Risk, ethics and compliance requirements are a daily reality for most organisations. Regulators and stakeholders (including employees) demand more of most organisations, from equality, to anti-corruption, to supply chain ethics. Start-ups stutter and unicorns crash to earth when they get risk wrong. What should be done? Where should you start? How can risk management enable, not hinder, the organization's strategic goals? This book answers these questions -- rightsizing risk for every organization -- using frontline-tested tools, tips, and techniques. Whether you're (...) a purpose-driven changemaker or just struggling to comply with a seemingly unending stream of regulation, we will make risk work for you. (shrink)

Arguing that the prevalence of evil presents a fundamental problem for our secular sensibility, John Kekes develops a conception of character-morality as a response. He shows that the main sources of evil are habitual, unchosen actions produced by our character defects and that we can increase our control over the evil we cause by cultivating a reflective temper.

This paper develops a challenge to theism. The challenge is to explain why the hypothesis that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and all-good god should be considered significantly more reasonable than the hypothesis that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and all-evil god. Theists typically dismiss the evil-god hypothesis out of hand because of the problem of good–there is surely too much good in the world for it to be the creation of such a being. But then why doesn't (...) the problem of evil provide equally good grounds for dismissing belief in a good god? I develop this evil-god challenge in detail, anticipate several replies, and correct errors made in earlier discussions of the problem of good. (shrink)

Some theists maintain that they need not answer the threat posed to theistic belief by natural evil; they have reason enough to believe that God exists and it renders impotent any threat that natural evil poses to theism. Explicating how God and natural evil coexist is not necessary since they already know both exist. I will argue that, even granting theists the knowledge they claim, this does not leave them in an agreeable position. It commits the theist (...) to a very unpalatable position: our universe was not designed by God and is instead, most likely, a computer simulation. (shrink)

The way in which mainstream human rights discourse speaks of such evils as the Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid puts them solidly in the past. Its elaborate techniques of "transitional" justice encourage future generations to move forward by creating a false assumption of closure, enabling those who are guilty to elude responsibility. This approach to history, common to late-twentieth-century humanitarianism, doesn't presuppose that evil ends when justice begins. Rather, it assumes that a time _before_ justice is the moment to put (...) evil in the past. Merging examples from literature and history, Robert Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He boldly challenges the empty moral logic of "never again" or the theoretical reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it _was_. Meister criticizes such methods for their deferral of justice and susceptibility to exploitation and elaborates the flawed moral logic of "never again" in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into a twenty-first-century doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect. (shrink)

No one will deny that we live in a world where evil exists. But how are we to come to grips with human atrocity and its diabolical intensity? Martin Beck Matuštík considers evil to be even more radically evil than previously thought and to have become all too familiar in everyday life. While we can name various moral wrongs and specific cruelties, Matuštík maintains that radical evil understood as a religious phenomenon requires a religious response where (...) the language of hope, forgiveness, redemption, and love can take us beyond unspeakable harm and irreparable violence. Drawing upon the work of Kant, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, this work is written as a series of meditations. Matuštík presents a bold new way of dealing with one of humanity's most intractable problems. (shrink)

The moral status of some particularly horrendous actions cannot be adequately captured by the concept of wrongdoing.See Daniel Haybron, “Moral Monsters and Saints,” Monist, Vol. 85 : p. 260; Paul Formosa, “Evil, Wrongs and Dignity: How to Test a Theory of Evil,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 47 : pp. 235–253; Eve Garrard, “The Nature of Evil,” Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action, Vol. 1 : pp. 43–45; Hillel Steiner, “Calibrating (...) class='Hi'>Evil,” The Monist, Vol. 85 : pp. 183–185. For instance, sadistic torture and genocidal mass murder are not just wrong, or very wrong, or very very wrong. We need the concept of evil to make sense of the moral status of these actions. But what is evil? And how is it distinct from mere wrongdoing?In recent years, several theorists writing about the concept of evil have argued that the best way to proceed is to think reflectively about evil’s opposite. Call this the mirror methodology... (shrink)

