Evil Opaque

Evil Opaque

There is an interesting epistemic asymmetry between good and evil: you can be doing evil and not know it, but you can’t be doing good and not know it. You can think you are doing good and really be doing evil, but you can’t think you are doing evil and really be doing good. Goodness is transparent, but evil isn’t. You can have unconscious evil motives that you consciously represent as good, but you can’t have unconscious virtuous motives that you consciously represent as evil. For example, no one ever gives money to charity with nothing but good intentions and yet believes he is acting evilly; but plenty of people have killed other people in evil ways while not recognizing the evil of their actions. Indeed, evil acts, evilly motivated, have often been represented as especially virtuous acts—genocidal acts, racist acts, acts of religious persecution, etc. A lot of evil flies under the radar, while virtuous acts are never depicted as evil (or morally neutral) by the agent. We can think we are good when we are not, but we never think we are evil when we are not (putting aside insanity or brainwashing). Why? Because evil is bad and virtue is good—so we have to represent evil as really virtuous, or at least morally neutral. There is no similar motive to regard good acts as evil—what would be the point of that? Evil must hide itself, but virtue has nothing to hide—there is nothing good about evil, but good is good. Thus, evil is opaque, furtive, sly—while goodness is out in the open and has no reason to disguise itself as evil. No one boasts about being evil when they are actually good, but people routinely boast of their goodness when their evil is quite evident to others. If people could not hide their evil from themselves, there would be much less of it—maybe none. If all evil were conscious evil, it would be a rare commodity. Good is invariably conscious good, which is fortunate or else good acts might be smothered by self-ascriptions of evil. But evil has the ability to conceal itself by various psychological stratagems, so it can lurk unseen while the conscious mind paints it in virtuous colors. Just think how different history would be if evil had no such ability, simply revealing its presence to the conscious mind. It is much the same with intelligence and stupidity: intelligent acts reveal themselves to the subject as intelligent, but stupid acts don’t automatically reveal themselves as stupid—the subject may regard them as perfectly intelligent. There is an epistemic asymmetry here: stupidity is opaque but intelligence is transparent. People don’t go around accusing themselves of stupidity when they are models of intelligence, because stupidity is not a desirable trait; but they do ascribe intelligence to themselves no matter how stupid they really are. Again, there would surely be less stupidity if stupidity were self-intimating; but it is able to conceal itself and put on a good face. Stupidity can disguise itself as intelligence, and has reason to do so, but intelligence never presents itself as stupidity—what would be the point of that? To put it in terms of repression, self-knowledge of stupidity and evil is subject to repression, because these are not admirable traits; but self-knowledge of virtue and intelligence has no reason to be repressed, because they are admirable qualities. If such repression were impossible, stupidity and evil would be far less prevalent (though some people might revel in their stupidity and evil).[1]

[1] Imagine if there were a stupidity-evil meter in the brain that automatically went off whenever the person did something stupid or evil: surely that would deter the person in question (no-one would be deterred from being intelligent and virtuous by a similar meter). Perhaps one day such a device will be invented; the world would be a better place (or am I being naïve?). As things stand, stupidity and evil are opaque presences in the mind, shielding themselves from exposure.