1
Natural Evil
Moral Evil
1. What Makes an action seriously wrong or evil?
St. Augistine's View
For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name “evil”
2. Right and Wrong are not bivalent properties
- Truth / Falsity = concern objective representation value(s)
- The ought/is Distinction
3. To assert that an action is wrong is to make a value - but what are values?
A couple of Views:
- Objectionist view
- Dispositionalist view
- an action X can be valued as good by party A and evil by party B simultaneously
- example) Al Queda
5. A Key Distinction on Value Properties
- Attributions
- Predications
-Wrong actions appear to be predicatively so, but in reality we must delimit the idea as a perspectival disposition that attributes wrongness
5. Where does the predicative assumption that certain actions are wrong arise?
a. The disposition depends upon the perspective taken
b. Moral systems depend upon inter-subjective communities
c. When people in communities agree that certain actions are wrong, moral attributes get treated as predicates
6. Another Distinction:
- Hard Objectivity
- Soft Objectivity
Community perspectives create the veneer of moral objectivity because they maintain, primarily through a set of agreements, a soft objective standard for which types of actions are allowable and which are not.
7. Back to the Question of Evil
Things can be called seriously wrong if they broach an inter-subjective standard that is nearly universal within a community or within multiple communities.
Evil is the negation of the inter-subjective community
Natural & Moral Evil have the same form
Collective wrong doing is a form of schizophreniawithin a given inter-subjective community
8. Understanding Thick and Thin moral concepts
a. The universality of Williams’ thick moral concepts can be directed correlated with those necessary and sufficient conditions that must be operative for any intersubjective community to exist at all: things such as bodily respect, basic forms of honesty, collective understanding, etc.
b. Thin and particular concepts in morality are not universal because they are ultimately neither sufficient or necessary conditions for any community, but only the localized community in question.
9. Degrees and Types of Evil
i. Bands of wrongdoing
Ex) Columbine
ii. Systemic wrong doing
Ex) Monsanto monopolization of the farming industry
iii. Organized Utilitarian wrongdoing
Ex) Making war (the bombing of Hiroshima)
iv. Totalitarian wrongdoing
Ex) Nazis
10. Conclusion
So to the question as to whether or not something is wrong, seriously wrong, or evil is not a matter of diminishment of being or reality, it is a matter of negation of inter-subjective community and the transgression of those dispositional norms an adopted perspective assumes. So in a certain sense the ancients were right, evil is the negation of not being in general, but the collaboration among beings.
Evil
&
Others
4. Values are both circumstantial = perspectival
Mali enim nulla natura est : sed amissio boni, mali nomen