In previous work we have presented a reply to the Lucretian Symmetry, which has it that it is rational to have symmetric attitudes toward prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. Our reply relies on Parfit-style thought-experiments. Here we reply to a critique of our approach by Huiyuhl Yi, which appears in this journal: Brueckner and Fischer on the evil of death. We argue that this critique fails to attend to the specific nature of the thought-experiments (and our associated argument). More specifically, (...) the thought-experiments seek to elicit attitudes about (say) past pleasures per se, and not insofar as such pleasures are connected to more pleasures in the future or a greater total amount of pleasures in one’s life overall. (shrink)

IN THE DISCUSSION on education in the Republic, Socrates lays down the principles which those who speak about the gods must follow if they want to avoid the errors of traditional mythology. The first typos of this rational theology is this: "God is the cause, not of all things, but only of the good." For "God, being good, cannot be responsible for everything happening in our life, as is commonly believed, but only for a small part. For we have a (...) far smaller share of good than of evil, and while God must be held to be the sole cause of good, we must look for some other factors than God as cause of the evil." Rightly celebrated, this passage has set the agenda for ages of reflection in Western thought on the cause of evil. In contrast to traditional mythology where the gods are seen as the origin of both good and evil--as Homer says, "Zeus has two jars standing on the floor of his palace, full of fates, good in one and evil in the other"--the divinity is now freed of all responsibility for evil. God, who is entirely good, can only be the cause of well-being. If this answer sets God free of all responsibility for evil, it seems to be at the cost of limiting God's power: for God is no longer responsible for "most things in human life," since most of them are evil. What, then, may be the cause or causes of evil? Do bad things have a cause? Or do they just happen? Plato's formulation seems to suggest that he favours a dualistic solution to the problem of evil: God is the cause of all good, but for evil we have to find other causes. What could those causes be: matter, cosmic necessity, an evil soul? Various answers of this type were developed in later Platonism and in later mythological philosophies. Without denying that Plato often uses a dualistic discourse and uses elements of it in his cosmology, I do think that Plato had something different in mind. After all, he was not primarily interested in the problem of theodicy. For in this passage of the Republic, he is not concerned with the problem of evil in the universe as a whole, which is really the theodicy question, but with evil in "human life," that is, evil insofar as human beings experience it and suffer from it: the fact that we are not at all living well but are instead miserable and unhappy. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's well-known examinations of the problem of evil are not contradictory and they are central to her corpus. Evil can be banal in some cases (Adolf Eichmann) and radical (the phenomenon of totalitarianism) in others. But behind all expressions of evil, in Arendt's formulations, is the imperative that it be confronted by thinking subjects and thoroughly historicized. This led her away from a view of evil as radical to one of evil as banal. Arendt's (...) ruminations on evil are illuminated, in part, by concerns that she shared with her fellow New York intellectuals about the withering effects of mass culture upon individual volition and understanding. In confronting the challenges of evil, Arendt functioned as a suggesting profitable ways that historians might look at history from a moral perspective. Indeed, her work may be viewed as anticipating a currently afoot in the historical profession. (shrink)

This article presents a variety of philosophical answers to the age old question: unde malum - where does evil come from? Starting with the metaphysical responses of Augustine, Hegel and Kant, it proceeds to examine some more recent approaches - Lyotard, Kristeva and Zizek - in terms of the 'postmodern sublime'. He concludes by proposing a 'hermeneutic' response to the problem, inspired by Paul Ricoeur, which seeks to address the question in terms of narrative understanding and practical action. /// (...) O presente artigo apresenta uma série de respostas filosóficas à imemorial questão: unde malum - qual a origem do mal? Partindo das respostas metafísicas de Santo Agostinho, Hegel e Kant, o autor examina depois algumas das abordagens mais recentes ao problema - Lyotard, Kristeva e Zizek - em termos do 'sublime pós-moderno', O artigo conclui com uma proposta 'hermenêutica 'para o problema, proposta essa inspirada no pensamento de Paul Ricoeur e cujo objectivo é elucidar a questão do mal em termos de uma compreensão narrativa e de acção prática. (shrink)

