The Concept Of Evil

 

The Concept of Evil

 

I read this morning an article called The Concept of Evil. It was written in 2013 by T Calder and it is printed online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The article is rich, but not initially seem definitive to me, and it seems to argue that evil is an outmoded but surprisingly resilient concept. My quick sense if that it is regarded by professional thinkers as a social construct, not a metaphysical force, which it is.

 

I am not ready today to comment on that article, but I know evil when I do it, experience it being done to me, or observe how young boys, running in packs can downgrade themselves into a vicious mob, with no moral restraints, capable at that point of doing anything imaginable to anyone close by that they are strong enough to inflict harm upon.

 

Their easy decline into cruelty and violence is so stark, patent, and quick to emerge that I must conclude that they have evil hearts, an evil capacity to misbehave on a grand scale, and, in mob anonymity; there and then whatever private conscience was restraining each individual is obliterated as he absorbed into the irresistible, destructive collective will to which he is subsumed into and consumed by.

 

I may not be able to define evil exactly—and nor did anyone else in the article on professional ethicists citied above, but I intuitively know it when it is in my presence. My life is built upon fighting it.

 

Thinkers can theorize all day about the concept of evil, and should, but we need a moral practical, working definition of good and evil and set of rules to live by so we can help our young people get on with the business of living well and doing well, to survive in the everyday world.