| | From Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics, by Tara Smith... from the chapter on Justice, the section on The Refusal to Sanction Evil....
"Evil" is sometimes used to refer to anything that falls on the negative side of the expansive spectrum of actions and qualities that are morally good or bad. In this very broad sense, "evil" would encompass everything from stealing thousands of dollars or plotting the slaughter of millions to taking a teaspoon from a restaurant to telling a lie to spare a person's feelings. Other times, we reserve "evil" to designate those persons or actions at the extreme immoral end of the spectrum. In this sense, "evil" refers to the most serious breaches and to those who commit them most routinely. It refers to tjose individuals whose deeds are most knowingly, willfully, and consistantly immoral, to those who are most thoroughly vicious and whose immoral actions are of an intensity and scale that vastly exceeds everyday dimensions.
.........No aspect of a person's conduct or character is, in principle, beyond the proper purview of judgment or correlative treatment that justice demands. The prohibition on sanctioning evil thus applies, strictly, to all immorality, major or minor. Nonetheless, the prohibition holds special salience in regards to extraordinary degrees of immorality because the stakes are much greater in such cases.....
The basic rationale for the refusal to sanction evil is straightforward. When a person fails to condemn evil practices or evil persons, he acts as if they are benign. This is irrational in at least three related ways. First, it may benefit evil materially, if the person is in a position to withold material support or to materially assist others who actively oppose the evil in question. Second, it bestows on the grossly undeserving the spiritual shelter of the sanctioner's tacit approval, for that is the message that his failure to condemn conveys. Third, a person's failure to oppose evil exposes him to the damage to values that others' eveil threatens. The sanction of evil helps to sustain practices that works against a person's life. Ignoring others' evil does not disarm it. The greater the evil that a person indulges, the greater the potential damage to his own values. Depending on the kind and degree of evil that i sanction, I may lose my tereth (to a bully), my money (to a corrupt politician), my freedom (to a dictator). Given that what makes something evil is its adversarial relationship to objective values, whatever form of evil I sanction, by doing so, I am putting myself in a position to lose.
Evil is dangerous. But - evil is parasitic on the good. It is for this reason that the withdrawal of sanction is the appropriate response to evil. For it is the most effective means of resisting the dangers that evil poses. Let me spell this out in a little more detail.
Only certain actions (those broadly identified as virtuous) can actually further human life and contribute to anyone's flourishing. The evil is that which is anti-life, that which works to prevent or diminish human flourishing. The anti-life cannot fuel life, however; actions working against the requirements of human life cannot create or nourish the values that human life depends on. Because no person can survive on a diet of consistantly life-diminishing actions, evil (evil persons and evil practices) can exist only to the extent that it feeds on values created by the good. A slothful person must draw from the productive; a faker must draw from the honest; a second handler must draw from the independent....
The point is, the support of the good is indispensible to the existence of the evil. Drained of that support, the evil wopuld collapse; its continued existence would be only a matter of time. To sanction evilis thus to give evil the food it needs for endure. Sanction from the good is the only lifeline that evil has. Whether the good offer material support or spiritual support, whether the good offer crumbs or cakes, grudging concessions or hearty congratulations, such gifts supply the totality of evil's lease on life.
Remember that the evil, to the extent that it is such, acts in ways that could not sustain its own existence. The refusal to sanction evil becomes imperative, therefore, because by lending support to evil, a person keeps afloat the very type of person or practice that eworks against his own life. He is feeding those who necessarily prey on the virtuous and seek (whether self-consciously or not) to weaken the lives of those who create objective values (since the evil seek to gain the values that their existence requires without offering comparable values in exchange). In the terms of pop psychology, those who sanction evil are quintessional "enablers".
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To abstain from condemning a torturer is to become an accessory to his crimes
