his thinking that results from an absolute lack of empathy toward other living, sentient human beings.

42:23Yeah. The point that they wanted to emigrate is that that's a real wild. Like it's wild. That stretches the limits of believability even far more than some of the other claims. Yeah. But like the language really is so problematic because he speaks in all these generalities. He invokes all kinds of stereotypes. And so the Jew as an individual or the Jewish person in his language appears as a trope only, not as an individual. And that means, according to Arendt, that he has no curiosity, no moral curiosity about who these people are as subjects with their own perspective on the world.

43:02And she sums it up by saying that he wasn't a monster. He was a buffoon. And the banality of evil names precisely that buffoonery or the fact that evil doesn't require monstrous humans, that total derangement of the human spirit that I that I referred to a few moments ago. It just requires people who lack empathy and who follow orders without thinking. Evil doesn't happen at the extremes, but it is a possibility for all of us under the wrong circumstances.

43:37Yeah. And this point, as powerful as it is, and I think it has me thinking about a lot of things in the present day, has received its fair share of criticism. So some critics point out that describing Eichmann as thoughtless just can't be an accurate description given how deliberately he had to act in order to attain such a high position in the complex bureaucracy of the Nazi party. He wasn't just like a foot soldier, right? It's not quite right to say that he was just a robot or a rule following machine. He had to do this deliberately, at least in order to attain the kind of power that he had.

44:11Well, Ray, who is the one that says, you know, the original concept of radical evil was not very clearly explained. He comes to Arendt's defense on this point and he defends her from precisely this criticism that, no, he really knew what he was doing. And he points out that Arendt is not saying that Eichmann didn't think at all, that he was incapable of thinking, but rather that we need to distinguish between two different kinds of thinking. There is substantively oriented thinking and there is instrumentally oriented thinking, which is not about goals, but purely about means.

44:50And Eichmann was actually very good. He was very successful at thinking instrumentally. He just was awful at thinking substantively. He could only think about means, but not about the ultimate ends that they served and the justifiability of those ends on moral or political grounds. Yeah. Yeah. This has become a bit difficult to justify, though, given evidence that came to light after the trial, suggesting that Eichmann was actually putting on an appearance of thoughtlessness. So, I mean, it definitely could be the case that somebody is instrumentally oriented and that's where the banality of their evil lies rather than being substantively oriented.

45:27But Eichmann's tapes and writings from after the trial have revealed that he was much more ideologically committed than his performance during the trial suggested and therefore than Arendt believed. And so it could be that the thoughtlessness, at least in the case of Eichmann, was not really what was going on. With the exception of Arendt, evil has largely been an unpopular concept in ethics since the time of Leibniz. It's something that the theologians are still talking about, but ethics, not really so concerned with it.

46:00But the philosopher Paul Formosa has argued that we should really hold on to the idea of evil for contemporary ethics. And he thinks that in spite of its theological baggage, evil has an important role to play in our moral vocabulary. He thinks we have no other term with which to express our strongest moral condemnation for the worst actions that humans are capable of. And so he says we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact, if we don't call genocide evil, we're not describing it appropriately in moral terms. So even if the concept of evil has theological connotations, we shouldn't use that as reason to discount evil as a concept for ethics.

46:38In fact, we should really hold on to it. So this was the most important question that I posed myself when we agreed to do this episode. Do I, David, as a philosopher, believe that evil as a concept has room for us in a secular time? And I think I've come to the conclusion that, yes, there is room for us to think about evil and maybe disambiguated or disassociated from its religious past, precisely because I agree with this claim that if we don't call certain things that are the acme of injustice, like ethnic cleansing or genocide, evil, then it seems like we are poorly describing our moral reality.

47:22And for Mosa, for what it's worth, he is one of a wave of thinkers who have followed Arendt in thinking that, hey, the concept of evil is useful in moral theory, it is useful in political theory, and we need to salvage it in order to give a proper diagnosis of the things that some people do under certain circumstances. And so I do think we, and by that I mean we, those of us who are not religious individuals, need to give an account of what evil is and be very clear about what we mean by that term.

47:57Mm-hmm. And when we're thinking about what we do mean by that term, he suggests that sometimes we use evil as synonymous with bad. It's the opposite of good. And when we do that to sort of cover all manner of things that might possibly go wrong in a human life, we're using it in what he calls the axiological sense. That, I think, is like often what people associate with the theological or religious connotations of evil. But he says we can also use evil in a specifically moral sense. And when we use it in a moral sense, we sometimes might think of it as not synonymous with bad, but synonymous with wrong.

48:33Like this is something you shouldn't do. Anything you shouldn't do is considered evil. Evil. And, you know, that's a situation where I'm like, yeah, we don't really need the term evil for that. Let's just say this is wrong. Or even why not just say that's bad? I also think that's OK. But he says there's a more restricted moral sense of evil, which indicates things that are really beyond the pale, like genocide. He says that Hitler is obviously, you know, evil in this sense. So he says that evil has an essential role to play in secular ethical discourses because it names and condemns in the strongest possible terms the very worst actions of which humans are capable.

49:13And so we need the strong and stark language of evil, he says, in order to properly confront the depths of depravity to which humans can sink. Yeah. So in one of the articles that Formosa has written on the concept of evil called A Conception of Evil, he gives a definition of an evil act that I think captures this depravity that you're talking about toward which we can all sink under certain circumstances. And it also underscores the extremity of evil, which is what differentiates it from just actions that are wrong, you know, like thieving or lying, for example.

