The Uniformity of Evil

 

 

Evil comes in many varieties. A typical list would include: genocide, murder, torture, terrorism, slavery, sadism, the sexual and physical abuse of children, slander, betrayal of trust, desecration of the sacred, disfiguring, maiming, and crippling. We might count as evil the willful destruction of great works of art or architecture, in addition to such standard examples as the extermination of innocent populations. Physical harm to persons is not always involved, though it often is, along with emotional pain. Given this variety, we might be tempted to suppose that the class of evil acts is irreducibly heterogeneous, united by nothing more than brute disjunction or family resemblance. That is, we might deny that there is any one feature common and peculiar to all evil acts. The concept of evil, it may be said, is just too vague and open-textured to admit of informative definition. We must accordingly accept the diversity of evil.

            I shall suggest, to the contrary, that evil is a unitary quality common to all acts rightly classified as evil. Moreover, it is quite a simple quality, which is not to say that it is easily identified in practical life. My definition of evil, to get right to it, is that it is the intentional destruction of the good—but this will need some unpacking. First, destruction: by this I simply mean, “causing to cease to exist”. The world contains a certain entity or quality at a certain time and to destroy that entity or quality is to bring about its cessation. This may be done violently or insidiously, quickly or slowly. It is the opposite of creation: instead of causing something to exist, it removes that thing from reality. So destruction is explained through the notion of existence and its negation. It is therefore a highly general notion applicable a wide variety of cases—people, animals, artifacts, states of mind, social movements, bits of nature.

            Second, the good: by this I mean any good state of affairs. Without going into the matter fully, the following list will serve our purposes (we could add to it if need be): life, happiness, knowledge, innocence, freedom, friendship, and aesthetic quality. If you think some of these items reduce to others, or should not be on the list of intrinsic goods at all, by all means amend as you see fit; the definition of evil will remain the same, even if its extension differs. I favor keeping the list fairly long and non-reductive, because I think that the good is best seen in all its variety; we don’t want theories that try to reduce every basic value to one (such as pleasure). Despite the variety of the goods, there is something they all having in common—that they are precisely good—and that is what matters to the definition of evil.

            Third, intentional: by this I mean that the act in question must be intended in a certain way. If an agent destroys something good by accident, through no fault of his own, and is horrified by what he has wrought, he cannot be adjudged evil, merely unlucky. So we should say that an evil act is one that is intentional under the description “destruction of the good”: the agent foresees and intends the destruction of the good and acts as he does in order to bring this destruction about. He “knows what he is doing”. In a typical case he plans the destructive act and self-consciously carries it out.

            Thus an evil act is one that involves an agent intentionally destroying what he knows to be good. The mental state of the agent incorporates the concepts of destruction and goodness—this is the content of his intention in acting. It is the intention that defines the evil agent. Is there a second-order intention associated with this first-order intention? Grice argued that communicative acts require a second-order intention—not only the intention to produce a belief in one’s audience, but also an intention that the first intention should be recognized by the audience. Thus the basic intention is transparent, not concealed and secret. In the case of the evil agent, there is also a second-order intention, but it is not a transparency intention—it is an opacity intention. The agent intends that his first-order intention should not be recognized by observers (he may even try to shield himself from knowledge of his intention). The evil agent is trying to destroy the good, but he doesn’t want people to know that this is what he is doing, possibly including himself. Even if he feels safe in his actions, fearing no repercussions, he does not want it to be apparent that his aim is precisely to destroy something good. So he will often characterize his actions in other ways—say, by arguing that he is serving a greater good. I might put it by saying that there is always a level of shame about evil actions, and hence a desire for concealment. The agent is not proud of what he does, even if he tells himself it is somehow necessary. For the agent has set about intentionally destroying what he acknowledges to be good, and this is not something he can happily admit. That is why there is often a degree of self-deception involved in evil actions (not so for virtuous actions). For this reason there will typically be a second-order intention to conceal the first-order intention. The easiest way to fulfill that intention is to commit the evil act secretly, away from prying eyes—as it might be, in a dungeon or concentration camp or in the dark. The evil agent is by nature deceptive; secrecy is his cover, his protection.

            The conception of evil I am suggesting limits it to creatures capable of certain kinds of “sophisticated” attitudes. I doubt that animals are capable of evil in the sense I have defined, though they are certainly capable of impressive feats of destruction. Animals may maim or kill but they don’t do so with the kinds of intentions I have described (some of our primate relatives may have such intentions, in which case my claim applies to non-primate animals). They may cause great suffering and death but they do not do so under the description “destroy the good”. They just don’t have the concept. Evil is what results when a creature acquires such abstract concepts, so it is a uniquely human achievement. Perhaps, indeed, the very acquisition of the concept of the good (as well as the concept of destruction) is what opens the human species up to feats of evil not possible for other species. We do evil things precisely because we know what good is; we destroy the good because we apprehend things as good. Evil thus requires a certain intellectual attainment. The necessity to conceal evil acts also requires a cognitive sophistication absent in other animals (possibly with certain exceptions). It is not that animals do less harm than we do—though that is doubtless true—but rather that the harm they do does not spring from evil motives and intentions.