There are a number of possible strategies open to one in meeting this problem. He can try to show that God's unlimited power and goodness are, in fact, compatible; or show, through linguistic analysis, that the problem is meaningless; or show, through the use of the notions of commitment and mysticism, that the problem can be safely ignored. There are, however, grave difficulties with all these moves. So the most reasonable alternative move for one who wishes to remain more or (...) less within the theistic tradition is to try to modify the notion of unlimited power in a way that neither does violence to this tradition nor founders on the problem of evil. Whitehead and Hartshorne are the best examples of this interesting and complicated strategy. This strategy requires careful analysis before effective criticism can be advanced. After careful analysis, however, the criticisms of this strategy can be seen to be as effective as the criticisms of all the other strategies. The ultimate result is driving another nail into the coffin of religious cosmology. (shrink)

How to reconcile the existence of evil with the belief in a benevolent God has long posed a philosophical problem to the system of Christian theism. This work redress this difficulty in modern terms.

In this paper, I reconstruct the problem of evil as an argument to the conclusion, "No one can claim to be a theist without abandoning the ethics of belief that would ordinarily be required for a civil way of life." Most theistic replies to this argument reduce theism to a "Sunday truth," i.e., a sincere belief that has no direct relevance to ordinary life. Bishop Butler's position - that this world is best understood as a probationary state - is (...) presented and defended. Nevertheless, Butler's argument that one follow the ethics of belief is consistent with being led to doubt God's existence. (shrink)

This paper uses Paul Ricœur’s analyses of ideology to argue for the mitigation of the possibility of political evil within the political paradox. In explicating the paradox, Ricœur seeks to hold in tension two basic aspects of politics: its benefits and its propensity to evil. This tension, however, should not be viewed as representative of a dualism. The evil of politics notwithstanding, Ricœur encourages us to view the political order as a deeply important part of our shared (...) existence. By thinking past the distorting function of ideology to the legitimating and integrating functions that Ricœur calls more basic than distortion, a mode of thought that is often at the heart of political evil, ideology can be used to mitigate that very evil. Keywords: Ri cœur, “The Political Paradox,” Ideology, Political Violence, Justice. Résumé Cet article s’appuie sur les analyses ricœuriennes de l’idéologie dans le but de montrer que l’idéologie est susceptible de contribuer à une atténuation du mal politique inhérent au paradoxe politique. Dans son explicitation de ce paradoxe, Ricœur cherche à mettre en relation tensionnelle deux aspects fondamentaux de la politique: ses avantages et ses maux. Cependant, cette tension ne devrait pas être interprétée comme l’expression d’un dualisme. En dépit du mal inhérent au politique, Ricœur nous encourage à voir l’ordre politique comme une partie profondément importante de notre existence partagée. Si l’on régresse en-deçà de la fonction de distorsion de l’idéologie vers ses fonctions légitimantes et integratrices, c’est-à-dire vers ses fonctions les plus fondamentales, il apparaît en effet que l’idéologie, tout en étant souvent au cœur du mal politique, peut néanmoins être utilisée pour atténuer ce mal. Mots-clés: Ricœur, paradoxe politique, ideologie, violence politique, justice. (shrink)

In order to make sense of the relationship between evil and enmity, I make an excursion into moral theory, and discuss ideas on the origin of evil in two very different moral philosophers: Kant and Darwin. Thinking about evil the way Kant does leads to a theoretical impasse Darwin’s evolutionary natural history of morality readily overcomes. Today enmity is more consequential, and potentially more dangerous, than at any time in our 100,000 years on the earth. An enemy (...) may force us to fight, as we have forced our enemies to fight. Reconciliation is not always to be desired at any price. But we will have a clearer view of precisely what the price of enmity is if we refrain from imagining a confrontation between evil and avenging righteousness. (shrink)

