Evil (moral and philosophical concept)

In philosophical ethics, an action or the will striving for it is generally described as evil if the action is judged to be morally impermissible. Depending on the ethical position, however, different criteria are applied. For example, consequentialist theories assess the consequences of the action, teleological the goals pursued by the action, deontological the affected goods or duties or rules; ethics of mind and partly also ethics of virtue often disregard the action altogether and assess only the will. Two central conceptions of evil can be distinguished. The privation theory of evil understands it as a mere lack of being. Representatives of this view include Plotinus, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. The perversion theory, on the other hand, conceives of evil as a reality in its own right that actively perverts the order of the good. Representatives of this view are above all Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard.

History of Philosophy

In his collection of sentences Encheiridion 'Handbook of Morals', Epictetus describes that just as a goal is not set up to be missed, so evil cannot be a goal and cannot have a first cause in the world order and in being. Evil, however, could be aimed at as such. In this, will to evil raises the question of the origin of evil.

According to Augustine, evil comes into the world from man's free will. Through original sin, man has lost his free will and bears the guilt for his suffering. Augustine sees all suffering as a consequence of man's original sin. Evil is characterized as insubstantial by numerous philosophers and theologians (e.g., Augustine and almost universally in the Middle Ages). It is a mere deficiency of the good (a privativum). Blindness, for example, is also analyzed as a privativum: Blindness is not a positive quality, but simply lack of vision. Just as cold is merely the absence of warmth, so evil is merely the absence of the good or of God.

Benedict de Spinoza characterized evil in his work Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata (German: 'Ethics presented in geometric order') as a subjective attribution: that which inhibits the self-assertion of the individual, the person concerned calls "evil" (according to him, the reverse is also true for the term "good").

A turn to evil was recommended by de Sade, according to whom the bad can lead a happy and successful life of crime, while the good become the unfortunate victims of the bad. Evil people in de Sade are individualistic, purposive egoists and cynics who only care about their own pleasure. Knowing neither solidarity nor compassion, they cooperate solely for their own gain. They therefore reject religions and worldviews that assign an independent value to the community of people, independent of individual advantage. The ideologies that led to millions of mass murders in the 20th century are thus incompatible with de Sade's conception of evil.

Evil is inherent and essential to human nature (cf. Immanence), postulated Immanuel Kant in 1793 in his work on the philosophy of religion, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft. As a radical evil, it is an essential component of human nature, since the latter is not only a rational being, but also a being with empirical needs.

Friedrich Nietzsche declares evil to be a construct of Christian slave morality that has reversed the original distinction between good and bad into good and evil.

Karl Jaspers presents three levels for the relationship between good and evil, on which man has alternatives and is thus challenged to make a decision.

1. Moral relation: This relation stands between duty and inclination in Kant's sense. It is evil to let oneself be guided by the immediate drives. In contrast to this is the control of the immediate drives by the will following the moral laws. As in the other stages, it is not the concrete result of action that determines whether the acting person is evil, but the choice of his drive.
2. Ethical relation: The relation is first determined by the truthfulness of the motives. In the reality of acting under both conditional and unconditional, the unconditional makes one dependent on the conditional. It deprives itself of its freedom of choice and thus evades its responsibility. Evil here is weakness yielding to inclination. Evil is even the sham goodness as a luxury of happy conditions. Alternativity is instrumentalized in order to spare the agent the conflict.
3. Metaphysical relation: Here the relation between love urging to being and hate urging to non-being determines the relation between good and evil. Evil is only the will to evil (also expressed in the apology of evil), which here is a will to destruction.

The first stage is the strictest in terms of its requirement for the doer: impulsiveness of every kind. On the second and weaker level, only a lack is the criterion for evil: the lack of the will to good, to truthfulness. On the third and weakest level, a presence is the criterion for evil: the presence of the will to evil.

The three stages have in common that the result of action does not serve as a criterion for evil. No end can thus justify the means. The means are the focus. This approach to defining evil, which is possible with carefully thought-out action, is a challenge both to the group relativism, pragmatism and subjectivism, which limits the space for alternatives through result-oriented prevalence, and to fundamentalism, which harshly constructs a lack of alternatives.

The reference to the way of decision - to the path - instead of a reference to the results of action - to the goal - also has similarities with urbuddhist views, in which results are not evaluated and divine guidelines are followed, but driven by greed and a lack of effort for knowledge leads to evil actions.

Moral Realism

Some more modern philosophical positions hold, as Spinoza did, that standpoint dependence is in principle essential to ethical judgments. This position is held by various positions of moral relativism as well as some positions of pragmatism and subjectivism. Context dependence is emphasized to different degrees by different positions. The concrete assessment of moral value depends on the context of the situation and the person making the assessment.