            Now we must see how the definition fits the various types of evil I have listed. Let’s start with a hypothetical example. Suppose a university administrator, call her Eva, receives a complaint against a distinguished professor, call him Carl. The complaint is completely fictitious, being motivated by malice and a bad grade. Eva knows this, but she also knows that taking disciplinary action against Carl will, in the current climate, score her political points, help with funding, and appease the radical feminists. She decides to initiate dismissal proceedings against Carl, fully aware that this will ruin his reputation, take away his livelihood, and prevent him from any further achievements as a scholar and teacher. She also knows that he cannot fight her actions legally because it would bankrupt him to do so. Eva thus uses her power, quite cynically, to destroy Carl in order to advance her political and personal goals. Carl is duly forced out of his position, becoming impoverished and bitter. I hope we can agree that Eva was evil in acting as she did, and the reason is clear: she intentionally destroyed something good. Carl was an innocent man, a good man, and also a productive and brilliant scholar. Eva destroyed his ability to work and teach, as well as his happiness and security, along with that of his family. She did so deceptively, unethically, and callously. Her evil actions fit the definition perfectly.  [1]

            Next consider an artist who is tired of being unfavorably compared to another artist, whose work is vastly superior. He decides to destroy the superior artist’s work, stealing into his studio one night and burning all his paintings. Let’s suppose that he manages to destroy every one of the great artist’s works and also to prevent him producing any more (he is so traumatized by the destruction). Now the second-rate artist gets more attention and makes more sales, with his main rival eliminated. Again, these actions are clearly evil, and they fit the definition perfectly: the evil artist has intentionally destroyed works of great aesthetic value for his personal gain and out of envy.

            David is a bitter man and a failure in life. He lashes out at anyone he can, belittling and insulting people. His young son Patrick becomes a target of his ire because David cannot stand the thought that his son might succeed where he failed. He sets out to damage Patrick psychologically, even going to the extreme of raping his five-year old son. He succeeds in his aim and Patrick is so traumatized that he becomes a heroin addict and eventually commits suicide. Again, the evil is obvious, and again we can see why: David has destroyed Patrick’s innocence and happiness in order to satisfy his own warped needs. His express aim was to prevent his son from achieving anything good in life, including any chance of happiness: he destroys the good in order not to suffer the pangs of his own sense of failure.  [2]

            Terrorists bomb a city center, killing dozens of innocent men, women, and children. They do so because the people they have targeted practice a different religion from theirs and appear to be happy and prosperous doing so, making their own religion look shabby and regressive. Their aim is not just to kill and maim but also to undermine the peace of mind of people living in the city in question. Their actions are evil and for the usual reason: they have destroyed life, happiness, and peace of mind among the target population, because of their misguided religious zealotry.

            The Nazis undertake a program of mass extermination against the Jews. Their motivation is that the Jews are far too successful in German society, owing to their intellectual and cultural superiority. The Nazis covertly acknowledge the qualities of the Jewish minority and wish to rid themselves of a people that challenge their sense of racial superiority. They accordingly murder six million Jews by means of starvation, gunshots, and poison gas. They are defeated before they can realize their project of total genocide, but they would have carried it through to the end if they could. No one can doubt the evil of the Nazis, and their actions clearly conform to the theory: they intentionally destroyed the good—life, well-being, culture, achievement—in order to gratify their own (shaky) sense of superiority.

            Liz is a friend of Susan, who is also friends with Wendy. But Liz doesn’t like the friendship between Susan and Wendy; she wants Susan to herself. She decides to undermine the friendship between Susan and Wendy by telling lies about Wendy to Susan, to the effect that Wendy has been making advances to Susan’s boyfriend. Liz convinces Susan of this falsehood, using doctored photographs and what not. Susan consequently drops Wendy as a friend, causing her considerable distress. This is not evil on a grand scale, like the previous example, but it is evil nonetheless. Here the good that has been destroyed is friendship.

            Iago sets out to destroy Othello, who is respected as a great general and honorable man (Iago’s reasons are obscure), by making him jealous. He succeeds in reducing the normally unflappable Othello to a blubbering heap and a murderer of Desdemona, his wife. Iago’s evil consists in this act of destruction, more of the soul than the body, in the case of Othello. Macbeth betrays the trust of King Duncan, murdering him while he sleeps, in order to advance his own ambitions, and then murders others to cover his crime. He doesn’t think Duncan is a bad king; on the contrary, he likes and admires Duncan. So he has knowingly destroyed something good. Judas betrays Jesus, despite believing him to be the Son of God, for fifty pieces of silver; he thus destroys the embodiment of goodness for a tawdry sum.