Since the modern age the attacks against faith and religious belief have been raised. One of the major arguments against the existence of God who is described in theistic religious holy books as Almighty and all loving God come in terms of suffering in human life and the presence of evil in the world created by God. The challenge according to the critics against the religious life and faith is how a believer can be considered rational in his faith (...) while there are many suffering in human life and evil in the world. The aim of this paper is to deal with this challenge and the solution is given on the basis of Islamic teachings. There are different responses for this challenge both in Islamic theology and Christian theology. This research is limited to Quranic teachings and the main claim as one possible response and defense for the presence of evil in human life is to point out that evil plays a main role in provoking inborn knowledge of God in human nature. Keywords - life, inborn, faith, Quran, evil. (shrink)

Is there really a hell? Should we be good simply to avoid punishment in the life hereafter? Just asking these questions theoretically doesn't get us far, George F. Dole suggests, but examining the works of someone who has been there may help. Dole refers to Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and statesman who over the last twenty-seven years of his life had the privileged status of an observer of non-physical worlds, including hell. Swedenborg wrote that we are unconscious residents (...) of the spiritual world as well as the material world, and the hells he encountered have mirrors in our everyday lives. Within this framework, Dole examines questions about evil and hell that have plagued thinkers for centuries: Do we have freedom of choice? Do our spirits exist after death? Does an all-loving God condemn us to hell? If not, can we ourselves become irredeemably evil? What distinguishes Dole's approach to these questions is his open-mindedness and his hopefulness. Freedom and Evil brings us face to face with a God of mercy, and it is easy to believe, with Dole, that the gates of hell are not to keep people in but to keep people out. (shrink)

This study examines the ritualized character of crimes against humanity in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Encompassing a victim, a victimizer, and a witness, degradation ceremonies structured the activity of what is euphemistically called ethnic cleansing. The observing world played the role of witness, which became a perpetuating component of the ritual.The discussion leads to the formulation of evil as the degradation of not only an individual human being but also humanity itself.

This engrossing book explores the human experience of evil and locates its ground in “an experience of dread almost beyond words,” arguing that the evil we do is “an attempt to master the experience by inflicting it on others”. This conclusion is the fruit of Alford’s reflections on interviews and surveys with two groups of people, those who responded to newspaper advertisements and a group of state prison inmates. Alford finds that their account of evil is not (...) unlike that of St. Augustine: it is “no-thing”. The book, however, is not a theodicy. What the ultimate explanation of evil is Alford leaves the reader to ponder. Rather he offers an account of our experience of evil, one which covers both the evil we do and the evil we suffer. (shrink)

Is it more dangerous to call something evil or not to? This fundamental question deeply divides those who fear that the term oversimplifies grave problems and those who worry that, to effectively address such issues as terrorism and genocide, we must first acknowledge them as evil. Recognizing that the way we approach this dilemma can significantly affect both the harm we suffer and the suffering we inflict, a distinguished group of contributors engages in the debate with this series (...) of timely and original essays. Drawing on Western conceptions of evil from the Middle Ages to the present, these pieces demonstrate that, while it may not be possible to definitively settle moral questions, we are still able—and in fact are obligated—to make moral arguments and judgments. Using a wide variety of approaches, the authors raise tough questions: Why is so much evil perpetrated in the name of good? Could evil ever be eradicated? How can liberal democratic politics help us strike a balance between the need to pass judgment and the need to remain tolerant? Their insightful answers exemplify how the sometimes rarefied worlds of political theory, philosophy, theology, and history can illuminate pressing contemporary concerns. (shrink)