49:49He says, an evil act is an act of wrongdoing in which the perpetrator of the act is responsible for the suffering of others, what would at least normally be a life-wrecking or ending harm. And where in so acting we judge the perpetrator in light of all the relevant details to be deserving of our very strongest moral condemnations. So, yeah, an evil act is something that a perpetrator does that wrecks or ends the life of another and that deserves the highest form of moral blame.

50:24And this idea that evil actions pertain to what is life-wrecking, I think suggests that evil actions wouldn't only be things like murder, serious assault, but also might apply to things like the actions of the bankers pre-2008 financial crisis, where they were knowingly taking such extreme advantage of average American citizens who lost their entire life savings in the process, lost their homes, right?

50:57Those would also count as evil actions in the sense that they're life-wrecking. Yeah, and in some cases, it was also life-ending because some people who lost everything also died by suicide as a result of the financial crisis. Now, you and I might agree then that there is room in our moral lexicon for the concept of evil because there are evil actions, there are evil wrongdoings that get misdescribed if we just call them bad or wrong. They're so bad or so wrong that they merit a different term.

51:29And I agree there is no other contender to do that description work. Now, the more controversial question is whether, aside from there being evil acts in the world, we agree that there are evil people, like people who are fundamentally evil, where evil is not a description of their behavior, but is a description of them, of their personality, their personhood, their essence. And I think that's a little bit harder to parse out, but Formosa doubles down and he develops what he calls a theory of evil persons, where he says, yes, there are people out there who ought to be called evil and where the application of the term is not specifically tied just to their actions.

52:16And I'm curious about what you think about this, Ellie. Would you call some people out there evil? Well, I want to go back a step because I feel like I want to talk a little more about evil actions, to be honest. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. But I will hold your feet to the fire on evil persons. Because I will say before recording this episode, I did think that the concept of evil was mainly useful theologically and therefore maybe not that useful for me and that it didn't really have much of a place in morality. And so although I was really interested to do the research for this episode, I didn't think that I would find the concept as worth maintaining as I have.

52:52And I think I've been convinced by Formosa that actually evil is an important moral categorization. And so I am actually now convinced after reading the Problems with Evil article that I looked at that we can hold on to the idea of evil when it comes to actions, like labeling actions as, again, beyond the pale life wrecking and so on and so forth. And I think this is different from how I came into the episode, which was a little bit more Nietzschean.

53:22So Nietzsche writes about evil a lot. We talked about Nietzsche a lot and not so much about medieval theology, so we don't really have time to get into his idea of it in this episode, which is totally fine. You know, we talk about Nietzsche a lot, but Nietzsche has an account of how good and bad, that distinction then kind of weirdly transformed into the distinction of good and evil. And that genealogy, I think, at least implies that evil is historically contingent and therefore worth questioning as a concept. Now, if you have thoughts on that, go for it.

53:54But then we can come back to evil people. The piece that I read by Formosa didn't talk about evil people. So I just want to hear a little bit more about what he says about people being evil. I want to focus on the question of whether there are evil people. And let's get to the definition first and foremost. So Formosa in this other article says, an evil person is an unreformed person who repeatedly perpetrates or at least intends to perpetrate evil acts. And so on his definition, the key terms are unreformed, somebody who sort of refuses to change after having already committed at least one evil act and then continues to perform those evil acts repeatedly and either perpetrates those acts or at least intends to.

54:45So it's both about the performance of the act, but also the intention that is behind the performance. So with that definition in mind, what are your reactions? If it is an unreformed person who has perpetrated these evil actions, which have been life-ending for people and or intends to perpetrate those actions, yeah, why not call that person evil? And, you know, like he recognizes that sometimes it can be a little tricky because there will be some gray areas. But when it comes to the unreformed element, he says it's possible for a person to do something evil, to commit an evil thing, and maybe to therefore marry the term evil person.

55:26But then with the passage of time to reform themselves and therefore to no longer be an evil person. And so he says, in order for us to get there, we have to have some evidence of the reformation, right? Like the person has to show remorse. They have to show guilt. They have to show concern for their victims. And above all, they have to show that they were willing to make amends. They had to do something through action rather than just through feeling bad about it. And he gives a hypothetical example of a Nazi individual who committed evil acts, but then who somehow manages to accrue a fortune after, you know, for a period of like a decade and then donates all of their fortune to Jewish charities while living in absolute poverty in their life.

56:15And he says, in that case, I might want to say that that person has been reformed, even if we don't want to negate or minimize the life-wrecking or life-ending harm that they originally created. So it is the highest moral condemnation, but it's important to note that even here for Formosa, there is room for somebody to shed the label if they meet some conditions. Harvey Weinstein, evil? Yeah, definitely evil. Definitely on reform.

56:46There was like a horrible interview with him from prison, which, yeah, just, wow. Epstein, evil. Yeah, for sure. Trump? Definitely. I mean, he's like almost too stupid to be evil. I was going to say, I would say buffoon. So evil in the Arendtian sense of the term, of somebody who is both unempathetic and has a general thoughtlessness and just does things because they happen to be available to him. So somewhere between evil in the Arendtian sense and evil in the Formosian sense, I would say.

57:19Steve Bannon, evil in the full sense. Yeah, he's evil in the theological sense. He's evil in the Manichaean sense of the term. He's actually safe. He's actually safe. He's actually like the substance of evil personified. And there's our Manichaean fights. But I dislike the idea that we're all a mixture of God and Steve Bannon. So maybe not. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our sub stack for extended ad-free episodes, community chats, and additional Overthink content.

57:55To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one-time tax-deductible donations, go to OverthinkPodcast.com. You can also check us out on YouTube, as well as TikTok and Instagram at Overthink underscore pod. We'd like to thank co-producer and audio editor Aaron Morgan, production assistants Bayarma Bat-Urdine and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for Overthinking with us.