            I don’t think I need to multiply examples any further: it is easy to see how the definition of evil I have presented works, and indeed it is an intuitive and natural way to characterize evil. The definition is simple and straightforward; and it offers a uniform account of what evil is. Are there any counterexamples to it? Someone might suggest that the definition does not provide a necessary condition for evil, since some evil consists in positively producing harm, not just removing the good. The evil of torture, say, is that it produces a lot of harm, either pain or injury. But I take it that this is just another way to phrase the theory under discussion: to produce harm is just to annihilate a good, i.e. the good of not being harmed. Harms are defined relative to goods: for example, pain is bad because it is good not to be in pain. The trouble with stating the theory in terms of harm is that it loses generality—not all cases involve an intention to harm. The envious artist was not attempting to harm his rival exactly, though he did; his intention was to destroy the good—the harm to his rival was just a by-product.  The same can be said of the desecration of sacred sites or buildings. The harm formulation gets the emphasis wrong: the evil agent recognizes the good in something and seeks to destroy it despite this; he is not just out to do harm. A run-of the-mill thug might be out to create harm by punching anyone within range, but he is not evil in the sense I am trying to capture. Evil is the intentional abolition of the good, recognized as the good. Iago, say, is not interested in bringing down some undistinguished nobody; what incites him is Othello’s distinction—the good that he embodies. And what marks Judas out is not just a betrayal of any old goat-herder from Palestine, but the fact that he betrayed the Son of God (allegedly). The harm caused might be the same in both cases, but the evil agent is doing more than just maximizing harm—he is destroying that which is indisputably good. It is true that one way to destroy what is good is to cause harm, as in crippling an athletic rival, but the evil resides in the negation of goodness, not in the harm as such. Nor is it clear that negating the goodness of a person is always harming her: if a scientist reduces the intelligence of a rival by putting a chemical in her drink, this is definitely evil, but it is not clear that the target has been harmed—she might be quite happy having average intelligence. I might set out to make you happier by chemical means, so that you spend less time at home working, and more time out having fun—as a way to lessen your intellectual output. This would be evil, but it is not clear what harm I have done to you—you might even decide you want to change your life-style in that direction anyway. What if I introduce you to a very seductive partner so as to distract you from your important intellectual work—have I harmed you?

            Now it might be claimed that the conditions are not sufficient for evil, since it is possible to intend to destroy the good for morally praiseworthy reasons. Thus we have vaccination and surgery—we remove a person’s tranquility and freedom from suffering by subjecting them to these procedures. Are dentists necessarily evil? The obvious answer is that the agent is aiming for the greater good of the patient, and rightly so: the short term removal of the good is justified by the long term creation of the good. It wasn’t that Iago believed that only by destroying Othello and Desdemona could he save the city of Venice from a terrible fate: he did not commit his harmful acts with a heavy heart, with everyone’s best interests in mind. So we should add that evil is the intentional destruction of the good all things considered—that is, when the destruction of one good is not justified by the production of a further good. Of course, this is not to deny that some evil agents use such justifications spuriously, as the Nazis did to excuse their genocidal actions. But in cases like dentistry it is clear that no evil is committed, since the intention is to produce long term dental goodness in the (temporarily) suffering patient. The dentist is promoting the good not negating it.

            Let me return for a moment to the destruction of reputation, because I think it is particularly instructive. This does not involve physical harm or death, so it doesn’t fit a crude definition of evil as simply “causing suffering”. A person can no doubt suffer from the unjust destruction of his reputation, but that suffering does not pinpoint wherein the evil lies. The slanderer is taking aim at a manifest good and seeking to annihilate it: the good character or good standing of the person unjustly accused. Suppose the target’s reputation is well earned and fully justified—it is backed by undeniably good qualities. Then the slanderous accuser is attempting to negate this manifest good—say, with a view to preventing the person accused from gaining employment. The intention is precisely to destroy a human good—that is its exact focus. This epitomizes evil, perhaps more clearly than any other case, because the good that is destroyed is specifically targeted as such. It is close to another paradigm of evil—the intentional undermining of trust. If an evil agent sets out to gain the trust of another person, himself without evil intent, by encouraging such trust, with a view to betraying it later, she has attacked a deep and central human good—the ability to trust another person. A person treated in this way may never be able to trust again, which undermines many other human goods. The betrayer has destroyed something precious and precarious, and we rightly reserve our severest criticism for such actions. This is precisely what Iago and Macbeth do. It is particularly heinous because it specifically targets a central human good for annihilation. Just as a person values his good name, so he values being able to trust other human beings: to destroy these things is evil in the purest sense. Neither of these forms of evil is calculated to cause pain or death (though they may cause both of these things); what they are calculated to do is to take a certain kind of good from a person that is highly valued. Both involve depriving the target of normal social relations. The evil here consists in destroying a fundamental social good—being well thought of and kindly received, and being able to place one’s trust in another. Hence these are my paradigms of evil, not the usual cases of torture and murder—because they exemplify the abstract form of evil so clearly.    

            We need to make a minor amendment to the definition. I have been speaking of evil agents, but there are also those who are passively complicit in evil—bystanders or onlookers. There are not just those who do the deeds, there are those who allow them to be done. It is not only the agents of the action who are evil but also the observers of it: the wife who lets her husband rape his son, those who tolerate atrocities committed by others, people who make no protest when those with power persecute the innocent—the whole sorry crew of cowards, toadies, and the morally numb. These enablers of evil should also be included under the concept. It is easy to do so: just add “or those who tolerate the destruction of the good”. We thus recognize two categories of evil: active and passive.

