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I think we both know that's not true. I see what you mean though - but I just don't see how anyone would EVER chose to be EVIL if they were sane.... everyone makes amoral choices and everyone wants to be good!
Hoom. Certainly, to have somebody describe themselves as “evil” is an unusual and interesting statement. I would observe that the people who do it tend to be doing it primarily as a matter of aesthetic self-identification rather than actual moral assessment. That is, “evil” is used to say something other than “evil” – that I am a goth, that I am exciting, that sort of thing. People who have actively and positively self-identified as evil in the moral terminology I think are limited to Satan in Paradise Lost and Mr. Dent in Codename: Eternity. “I have done evil things” might be signed up to by more people, but that needs something to underwrite it… which may be a set of absolute moral prohibitions defining the idea of what constitutes evil, or may just be an intensifier (of which more below).
Evil like it's opposite Good certainly cannot be argued for as an absolute, even an uneasy one ! Nor does it make any sense to suggest that religion can be used to justify our current understandings of Good or Evil. Not merely because of the absurdity of blaming the human condition on one or more non-existent supernatural being - but mainly because it seems terrible to suggest that what counts for evil or good in this society should be proposed as a 'universal' good or evil - rather than a passing moment.
If one accepts first that one has atemporal or eternal supernatural beings, then one can assume further that their ideas of what constitutes evil are also atemporal or eternal. The problem then becomes whether the interpretation of an act as being good or evil in those terms is accurate. Of course, if you don’t accept the divine beings, no worries, but if you do then absolute evil does make sense. Terrible does not mean nonsensical in these terms.
likewise we don't disapprove of Facism because it's 'evil' but becase they were a reactionary force. These are specific historical events and are not evil in the sense of evil or good for eternity...
Interesting. I think the rules by which one defines evil and an evil are very important here. When you say “specific historical events and are not evil in the sense of evil or good for eternity”, do you mean that they are not ongoing evils or goods (which I don’t think a religious perspective would demand), or that their perception as evil or good is a purely temporal one – that they may be viewed as evils at this time, but they were not at another time, and may not be in the future. And, for that matter, we do not unilaterally condemn Fascism now. There is not a complete consensus. Perhaps there might be on some concepts – for example, perhaps “murder is evil”, but “murder” here would have to be carefully defined, until in the end it essentially means “acts of killing that can be identified consensually as morally indefensible”. Which dovetails with what Badio is saying about the creation of consensus.
So… let’s look, at the risk of Godwinism, at the Holocaust. That is a specific historical event, more so in fact than Fascism. Was it evil, even if we assume that those performing it did not think of it as evil and that there is no deity to identify it categorically as evil?
From my point of view, I can say (subjectively) that it was bad, and that the behaviours that created it were wrong. Can I say that it was evil? Well, yes, I can. But I have to use the term with a very specific meaning. When I call something evil, presumably what I have to mean is “I really do not like this thing at all”. It’s a matter of degree of, rather than transcendence of, ethical revulsion.
However, that has the problem that a) the idea of evil is culturally determined and b) the territory of the terminology of evil is open to constant contest. So, unless everybody understands what you mean by evil, you get to the sort of problems Badiou describes, where the idea of evil as culturally specific and the idea of evil as transcendent are fudged to create an exculpatory opposite:
Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.
That's why the idea of Evil has become essential. No intellectual will actually defend the brutal power of money and the accompanying political disdain for the disenfranchised, or for manual laborers, but many agree to say that real Evil is elsewhere. |
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