This paper regards the plausibility of rejecting the scholastic claim that the “good” is a transcendental property of being—that ens et bonum convertuntur—onthe basis of two claims: Stephen Cahn’s claim that evil worlds created by an evil God are intrinsically plausible—i.e., that it is plausible to think of evil as a positive and instantiable property; and the claim that “evil is a primitive”—that is, that evil is a primary or basic ontological property. It argues that (...) if an “ontological primitive” must be a property which has no basic constituents other than itself—or whose definition cannot invoke concepts or constituents other than the primitive itself—evil itself cannot be considered a primitive. Nor can it be considered a positive property. (shrink)

This piece is a relatively long and critical discussion of two new books on the problem of evil: Susan Neiman's _Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton University Press, 2002) and _Rethinking Evil, edited by Maria Pia Lara (University of California Press, 2001). My focus in the essay concerns the ways in which Kant's understanding of evil are represented in both books. I especially focus on how Kant's understanding of evil can work as a way to explain (...) class='Hi'>evil in ways that Arendt's thesis fails to explain evil. Even though I am often critical of the arguments in the books, I come to the conclusion that both books are excellent additions to the discussion of evil. (shrink)

The Enlightenment marked a shift inmoral debates away from notions of sin and eviltoward the more secular concept of virtue basedin reason. Perhaps the most notable example ofsuch liberal thought can be found in JohnDewey's 1934 A Common Faith, where he arguesthat people should set aside bickering overreligious differences and work in a utilitarianspirit to achieve public good through science.Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, theChinese cultural revolution, and the Cold War'sthreat of mutually assured destruction haveinspired philosophers and theologians to revivethe (...) concept of evil to explain atrocities tooextreme to be incorporated into conventionalunderstandings of virtue and reason. In theirstruggle to explain the enormity of humancapacities for destruction, they have replacedtraditional religious definitions of evil witha more secular one: the construction anddefense of a systemic contempt for life.Assuming that bad consequences are simply theunintended result of good intentions, socialscientists have resisted employing such aconception of evil. Persisting in thisassumption may prevent us from seeing theperversity of the liberal economicjustification for promoting and perpetuatingdestructive tendencies in the industrialagricultural system. This paper seeks tooperationalize a conception of evil and toapply it to policy debates surrounding the 1985Food Security Act in the hope of evaluating oursociety's inability to resolve social andenvironmental consequences generated byindustrial agriculture. (shrink)

The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from both (...) the phenomenal conception of evidence and the knowledge-first view of evidence. (shrink)

Evil is a poorly understood phenomenon. In this provocative 2005 book, Professor Vetlesen argues that to do evil is to intentionally inflict pain on another human being, against his or her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm. Vetlesen investigates why and in what sort of circumstances such a desire arises, and how it is channeled, or exploited, into collective evildoing. He argues that such evildoing, pitting whole groups against each other, springs from a combination of character, situation, (...) and social structure. By combining a philosophical approach inspired by Hannah Arendt, a psychological approach inspired by C. Fred Alford and a sociological approach inspired by Zygmunt Bauman, and bringing these to bear on the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Vetlesen shows how closely perpetrators, victims, and bystanders interact, and how aspects of human agency are recognized, denied, and projected by different agents. (shrink)

Much philosophical attention has been paid to the question of whether, and why, one may divert a runaway trolley away from where it will kill five people to where it will kill one. But little attention has been paid to whether the reasons that ground a permission to divert thereby ground a duty to divert. This paper defends the Requirement Thesis, which holds that one is, ordinarily, required to act on lesser-evil justifications for harming for the sake of others. (...) Cases in which we have lesser-evil justifications of harming for the sake of others are rescue cases. Ordinarily, an agent is under a duty to rescue unless doing so imposes too great a cost on her, or violates someone else's rights. When neither of these defeating conditions obtain, one is required to rescue even if this involves causing harm to innocent people. (shrink)