            We should also make a distinction between ideological evil and non-ideological evil. Iago and Macbeth are not evil ideologues, like Stalin or Hitler. They stop when the count of corpses reaches the double figures, and no general ideology drives their homicidal tendencies. But the evil ideologue envisages a much wider field of operations—sometimes totaling in the millions. Here entire sections of the population are targeted for destruction: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the bourgeoisie, heretics, racial minorities, and many others. The guiding ideologies are by now very familiar to us, but it is easy to miss them when they emerge, because they masquerade as moral crusades. It is often only in retrospect that an evil ideology reveals itself for what it is. Ideological evil allows people to destroy the good while telling themselves they are working for a greater good, so it is especially sinister and dangerous. They make people think that their evil acts are not evil at all. Whenever you see people justifying destructive acts by reference to an ideology be on the lookout for ideological evil. One sees in the ideologue a wild-eyed enthusiasm, a disregard for basic principles of fairness and justice, violent imagery and extreme response, blanket condemnation, sloganeering, demonizing, prejudice and pre-judgment, sectarianism, and social conformity. The psychology of ideology is murky, but the human mind clearly has a weakness for ideology, and the results can be devastating (consult history). I don’t doubt that one of their principal attractions is that they permit people to do evil in the guise of promoting the good.

            It is important for any conception of evil to distinguish it from merely bad or immoral acts. Evil acts are always immoral, trivially, but not all immoral acts are evil. It is not ipso facto evil to break promises or steal or tell lies or defraud or assault. In certain circumstances all these can be evil, but they are not evil in all circumstances. So we had better hope that they don’t turn out to be evil according to our definition. Nor do they: breaking a promise or stealing things are not intentional under the description “destroying the good”. They are not even cases of intending to do harm, even if they do in fact do harm. When I break a promise to you I have not identified a good in you that I proceed intentionally to eliminate; I simply act selfishly or lazily. Nor is it my aim in stealing from you to remove a good from your life; it is simply to add a good to my life. I would be quite happy to enhance my life by leaving yours undisturbed, so long as I get what I want; taking your things is just my means to enhancing my life. It is entirely contingent that my gain is your loss.

By contrast, if I decided to steal from you in order to deprive you of something precious to you, even if it meant nothing to me, then I would be acting evilly. But ordinary instrumental theft, in which I am merely trying to accumulate more goods for myself, does not exemplify the evil schema; I am not so much destroying a good as transferring it from you to me. Even assaulting another person, say in the course of robbery, is not evil by the criterion laid down here, since this is merely a means for me to get what I want. I am not trying to obliterate a good that you have; I am simply using the means necessary to my obtaining a good that I want. I would be quite happy to get what I want without assaulting you, but as it happens I have to. If I assault you intending to destroy your happiness and future, then I am acting evilly; but not all assault is so motivated. A crime it may be, and it is certainly immoral; but it is not evil, intuitively or according to our theory. It all depends on the motive behind the assault.

This is why, if the assault is disproportionate to the intended theft, it veers into the realm of the evil. If all I need to do is twist your arm, but I hit you on the head with a brick, then I have acted evilly, because I have removed more good from you than if I had used the minimal means to enact the theft. My action is immoral either way, but it is only evil when I destroy a good as an end in itself. Just war and self-defense both involve destroying good things, notably lives, but they are not evil because there is no intention to destroy the good as an end, just as a (proportionate) means. I would even distinguish between very bad acts and the subclass of bad acts I am calling evil acts. It is very bad to steal from helpless old ladies, and more so to assault them, but this is not a case of downright evil, as when you decide to terrorize old ladies for its own sake. It is when you take aim at their wellbeing itself that you become evil. The hardened criminal is not necessarily opposed to the good of others; he is merely out for his own good, irrespective of the deprivations he brings to others.  But Iago is not just a self-centered criminal using Othello for his own enrichment; his intention is rather to destroy Othello, mind and body, without regard for how he might benefit. A career criminal would find Iago irrational, given the risks and potential payoffs, but Iago is quite rational given his real aims. He is in the business of removing the good not in acquiring goods.

            The evildoer is therefore often quite difficult to distinguish from the mere criminal or immoralist. The actions look the same from the outside; it is the inner attitude that makes the difference. The same act of violence can be motivated by evil intentions or by merely criminal intentions. It would be easier if all evil actions were purely evil, i.e. motivated by nothing more than a desire to destroy something good. But some evil is instrumental—the agent expects to get something out of it himself. Here is where evil can shade into mere criminality or wrongdoing. Suppose I have a selfish aim and I am not too particular about how I achieve my aim: then I am not ipso facto evil, just rather unscrupulous. I might cheat people or coerce them or rob them to get what I want. This is not yet to act evilly towards others, because my focus is not destroying what is good for them. It is said by historians that the Germans at the beginning of their persecution of the Jews sought only to have them leave Germany: they made life difficult for Jews in the hope that they would voluntarily leave the country. These were no doubt deplorable and vicious policies, but they do not compare to the policies that succeeded them. If the Jews were not willing to leave voluntarily, then they would have to be exterminated. At first this was achieved by mass executions conducted wherever Jews lived, using bullets, but that was deemed inefficient, so special extermination camps were set up, where starvation and gas were used to kill people. Here the intentions of the Germans were nakedly sadistic and designed to bring about extreme degradation. They wanted to remove as much as possible of what makes life good from the Jews in their captivity. In this they entered the realm of evil quite decisively. They began to make the destruction of soul and body an end in itself. At the beginning they had an instrumental desire to force Jews into exile, but as time went on this was replaced by a desire to annul everything Jewish. They went from the merely criminal and bad to outright evil and depravity. They sought systematically and ruthlessly to destroy the good as exemplified in a population of people.  

