Luke Russell's Being Evil is an extraordinarily clear and succinct presentation of the leading accounts of the nature of evil action. Russell surveys these theories, offering concise criticisms of each, thereby paving the way for a defense of his own view according to which evil actions are just extreme cases of certain types of wrongdoing. The clarity and range of Russell's discussion, in conjunction with the brevity of the book – the text itself is only 127 short pages – make it an excellent choice for someone wanting a quick overview of the field with some critical content, an accompaniment to an undergraduate course on the topic, or as a unit in a more wide-ranging ethics course.
Russell notes that there are some who think that we should get rid of the concept of evil because it is a ‘myth’ requiring supernatural commitments to some sort of demonic entities. Thus, he says, ‘those … who want to defend this concept are required to give a plausible and informative definition of evil, and to show that this definition accurately describes some things in the real world’ (p. 45). Beginning in Chapter 2 he surveys accounts of evil which see it as qualitatively different from ‘ordinary wrong-doing,’ accounts which attempt to locate that qualitative difference in either (i) our reactions to the action, (ii) the psychology of the agent, or (iii) the nature of the harm caused by the action (p. 45). In responding to each of these appeals to some special feature that marks off evil actions from non-evil wrongdoing, Russell progresses through several versions, refining them until he reaches a final version. I will discuss his general objections to appeals to each of the three features that have been suggested as possible candidates for what makes a qualitative difference between evil and ordinary wrong-doing.
Chapter 2 discusses ‘response-dependent’ accounts of evil action, i.e. accounts which hold ‘that the qualitative difference that marks out evil actions is a distinctive response from victims or third-party observers’ (p. 43). Such a response might be emotive (horror or some sort of distinctive ‘moral horror’) or cognitive (an ‘unfathomable motive’ or an inability to conceive of choosing to perform the action). Russell's criticism of such views amounts to a version of the Euthyphro Dilemma (Russell himself does not refer to Euthyphro): is an action evil because we respond to it with horror (incomprehension) or do we respond to the action with horror (incomprehension) because it is evil? Russell concludes that, given that we want to allow that we can be mistaken as to whether an action is evil, we ought to understand horror and incomprehension as appropriate reactions to what is evil, not as determinative of what is evil.
Considered as a stand-alone account of evil, Russell's objections seem correct to me. However, he fails to consider the possibility that evil actions are extreme cases of certain types of wrongdoing that also cause horror or incomprehension where our use of the term acts to express that horror. It might be the case that the term ‘evil’ has a kind of emphatic emotive force such that we use it to describe very wrong actions and to convey our horror at or incomprehension with respect to those actions. On such an account, the extreme wrongness is what makes our horror or incomprehension appropriate in some sense, but when we say of an extremely wrong action that it is evil, we thereby express and/or describe our reactions to it (and perhaps also encourage others to have such reactions). Russell may not want to take this route because he seems to want to see ‘evil’ as a purely descriptive term, but I think that it is an option worth considering.
In Chapter 3 Russell considers accounts according to which evil actions are distinguished by psychological features of the agents who perform them. Such features include malice, sadistic pleasure, a knowing defiance of morality, and the silencing of decisive considerations against the action. Not surprisingly, Russell argues against each of these accounts by an appeal to counterexamples in which he thinks that the relevant psychological feature is not present in the agent and yet we are inclined to describe that agent's action as evil. So, for example, with respect to the appeal to malice, Russell considers a case of someone, say a bank robber, intent upon some goal – in this case, getting money – and kills bank employees or customers when those persons get in the way of his achieving his goal. Such a person need not act maliciously, but, rather, may simply take a cool, detached approach to his task: he wants the money and killing the victims is viewed merely as a means to his end. Similarly, in the case of the account that appeals to knowing defiance of morality as the defining feature of the agent perpetrating evil, Russell points out that some of the most evil actions such as genocide have been performed by individuals like Hitler who were quite assured of the righteousness of their causes. Russell concludes that ‘we can always find examples of extremely wrong actions that lack one of the purported psychological hallmarks of evil’ (p. 67).
While Russell seems correct with respect to this conclusion, his argument does not seem sufficient to rule out an appeal to some distinctive psychological aspect of the wrong-doer as essential to the characterization of an action as evil. All of the accounts that Russell discusses are simple, in the sense that each involves an appeal to only one relevant feature of the agent. Even if we reject all of those accounts, the possibility remains that the evil-doer must have some distinctive psychology, but that that distinctive psychology is more complex than is supposed by the views considered by Russell. For example, in his ‘The Apparent Banality of Evil: The Relationship Between Evil Acts and Evil Character’,Footnote 1 Todd Calder argues for the view that ‘we act evilly when we intentionally cause or witness someone else's significant, real harm, from an e-desire set’, and, in order to have an e-desire set, one ‘must either have an effective desire for someone else's significant harm for an unworthy goal, or else have an effective desire for some unworthy object or state of affairs which is inconsistent with someone else's being spared serious harm’ (Calder, 2003, p. 367). I make no claims for the correctness of Calder's account. I am simply using it as an example of a much more complex account of the psychology requisite for the doing of evil.
Russell presents his own view of evil action in Chapter 4. Before doing that, he quickly dismisses the suggestion that evil action is defined by some special type of harm caused to the victims of the action, pointing to the various kinds of harm that wrong-doing can cause and the implausibility of picking out one as defining evil action (pp. 70-71). Russell's own view is that ‘an action is evil if and only if it is a wrong that is extremely harmful for at least one individual victim, where the wrong-doer is fully culpable for that harm in its extremity, or it is an action that is appropriately connected to an actual or possible extreme harm of this kind, and the agent is fully culpable for that action’, or, more succinctly, ‘evil actions are extreme culpable wrongs’ (p. 87). While I think that this is plausible to some extent, I also think, as I have said, that the possibility remains of a much more complex account of evil, one, perhaps, that starts from Russell's own account but then adds on some complex psychological set of the agent or some claim about the special emotive force of ‘evil’. But it may very well be sufficient that the general reader or student is given the tools provided by the more straightforward accounts discussed by Russell: they can then begin to consider whether we need a more complex account, or whether we should consider accounts according to which ‘evil’ is not a descriptive term.
After his discussions of evil action, in Chapter 5 Russell turns to a consideration of what it is for a person to be evil. He defends what he calls ‘the fixed dispositional account of evil personhood’, according to which ‘[y]ou are an evil person if and only if you are strongly disposed to perform evil actions, and this disposition is now so firmly fixed that you ought to be treated as a write off” (p. 114).Footnote 2 As Russell says, this definition makes it the case that we need to be very careful in using ‘evil’ to describe a person, because, in so doing, we are saying that we ought to give up on any possibility of redemption for such an individual. But I think that speaks in favor of this definition, in so far as we reserve the label for people such as Hitler and Ted Bundy, people with whom we think further dialogue is a waste of our time.
While I have offered some criticisms of Russell's account, I do not mean for those to be taken as distracting from the merit of his book. It is a marvelously clear and straightforward presentation of the territory that is sure to prompt discussion and provoke thought in students, laypersons, and philosophers seeking an entry into the topic of evil.