At present, there is an enormous gulf between the visibility of evil and the paucity of our intellectual resources for coming to grips with it. We have been flooded with images of death camps, terrorist attacks and horrendous human suffering. Yet when we ask what we mean by radical evil and how we are to account for it, we seem to be at a loss for proper responses. Bernstein seeks to discover what we can learn about the meaning (...) of evil and human responsibility. He turns to philosophers such as Kant, who coined the expression 'radical evil', as well as to Hegel and Schelling. He also examines more recent explorations of evil, namely the thinking of Freud and Nietzsche on the moral psychology of evil. Finally, he looks at the way in which three post-Holocaust thinkers - Emmanuel Levinas, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt - have sought to come to grips with evil "after Auschwitz." Bernstein's primary concern throughout this challenging book is to enrich and deepen our understanding of evil in the contemporary world, and to emphasize the vigilance and personal responsibility required for combating it. Radical Evil will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy, social and political theory, and religious studies. (shrink)

Is evil a distinct moral concept? Or are evil actions just very wrong actions? Some philosophers have argued that evil is a distinct moral concept. These philosophers argue that evil is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. Other philosophers have suggested that evil is only quantitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. On this view, evil is just very wrong. In this paper I argue that evil is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. The first part of (...) the paper is critical. I argue that Luke Russell’s attempt to show that evil is only quantitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing fails. Russell’s argument fails because it is based on an implausible criterion for determining whether two concepts are qualitatively distinct. I offer a more plausible criterion and argue that based on this criterion evil and wrongdoing are qualitatively distinct. To help make my case, I sketch a theory of evil which makes a genuinely qualitative distinction between evil and wrongdoing. I argue that we cannot characterize evil as just very wrong on plausible conceptions of evil and wrongdoing. I focus on act-consequentialist, Kantian, and contractarian conceptions of wrongdoing. (shrink)

A compelling account of evil in which Adam Morton draws on fascinating examples as diverse as Augustine and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Exciting and thought-provoking, On Evil is essential reading for anyone interested in a topic that attracts and.

When asked to describe wartime atrocities, terrorist acts, and serial killers, many of us reach for the word 'evil'. But what does it really mean? Luke Russell defends a new account of the nature of evil action and persons. Although the concept of evil is extreme and often misused, it has a legitimate place in contemporary secular moral thought.

Stephen Law developed a challenge to theism, known as the evil-god challenge (Law (2010) ). The evil-god challenge to theism is to explain why the theist’s responses to the problem of evil are any better than the diabolist’s – who believes in a supremely evil god – rejoinders to the problem of good, when all the theist’s ploys (theodicy, sceptical theism, etc.) can be parodied by the diabolist. In the first part of this article, I extend (...) the evil-god challenge by showing that additional theist replies to the problem of evil (more theodicies, the privation view of evil, and others) also may be appropriated, with just as much plausibility, in support of the diabolist position. In the second part of the article, I defend the evil-god challenge against several objections. (shrink)

This book offers a compelling examination of the problem of evil and the doctrine of sin. It engages with and advances extant discussions on the topic by drawing together philosophical arguments, theological reflections, scientific evidence, Biblical exegesis, and real-life stories. The chapters provide a comprehensive evaluation of objections by anti-theodicists and atheists, and bring recent philosophical work concerning the arguments for Christian theism and advances in science and religion to bear on the discussion. The author defends the Cosmic Conflict (...) Theodicy against philosophical and theological objections, and uses it together with the Connection Building Theodicy, Adamic Fall Theodicy, arguments for divine hiddenness, and Afterlife Theodicy to address the vexing problem of horrendous evil. (shrink)