            We find evil shocking in a way we don’t find routine crime shocking. Why? The theory gives us the answer: because the evil will is aimed at the destruction of the good. The criminal will is not: it is aimed rather at the good of the criminal, with indifference towards the good of others. But the evil agent is bent on the destruction of the good as such—in the purest case, he wishes simply to destroy what is good without any benefit accruing to himself. This is shocking, because we normally think that the pursuit of good states of affairs is what human motivation is all about. The evil agent inverts that assumption and aims to annihilate the good, not create it (in himself or others). We wonder why anyone would do anything so negative; hence the evil agent strikes us as a monster, a freak, even a paradox. The merely self-interested criminal, by contrast, is normal in his motivation, just unscrupulous. We wonder what the point of evil is, if it is aimed solely at the reduction of the amount of good in the world. No one’s utilities are being maximized. This raises the question of motivation, which I don’t want to get into here. Suffice it to say that envy, competition, and Schadenfreude often play a role. There is also, apparently, a brute appetite for destruction for its own sake—a kind of generalized vandalism. It may have to do with assertions of power, and certainly evil shadows power. In any case it is the opposite of the normal desire to bring about the good.  [3]

            Let me end with the question of natural evil, i.e. the kind that arises in the world independently of anyone’s will—earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, etc. This appears to be a counterexample to the theory defended here, since the natural destruction of the good is not an intentional destruction. Of course, if there is an agency behind it (say, Satan), then it fits our definition—these events are instances of intentional action. But suppose they are purely natural—what should we say about this kind of evil? My answer is that this is not a kind of evil; it is simply the occurrence of bad states of affairs. Talk of evil here is just a holdover from antiquated ways of thinking about the natural world, as if everything that happens must be willed by somebody. There are evil agents, but there aren’t evil facts or events or conditions. So the notion of “natural evil” is an oxymoron, unless we explicitly postulate an agent behind the bad events. A child dying of cancer is no doubt a horrible thing, but it is not an evil thing. What is called “the problem of evil” only arises when we introduce an agent like God. The problem is usually posed by asking why God allows horrible things to happen, as if he is a passive bystander too lazy or indifferent to lift a finger; and indeed, that is a form of evil (“passive onlooker evil”). Then evil is involved, but only because of an assumed agent—not because of the horrible event in itself.

But there is also the problem of active divine evil if we suppose that God is responsible for everything that happens—if he is the cause of all natural events. Then it looks as if God is actively, intentionally, and knowingly producing very bad states of affairs—that is, he is destroying the good on a grand scale. He then appears as an evil agent. This problem of evil  (“active agent evil”) is even worse than the kind in which God is conceived as a mere onlooker, since it is his will that actively creates the bad state of affairs. How can God be good and yet he intentionally produces very bad states of affairs? The only conceivable answer relies on the model of the benevolent dentist, but that rings very hollow to most people. In any case, there is no counterexample here to the definition, since God would be evil if he intentionally destroys the good (without some excusing instrumental explanation). In either case (God or no God) the existence of “natural evil” poses no problem for our theory.

            I hope that the theory I have presented strikes the reader as natural and intuitive, almost a truism. Truism or not, it still serves to bring order to our thinking about evil, by providing an account that discerns uniformity in the many varieties of evil. We don’t have to fall back on a disjunctive analysis or a vague family resemblance story, i.e. no definition at all. We now know what to look for when we are keeping our eye open for evil. Thus a theoretical advance might lead to a practical advance: we might become better at detecting evil, and hence preventing it. It is also good to reserve a special label for one particular kind of human badness, and we need to be able to justify the use of the concept of evil in our classifications of human actions. We need to know that the word “evil” denotes a coherent and well-defined natural kind—a distinctive moral natural kind. My view is that the concept of evil is a vital part of our moral conceptual scheme, corresponding to a very real type of human act. My aim has been to buttress the concept by providing a clear and straightforward definition of it, applicable to the major kinds of evil that exist. Absolute precision may not be possible, and borderline cases can no doubt be constructed, but I hope to have shown that the concept of evil deserves a place in our repertoire of moral concepts. Actually getting rid of evil may not be so easy.         

 

  [1] I do not intend to describe any actual case here; it is purely fictitious. This paper is philosophy not history.

  [2] This case is based on, but departs from, the novel sequence The Patrick Melrose Trilogy by Edward St Aubyn, a study of evil.

  [3] I discuss evil motivation at length in Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1997). Here I am defining what evil is; in that book I was concerned with its psychology.

                                   

 

 

 

The Sermon on the Mount

 

Is there any evidence of Jesus’ divinity in the passages known as the Sermon on the Mount? If his moral teachings reflected some kind of divine infallibility, we would expect these teachings to express the most advanced morality possible. We would expect Jesus to be a moral sage. And if we found such an advanced morality in his reported words, that would be evidence of his divinity, since only a godlike being could so transcend the morality of his time and place. On the other hand, if his recorded sayings were merely banal or erroneous, that would undermine his claim to be the Son of God. So, how good was Jesus as a moralist?

