Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- List of acronyms and abbreviations
- PART I The concept of evil
- 1 Inexcusable wrongs
- 2 Between good and evil
- 3 Complicity in structural evils
- 4 To whom (or to what) can evils be done?
- PART II Terrorism, torture, genocide
- Bibliography
- List of films referred to
- List of websites for international documents
- Index
2 - Between good and evil
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- List of acronyms and abbreviations
- PART I The concept of evil
- 1 Inexcusable wrongs
- 2 Between good and evil
- 3 Complicity in structural evils
- 4 To whom (or to what) can evils be done?
- PART II Terrorism, torture, genocide
- Bibliography
- List of films referred to
- List of websites for international documents
- Index
Summary
The question arises whether a middle ground may not at least be possible, namely that, as a species, the human being can neither be good nor evil or, at any rate, that he can be the one just as much as the other, partly good, partly evil. (Kant 1996b, p. 70)
In this passage Immanuel Kant says “as a species.” But he goes on to discuss the individual human will and argues that for it there is no middle ground. I call this view Kant's “moral excluded middle.” Kant's view on this point is shared by many who hold that only those who are good deserve heaven and those who are evil deserve either purgatory or hell. The idea that human beings can eventually be sorted into those who deserve to go to heaven (people of good will) and those who deserve purgatory or hell (people who lack good will) presupposes that of those who are capable of morality, any who are not good are evil and that of those who are evil, some may be redeemable, but others are not. Kant rejects the idea of diabolical evil as inapplicable to human beings. But he accepts the idea that a will that is not good is evil. In this chapter, I disagree with Kant's moral excluded middle. But I defend a distinction between diabolical evil and lesser evils.
A widely shared common-sense view is that good and evil, unlike right and wrong, are not contradictories. They are contraries.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Confronting EvilsTerrorism, Torture, Genocide, pp. 36 - 61Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010