Evil As An Abstract Category

     Yesterday, I posted a snippet of my fiction as a stimulator to a discussion I hope to pursue today. The scene therein is one that has never been commonplace, neither among adults or children. (Include teenagers in either category, as you prefer.) Yet what could be more important? Assuming, that is, that evil is “real” in some sense beyond our opinions.

     There’s a certain amount of irony in this: the young usually have a better grasp of evil than their elders. At the very least, they concede its reality, whereas the trend among adults is to wave the subject aside, or to flatly deny that “evil” is somehow distinct from other unpleasantnesses. That has sometimes led me to wonder whether justice, in this world at least, would be better served if anyone over the age of twelve – other than the defendant, of course – were forcibly excluded from it, but that’s a conjecture for another day.

     Is evil real? That is: can we state with assurance that there are some phenomena that are demonstrably evil, whereas other phenomena are not? A phenomenologist would pause here to tell you that states of consciousness, including our intentions, must be postulated as real for the discussion to proceed. But then, if intentions were other than real, we would we not be men… and we are, aren’t we?

     To grapple meaningfully with this question, we must also posit that “reality is real:” i.e., that there are entities and phenomena outside our consciousness, such that our perceptions, decisions, and opinions of them have no material bearing on what they are. Now, there are some lumps in this, including the old holism versus reductionism debate. However, that debate has not ended and probably never will. For our purposes – and whose purposes matter more? – we must take “reality is real” and “reality has parts” as postulates. Men, and their decisions and actions, are some of those parts.

     Now comes the question that precedes all attempts to define: what constitutes a valid and practical definition?

     There are two ways to “define,” though one is of more use than the other. But before we get to that, we must recognize that definition is about grouping things into categories. No one allowed out of the house without a minder would ask you to “define Milwaukee.” It’s a nonsensical undertaking; Milwaukee is simply there, self-demonstrating, on the shore of Lake Michigan in southeastern Wisconsin. The name it bears is essentially arbitrary, assigned by long-ago cartographers and perpetuated by politicians avid for tax revenues. By contrast, to define city, apart from any particular city, is an attempt to put things into a category, though there might well be differences of opinion on what belongs in it.

     Categories, of course, are abstractions: mental artifacts we use in reasoning and making decisions. Perhaps the category of city isn’t one that most of us have a lot of use for. That’s not the case with the category of evil.

     In treating evil as a category, we can take two approaches:

1. Extensive: We can say “These things and only these things, which are specifically named here, are in the category to be called evil.” (This is sometimes called definition by enumeration or tabulation.)
2. Intensive: We can say “To be evil, a thing must possess certain qualities. Anything that does not possess one or more of the specified qualities is not evil.”

     An intensive definition of evil is the sort we seek. No one would dare to say that “all evil things already exist and are known.” Imagine saying that before the rise of Pol Pot, for instance.

     A commenter to the previous piece proposed this two-part approach:

1. Evil is the deliberate, freewill choice to inflict harm on others for one’s own benefit…or worse, for the pleasure of seeing those others suffer.
2. Evil is also the deliberate, freewill choice to take action towards one’s own benefit at the expense of others’ well-being.

     The key word in both parts of Carol’s definition is choice. A choice is a consciously made decision that has action in mind. In this formulation, whether the action ever occurs, and the results of the action if so, are irrelevant.

     Carol’s proposal has merit, but it’s incomplete. She includes benefit sought from the evil deed as a part of the formula. This omits crimes of envy, which often bring no benefit to the envious one. Sometimes they even cause him harm! His whole intention is to see the target of his envy suffer loss. The “I know it when I see it” crowd would not be satisfied. Neither would I, as among the great stories are several in which the villain is punished (in part) by seeing his envious intention thwarted. (Hey, I’m a storyteller. We’re like that.)

     Lurking behind this phenomenon is the possibility that evil resides in the intention and nowhere else. Part of me finds this attractive owing to the consideration above. But part of me is unsatisfied for a practical reason: No one can determine another person’s intentions with total confidence. Indeed, that’s one of the perennial problems of justice, as we want to refrain from punishing people who do things that cause harm but “didn’t mean it.” (We may demand restitution – we certainly should – but we don’t consider them villains even if “he should have known better.” Some people plainly don’t.)

     At this point, the mathematician in me wants to throw two words at my Gentle Readers: necessary and sufficient.

     Aristotle’s approach to definition is much like that of the mathematician formulating a theorem, except for the difference in terminology: in the Aristotelian scheme, a definition must have:

1. a genus
2. and a differentia.

     The genus specifies a category of things to which all things in the category being defined must belong, though other things may be in the genus as well. The differentia specifies a property that all the things in the category being defined must have, but the other things in the genus do not. (A mathematician would be muttering about “sets and subsets.”) So our concluding question for today – we’ll be back to this, I promise – is:

     More anon.