Evil acts are not merely wrong; they belong to a different moral category. For example, telling a minor lie might be wrong but it is not evil, whereas the worst act of gratuitous torture that you can imagine is evil and not merely wrong. But how do wrongs and evils differ? A theory or conception of evil should, among other things, answer that question. But once a theory of evil has been developed, how do we (...) defend or refute it? The most commonly used method for doing this in the literature has been to, respectively, provide pro-examples or counter-examples. While this method might be sufficient for establishing that a theory is at least a prima facie plausible theory of evil, it is often insufficient for making fine-grained distinctions between otherwise plausible theories of evil. To supplement this insufficiency I propose that we also focus on five theoretical virtues that a theory of evil should have. These virtues are: 1) meshing well with important theories of moral wrongdoing; 2) being based on a plausible moral psychology; 3) explaining the basis of our judgments about evil; 4) being able to alter, revise and expand our judgments about evil; and 5) being pitched at the right level of generality. The main result of this paper will be to show that these five theoretical virtues provide a useful analytical tool for interrogating plausible theories of evil. The secondary result will be to show that my theory of evil has these five virtues. (shrink)

"I am delighted to offer my highest praise to Dean Cocking and Jeroen van den Hoven's brilliant new book, Evil Online. The confrontation between good and evil occupies a central place in the challenges facing our human nature, and this creative investigation into the spread of evil by means of all-powerful new technologies raises fundamental questions about our morality and values. Cocking and Van den Hoven's account of the moral fog of evil forces us to face (...) both the demons within each of us as well as the demons all around us. In the end, we are all enriched by their perceptive analyses." —Phil Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Stanford University Principal Investigator, Stanford Prison Experiment "The internet offers new and deeply concerning opportunities for immorality, much of it shocking and extreme. This volume explains with great insight and clarity the corrupting nature of the internet and the moral confusion it has produced. It will play a vital role in the growing debate about how to balance the benefits of the internet against the risks it poses to all of us. Evil Online is an excellent book." —Roger Crisp, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford We now live in an era defined by the ubiquity of the internet. From our everyday engagement with social media to trolls on forums and the emergence of the dark web, the internet is a space characterized by unreality, isolation, anonymity, objectification, and rampant self-obsession—the perfect breeding ground for new, unprecedented manifestations of evil. Evil Online is the first comprehensive analysis of evil and moral character in relation to our increasingly online lives. Chapters consider traditional ideas around the phenomenon of evil in moral philosophy and explore how the dawn of the internet has presented unprecedented challenges to older theoretical approaches. Cocking and Van den Hoven propose that a growing sense of moral confusion—moral fog—pushes otherwise ordinary, normal people toward evildoing, and that values basic to moral life such as autonomy, intimacy, trust, and privacy are put at risk by online platforms and new technologies. This new theory of evildoing offers fresh insight into the moral character of the individual, and opens the way for a burgeoning new area of social thought. A comprehensive analysis of an emerging and disturbing social phenomenon, Evil Online examines the morally troubling aspects of the internet in our society. Written not only for academics in the fields of philosophy, psychology, information science, and social science, Evil Online is accessible and compelling reading for anyone interested in understanding the emergence of evil in our digitally-dominated world. (shrink)

Sometimes one can prevent harm only by contravening rights. If the harm one can prevent is great enough, compared to the stringency of the opposing rights, then one has a lesser-evil justification to contravene the rights. Non-consequentialist orthodoxy holds that, most of the time, lesser-evil justifications add to agents’ permissible options without taking any away. Helen Frowe rejects this view. She claims that, almost always, agents must act on their lesser-evil justifications. Our primary task is to refute (...) Frowe’s flagship argument. Secondarily, it is to sketch a positive case for nonconsequentialist orthodoxy. (shrink)

I argue that the atheological claim that the existence of pain and suffering either contradicts or makes improbable God's existence or his possession of certain critical properties cannot be sustained. The construction of a theodicy for both moral and natural evils is the focus of the central part of the book. In the final chapters I analyze the concept of the best possible world and the properties of goodness and omnipotence insofar as they are predicated of God.

