Roots of Evil

"Evil is the most serious of our moral problems. All over the world cruelty, greed, prejudice, and fanaticism ruin the lives of countless victims. Outrage provokes outrage. Millions nurture seething hatred of real or imagined enemies, revealing savage and destructive tendencies in human nature. Understanding this challenges our optimistic illusions about the effectiveness of reason and morality in bettering human lives. But abandoning these illusions is vitally important because they are obstacles to countering the threat of evil. The aim of this book is to explain why people act in these ways and what can be done about it."-John Kekes

Preface
Introduction: The Problem and the Approach
What Is Evil?
Approaches to Explanation
Toward an Adequate Explanation
The Approach
Part One FORMS OF EVIL
The Sleep of Reason
Crusade against the Cathars
Possible Excuses
Appeal to Faith
The Permanent Threat of Faith
Faith and Evil
Perilous Dreams
Background
The Terror
The Ideologue
Justification by Ideology
Ideology and Evil
A Fatal Fusion
Inferno
The Man
His Responsibility and Choices
His Character
Ambition and Evil
The Revenge of Ruined Pride
The Crimes and the Criminal
The Vice
The Motive
The Judgment
Envy and Evil
Wickedness in High Places
What Was Done
Why It Was Done
Failed Justification
Condemnation
Honor and Evil
Disenchantment with Ordinary Life
The Psychopath
Boredom
Prevalence
The Thrill of Evil
Boredom and Evil
Taking Stock
Sources of Evil
Responsibility
Intention
Realism about Evil
The Approach
Part Two EXPLANATIONS OF EVIL
External Explanations
Four Types of Explanation
Evil as Unavoidable
Reasons against Explaining Evil as Unavoidable
Evil as Corruption
Reasons against Explaining Evil as Corruption
A Biological Explanation
Natural Goodness and Defect
The Human Good
Practical Reason
What Reason Requires and Allows
Nature and Evil
Internal Explanations
Evil as Malfunction
Reasons against Explaining Evil as Malfunction
Evil as Natural
Reasons against Explaining Evil as Natural
Transition to Mixed Explanation
The Mixed Explanation
Preamble
The Conditions
The Internal Condition
The External Condition
Reason
Responsibility
The Approach
The Account
Excuses
Intention
Shibboleths
Toward Elementary Decency
The Secular Problem of Evil
Morality
Internal Reasons
External Reasons
The Permanent Threat of Evil
Conclusion: What Is to Be Done?
Changing Internal Conditions
Changing External Conditions
Summary
Notes
Works Cited
Index



The first part of this book is a detailed discussion of six horrible cases of evil: the Albigensian Crusade of about 1210; Robespierre's Terror of 1793-94; Franz Stangl, who commanded a Nazi death camp in 1943-44; the 1969 murders committed by Charles Manson and his "family"; the "dirty war" conducted by the Argentinean military dictatorship of the late 1970s; and the activities of a psychopath named John Allen, who recorded reminiscences in 1975. John Kekes includes these examples not out of sensationalism, but rather to underline the need to hold vividly in our minds just what evil is. The second part shows why, in Kekes's view, explanations of evil inspired by Christianity and the Enlightenment fail to account for these cases and then provides an original explanation of evil in general and of these instances of it in particular.