Evil

2. Evil as deviation from the good

The philosophically most influential explanation of evil is embedded in the Socratic view that no one does evil knowingly (see Socrates §6). The thought behind the apparently obvious falsehood of this claim is that human agents are normally guided in their actions by what seems to be good to them. The explanation of evil actions must therefore be either that the agents are ignorant of the good, and perform evil actions in the mistaken belief that they are good, or, while they know what the good is, they do evil unintentionally, through accident, coercion, or some incapacity (see Moral knowledge §1; Akrasia). The remedy for evil, consequently, is moral education that imparts genuine knowledge of the good and strengthens the intention to act on it.

This Socratic view, however, is driven to rely on a metaphysical assumption about the nature of reality and its effect on human aspirations. For, since human experience of the world testifies that thorough knowledge of the good and good intentions are compatible with evil actions, it must be supposed that human experiences disclose only appearances, not reality. The metaphysical assumption that needs to be made, therefore, is: first, that beyond human experiences of the world that appears to contain chaos and evil, there is a suprasensible true reality, in which a moral order prevails; and second, that good lives for human beings depend on learning to live in conformity to this order, rather than being led astray by deceptive appearances. Plato’s Socrates explains evil, therefore, as a deviation from the good due to a human defect in cognition or intention that leads to mistaking appearance for reality.

This metaphysical assumption and the explanation of evil implied by it has passed from Greek thought to Christian theology chiefly through the works of Augustine and Aquinas. Christianity attributes to an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God the creation of the moral order that permeates reality, and it explains the prevalence of evil by the corrupting influence of original sin, which leads human beings to choose evil over the good, and thereby wilfully or weakly pit themselves against God’s moral order (see Sin §2). Although Christian thinking about evil has dominated Western thought between the Greeks’ time and ours, it nevertheless must be seen, if we ignore some twists and turns of theological sophistication, as a particular adaptation and elaboration of the metaphysical assumption and explanation of evil first advanced by Plato’s Socrates.

This metaphysical assumption, however, cannot be reasonably maintained in the light of well-known objections, which can only be stated here without elaboration. First, any evidence that may be cited in favour of the supposed existence of a moral order in a supposed suprasensible reality beyond the world as it appears to normal human observers must be derived from the world as it appears to normal human observers, since, as a matter of logic, there is no other possible source of evidence. The evidence derived from appearances, however, cannot reasonably be taken to point to any suprasensible order in reality because the most such evidence can imply is that human knowledge of the world as it appears is limited and fallible. It is logically impossible for evidence to support inferences about what may lie beyond all possible evidence. Second, if, undeterred by this logical obstacle, defenders of the metaphysical assumption pursue their speculations about the implications of the evidence, they must recognize that evidentially unsupported implications can be derived both in favour of and against their assumption. If the existence of a moral order in suprasensible reality is inferred from observed instances of apparent goodness, then the existence of an evil order in suprasensible reality must be analogously inferrable from observed instances of evil. There is, consequently, no more reason to think of evil as deviation from the good than there is to think of the good as deviation from evil. Third, even if it is assumed for the sake of argument that the metaphysical assumption is defensible, it accounts only for moral evil, caused by human failure, and not for natural evil, whose occurrence cannot be attributed to human agency.