In this contribution to philosophical ethics, Claudia Card revisits the theory of evil developed in her earlier book The Atrocity Paradigm, and expands it to consider collectively perpetrated and collectively suffered atrocities. Redefining evil as a secular concept and focusing on the inexcusability - rather than the culpability - of atrocities, Card examines the tension between responding to evils and preserving humanitarian values. This stimulating and often provocative book contends that understanding the evils in terrorism, torture and genocide (...) enables us to recognise similar evils in everyday life: daily life under oppressive regimes and in racist environments; violence against women, including in the home; violence and executions in prisons; hate crimes; and violence against animals. Card analyses torture, terrorism and genocide in the light of recent atrocities, considering whether there can be moral justifications for terrorism and torture, and providing conceptual tools to distinguish genocide from non-genocidal mass slaughter. (shrink)

Problems in moral philosophy and philosophy of religion can take on new forms in light of contemporary physical theories. Here we discuss how the problem of evil is transformed by the Everettian "Many-Worlds" theory of quantum mechanics. We first present an Everettian version of the problem and contrast it to the problem in single-universe physical theories such as Newtonian mechanics and Bohmian mechanics. We argue that, pace Turner (2016) and Zimmerman (2017), the Everettian problem of evil is no (...) more extreme than the Bohmian one. The existence and multiplicity of (morally) terrible branches in the Everettian multiverse in contrast to the mere possibility of them in the Bohmian universe does not entail there is "more evil" in the former than in the latter. Low probability in the Bohmian case and low branch weight in the Everettian case should modulate how we respond to them in exactly the same way. We suggest that the same applies to the divine decision of creating an Everettian multiverse. For an empirically adequate Everettian quantum mechanics that justifies the Born rule, there is no special problem of evil. In order for there to be a special Everettian problem of evil, the Everettian interpretation must already have been exposed to decisive refutation. In the process, we hope to show how attention to the details of physical and metaphysical theories can and should impact the way we think about problems in moral philosophy and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This essay is aimed at a theistic audience, mainly those who are new to thinking hard about the problem of evil.

Social evil is any pain or suffering brought about by game-theoretic interactions of many individuals. This chapter introduces and discusses social evil. It begins with social evil brought about by game-theoretic interactions of rational moral individuals. The problem social evil poses for theism is distinct from the problems of natural and moral evils. Social evil is not a natural evil because it is brought about by the choices of individuals. But social evil is (...) not a form of moral evil because each individual actor does not misuse his free will. Traditional defenses for natural and moral evil fall short in addressing social evil. The final section discusses social evil and virtue. It is argued that social evil arises even when all the participants are truly virtuous. The conclusion of this chapter is that social evil is problematic and provides new ground for exploring the conceptual resources of theism. (shrink)

There is nothing new about evil; it has been with us since time immemorial. But there is something new about the kind of evil that characterizes our contemporary liquid-modern world. The evil that characterized earlier forms of solid modernity was concentrated in the hands of states claiming monopolies on the means of coercion and using the means at their disposal to pursue their ends ends that were at times horrifically brutal and barbaric. In our contemporary liquid-modern societies, (...) by contrast, evil has become altogether more pervasive and at the same time less visible. Liquid evil hides in the seams of the canvass woven daily by the liquid-modern mode of human interaction and commerce, conceals itself in the very tissue of human cohabitation and in the course of its routine and day-to-day reproduction. Evil lurks in the countless black holes of a thoroughly deregulated and privatized social space in which cutthroat competition and mutual estrangement have replaced cooperation and solidarity, while forceful individualization erodes the adhesive power of inter-human bonds. In its present form evil is hard to spot, unmask and resist. It seduces us by its ordinariness and then jumps out without warning, striking seemingly at random. The result is a social world that is comparable to a minefield: we know it is full of explosives and that explosions will happen sooner or later but we have no idea when and where they will occur. In this new book, the sequel to their acclaimed work Moral Blindness Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis guide the reader through this new terrain in which evil has become both more ordinary and more insidious, threatening to strip humanity of its dreams, alternative projects and powers of dissent at the very time when they are needed most. (shrink)