According to other ethical positions, there are fixed moral truths, context-independent moral values and goods. These positions also claim to be true to their own basic moral intuitions. Yet some ethical theories, especially deontological theories, are criticized as rigorist. For example, when Kant decisively rejects the principle that "ought presupposes can" (see also ought-claim).

In various societies and their subsystems, especially in many religions, conventions exist which regulate the ethical evaluation of most courses of action. The significance of these conventions for the justification and validity of moral judgements is assessed differently. Immanuel Kant, in the text What is Enlightenment, distinguished between a free, public use of reason and one that is bound by institutions. According to Kant's argumentation, as a member of the republic of scholars, even a preacher would have to put the conditions of validity of his own religious conventions up for debate, but in his capacity as a member of his church he would be justified and obliged to adhere to them without question.

The philosopher and existentialist Emil Cioran wrote:

"Shy, without dynamism, good is incapable of communicating itself; evil, much more eager, wants to transmit itself and achieves it, for it possesses the double privilege of being fascinating and contagious."

Some drafts of theological ethics represent intermediate positions. Alfons Auer, for example, is of the opinion that ethical judgements draw their motivational horizon from religious convictions, but are to be justified autonomously. After the development of value insights the justification of normative statements has to take place. The former are therefore the conditional context of normative justifications. Thus, theological statements are the interpretive context of an ethical argumentation that is independent in itself.

Gerhard Ringeling, for example, also emphasizes: Christianity has a certain cultural experience and from it shapes its reception of new experiences. But the integration of these experiences is also to be understood as disfunctional to prevailing communication trends.

Dietmar Mieth, for example, distinguishes as follows:

• Social norms are not based on insight into reasons, but on the basis of social relationships and relieve people from a permanent reflection on their behaviour.
• Moral norms, on the other hand, integrate and surpass biological or legal understandings of norms in the direction of a free orientation of human action and are value preference judgements, i.e. weighings of values under given conditions, general or relative priority rules in the case of value conflict. One should therefore speak of norms only when the clause of application has been clearly clarified.
• Deontological norms are norms that always command or forbid (such as: telling the truth and avoiding lies).
• Teleological norms command or prohibit with regard to the effects of the action and therefore specify the exact circumstances (for example: the direct killing of an innocent life is not permitted).

Those who do not believe in the existence of (standpoint-independent) deontological norms can at least see them justified in inculcating general value insights with the utmost urgency. Normative ethics, according to Mieth, has its strength in delimiting evil and thus in gaining a framework for the good, and is accordingly either formal or casuistic. Norms understood as avoidance imperatives thus name the not-more-good (evil), but thereby leave open the good as the materially moral. For concrete judgements, contexts of experience are decisive, as for Auer: more complex value judgements rest on simple value insights, which only arise from the value conflict - but even simple value insights are by no means self-evident. The necessary competence is based on experience as integrating appropriation (not as empiricism, but as experience mediated by symbolic patterns). Accordingly, an ethos is formed from the interaction of value insights. Ultimately, the question is not about the right norms, but about the personal appropriation of morality ("How should I be? What can I do?"). This requires not only a normative but also an attitudinal pedagogical treatment of ethical problems.

According to Schmidt-Salomon, the concept of evil is not ethically meaningful, since no one understands himself as evil. According to him, evil is essentially a fighting term to legitimize the exclusion and murder of allegedly evil others.

In several cultures there are personifications of evil, such as the Christian devil, Persian Diw or the Asura of Hinduism. They all have in common - according to their evil nature - that they bring misfortune and ruin.

Often such personifications are reinterpretations of religious figures that have been displaced from their previous functions and from their status as protagonists by changes of religion. For example, the horned Greek shepherd god Pan became a manifestation of the devil as a result of Christian missionization, who thus also acquired horns and goat's feet (such a reinterpretation is a case of Interpretatio Christiana).

The personification of evil as Satan or the devil can be found in many Western works of world literature, such as Dante's Inferno, Goethe's Faust or Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. In Goethe's Faust, the devil Mephistopheles describes himself as: "A part of that power, // Which always wills evil and always creates good. ... I am the spirit that always denies!" (Goethe: Faust. Der Tragödie erster Theil, Act 1, Study.)

There are also prominent leaders of the bad guys in numerous fantasy books and films: Morgoth and Sauron in J. R. R. Tolkien, Voldemort in Harry Potter, the Emperor in Star Wars. Only in these fantasies are there dark rulers who also define themselves as evil. What all of these figures have in common is a quest to steadily increase their power over as many beings as possible for their own benefit alone, without scruples or moral qualms. According to some views, evil is also seen as an independent elemental force, sometimes personalized in demons, but sometimes appearing independently as absolute evil (e.g., in the Cthulhu myth). According to some, the development of society proceeds in cycles between ages of good, golden ages, and ages of evil, dark ages.