The Thin Moral Concept of Evil
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/szhf.2022.015Keywords
evil, evil-scepticism, evil-realism, thick concepts, conceptual engineering, capital punishment, remorseAbstract
Evil-scepticism comes in two varieties: one variety is descriptive, where it is claimed that the concept of evil does not successfully denote anything in the world; the other variety is normative, where it is claimed that the concept of evil is not a helpful or useful concept to be employing in either our social or interpersonal lives. This paper argues that evil-scepticism can be responded to by understanding the concept of evil as a thin moral concept. Understood in this thin way, the descriptive challenge fades, because the concept of evil does not even purport to denote anything in the world (it is purely evaluative), and so does the normative argument, since the thinness of the concept means that, first, it is ineliminable anyway, and, second, its malleability allows for it to be used for progressive and constructive means.
References
Baron-Cohen Simon. 2012. Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness. London: Penguin.
Barry Peter Brian. 2013. Evil and Moral Psychology. New York: Routledge.
Brooks Thom. 2012. Punishment. London: Routledge.
Burge Tyler. 1979. “Individualism and the Mental”. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4(1):73–122.
Calder Todd. 2018. “The Concept of Evil”. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/concept-evil/.
Calder Todd. 2019. “Evil and Wrongdoing”. In: The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil, ed. Thomas Nys, Stephen de Wijze, 218–233. London: Routledge.
Chignell Andrew. 2019. “Introduction”. In: Evil: A History, ed. Andrew Chignell. New York: Oxford University Press.
Claridge Claudia. 2007. “The Superlative in Spoken English”. In: Corpus Linguistics Twenty-Five Years on. Selected Papers of the Twenty-Fifth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerised Corpora, ed. Roberta Facchinetti, 121–148. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Clinton Catherine. 2004. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. New York: Black Bay Books.
Cole Phillip. 2006. The Myth of Evil. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Feinberg Joel. 2003. Problems at the Roots of Law: Essays in Legal and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gaita Raimond. 1998. A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice. London: Routledge.
Garrard Eve. 2019. “Does the Term ‘Evil’ Have any Explanatory Power?”. In: The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil, ed. Thomas Nys, Stephen de Wijze, 189–202. London: Routledge.
Garrard Eve, David McNaughton. 2021. “Forgiving Evil”. In: Forgiveness and its Moral Dimensions, ed. Brandom Warmke, Dana Kay Nelkin, Michael McKenna, 197–211. New York: Oxford University Press.
Glasgow Joshua. 2020. “Conceptual Revolution”. In: Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability, eds. Teresa Marques, Asa Wikforss, 149–166. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hallie Philip. 1981. “From Cruelty to Goodness”. The Hasting Center Report 11(3): 23–28.
Higginbotham James. 1998. “Conceptual Competence”. Philosophical Issues 9: 149–162.
Hume David. 1751. “An Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals”. In: Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. revised by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Kirchin Simon. 2013. Thick Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Knoll James L. 2008. “The Recurrence of an Illusion: The Concept of ‘Evil’ in Forensic Psychiatry”. Journal of American Academy of Psychiatry Law 23: 105–116.
Kramer Matthew. 2012. The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and its Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Margalit Avishai. 1996. The Decent Society. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Morton Adam. 2004. On Evil. London: Routledge.
Neiman Susan. 2002. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
O’Hara Neil. 2018. Moral Certainty and the Foundations of Morality. Switzerland: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Oldridge Darren. 2012. The Devil: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pojman Louis. 2007. “In Defense of the Death Penalty”. In: Ethics in Practice, ed. Hugh LaFollette, 544–554. London: Blackwell Publishing.
Ruffell Antonia. 2019. “Kakology: A Study of Some Evils”. In: Evil: A History, ed. Andrew Chignell, 43–49. New York: Oxford University Press.
Russell Luke. 2006. “Evil-Revivalism Versus Evil-Skepticism”. Journal of Value Inquiry 40: 89–105.
Russell Luke. 2014. Evil: A Philosophical Investigation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singer Marcus. 2004. “The Concept of Evil”. Philosophy 79: 185–214.
Taylor Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press.
Thomas Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Reading: Peregrine Books.
Uidhur Christy Mag. 2019. “Reflection: Cinematic Evil”. In: Evil: A History, ed. Andrew Chignell, 414–422. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wijze Stephen de. 2019. “Defining the Concept of Evil: Insights from our Pre-Cognitive Responses”. In: The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil, ed. Thomas Nys, Stephen de Wijze, 203–217. London: Routledge.
Williams Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilson Keith M., Jennifer Hull. 2001. “Scaling Satan”. The Journal of Psychology Interdisciplinary and Applied 135(3): 292–300.
Wittgenstein Ludwig. 1969. On Certainty, ed. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright. New York: Harper & Row.
Zaibert Leo. 2019. “Evil and Punishment”. In: The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil, ed. Thomas Nys, Stephen de Wijze, 269–281. London: Routledge.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Stats
Number of views and downloads: 79
Number of citations: 0
