Evil and Incomprehensibility
Evil and Incomprehensibility
复制标题
邪恶与不可理解
DOI：
10.1111/j.1475-4975.2012.00234.x
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发表时间：
2012
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Luke Russell
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文献类型：
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作者：
Luke Russell
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Evil actions are morally wrong, but they are not merely morally wrong. You ought not score cheap laughs by embarrassing a friend in public, and you ought not cheat on your income tax, but it is not evil to do these things. In contrast, the terrorist spree killing carried out by Andre Breivik in Norway in 2011 does strike many people as being not just wrong, but evil. Actions that deserve to be condemned as evil, including Breivik’s murders, are never trivial. Evil actions are extreme. Evils possess a gravity that is lacking in many ordinary wrongs. While this intuition is widely shared, it is hard to say exactly what the difference between evil and non-evil wrongs amounts to. Some philosophers suggest that the difference lies in the fact that evil actions are extremely harmful. For instance, Claudia Card claims that an evil intention is the “culpable intention to do someone intolerable harm, or to do something with that foreseeable result”, and “[i]n an evil deed, the intention succeeds” (Card 2002, 20). Marcus Singer agrees that “evil acts are acts that are horrendously wrong, that cause immense suffering” (Singer 2004, 193). Breivik’s evil actions, we could argue, are distinct from non-evil wrongs in virtue of being much more harmful. This claim seem unconvincing, though, when we consider a case in which a morally wrong action is extremely harmful, but in which the extreme harm caused by the action was not rationally foreseeable. For example, let us imagine that someone breaks into a medical lab in an attempt to steal drugs, and in doing so inadvertently releases a dangerous virus contained in a test tube in the lab, which bs_bs_banner MIDWEST STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY