Machan's Musings - Why Bad Isn't The Same As Evil
by Tibor R. Machan
Because so much of the substance of ethics is linked to religion, and because religion is a troublesome seat of truth for those who trade in evidence and argument, ethics (or morality) has itself gotten the back of the hand of the modern, erudite intellectual. Instead of talk of evil, which such people tend to demean as superstitious or confused, modern thinkers acknowledge only the existence of bad things, mistakes, or mishaps.
Bad things, of course, are hardly deniable. An earthquake that kills thousands is bad. A virus or a hurricane would also be. But all these are generally thought of as distinct from evil deeds, which are the bad things people do that they might and ought not have done. Evil assumes that those who do it have a choice. They could refrain from doing the deed and indeed ought to. Evil is something only an agent with free will can produce.
In the last 400 years or so there emerged a view of the world that has basically eliminated morality because the idea is that everything that happens has to happen. There is no choice in the universe, nothing that can be produced by something with a free will. A free will is taken to be something spooky, mysterious, miraculous and thus the province of faith, not of science, reason, evidence or argument. As a result, evil is dead.
What has come to replace evil is, of course, "bad stuff." Murder, rape, lying, cheating, laziness, betrayal, cowardliness, and such are all afflictions. People are victims of such behavior, or suffer such conditions, but are never responsible for them. And their decency, heroism, or other worthy achievements are also simply accidental, not something for which they can rightfully take credit. The most prominent of ethical and political writers today embrace this outlook.
Of course there isn’t full consistency about any of this. There are plenty of intellectuals, philosophers, even psychologists willing to deploy ethical or moral language, but very selectively. Racism is still evil, so is bigotry or unfairness, especially when it comes to promoting it in the economic sphere. And Enron’s ex-chiefs are still evil!
But when push comes to shove, this is pretty forced nowadays. The basic theories that rule, from particle physics to cosmology, tilt firmly against the idea that human beings are free agents and are responsible for what they do.
Not that all those who are complicit in dispensing with ethics will bite the bullet. Some do—there are books arguing unapologetically against morality by people who embrace the fully determinist outlook (just take a look at Ted Honderich’s little volume, 'How Free Are You?' [Oxford University Press, 2002])—but some want to have it both ways and try to make determinism compatible with free will (for instance, Daniel Dennett in his 'Elbow Room, The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having' [MIT Press, 1984]). But the latter mean something different by ethics from what most of us do: they have in mind that bad behavior exists and that yes there are means of coping with such behavior, like punishment, blame and so forth. Yet, they deny that the behavior could have been otherwise, except if certain impersonal forces had prevented it.
So, for example, a murderer is responsible for the murder in the sense that it was he or she who engaged in the behavior that produced the homicide. But only if there had been some factors to intervene would the behavior have been avoided. Choice didn’t have a role at all—or if it did, then the choice itself had to be caused by certain factors.
In short, the same person in the identical circumstances could not have done otherwise. Which is to say, free will does not exist by this view.
Well, this is a problem and I am not going to presume to deal with it all here. Suffice it to observe only that what underlies it is an impoverished view of what is possible in the world. The determinists think there can only be one kind of cause, namely, the sort we witness in mechanics—say on the pool table when one ball causes another to move. But there could well be other types of causes—for instance, when Mozart creates music or Rembrandt paints or indeed a philosopher produces a defense of determinism.
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