            There are two sides to the question: what he said and what he didn’t say. He said nothing about issues of the utmost moral importance, still less say what needs to be said about these issues. He never says that slavery is an abomination or that capital punishment is wrong or that a man should not beat his wife or that abusing animals is wrong or that racism is bad or that homosexuality is not a sin or that children should not be flogged. These would have been sayings revealing a remarkably advanced moral intelligence, quite out of step with the assumptions of the time, indicative of divine insight: but Jesus says none of these things. Is that because he does not believe them? Or is it that he does believe them but is reluctant to speak his mind for fear of seeming too radical? I think it is evident that he doesn’t say them simply because they have not occurred to him: that is, he has no source of moral insight beyond that of his particular time and place. His moral thinking is not shaped by access to an omniscient and morally perfect God but by prevailing norms. What he says positively is a mixture of oddity and common sense: for example, “Anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 5.31); “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough troubles of its own” (5.32); “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown in prison” (5.25). These are hardly the remarks of a deep and insightful moral thinker: they are highly contestable and advance no radically new vision of morality. He also reiterates the point that you should not advertize your good deeds to others for their approval, because God is always watching you and he will reward you for them, which seems to take back what it enjoins.

            But there is one passage that has caught the imagination of generations and is often regarded as the heart of Christian teaching, viz.: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.” (7.38) This passage does indeed stand out for its novelty and radicalism, and it has the form of a general ethical stance not just advice on practical matters. But it is surely unacceptable as a moral directive: we should seek to prevent evil not tolerate it. Jesus says we should turn the other cheek when slapped—does he extend this doctrine to punching and stabbing? How many times must one invite further assault—until the point of death? If you are against acting violently on principle, what about just running away? And what if the person assaulted is not yourself but (say) your child: should you advise your child to turn the other cheek when slapped in front of you? Should you allow the slapping to go on unimpeded? Shouldn’t you at least remove your child from danger? What precisely is the point of encouraging more evil from the evildoer? Should the legal system contain no discouragement to evil? Should the police turn the other cheek or decline to defend someone who is being assaulted? What if it is just a simple matter of saying, “Stop that”? Jesus baldly asserts, “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person”: isn’t that the worst advice possible? Of course we should resist evil—evil is precisely that which should be resisted! What is he thinking—that the evildoer will feel ashamed if we offer him our coat as well as our shirt? What if he doesn’t? Jesus seems to be suggesting that we should not even rebuke bad actors, that we should actively encourage people to exploit and abuse other people. Why is this good? He doesn’t say. What would a society be like that offered no resistance, or even rebuke, to those bent on evil? Should rape be followed by an invitation to more rape? If someone murders your sister, should you suggest murdering your brother too?

True, it is good to minimize violence, but Jesus goes a lot further than that: he seems to be advocating a bizarre kind of masochism. So this directive is simply not defensible as a moral principle. Nor does he offer any justification of it. I really have no idea why he would assert such a thing—it certainly doesn’t strike me as a profound moral insight. I can’t think of any moral thinker before or since who has advocated such an extreme form of moral passivity: even when it would be easy to prevent evil being done, we are enjoined to make no protest and take no preventive action. Presumably Jesus thinks we should praise and encourage good action, but he seems to be against criticizing and discouraging bad action. Nor is it easy to see how this position is consistent with his readiness to insist on other injunctions: he is quite happy to tell people what not to do in matters of divorce and oaths and giving to the needy, so why not tell people not to slap you for no reason? He never says anything expressly against violence in the Sermon on the Mount, but it is surely not his position that we should actively condemn adultery but not violence: all immoral acts should be condemned. Sound morality tells us to prevent evil acts, but Jesus explicitly rejects that idea. And it isn’t that he thinks that non-resistance in the face of evil will lead to less evil–he is not being a peculiar kind of consequentialist. He is not recommending non-violent resistance to injustice but simply non-resistance, non-complaint. Does he think (implausibly) that this will reduce the amount of evil in the world? Or is it that he thinks that we will get our reward in heaven so we need not worry about evil on earth?

            All in all the Sermon on the Mount is mishmash of antiquated, peculiar, and dubious pronouncements, asserted without justification, and often quite opaque in meaning. It is hard to see how these “teachings” could be regarded as evidence of divine inspiration—they show no special moral acuity.

 

                                   

 

 

 

The Non-Existence of Lolita

 

 

The novel Lolita takes for granted the existence of Lolita—or does it? Is she real? There is no doubt that Dolores Haze, a twelve-year-old American schoolgirl, is real: but is Lolita real? To answer this question we must first investigate the category of the nymphet: is there such a thing as a nymphet? Early in the novel Humbert expatiates as follows: “Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets’”. The nymphet is thus a “maiden” who is not a human but a demon, recognizable only by someone bewitched. She sounds very much like a mythological creature not a flesh-and-blood human child. The nymphet is said to live on an “enchanted island” surrounded by a “vast misty sea”. “[A]re all girl-children nymphets?” Humbert asks. “Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone insane.” Is it just the pretty ones? “Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes.”

Clearly the nymphet is difficult to identify and indeed is close to indefinable (“certain mysterious characteristics”). “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.” The true nymphet is a far cry from the pretty young girl who might attract the eye of a man of pedophilic disposition; she is much harder to pin down and analyze (“ineffable signs”), seeming to depend on the sensibilities of the “artist and madman” who sets out to detect her. To put it plainly: she is a projection of his fantasies not an objective human type. There is really no such thing as a nymphet—no human girl falls into the category as a matter of objective fact. This is why Humbert’s attempts at providing criteria are so vague and unhelpful: he simply can’t tell us what makes a girl a nymphet. A nymphet is, as he implies, a mythical creature, a creation of the (fevered) imagination, not a member of a subclass of actual human girls. Nymphets don’t exist in the real world but only in the world of imagination. It is impossible to pick one out of a crowd of human children for the simple reason that there are none, except as projected by the bewitched observer. There are pretty girls and plain girls, thin girls and plump girls, shy girls and bold girls, but there are no girls that are nymphic demons—they exist only in fairy tales. If a bewitched traveler discerns one in a group that is only because he projects his fantasies onto her: the object of his fantasy does not really exist—though its real-world counterpart does. We cannot existentially quantify over nymphets.

            But Lolita is essentially and by definition a nymphet. Not so Dolores Haze, an actual American schoolgirl: she is no mysterious deadly demon equipped with magic powers. At the outset of the novel we memorably read: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.” Here the theme of multiple identities is sounded loud and clear: the real girl Dolores is contrasted with the fantasy girl Lolita constructed in Humbert’s febrile mind. In his arms she was always Lolita; in his mind too. She was Lolita to him. Put this together with the passage about the idea of the nymphet: she was a nymphet to him, not in the real world. Her name is “Dolores Haze”; he calls her “Lolita”. Thus, given that nymphets don’t exist, and that Lolita is a nymphet, we can deduce that Lolita doesn’t exist. She is a figment of Humbert’s imagination superimposed on the actual girl Dolores Haze (dolorous and hazy). The title of the book is therefore the name of a mythical creature not of a human girl. Lolita never existed. There was no such person.

            If Lolita never existed, can she die? Did she die? We know that Dolores Haze dies because she is numerically identical with Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, who we are informed died in childbirth (by John Ray, Jr., PhD, in the Foreword). But Lolita is not identical to her, so didn’t die with her. Then did she outlive Dolores? No, because the lifespan of the nymphet is strictly limited, expiring at the age of fourteen. Lolita actually died a few years before Dolores—the latter being a tragedy, the former not so much. We do not weep for Lolita, because she is a mythical being who never existed to begin with. In the middle of the novel Humbert anticipates the death of his nymphet owing to advancing age, mainly viewing it as an inconvenience requiring him to get rid of Dolores and find another nymphet to take her place: nymphets come and go quickly (lifespan, five years at most). However, the non-identity of Lolita and Dolores does have implications for the course of Humbert’s love life (if we may so describe it), because when, at the end of the novel, he finds himself loving the woman about to bear another man’s child, it is not Lolita that he then loves. He used to love Lolita (or whatever passed for love in his nymphleptic days with her), but now she is gone and the individual before him is not a nymphet at all but a grown woman. It is not that he still loves Lolita in her post-nymphet incarnation, because there can be no such thing, but rather that he loves the person that corresponded to her in the real world. He now loves a real human being—Mrs. Dolores Schiller, notLolita. She does not belong on an enchanted island but lives in a crappy house in the grim North West. He has thus made a stunning psychological breakthrough: not just loving a female beyond the age limit of the nymphet but also loving a real person. That is his fundamental transition—the move from fantasy to reality, not just from one age of female to another. Now he loves someone distinct from his fantasy objects—someone who can really die (and does die quite soon). He was a pedophile, to be sure, but he was also a fantasy-phile, cut off from reality. For the first time he lives in the real world. That is his redemption as well as his tragedy. We need feel no grief for Lolita, because she was a mere figment, a phantasm, an hallucination–though Dolores has our profound sympathy. What was done to Dolores was criminal. So there is no consolation for the reader in getting the ontology of Lolitastraight. Lolita doesn’t exist, never did, and so can’t be harmed; Dolores does exist, and certainly was harmed.

            So here is a linguistic recommendation: stop referring to Dolores Haze as “Lolita”, because that buys into Humbert’s distorting prism of self-serving fantasy; instead call her by her proper name, “Dolores” (or “Dolly” or “Lo” if you like). She was never a nymphet, save in Humbert’s imagination, but always an ordinary human girl. The creature called “Lolita” is a non-existent entity conjured up by the sick mind of a “panting maniac” (as Dr. Ray aptly describes friend Humbert). Names matter. Dolores Haze was no Lolita.  [1]

 

  [1] Both films of Lolita (not to mention countless readers) treat our young heroine as objectively nymphet-like, completely missing the point that she is a fantasy object of Humbert’s, as the text makes clear (if studied carefully). It is now a commonplace to suppose that the world is populated with actual Lolita’s. In fact, there are none, because the nymphet is as mythical as the unicorn. No one has ever been a Lolita.

                                   

 

 

The Mystery of Color

 

 

How does color come into the world? Not color experience but color itself—the color properties of objects. How do things come to be red, say? Not by virtue of their intrinsic objective properties, since things are not intrinsically and objectively colored. Shape properties (among others) come into the world in virtue of the nature of physical objects, but color properties are not like that (they are “secondary” not “primary” properties). Let us say that colors don’t have a “worldly genesis”, unlike shape. Then the obvious suggestion is that they have a mental genesis: they come into the world in virtue of the mind that apprehends the world. The explanation of the fact that objects are colored is that we see them as colored—that is how colors come to be, what they “emerge” from. They don’t come from objects themselves, or from nowhere, but from our peculiar mode of sensibility. Thus we resolve the mystery of the origin of color. As Hume famously put it, the mind spreads color on the world, paints it in qualities of its own devising; or as people nowadays say, we project color onto the world. Colors emanate from inside us, but we project them outward, thus creating a world of colored objects. Mystery removed.

            But we should scrutinize this idea of spreading or projecting more carefully: do we really understand what it means? The most obvious interpretation of it is that the mind has certain properties that it attributes to things outside it, as in primitive animism or anthropomorphism. It transfers properties from itself to things beyond, making external what is originally internal. Why it would do this is a question, since it appears to involve a rather grotesque error, but the suggestion is that the mind has a natural tendency to spread itself. Perception is an exercise in self-projection: we see the world according to our own mental nature. But this picture faces an obvious problem: the mind is not itself colored. Our perceptual experiences are not red or blue or purple; rather, they represent external things as red or blue or purple. We don’t experience our experiences as colored; we experience the external world as colored. Nor could they be colored because then they would have to have properties of extension such as size and shape. If I see a red sphere, I do not have an experience that itself red and spherical. So there is no property of my mind that could be the basis for the projection we are contemplating. Note that we don’t project the property of experiencing color onto objects—that would be a case of genuine projection; we are supposed to project color itself from the inside to the outside—yet we don’t instantiate color properties on the inside. It would be bizarre if we projected color experience onto objects; the error would be only too obvious. But we don’t do that when we see colors; so what we see is not a property of mind. True, the mind represents color perceptually, but that is not the same as the mind’s being colored.

            Why not say that the mind projects what it represents, as opposed to instantiates? The idea would be that objects are not objectively colored, but the mind has the capacity to depict the world as colored from within its own resources. The problem with this is that it presupposes that color properties already exist—as objects of representation, if not as prior properties of objects. But where did the property come from? Not from external objects and not from internal properties of experience; so it seems to come from nowhere. The property exists and we can get it in our mental sights, but it has its origin neither in the external realm nor the internal. Its existence is mysterious, unexplained, perplexing. Where did it come from? It seems like it belongs to a third realm, neither mental nor physical (nor abstract). We don’t find the property in external objects as an antecedent existence but nor do we sense it in ourselves (like pain or pleasure): it is a worldly property that comes neither from external reality nor from projection of our own nature as psychological beings. It is neither discovered out there nor projected from in here. So the two most natural theories of its origin don’t work. Nor is it remotely plausible to suggest that brain properties form the origin of color properties, since the brain does not have the colors possessed by external objects, being mainly grey: we don’t have red neurons whose properties we attribute to (intrinsically colorless) things outside! The color red appears to be instantiated neither by the mind (or brain) nor by external objects considered independently of the mind. Objects are colored but not in virtue of their intrinsic nature or the projective powers of the mind (if there are such powers). The whole idea of projection was contrived to explain how objects manage to be colored without being so in themselves, but it faces insuperable problems of intelligibility, given that the mind is not itself colored. So we are in the presence of a classic philosophical conundrum: there seems to be a fact (objects are colored) that has no explanation. We are confronted by a mystery, analogous to other mysteries (e.g. consciousness). Colors ought not to exist, but they do.

            Various responses are conceivable, and they run the usual gamut. We could favor a reductionist theory that claims colors to be reducible to physical properties of objects, so that their origin is the same as other properties, i.e. the actual nature of things. Or we could declare colors to be pseudo-properties, so there is nothing to explain: when we see things as colored we don’t really see them to have properties, as we do for things like size and shape, but rather we reify in some way our subjective responses. We have visual sensations in response to objects but these sensations don’t involve any represented properties; we then mistakenly construe our responses as involving properties of objects. Third, we might claim that experiences do actually instantiate color properties but in a special way: they may be said to be “reddish” or to occur “redly”. There is thus enough red in them to provide an adequate basis for projection (plus modification). Fourth, we might opt for radical ontological inflation: color properties exist in a realm of their own, accessible by the mind, and don’t need to be explained in terms of anything else. They don’t exist in virtue of the inherent nature of objects nor by some kind of projective mental act; they exist in their own right, primitively and inexplicably. Fifth, we might be tempted by a supernatural explanation: God bestows these properties on objects for our use and entertainment, so their origin is divine. We gaze at objects and God intervenes to implant colors in those objects, thus obviating the need for human projection.  [1]

I won’t discuss these different theories, merely noting the familiarity of the theoretical landscape; my point is that we are confronted by a mystery of a standard philosophical type. I will say that none of the proffered positions is terribly attractive, so we are left with a real mystery whose solution is elusive. It is genuinely puzzling how the world comes to contain colors: they weren’t there all along and the mind is incapable of conferring them; so their existence is problematic. What makes the world colored?  [2]

 

Colin McGinn 

  [1] A determined theologian might see here an argument for the existence of God: the only way for objects to be colored is for God to be the author of their existence, since minds and objects can’t do the trick. Whenever we see a red object we are seeing God at work.

  [2] Imagine if the objective world lacked shape properties and yet we perceived objects as having shapes. It would be hard to maintain that we project such properties from mind to world, given that the mind doesn’t have shape. This would present a real puzzle: how can there be shape properties attributed to objects if objects don’t have shape and shape cannot be derived from the mind? Where would these properties come from? They would seem to be invented from nothing.